Tag: Keiko Takahashi

Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet (ネオ チンピラ 鉄砲玉ぴゅ～, Banmei Takahashi, 1990)

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In the classic yazkua films of old, going to prison for the gang could be a badge of honour and one of the ways you could catapult yourself into the higher ranks. By the 1990s, however, the yakuza is a much depleted force and it seems few are willing to give up years of their lives on a point of honour for an uncertain reward. At least, that’s how it is for most of the gangsters at the centre of Banmei Takahashi’s Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet (ネオ チンピラ 鉄砲玉ぴゅ～, Neo Chinpira: Teppodama Pyu) , a slacker comedy in which a young hanger on faces a dilemma when he’s made the lookout on a squad sent to bump off a rival only for his squamates go to great lengths to injure themselves first so they won’t have to go through with it.

Junko (Sho Aikawa) is an unlikely hero. With a rockabilly quiff and a red jacket, he’s nominally the driver for gangster Yoshikawa (Toru Minegishi) which means he gets to drive his limo and act like a big man for a while making calls on his carphone. But as much as Junko shows off to his girlfriend Noriko, a hostess at a Korean bar, by instructing the landlady not to clear up his empty bottles because they’ll make a good weapon in an emergency, he’s otherwise something of a joke. The limo ends up getting “stolen” by a young woman who just likes American cars and sexually aroused by gunfire.

Even Yumeko (Chikako Aoyama) chuckles that Junko sounds like a girl when he says he wants to see the ocean while they’re driving around. “Junko” is ordinarily a girl’s name. He picked it up as a kind of hazing based on an alternate reading of his name kanji. She says the same thing again when he reveals he’s never brought a girl back to his place before, probably because it’s in a disused building he was given to manage where he’s surrounded by junk like an old barber’s chair and pinball machine while the figure of Humphrey Bogart in the Maltese Falcon looks down at him from a poster as if embodying his unattainable gangster dreams. As masculine icons go, Junko is also plagued by his uncle, Mizuta (Joe Shishido), a legendary gangster and representative of old school yakuza who take the code seriously and wouldn’t put up with people like Junko’s colleagues who engage in “zooming”, deliberately shooting themselves to get out of being ordered to carry out a hit. He’s not overly impressed by Junko either, unable to understand why he’d become an errand boy for a petty gangster rather than be his own boss as a small-time crook.

Junko’s dilemma is whether he’s really up to this task and will be to go through with it or will end up chickening out and injuring himself too. Crows are more cowardly than they seem, Yumeko explains in an obvious allegory for the yakuza. They pick a place and defend it as a group, while their numbers are way up lately so their individual turfs are shrinking. But now Junko’s all on his own and filled with uncertainty not knowing if he can pass this rite of passage and be accorded a man or will forever be trapped in a liminal space of adolescence never to be taken seriously or make any progress in his life. In an effort to toughen up, he swaps his red jacket for a suit and finally puts on a shiny leather overcoat, ripping off the buttons to bind it more tightly around him with the belt as if it were a kind of armour. 

Somehow the lighthearted ridiculousness of this world of bumbling yakuza and creepy corrupt cops lends an additional poignancy to Junko’s final gesture as he sets off on his path, not really believing he will return. He doesn’t even wait for the pictures he had taken at a photo booth. They won’t be much use to him where he’s going, but at the same time it’s like he’s treading water never quite getting closer to his destination but continuing along his long sad walk. Banmei Takahashi sticks firmly to his pink film roots, sticking in a weird sex scene at regular intervals as Yumeko becomes enraptured by pistols, but also has quite a lot of fun with his “uncool” gangsters and the lost young man who looks up to them while perhaps knowing that this image of stone cold masculinity only really exists in the movies.

I Am Kirishima (桐島です, Banmei Takahashi, 2025)

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In early 2024, an elderly man made a shocking confession. He told members of the medical staff at the hospital where he was being treated that his name was actually “Satoshi Kirishima” and that he was a fugitive from justice wanted for the terrorist bombing of Mitsubishi Industries in 1974 that resulted in the deaths of eight people. Banmei Takahashi’s I Am Kirishima (桐島です, Kirishima desu) attempts to chart the course of his lifetime on the run but may prove controversial in the depths of its sympathy for a man who was party to this kind violence and to a degree found it justified even if he could not justify that his organisation threatened the lives of ordinary people rather than simply the infrastructure of companies they believed to be fuelling corporate imperialism.

Takashi has visited this era before with 2001’s Rain of Light which like Wakamatsu’s United Red Army readdressed the Asama-Sanso Incident and the failure of the student movement in early 1970s of which both directors had been a part. In February 1972, five members of the URA fleeing a purge inside the group holed up in a mountain lodge taking the innkeeper’s wife hostage. The event was one of the first news events in Japan to be broadcast live and its aftermath exposed the cult-like depths of violence and abuse to which the URA had descended forever the souring the nation as a whole on the idea of left-wing revolution. Meanwhile, the fragmentary groups that remained shifted further towards the extremes such completing bombing campaigns to disrupt the new capitalistic prosperity of the economic miracle. Kirishima and his cell believe these large conglomerates, such as Mitsubishi, to be enacting a new kind of Japanese imperialism through exploitative labour practices often targeting migrant workers in much the same way they made use of the forced labour of Korean and Chinese people trafficked to Japan during the colonial period.

To this extent, Kirishima justifies acts of terrorism but thinks they should avoid ordinary people getting caught up in the blast. The film is keen to cast him as “a man behind the times,” an foolish idealist who is exiled from the modern society because of his outdated beliefs in equality and fairness. As such, it lends an elegiac quality to the tragedy of his life in which his 50 years on the run weren’t all that much better than prison given that he had to live under an assumed identity, forever watching his back and unable to put down roots. A tentative romance with a singer-songwriter is hinted at, but Kirishima forgoes his romantic desires out of a feeling that it would be irresponsible to marry without being able to reveal his true self. 

But the film equally seems to drawn a parallel with contemporary Japan in Kirishima finds himself working alongside a middle school drop out with openly xenophobic views who makes frequent racist remarks such as implicating a co-worker when he’s taken to task for being late by insisting that it must be the other guy’s fault because he’s Korean and Koreans always lie. He also says that the migrant workers whom he claims are working illegally should be grateful to be exploited in Japan and can always go home if they don’t like it. It’s all a little too much for Kirishima who sacrificed his life for an ideal this boy repudiates while Japan has become a nation ruled by capitalism and exploitation with the labour revolution he dreamed of now a distant memory. Watching a Shinzo Abe press conference in which he discusses revising the constitution, Kirishima throws a beer can at the TV in frustration. His old comrade dies in prison leaving only a book of poetry behind, while another is released after serving his time though he obviously can’t make contact with him without risking his identity being exposed and getting picked up after all these years. 

Indeed, the film romanticises this image of Kirishima as a man from a bygone age in which another Japan was possible but did not and now presumably cannot come to pass. In doing so, it gives tacit approval to some of the actions of the extremist groups of the 1970s while simultaneously declaring the end of an era as a “case closed” card is placed over the cheerfully smiling face of a young Kirishima which had graced wanted posters all over the country for the last 50 years. His life itself becomes a failed revolution, but also kind of victory in which he managed to “beat” the police by remaining a fugitive all that time even if in the end he seems to regret the life he was prevented from living along with the isolation and loneliness of which he may now at last be free.

I Am Kirishima screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Door II: Tokyo Diary (Banmei Takahashi, 1991)

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A sequel in name only, Banmei Takahashi’s Door II: Tokyo Diary has almost nothing to do with his previous film Door, the title was apparently tacked on at the behest of studio execs who noticed that it had sold well on home video. Nevertheless, the film has its own door motif as the aimless heroine searches for herself among the many available to her, temporarily trying on other personas while wilfully flirting with danger. 

A menacing voice message reminds Ai (Chikako Aoyama) that her work is dangerous, a woman telling her to back off but for unclear reasons either genuinely concerned for her safety or annoyed she’s infringing on her business. Ironically enough, Ai is a call girl who runs her own operation through the soon-to-be obsolete technology of a telephone answering service which unlike the phones in Door offer her a one way portal of communication that isolates her from her potential clients. She explains that she chooses the men for herself, watching idly having quadruple booked the same appointment until finally deciding which door to open though it seems unclear how far she is aware of her vulnerability given that working alone means there’s no one to call if something goes wrong as it eventually does. Even the first client we see her with changes the moment he steps over the threshold, becoming angry having realised that Ai doubled booked the appointment while playing rough with her and forcing her down onto the bed. 

Ai (whose name means love) seems to treat each of the doors as another world in which she must play her assigned role. As such, she submits herself to every degradation though it’s unclear if the act of submission is empowering or she is really just at the mercy of these wealthy mean who’ve paid to do what they like with her. Then again as Ai explains to sometime love interest Ichiro (Shingo Kazami), her real motive is sex and not money leading her to turn down an appointment with a sweet older gentleman who’s checking call girl experience off his bucket list but does not actually want to sleep with her only go on a date. Meanwhile, she finds herself bound and blindfolded while a man in heavy makeup and a nazi uniform dribbles wine down her face as part of a urination role-play. She later plays the piano for him while he curls up in a little ball at her side. 

Becoming involved with a mysteriously wealthy art dealer (Joe Yamanaka) who treats her with unusual tenderness seems to shift Ai’s world view, but equally does an incredibly dark encounter with a dangerous man who attacks Ai and her friend Tomoyo (Yukino Tobita) with a pair of scissors until Tomoyo bites one of his toes off so they can escape. This is the danger the middle-aged madam (Keiko Takahashi) tried to warn her about and causes her to reconsider her life as a call girl until she finally decides to try the same door again and bursts the fantasy bubble by telling the art dealer she loves him. 

A climatic and hugely inappropriate speech at a wedding which nevertheless earns the appreciation of the bride, allows Ai to begin to rediscover herself realising that it was the sense of anticipation that she craved not knowing what she’d discover beyond each and every door. She decides she’d like to swim in the great ocean of infinite possibility once again, ready to open more doors to find out what lies beyond possibly reassured by the art dealer’s assertion that though most of his paintings are fakes he’s discovered a handful of “originals” too restoring Ai’s sense of self as an individual rather than an anonymous call girl who comes when called and has no direction of her own. A melancholy tale of youthful anxiety in the fracturing economy of the Bubble on the eve of its implosion the film trades on Takahashi’s experience in pink film in its at times perverse eroticism but ultimately presents a tale of a young woman regaining control over her self and her life, willing to embrace new possibilities and their concurrent dangers so long as she chooses them for herself. 

Door II: Tokyo Diary is released in the UK on blu-ray 30th October courtesy of Third Window Films.

Restoration trailer (English subtitles)

Door (Banmei Takahashi, 1988)

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You like to think you’re safe behind closed doors, that nothing that happens behind them is anybody’s business and you’re free to be yourself. But a door is as much about keeping things in as it is about keeping them out and perhaps you’re not as in control of it as you thought. Arriving at the tail end of the Bubble era, Banmei Takahashi’s giallo-esque home invasion thriller is at heart about insecurity, a feeling of anxiety and ever impending doom under the watchful eyes of a judgemental society. 

At least, Yasuko (Keiko Takahashi) feels the eyes of her neighbours keenly on her, nervously attempting to live up to the role that’s been assigned to her as a moderately affluent housewife in a nice middle-class area that is nevertheless full of hazards even if many of them are social and psychological rather than directly physical. We can feel her discomfort when an anonymous neighbour passive aggressively returns her rubbish to her front door when she attempts to throw it out on the incorrect day, her husband’s (Shiro Shimomoto) advice simply to make sure she follows the bin day timetable correctly in the future. Another neighbour whose face is also not seen later stares at her when she drops a tissue that has been placed in her letterbox by a salesman (Daijiro Tsutsumi) who is harassing her, forcing Yasuko to pick it back up and take to her own apartment to dispose of lest she be judged for failing to obey this simple rule of urban living despite realising that the tissue likely contains unpleasant bodily fluids. 

The great mystery is why Yasuko, who clearly finds the salesman’s attentions threatening, does not immediately hang up when he calls her but continues to listen to his ominous conversation which heavily implies he is close by and watching her. Previously he’d daubed an obscene message on her front door branding her as “sexually frustrated” which as it turns out may not be far off the mark. Her husband is largely absent and often works away. When he returns she tries to wake him up after putting their son to bed, but he’s dead to the world and leaves the next morning having explained that he’ll be away the next three nights due to a colleague falling ill. Among the junk mail delivered to their flat were a series of business cards for cabaret bars that he jokingly suggested keeping, though as it turns out he really is at work and not spinning a yarn for a three-day jaunt with a mistress even if you could make a case that he’s in an extra-marital affair with his career. Yasuko almost says as much when she calls and tells him she’s scared but he refuses to come home, crying out that he obviously has no regard for his wife and child. 

It’s clear that the economic demands of the late Bubble era have endangered the traditional family even as they’ve provided a level of financial comfort that enables Yasuko to live in this “nice” apartment even if it’s perhaps only ordinarily nice for a middling middle-class couple living a stereotypically middle-class suburban life. Yasuko’s sense of anxiety partly stems from being constantly observed by those around her in an alienating urban environment but also suggests an insecurity in her social status which is after all dependent on a financial security which may be about to disappear as the Bubble bursts. The home is also a burden, and the space behind the door one of isolation rather than safety that leaves her feeling vulnerable and alone in the continual absence of her husband. 

Tellingly all of the voices she hears other than his (and their son’s) are filtered as if they were speaking to her via telephone. She has two handsets in her home, one belonging to the phone itself, black with an answering machine, and the other to the intercom, white and wall-mounted, which is intended to give her control over her door but which in the end offers little comfort just like the near pointless chain-lock intended to keep strangers at arm’s length but in reality easily breakable. In this society of ultra-politeness simply not answering an urgent knocking may not be an option, but behind the door Yasuko is also lonely so perhaps those nuisance cold calls telling her she’s won a cruise, encouraging her to take up English conversation classes, or maybe join a cult, are not really so much of a nuisance at all simultaneously interrupting her loneliness while also penetrating the protective sanctuary of the private space of the home much as the salesman will eventually do in physically breaking a protective barrier. 

When Yasuko fights back, she does so with a housewife’s weapons such as carving forks and chopping boards even picking up her son’s rollerblades to enlist him in the resistance. Takahashi films the final confrontation from above in a complex aerial shot that suggests a literal cat and mouse game as if Yasuko were intent on ejecting a stubborn rodent from her home, the rounded, doorless entranceways between rooms almost like oversized mouse holes in a scene from a cartoon. The question is whether Yasuko can in fact protect this space, a space which represents her family, in overcoming her own anxieties and the latent dark desire which draws her towards her stalker in her loneliness and lack of fulfilment. Yet the answer doesn’t quite lie in perfecting the persona of the perfect housewife even if it could on one level be argued that she’s saved by another kind of male protector but in taking care of business and reasserting her control over the space by means of resetting its boundaries very much on her own terms.

Door is released in the UK on blu-ray 30th October courtesy of Third Window Films.

Restoration trailer (English subtitles)

It’s Me, It’s Me (俺俺, Satoshi Miki, 2013)

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It's Me It's Me posterSome say it’s good to be your own best friend, but then again perhaps too much of your own company isn’t so good for you after all. The hero of Satoshi Miki’s adaptation of the Tomoyuki Hoshino novel, It’s Me, It’s Me (俺俺, Ore Ore), is about to put this hypothesis to the test as his identity literally splinters, overwriting the source code of strangers and replacing it with its own. How can you save your identity when you aren’t sure who you are? Perhaps getting to know yourself isn’t as straightforward a process as most would believe.

Hitoshi (Kazuya Kamenashi), an aimless 20-something, had dreams of becoming a photographer but they’ve fallen by the wayside while he supports himself with a dead end job on the camera counter in a local electronics superstore. Virtually invisible to all around him and so anonymous the woman in the fast food restaurant almost wouldn’t give him the fries he’d ordered, Hitoshi is irritated when two salaryman-types gossiping about how one of them plans to quit the company to pursue his dreams rudely invade his space. Perhaps for this reason, he finds himself taking off with the irritating stranger’s phone after he carelessly allows it to fall onto Hitoshi’s tray.

Emboldened, Hitoshi decides to use the phone to commit an “Ore Ore” scam – a well known telephone fraud in which a stranger rings an elderly person and shouts “it’s me, it’s me!” in a panic so they won’t twig it’s not really their grandson who is ringing them and claiming to be in some kind of terrible trouble which can only be relieved with cold hard cash. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, Hitoshi gets the money wired to his account and then tries to dispose of the phone but it’s already too late. When he gets home, a strange woman (Keiko Takahashi) is in his apartment and she keeps calling him “Daiki”. What’s more, when he tries to go and see his mum (Midoriko Kimura), another guy is there who looks just like him and his mum won’t let him in.

Hitoshi eventually becomes friends with “Daiki” who introduces him to another “Me”, Nao – a cheerful student slacker. Each in their own way slightly disconnected, the trio build up an easy friendship – they do after all have quite a lot in common, and begin jokingly referring to their shared apartment as “Me Island”. Hitoshi, remarking that he’s never felt so carefree among others, begins to see the upsides of his strange new situation which obviously include the ability to be in two places at once, but too much of himself eventually begins to grate when Nao begins tracking down and bringing home all the other Mes he can find with the intention of launching a Me Empire.

A member of a lost generation, Hitoshi is a perfect example of modern urban malaise. Though he once had dreams, they’ve been steadily killed off by an oppressive society leaving him alone and adrift, unable to connect with others as the light slowly dies in his eyes. Perhaps, however, there is the odd flicker of resistance in his intense resentment towards those who have defiantly not given up – the chatty salaryman talking about his individualist dreams and later his work colleague who has been secretly taking accountancy classes in an effort to escape casual employment hell for a steady, if dull, regular job.

Hitoshi has always regarded relationships as “troublesome” but begins to feel differently through bonding with himself. As Daiki puts it, accepting others means that you’ll be accepted – something Hitoshi unconsciously longs for but is too insecure to believe is possible. His actualisation receives another stimulus when he meets the beautiful and mysterious Sayaka (Yuki Uchida) who again encourages him to accept the one who accepts you and is the only other person who seems to be able to see the “real” him as distinct from all the other Mes. Yet Hitoshi struggles – he can accept parts of but not all of himself, eventually leading to a disastrous turn of events in which the parts of himself he does not like begin being “deleted” as one Me decides to make war on all the others.

Only by ridding his psyche of imperfections can Hitoshi reformat his personality and once again resume full autonomy as the one and only Me. Yet can we be so sure final Hitoshi is the “true” Hitoshi? Who can say – only Hitoshi himself can know the answer to that (or not), the rest of us will just have to accept him as he is in the hope that he will also be able to accept us so that we can in turn accept ourselves.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Play (遊び, Yasuzo Masumura, 1971)

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5a4a5621a8387Yasuzo Masumura is most often associated with the eroticism and grotesquery which marked the middle part of his career, but his beginnings as a regular studio director at Daiei are a more cheerful affair even if darker in tone and with additional bite. His debut, 1957’s Kisses, was an unusual youth drama for the time – an innocent romance between a naive boy and girl who meet when each of their parents is languishing in jail. Far from the tragic conclusion of Ko Nakahira’s Crazed Fruit, Masumura offers his youngsters a degree of hope and the possibility, at least, of a happy ending. Daiei would go bust in 1971, and so it’s a minor irony that Masumura would revisit a similar theme towards the end of his tenure at the studio. Play (遊び, Asobi, AKA Play With Fire / Games), inspired by Akiyuki Nosaka’s novel, is another tale of youthful romance threatened by a harsh society, but this time around Masumura is not quite so hopeful.

A 16 year old (unnamed) girl has become the main breadwinner for her mother and bedridden older sister following the death of her father, formerly a violent drunk. Having had to leave school, she has a full-time job at an electronics factory where she lives in the company dorm along with a number of other female employees, most of whom are a few years older than she is. The girl is an earnest sort, she resents her mother’s constant pestering of her for money, but she sends her pay checks home keeping only enough to keep herself fed and clothed.

When an older woman, Yoshiko, who works as a “hostess” in one of the local cabaret bars comes to visit, she does so dressed to the nines with a handsome man sporting fancy sunglasses and porting a selection of upscale cakes. Yoshiko sells the virtues of life in the clubs, talking about the money to be made by having fun while the naive gaggle of young women remain in awe of her confidence, poise, and fancy haircut. In desperate need of money, the girl considers Yoshiko’s suggestion which is what brings her into contact with the (unnamed) boy (Masaaki Daimon).

The boy is 18 and pretends to be more worldly wise than he really is. He offers to show the girl around the cabaret scene, though he discourages her from working there. Taking her out and around town, the boy charms the girl though he has a dark and ulterior motive. The boy is a petty yakuza for a gang whose main stock in trade is pulling girls off the street and raping them for reasons of both blackmail and forced prostitution.

Owing to her young age and bad experience with her father who was often drunk and violent, the girl has steered clear of men. The other girls make fun of her for not having a boyfriend, not wearing make up, and for being “good” in sending all her money home. The girl isn’t really interested in the same kind of fun loving life as the more jaded of the factory girls – especially when she sees them roll in drunk boasting about the bruises on their skin from a night of debauchery, or even staggering back crying with a dress torn to shreds after being violently assaulted (perhaps by the same kind of yakuza thugs that will shortly target her). Despite the harshness of her life, she remains naive and innocent, concerned for her mother and invalid sister who have only her to depend on.

The boy is in a similar situation, though far less keen to confess it. Also let down by a drunken, promiscuous mother, he’s found himself in a gang desperate for the approval of his new “big brother”. Though he reacts with horror to the gang’s main stock in trade, he does not try to stop it even if he stops short of rape himself, but continues to assist in trapping the girls whilst fully aware of what will happen to them.

Coming from a harsh world, the boy has never met anyone as earnest or as naive as the girl and her goodness starts to reawaken something in him. Likewise, the girl, unaware of the boy’s true purpose, has never met anyone that was so immediately nice to her – her fear of men and alcohol dissipates as she (mistakenly, or perhaps not) believes she has met someone truly good and kind who only wants to help her. The girl does not belong in the boy’s world of sleazy clubs and youth haunts but bears them well enough for him. The boy recognises the incongruity and takes her somewhere else, still conflicted in his true purpose of delivering her to the dingy love hotel where his boss conducts his illicit trade.

The boy and the girl are innocents corrupted by their environments. Let down by irresponsible parenting (perhaps also a symptom of the difficulties of the society they live in), the pair remain trapped, dreaming of freedom and happiness but seeing no way of finding them. Deciding to make a break for it, leave their respective disappointing families far behind, the boy and the girl sail away. Their boat is full of holes, but they refuse to be beaten, committing to forge ahead together they swim towards the sea and an uncertain but hopeful future.

Title sequence (no subtitles)