Tag: Tokuko Watanabe

The Strangling (絞殺, Kaneto Shindo, 1979)

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In some ways, the themes of Kaneto Shindo’s The Strangling (絞殺, Kosatsu) may have seemed a little outdated even on its original release in 1979, though it was in fact based on a recent event in which a boy from an elite high school was murdered by his father because he had become violent towards his parents and they feared he would eventually become a criminal, while it was also reported that that he was being sexually abused by his mother. The main controversy may be, however, that the father was given a significantly lighter sentence than might be expected with a crime of this magnitude, partly because his wife had strongly supported him in court.

The film’s title implies that a noose has already been placed around Tsutomu’s (Tsutomu Kariba) neck and it’s the society that is slowly strangling him. His family moved into this area because he succeeded in getting into a prestigious high school which, they hope, will enable him to win a place at Tokyo University and then be set for life. It is never really clear what Tsutomu wants, though it seems he’s growing resistant to the pressure that’s being placed on him. The 4:3 screen ratio seems to bear out this sense of claustrophobia as Tsutomu is regularly cautioned not to get left behind and if that you fall from the ladder before reaching the top, that’s it, you’re out of the game.

His father, Yasuzo (Ko Nishimura), echoes this survival of the fittest mentality in remarking it doesn’t matter how much pesticide they drop, it just makes the flies who survive stronger. If his generation isn’t strong enough, it’ll perish. When a girl in Tsutomu’s class, Hatsuko, takes her own life after killing her abusive stepfather, the other students are asked for their opinions, but they don’t really have any. She was a rival, not a friend, many of them say. They’re all in competition for places at top universities, and now there’s one less person standing in their way. Several of the students call the girl stupid, one remarking that she should simply have tried to manipulate her stepfather instead to turn the situation to her advantage. “We can’t help students who can’t hack it,” the teacher callously explains.

In any case, with all this studying, the kids haven’t had any time to develop social skills or emotional bonds with other people which might be one reason that Tsutomu has become alienated from his parents. The unnaturally loud sound of their walking on en masse to school takes on an ominous quality. Tsutomu becomes interested in a girl, but tries to rape her, and is then confused when she starts avoiding him. The film seems to forget that this happened as the girl, Hatsuko, calls Tsutomu after murdering her stepfather and asks him to have purifying sex with her in the snow before she takes her own life. Hatsuko’s death seems to deepen Tsutomu’s resentment towards the older generation, though he’s incapable of seeing that perhaps he isn’t much different given that he also tried to force himself on Hatsuko. 

He sees his father as the same as hers in that he accuses him of raping his mother, attacking the idea of patriarchal marriage in part because there’s was arranged and not a love match. Meanwhile, he feels Yasuzo to be a hypocrite and is ashamed of him because he continues to live on the inherited wealth of his father. Unlike the other parents, Yasuzo owns a small cafe which would not ordinarily permit living in this kind of home in this kind of area nor support their comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle. This class-based resentment perhaps also makes Tsutomu feel generally out of place, while also convincing him that his father is a small and petty man which might not be entirely unfair. 

He has a boy working in his cafe who has failed the entrance exam for Tokyo University several times and has now decided to go wherever he gets in on the next round. For Yasuzo, maybe he’s just a fly who didn’t make it. When he catches him stealing from the till, he extends him no compassion and doesn’t stop to ask why he did or if there’s any way he could help. He doesn’t offer him the opportunity to pay the money back and is offended when the boy pleads with him not to tell his teachers or the police because he doesn’t want his mother, whom he’s been sending money home to, to know what he’s become. Rather, Yasuzo makes a point of humiliating him by making the boy kneel and apologise before his female waitress ends up quitting too in solidarity with the belittled worker.

It seems to be this incident that makes clear to Tsutomu that his father uses violence and status to control those around him, but his relationship with his mother is problematic too in that he partly blames her for allowing herself to be dominated by his father while her latent incestuous desire for him sees her mollycoddling her son by sucking on his finger when he cuts himself though he is nearly a grown man. Eventually he tries to rape her too, which is equal parts an attempt to overcome his father and misplaced sexual desire.

Throughout it all, the parents are surrounded by a greek chorus of noisy neighbours who are also all firmly on the father’s side. The implication seems to be that they think they did the right thing in ending their son’s life because he’d already veered off the path and was not going to become a respectable member of society. Though an attempt to take Tsutomu to a doctor only ends up with a diagnosis of “adolescence” which he says can be cured through “good parenting”, the judge seems to have some sympathy for the father with the implication that he’s cleaned up his own mess in being unable to raise his son to be a model citizen. The films seems uncertain whether it agrees with him, but is otherwise convinced that the whole society has gone to pot. When Tsutomu smashes up his father’s pointlessly expensive Buddhist altar, it’s like he takes a bat to the patriarchal order, but in the end achieves very little of anything at all as his rebellion appears to generate only more pain and suffering until the system finally snuffs it out. 

Empire of Kids (ガキ帝国, Kazuyuki Izutsu, 1981)

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Empire of Kids posterJapan in 1981 was a vastly different place than the Japan of 1967. Rising economic prosperity had produced an amiable social calm in which desire for conventional success and increasingly aspirational consumerism had replaced the firebrand need for social change which had defined the previous decade. Filmmaker, film critic, and sometimes outspoken TV personality Kazuyuki Izutsu was presumedly not a huge fan of consumerism and for this, his first “mainstream” film made for ATG, retreats back to the Osaka of 1967 in which petty street punks lamented their lack of opportunities by banding together and battling for control of their respective neighbourhoods like boys in the schoolyard only armed with knives and filled with nihilistic desperation.

The film opens with our “hero”, Ryu (Shinsuke Shimada), being released from juvie after presumably getting into trouble for his petty punk antics. Waiting for him are his two best friends – soulful zainichi Korean Ken (Cho Bang-ho), and rockabilly Chabo (Ryusuke Matsumoto). Ryu is released alongside another boy, Ko (Takeshi Masu), whom he tries to recruit into their mini gang but quickly becomes an enemy, teaming up with the boys’ rivals – the Hokushin Alliance, while also becoming a potential rival for Ryu’s old girlfriend with dancing dreams, Kyoko (Megumi Sanuki). The boys, still in their last year of high school, become obsessed with trouncing their competition, proving their manhood on the streets while asserting their rightful place as the dominant forces in their native area, but as it increases in intensity the game becomes frighteningly serious and its dangers all too apparent.

Izutsu’s film fits comfortably into the “delinquent” genre but perhaps takes its cues from the Hollywood cinema of alienation more than the tough guy antics of the youth movie past. From Chabo’s bright red jacket and neatly greased quiff, the starting point is Rebel Without a Cause as these otherwise not too bad kids struggle with their place in the world, unable to see a clear path and direction for themselves in the society of 1967 which seemed both frustratingly open and closed to unremarkable lower middle-class boys. Ryu’s brother is going to give up football to go to cram school so he doesn’t end up like Ryu, while Ryu has taken to reading brain training books to try and get back on the academic path to success which he fears may have already passed him by. Ken, idly talking of the future, can’t see much beyond winding up in the yakuza, opening a bowling alley, or maybe becoming a comedian (this is Osaka after all). None of these guys is going to university or getting a salaryman job, they know not much awaits them outside of low-paid manual work, marriage, children, family and death, so they take their frustrations out on each other playing at gangsterism out on the streets.

For Ryu, Ken, and Chabo the reasons for their violence are “honourable” – they want to keep their local space local and are committed to defending it from the “external” threat of the shadier street punks from uptown. Apparently from stable economic backgrounds, the boys’ acts of street justice have no particular economic component, in contrast to those of the Hokushin Alliance which positions itself as a yakuza training school with a brutal hazing regime for new recruits and a business plan which involves hunting young women and trapping them through rape and blackmail to force them into prostitution. 

Aside from lack of direction, Ken – the most introspective of the boys, also has to deal with the constant threat of discrimination due to his roots as an ethnic Korean living in Japan. One of the reasons he hates the Hokushin Alliance and distrusts some of the other gangs is that they deliberately target Koreans in racially motivated attacks. One of his old friends, Zeni (Masaaki Namura), is a member of an all Korean street gang which attempts to defend itself against the strong anti-Korean sentiment out on the streets but finds itself outgunned by the sheer weight of numbers. Ken speaks Korean openly with his friends (even when there are non-Koreans close-by) and has no interest in hiding his ethnic identity even if he uses his Japanese name in his every day life, while Ko (whom we later realise is also ethnically Korean) hides his ethnicity completely and subsumes himself into the Hokushin with a view to finally joining the yakuza even whilst knowing that the gangs he has joined are extremely prejudiced against “foreigners” and Koreans in particular. Ken would never out someone deliberately, but finds Ko’s attitude difficult to stomach, not only in his willingness to hide his roots to fit in with gangster thugs, but in his willingness to persecute his own in order to do it.

The atmosphere that surrounds the boys is one of intense futility. They fight each other pointlessly, like children in the playground, and it’s all fun and games until someone reaches for a knife. Petty disputes quickly escalate when the yakuza gets itself involved in children’s games – an assault rifle, after all, has little place in a kids’ disco where teenagers come to drink Coca Cola and slow dance to a terrible covers band singing the “uncool” music of the day. Despite the melancholy air of frustration and inevitability, Empire of Kids (ガキ帝国, Gaki Teikoku) adopts the otherwise warm and nostalgic tone of the Japanese teen movie, embracing the typically Osakan need for spiky comedy even as our guys fall ever deeper into the hole their society has cut out for them. There are few rays of sunshine to be found here, friendships are broken, trusts betrayed, and futures ruined but then again, that was only life, in Osaka, in 1967.