Nick Lake is an editorial director at HarperCollins Children’s Books. His books, Blood Ninja (Corvus) and Lord Oda’s Revenge (Corvus) – jam-packed with assassins, samurai, ancient curses and blood-sucking warriors – were inspired by his interest in the Far East, and by the fact that he is secretly a vampire ninja himself. Below he explains why his filmic alter ego is blind swordsman Zatoichi, as seen by Takeshi Kitano. Eithne Farry
My favourite Japanese film is the 2003 version of Zatoichi. If you don’t know the movie, it might be described like this: if The Seven Samurai is a cappuccino, then Zatoichi is an espresso. It’s an economical, intense, brutal action film – with just a slight froth of humour and musicality, of balletic grace to its violence.
Zatoichi, the titular character, is an old blind man, who roams the countryside with a sword hidden inside a cane, protecting the weak and the poor from the depredations of ronin and samurai. He’s the ultimate underdog. Even his name signals his base status. It’s actually Ichi – the ‘Zato’ bit means ‘4th class’, because he is a 4th-class blind person, lowly even by the standards of the blind, who rank somewhere alongside beggars and fools in feudal Japan. In other words, he’s nobody. He isn’t even allowed to carry a katana, hence his hidden blade. But time and again, he rids villages of troublesome gangsters, rescues the vulnerable – revealing, when he draws the blade from his cane, a stunning skill at fighting, due to his remarkable hearing.
So much do I love Zatoichi, in fact, that I more or less stole him for my own books. I thought that Shusaku, the ninja mentor of my hero Taro, was going to die at the end of the first book. Then I remembered Zatoichi – and I decided to burn out his eyes instead. So the first scene of Blood Ninja II has a blind man fighting multiple enemies on a dark night, in the rain…
Zatoichi is actually a relatively recently created character – nowhere near as old as Robin Hood. But I think that, in his infirmity, his old age and his contemptible social status, but amazing talent and moral rectitude, he encapsulates something timeless. You can see him as a metaphor for justice. You can see him as an avatar of the common man, rising up against his oppressor. He, of course, doesn’t need to see at all.
The Art Theatre Guild of Japan: Spaces for Intercultural and Intermedial Cinema
Two-day symposium
30-31 August 2011
Birkbeck College, London
The 40th anniversary of the events of 1968 was marked in 2008 by a resurgence of interest in the phenomenon and, ever since, there has been a wave of activities across the world that have celebrated the peaks of creativity and political activism that flourished in the surrounding years. 1968 was not just an event situated in the West, but parallel equivalents emerged simultaneously in many corners of the globe, Japan being no exception. What differentiated Japan’s 1968 was that it was situated in the wake of a failed revolution against ‘Anpo’, the renewal in 1960 of the US-Japan security treaty, which was vehemently opposed by the Japanese populace. For the Japanese, the 1960s were a decade that was defined by disenchantment and by a reinvigorated and necessary urge to focus on the issue in preparation for the treaty’s next renewal in 1970. The artists of this generation, many of whom grew up in a Japan devastated by the war, acted on their impulse to use artistic expression to contribute to the climate of social protest and avant-garde activity.
The screenings organised in London in the coming months, namely Close-Up Film Centre’s July season, Theatre Scorpio: Japanese Independent and Experimental Cinema of the 1960s, and the BFI Southbank’s August season, Shinjuku Diaries: Films from the Art Theatre Guild of Japan, demonstrate the best of Japanese independent cinema in the age of cultural and political revolution.
The programmes have been put together to counter the traditional auteur-driven notion of cultural productivity. Instead, they focus on the era’s creative spirit, which permeated the arts community. Close-Up’s Studies in Movement: Experiments by Three Filmmakers programme will screen Hausu director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s early shorts and New Wave titan Nagisa Ôshima’s photo-collage film Yunbogi’s Diary alongside collaborative experiments by a student collective, the young filmmakers of Nihon University Film Studies Club. The programmes intend to dismantle the boundaries that have been set up between experimental cinema and narrative features to prove the two modes of expression and their practitioners continuously infiltrated one another. Katsu Kanai, who will be visiting the UK for the first time to introduce his Smiling Milky Way Trilogy, was one of the key filmmakers of the period. He was able to merge fiction and reality, narrative and visual poetry, in a way that revelled in a joyous desire for experimentation. A nun with a machine gun and a man giving birth to his doppelgä;nger from his wounded back are just two out of many images that you will never forget.
Masao Adachi’s Galaxy, screening with English subtitles for the first time, is a masterpiece of surrealist filmmaking, where a sense of narrative melts into the protagonist’s subconscious. The inaugural film at the Theatre Scorpio, an underground art space where dance, theatre and screenings took place, Galaxy was instrumental in launching Adachi’s career as a scriptwriter and pink director. This is where he met his long-term collaborator, KÔji Wakamatsu, who walked past the venue in awe at the queues around the corner, and immediately got in touch with Adachi. The venue quickly became a focal point for all corners of the art scene and a space where artists shared ideas and established collaborations. Close-Up’s film programme is in celebration of this influential theatre, its name given by Yukio Mishima in tribute to Kenneth Anger‘s Scorpio Rising.
Located above Theatre Scorpio was the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka, the centrepiece cinema for the Art Theatre Guild, where a range of foreign art-house films, by directors from Glauber Rocha to Satyajit Ray, and from the Polish New Wave to world cinema classics, were screened to large crowds. One of ten ATG cinemas that were established across the country in 1962, the venue screened films ATG distributed and, from 1967, local independent films that the organisation helped to finance as co-producers. The space was also used for jazz concerts, rakugo comedy and late-night angura theatre. The BFI season in August showcases the early period of ATG productions with their 13-film programme, which includes films by luminaries of the Japanese New Wave, Nagisa Ôshima, Shûji Terayama (whose films will be screened at Tate Modern in March 2012), Toshio Matsumoto and Masahiro Shinoda, alongside prominent titles by lesser-known directors such as Kazuo Kuroki, Akio Jissôji and Susumu Hani. ATG continued to support productions until the late 1980s, a later period that is currently placed under the spotlight in a full-scale retrospective at the Maison de la culture du Japon in Paris.
Perhaps due to the interactive nature of the art spaces, where films were placed alongside other arts, the featured titles in the programme have become invaluable records of theatrical happenings and the visual arts scene, as well as testaments to the existence of a participatory environment that unabatedly crossed disciplines. The ATG encouraged prominent playwrights, graphic designers and composers to take part in the production of film: famed graphic designer Kiyoshi Awazu took charge of the art design of Double Suicide; Terayama scripted Inferno of First Love; theatre directors Kunio Shimizu and Jûrô Kara took on film directing; and Tôru Takemitsu, Yasunao Tone, Toshi Ichiyanagi and Takehisa Kosugi (whose work is exhibited at Spitalfield’s Raven Row Gallery until July 17) all provided radically innovative soundtracks for films of the period. The importance of the art spaces will be the focus of a free two-day symposium at Birkbeck College (July 30-31), an event that will include a talk by Katsu Kanai and keynote speeches by curators Go Hirasawa and Roland Domenig, as well as three UK premieres of rare films from the period.
Performance art and live art were documented on film, yet in characteristic approaches that emphasised the director’s personal vision rather than clarity in documentation. The infamous ‘rituals’ performed by Zero Jigen feature in Funeral Parade of Roses and The Deserted Archipelago, and Terayama’s theatre troupe Tenjô Sajiki appear in his feature-length ATG films and Double Suicide. Motoharu Jonouchi, an experimental filmmaker whose work is the subject of an entire programme in the Close-Up season, participated in live art events as a collaborator-filmmaker. His film Hi-Red Centre Shelter Plan, to be screened at Peckham’s Flat Time House as part of South London Art Map’s Last Friday events (July 29th), records the notorious live art event at the Imperial Hotel in which Tokyo avant-garde figures such as Yoko Ono, Tadanori Yokoo, Nam June Paik and a naked Masao Adachi participated. Jonouchi’s butoh dance film, Tatsumi Hijikata, which captures the co-founder of butoh dance’s contorted choreographies frame by frame, will also feature in Close-Up’s programme. Kazuo Ohno is the other leader of butoh and his flamboyant costumes will be displayed in an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum this autumn. Both feature in Takahiko Iimura’s Cine-Dance films, screened as part of the BFI’s Essential Experiments strand, together with Yayoi Kusama’s body paintings, which feature in her film Flowers; her work will be the subject of a major exhibition at Tate Modern in January 2012.
These seasons, brought together especially for UK audiences, testify to and take part in a renewed interest around the world in Japan’s counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The screenings and events are an exceptional opportunity to encounter these rare works of art, as many of these films are unavailable on home-viewing formats even in Japan. All screenings are accompanied by an introduction by the curators, filmmakers and experts in the field, who will provide a platform for discussion. If you thought 1960s Japan was only about Ôshima, think again; Japan’s avant-garde had many faces, and the screenings will provide vital occasions for an introduction to the exhilarating explosion of creativity that was the post-war Japanese art scene.
With last year’s Icelandic volcano and this year’s colossal earthquake in Japan, it seems Frankfurt’s annual Nippon Connection is perennially haunted by natural disasters. It was even announced that the festival team had toyed with the idea of cancelling the event in response to the recent tragedy, yet the woe at the opening remarks was soon dissipated thanks to the festival staff’s infectious enthusiasm and glowing spirit. With an assorted programme ranging between commercial blockbusters, such as the sci-fi manga adaptation Gantz (Sato Shinsuke, 2011), congenial comedies of the likes of Permanent Nobara (Yoshida Daihachi, 2010) and voices of the independent art scene represented in the appropriately renamed section Nippon Visions, which this report will focus on, Nippon Connection had at least one film to fit our every mood.
Heaven’s Story (Takahisa Zeze, 2010)
The best feature from Japan in recent years, and the FIPRESCI award-winner at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, Zeze’s latest offering from his post-pink period clocks out at an epic four and a half hours. An intricately woven tale of revenge and redemption, trauma and forgiveness, crime and punishment, Heaven’s Story threads multiple characters into its embellished spiralling narrative. The metaphor involving monsters announced in the opening underpins the film’s meditation on the ethics of human encounters, a contemplation that is bookmarked by haunting performance-art footage of puppetry troupe Yumehine and dancer Hyakkidondoro. With stunning photography, the controlled balance of urgency and patience propels Zeze’s characters down their destined paths, which seem designed to cross, each encounter instigating new sparks.
Arrietty (Hiromasa Yonebayashi, 2010)
Although on a much quieter scale, Studio Ghibli’s latest release, Arrietty, also dwells on the ethics of self-and-other relationships in its adaptation of Mary Norton’s tales, The Borrowers. The predictable winner of the festival’s Audience Award, the story paints the chance meeting of sickly youth Sho and tiny Arrietty, also a teenager, but from a different race of little people who reside underneath rural households. A child of an endangered species, Arrietty is initially wary of her neighbour’s presence, yet soon warms to his tender care and yearning for amity. Though entirely forgettable compared to Ghibli’s previous output, from which it ‘borrows’ quite heavily, Arrietty may be remembered for its serene animation that sees the directing debut of young animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi. But let us all forget the theme song.
Midori-ko (Keita Kurosaka, 2010) / Still in Cosmos (Makino Takashi, 2009)
A double bill that would be hard to come by at any other festival, Midori-ko and Still in Cosmos may at first seem an odd couple, but screened together represented the cutting edge of non-commercial filmmaking in Japan.
Midori-ko is Kurosaka’s lovechild and took 10 years to nurture, a hand-drawn parable that borrows its pale aesthetics from Yuriy Norshteyn. Midori is a young, impoverished scientist who discovers a strange vegetable that has landed in her room as if it were a fallen star. Though rather simplistic and oddly paced, the skewered fairy tale is at times thought-provoking, and the subtle shades and tonal moderations of the drawings are captivating.
One of experimental filmmaker Makino’s latest collaborations with Jim O’Rourke, which fuse sound and moving image, Still in Cosmos shatters the screen surface in a composed piece of sustained tension and controlled ambience. Words prove inefficient to describe the experience of Makino’s experiments, where he transfers film into crepitant digital layers that vibrate into each other in pulsed drones.
The Duckling (Sayaka Ono, 2005-10)
It is no surprise that Kazuo Hara, a pioneering voice of personal documentaries in Japan, is said to have overseen the production of The Duckling, for Ono’s debut feature is steeped in his style of storytelling. Ono’s autobiographical documentary feels like a therapy session as she visits each member of her family to unravel the childhood traumas that have led her to the brink of suicide. Though the film succeeds in exuding a dense intensity that pushes the boundaries of its genre, it feels too much like an uncomfortable continuation of her self-harm. One question remains – at such a young age, what will Ono do now that she has exhausted her entire life within one project?
Teto (Hiroshi Gokan, 2010)
Part of the Tokyo University of Arts special programme, Teto is a feature-length graduation piece by Hiroshi Gokan and was the surprise triumph of the festival. Utterly unique, the film weaves together different generic codes from espionage thrillers and post-apocalypse dread to period set-pieces, performed by the characters, who run a theatre troupe of orphans. Teto sustains its despondent aura and a foreboding gloom with committed control, never caving in to spell out its own mysteries. The ability to conjure intensity from its spectral narrative evokes another recent East Asian debut, End of Animal (2010), yet Teto‘s chaos is more simmering and muted.
Gen Takahashi’s Confessions of a Dog follows a simple, honest beat cop as he wins the confidence of the Head of the Criminal Investigative Department and works his way up, finding out as he does how corrupted the system is. Too committed to his job to reject an order, Takeda (Shun Sugata) soon sees himself embroiled in the daily transgressions of the force, from seedy backroom dealings to blackmail and brutal violence, which not only jeopardise his life but also cause him to become increasingly detached from his wife and daughter.
Although ticking in at a bum-numbing 195 minutes, the film’s length implicitly adds to its gripping intensity, allowing the viewer to become fully immersed in the correlations between crime, police corruption and the complicit media. Confessions of a Dog thrives on its deft pacing as much as on the towering lead performance given by Shun Sugata, who is increasingly unnerving as Takeda becomes trapped in the dirty business that goes all the way to the top of the force. It’s a mesmerising psychological ride that builds up to a gloriously theatrical tragic finale as the broken Takeda has to face the consequences of his actions.
The fact that Takahashi has dared to tackle such a controversial subject and has turned it into one of the finest and most devastating films about the everyday politics of corruption has unfortunately led to the film being only marginally released in Japan. But Confessions of a Dog deserves to be seen widely, and thanks to Third Window Films it is now getting a DVD release in the UK. Pamela Jahn
Sarah Cronin caught up with director Gen Takahashi on his visit to the UK last month and he told her about the complex motivations of Shun Sugata’s bent cop, the reality of police corruption and the reception of the film in Japan.
Sarah Cronin: Why did you choose to make a film about police corruption? Is it based on real events?
Gen Takahashi: Because I hate the police, and yes, it’s all true.
Why do you hate the police?
Because they trick people out of money. The things that you see in the film are just one part of what they do – they actually do a lot more than what is shown. They are civil servants, they live off our taxes, but because they are the ones in charge of law enforcement, if no one knows about the things they do, they can get away with it. So they’re very sly in some respects, and I don’t like sly people. The yakuza, on the other hand, I’m not saying I like them, but I feel closer to them, because if they do something wrong or commit a crime, they are charged and they go to prison.
How closely do the yakuza and the police work together in Japan?
They don’t collaborate, apart from possibly on a personal level, although the police need the yakuza, but the yakuza don’t need the police. They both use each other.
Can you explain the delay between the completion of the film in 2005 and its release last year? Did you come under pressure to change or re-edit the film?
Not at all. I wish I could say that, it would be quite cool. But nothing. I’m asked that question a lot, by Chinese people, by Europeans, but I think they’re making the mistake of thinking that Japanese people have a cultural and mental awareness level that is higher than it actually is. Because even the police don’t do anything about a film like this. I’ve never been threatened or been at risk. My phone has been tapped occasionally, but that’s about it. I just haven’t been proactive in promoting the film. The first distributor I brought it to took it on, so it’s not like I’ve been applying to lots of places that have been turning it down.
There’s a tradition of American cop movies from the 70s and 80s like Serpico, Dirty Harry, Bad Lieutenant that all expose police corruption. Why do you think this type of film never took off in Japan?
One reason is that in Japanese culture you’re not allowed to criticise the police. There have been a lot of characters in films who were corrupt policemen, but they are fictional characters. In Japan, people either trust the police or they’re scared of them, and they don’t want to be blacklisted by the police.
Were you inspired by any of these films while making Confessions of a Dog?
No. Everyone says Serpico, Serpico, but I’ve not actually seen it.
So what did inspire you?
There are no particular films that inspired me with this. There are filmmakers I like, like Martin Scorsese, people who bring real life into the world of film. I’m inspired by the 60s and 70s in Europe, Italian neo-realism, by new cinema in the US and the UK. Cinema rather than movies.
Why do you think corruption is so rampant in the police and the judiciary? And why isn’t there a stronger moral code?
That’s a very good question. And it’s not just the police in Japan, but all civil servants. Whatever they do, they won’t get sacked, so they’re all corrupt.
I suppose in the West we learn our history of Japan through the samurai warrior or the salary man. I think we have this idea that people are actually very moral. I don’t think we associate corruption with Japan.
The Japanese people are very moral, but it’s the civil servants who aren’t.
Because it’s so easy to get away with it?
It’s because the civil servants create society, they make the rules that benefit themselves. So nowadays you hear that there are no jobs for young people coming out of university. The average wage is £20-30,000 for a young person, but for a civil servant it’s £60-70,000. It’s because the civil servants just decide that’s how much more they’re going to get paid.
The film is also very critical of the press, who seems to be guilty of self-censorship. Why are newspapers so obedient?
In Japan you have the kisha, or press club, and they write their articles based on what the police tells them. They actually have their offices in police stations, and the rent and the phone bills are paid for by the police. So if they were to criticise the police, they would just be biting the hands that feed them.
Is the character of the journalist based on someone you collaborated with?
Yes, but he’s not one person in particular. The journalist in the film quits his job and goes freelance, and some people do that in real life as well, because if they have a sense of justice they will quit the mass media. They tend to follow the same path that the journalist in the film does – they’ll go to the internet where there’s less censorship and write their stories there. I know several people who have done that, so there was no need for me to do any special research into that aspect of the film, because I already knew those people in my life.
Why does Takeda allow himself to be used as a scapegoat? Why does he go along with it for so long?
That’s what I want to know. His mindset is the same as the kamikaze – although not quite the same, because the kamikaze pilots were ready to die for their country. Whereas this, rather than being real self-sacrifice, is a pretend self-sacrifice. They sacrifice themselves because they know that they will be rewarded later. [SPOILER] In the film, there’s the scene where the police boss says, when he gets out of prison, let’s make sure he gets a good job. There’s that sense that you’ll be rewarded. So even though you see him trying to commit suicide with the box cutter, he’s not actually trying to die, he’s not trying to kill himself – he does it in a way so that he knows he won’t die.
And they don’t want him to die either, I guess – is the whole thing an act?
Yes, it is put on. It’s all about who profits, so the lower-ranking officer can only profit by behaving the way he behaved, and the higher-ranking officers profit by treating their subordinates in that way, to have their dogs. And what I was trying to depict was that it’s not going to change. [END OF SPOILER]
In some ways Takeda is still a sympathetic character, despite his brutal criminality – was that intentional?
It is intentional. I worked together with the actor to make him a sympathetic figure. He sacrifices himself, and the audience feels sorry for him, even though he’s in the wrong. I wanted to point out to the audience that they are stupid for feeling sorry for him, being tricked by him.
I read that you do a lot of work in Hong Kong. Is it much easier to get films made there than in Japan?
I haven’t actually directed a film in Hong Kong, I’m more involved in the production side there. I chose Hong Kong because it has a history of being a launch pad into the international film world for Japanese and Asian people, so I’ve learnt a lot about the business side in Hong Kong.
Is it a better environment to work in?
The Hong Kong film industry is actually losing its power now. Setting aside the question of whether it’s easier to make a film in Hong Kong, it’s definitely more difficult in Japan.
For me, film festivals are all about new films, so I normally shun retrospectives honouring classic films or deceased directors. The Berlinale’s presentation of eight Shibuya Minoru films was a special case: while all of the films were from the 1950s and 60s, they will have been a new discovery for most audience members, since Shibuya’s work has never been available on DVD outside Japan. A retrospective of Shibuya Minoru was screened at last November’s Tokyo FILMeX and picked up by Ulrich Gregor for the Berlinale’s Forum section. At the Berlinale, it seemed that audiences shared my prejudice against old films: the three Shibuya screenings I went to attracted a respectable showing, but the cinema was far from packed. It was a testament to the quality of Shibuya’s work that the screening ended with applause, even though the director had passed away some 30 years ago.
Shibuya’s 1960s films share some features with the work of Ozu Yasujiro, a more familiar name from this period. The characteristically low camera height would have felt normal to domestic audiences who sit, eat and sleep close to the floor; for Western viewers, this lower-level perspective on the action is unusual. Similar to Ozu, too, is Shibuya’s recurring theme of family relationships in a changed, and still changing, post-war Japan. The similarities end here, though: while Ozu tended to focus on quietly pleasing aesthetics, and tenderly moving portrayals of parent-child and husband-wife dynamics, Shibuya’s films are a livelier affair. They are marked by their humour, from light comic banter to satire. Yet because Shibuya’s films treat relevant topics, they are more than just entertainment: they complete the portrait of 1950s and 60s Japan, rounding out Ozu’s lyricism with silliness, sexuality, and even despair.
Yopparai tengoku (Drunkard’s Paradise, 1962)
This was the first Shibuya film I saw, and the one with the most sobering conclusion. At first, Drunkard’s Paradise portrays drinking as a minor (and entertaining) vice: its worst effects are embarrassing behaviour, a diminished bank account and an overnight stay in a prison cell. But the film also explores more serious potential consequences of drinking, through a believable scenario involving four central characters: a father and son, the son’s fiancée and a famous baseball player. When one of these characters becomes violent after drinking, it brings about a dramatic change in the lives of all four. One of the problems explicitly addressed is that at that time in Japan, drunk people were not held responsible for their actions.
Drunkard’s Paradise can become oppressive at times, as its characters are crushed by needless tragedy. The audience is rewarded, though, first by the film’s opening comic scenes, and later by complex character development. Although the film’s premise seems designed to show that alcoholics bring unhappiness on themselves, the film is not so simple or moralising as this. All four characters are sympathetic, inviting the audience’s compassion: their justifications can always be understood, if not accepted.
Kojin kojitsu (A Good Man, A Good Day, 1961)
After the bleak black and white images of Drunkard’s Paradise, the saturated colour of A Good Man, A Good Day was a welcome surprise. This was a film more uniformly comic in tone, although it too addressed important social issues, this time of class. The good man in question is an eccentric mathematics professor who wears his shoes on the wrong feet and ignores people who don’t interest him. This doesn’t help his daughter’s marriage prospects: her fiancé’s family is none too sure about hers.
The film’s even tone is more reminiscent of Ozu than Drunkard’s Paradise, but with Shibuya’s characteristic dash of comedy: the professor is unimpressed by his daughter’s fiancé until the young man has the nerve to call him an ‘old fart’. This points to the film’s satire on status: although the professor is venerated at the university, he only gains wider respect when he wins a prize from the Ministry of Culture. In a nod to contemporary reality, the professor’s daughter is adopted, having been orphaned by WWII bombings: this too is a source of prejudice against the family. Unlike Drunkard’s Paradise, though, A Good Man, A Good Day ends happily.
Daikon to ninjin (The Radish and the Carrot, 1964)
All three films that I saw happened to include the prolific actor Ryu Chishu in the role of the father. His acting capabilities were showcased beautifully, as the fathers are quite different in each film: a drunk, a scholar, and an ordinary man with a secret. Ryu also appeared in almost every one of Ozu’s films, but The Radish and the Carrot has an even stronger link to this director: it is based on an unfinished script that Ozu was working on just before he died. It is the story of a family man who disappears, leaving his wife and four daughters wondering whether he has run away or been kidnapped. Only in his absence does the man’s family really start to think about him, considering their relationship to him, and what secrets he might have. The film’s title stems from his daughter’s comment after he leaves: they think of him as ‘a radish or a carrot on the kitchen floor’ – necessary, then, but unremarkable. The film teaches us not to take our family for granted, certainly, but it also recognises that family can be a burden on us as individuals.
After giving us the bubblegum quirkiness of Kamikaze Girls and the candy-coloured melodrama of Memories of Matsuko, Tetsuya Nakashima returns with Confessions, a superbly accomplished, original take on the revenge tale, adapted from the debut novel by Kanae Minato.
Yuko Moriguchi is a meek teacher who decides to quit her job after the death of her four-year-old daughter. But before she leaves, she lets her class know that she believes her daughter was killed by two of the students. Knowing that the law won’t help her, she constructs an intricate revenge against them. Masterfully scripted, surprising, convincing, chilling, provocative, Confessions is an impressive achievement. Below, the laconic Tetsuya Nakashima answers Virginie Sélavy’s questions about his focus on young characters, his use of colours and his interest in female characters.
VS: What attracted you to Kanae Minato’s book?
TN: The novel is basically a monologue and the characters are full of hatred. These two facts attracted me.
Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko were also adapted from novels. Why do you like to base your films on books?
It was just by pure chance. For me the characters in these novels happened to be in tune with modern life and attractive.
Narratively, Confessions is a very unconventional and complex film, with the use of successive points of view offering different angles on the story. Were you interested in experimenting with structure and narration with this film?
It was thought to be extremely difficult to make this novel into a film. But I believed it was worthwhile to try all the more for this expected difficulty.
The film works almost like a diabolical clock, everything ticking towards the fulfilment of Yuko’s revenge. Is that the effect you wanted to create?
My purpose in making this film was to dig down the inner side of Yuko Moriguchi, rather than investigate further the fact of her revenge.
It is a fantastic study of cruelty, a theme that is already present in Memories of Matsuko to some degree. Is it something that you’re particularly interested in?
I’m always more fascinated by the faults of people than by the good. Not only cruelty, but also weakness and superficiality, frivolity, etc., are fascinating.
The film offers a brilliant and chilling dissection of the dynamics of the teenage group and peer pressure. The vision of young people presented in Confessions is quite disturbing. Do you feel it reflects Japan’s anxieties about its youth, or more generally anxieties of modern societies?
I spoke with many young people in order to make this film. I have the impression that they are exposed to fear and they feel scared. And they don’t understand the cause of the fear.
It also seems to me that Confessions parodies teenagers’ self-obsession and sentimentality in some ways. Is that fair to say?
What they say in the film are not necessarily their true feelings and intentions. The best way to enjoy this film is to imagine and speculate what they really want.
How did you select the soundtrack? Why the choice of Radiohead, Boris and the XX?
I happened to listen to them all while I was writing the script and thought they were nice.
Confessions is a much darker film than Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko.
The style of image is due to the contents of the film, so stylistic changes are natural with different films.
All your films show a great attention to colour, and in Confessions the colour palette is dominated by blues.
I tried to get rid of colours as much as I could and to control them so that the film would be dominated only by the cold atmospheric blue and blood red.
In Confessions, Kamikaze Girls and Matsuko, you focus on strong, unconventional female characters. Why this interest?
Probably I just like this type of women…
In Matsuko and Confessions, they are more specifically unfortunate, tragic female characters, but while Matsuko suffers and doesn’t really fight back, Yuko turns into a frighteningly masterful avenger. Were you interested in a more active, and more morally ambiguous, type of female character in Confessions?
Both Matsuko and Yuko have strengths and weaknesses. And they both make bad decisions in life. I love them for being really human.
How was the film received in Japan?
It was a huge hit and I received variety of reactions and responses, which made me happy as I wanted it to be that way.
How did you react when Confessions was selected at Japan’s official entry in the Best Foreign Film category of the 83rd Annual Academy Awards?
Very surprised! But it didn’t make it to the final…
Part of the Late Mizoguchi – Eight Films 1951-1956 DVD box-set
As the rather sordid title suggests, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame exists somewhere between melodrama and social polemic, with the director’s final film taking place in Tokyo’s 300-year-old Yoshiwara district. The Japanese title – Akasen Chitai – literally translates as the more matter-of-fact Red Light District, but Mizoguchi was as much a dramatist as he was a documentarian, and Street of Shame is an emotional experience that grounds its narrative within the context of the 1950s debate regarding the anti-prostitution bill. This was not the only occasion that Mizoguchi would focus on the lives of women forced to sell themselves for economic survival; Osaka Elegy (1936) tells the story of a telephone operator who becomes a mistress to her employer in order to settle family debts, while both Sisters of the Gion (1936) and A Geisha (1953) take place in brothels and observe the interactions between the women that work in such establishments. Although the director was particularly concerned about the plight of women in Japanese society, any material that dealt with the sex trade had additional personal significance for him; economic circumstances forced Mizoguchi’s parents to put his sister up for adoption, and she was subsequently sold as a geisha, explaining the director’s regular return to such subject matter. Street of Shame takes place almost entirely within the confines of the Floating World (licensed places for middle-class pleasure-seeking, such as brothels, tea house and theatres), tackling the issue of prostitution at a time when political parties were using their stance on the matter as a means of influencing electoral power.
The episodic narrative of Street of Shame devotes an equal amount of attention to each of the five women who work at a brothel called Dreamland. Yasumi (Ayako Wakao) is always the top earner, not only saving her money but lending it to her co-workers on the condition that it is paid back with interest, earning the nickname ‘Lady Shylock’ while also stringing along a local businessman who has made her a marriage proposal. Hanae (Michiyo Kogure) is struggling to support her family, which consists of a baby and a tuberculosis-ridden husband who is prone to suicidal impulses; they are constantly being threatened with eviction and, as the pressure of such familial responsibility becomes physically apparent, Hanae becomes less appealing to customers who prefer to spend time with younger courtesans. Yorie (Hiroka Machida) manages to marry a man who makes clogs for a living and is thrown a leaving party by her co-workers; however, she soon returns to Dreamland in a state of distress because her husband has simply expected her to be his servant. The older Yumeko (Aiko Mimasu) is a ‘country bumpkin’ who moved to Tokyo years ago to provide for her son, but has recently discovered that he has also relocated to the big city; meeting him outside the toy factory where he has found work, Yumeko is rejected by her son who is ashamed of her profession. The youngest of the five is Mickey (Machiko Kyo), who has walked away from a relatively wealthy background due to a strained relationship with her father; she is always in debt, and borrows money from both Yasumi and Dreamland proprietor Mr Taya in order to make it through the month.
Mizoguchi was shooting Street of Shame while members of government councils were meeting to discuss passing an anti-prostitution bill, and the employees of Dreamland listen to summaries of these talks on the radio. There is a sense that Mizoguchi is documenting the beginning of the end in this area of the sex industry, not only in terms of its status as a legal enterprise, but also with regards to its rapidly declining professional standards. Looking back on the role of the geisha – perhaps through rose-tinted glasses – the maid comments, ‘In the old days, a high-ranked courtesan would be skilled in Japanese poetry, the way of tea, flower arrangement and even calligraphy’. However, the women who work at Dreamland do not seem to have cultivated any of these abilities, and often resort to desperately dragging their customers in from the streets. There is little professional code among these women of the night, with ‘you can steal anything you want except another girl’s customer’ being the only house rule that is mentioned, although even this one is broken when a regular patron of Dreamland decides to try a different girl. The younger generation of geisha is represented by the gum-chewing Mickey, an arrogant example of Westernisation who racks up debt around the district and moans about having to get up early. The slightly older and financially sensible Yasumi seems to be a more traditional geisha in both attitude and appearance, but is eventually revealed to be a master manipulator; her father has been jailed for extortion and she leads another man down the path that placed him behind bars in order to raise the bail money.
By mixing melodrama with social concern, Mizoguchi is able to follow five story strands while maintaining a world view that is consistently critical regardless of the individual outcomes. Yasumi actually has more progressive business sense than her employers as she eventually leaves Dreamland to take over the bedding and quilting shop that sells directly to the brothel; she has sold her body as a relatively swift solution to a family problem, but her newfound prosperity is certainly tinged with resentment. While the prudent Yasumi has an escape plan, and the spendthrift Mickey is happy to whittle away her earnings and self-respect, Hanea, Yorie and Yumeko want to leave the profession but do not have the means to do so. Although there are distinct differences between these women, they are united in their bitterness towards the individual circumstances that led them to Dreamland. Yasumu and Mickey blame a lack of parental responsibility in the respective areas of finance and marital faithfulness, while Hanae is frustrated that she and her husband could never earn enough money to live on despite being hard-working and Yorie’s illusions about marriage turn out to be just that, leaving her with little to live for. However, it is Yumeko who truly pays the price for her choice of profession; although she dislikes her work as much as the other women, she has willingly made the sacrifice in order to support her son and only wants to see him succeed, but his vehement refusal to allow her to be part of his life shatters Yumeko’s fragile sense of self, swiftly resulting in mental breakdown.
While discussing the anti-prostitution bill with the Mamasan (Sadako Sawamura), a policeman observes, ‘the government has to deal with public opinion’; this is what happened in Japan in 1956 as the anti-prostitution bill was finally passed, a legislative event that was partially attributed to audience response to Street of Shame. Mizugochi is typically sympathetic towards the women of Dreamland, but finds their profession unpleasant and considers their employers to be little more than exploitation merchants. Mr Taya may insist, ‘We are the ones who really care about you. We built this club so you can do business. That’s how you can make a living. We are compensating for work that the government overlooks. We’re social workers!’ but does so on several occasions in a pre-rehearsed manner, suggesting that this is less of a heartfelt social statement than it is a means of motivating his workforce. Yoshiwara is presented as a maze of squalid streets with customers and workers struggling to find their way out, while Toshirô Mayuzumi’s luridly off-kilter score adds a surreal element to the proceedings, emphasising that everyone in this district is on a downward spiral. The loss of Yasumi and Yumeko prompts the proprietor of Dreamland to take on a new worker, the virginal Shizuko (Yasuko Kawakami), and Street of Shame ends with her induction as the Mamasan ensures that make-up is properly applied before sending her out to learn the trade. Based on the five lives that Mizugochi has explored, Shizuko has three options: save and buy her way out, live with no regard for tomorrow, or become shackled to the profession with dreams of normality remaining just that. Whichever path she chooses, Mizugochi makes it clear that the bitterness that is caused by such a loss of innocence is cruelly inevitable.
Screening as part of the Zipangu Festival on 27 November 2010
Director: Hisayasu Satô
Screenplay: Naoko Nishida
Based on the book by: Atsuhiko Nakamura
Original title:Namae no nai onna-tachi
Cast: Hirofumi Arai, Natsumi Kamata and Ryônosuke Kawai
Japan 2010
105 mins
Hisayasu Satô is best known as one of the ‘Four Devils’ of pinku eiga, one of the four directors who rocked the Japanese soft porn industry in the 1990s with their extreme erotic films such as The Bedroom (Uwakizuma: Chijokuzeme, 1992), Love – Zero = Infinity (Iyarashii hitozuma: Nureru, 1994) and Naked Blood (Nekeddo burâddo: Megyaku, 1995). He has also made films in the non-pink industry, contributing the acclaimed ‘Caterpillar’ section to Rampo Noir (Rampo Jigoku, 2005), adapted from the work of mystery writer Edogawa Rampo.
A fictional story based on a non-fiction book about the Japanese porn industry, Love and Loathing and Lulu and Ayano (2010) continues to explore the themes of identity, alienation and communication that run through Satô’s work. The film focuses on a meek, bespectacled young woman, Junko, who tries to escape from an abusive mother and a dreary office job by becoming a porn actress. She constructs an alternative porn identity as the comic character Lulu and strikes an unlikely friendship with the streetwise, fiery Ayano, but soon the tension between her two lives becomes impossible to manage.
Satô attended the premiere of the film at Zipangu Fest, a new, innovative festival of Japanese cinema, and talked to Virginie Sélavy about what Lulu and Ayano reveals about the Japanese porn industry and Japanese society in general, the motivation behind his most extreme films and the influence of Kôji Wakatmatsu.
VS: Could you tell me a bit more about the book Lulu and Ayano was based on?
HS: The book is a collection of interviews with unknown porn actresses who work in the type of films where you learn on the set what you have to do that day. The interviews are about their motives, what drives them to do a job like that.
Are they actresses from AV (Adult Video, the equivalent of hard-core porn), pink film or both?
The girls interviewed in the book are strictly AV actresses, not pink actresses. There are over 100 interviews with girls working in that particular porn industry.
You said in the Q&A that followed the screening that the idea of adapting this book came from a producer, but you weren’t sure you wanted to do it at first. Why did this producer think you’d be a good person to direct the film? And what decided you to do it?
The producer started as a casting producer and Lulu and Ayano was the first film he worked on as a film producer. He became interested in working with me after seeing an old film of mine. Before we decided to do Lulu and Ayano, we were talking about doing another film together, which was a historical piece. But it was difficult to get the funding for that film, we worked on the project for two years but it didn’t work out. So the producer got the licence for the Lulu and Ayano project and he approached me and asked if we could do that one together. He showed me the book and when I read it, I thought it was tough material, they were talking about things like domestic violence and incestuous relationships. The main theme underlying the stories of the girls was the search for identity in the middle of the cruelty that they experienced in their daily lives. To exactly adapt the original book into film would have been too difficult, and it would have been hard to get funding. So I decided to take two or three girls from the book and turn them into characters, fictionalise them. My aim with the film was to show what it’s like to work in the lowest possible form of the porn industry. I didn’t want to make a film about this being a special or particular area, I really wanted to show that this is a normal problem for girls today in Japan and that the weakest members of society get affected by this social phenomenon, and I wanted to depict how they overcome this.
Did you draw on your work in the pink industry to make this film?
Of course I directed pink films and I also directed AV films until four or five years ago, films that actually included rape scenes, and the actresses I encountered on the sets were sensitive girls who were thinking about what they wanted to do in their lives. I thought it was really interesting and I wanted to focus on this in my film.
Do you think your film is a realistic description of the porn industry, not just in the depiction of the actresses, their work and the way they are treated, but also in the characters of the stalker and the scout?
Stalkers and scouts are now a social phenomenon. Porn scouts go to Shibuya, the shopping district in Tokyo and look for girls who have a void in their hearts. They look for the little wounds that will draw them into the porn industry. Stalking especially is an important phenomenon of today’s society. It’s really different from 10 years ago, with the internet it’s possible to communicate with someone you don’t really know. And I think in a way it really depicts this problem of communication, not being able to communicate with each other anymore.
This idea of communication is central to your work, together with characters who are loners or alienated from society. Do you feel Lulu and Ayano continues this theme?
Yes. I came to Tokyo when I was 18 and I personally experienced this gap between society and one’s self. Since then it has been a topic in my films and it is there again in Lulu and Ayano.
What’s interesting is that the film is clearly critical of the way the women are treated in the porn industry but at the same time there is a contrast between the bright world of porn and the dull, repressive office environment.
The office life is what Lulu’s mother wants for her and I took it as a metaphor, a symbol to depict her identity crisis and her conflict with her mother and with what society wants her to be, this nice girl working as an office lady. In a way you could almost say that when the scout approaches her it’s a positive moment; this offer to work as a porn actress seems like a ray of light because it enables her to escape from the expectations of her mother and of society.
Although the film is realistic in some ways, there is also a very stylised aspect, with a great work on colours.
I pay a lot of attention to the colours, the lighting and the set. I’m a photographer, so the look of the film is as important to me as the script and the writing. I always imagined how the film would look like. There is a colour choreography in the film. At the beginning, there are no colours, which should be taken as a metaphor for the situation of the girl at that point, and when she’s asked by the scout to become a porn actress the colours start to come in, in particular in the cosplay scene, but at the very end it returns to black and white. It reflects the inner situation of the characters and the final scene in black and white is like a restart, and it’s also supposed to be a message, a provocative question to the audience: what will happen when Lulu leaves the AV world?
It’s a very female-focused film, and you clearly have a lot of empathy for the actresses. At the same time, some scenes are filmed in a way that could be deemed titillating, for instance the scene where Lulu and Ayano throw beer at each other and take all their clothes off. What was the purpose of that scene and why did you choose to film it in that way?
Lulu and Ayano are two characters who have problems communicating with each other and with other people. I just wanted to show that through their friendship they find they share common points and this scene for me depicts the climax of their friendship. They literally strip down and connect in a way. That’s what it’s meant to be.
Compared with your earlier films, it’s not an extreme film at all, apart from maybe the splatter scene at the end.
For me, film necessarily reflects society, so it would be great to have a world without violence but as I observe it, there is a tendency towards more violence. Now maybe it’s different types, like psychological violence and inner violence, and I don’t know how my films will develop, maybe I’ll depict this inner violence. It’s interesting for me to see how society develops.
Why did you start in pink film? There have been a number of Japanese directors who were attracted to pink film as a faster way of becoming a director and because it allows a lot of freedom. Was it the same for you?
I felt a connection with pink film. Compared to Hollywood, they had very small budgets but films by, for example, Kumashiro Tatsumi, Kôji Wakamatsu and Tanaka Noboru, touched me more. So I felt I wanted to work in that area.
In what way did Wakamatsu influence you?
I wouldn’t say I was directly influenced by him but when I was younger I watched a lot of pink films and older films, including films by Wakamatsu, and I thought that they showed a way to express the repressed anger I felt towards society at the time.
Does that anger explain some of the more extreme imagery in some of the films, such as the self-cannibalistic woman in Naked Blood or the sado-masochistic experiment in Fuga Music for Alpha and Beta (Alpha to beta no fûga, 1989) or the vibrator torture in The Secret Garden (Himitsu no hanazono, 1987)?
Yes, in a way, you could say it reflects the anger I felt at the time, but the anger I express in my films is not very clear. With Wakamatsu, it’s clear that it’s the anger he feels against the political system, but what bothers me more is this invisible violence we experience every day, the individual being suppressed by the system, and this is the violence I’d like to express and which I feel angry against.
Do you feel that the more extreme films you made were connected to a particular time?
Of course society has changed, and so have I. But there was also the criticism I got from cinemas and producers who thought that there shouldn’t be so much violence in pink films. It wasn’t my aim to be so radical, but some of my younger fans always talk to me about this particular aspect, Naked Blood in particular.
In a way, some of your earlier films could be described as horror films. Would you agree?
I’m not so much into genres. Everybody said that the splatter aspect of my early films was very strong but I wasn’t really aware of that. I wasn’t thinking I was making a splatter film or a horror film. For me to show all this blood was necessary to express what I wanted to say. After I was criticised by producers there were a couple of films where I tried to find other means of expression, to find an antithesis to the violence.
In which films for instance?
Love-Zero=Infinity and Rafureshia (Sukebe tsuma: otto no rusu ni, 1995) for instance. Love-Zero=Infinity is a vampire story set in contemporary society. It was a metaphor: I wanted to show that the Japanese society of today is a society of vampires. The imperial system is the backbone of Japanese society as I see it. So the background of the film is the Shôwa era, which is when I grew up. This Shôwa era is what defines me and I wanted to reflect that in the film. I was born on August 15, 1945, when Japan lost the war. I wanted to show the political atmosphere of the era I grew up in. My life started with a prayer – to peace and war veterans – after we lost the war.
If you had the choice, would you rather make pink or non-pink film?
There is a crisis of independent cinema in general in Japan, including pink film. Cinemas are closing and the production opportunities are diminishing. If pink films are shown on TV, the violent scenes are cut. But as I want my films to be seen by as many people as possible, I try to not be so focused on pink films.
Zipangu Fest was created by Japanese film expert Jasper Sharp to challenge yakuza-and-Godzilla clichés about Nippon cinema and with a programme that encompassed 60s experimental cinema, horror underground animation, new and old features as well as documentaries about subjects ranging from a mysterious porn actress to graffiti and Japanese rock, the inaugural edition of the festival easily succeeded. One of the best things about the festival was that, unlike so many bigger festivals, it wasn’t just a more or less random programme of recent feature films, but many of the screenings were carefully curated events around a theme or a specific type of film. This curatorial attention and the impressive knowledge Sharp and his team have of little-known, fascinating areas of Japanese cinema made the festival a very special and hugely enjoyable event, despite some technical problems.
Sarah Cronin, Virginie Sélavy, Tom Mes, Helen Mullane and Pamela Jahn report on the programme and feature highlights of the festival.
Zipangu Fest Opening Night
I fell in love with PyuuPiru. It was a cold November night in London’s Brick Lane, and I was huddled up on a leather sofa in Café 1001 for the opening of Zipangu Fest. The event promised to be an evening full of fascinating, unknown films, and the programme easily exceeded expectations.
Before my introduction to PyuuPiru 2001-2008 (2009), there was Suridh Hassan’s RackGaki (2008), a visually arresting film devoted to Japanese graffiti. Made by London’s SRK Studios, it uses time-lapse photography and a trip-hop soundtrack to totally immerse the viewer in Japan’s street scene. The audience was also treated to a selection of shorts, involving a house party filled with weird and wonderful creatures in Dotera Asayama’s PsychoMediaParty (2007); a hideous, red claymation creature hunting down a poor little girl in Takena Nagao’s Bloody Night (2006); a boy who is visited by a carp in Taijin Takeuchi’s 2010 A Song Like a Fish (I recommend watching his terrific stop-animation short A Wolf Loves Pork on YouTube); and a samurai film made in Tunbridge Wells, Taichi Kimura’s Spiral (2010).
But the night’s highlight was PyuuPiru, an irresistible, moving portrait of a unique and eccentric artist whose personality is deeply intertwined with his art, directed by friend and collaborator Daishi Matsunaga. Matsunaga and PyuuPiru met when the future artist was making his own flamboyant outfits for the club scene, and this superb documentary charts his artistic and psychological evolution. The film perfectly captures PyuuPiru’s creative process – a dress-like cone made of thousands of paper cranes is incredible – but the documentary also captures a physical and mental transformation. Uncomfortable living as a man, PyuuPiru starts hormone therapy, eventually taking ever-more drastic steps to turn himself into a woman after falling in love with a straight man, until plastic surgery becomes a part of his art and personality. Despite the pain he puts himself through, he remains a generous, warm-hearted and incredibly charismatic artist. Daishi’s film is a work-in-progress, and it will be fascinating to see what direction he and PyuuPiru take next. Sarah Cronin
Nippon Year Zero
The previous night, as a pre-opening night warm-up event, Zipangu had presented a programme of 60s experimental Japanese cinema in collaboration with Close-Up at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. Transformed into a makeshift cinema with a projector whirring at the back of the room, it was the perfect setting for an evocation of a turbulent, volatile time of political unrest and intense creativity. The selection of films by Donald Richie, Motoharu Jonouchi and Masanori Oe was meant to establish a dialogue between Japan and the USA, with Richie providing an American viewpoint on Japan, and Oe articulating a Japanese perception of American society. The differences between the films were not merely down to nationality, but also style: Richie’s poetic, meditative filmmaking was contrasted with the frantic editing, experimental use of sound and image, and sensory overload of Jonouchi and Oe’s films.
In War Games (1962), Richie wordlessly follows the actions of a group of small Japanese boys who find a goat, crafting a visual tale of cruelty and innocence framed by the eternal ebb and flow of the ocean. Opening with a quote from a poem by Mutsuro Takahashi, Dead Youth (1967) was a homoerotic cine-poem set in a Japanese cemetery, in which Richie’s almost tactile filmmaking, with its focus on physical textures – skin, fur, hair, sand – was developed in a more sexual manner.
This was followed by Jonouchi’s chaotic, kinetic Shinjuku Station (1974), which evoked the district at the centre of Tokyo’s art scene and political rebellion through a fast, shaky montage of various images of the area – the station, protests, the police, etc – accompanied by the filmmaker reciting sound poetry. Later, this frenzy of tumultuous images and sounds gives way to longer shots of nature before the screen goes black and the film ends with a long, purely musical section. In Gewaltopia Trailer (1978), Jonouchi juxtaposes images of mushroom clouds, children running, Hitler, a political rally and student demonstrations with scenes from King Kong and Nosferatu, and images of words (in Japanese) inscribed on parts of an actor’s naked body. The remarkable soundtrack mixes voices talking and moaning with drones, rattling noises and blowing wind, creating an oppressive, unnerving, sinister atmosphere that connects and unites the images.
The last film on the bill, Oe’s Great Society (1967), was an ambitious split-screen piece that investigated American society through six simultaneous strands of images. News footage showing the Kennedy assassination, civil rights demonstrations, Ku Klux Klan members, fast cars, American sports, festivals, a rocket launch, Vietnam and mushroom clouds, among other things, was compiled to a soundtrack of iconic 60s musicians including The Byrds, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jefferson Airplane. The six screens interacted and contrasted with one another, sometimes forming a united picture, sometimes divergent ones, with some of the screens at times left blank, creating a complex, contradictory and dynamic picture of the USA in that crucial decade. Virginie Sélavy
Live Tape
Live Tape ‘Live’ Night
Zipangu’s rock night on November 25 presented two music-themed documentaries and a live performance at Brick Lane’s Café 1001. Rock Tanjo (‘The birth of rock’) sounded promising: a chronicle of the birth and growth of ‘New Rock’ – a wave of Japanese bands heavily inspired by the likes of Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Cream, which in the early 1970s replaced the previous generation of Beatles-influenced ‘Group Sound’ combos.
The vanguard of this movement was formed by the Flower Traveling Band, whose heavy, psychedelic magnum opus Satori a few years ago formed the soundtrack of Takashi Miike’s Deadly Outlaw: Rekka. (Recently released on DVD in the UK by Arrow, Rekka also features the band’s founder/mentor and its singer, Yuya Uchida and Joe Yamanaka, in supporting roles.)
Great bands and a fascinating musical scene unfortunately never get their due in Rock Tanjo, a plodding documentary whose interview/performance format soon grows repetitive, due to a lack of narrative or dramatic build-up and songs that are rarely among the bands’ best work.
Vastly more successful was the evening’s second film, Tetsuaki Matsue’s Live Tape, which already gathered praise both at home and at festivals abroad (Nippon Digital award at Frankfurt’s Nippon Connection festival last April). In a single, uninterrupted 90-minute take, it follows tousle-haired busker Kenta Maeno as he strums his way through the crowded streets of Tokyo’s Kichijoji suburb on New Year’s Day. As Maeno belts out his repertoire, the interplay between subject and director lends the film first a great sense of tension and eventually a touching personal and emotional core.
Just as Live Tape culminates in a full-band performance at a park bandstand, the evening at the 1001 climaxed with the interruption of Kenta Maeno and Chinese harpist Yuki Yoshida, in mid-performance after having replayed the Live Tape set-up in Brick Lane. Like a certain rat-catcher, Maeno drew additional crowds off the street and into the café, where he continued with an amplified set of the most memorable songs from the film. Tom Mes
Ero Guro Mash Up Night
This selection of grotesque, supernatural or horror-inflected animated films from underground filmmakers Naoyuki Niiya and Hiroshi Harada offered an insight into a strand of Japanese animation that is rarely seen on Western screens. Niiya’s Metempsychosis (Squid Festival, 1993), plunged us into an underground universe of darkness, interspersed with the lights of a mysterious celebration, possibly the squid festival of the alternate title. Next came Niiya’s Man-Eater Mountain (2008), which used paper theatre to tell a gruesome folk tale. Serial killer Tashiro is taken to the mountains to find the bodies of his victims, but soon the police inspectors and their guide face the demons of the mountain. The beautifully atmospheric black-and-white drawings emphasised the nightmarish, Bosch-like horror of blood-sucking trees, impaled animals, bodies torn apart or eaten by demons. Closing the programme, Harada’s Midori: The Girl in the Freak Show (1992) is a 52-minute film following the misadventures of a young girl who is sold to a travelling circus and mistreated by its freak performers. Violent and disturbing, elaborate both in the cruelty of the story and the beauty of the images, it was a memorable ending to the evening.
Another Harada short, The Death Lullaby (1995), screened before NN-891102 (see review below). The tale of a boy bullied for his protruding teeth, it was an abrasive and powerful film. Set in Narita, showing the destruction of the old city to make room for the airport, The Death Lullaby suggests a parallel between the abuse of the boy and the abuse of the Japanese people by the government. Persecution, despair and violence lead to total destruction, but the boy’s revenge is followed by an apparent reversal of the devastation of Narita. Virginie Sélavy
NN-891102
Jasper Sharp is the author of Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema and his knowledge of pink film was reflected in the choice of the feature films selected for the festival, among which was ‘Four Devil’ Hisayasu Satô’s latest, Love and Loathing and Lulu and Anayo, which focuses on a shy office clerk who becomes a porn actress, as well as a documentary on porn actress Annyong Yumika.
Hayashi Yumika is a name well known to those who frequent a certain type of cinema in Japan. The Tokyo native was a prolific actress in the country’s pink and AV movie industries (equivalent to soft and hardcore porn), most famous for her role in the critically acclaimed Lunchbox, and the star of 400 other films. She died in 2005, the night of her 35th birthday celebration.
Tetsuaki Matsue’s moving and humorous documentary is clearly a labour of love, as the director journeys to unravel the mystery of Junko: The Story of a Tokyo Housewife, an obscure video and one of the earliest examples of a Korean/Japanese pornographic co-production in existence, starring Yumika. The film is amusingly inept with some pretty painful acting – so far so cheap porn, but the mystery stands: what on earth is one of Japan’s premier porno actresses doing in this film?
The question is tackled through interviews with Yumika’s former lovers and colleagues, and is handled with a light hand. Annyong Yumika never takes itself too seriously, but also never treats its subject with anything but respect and reverence. Matsuo’s low-fi, scrapbook style contains quirks that are at times jarring, but ultimately complements the film’s intimate feel. By the end of the documentary you are left with the feeling that even those closest to Yumika couldn’t unravel the mystery of this enigmatic woman, who remains intriguingly elusive to the end. Helen Mullane
NN-891102
‘I want to become a sound particle in the explosion,’ says the troubled central character of Go Shibata’s NN-891102 (1999), one of the two retrospective screenings in the festival. Having survived the bombing of Nagasaki – on 9 August 1945 at 11:02am – as a child, he becomes obsessed with recreating the sound of the explosion. We follow his efforts throughout his life, from early attempts to his ground-breaking experiments as a sound engineer. Dark and enigmatic, beautifully shot in high contrast and with a remarkable soundtrack mixing noise and music, NN-891102 builds a fragmentary, evocative, complex picture of unspeakable trauma and grief. Virginie Sélavy
Confessions of a Dog
The festival closed on a high note with Gen Takahashi’s Confessions of a Dog, in which a simple, honest beat cop wins the confidence of the Head of the Criminal Investigative Department and works his way up, finding out as he does how corrupted the system is. Too committed to his job to reject an order, Takeda (Shun Sugata) soon sees himself embroiled in the daily transgressions of the force, from seedy back room dealings to blackmail and brutal violence, which not only jeopardise his life but also cause him to become increasingly detached from his wife and daughter.
Although ticking in at a bum-numbing 195 minutes, the film’s length implicitly adds to its gripping intensity, allowing the viewer to become fully immersed in the correlations between crime, police corruption and the complicit media. Confessions of a Dog thrives on its deft pacing as much as on the towering lead performance given by Shun Sugata, who is increasingly unnerving as Takeda becomes trapped in the dirty business that goes all the way to the top of the force. It’s a mesmerising psychological ride that builds up to a gloriously theatrical tragic finale as the broken Takeda has to face the consequences of his actions.
The fact that Takahashi has dared to tackle such a controversial subject and has turned it into one of the finest and most devastating films about the everyday politics of corruption has unfortunately led to the film being only marginally released in Japan. But Confessions of a Dog is a film that deserves to be seen widely, and thanks to Third Window Films it will be released on DVD in the UK in March 2011. Pamela Jahn
We are very excited about the forthcoming Zipangu Fest, a UK festival devoted to Japanese cinema curated by Jasper Sharp.
Here’s what they have on offer:
Zipangu Fest begins on Tuesday 23 November with a special event entitled Nippon Year Zero: Japanese Experimental Film from the 1960s-1970s, presented in collaboration with Close-Up at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. This retrospective programme will introduce audiences to the early Japanese avant-garde filmmaking scene with rare screenings of works by three landmark figures, Donald Richie, Motoharu Jonouchi and Masanori Oe, who captured the period they were an intrinsic part of, articulating themselves in ways that range from the poetic to the abrasive.
The festival officially gets underway on Wednesday 24 with the Zipangu Fest Opening Party at Café 1001 on Brick Lane, featuring the UK premiere of Pyuupiru 2001 – 2008, Daishi Matsunaga’s moving documentary charting the physical, psychological and artistic metamorphosis of the flamboyant transgender artist Pyuupiru. The evening will also feature a selection of shorts and a screening of Rackgaki: Japanese Graffiti, a documentary examining Japan’s explosive graffiti scene, and concludes with a set from London’s top Japanese DJ Tomoki Tamura + SUPERMETHOD.
The following evening, on Thursday 25, Zipangu Fest will continue at Café 1001 with the Live Tape ‘Live’ Night at Café 1001, a music-themed evening that sees the UK premiere of Rock Tanjo: The Movement 70s, a documentary looking at the birth of ‘New Rock’ in 1970s Japan featuring interviews and performances from bands including the Flower Travellin’ Band, and the UK premiere of Live Tape, the award-winning one-take concert film featuring singer-songwriter Kenta Maeno that has been making waves at festivals around the world. The festival’s special guest, Live Tape director Tetsuaki Matsue, will be in attendance to introduce his film, which will be followed by a live set by Maeno accompanied by Yuki Yoshida on the Chinese harp.
Friday 26 November sees Zipangu Fest moving to Genesis Cinema in Mile End where the main festival programme begins with Yuriko’s Aroma, Kota Yoshida’s humorous portrait of an aromatherapist besotted by the scent of a sweaty highâ€schooler, and ends with the UK premiere of Gen Takahashi’s epic Confessions of a Dog, a gripping indictment of corruption within the Japanese police, as the closing film on Sunday 28th November.
Other UK premieres include Annyong Yumika, an innovative documentary homage to legendary Japanese pink film actress Yumika Hayashi who was mysteriously found dead after returning home from her 35th birthday celebrations, and the second title by Zipangu Fest special guest Tetsuaki Matsue, Love & Loathing & Lulu & Ayano, a revealing drama about exploitation and abuse in Japan’s Adult Video industry, directed by the infamous Hisayasu Sato, who will be in attendance to introduce the film; the all new Mutant Girls Squad, from Noboru Iguchi, director of the hits The Machine Girl and RoboGeisha; and Footed Tadpoles, a quirky coming-of-age drama from Tomoya Maeno.
Zipangu Fest is also proud to be presenting a selection of some of the finest in Japanese independent animation. The Zipangu Fest Ero Guro Mash Up Night features three nightmarishly morbid works in the ‘erotic grotesque’ tradition from the underground animators Hiroshi Harada and Naoyuki Niiya, while the Beyond Anime: CALF Animation programme features recent envelope-pushing works from Mirai Mizue, Kei Oyama, Atsushi Wada and TOCHKA.
Also featuring as part of the main programme are the Zipangu Retro screenings of two classic but very different titles rarely shown in the UK, Children of the Beehive (1948) and NN-891102 (1999). Directed by one of the masters of Japanese cinema, Hiroshi Shimizu, Children of the Beehive relates the journey of a group of war orphans (in real life all orphans taken in and raised by the director) as they are taken under the wing of a nameless soldier and set out across a shattered, postwar landscape in search of a more certain future. NN-891102, the debut feature by cult hero Go Shibata, depicts a traumatised Nagasaki survivor’s obsession with recreating the sound of the atomic bomb.
Following the festival, a selection of titles from the programme will be screened at the Arnolfini in Bristol, from Thursday 16 to Sunday 19 December. The Arnolfini programme consists of Annyong Kimchee, Children of the Beehive, Footed Tadpoles, Live Tape, NN-891102, Confessions of a Dog and a selection of shorts.
Full details and descriptions of the films and other events can be found on the Zipangu Fest website .
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
