Persistently Postwar: Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan 9781785339608

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Persistently Postwar

Persistently Postwar Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan

Edited by Blai Guarné, Artur Lozano-Méndez and Dolores P. Martinez

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Blai Guarné, Artur Lozano-Méndez and Dolores P. Martinez All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Guarné, Blai, editor. | Lozano-Méndez, Artur, editor. | Martinez, D. P. (Dolores P.), 1957- editor. Title: Persistently postwar : media and the politics of memory in Japan / edited by Blai Guarné, Artur Lozano-Mendez and Dolores P. Martinez. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018056520 (print) | LCCN 2019000588 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339608 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339592 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Collective memory in mass media. | Mass media and history--Japan. | Mass media and culture--Japan. | Japan--Civilization--1945Classification: LCC P96.C652 (ebook) | LCC P96.C652 J3 2019 (print) | DDC 791.43/65852--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056520 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78533-959-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-960-8 ebook

Contents

List of Figures and Tables vii Acknowledgements viii Note on Language ix Introduction The Politics of Media and Memory Representation in Japan Blai Guarné, Artur Lozano-Méndez, Dolores P. Martinez

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Part I. War’s Aftermath Chapter 1 The Death of Certainty: Memory, Guilt and Redemption in Ikiru Dolores P. Martinez Chapter 2 Postwar Narratives and the Avant-garde Documentary: Tokyo 1958 and Furyō Shōnen Marcos P. Centeno Martín Chapter 3 Radical Subjectivity as a Counter to Japanese Humanist Cinema: Ōshima Nagisa’s Nūberu Bāgu Ferran de Vargas

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Contents

Part II. The Past in the Present Chapter 4 Recreating Memory? The Drama Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai and Its Remakes Griseldis Kirsch Chapter 5 From Myth to Cult: Tragic Heroes, Parody and Gender Politics in the 1960s–1970s ‘Bad Girls’ Cinema of Japan Laura Treglia Chapter 6 Collective Remorse for the Past: Japanese Film and TV Representations of the 1960s Student Movement Katsuyuki Hidaka

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Part III. The Persistence of Memory Chapter 7 Depicting the Persistence of Being Postwar: Eden of the East Artur Lozano-Méndez Chapter 8 Rethinking Anime in East Asia: Creative Labour in Transnational Production, or What Gets Lost in Translation Tomohiro Morisawa Conclusion The Persistence of Trauma Dolores P. Martinez, Blai Guarné and Artur Lozano-Méndez

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Index 191

Figures and Tables

Figures Figure 2.1 Visual representation before the surrender. The Shōwa Emperor’s coronation in 1928. Figure 2.2 Visual representation before the surrender. The Imperial Family on 7 December 1941. Figure 2.3 MacArthur and Hirohito at the US Embassy in Japan, 27 September 1945. Figure 8.1 Production flow chart and IB-TP.

52 52 53 166

Table Table 7.1

The Eden of the East animation franchise.

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Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a conversation that began at the European Association of Japanese Studies (EAJS) meeting held in Tallinn, Estonia in 2011. This idea for a volume on media and memory was continuously developed over the following years, particularly during a sabbatical visit by Artur to SOAS in 2013 and a short teaching stint in Barcelona by Lola in 2016. The last few years of editing have seen the chapters undergoing many changes before becoming this book and for this we thank our indefatigable contributors. Our thanks also go to Berghahn production staff, who have been especially helpful in the editing process, and to the anonymous readers who helped us refine the book’s argument. Our greatest debt, as ever, goes to our ever patient partners: David Gellner, Javi, and Shimoyoshi Ayumi.

Note on Language

All Japanese terms, except for those well known or commonly used in English, have been italicized and romanized according to the modified Hepburn system, which marks long vowels with macrons. Japanese names appear in standard Japanese order in the text, with surname first.

Introduction

The Politics of Media and Memory Representation in Japan Blai Guarné, Artur Lozano-Méndez and Dolores P. Martinez

Spanning six decades from the end of the Second World War, the chapters in this volume examine the transition from the Japanese experience of war to war as a memory through a variety of politicalized, artistic media productions. This transition led to many creative expressions of radical scepticism from the 1950s to 1960s. Moreover, much of this postwar era saw a ‘re-membering’ of the past through the reformulation of fictive narratives set in prewar Japan, a mythologized era in which ‘shared’ Japanese values could be celebrated. The critiquing of the present and nostalgic reimagining of certain epochs have persisted in tandem and manifest in a variety of ways within Japan’s audiovisual culture. It is this dualism that is explored in this volume through an analysis of commercial, cult and animated (anime) films, as well as avant-garde documentaries and television dramas written by scholars from the fields of anthropology, sociology and film, media and cultural studies, all of whom are Japan experts. This type of interdisciplinary approach was pioneered by the intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School of social theory, who, regardless of their initial training and different specializations, all realized that multifaceted social phenomena demanded complex analyses. Many of the fundamental concerns discussed by these twentieth century critical theorists continue to trouble us in the twenty-first century. While none of the authors here has merely transplanted concepts such as ‘social consciousness’ (Marx 1977 [1859]; cf. Engels 1893)1 or ‘historicity’ (Marcuse 1987 [1932]),2 it is apparent that we all are grappling with the issues that have sprung from these milestone analyses of social phenomena  – namely, trying to understand what discursive resources and epistemological tools

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are mobilized by societies to account for their social processes, products and practices. Yet, however much a single scholar may strive to produce such complex and complete analyses, a truly multifaceted methodology requires a multisited approach by different voices. Interchange and the implementation of contrapuntal strategies are paths that research in sociology and the humanities could take in order to achieve qualitative breakthroughs. This would entail people from different academic backgrounds and strata comparing perspectives on the same subject in a shared platform. The template for such critical enterprises was set by Said (1993: 18–19): By looking at the different experiences contrapuntally, as making up a set of what I call intertwined and overlapping histories, I shall try to formulate an alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility. A more interesting type of secular interpretation can emerge, altogether more rewarding than the denunciations of the past, the expressions of regret for its having ended, or  – even more wasteful because violent and far too easy and attractive – the hostility between Western and nonWestern cultures that leads to crises. The world is too small and interdependent to let these passively happen.

Thus, this book’s interdisciplinary approach stands on an already rich tradition that has been developed in cultural and media studies. Additionally, the politics of cultural production regarding remembrance and representation almost demanded that we take different disciplinary approaches to the problematic of social, or collective, memory.

Social Memory in Postwar Japan Social memory comprises not only the most widely accepted and reproduced accounts and interpretations of history; it is intrinsic to the ‘dominant cultural order’ and to the ‘structure of discourses in dominance’ (Hall 1999: 513). Thus, it intervenes in the silting of hierarchically organized ‘dominant or preferred meanings’ (ibid.). While memory can be individual, linked with identity issues and psychology, recollection can be seen also as history or as an invention; or as an archive that shapes both personal and social genealogies; or even as the historical a priori of discourse. What these engagements have in common is an element of the political: either as an oblique articulation in the representation of the past or by begging the question of individual/collective responsibility and also through raising the possibility, or not, of redemption.

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Hegemonic, guiding political principles favour a reified version of history that is then used to ground the representations of contemporary, shared identities. It is equally correct, then, to argue that the reification of history is ‘reverse engineered’ in order to create an epistemic rationale for a society’s cultural identity. Such collective identities separate citizens from the Angel of History: in contrast to what the Angelus Novus glimpses from the corner of his eye, seeing the rubble and the storm, these constructed identities offer perfect teleological meaning (Benjamin 2007 [1940]: 257–58). In the case of modern Japan, as Vlastos (1998) and Gluck (1993) have argued for the country’s ‘restoration’ post-1868, shared social memory has been worked and reworked many times, particularly in the postwar era. It should be no surprise, then, that scholars of Japan recently have turned away from analysing Japanese identity-making (nihonjinron, theories of the Japanese) to the examination of memory in twentieth-century postwar Japan, considering it a significant strand within the national discourse of a ‘unique’ homogeneity. Consequently, the politics of memory in the postwar era has been scrutinized from diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches3 and through various foci: war memory and history,4 nostalgia and the invention of tradition,5 cultural memory and identity-making narratives,6 and memory and popular culture.7 In their edited volume focused on social memory in Japan, Hui, Van Bremen and Ben-Ari (2005) offer six explanations for this widespread and pervasive interest in memory. First, they posit that periods of accelerated social change often prompt individuals to look back and reconsider the past in order to face the present’s uncertainties. This reaction also results from a dissatisfaction with contemporary reality, as was the case in postbubble Japan (1991–2000) – particularly in light of the economic recession and both the Hanshin earthquake and then the sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway network in 1995. Second, responding to the internationalization of their society, many Japanese searched for the origins of their ‘distinctive’ cultural identity through a revision of past traditions. Related to this is a third cause: still-affluent Japan has seen an increase in associations, clubs and circles interested in local history, cultural traditions and heritage, in a ‘memory boom’ in which all the mass media, as well as the tourism industry, have played a key role. The fourth factor relates to the death of the Shōwa Emperor (1901–1989) and the cycle of commemorative events related to the Second World War that were held both inside and outside Japan at the time. The notion that an historical period had ended gained currency. This ‘closure’ narrative was shared by analysts from academia, politicians and the media.

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The fifth cause is seen to be a result of both the foreign influence on Japan’s politics of identity and the historical narratives that are discursively displayed in museums, exhibitions and commemorative institutions. Finally, the sixth factor revolves around the fact that Japanese studies have seen an expansion in the relationships between anthro­pology and other disciplines such as history, oral history, cultural studies and media studies, leading to a development of multiple, interdisciplinary approaches to the tropes of the past and memory in Japan. According to Hui, Van Bremen and Ben-Ari, what seems to characterize the scholarly study of the Japanese past is a complex intertwining of remembering and forgetting, particularly when examining postwar issues, in which the conceptual underpinnings of historicity, truth and identity are essential for an understanding of the links between memory and power. This has required a critical analysis of the politics of memory and its competing narratives. Therefore, we need to ask: in what way is Japan postwar and what does it mean to be a society that was rebuilt after being defeated in the Second World War? Various dates have been posited for the ending of the postwar era: did it end in 1989 when the Shōwa Emperor was laid to rest? Did it end in 1995, fifty years after the end of the Second World War, with a series of disasters that highlighted the need for profound changes in Japan’s economic, political and social domains (Harootunian 2000)? Or did it end on 11 March 2011 with the ‘Triple Disaster’ of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown (Gerteis and George 2013)? It seems that for some Japanese politicians on the Right, the era will only end with changes to the postwar Constitution that the Allies wrote for the Japanese. Many on the Right want an amendment to Article 9 that would allow Japan to go to war, thus restoring and expanding8 the nation state’s monopoly on legitimate violence  – as Weber (2015) might have it  – restoring Japan’s full sovereignty and making it the equal of other nation states. This is hampered by many factors, including the hostility of the nation’s former enemies, neighbours and colonies, whose own collective histories can be said to rely on Japan’s representation as the dangerous Other. In short, it could be said that Japan is a nation that cannot be trusted with the full constitutional powers that Western nation states enjoy – in fact, it is seen as not to be trusted, even when apologizing for its past actions. Thus, in discussing politics and memory, we are confronted by a contemporary situation in which, politically, Japan sees itself as emasculated: it is still reliant on the US in the international arena, since it is not allowed to wage war nor can it rely on a strategic use of violence that is the ‘right’ of every other sovereign nation state in the world. Even their ‘re-membering’ of history is monitored in the global

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panopticon when there are attempts to downplay the atrocities of the war. No wonder that the country’s postwar history could be interpreted in terms of themes that arise from this sense of impotency: from the first attempts to come to grips with the idea that they were the villains, not the heroes, of their own recent history; to the 1960s student protests over the US-Japan relationship; to the turn of the century’s struggle to understand why Japanese society appears to be somehow in stasis, there is an inherent concern with how the country’s economic and political power does not quite translate into equality with the Western world. In order to understand this continued sense of powerlessness from the world’s third most powerful economy, we need, then, to consider the way in which being postwar has been represented in the last 60–70 years – this is the aim of this volume. The various chapters in this collection build on recent scholarship to describe the end of the war as a moment of rupture, one in which the past was invalidated – state propaganda was debunked and ‘traditional’ ethics and values were considered dangerous. Japan had to be ‘remade’ as democratic, to be switched onto the ‘right track’. This was simpler for some than for others. Children might well not understand all the shifts in the cultural and political milieus but would come to adjust to modernity and capitalism more or less easily, often seduced by the latter’s commodities (Bourdaghs 2005). Adult women, who were just as implicated in the culture of fascist prewar ideology as their menfolk, were being asked to do what they had always been expected to do: to work hard to support the family and, by extension, the economy; to marry and have children to secure the nation’s future; and to properly socialize their children to be good Japanese citizens. The definition of what it is to be a good citizen had changed from the beginnings of the Meiji era (1868–1912) through to 1945, but the idea that women had to ensure that their children grew up to be good Japanese remained the same (see Imamura 1996). Men, of course, also had a role: to be the warriors of the peace, rebuilding the nation both at home and abroad, undoing the damage of the war. In all this it would seem that Japan and its citizens have succeeded. The scars, however, remain. As Davis (1992) argued in his essay on the anthropology of suffering, such events are not transient – here today, cured tomorrow. Collective trauma is experienced as an anguish that suffuses the social whole and echoes down the generations, influencing history and myth, memory, politics and social relations. Moreover, collective trauma that must be repressed has unfathomable effects. This is not to say that, as noted above, we cannot find the traces of this trauma within postwar Japanese media representations. Certainly, suffering occupied

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the minds of a generation of artists, whose work revealed reverberations that now might seem difficult to decipher in light of the narrative of Japan’s successful postwar recovery. Yet, as the chapters in this collection demonstrate, for those who look, the signs are there and can be followed through to any number of dilemmas that are seen to beleaguer the construction of modern Japanese identity: NEETs, freeters, hikikomori, otaku and workaholic men have all been signalled out as problematic and have been analysed both within and outside Japan as examples of the problems that ‘traditional’ Japanese social organization has engendered. The Japanese case importantly underscores how, as individuals and as members of communities, we all are equally enmeshed within multilayered, criss-crossing networks of images that contribute to the creation of both an individual and collective selfhood. Within this system the past only figuratively precedes the present. More exactly, history is a multifaceted, contingent process of contestation and adjustment in which remembering inextricably coexists with forgetting. Therefore, we define the past as an historical projection of identity – individual and collective – since selfhood is shaped in the flow of the present, although it is often encapsulated in the dominant episteme as transcendental. Consider the teleological reasoning behind aphorisms such as ‘we can’t know where we’re going until we know where we’ve been’; ‘knowing the past to understand the present’; or even ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ (Santayana 1948 [1905]: 284). More often than not, when it comes to the historical a priori, it is actually the condition of being oblivious to contemporary discourses that hinders our awareness of the biases in the past’s chronicling.

Media and the Representation of Memory As Martinez has argued (1998: 9), the mass media act as a platform for social negotiation: imagining possibilities for all sorts of situations and relationships within modernity and offering imaginative solutions to their audiences. Keeping the potential of such mediation in mind, this volume’s focus is not just on the ways in which we might use media representations to understand particular societies but also on how they connect to the politics of an era and a place  – and how that political dimension shifts on an historical axis. The study of any mass medium as cultural production cannot be understood without considering its political dimension. This dimension is expressed on two levels: the first encompasses its role in producing a society’s superstructure, through which a feedback loop is established between political discourses and the social, artistic and

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ideological dimensions of the mass media. The second includes its distribution and reception in wider national, transnational and global contexts. Building on the audiences’ experiences, cultural productions can reinforce or contest other systems of representation, exploit personal and collective narratives and formulate new cultural meanings. Moreover, audiovisual productions are examples of ‘reading’ modalities (Hall 1999) that occur both dialogically and diachronically: they are open to constant reworking and reinterpretation within the global context. Their circulation is produced within a complex network of relationships that involves cultural representations, social strategies, economic interests and political projects, as well as the consumption patterns and (re)interpretations of audiences. Accordingly, the consumption of Japan’s audiovisual productions occurs within a global distribution circuit, which ensures different receptions and interpretations. While some of the works examined in this volume are part of mainstream media production in Japan or are, at least, accessible to non-Japanese (see Morisawa and Lozano-Méndez’s chapters in Part III), others have not been licensed in many countries or remain firmly as part of a niche market. Some works even enjoy classic status both within and outside Japan, as is the case with Kurosawa, who is seen to be part of the world history of cinema (see Martinez’s Chapter 1). None of this is just a matter of trends and tastes developing in a void – these media products are all enmeshed in the fabric of transformations that take place in both society and the mass media. For example, read Treglia’s contribution to compare the preferred readings of yakuza films (specifically ninkyō eiga) by male audiences in the 1960s–1970s with some of the more gender progressive critical readings that can be performed in the twenty-first century. It is not just because there is an oppositional code at play that requires an acknowledgement of the original dominant code; rather, the professional code and the production and distribution structure in which both dominant and professional codes were inscribed have changed (see Hall 1999). Yakuza films also are no longer as widely produced, nor are there as many movie theatres in Japan as there were in previous decades; audience preferences have also evolved as the price of admission to theatres has increased. Moreover, the wide range of media products available through multiple channels has forced consumers to actually see their leisure choices as a matrix of both cultural and libidinal economic investment, in which the ‘least objectionable programme’ has become a passive consumption mode and just another of the available options. Building on these considerations, this volume’s contributions explore the representation of the past in the cultural production of, and by, Japan both on a local scale and within transnational processes of production, distribution and consumption. This approach allows us to illuminate the inner workings

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of the mediation of the politics of memory as well as the vicissitudes and overlapping that memory is subjected to throughout time. The attention to ‘overlapping histories’ by a single author can yield (has yielded) illuminating readings. However, this book represents a collaborative effort that results not just in a focus on different histories but also on different analyses as to which histories are vying for dominion within Japanese collective narratives. Importantly, they represent different perspectives as to how these histories collaborate with and/or challenge each other. Such intersecting narratives are not clearly laid out in detail to produce an authoritative output: they are not self-contained ‘devices’. Indeed, some of these histories may only make sense as the converse of another, contrarian, history with which the receiver must also be familiar. To reiterate: while none of the histories are apolitical, their social reproduction does not occur in isolation nor does their transmission follow a master plan. Contextualized within its network of relationships, the mass media’s political reconstruction of memory becomes, as we have noted, a resource in which the process of ‘remembering is paired with the process of forgetting’ (Igarashi 2000: 10). It also becomes a medium where unresolved conflicts and tensions surface. The myth-making practices and nostalgic celebrations of such mediations attempt to erase, but never fully succeed in erasing, the struggle of dealing with the past. This is why the most productive lens through which to analyse such histories is to examine them as they affect discrete cultural products, agents and practices; to see them as reproducing political discourses that formulate the past in order to legitimate the present, and therefore as key drivers in the production of consistent genealogies for social memory. This politics of memory in the Japanese media also can be seen as an effort to reconcile the actuality of the present with the experience of the immediate past. Such deliberately slanted views of a past that is both spectral and vanishing from living memory incite the constant reemergence of narratives suffused with fragmentation and continuity, complicity and redemption and decontextualization and (re)articulation. These vectors are interwoven throughout this book’s chapters. While each author produced their own take, and focus, on different cultural products and practices, all of them have identified similar geneses to the discursive function of memory within the Japanese context.

The Chapters The chapters included in Part I, ‘War’s Aftermath’, provide the reader with analyses that cover the first attempts to make sense of the fresh

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experiences of war, defeat and occupation. The initial media engagements invested in projects of redemption and social democracy, albeit the representation of such ideals was humbled by a sinking nihilism that prevented any aloofness. By the 1960s, such nihilism had turned into a feeling of absurdity in the face of ‘the mediation of the total society’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002 [1944]: 29) and the ‘administered world’ (ibid.: 232). Part II, ‘The Past in the Present’, offers insights into the evolution of media and of popular perceptions of historical events, both for intergenerational media remakes and for intellectual property iterations within the span of a single life. Part III, ‘The Persistence of Memory’, addresses the recent strategies that the culture industry, the press and public discourses have developed in order to paste over perceived fractures in the transmission of established memories and identities to others: be they foreign subcontracted professionals or a large segment of society, such as all of Japan’s youth. All these issues are touched on again in the Conclusion to this volume.

War’s Aftermath The contributions in Part I, ‘War’s Aftermath’, illustrate how the political demands of the postwar period in Japan implicitly made the construction of Japanese social memory one of the most striking and powerful instances of how history is assembled that we might examine, where continuities are enabled and endure precisely through, and thanks to, fragmentation. There was a social fragmentation of recent experiences that encompassed everything from creative accounts to material mementos. Personal recollections were progressively displaced in favour of increasingly sympathetic depictions of the Japanese as the innocent victims of the military government  – soon enough even the Emperor was depicted as having been in need of rescue from his own generals (see Igarashi 2000: 13–14, 20). The war period was splintered from ‘history’ in that it was bracketed as an aberration that the Japanese would redress as soon as they could get back onto the ‘proper’ historical track that led towards modernity (see Gluck 1993). This process was helped by the complete collapse of the public narratives that were prevalent during the war period. The process of fragmentation, in turn, required the turning of a blind eye to many of the prewar values that had facilitated the emergence of a more expansionist and aggressive emperor system ideology (kokutai), and which paradoxically allowed many of these mores to continue to exist during the Occupation (1945–1952) and after. This section thus deals with the vexed issue of the degree to which the Japanese were complicit with or critical of the official regime. SCAP

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(Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, embodied in General Douglas MacArthur) held the authority to pardon the guilty. Even before the penalizing of only a fraction of Japanese war criminals in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials (1946–1948), it was apparent that the Occupation needed to entrench the intelligentsia within the political, economic and bureaucratic systems, or in what remained of them. This milieu was favourable to the emergence of a narrative of redemption, which manifested as self-victimization, not as a resolute repentance; the aforementioned state of fragmentation prioritized accounts of suffering by Japanese civilians rather than of any savage acts committed during colonization or the war. This process was facilitated by the undeniable fact of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 as well as widespread postwar hardship. The redemption was self-redemption inasmuch as the Japanese media helped establish the requirements needed to attain salvation in an era in which ‘the victim became the hero for Japan’ (Orr 2001: 10). The first chapter in Part I,  Martinez’s analysis of Ikiru (among other films by Kurosawa), raises important questions about guilt and responsibility, complicity and redemption as well as the problem of memory and the legacy for the next generation. Her piece asks about the possibility of responsibility in a world that lacks certainty, and hence the very notion of guilt becomes an open question. Martinez relates this to a lost generation of leftist artistic liberals, who bowed their heads, cooperated with the establishment and, at the war’s end, had to decide not just how to or how not to assume responsibility for their inaction but what they would do about it as survivors. Given this context, Martinez understands Kurosawa’s work as a part of his personal redemption at a time when the feelings of guilt about the past were a source of continuous tension beneath the social fabric. The issue of responsibility is also indirectly present in the chapter by Marcos P. Centeno Martín. In his analysis, Centeno documents how the films Tokyo 1958 (by the creative group Shinema 1958, led by Hani Susumu) and Furyō Shōnen (‘Bad Boys’, Hani 1960) materialized the demands for a new type of documentary film after the crisis of realism and the ideological rupture within the Left took place from the second half of the 1950s onwards. These productions reclaimed the political sense that the term avant-garde had carried before the war and drew on the idea of subjectivity to attack the old objectivism while casting a critical gaze over the concurrent period. Subjectivity is explored as well by Ferran de Vargas’ chapter through the analysis of the film Kōshikei (‘Death by Hanging’, 1968), in which the function of the characters’ subjectivity – as well as that of the audience and of the director Ōshima Nagisa – is continuously addressed. As one of the prime

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representatives of the 1960s Japanese Nūberu Bāgu (New Wave), Ōshima was trying to develop a filmic text based on radical scepticism and subjectivism as opposed to humanist cinema, whose themes expressed a fear of Japan’s premodern past and a trust in the structures of modernity. Within this intellectual and artistic context, different aesthetic movements appeared and, from their own standpoints, they attempted to foster the Japanese subject in terms of its autonomy. In light of this trend, De Vargas’ work explores how the radical subjectivity advocated by the cinema of the Nūberu Bāgu acquires its full meaning as an aesthetic correlate of the Japanese New Left movement that reacted to the prevailing progressive thinking – heavily influenced by the Marxism of the Japanese Communist Party  – that characterized the humanist cinema in the immediate postwar years.

The Past in the Present As previously mentioned, the responsibility for the war was transferred to an ill-defined Other, an abstract idea of the militarist state or a vague entity called simply ‘the system’ (Orr 2001: 3), meaning a ‘system of irresponsibilities’ that had constituted Japan’s fascist rule (Maruyama 1969 [1949]) and that was typified as an autonomous and self-contained body, a sort of single agent considered responsible for the war. Through this practice war actions were anonymized and abstracted from any historical or political context. Such a decontextualization of war memories led to an amnesia about the war era. The more that forgetting became the political hegemony’s norm, the more possible it became for the past to be associated with the contemporaneous ideological interests of different political groups. Concurrently with this top-down amnesia, war memories emerged everywhere as a persistent and inevitable ‘absent presence’ (Igarashi 2000: 3, 10). Mirroring the summary execution depicted in Kōshikei, Part II opens with Griseldis Kirsch’s analysis of the TV drama Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai (I Want to Be a Shellfish) in which Shimizu, an ordinary man from a small town, is arrested on charges of being a war criminal after Japan’s defeat. Kirsch explores the politics of identity in a production that has been the object of several remakes, considering especially the way in which the present reconstructs and shapes the past according to contemporary social demands and political intentions. It is particularly interesting how Kirsch reveals the narrative strategies that link the individual story of Shimizu, a good man sent to the war front, with an entire generation and how his particular victimization embodies the victimization of Japan as a whole. The fragmentation of memory through the nostalgic reimagination of the past also constitutes a core issue in Laura Treglia’s analysis of

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myth-making and the reworking of cultural gender meanings in yakuza eiga (gangster movies)  – one of the few early postwar genres in which Japanese men could be represented as both violent and heroic. Treglia explores the ambiguous impact of parodic inversions in women’s representation in ‘pinky violence’ genre movies by observing the redefinition of their characters vis-à-vis a continuation of the masculine tragic hero ideal. It is significant that these reversed images, ultimately, reinforce as much as contest stereotypical gender representations, revealing the exploitation and reproduction of a trite feminine archetype that becomes significant not only in the reading of the past but mainly in the critical understanding of the present. The archaeology of yakuza movies traced in Treglia’s chapter is especially illuminating, not just in its scope but also in tracing both a genealogy of outlaw characters and failed heroes drawn from past collective memory and the popular culture that is bequeathed to the future. In this sense, her analysis of the yakuza film genre eloquently demonstrates the extent to which past fictional narratives reveal much about present-day reality. By analysing the media representations of the legendary 300 million yen robbery that occurred in 1968 in Tokyo, the account of the past takes a different spin in the chapter by Katsuyuki Hidaka, without departing from the issues of nostalgia for a postwar era that allowed contestation, idealism and the struggle for a progressive future. If memory is always a reconstruction of history through the gaze of the present, the nostalgic appeal of the failed heroes of the past  – whether romantic white-collar criminals or idealist student radicals of the 1960s – reveals also the current discontentment with the present and has its roots in a Japanese tradition of appreciating nonconformist, tragic heroes (see Morris 2014). Hidaka explores how the media have represented that robbery both heroically, as an anti-authoritarian political offence associated with the New Left student movement, and critically, by denouncing the student activists’ self-deception and their complicity in the development of Japan’s fullscale consumer society.

The Persistence of Memory Closing the collection, Part III, ‘The Persistence of Memory’, addresses the transnational presence of Japanese media productions in relation to the issues hitherto discussed. In the first chapter, Artur Lozano-Méndez underscores how the animation industry also adopts a multifaceted approach to memory that foregrounds the social arena as the hub where the past is negotiated to explain contemporary political realities. Eden of the East (2009–2010), the anime franchise analysed in his chapter, takes a

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more unforgiving view of the Shōwa era’s legacy than the films discussed by Hidaka. While older and powerful characters may feel responsible for their past actions (given Japan’s current social and economic stagnation), they maintain that it is the younger generation that is morally obliged to come up with a solution to a crisis that they have not created. Lozano-Méndez explores other issues of legacy with which the series deals: digital memory, rumours and memes, amnesia and alternative identities. Thus, the reified concept of historical fact is undermined, as is the notion of utopia as intrinsically unattainable. Eden of the East asks why is it ‘mature’ to temper current political aspirations with realism and who sets the limits as well as the historical a priori of realpolitik. Director Kamiyama Kenji and his team of writers are eminently worried about the perceived stagnation of the Japanese economy and social prospects, and they point to the idea that the same dominant cultural order that stifles memory is inhibiting the emergence of new paths out of the postmodern simulacra, be these akin to Disneyland or Watergate (Baudrillard 1978: 29, 36). Focusing also on the animation industry, in the closing chapter, Tomohiro Morisawa poses a fundamental question regarding the weight of memory in the building of contemporary expectations. The animation industry has followed the path of other Japanese industries in cutting the cost of production and outsourcing links in the production chain, but as semiotic codes are embedded within the process of production, the question of how to keep Japanese anime ‘Japanese’ and, therefore, what makes Japanese animation ‘Japanese’ arises. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Filipino and Japanese studios, Morisawa explicates how the Japanese industry has tackled this and how it manages to do so in a situation that could only be labelled ‘postcolonial’, since the outsourcing is to former colonies of the Japanese Empire. His chapter provides an analysis that, ultimately, queries the meaning of ‘national creative industries’  – particularly that of Japan – in an era of transnational production and the global circulation of media culture. This section showcases the recursivity of the previous chapters’ concerns regarding responsibility, identity and the political direction of the country. The modalities of management and representation of these issues adopted in recent media reveal the continuity with roots in the emperor system, the Greater East Asia War and the Occupation. The dynamics observed in Part I – the decontextualization of victim and aggressor – and the lack of focus in the re-emerging media industry on the hundreds of thousands Japanese nanmin (refugees) returning to Japan from its former colonies is echoed in the use of the term nanmin in the 2000s to designate the Japanese victims of economic hardship or the working poor.

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Japanese victimization, then, neglected the victims of the country’s war aggression and now neglects the citizens from other countries who are fleeing persecution and life-threatening situations in a global context of periodical refugee crises that Japan’s legislative majority has not felt compelled to address  – the state’s provisions for immigration and asylum remain amongst the most stringent in developed countries.9 The desultory repentance of prewar leaders, then, is mirrored in the halfhearted assumption of the responsibility by baby boomers employed in public administration and on the boards of major companies (including the media) apropos their role in Japan’s listless economic recovery. They are also quick to ‘share’ the responsibility with younger generations, who they criticize on moral grounds  – pointing to their supposed lack of entrepreneurship and work ethics. We posit that these are not mere coincidences or loosely drawn parallelisms. There is historical a priori at work that (re)articulates familiar performative rules that draw from preexisting preferred readings and reinforce dominant-hegemonic positions. While Part III is called ‘The Persistence of Memory’, we could have just as easily opted for a ‘return of the repressed’ epigraph, and the Conclusion tackles this aspect through a discussion of national trauma and suffering. Case studies such as the ones compiled here function as tangible entry points into narratives and worldviews that refuse to be reduced to a clear pattern and to a unique voice, although trauma might be seen as a unifying theme. As Kaplan and Wang argue, ‘trauma consists in the unmaking of the world’ (2008: 12), and the Japanese have long been trying to remake their nation, but no amount of image management has yet healed the fracturing of 1945. The chapters in this collection can only sketch out some of the ways in which this has been represented in a long postwar that seems to be Japan’s state of being, but they also remind us that the Japanese case is not unique. Modern societies are all damaged; their citizens live with suffering marked by past traumas – whether as ‘winners’ or ‘losers’. The fruits of this condition are cross-cultural: we live in uncertain times and desperately attempt to shore up our identities in the light of that ­ambiguity. Fragility may well be our postmodern default setting. Blai Guarné is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the East Asian Studies Programme at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where he also serves as Secretary of the CERAO. He has also convened the EAJS Media Studies Section. His publications include ‘Japan in Global Circulation’ (co-edited with Shinji Yamashita, Minpaku, 2015), Antropología de Japón (Bellaterra, 2017) and Escaping Japan: Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-First Century (co-edited with Paul

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Hansen, Routledge, 2018). His work in this volume has been supported by the Research Group GREGAL (2017 SGR 1596) at the UAB. Artur Lozano-Méndez is Lecturer of East Asian Studies at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). His PhD was in translation and intercultural studies (UAB), specializing in research on contemporary East Asia, particularly in relation to cultural studies with a focus on Japan. His publications include ‘Mamoru Oshii’s ‘Exploration of the Potentialities of Consciousness in a Globalised Capitalist Network’ (Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2015), and he has edited El Japón contemporáneo: Una aproximación desde los estudios culturales (Bellaterra, 2016). Dolores P. Martinez is Emeritus Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, and a Research Associate at ISCA, University of Oxford. She has written on maritime anthropology, tourism, religion, gender and popular culture in Japan, as well as on women’s football in the US, documentary film, and humour in science fiction films. Her latest publications include Remaking Kurosawa (Palgrave, 2009); Gender and Japanese Society (Routledge, 2014); and with Griseldis Kirsch and Merry White as co-editors, Assembling Japan (Peter Lang, 2015).

Notes 1. For Marx’s definition of ‘social consciousness’ see his 1859 ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ (Marx 1977 [1859]). Most famously he argued that: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness,’ pointing to the ideological dimensions of consciousness. Engels further developed Marx’s concept of social consciousness in a letter to Franz Mehring (1893), coining the term ‘false consciousness’. Here Engels clearly links consciousness with ideology: ‘Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all’. Most important for our volume is Engel’s (1893) assertion that ‘The ideologist who deals with history (history is here simply meant to comprise all the spheres – political, juridical, philosophical, theological – belonging to society and not only to nature), the ideologist dealing with history then, possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through an independent series of developments in the brains of these successive generations’. 2. Marcuse (1987 [1932]: 1) outlined the premises of this term: ‘Historicity is what defines history and thus distinguishes it from “nature” or from the “economy”. Historicity signifies the meaning we intend when we say of something that it is “historical”. Historicity signifies the meaning of this “is”, namely the meaning of the Being of the historical’. Stephen Bronner (2011: 14) provides a more synthetic definition: ‘… “historicity”, or the phenomenological structures whereby social reality is experienced by the individual’.

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3. See especially: Gordon 1993; Hui, Van Bremen and Ben-Ari 2005; Saaler and Schwentker 2008; Yoda and Harootunian 2006. 4. See: Barnard 2003; Buruma 1994; Dower 1999, 2012; Hein and Selden 2000; Hogan 1996; Nozaki 2008; Orr 2001; Saaler 2005; Seaton 2007, 2016; Seraphim 2006. 5. See: Bestor 1989; Ivy 1995, 1998; Kelly 1986; Martinez 1990; Morris-Suzuki 1998; Robertson 1991, 1997; Vlastos 1998; Yano 2002. 6. See: Cook and Cook 1992; Hashimoto 2015; Igarashi 2000; Ohnuki-Tierney 2002, 2006; Selden and Selden 1989; Tamanoi 2009; Trefalt 2003; Yoneyama 1999. 7. Some selected readings on this would include: Frühstück 2007; Ikeda 2014; MorrisSuzuki 2005; Stahl and Williams 2010; Tachibana 1998; Treat 1995. 8. While Weber discussed the state’s monopoly on violence as the core of its internal control over its citizens bounded by the nation’s territory, his argument applies equally to the state’s attempts to defend its borders. 9. According to Dower (1999: 48–49): ‘In the wake of defeat, approximately 6.5 million Japanese were stranded in Asia, Siberia, and the Pacific Ocean area’, that includes both the military and the civilians (many of these were employed in the structure of the empire too). Regarding the contemporary use of the term nanmin, which preceded the introduction of genpatsu nanmin (nuclear refugees) to designate populations displaced from Tōhoku after the Triple Catastrophe of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown on 11 March 2011, see Allison 2013 and also Lozano-Méndez in this volume. The yearly report of the UNHCR for 2017, ‘Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2017’, depicts the upward trend in the number of millions of people forcibly displaced during the previous decade, with the figure reaching a historical record high in 2017 (68.5 million forcibly displaced worldwide).

References Adorno, T.W. and M. Horkheimer. 2002 [1944]. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Allison, A. 2013. Precarious Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barnard, C. 2003. Language, Ideology and Japanese History Textbooks. London and New York: Routledge Curzon. Baudrillard, J. 1978. Cultura y Simulacro. Barcelona: Editorial Kairós. Benjamin, W. 2007 [1940]. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Shocken Books, pp. 253–264. Bestor, T.C. 1989. Neighborhood Tokyo. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdaghs, M. 2005. ‘What it Sounds Like to Lose an Empire: Happy End and The Kinks’, in T.Y. Hui, J. Van Bremen and E. Ben-Ari (eds), Perspectives on Social Memory in Japan. Folkestone: Global Oriental. Bronner, S.E. 2011. Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Buruma, I. 1994. The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. New York: Meridian. Cook, H.T. and T.F. Cook. 1992. Japan at War: An Oral History. New York: New Press. Davis, J. 1992. ‘The Anthropology of Suffering’, Journal of Refugee Studies (5)2: 149–61.

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Dower, J.W. 1999. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, The New Press. ______. 2012. Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World. New York: New Press. Engels, F. 1893. ‘Engels to Franz Mehring. London, July 14, 1893’, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Correspondence, 1846–1895. Retrieved 29 October 2016 from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14. htm. Frühstück, S. 2007. Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gerteis, C. and T.S. George. 2013. Japan Since 1945: From Postwar to Post-Bubble. London: Bloomsbury. Gluck, C. 1993. ‘The Past in the Present’, in A. Gordon (ed.), Postwar Japan as History. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 64–95. Gordon, A. (ed.). 1993. Postwar Japan as History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hall, S. 1999. ‘Encoding Decoding’, in S. During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader – Second Edition. New York: Routledge, pp. 507–516. Harootunian, H.D. 2000. ‘Japan’s Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History’, South Atlantic Quarterly 99(4): 715–40. Hashimoto, A. 2015. The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan. New York: Oxford University Press. Hein, L. and M. Selden (eds). 2000. Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Hogan, M.J. (ed.). 1996. Hiroshima in History and Memory. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Hui, T.Y., J. Van Bremen and E. Ben-Ari (eds). 2005. Perspectives on Social Memory in Japan. Folkestone: Global Oriental. Igarashi, Y. 2000. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ikeda, K. 2014. Okinawan War Memory: Transgenerational Trauma and the War Fiction of Medoruma Shun. New York: Routledge. Imamura, A.E. 1996. Re-imaging Japanese Women. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ivy, M. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. 1998. ‘Mourning the Japanese Thing’, in N.B. Dirks (ed.), In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 93–118. Kaplan, E.A. and B. Wang. 2008. Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Kelly, W. 1986. ‘Rationalization and Nostalgia: Cultural Dynamics of New Middle Class Japan’, American Ethnologist 13(4): 603–18. Kondo, A. 2015. ‘Migration and Law in Japan’, Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies 2(1): 155–68. Marcuse, H. and S. Benhabib (ed.). 1987 [1932]. Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Martinez, D.P. 1990. ‘Tourism and the Ama: The Search for a Real Japan’, in E. Ben-Ari, B. Moeran and J. Valentine (eds), Unwrapping Japan: Society and Culture in Anthropological Perspective. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ______. 1998. ‘Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures’, in D.P. Martinez (ed.), The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–18. Maruyama, M. 1969 [1949]. ‘Thought and Behaviour Patterns of Japan’s Wartime Leaders’, in I. Morris (ed.), Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 84–134. Marx, K. 1977 [1859]. ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’. Retrieved 18 October 2016 from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm. Morris, I. 2014. The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan. Fukuoka: Kurodahan Press. Morris-Suzuki, T. 1998. Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. ______. 2005. The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History. London and New York: Verso. Nozaki, Y. 2008. War Memory, Nationalism and Education in Postwar Japan, 1945–2007: The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and Ienaga Saburo’s Court Challenges. London and New York: Routledge. Ohnuki-Tierney, E. 2002. Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. 2006. Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Orr, J.J. 2001. The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Robertson, J.E. 1991. Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City. Berkeley: University of California Press. ______. 1997. ‘Empire of Nostalgia: Rethinking “Internationalization” in Japan Today’, Theory, Culture & Society 14(4): 97–122. Saaler, S. 2005. Politics, Memory and Public Opinion: The History Textbook Controversy and Japanese Society. Munich: Iudicium. Saaler, S. and W. Schwentker (eds). 2008. The Power of Memory in Modern Japan. Folkestone: Global Oriental. Said, E.W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books/Random House. Santayana, G. 1948 [1905]. The Life of Reason; or, the Phases of Human Progress: Introduction, and Reason in Common Sense. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons. Seaton, P.A. 2007. Japan’s Contested War Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical Consciousness of World War II. London and New York: Routledge. ______. 2016 (ed.). Local History and War Memories in Hokkaido. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Selden, K. and M. Selden (eds). 1989. The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

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Seraphim, F. 2006. War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Stahl, D. and M. Williams (eds). 2010. Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Tachibana, R. 1998. Narrative as Counter-Memory: A Half-Century of Postwar Writing in Germany and Japan. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Tamanoi, M.A. 2009. Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Treat, J.W. 1995. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trefalt, B. 2003. Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950–1975. London and New York: Routledge Curzon. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). 2018. ‘Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2017’. Retrieved 19 June 2018 from http:// www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2017/. Vlastos, S. (ed.). 1998. Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, M. 2015. ‘Politics as Vocation’, in trans. T. Waters and D. Waters (eds), Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 129–97. Yano, C.R. 2002. Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Yoda, T. and H.D. Harootunian (eds). 2006. Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yoneyama, L. 1999. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Part I

War’s Aftermath

Chapter 1

The Death of Certainty

Memory, Guilt and Redemption in Ikiru Dolores P. Martinez

Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation. —Ernest Renan, ‘What Is a Nation?’

Introduction Ikiru (To Live, 1952) is often cited as a favourite Kurosawa Akira film by Japanese men of the postwar generation and by foreign aficionados of Japanese film such as Steven Spielberg.1 The common answers to the question of why the story of a middle-aged man’s midlife (and impending death) crisis, which leads to his search for meaning and redemption, should inspire such admiration are interesting: for many Japanese, the era it is set in and the film’s humour are important. For foreign viewers, the humour does translate, but it is the everyman protagonist who has to confront his own mortality that appeals.2 Moreover, because the film’s protagonist, Watanabe (Shimura Takeshi), decides to act nobly instead of just living, the narrative is seen as a positive humanist tale.3 That the film also speaks to a nostalgia based on forgetting is noted by film scholars, who examine its complex narrative structure built around flashbacks (Burch 1979, Desser 1992, Goodwin 1994, Prince 1991, Richie 1996).4 While the contemporary decontextualized reading of Ikiru demonstrates what makes a great film – the power to cross time and cultures because its central meaning seems to be universal and enduring – I am more interested in the meanings that the film may have had for the

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immediate postwar audience and how these understandings resonated with Kurosawa’s own experience as a Japanese man born in the Taishō era (1912–1926) and who lived through the momentous events of the Shōwa period (1926–1989). In short, I want to examine Ikiru as a film that spoke to particular uncertainties amongst its first native viewers and consider what this might tell us about a sense of postwar guilt in Japan. Seaton (2007) makes an important point on the subject of memory in postwar Japan: individuals’ memories and State official history are two different if sometimes overlapping arenas. The former is often personal and varies across generations, genders and class; the latter speaks to the official acts, actions and the political positioning of Japan in East Asia and the West, where it is remembered, in turn, as an aggressor. Other work on the subject looks back at more than sixty years of being ‘postwar’ and often begins an analysis of the subject in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Bourdaghs argues that this long period of postwar subjectivity is analogous to the situation of being postcolonial and quotes Bhabha on remembering; it is never ‘a quiet act of introspection or retrospection, but rather “a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present”’ (in Bourdaghs 2005: 115). As the historian Igarashi also notes: being postwar involves bodies (as abstract concepts) of memory that metaphorically resemble other sorts of tangible and intangible bodies such as that of the nation state: The healthy body of the nation was dismembered as imperial Japan experienced a radical transformation, and these dismembered bodily images were assembled again in the postwar period in order to articulate the new statehood. Body parts were metaphorically sutured together to regain the nation’s organic unity and to overcome its trauma; yet the suture left on the discursive body’s surface served as a constant reminder of the trauma. (Igarashi 2000: 14)

Ikiru is a postwar film made whilst Japan was still occupied by the allied forces (1945–1952). Thus the film was made while the process of ‘suturing’ was taking place; in an epoch during which the traumas of having fought, suffered through and lost a war, for which crimes some Japanese were put on trial by the victors, were being repressed. It was in this era that an early sense of postmodern uncertainty was being engendered in Japan through the disjuncture between pre- and postwar national discourses (see Frühstück 2007; Galan 2008; Martinez 2009: 39–40): what was true? This question clearly framed Kurosawa’s previous film Rashomon (1950). That Ikiru has come to be viewed with nostalgia by both Japanese and non-Japanese viewers speaks to the success of a repression that was necessary for Japan to rebuild after the war. This involved acts of amnesia, or

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selective forgetting, that created both a new sense of nationalism and a yearning for what had gone before, both of which have gone on to fuel the furusato (hometown) discourse based on a sense that there once existed a purer, more authentic Japan. Through still visible but fast vanishing traces, contemporary Japanese can map out continuities that make up modern ‘Japaneseness’. These ‘discourses of the vanishing’ (Ivy 1995) rely on not exploring the lacunae that exist in representations of the past. Certain historical eras, such as that of immediate postwar Japan, seem especially subject to the production of nostalgic recollections based around celebrating the quotidian rather than focusing on the experience of shared trauma. Consequently, the Japan that pulled itself together and soldiered on, producing the ‘new’ Japan born in 1964 with its hosting of the Olympics, is remembered with much sentimentality by various postwar generations. Paradoxically, while Kurosawa’s films of this postwar Occupation era often examine, in subtle and sometimes darkly ironic ways, the problematic relationships between trauma and memory, and responsibility and guilt that existed during this era, currently these films are viewed more for their ability to evoke that lost Japan than for their critical commentary.5 It is important to see Ikiru as a pair with Rashomon, the film Kurosawa had made two years before and which had won the Gran Prix at Venice in 1951. This is not an original insight. Goodwin (1994) notes the similar visual techniques; Burch (1979) is struck by the shared narrative strategies; and Desser, in particular, makes the point most clearly. Ikiru ‘borrows, problematizes, issues raised in … Drunken Angel and Rashomon’ (Desser 1992: 59). With Drunken Angel (1948) the question shared is: ‘what does it mean to be a hero in modern times, under ordinary circumstances?’ (ibid.). The problem raised by Rashomon and shared by the films is: ‘how to live in an existential world, a world rendered meaningless by the death of certainty, by the death, that is, of God’ (ibid.).6 The death of God as a shared theme between Japan and the West does not make sense in a society with a complex religious system in which Shinto and Buddhist beliefs dominate, providing their adherents with many deities and bodhisattvas to choose from – and little in Kurosawa’s work speaks to this very Western and post-1960s concern.7 However, the death of certainty is an important theme throughout Kurosawa’s work, and his concern with this topic could be seen to arise out of three events, two of which he discusses in his autobiography (Kurosawa 1983) and the third to which he only alludes. These events are: wandering the streets of Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake with his older brother Heigo when Kurosawa was just thirteen; the period of time spent living with his brother in a Tokyo slum, followed by Heigo’s suicide;8 and finally, the

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experience of the Second World War itself. The emotional residue of these events influence his depiction of Watanabe’s midlife crisis, becoming a form of experience shared with his audience. The first event is described graphically in the autobiography. ‘The people who stood to the left and right of me in this scene looked for all the world like fugitives from hell and the whole landscape took on a bizarre and eerie aspect’ he notes, adding that his brother told him that the way to overcome his fear was to look at things directly (1983: 50). Kurosawa admits that Ikiru grew out of his own fear of impending death and drew on own his dread (Richie 1996: 86). The second event was the period of time he spent living in a Tokyo slum. His description of the people he came to know while living there includes his admiration for their optimism and humour; an admiration that went hand in hand with the knowledge that sympathy was of no help at all – he recounts how he tried to rescue a girl who was regularly beaten but who refused to be saved or she would be abused even more: this engendered an admiration for the urban poor that became a theme in many of his films, including Ikiru. The last event is only alluded to in his autobiography: I offered no resistance to Japan’s militarism. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I did not have the courage to resist in any positive way and I only got by, ingratiating myself when necessary and otherwise evading censure. I am ashamed of this, but I must be honest about it. (1983: 145)

Thus the death of certainty in Ikiru as a theme is related to various tropes that are found throughout the work of Kurosawa: the problems of guilt, responsibility, and the role memory plays in the shouldering (or not) of these emotions. The key question is: if memory is multifaceted, unreliable (as in Rashomon) and there is no certainty about past events, how is it possible to be responsible or feel guilt? For Kurosawa this question arose especially in relationship to modern urban life. The importance of women as catalysts also needs to be discussed as does the significance of the mentor/parent and student/child bond. These all link up to Desser’s query on how one might act heroically in modern life; the answer provided in Ikiru requires that the film be contextualized as a profoundly postwar work, much like Stray Dog (1949), made three years before. That is, the absent presence in Stray Dog, Rashomon and Ikiru is not only the occupying US army but also any direct discussion of responsibility for the war (Gluck 1993: 65–66). It is imperative to recall Yoshimoto’s (2000) argument that many studies of Kurosawa’s films differ from the readings that experts on Japanese film history might bring to bear – issues of censorship, genre conventions (and thus of attempts to overturn these) – as well as the taken-for-granted contexts that an immediate postwar generation

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might bring to their reading of these films. It is on this last area that I will attempt to shed some light.

Postwar Heroes? To begin, Stray Dog will be briefly discussed. Of the three films mentioned above, only Stray Dog obliquely alludes to the issue of responsibility, in a short conversation held between Detective Sato (Shimura Takashi) and Detective Murakami (Mifune Tohsiro). They discuss the differences between Murakami as an ex-soldier and his opponent Yusa, another exsoldier, who has his stolen revolver. Sato: Wrong is wrong.9 Murakami: That’s not the way I think. During the war, I saw men do bad things. Sato: Is it the difference in our ages or the changing times? They call it something … apuru … Murakami: Après guerre? Sato: That’s it! The après guerre generation. You understand him very well. Murakami: Perhaps I do. [They then discuss how Murakami’s life resembles that of the criminal they are hunting because at the very end of the war their knapsacks were both stolen and both men felt desperate.] Sato then comments: It’s this après guerre… There are two sorts. You’re the genuine article,10 Yusa’s apuru … apuru … A bad apple! (my retranslation)

The idea that some men are born wrong, or evil, in contrast to good men, who cannot be corrupted, and who always will try and do the right thing, is subtly delineated.11 If we consider Stray Dog within the context of the film noir genre (see Martinez 2015), it seems that for Kurosawa, the noir protagonist and his problematic masculinity formed part of his concern with Japanese postwar masculine identities: after the defeat, when the Americans in particular were putting Japanese on trial for their war crimes, how was it possible to ‘be’ a good man – let alone a hero? To show how thin the line might be, Kurosawa gives us the handsome Detective Murakami, dressed in his pristine white suit, as the other side of the coin of the criminal he is hunting: both were soldiers in the war; both had their knapsacks stolen; both had to remake themselves in the light of this theft (and what might the knapsack represent that the theft of it leads one man to despair and madness and the other to the law and obsessiveness?); and both become involved with the same woman, Namaki Harumi (Awaji Keiko), during their wanderings through Tokyo’s underworld.

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The police officer who is the alter ego of his criminal friend, brother or fellow soldier is a common anti-hero. More interesting, as Yoshimoto (2000: 171–72) notes, is that new and Western audiences might not see the calm, humorous and humane Sato, Murakami’s mentor, in a critical light. At the very start of the scene described above, Murakami admires the certificates of merit that line the walls in Sato’s home. These certificates go back twenty-five years to 1924, and Yoshimoto argues that a 1950s Japanese audience would have asked itself what sort of man was Sato if he had been a commendable police officer while he enforced the laws of Japan’s increasingly militaristic government during the late 1920s until 1945. How had he survived postwar and what did his survival mean? Thus we are confronted by a lacuna in certainty: is Sato really a good man? If so, was he always a good man? Has the definition of a good man changed? Similarly, what exactly did Murakami do during the war that makes him such a promising police officer (missing gun not withstanding), keen to follow all rules and obey orders, afterwards? These questions also can be asked of Watanabe Kanji (Shimura Takashi again) in Ikiru. It is 1951 and he has worked as a government bureaucrat since 1921, while his son Mitsuo (Kaneko Nobuo) was a soldier during the war. These men must have survived by keeping their heads down and thus are guilty of allowing fascism to arise. The often repeated (particularly during the Second World War) aphorism notes that ‘all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’,12 but this does not tell us what might happen to these good men after evil has triumphed and then has been defeated. Kurosawa, like many artists of his generation, wrestled with this question through an ancillary query: once defined as ‘good imperial subjects’, the Japanese – after losing the war – were branded as a complicit and thus guilty people who had to be remade as moral democratic citizens; if this was true, then was individual redemption necessary or even possible? Or, how was redemption possible, particularly given the postwar lack of certainty (see also Harootunian 2005)? This seems an odd question to ask about the members of a society famously described by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1989 [1946]) as part of a shame not guilt culture, but this depiction of Japanese society ignores nearly 1,500 years of Buddhist influence in which guilt played a large part (see Martinez 2009: 38). Buddhism does have concepts of sin, guilt and of assuming responsibility for one’s actions; its sects teach the Japanese how to make merit and how to avoid suffering in this life and/or in hell. Kurosawa’s experience of the earthquake as a vision of hell is evoked at the beginning of Rashomon, or demon’s gate, with its references to life having become a sort of hell on earth. Both the experience and filmic depiction are grounded in a religious

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doctrine that attempted, as did Confucian ideology, to teach men how to be good, responsible social beings. Rashomon raises these issues via a ‘black joke’ (Martinez 2009: 56): filmed during the Tokyo War Crimes trials, Rashomon alludes to them through the camera acting as judge or ‘the eyes of the Occupation’. This film perversely asks what were to happen if everyone revealed their sense of guilt. The surrealist aspect to Rashomon is that three characters confess to the same murder, telling the story in such a way as to make it impossible to determine the truth. It is in this sense that Rashomon is also one of the very first – if not the first – postmodern film pointing to the state of uncertainty that defines late modernity. If audiences were asked who the hero of this film might be, they would be hard put to give a satisfactory answer. Rather than searching for godlike heroes we could ask: if even good men have done evil by keeping their heads down and not resisting fascism in wartime Japan, how can they then go on to act heroically postwar? How might they atone for their having ‘done nothing’? In the case of Rashomon, given that the audience voyeuristically watches and thus is made complicit in the rape of the wife – and Kurosawa famously said that this was what the film was about, not the murder – it is the woodcutter who finds redemption by taking the small baby at the film’s end. This is an insignificant-seeming action, one that Richie labels sentimental (private communication) but which is Kurosawa’s answer to the question of how to be heroic in modern times: not through epic deeds but through acts of kindness that may well reverberate into the future. This possibility of redemption is a theme shared with Dostoevsky, who as Kurosawa himself noted, was a major influence on his work.13 In Dostoevsky’s books a woman’s love can be a path to salvation (Crime and Punishment); while children are often symbols of hope and recovery (The Brothers Karamazov), and these also are important themes in Kurosawa’s films. Briefly, the women in One Wonderful Sunday (1947), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Sanjuro (1962) and High and Low (1963) as well as the children in High and Low (again), The Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961) and A Rhapsody in August (1991) can be seen as examples of these two themes. Thus it is also worth considering the role of women and children in Ikiru.

Women as Catalysts In both Rashomon and Ikiru, city life is an important aspect of the story. While the city is an absent presence in Rashomon (the story is told at the gate to the devastated city, and the trial takes place within its walls), the

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polluted city – busy, bustling and, in a night scene straight out of Faust, its underworld – is clearly delineated in Ikiru. If Watanabe is ill, so too is the modern city, with its labyrinth bureaucracy and with the development of what Simmel (1997) termed a ‘blasé’ attitude to one’s fellow humans. To be in the city is to be at risk of losing one’s sense of humanity. No better symbol of this could there be than the opening shot of Watanabe’s stomach X-ray, showing the cancerous tumour that will kill him.14 Watanabe is both doomed and defined by a cancer very common among Japanese men (Richie 1996): so far so ordinary. More importantly, and what many audiences may miss, is that the cancer is in his stomach: that is, he has a cancer that affects the part of his body – the belly or hara  – that Japanese associate with feeling, intuition, instinctive action, and the understanding of one’s fellow human beings. While the heart, or kokoro, is the seat of knowledge and this is what goes astray in Rashomon; in Ikiru it is the seat of feeling that is affected. Not for nothing has the young office worker Toyo (Odagiri Miki) nicknamed her boss Watanabe ‘the mummy’ – he is petrified, still thinking and functioning, but he has grown deficient in what we might call in English, for lack of a better term, his soul. It is strangely appropriate that the cancer is in his belly. This makes his Faustian (see Carr 1996) evening out with the novelist (Itō Yūnosuke), one of his responses to the news of his impending death, an inverted joke: Watanabe does not need to sell his soul – it is already gone, lost not only in thirty years of soul-destroying work but also it has been affected by his wife’s death and his total dedication to raising his son, Mitsuo. It is telling that his last memory, as he reviews the last twenty or so years of his life, is of waving his child off to war. Thus it is not just Watanabe who has lost his soul but also Mitsuo, whom we first see discussing how to get the money for a new home out of his father. He and his wife, Kazue (Seki Kyōko), are shown as whining, complaining, grasping young modern consumers – seemingly only caring about money. They too, Mitsuo especially, seem devoid in the area of fellow human feeling. Part of this lack of humanity, as Kurosawa explores in subsequent films, is due to the expansion of a modern, Western lifestyle in Japan with its emphasis on keeping oneself to oneself in an urban environment. However, a 1952 film audience would also wonder if such hardness on the son’s part did not grow out of his experience of the war. Japan was full of such traumatized, silent men whose lives had been ‘interrupted’ (Nakamaki 2005) and then remade in light of new nationalist discourses. If delving into the pleasures of the flesh in a modern Tokyo with its Western-style cabarets, strip clubs and jazz music does not offer Watanabe anything he wants, how does he find redemption, how does he regain his

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soul? This happens in two ways: first of all the women of the slum, who want the flooded area outside their homes to be turned into a playground, rebel: they make their point. That is, after very patiently allowing themselves to be run around the bureaucratic mill for months – a journey initiated by Watanabe passing them on in the first place – they speak their minds, and this causes an embarrassed subsection head to decide that their proposal should land, once again, on Watanabe’s desk. Watanabe, however, is not there that day; he is in hospital, learning – from a fellow patient rather than the doctor – about his illness. In shock at the diagnosis, he stays away from work for two weeks and it is only through the intervention of young Toyo that he is ‘saved’. She tracks him down to get him to stamp her resignation form and finds him the morning after his night of would-be debauchery with the novelist. The only remnant of the night is Watanabe’s new light-coloured hat – a hat totally unsuitable to wear with the dark suit of a civil servant. However the hat symbolizes a change in Watanabe, perhaps a change in mind; it is up to Toyo to teach him how to change his hara. This is not a simple process. First Watanabe reaches out to Toyo in a way that is almost pathetic: he takes her out to buy stockings because hers have so many holes in them; then out for a day that innocently parallels his night out on the town; and finally he takes her to tea. She is poor and clearly hungry yet full of good humour and high spirits. She tells him what she thinks of her about to be ex-fellow office workers and laughs at the idea of escaping them. Watanabe is drawn to Toyo and attempts to spend more time with her, taking her out to dinner and telling her about his son, but she berates him when he describes his thirty years of stifling work as the price he has paid to raise his son as a widower. She asks: ‘Why do parents want their children to be grateful? … They did not ask to be born’. If there is something wrong with Mitsuo, Watanabe should shoulder some blame for this. Moreover Toyo also sees something we might not have noted: ‘You love your son best of all’, she tells him, and, almost shamefaced, Watanabe agrees. Soon Toyo begins to find his attention oppressive and even a little frightening: is he trying to make her his lover? He finally tells her of his illness and demands of her a boon similar to that which Goethe’s Faust asked of Mephistopheles: one day of living as vigorously as does she. She tries to tell him to turn to his son, but Watanabe says his son is gone, at some distance it would seem. Then, Toyo tells him to ‘make something’. The scene is set for Watanabe’s small act of heroism – the building of the playground in a Tokyo slum. Toyo does not reappear in the film, although the women of the slum do. Yet her importance cannot be underestimated – it is she who sees the truth: that Watanabe desperately loves

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his child. Again we have the theme of caring for children, as they represent hope for the future. It is Toyo who puts him on the path to some sort of redemption, a regaining of self, of courage, of self-respect even, that will affect the people around him; some more profoundly than others. Such female characters abound in Kurosawa films. We may never get them as fully developed characters; they may flit in and out, seem silly, passive or even evil, but rare is a Kurosawa postwar film that does not have a woman whose actions bring into focus, perhaps even bring into being, the essential meaning of the narrative itself (Martinez 2007b). Unlike his uncertain men, most of Kurosawa’s women, varied as their representations might be, know how to live, how to just ‘be’. There are female characters who are grasping consumers, like Mitsuo’s wife, but other women act as the conscience and the centre of all that matters. It is they who think about abstract ideals such as love and children’s wellbeing; it is they who, out of necessity, will act without hesitation. Women can tempt men to wrong-doing, but they also act as moral centres. To what end, we might ask? It is useful here to turn to the mentor/parent discipline/child relationship.

On Legacies, or Fathers and Sons When Watanabe asks Toyo about her vigour, she replies, with some alarm: ‘I eat and move about’. Toyo answers his fear and qualms with the most fundamental of certainties; she is someone who meets life’s uncertainties head on and lives in the moment. She could have added: ‘I was born and I will die’. If life were as basic as that, humans would be unthinking animals – there must be more and Toyo realizes this as well. ‘I just make things’, she adds and shows him a toy rabbit, the manufacture of which makes her feel ‘kin to all the babies of Japan’. This is a reminder of the other thing humans, in common with other beings, do: reproduce. However human reproduction is not just biological but also social: children are made into social beings. Normally this is largely the job of mothers and the education system, but in the film Watanabe has been both mother and father to his son. He has helped make this man, as Toyo noted in an earlier scene, and cannot blame his coldness on his son alone. He, as a parent, needs to take some responsibility for Mitsuo’s hardness and distance. Perhaps twenty-first century audiences may not grasp that Watanabe’s realization that he loves his wounded son and remains responsible for him is an allusion to the parents of Japan’s postwar generation. Who but they made, or allowed, the conditions that led to the Second World War? Who but they embraced the values that allowed their sons to go off to war

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with much flag waving and patriotic fervour? Who taught their sons those values? Ikiru is as much about complicity as is Rashomon, which makes its audience complicit through being forced to watch the rape. We are in the terrain occupied by the ghost that haunts the Japanese-US relationship: the Second World War. This was an event so all-encompassing for Watanabe’s and Mitsuo’s generations that no one escaped doing their bit for the nation at war. The cultural ‘amnesia’ necessary to rebuild during the 1950s and1960s required that all prewar rhetoric, ideology and mass culture be buried; this process, the conceptual unpinning and remaking of national identity, resulted in what Igarashi (2000) terms ‘bodies in pain’. Building a playground for a generation of postwar babies seems a small gesture towards redemption in the face of this sort of unthinking complicity and emotional as well as moral mummification. If this were all that Ikiru was about, it would not be a masterpiece. However Watanabe’s story is as much about memory as Rashomon, but in the case of the latter, guilt-filled memory obscures and hides the truth; in the case of Ikiru, egotistical attempts at re-membering the past in such a way as to glorify individual selves, rather than Watanabe, fail. In the second part of the film, during the toasts at Watanabe’s funeral, the interlocutors all, as the flashbacks show, remember the truth even as they tell lies about their role in getting the playground built. We, the audience, see the story of how Watanabe got the project through despite the reworked narratives told by the drunken office staff at his wake: we see how courageous his final days were. In short, Kurosawa demonstrates that telling a new version of events cannot completely erase the past. An important symbolic connection to make here is that the 1950s audience might have identified Watanabe with the rabbits that Toyo makes and shows him. Japan has hares rather than rabbits, but the rabbit occupies an interesting place in both Buddhist narrative and Japanese folklore, both of which describe the dark shadow on the moon as a rabbit pounding mochi (a dough made from boiled rice). The Buddhist story of the Tsukiyo no Usagi (moon rabbit), who is associated with the festival of moon viewing on 15 September, is found in both China and Japan. The original story is found in the Buddhist Śaśajâtaka (Jataka Tale 316), which can be summarized as follows: a monkey, an otter, a jackal, and a rabbit resolved to practice charity on the day of the full moon (Uposatha), believing a demonstration of great virtue would earn a great reward. When an old man begged for food, the monkey gathered fruits from the trees and the otter collected fish, while the jackal wrongfully pilfered a lizard and a pot of milk-curd. The rabbit, who knew only how to gather grass, instead offered its own body, throwing itself into a fire the man had built. The rabbit, however, was not burnt. The old man revealed himself

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to be Śakra and, touched by the rabbit’s virtue, drew the likeness of the rabbit on the moon for all to see. It is said the lunar image is still draped in the smoke that rose when the rabbit cast itself into the fire. (Japanese Mythology & Folklore)

In other Japanese folk tales, the rabbit/hare is a clever character: a crafty, clownish, mischievous figure, a true trickster.15 Watanabe is all of this in the film, initially clownish, tragic, and pitiable because of his cancer. However as he fights to get the playground built, all his intelligence and craftiness, as well as mischievousness, appear. Moreover as in the Buddhist story, Watanabe is also the willing sacrificial animal; a point made by the novelist, who says that he is being crucified on the cross of his cancer, adding ‘Ecce Homo’ (behold the man), a reference to Christ. So Watanabe sacrifices his last days to get the playground built rather than rest at home or partake in general debauchery as his brother hopes. In other words, while the higher up officials attempt to re-member Watanabe as an annoying outsider who merits little praise, Kurosawa represents him as the ultimate self-sacrificing hero. To what end? For many the point of the film is that it highlights the possibility of change and individual heroism – even if only for an ordinary working man. Watanabe’s fellow civil servant, Kimura (Himori Shinichi), or ‘Gelatine’ as Toyo nicknames him, seems poised to act more humanely, but only poised, at the film’s end. The last scene shows him standing, not speaking, and then sitting again as a new bureaucratic merry-go-round around begins; then we see him standing on a bridge, looking down at the playground that Watanabe succeeded in building. Yet it is not Kimura who is the person most changed by Watanabe’s sacrifice: it is Mitsuo, his son, left clutching his father’s symbolic grey hat at the wake, who could be seen as softening, losing some of his hard and cynical edge. That Kurosawa does not spell it out for us is unimportant. The theme of the young man who changes through his encounter with a wiser older man, with or without the intervention of women, occurs frequently in his films. Sometimes the change is clear, as in Stray Dog, Seven Samurai, or Sanjuro. Sometimes it is to no obvious avail as in Drunken Angel. In some films, as in Yojimbo and Ikiru we do not know what will happen next. This is fair enough, since in 1952 it was unclear what would happen in Japan and what the war veterans, back in society and doing their jobs, would achieve. In hindsight we can say that they bent their will to achieving in peace what they could not do in war; but Kurosawa did not know that at the time. Instead he saw continuities in bureaucracy and its servants, as well as in big business and politics that appeared

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unchanged by the war. In short, Kurosawa’s films of this era aimed to expose the lacunae being created around him; they are a critical response to the lack of protest not only before and during the war but also to the silence that came afterwards, when many of his fellow Japanese chose to continue to be complacent and compliant, albeit under a new, democratic regime.

Conclusion Where does the heart go astray? Kurosawa said that in Rashomon it was in the forest where people get lost and are stripped back to their subjective selves. As Richie (1987: 19) noted, the characters in Rashomon are locked into their roles and assume a guilt analogous to their status. In contrast, in Ikiru, it is not the kokoro that has gone astray – although I would argue that kokoro as part of the Japanese spirit might well be alluded to – but the hara that is ill and lost in the city’s labyrinth, where it wanders in the aftermath of a national trauma. With it goes the ability to care about one’s fellow human beings. Watanabe regains his empathy and remembers his love for his son. His decision to make something before he dies, to do good, redeems him. Whether his sacrifice is enough to profoundly change others is a question audiences might want to consider. However, we are given the answer to the question of how to act heroically in times of uncertainty and in moments of national and personal guilt. To turn to the future and not romanticize the past; to make the present better, no matter the obstacles, while shouldering the responsibility for one’s own past actions rather than pointing the finger of blame elsewhere; these are shown as the only morally responsible ways forward. This is also the answer to the question of how to be a hero in such circumstances. Given such analysis, it is perhaps time that the work of Kurosawa Akira is reconsidered. In the Western film canon he is discussed as a great film auteur and scriptwriter whose films transcend cultural boundaries and the era of their making. He was truly an international artist. His films and their influence make him more than worthy of being included in the lists of the world’s top filmmakers. However, Kurosawa was also a Japanese film artist who should be contextualized as being of his era and very much of his generation. He was part of that prewar Tokyo generation described by Ohnuki-Tierney (2006) and Silverberg (2009): original, daring, artistic, well versed in foreign and Japanese literature, films and the arts, as well as being politically aware. Kurosawa is best understood if he is seen as part of this ‘lost’ generation, the lefty artistic liberals, who put their heads down, cooperated and then, at the war’s end, had to decide how to or

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how not to assume responsibility for their inaction. Kurosawa’s art grows out of this moment; its greatness lies in the fact that it mirrors something essential about his own internal dilemmas while also being universal; it speaks of the complexity of memory, of a guilt and responsibility that he himself felt and shared with others. Depicting all this in his films was part of his redemption. Dolores P. Martinez is Emeritus Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, and a Research Associate at ISCA, University of Oxford. She has written on maritime anthropology, tourism, religion, gender and popular culture in Japan, as well as on women’s football in the US, documentary film and humour in science fiction films. Her latest publications include Remaking Kurosawa (Palgrave, 2009); Gender and Japanese Society (Routledge, 2014); and with Griseldis Kirsch and Merry White as co-editors, Assembling Japan (Peter Lang, 2015).

Notes I am indebted to many: to Mark Nornes for asking that I talk about this and not Rashomon at the University of Michigan; to David Gellner for comments; and to the quick response of some of those on the KineJapan list: mainly Marty Gross and Roger Macy. Linda Flores, also thinking about war and trauma, gave me an afternoon of chatting around the subject. Any errors, of course, are my own.  1. I claim this based on conversations with Japanese men of that generation: while a few name Shichinin no Samurai (1954), many agreed that it was Ikiru that they admired the most. This is by no means an extensive or representative survey, as increasingly, young Japanese tend to know that Kurosawa Akira is a famous film director but often have never seen a film by him. As for Spielberg, both he and the actor Tom Hanks have spoken about remaking the film; a project that has yet to see the light of day. My assertion about the foreign viewers of the film does come from many an informed conversation with those who are already Kurosawa fans; supported by the fact that any internet search will reveal articles praising Ikiru.  2. It would be difficult to be sure of what sort of everyman audiences might have in mind, since this is a protean category, changing over time, but if Spielberg is interested in the project, we might assume he is thinking about George Bailey (James Stewart) in Capra’s postwar (1946) It’s a Wonderful Life.  3. See de Vargas’ Chapter 3 in this volume for a discussion of humanist films.  4. Goodwin (1994: 156) in particular provides a useful diagram that outlines the narrative structure of the film in tandem with the chronological organization of events.  5. Prince’s voice-over commentary for the 2009 Criterion DVD reissue of Ikiru notes the postwar conditions that frame the film and its implicit critiques.  6. Prince links the film more to No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), Scandal (1950), The Quiet Duel (1949), Drunken Angel and Stray Dog in terms of themes (1991: 112).  7. In an interview with Gadi, Kurosawa said ‘Not even my religion interacts with my work. I remember what my mother used to tell me when I was a child. She said, “Love

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 8.  9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

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of God and holiness should be kept in the heart”’ (2008: 32), which seems to indicate that Kurosawa did believe in god rather than in the death of. In his autobiography (1983) the chapter on Heigo’s suicide is entitled ‘A Story I Don’t Want to Tell’, indicating how profoundly affected by the event he was. This is subtitled as ‘Evil remains evil’, but the term used, warui, is more related to notions of wrong or bad and even guilt (to apologize, one can say: I feel warui about that) than to religious notions of evil. Hon no mono in Japanese. This is subtitled differently, but the nuance is important here: Sato is obliquely referring to the fact that Murakami is somehow genuinely Japanese – a good man – while Yusa, somehow, is not. Parker Tyler (1971) argues that the depiction of villains as madmen who enjoy killing and causing pain in contrast to the sane protagonist who is forced to kill is key to understanding US postwar trauma as symbolically represented in film noir. It is unclear who said this, but the quotation remains true in sentiment if not clear in attribution (see Boller Jr. and George 1989: 10). Prince (1991) has written extensively on this relationship. The never-identified narrator in this opening scene, discussing an X-ray of the cancer at a much more advanced stage than it is at the point at which we are introduced to Watanabe (Gorbman 1995: 489), reminds me of the opening to Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Could Ikiru be Kurosawa’s response to whimsical romantic comedy? In no other way do the films resemble each other beyond the odd voice-over. However, it is interesting that a victorious Britain’s response to war trauma was a film about a dying British airman falling in love with an American air traffic controller, while Kurosawa’s response was to make a film about a dying middle-age bureaucrat building a playground. Kurosawa had met Powell in 1945 (Galbraith 2001: 61) and admired his work (Nogami Teruyo, private communication via Marty Gross), but there is no evidence that Ikiru might be a response to this film, known in Japan as Stairway to Heaven (Tengoku no kaidan). However, Kurosawa probably saw the film in 1950, when it was released in Japan (my thanks to Roger Macy for pointing this out), and there is a photograph of him meeting with Powell again in Tokyo in 1952 (see Harper 2003: 16). Could Toyo and the unnamed writer, both of whom advise Watanabe on how to deal with his life before death, also be trickster figures? It would depend on where to put them within an elastic definition of the term. However as an allegorical tale, as Ikiru in many ways is, I would argue for these two ‘helpers’ to be seen as very different bodhisattva, who offer him two differing paths to transcendence.

References Benedict, R. 1989 [1946]. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul. Boller, Jr., P. and J. George. 1989. They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes and Misleading Attributions. Oxford: OUP. Bourdaghs, M. 2005. ‘What it Sounds Like to Lose an Empire: Happy End and the Kinks’, in T.Y. Hui, J. Van Bremen and E. Ben-Ari (eds), Perspectives on Social Memory in Japan. Folkestone: Global Oriental, pp. 115–33. Burch, N. 1979. ‘Kurosawa Akira’, in To the Distant Observer, Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 291–323. Carr, B. 1996. ‘Goethe and Kurosawa: Faust and the Totality of Human Experience – West and East’, Literature Film Quarterly 24(3): 274–80.

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Desser, D. 1992. ‘Ikiru: Narration as a Moral Act’, in A. Nolletti Jr. and D. Desser (eds), Reframing Japanese Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 56–68. Dostoevsky, F. 1993 [1880]. The Brothers Karamazov, trans. and introduction by D. McDuff. London: Penguin Books. ______. 2017 [1866]. Crime and Punishment, trans. N.P. Slater. Oxford: OUP. Frühstück, S. 2007. Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gadi, R.B. 2008. ‘An Afternoon with Kurosawa’, in B. Cardullo (ed.), Akira Kurosawa: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 31–42. Galan, C. 2008. ‘The New Image of Childhood in Japan during the Years 1945–59 and the Construction of a Japanese Collective Memory’, in S. Saaler and W. Schwentker (eds), The Power of Memory in Modern Japan. Folkestone: Global Oriental, pp. 189–203. Galbraith, S. 2001. The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. New York: Faber and Faber. Gluck, C. 1993. ‘The Past in the Present’, in A. Gordon (ed.), Postwar Japan as History. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 64–97. Goodwin, J. 1994. ‘Ikiru’ in Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 147–64. Gorbman, C. 1995. ‘Ikiru’s Soundtrack’, in E. Miner, T. Haga, K. Kawamoto, H. Yuan and Y. Ohsawa (eds), The Force of Vision, VI: Inter-Asian Comparative Literature. Tokyo: ICLA, pp. 487–94. Harootunian, H. 2005. ‘Detour to the East: Noel Burch and the Task of Japanese Film: History, Signs, and Difference’, Introduction to the Michigan Electronic reprint of To the Distant Observer by Noel Burch. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies Publications, University of Michigan, pp. 1–10. Harper, G. 2003. ‘They’re a Weird Mob: European Cinema beyond Europe’, Spectator 23(2): 12–21. Igarashi, Y. 2000. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ivy, M. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Japanese Mythology & Folklore. Retrieved 12 June 2018 from https://japan​ese ​mythology.wordpress.com/notes-and-readings-​on-the-japanese-hare-inthe-moon-and-the-easter-bunny/. Kurosawa, A. 1983. Something Like an Autobiography, trans. A. Bock. New York: Vintage Books. Martinez, D.P. 2007a. ‘Where the Human Heart Goes Astray: Rashomon, Boomtown and Subjective Experience’, Film Studies 11: 27–36. ______. 2007b. ‘Seven Samurai and Six women: Kurosawa Akira’s Seven Samurai’, in A. Philips and J. Stringer (eds), Japanese Film: Texts and Contexts. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 112–23. ______. 2009. Remaking Kurosawa: Translations and Permutations in Global Cinema. New York: Palgrave.

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______. 2015. ‘Kurosawa’s Noir Quartet: Cinematic Musings on How to be a Tough Man’, in C.Y. Shin and M. Gallagher (eds), East Asian Film Noir. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 37–51. Nakamaki, H. 2005. ‘Memorial Monuments of Interrupted Lives in Modern Japan: From Ex Post Facto Treatment to Intensification Devices’, in T.Y. Hui, J. Van Bremen and E. Ben-Ari (eds), Perspectives on Social Memory in Japan. Folkestone: Global Oriental, pp. 44–56. Ohnuki-Tierney, E. 2006. Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Prince, S. 1991. The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Renan, E. 1992 [1882]. ‘What is a Nation?’, trans. E. Rundell. http://ucparis.fr/ files/9313/6549/9943/What_is_a_Nation.pdf. Richie, D. 1987. ‘Introduction’, in D. Richie (ed.), Focus on Rashomon. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 1–22. ______. 1996. ‘Ikiru’, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, with additional material by J. Mellen. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 86–96. Seaton, P. 2007. Japan’s Contested War Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical Consciousness of World War II. Abingdon: Routledge. Silverberg, M. 2009. Erotic, Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Simmel, G. 1997. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (eds), Simmel on Culture. London: Sage, pp. 17–85. Tyler, P. 1971. Magic and Myth of the Movies. London: Secker & Warburg. Yoshimoto, M. 2000. Kurosawa, Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Filmography A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven), dir. M. Powell and E. Pressburger, UK, The Archers, 1946. [DVD] It’s a Wonderful Life, dir. F. Capra, California, Liberty Films, 1946. [DVD]

Kurosawa Akira Films by Year (All Now Available on DVD) Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful), Japan, Toho Company, 1944. Waga seishun ni kuinashi (No Regrets for Our Youth), Japan, Toho Company, 1946. Subarashiki nichiyōbi (One Wonderful Sunday), Japan, Toho Company, 1947. Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel), Japan, Toho Company, 1948. Shizukanaru ketto (The Quiet Duel), Japan, Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1949. Nora inu (Stray Dog), Japan, Film Art Association, 1949. Shūbun (Scandal), Japan, Shochiku Company, 1950. Rashōmon (Rashomon), Japan, Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1950. Ikiru, Japan, Toho Company, 1952. Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai), Japan, Toho Company, 1954.

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Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well), Japan, Kurosawa Production Company, 1960. Yōjinbō (Yojimbo), Japan, Kurosawa Production Company, 1961. Tsubaki Sanjūrō (Sanjuro), Japan, Kurosawa Production Company, 1962. Tengoku to jigoku (High and Low), Japan, Kurosawa Production Company, 1963. Hachigatsu no kyôshikyoku (Rhapsody in August), Japan, Feature Film Enterprise II, 1991.

Chapter 2

Postwar Narratives and the Avant-garde Documentary Tokyo 1958 and Furyō Shōnen Marcos P. Centeno Martín

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made. — Franz Kafka

Introduction The end of the Second World War in Japan saw the proliferation of a large number of culture circles involving unconventional alliances between writers, critics and artists, who sought new ways to approach reality and to investigate the possibilities of the postwar avant-garde. These authors led a vigorous debate on the concept of kiroku, which can be translated as document or documentary, in a wide sense not restricted to cinema. Through the concept of sōgō geijutsu (synthetic art), they initiated a formal opposition to genre boundaries and to all the limits previously established by literature and arts. This approach shaped a kind of avant-garde documentary movement that tried to overcome distinctions among opposing concepts: creation and recording; dream and fact; realism and surrealism; and, in short, the documentary and avant-garde. This chapter discusses the role played by Hani Susumu, together with Teshigahara Hiroshi, in adapting this movement within cinematic terms. Both authors participated in the collective documentary Tokyo 1958 (1958), which manifests many of the New Left authors’ aesthetic and ideological concerns. The film ironically depicts Japanese modernity, playing with the stereotype and myth-making processes of the postwar period. The

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documentary offers a sceptical depiction of Japan’s economic recovery, postwar democracy and the capitalist system, and seeks to subvert the dominant iconographies and discourses that were attempting to portray the country as new and detached from its past. In addition, Tokyo 1958 articulates collectively an eclectic style that channels the concerns of postwar culture circles in order to explore new ways of documenting reality: first, seeking alliances with other arts in order to go beyond the genre limitations; second, implementing an alternative subjectivity to that proposed by other New Left authors. While there have been some recent contributions to the study of the role of documentary films in the postwar avant-garde (Furuhata 2013; Key 2011; Matsumoto and Ishizaka 2008; Toba 2010), Tokyo 1958 has not been revisited yet nor has it received the attention it deserves by contemporary scholars, despite being one case study that illustrated and also prompted many of the late 1950s’ theoretical discussions (Hani 1959b; Matsumoto et al., 1961; Ogi 1958). How documentary film adapted ideas that were circulating about what kind of reality the avant-garde might provide is the subject of this chapter. I tackle the negotiation between images and postwar narratives in Tokyo 1958 and Furyō Shōnen (Bad Boys, 1961) through an epistemological analysis that ultimately tries to update the value of these documentaries as records in and of themselves, exploring the type of historical approach provided by these images. If avant-garde authors explicitly promoted a subjective approach to reality, to what extent do these images mirror society? What type of historical approach do they permit? Is a film like Tokyo 1958 a suitable document for scholarly analysis? Recent contributions in the sociology of media, memory studies and the archaeology of images show that rather than approaching images as documents of factual truths they can be studied according to their value as witnesses to the fears, anxieties and hopes that existed at the moment they were (re)taken. Far from considering subjectivity (shutaisei) as an obstacle to insights about the past, the historical study of subjectivities through images can be an enriching object of analysis, as has been demonstrated by various recent historical and sociological approaches to cinema. Jackson argues that cinema must be considered as one of the repositories of twentieth century thought as it widely projects the mentality of the men and women who make films (Jackson 1983: 147). Additionally, other authors note the futility of using cinema to understand pro-filmic reality and instead call attention to film’s ability to capture an era’s zeitgeist, including a given society’s ideologies, daydreams and traumas (Ferro 1980: 67; Sorlin 1985: 42). More recently, scholars have warned that in the construction of the past images do not reproduce facts; they only represent them, and as a result

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we can only have access to one version of reality (Sánchez-Biosca 2008). This evidences the impossibility of liberating images from synchronic necessities and interests of any kind (ibid.). In light of this theorizing, any hermeneutic analysis of the representations of modernity and the imperial family must acknowledge that these images are detached from their referent – that which they are supposed to represent. In other words, the relationship between the world and its cinematographic representation depends on issues of historical codification (Prince 1993: 16–28), although this codification is governed by a variety of ideological and political ­criteria that condition the diverse production of meanings. In relation to the subjectivity that became key to the discussions on the revitalization of documentary film, the filmmakers Matsumoto Toshio and Hani Susumu represented two opposing currents within the New Left, both in theory and practice. On the one hand, Matsumoto et al. (1961: 131) emphasized that the author’s subjectivity was necessary in order to attack totalitarian cinema. The images projected referred to the filmmakers’ subconscious, including their memories, emotions and traumas. Authors needed to interrogate film as a medium and search for different ways of perceiving reality, rejecting realism and challenging perception automatisms through Hanada’s defamiliarization strategies (see Matsumoto et al. 1967: 20–36). On the other hand, Hani claimed that filmmakers should capture another kind of subjectivity – that of the characters before the cameras. To some extent, Hani together with Teshigahara Hiroshi defended the author’s ‘self-negation’ (jiko hitei) in the debates published between the late 1950s and early 1960s (Matsumoto et al. 1961: 125–37). This chapter explores both the theory and methods to achieve this self-negation and their cinematic consequences.

Documentary Avant-garde: The Synthesis of Arts and Political Implications Teshigahara played an essential role among the culture circles that flourished in the aftermath of the Second World War, insofar as he became a bridge between documentary film and the avant-garde arts. In 1947, while Teshigahara was still a student of fine arts, he joined the Seiki no Kai (Century Society) where he met the Marxist critics Hanada Kiyoteru, Sekine Hiroshi, Hariu Ichirō, the painter Okamoto Tarō and the writer Abe Kōbō.1 This group had initiated formal experimentation as a new way of registering – and transforming – reality through their publications (dōjinshi),2 Seikigun and Seiki Gashū. As Sekine claimed: ‘Revolution means overcoming reality. The way to overcome reality can be found in our

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dreams. In other words, the synthesis of reality and dream is the new poets’ problem’ (in Toba 2010: 51, my translation ). In 1951, this group was divided into one faction more interested in the avant-garde as a formal discourse, and another with a more political and instrumental bent linked to the Japanese Communist Party (JCP). The latter founded the Genzai no Kai (Contemporary Society) in March 1952, a new group that tried to conjoin artistic forms with current affairs in order to change the perception of reality. Teshigahara incorporated the use of the term documentary in his ruporutāju kaiga (painting reportages, also termed e-rupo), made together with Okamoto Tarō and Katsuragawa Hiroshi. They portrayed labour and farming conditions in an exhibition held at MOMAT (Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo) in 1953, as part of the activities promoted by the JCP to trigger an agrarian revolution.3 Teshigahara merged literary and painting reportages in the publication E no Shukudai (Sekine, ed., 1953), which combined his surrealistic drawings with Sekine Hiroshi’s poems. Members of Genzai no Kai continued these interdisciplinary creations and political commitment in the so-called ebanashi (narration-paintings), such as the Nihon no Shōgen (1955), a series of nine volumes including Keimusho, in which Teshigahara illustrated Kobayashi Masaru’s autobiographical experience as a member of the revolutionary Maoist group Shokanha. At the end of the 1950s, the exploration of new artistic forms through which to portray reality expanded into the cinematic arena, when documentary makers Hani Susumu and Matsumoto Toshio joined the Genzai no Kai. As a result, the group was reorganized into the Kiroku Geijutsu no Kai (Documentary Arts Society) in May 1957, and the notion of documentary acquired a broader sense: one not restricted to print but including audiovisual and performing arts, as stated in their leitmotiv: ‘from printed culture to visual culture’ (Key 2011: 13). Nornes (2006: 58) argues that the vitality of documentary film production, which had increased more than 1,000 per cent from 1946, came together with a critical approach that demanded a renewal of this medium. The members of Kiroku Geijutsu no Kai shared an aesthetic concern and used the idea of the synthesis of arts not just to overcome genre boundaries but also to promote an active exchange between documentary film and other means of expression. They believed that art was needed to meet the demands of contemporary life and so reaffirmed their commitment to opening up popular arts (tashū geijutsu) to the political realities of the time (Key 2011: 77). Authors such as Hanada (1964) claimed that while the French-inspired neologism avangyarudo had spread during the postwar period, authors should return to the Japanese term zen’ei in order to include the ideological and political implications that the proletarian

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avant-garde had had before the war.4 Thus, for the avant-garde documentary movement, revolutionary art and artistic revolution became intertwined objectives. This political concern was widespread in documentary-maker circles during the 1950s, amongst whom the JCP was an important influence. However, the discussion of the avant-garde documentary film was prefigured by the ideological rupture in the Left caused by the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, which was heavily criticized by artists and intellectuals in Japan. Criticism of the party’s orthodoxy led representatives of the New Left (shinsayoku),5 such as Teshigahara Hiroshi, Hani Susumu and Matsumoto Toshio, to react against the old realism and pretensions of objectivity, which were seen as a mark of an authoritarianism typical of fascism, as well as of Stalinism, which they considered to be inscribed in the JCP. This resulted in a double ideological and aesthetical rupture, illustrated by a 1957 debate that Hani Susumu held with the veteran documentary maker Kamei Fumio, published in Kinema Junpō.6 The crisis of realism prompted authors to look for a redefinition of the documentary throughout the year 1958: Hanada coined the term subdocumentalism in February 1958 and Abe published his essay ‘Proposal for a New Documentalism’ in July 1958. A few years later, Matsumoto (1963: 66–79) used Hanada and Abe’s theories to develop his idea of the neo-documentary. The demands for a new kind of documentary film materialized in the collective work Tokyo 1958, made by Teshigahara Hiroshi and Hani Susumu, together with seven other members of the experimental group Shinema 58. The next sections explore how Tokyo 1958 challenged previous cinematic conventions in three different ways: first, it questioned the documentary format itself, liberating it from genre constrictions; second, it rejected the notion of authorship; and third, it dismantled postwar narrative discourses and iconographies – including that of the imperial family – that were associated with Japan’s new democracy and economic miracle.

Tokyo 1958: Redefining Documentary Boundaries and Postwar Narratives Tokyo 1958 is an eclectic depiction of modern Japan and offers a singular dialogue with its past through a cross-genre approach that had been demanded by the culture circles for a decade. It breaks open the closed frames of literature, scenic and plastic arts, music, photography and cinema. Shinema 58 members had theoretical discussions about what new strategies would be used to portray the present, and, additionally,

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they organized screenings and debates around world avant-garde films (Hani 1959b: 71). However, these activities triggered among them a practical interest, as Ogi Masahiro, one of Tokyo 1958’s authors, stated: ‘… we always watched cutting-edge art film and did our best to explore new possibilities to prevent us from falling into old, pre-established formulas … While of course we respect cinema, we are a youth wanting to destroy this “art”, which has been consolidated over sixty years’ (Ogi 1958: 72–73, my translation). Even Hani, who had directed films based on technical aestheticism, expressed his desire to incorporate the achievements made in other arts: ‘Today there is an exchange between different genres outside the cinematic arena: music, fine arts, dance, etc. I think we can make some headway in cinema if we try a similar collaboration’ (Hani 1959b: 71, my translation). Together with Hani and Teshigahara, Tokyo 1958 was produced by a heterodox team formed by the filmmaker Kawazu Yoshirō, scriptwriter Matsuyama Zenzō, the journalist Kusakabe Kyushirō, writers Mushanokōji Kanzaburō and Sakisaka Ryuichirō , film critic Ogi Masahiro and the then head of the Tokyo National Film Centre, Maruo Sadamu. The multidisciplinary nature of this group favoured a creative integration of different arts. Thus, the film’s scenes incorporate a wide variety of styles, making the film consistent in its aesthetical inconsistency. Moreover, it is impossible to know who made what, which constitutes a radical negation of the notion of the author. The authors collaborated in order to liberate filmic techniques and contents from their servitude to the powers that be, following only the stricture to ‘not hoist the propaganda flag’ (Ogi 1958: 72–73). As a consequence, Tokyo 1958 ended up being a satirical portrayal of Tokyo, providing a new perspective on the present and calling into question the capital city’s role as a symbol of Japanese modernity from several angles. The film was composed of material vestiges taken from traditional arts and the mass media, manufactured and presented to the audience with unsettling meanings. This migration of images provided new possibilities for capturing the present and documenting how postwar society was changing. For example, the opening sequence features a Westerner staring lustfully at the figure of a woman portrayed in an ukiyo-e.7 Meanwhile, theatrical sound effects, such as taiko (Japanese drums), kakegoe (the shouts and calls used in traditional Japanese theatre, music and martial arts) and the song ‘Eternaku’, a piece of gagaku (Japanese classical music), can be heard on the soundtrack. This sequence already contains the main topics around which the film revolves: the coexistence of the past and present, the traditional and the modern, as well as the renewed relationships between the US and Japan.

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Iconographic Feminity, Tradition and Modernity Tokyo 1958’s formal heterogeneity must also be understood as an example of the international engagement amongst avant-garde authors: the film was made to be shown overseas at the World Competition of Experimental Cinema, which was part of the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair (Ogi 1958: 72). According to Hani (1960b: 125) it was also screened at a film festival in Brazil. Thus the film was made to be distributed and consumed outside Japan, and this transnational dimension not only determined the way it was made in formal terms – its voice-over narration is in French and English – but also conditioned the discussions of identity that were going to be raised before foreign audiences. Consequently Tokyo 1958 does not collapse into essentialist visions of Japan, whose iconography is reconstructed from a transcultural perspective. The opening scene portraying Tokyo through the eyes of an American character raises the question of to whom the gaze belongs in the construction of a Japanese postwar identity. The scene also evokes the importance that foreigners have always had for Japan’s self-definition (see Befu and Manabe 1991: 104; Hui et al. 2005: 2–3). Borders between American and Japanese popular culture were indeed blurred by the second half of the 1950s.8 One example of this is the music contests in which participants sang in English, embodying American popular culture, and which even included Elvis Presley impersonators. This is the starting point of the authors’ mockery of postwar popular culture, one that continuously echoes American imaginary and daydreams, including references to the American dream, consumerism and competitiveness as the highest achievements of the capitalist democracy. As Igarashi (2000: 19–72) has noted, Japanese history from the Occupation period (1945–52) onwards can be seen as a melodrama in which the relationship between the United States and Japan becomes sexualized. Igarashi’s perspective is helpful in interrogating how both countries are visually represented in Tokyo 1958: these portrayals are highly gender coded. The US plays the masculine role and is the subject of the gaze, while Japan plays a feminine role and becomes an object of desire. The female body is used throughout the documentary as a metonym for Japanese society; additionally femininity is used as a visual device that represents Japanese tradition, exemplified by the ukiyo-e desired by the American man in the opening scene and the life-size painting of a woman being molested by a Japanese salaryman at the end of the film.

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Yet, femininity is also used to channel changes in the modern era. Tokyo became the symbol of the new consumer society, which is illustrated through images of the Ginza district crammed with women wandering around department stores. Although it has been noted that the female body represented liberation during the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945– 1952), women’s sexuality also became the focus of both celebration and commodification, as is shown in the scene featuring poorly dressed young dancers in American-style nightclubs (Igarashi 2000: 57). The subsequent television commercials by the cosmetic industry inserted into the film also suggest how women’s bodies were subjected to market demands. The worship of female beauty comes to represent a new era, one that was officially announced by the Japanese government in 1956, when the Ministry of Finance used the popular phrase mohaya sengo dewanai (it’s no longer the postwar) in their Economic White Paper. The bulletin stated that Japan had reached the same economic levels as those prior to the war and that the hardships of the immediate postwar were over. Additionally, Tokyo 1958 shows scenes of television programmes featuring female characters practising calisthenics. Radio programmes about physical exercise were used to convey nationalist ideology during the militaristic years (Igarashi 2000: 47; Tanaka 1994: 195); afterwards they were readapted and integrated into the process of feminine commodification that Tokyo 1958 shows alongside the proliferation of electronic appliances that had started to fill Japanese homes. Objects of consumption became part of the imagery of the Japanese economic recovery, but here they are used to parody runaway consumerism. Even the past can be commoditized, and a traditional Shinto wedding ensemble is explained in economic terms by the voice-over: ‘A furisode is only ¥200,000; the obi ¥300,000, the uchikake ¥250,000, the ceremonial kimono ¥100,000 and the rest around ¥150,000’.

The Idea of Progress: Conflict and Representation These examples illustrate how the film’s unconventional style is configured by a multilayered network of images, and these go onto include references to four photographic reports about Tokyo’s urban geography, published between 1952 and 1956 in the collection Iwanami Shashin Bunko (Hani Susumu and photographer Natori Yōnosuke, eds). Tokyo 1958 indexes the metatextual relations with these reports in a sequence that shows population statistics, including the numbers of births and deaths per year, the percentage of suicides, as well as the number of cameras and cinemas per inhabitant. One problem covered is the tons of rubbish that

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the metropolis generated, an issue much discussed at the time, which was not sorted out until the urban restructuring for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. While the media promoted Tokyo as a kokusai toshi (international city), people mocked its actual state of hygiene, jokingly referring to it as the kusai toshi (smelly city, see Igarashi 2000: 150). These scenes’ newsreel style contrasts with several unrealistic effects in the rest of the film, recalling the 1920s avant-garde, which include: strong chiaroscuros, expressionist lighting, free camera movements, unfocused takes, sharp angles and even upside-down shots. One of these techniques intersperses black and white with colour takes, which reinforces the visual multidimensionality of the documentary. This becomes a powerful device to highlight the clash between the old and the new, tackled in both aesthetic and narrative terms. Tokyo 1958 participates in the postwar discussion on ‘Japaneseness’ (nihonjinron) but shows the perpetuation of the past in the present from the working class point of view. Thus, the images of the masses commuting to work, overlapped with ukiyo-e cuttings of Edo-period commoners, add a political nuance questioning the idea of ‘progress’ as such. As a consequence, while Tokyo 1958 is a documentary about a space – the urban landscape of the Japanese capital – it is also about time. The film is a dialogue with its historical period and the subjectivities of the time. Even the idea of technological development – the basis of the economic growth – is cast into doubt with the sequences of labourers constructing a road by hand, just as it is portrayed in a painting from the premodern era. The film articulates an ironic demystification of the past, and the sentence ‘Japan as a fusion of tradition and modernity’ is repeated in a satiric tone, ridiculing the militarist discourse of wartime, which often blended Japan’s legendary past with images of the nation’s industrial power.9 Tokyo 1958 also shows newsreel images of contemporary ministers and businessmen on whose faces are superimposed caricaturist portraits of Edo period leaders, which humorously raises the question of the perpetuity of the elites’ control of the economic and political power. Thus, the postwar attempt to break with the militarist past in the new democracy is shown to be a pretence. The narration sardonically notes, and the criticism remains implicit, that Ono Bamboko, president of the Lower House, and Sekitome Michiru, president of Sakuma Dam’s construction company, are in fact ‘descendants of distinguished samurai clans’. The montage sequence with old engravings showing Japanese subjects bowing before a superior becomes a powerful device. Nonverbally, it alerts the audience to the uninterrupted subjugation of Japanese people by a powerful infrastructure that while masquerading as a ‘new form of

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authority’ actually dates back to the feudal past. This apparently naive portrayal of the elites should not be ignored: it is composed of a powerful succession of images that counteract the dominant public narratives, which were prevalent during this period. These discourses emphasized Japan’s democratic renewal and the rupture with the militarist and feudal past; a fracture seen as necessary to lead Japan towards modernity. In contrast, the film skilfully highlights many of these postwar inconsistencies, as well as revealing the continuity in political and economic power after the Occupation’s end.

An Iconography of Legitimation The figure of Emperor Shōwa is included amongst these old elites with aristocratic origins. Tokyo 1958 does not deal with the issue of the war responsibility, but it does raise interesting questions regarding the stasis of Japanese society. Hirohito was recognized throughout the world as a symbol of Japanese militarism, a fact weighing against the survival of the monarchy. How is it then that the imperial household survived after Japan’s surrender? Some clues may be found through the documentary’s study of the iconography related to the monarchy. Tokyo 1958 captures Hirohito and the Empress Kōjun greeting the people from the imperial palace’s balcony as part of the New Year celebrations. The palace gates were open to the general public from 1 January 1948, although no member of the imperial family appeared to greet visitors until 1951. From then on, this event became part of the public relations machinery that worked to legitimize the imperial family’s continuity. This scene is from one of these appearances held on 2 January. These new images of the Emperor played a key role in a postwar iconography that reworked the imperial household image: changing it from a religious, military and political entity to that of a cultural institution. The film documents this singular reconstruction of the emperor system (tennōsei), highlighting the contradiction between two Hirohitos: the prewar sacred Emperor and the postwar humanized figure (Gluck 2009: 64–95). Sundering Hirohito from the recent past was essential and exonerated him from any war responsibility. However, the sequence in which contemporary political and economic elites’ images are overlapped with clips of characters from the feudal past makes an obvious point: the fact that both emperors were the same man (ibid.). In this way, Tokyo 1958 dismantles the visual representations that had helped to reshape the image of the imperial family to meet the demands

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of postwar democracy. The process of humanizing the former deity had become a political issue as soon as it was understood that the Allies were supporting the Japanese monarchy after the war, but this narrative and iconographic metamorphosis was seen as necessary in order to provide national continuity after the Occupation. As Nakasone Yasuhiro had acknowledged in 1957, in a discussion within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP): ‘Japan must establish an image of the emperor as a human being (ningen tennō), which would enable him and the imperial family to become deeply rooted in the life of the people’ (cited in Shillony 2005: 234). The images of Hirohito reused by Tokyo 1958 were part of this process and are remarkable when compared to those taken before Japan’s defeat. The few pictures available until then had been extremely carefully staged (see Figure 2.1). They sought to represent the Emperor as a head of state, commander-in-chief and a living god (arahitogami), in accordance with State Shinto (Earhart 2008: 11). Those photographs aimed to project a divine aura, isolating the imperial family from the masses. The family was posed in a formal manner, often wearing uniforms that symbolized their military or religious power (see Figure 2.2). Nonetheless, a metamorphosis from the sacred to the profane can be seen in the battery of images introduced to the Japanese people after the surrender. A photo of General MacArthur with Hirohito, taken at the US Embassy on 27 September 1945, was one of those images that marked the beginning of a new pattern of representation in which the Emperor was given a corporeal quality (see Figure 2.3). Nosaka Akiyuki noted a correlation between the physical strength and national power embodied by both figures: the Emperor is visibly smaller than General MacArthur, who evoked the corporeality of the victors (Ide 1991: 20). Details of the meeting are outlined by Igarashi (2000: 28–35), for whom this image contains the necessary ingredients that can be found in melodrama: the heroic acceptance of humiliation but also the sexualized power relations that make this picture symbolically ‘analogous to a wedding photo’ (Nosaka 1977: 447). Certainly, while this iconic image resembles a wedding picture – the alliance of powers that had been enemies during the war – it might be more productive to see this snapshot as a metaphorical funeral portrait. The figure of the Emperor’s worn-out body is dressed in a formal black suit of the sort also worn to funerals and could be understood as nothing less than the evidence of a god’s death; it also signified the end of the divine empire in which he had been worshipped as the head of the nation’s extended family (kazoku-kokka). General MacArthur, as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers

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Figure 2.1 Visual representation before the surrender. The Shōwa Emperor’s coronation in 1928. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Figure 2.2 Visual representation before the surrender. The Imperial Family on 7 December 1941. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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and the highest authority in Japan during the Occupation, was thus the key player who could institute the mechanisms needed to signal the Emperor’s redemption. The discourse of the Emperor’s humanization officially began on New Year’s Day, 1946, through a radio speech in which Hirohito renounced his divinity. Nevertheless, the roots of the transition to the profane can be found in Hirohito’s first radio speech announcing the surrender (Gyokuonhōsō), broadcast on 15 August 1945, in which the Japanese people heard the Emperor’s voice for the first time. Certainly the archaic Japanese he spoke made that broadcast difficult to understand, but a semiotic analysis reveals that it was the voice itself that constituted the true message. From an historical perspective, Shillony (2005: 205) suggests that this moment might not have been that crucial because it caused no sensation in the Japanese press; however, it should be noted that in discursive terms it was a key moment that provided a first step in preparing a new iconography.10 Igarashi (2000: 26) shows that this speech offered a possible narrative for both the citizens of the United States and Japan, in which, paradoxically, the autocratic power of the Emperor was seen as the key to peace. As long as this contradiction remained intact, his responsibility for the war could be exonerated. The attempt to bring Hirohito closer to the masses continued through extensive tours around the country, made with the approval of the Occupation authorities. As Shillony (2005: 222) points out, unlike the Meiji tours, which were aimed to impress the people with the majesty of the monarch, postwar tours were aimed to present him as a ‘human figure’. These trips worked to redefine the crown as the symbol of the nation’s unity. Japan was the only country in the world (until the Spanish Constitution of 1978) whose constitution explicitly defined the monarch as the ‘symbol’ of the nation (Ruoff 2001: 52); and a condition for allowing the imperial household to continue was that the Emperor have no Figure 2.3 MacArthur and Hirohito political role.11 at the US Embassy in Japan, 27 However, Tokyo 1958 mocks September 1945. Wikimedia these institutional messages in the Commons, public domain.

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postwar period through the employment of dysfunctional images. First, Hirohito is introduced in a montage right after the images highlighting how the feudal elites continued to hold political and economic power in the postwar era. Second, the monarch and the people are presented as visually separate; the former looks down from the balcony and the crowd looks up. This vertically divided space echoes the old hierarchy and highlights the distance between the ruler and his subjects, which is also emphasized at the event’s denouement: the emperor turns left and the masses turn right. After their brief encounter, each returns to their respective homes, moving, physically and symbolically, in opposite directions and turning their backs on each other. Through this collision of shots, to use Eisenstein’s terminology, Tokyo 1958 manages to rupture both the mise en scène and the discourse that this event was meant to convey. The ideological construction of meaning through montage was already a common practice among Soviet formalist filmmakers, but what this re-employment of footage reveals is the coexistence of opposing political discourses, with contradictions that could potentially overlap within a single image, such as the Emperor’s humanization and detachment from the people. Tokyo 1958 takes advantage of the malleable nature of images in order to insert irreverent ideas and renegotiate dominant narratives in the postwar era. Consequently, although Matsumoto had highlighted the weight of the filmmaker in the (re)production of reality, Tokyo 1958 becomes an extraordinary example illustrating how the practices of the time were used to reject the notion of authorship in two ways: first, this work is collectively made, making it impossible to assign an author to the documentary; second, the originality of this film lies precisely in its aesthetic diversity, and its eclectic style prevents there being any consistent authorial characteristics. Hani went on to develop the idea of the author’s self-negation in Furyō Shōnen (1961), a film based on a number of personal memories. The story revolves around Asai, an eighteen-year-old boy who is arrested after robbing a jeweller’s and who is sent to Kurihama reformatory. While Asai’s story is fictional, the film is based on the lives of the petty criminals, who play themselves. Hani was inspired by Tobenai Tsubasa (Jinushi, 1958), a book of the seikatsu kiroku (life documentary) genre, which documented the autobiographical narratives of Kurihama reformatory inmates. However, Hani shot the film with a great degree of improvisation, allowing the protagonists, many of whom were former inmates of that reformatory, to re-enact robberies and their imprisonment according to their own memories.

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Immediacy to the Present Time Furyō Shōnen continues Tokyo 1958’s negotiation with postwar narratives, and, again, Hani includes a scene showing a member of the imperial family, Takako (or Princess Suga), Emperor Hirohito’s daughter. The princess had become a commoner a few months previously, after marrying Hisanaga Shimazu, a businessman and descendant of the Satsuma clan. The union of the imperial family with a member of the former nobility – abolished in 1947 – had become a topical issue after Crown Prince Akihito had married a ‘commoner’ the year before, causing a great sensation in the Japanese press.12 Now Furyō Shōnen gives us Princess Suga wearing a casual dress and shopping in Ginza’s boutiques. This scene is followed by one of Asai being driven to a police station, while his voice-over states that the first time he saw Ginza was when he was inside a police van. The screenplay makes no reference to this sequence, and the images of Princess Suga undoubtedly were filmed by chance.13 This fact illustrates how Hani took the ideas of the avant-garde documentary and adapted them to suit his own interests. Thus, Furyō Shōnen shifts from the ‘synthesis of arts’ to a new kind of ‘synthesis of media’, which provided a heightened sense of immediacy that, according to Hani (1960b: 52), cinema needed. Hani believed that documentary should be enriched by the journalistic practices that existed in the mass media of the time: ‘I think we could think about audio-visual art as focusing on the three contemporary means of communication: radio, television, and cinema. Interrelating these three media and dealing with shared problems might help to set up an audiovisual method’ (Hani 1959a: 33, my translation). Hani’s attempt to challenge the notion of documentary was shaped by his early career: first as a journalist for Kyōdō News, then as a documentary maker for Iwanami Eiga, and, finally, as one of the earliest Japanese directors of television documentaries.14 While he defended the immediacy of newsreels (Hani 1958: 30), he was also enthusiastic about the possibilities of television, and he coined the neologism telementari – blending ‘television’ and ‘documentary’ – in which he praised the higher degree of improvisation that the new medium allowed (Hani 1960a: 69–76). Considering current affairs within cinema become a recurrent device during the 1960s renewal of the cinematic language, which inaugurated what Furuhata (2013) calls the ‘cinema of actuality’. Hani had already argued that filmmakers ‘should make the gap between reality and artistic expression disappear’ by linking cinema to its present moment (Hani 1959c: 49). Indeed, Furyō Shōnen caused a sensation among critics because

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of the way it transcended the borders between reality and fiction (Iijima 1960: 26). By incorporating journalistic practices, the film was able to capture the icons of Japanese economic growth that existed in popular culture. Thus, the opening sequence includes takes of small groups of young boys wearing Hawaiian T-shirts and girls in Western dresses, which mirrored the style spreading among teenagers in the late 1950s, after the taiyōzoku (sun tribe) phenomenon. That trend reached its height with the adaptation of Ishihara Sintarō’s novel, Taiyō no Kisetsu (Season of the Sun, 1955). It continued with a group of films released in the summer of 1956 that projected a bucolic image of the new Japan through portraying the carefree lives of young adults from wealthy families that lived in opulent residences along the Shonan Coast. However, Hani addresses the fallacies of this imaginary, replacing the point of view of the privileged with that of a dark vision of the Japanese economic miracle as seen by the lumpenproletariat.

Capitalist Monarchy As in Tokyo 1958, the scene of Princess Suga shopping connects with the postwar demystification process in which the imperial family was portrayed as being interested in the mundane. Again, these images were something new. Until that point, members of the imperial household rarely had been seen to worry about materialistic issues. According to Earhart (2008: 12), Japanese emperors did not handle currency, as money was considered to be too mundane and defiling for a divinity. To a great extent, this new association of the imperial family with capitalism was used to show how ‘the good enemy becomes converted into a representative of the U.S. values’ (Igarashi 2000: 29). This marked a shift to the historical representation of the monarchy in secular terms. As Shillony (2005: 227) notes, Hirohito and his wife visited a department store in Ginza for the first time in 1954. From the mid1950s onwards, the Emperor was also associated with sports. Hirohito attended sumo tournaments and baseball matches and he presided over the opening ceremonies at international events, such as the 1958 Asian Games in Tokyo. Thus, the Emperor became ‘a mortal man who loved “chocolate-covered peanuts, Mickey Mouse, baseball, and marine biology”’ (in Earhart 2008: 6). The religious, political and military symbolism once associated with the members of the royalty was replaced by a new association with Japan’s consumer society. Princess Suga going shopping was part of a strategy designed by the imperial household to show that the crown was close to the worries and interests of ordinary people. These

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images were then captured by journalists and photographers, who also appear in Furyō Shōnen. Consequently, Hani did not join the official political discourse that attempted to bring the imperial family to the masses. Furyō Shōnen neither humanizes nor makes them accessible; rather, it shows a capitalist monarchy indifferent to the problems of the lower classes. The underlying criticism in this sequence is articulated by overlapping Princess Suga’s image with Asai’s narration, stating that the first time he saw Ginza was inside a prison van. The following scene shows a van driving Asai to a police station only to discover that his father had died during the war, revealing an uneasy paradox: the elites who had been responsible for the war enjoy the benefits of consumer society, while the victims of the war are forgotten by the system. Nevertheless, the film challenges the victim mentality found in postwar humanism; after all, Furyō Shōnen is the story of a young delinquent. While the question of war responsibility is not really tackled, through Asai’s personal experience, the film attacks the institutions and the idea of the state as an extension of the imperial family. Furyō Shōnen tears down the notion of family (ie), which cemented the ideology of the family-nation that was promoted during the militarism (Standish 2011: 72), but it also rejects the official postwar policy that attempted to adapt the image of the imperial family to the new political context. Far from portraying the royals as everyday ordinary citizens, Hani emphasizes their distance from the masses. Through an intelligent use of montage, he contrasts the privileges enjoyed by the Japanese elites (represented by the princess) with the hardships of the lumpenproletariat (represented by the character of Asai).

Conclusion Tokyo 1958 and Furyō Shōnen are two key works that help us understand how the ideas of the avant-garde documentary movement were implemented in cinematographic terms. They adopted the political sense that the term avant-garde had had before the war, while reacting against warera propaganda and the realism promoted by the old left, by linking subjective gazes to the present era. Hani, and Teshigahara, together with the members of Shinema 58, challenged the notion of auteur, and they expanded the boundaries of the documentary genre by employing the idea of synthesis: creating alliances with other arts, which resulted in the heterodox style of Tokyo 1958. Two years later in Furyō Shōnen, Hani added the sense of immediacy that had already existed in newsreels and that was then being incorporated into the new medium of television. With

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this semi-documentary, Hani not only expanded the documentary genre across different forms of mass media but he also defied its format, as such, by erasing the boundaries between reality and fiction. Tokyo 1958 and Furyō Shōnen also became cutting-edge works in terms of narrative, providing an alternative portrayal of modernity and the imperial family by reusing existing imagery and deliberately manipulating it in order to add new political messages. Both films observed the metamorphosis of the imperial family through images of desacralization, which marked the beginning of Japan’s new era. However, these works only resorted to these discursive mechanisms of visual representation in order to highlight their contradictions. Tokyo 1958 presents a dirty capital city with labourers working under the same conditions as those of the Edo period. Furyō Shōnen features a war orphan who is arrested after being forgotten by the system. Both films dismantle the political discourse of the imperial family that was promoted by the postwar authorities. Thus while the monarchy became a powerful symbol of peace and democracy, the hereditary throne also represented an undemocratic institution that remained in power even after losing the war that had been declared in its name. In Furyō Shōnen, the imperial household finally embodied the values of the new consumer society, which was the core of the modernity represented in Tokyo 1958. In this chapter I have employed the tactics recognized by recent scholarly works that argue for the value of the image as a document enriching the contemporary study of these films. The authors of the avant-garde documentary movement explicitly stated that rather than duplicating reality, documentaries only present a subjective selection of fragments from the outside world. The archaeological study of these works reveals the existing substrates of different narratives that have coalesced around the image through the continuous production of meanings. This explains how while the ‘humanization’ of the imperial family could be used to legitimize the political situation of the time, the same iconography could also be used to question it. This is only possible if images are autonomous and ultimately divorced from any referent that they are supposed to represent. Whereas this means that images should be interpreted according to interests and necessities of the time, it also opens the door to new studies on the coexisting narratives that are continuously being renegotiated. Consequently, Tokyo 1958 and Furyō Shōnen raise questions about their present rather than the past. These two films demonstrate, and participate in, the postwar conflicts about identity, the reconfiguration of old myths and the contradictions inherent in economic growth in order to, eventually, show how the promises of the postwar’s ‘new democracy’ fail rather than succeed.

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Marcos P. Centeno Martín is a lecturer at, and the director of, the Japanese Studies programme at Birkbeck, University of London. Before that, he taught several courses on Japanese Cinema and Asian Cinemas and convened the MA ‘Global Cinemas and the Transcultural’ at SOAS. Centeno was also Research Associate at Waseda University (Japan), Research Fellow at the University of Valencia (Spain) and visiting researcher at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 and Goethe Universität Frankfurt. His research interests revolve around Japanese documentary film, postwar avant-garde, transculturality and representation of minorities in Japanese cinema.

Notes  1. Teshigahara and Abe epitomized a well-known alliance between literature and cinema during the sixties, which began with Otoshiana (The Pitfall, 1962) and became internationally renowned with the release of Suna no Onna (Woman of the Dunes, 1964).  2. Dōjinshi were journals edited by the culture circles. For an account of previous discussions about left-wing art and the avant garde held by Iwasaki Akira and Shimizu Hikaru in one of these dōjinshi, see Nornes (2013: 15). An extensive piece of research on the activities of the culture circles in the 1950s can be found in Toba (2010).  3. For an account on the ruporutāju kaiga during the first half of the 1950s, see Toba (2010: 55–63).  4. Namigata (2005) also pointed out that unlike the European aesthetic avant garde of the 1920s the notion of avant garde in Japan had had, historically, an inherent political leaning.  5. For a further discussion of the New Left and its politics see Ferran de Vargas’ Chapter 3 in this volume.  6. Authors discussed which sort of reality it was possible to capture cinematographically as a consequence of the scandal caused by Shiroi Sanmyaku (The White Mountains, Imamura, 1957), which used animal species unknown in the area – including a stuffed bear – where the documentary was shot (Hani et al. 1957).  7. Literally: pictures of the floating world, Japanese woodblock prints of the seventeenth to nineteenth century Edo (Tokugawa) era (1603–1867) based on life in old Edo’s (Tokyo) entertainment quarters.  8. I address the influence of American popular culture on Japanese youth cinematic icons in Centeno 2016.  9. Images combining technological development with Japan’s old legends and founding myths can be found in propaganda films such as the German-Japanese production Atarashiki Tsuchi/ Die Tochter des Samurai (The Daughter of the Samurai, Fanck and Itami, 1937) or in the animated film Momotarō no Umiwashi (Momotaro’s Sea Eagles, Seo, 1942). 10. The 15 August broadcast and subsequent representations from that moment onwards gave the Emperor an earthy quality that made an ethereal figure corporeal: previously, the Emperor had been an unattainable figure surrounded by mysticism and who lived in an inaccessible imperial palace. However, the public was allowed to enter the palace for the first time in 1948, in order to receive the Emperor’s greetings from the balcony. Even the name of the palace was changed from the military-sounding kyūjō (palace castle) to the civilian-sounding kōkyo (imperial residence) (Shillony 2005: 227). The

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11. 12.

13. 14.

Emperor’s appearances took place on his birthday, 29 April, and on 2 January, which is when the Tokyo 1958 scene was shot. However, the Emperor was never a completely depoliticized figure, since the American authorities used him as a bulwark against communism (Ruoff 2001: 7). The Japanese press referred to the wedding as a love match. At a time when government was considering revisions to Japan’s constitution, the popularity of the democratic marriage served to show that monarchy had become thoroughly embedded in Japan’s postwar culture (Ruoff 2001: 3). The script was published in a 1960 special issue of Kinema Junpō: Meisaku Shinarioshū 4: 135–42. Hani directed several episodes of Nenrin no himitsu (Secrets of the Year), which was aired on Fuji TV between 1959 and 1960.

References Befu, H. and K. Manabe. 1991. ‘Nihonjinron: The Discursive Manifestation of Cultural Nationalism’, Kwansei Gakuin Universit 15: 104–15. Centeno, M. 2016. ‘Imágenes del “Espíritu de Reconstrucción”: Hacia el Redescubrimiento del Documental Japonés a través de la Obra Olvidada de Hani Susumu’, in A. Lozano-Méndez (ed.), El Japón Contemporáneo: Una Aproximación desde los Estudios Culturales. Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, pp. 33–53. Earhart, D.C. 2008. Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Ferro, M. 1980. Cine e Historia, trans. J. Elias. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. Furuhata, Y. 2013. Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gluck, C. 2009. ‘The Past in the Present’, in A. Gordon (ed.), Postwar Japan as History. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 64–95. Hanada, K. 1958. ‘Dokyumentarī no Zento: Tokushū, Eiga no Jikken to Kanōsei [Documentary’s Future: Possibilities of Experimental Cinema and its Singularities]’, Eiga Hihyō 15 (February): 16–19. _______. 1964. ‘Nijūjinkaku [Dual Personality]’, in Chosakushū 3: 166–77. Tokyo: Miraisha. Hanada, K., et al. 1954 ‘Akuchuariti no Tame no Kadai’, Bijutsu Hihyō 25 (January): 15–31. Hani, S. 1960a. ‘Terementarī Ron [Telementary Theory]’, in K. Kanazawa (ed.), Gendai Terebi Kōza. Tokyo: Davidosha. _______. 1960b. Kamera to Maiku [Camera and Mic]. Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha. _______. 1959a. ‘Kiroku no Hōhō to sono Imi [The Documentary Method and its Significance]’, Bungaku 27 (November): 33–40. _______. 1959b. ‘Zenei Eiga no Koto [About Avant-garde Cinema]’, Ongaku Geijutsu (August): 68–71. _______. 1959c. ‘Eizō de wa Kangaerarenaika [Is it Not Possible to Think with Images?]’, Mita Bungaku 49 (February): 47–50. _______. 1958. ‘Ashita no tame no Eiga [For Tomorrow’s Cinema]’, Eiga Hihyō 15 (February): 28–31.

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Hani, S., et al. 1957. ‘Kiroku Eiga no Uso to Shinjitsu [Truth and Lies in Documentary Film]’, Kinema Junpō 15 (May): 40–47. Hui, T.Y., et al. (eds) 2005. Perspectives on Social Memory in Japan. Folkestone: Global Oriental. Iijima, K. 1960. ‘Hani Susumu to “Furyō Shōnen” [Hani Susumu and Bad Boys]’, Eiga Hihyō 17 (December): 24–28. Ide, M. 1991. Segoshi, Jō. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Igarashi, Y. 2000. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ishihara, S. 1956. ‘Taiyō no Kisetsu [Season of the Sun]’, Kinema Junpō 144: 31–47. Jackson, M.A. 1983. ‘The Uncertain Peace: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)’ in M.A. Jackson and J.E. O’Connor (eds), American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image. New York: Ungar, pp. 147–166. Jinushi, A. 1958. Tobenai Tsubasa: Kurihama Shōnenin Shukishū [Wings that Cannot Fly: Memories from Kurihama Reformatory]. Tokyo: Rironsha. Key, M.S. 2011. Truth from a Lie: Documentary, Detection, and Reflexivity in Abe Kobo’s Realist Project. New York: Lexington Books. Matsumoto, T. 1963. Eizō no Hakken: Avangyuarudo no Dokyumentari [Discovering Images: The Avant-Garde Documentaries]. Tokyo: Sanichi Shobō. Matsumoto, T. and K. Ishizaka. 2008. Dokyumentarii –no Umi e– Kiroku Eiga Sakka: Matsumoto Toshio to sono Taiwa [Towards a Documentary Sea: Authors of Documentary Cinema: Dialogue with Toshio Matsumoto]. Tokyo: Gendai Shokan. Matsumoto, T., et al. 1967. ‘Eiga to Gendai Geijutsu [Cinema and Contemporary Art]’, in S. Hani et al. (eds), Gendai Eiga Jiten. Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, pp. 20–36. Matsumoto, T., et al. 1961. ‘Kiroku Eiga to Gekieiga: Dokyumentarī no Hōhō o Megutte [Documentary Film and Fiction Film: About the Documentary Method]’, Shin Nihon Bungaku 16 (May): 125–37. Namigata, T. 2005. Eikkyō no Abangyarudo [The Influence of the Avant-garde]. Tokyo: NTT Shuppan. Nornes, A.M. 2006. ‘El Rastro del Cine Documental Japonés de Posguerra: a Tientas en la Oscuridad’, in C. Muguiro (ed.), El Cine de los Mil Años: Una Aproximación Histórica y Estética al Cine Documental Japonés (1945-2005). Pamplona: Colección Punto de Vista, pp. 56–88. _______. 2013. Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nosaka, A. 1977. ‘American Hijiki’, in H. Hibbett (ed.), Contemporary Japanese Literature. New York: Knopf, pp. 435–68. Ogi, M. 1958. ‘Tōkyō 1958 to Shinema 58’, Eiga Hihyō 15 (March): 72–74. Prince, S. 1993. ‘The Discourse of Pictures: Iconicity and Film Studies’, Film Quarterly 47(1): 16–28. Ruoff, K.J. 2001. The People’s Emperor Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 19451995. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Sánchez-Biosca, V. (ed.). 2008. ‘Imágenes, Iconos, Migraciones, con Fondo de Guerra Civil’, Archivos de la Filmoteca 60: 10–31. ________. 2006. Cine de Historia, Cine de Memoria: la Representación y sus Límites. Madrid: Cátedra.

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Sekine, H., et al. 1953. E no Shukudai [Homework of Drawing]. Tokyo: Tatetamisha. Shillony, B.A. 2005. Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japanese History. Folkestone: Global Oriental. Sorlin, P. 1985. Sociología del Cine: La Apertura para la Historia de Mañana, trans. J.J. Utrilla. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Standish, I. 2011. Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. New York: Continuum International. Tanaka, S. 1994. Eisei Tenrankai no Yokubō [The Desire for Hygiene Exhibitions]. Tokyo: Seikyakūsha. Toba, K. 2010. 1950 Nendai: ‘Kiroku’ no Jidai [The Fifties: The Documentary Age]. Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha.

Filmography Atarashiki Tsuchi/ Die Tochter des Samurai (The Daughter of the Samurai), dir. A. Fanck and M. Itami, The Criterion Collection, 1937 [DVD]. Furyō Shōnen (Bad Boys), dir. S. Hani, Japan, Iwanami Eiga, 1961 [VHS, DVD]. Momotarō no Umiwashi (Momotaro’s Sea Eagles), dir. M. Seo, Geijutsu Eigasha, 1942 [animation]. Nenrin no himitsu (The Year’s Secrets), dir. S. Hani, Japan, Fuji TV, 1959–1960 [DVD]. Otoshiana (Pitfall), dir. H. Teshigahara, Japan, The Criterion Collection, 1962 [DVD]. Shiroi Sanmyaku (The White Mountains), dir. S. Imamura, Japan, Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1957 [Film]. Suna no Onna (Woman of the Dunes), dir. H. Teshigahara, Japan, The Criterion Collection, 1964 [DVD]. Tokyo 1958, dir. Shinema 58, Japan, The Criterion Collection, 1958 [DVD].

Chapter 3

Radical Subjectivity as a Counter to Japanese Humanist Cinema Ōshima Nagisa’s Nūberu Bāgu Ferran de Vargas

Postwar Japan witnessed the appearance of several artistic movements that attempted to make the Japanese aware of their autonomy. Although humanist films dominated in Japanese cinema during the first decade following the country’s defeat, around the mid-1950s this movement began to lose ground to another form of avant-garde filmmaking, which during the 1960s evolved into Nūberu Bāgu (or New Wave) cinema.1 While Japanese humanist cinema was to some degree a filmic correlative to the prevailing leftist ideology of the immediate postwar period, one that was heavily influenced by the Marxism of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) and progressive intellectuals, the Nūberu Bāgu constituted a film movement paralleling that of the Japanese New Left political movement, which emerged in opposition to previous leftist ideas. In this chapter, I argue that the Nūberu Bāgu’s project aimed to foster both radical scepticism and subjectivism, in opposition to the humanist project, which essentially condemned Japan’s ‘premodern’ past and put its trust in modernity’s structures. To illustrate this, the last section of the chapter discusses Ōshima Nagisa, one of the key authors of Nūberu Bāgu, and analyses one of his most iconic films: Kōshikei (Death by Hanging, 1968).

Humanist Modern Cinema and the Trauma of Fascism What losing the Second World War meant differed vastly depending on the individual and their own experiences. For many intellectuals, the trauma lay in the fact that a totalitarian regime had been able to come to

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power in Japan without meeting much resistance from the people. For those who saw the trauma in this light, it was essential to expose those who were responsible and to understand the factors that had led to such a situation so that it could never happen again. In the cultural arena, confronting the past in this way was expressed mainly through one of two perspectives: either that of a humanistic nature influenced by Marxism, or from a tendency towards nihilism. Of these two, Marxist-influenced humanism was the predominant tendency. After the war, the majority of Japanese experienced an existential crisis, developing a deep loathing towards the regime that had led their country to its downfall. Many Japanese were aware that the majority of the wartime regime’s political prisoners released by the US Occupation forces were members of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) and, consequently, the public began to show some interest in Marxism. Even for non-Marxists, communism became an intellectual banner that provided possible answers to the question of how Japan should modernize. The Marxists’ interpretation of Japan’s prewar and wartime totalitarianism consisted of seeing Japanese society as essentially capitalist but built on feudal structures and premodern values2 that had been exploited by the imperialist regime at a moment of global crisis in order to bolster their authority and protect the interests of the oligarchy. So, if the desire was to thoroughly dismantle Japanese fascism, all vestiges of feudalism had to be eliminated, while the belief in the possibility of democracy, equality and individual freedom had to be promulgated. In short, people should look back with fear and forwards with hope. In fields such as cinema, this involved fostering a relatively little known humanism. The second approach to confronting the past, nihilism, did not attempt to fill the vacuum of values generated in postwar Japanese society but rather to turn this very void into its norm. This posture was expounded by Sakaguchi Ango, who believed that defeat freed the Japanese from the obligations of self-sacrifice and submission to lofty spiritual causes; thus, they should remain free by renouncing all beliefs or ideals. They should trust only in their own long-repressed physical sensations and desires (Buruma 2015 [1994]). To some degree, both viewpoints – the humanist and the nihilist – shared a common diagnosis of the faults in Japanese society: they saw the individual as subjugated to structures that stifled the development of a true subjectivity (shutaisei), while this lack of individuality allowed oppressive regimes to exist. The humanist response was positive: it confronted the contemporary situation by formulating another, which was based on liberating values that brought out the best in human beings. In contrast, the nihilist response was negative: it consisted of renouncing all

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moralizing doctrines with the conviction that only in this way could the individual thrive. From the early postwar era, novels written in the nihilist vein had enjoyed a good deal of success in Japan; however, the same could not be said for the film industry. In the first decade or so after the war, confronting the past was a tendency guided by what David Desser (1988: 15) terms ‘modern cinema’, whose directors can be defined as the ‘postwar humanists’. Here humanism is understood philosophically but also politically, as characteristic of a modernity that measures an individual only in terms of a single-dimension rational personhood: someone who is able to formulate coherent explanations about themselves and all around them based on causality and objectivism. Some of the best known postwar humanist directors were Kurosawa Akira, Kinoshita Keisuke, Ichikawa Kon and Kobayashi Masaki.3 They had all grown up during the years of a progressive shift towards the democracy that had been characteristic of the Taishō and very early Shōwa eras (1912–29). At first, they saw the occupation by the US Forces as an opportunity to once again take up this development, which had been interrupted by the fascism of the 1930s. However, after 1948, the US, alarmed by the growing power of the communists in China, decided on a change in their foreign policy strategy for Japan, shifting from promoting democracy and purging the nationalist extremists to promoting a series of regressive reforms. The film industry also suffered during this ‘reverse course’ (Dower 1993: 14): individuals who had been expelled from major film production companies for inciting war were restored to their positions, while dozens of left-wing employees were dismissed. Humanist directors were aware that the system was reverting to promoting premodern (e.g. feudal) tendencies in Japanese society and, fearing that Japan might backslide into the past, felt that it was their responsibility to continue the fight for modernization through their films. In accordance with the US Occupation forces’ dominant ideology, Japan’s humanist cinema adopted as its model the realist paradigm from Hollywood classics. This was expressed through plots focused on psychologically defined characters who find themselves in adverse situations. They were set and narrated within specific settings and historical moments, often in the 1930s and 1940s or during the feudal era, with the objective of drawing direct links between fascism/feudalism and Japanese society’s oppressive sociopolitical structure. The fact that the postwar humanists framed so many movies within this setting implies that, to a certain extent, they thought that these repressive trends ­continued to exist in contemporary Japan.

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In humanist films, the social circumstances endured by the main characters explain any wrongdoing or their inability to achieve their goals. Nonetheless, their inner feelings lead them to act correctly, or to feel guilty if they do not. Whatever the case, the clash between the circumstances imposed by society and an individual’s reasoning constitutes the starting point of these narratives, providing an explanation for the plot, which frequently ended tragically. In the same way that individuals are subject to circumstances, so too are they subordinate to these films’ very clearly defined storylines. To a certain extent, the characters in humanist films appear to be only symbolic elements in the construction of an archetypical narrative. However, whatever importance these cinematic narratives may have had when it came to developing humanism in a Japan emerging from a particularly dark period in its history, they were later challenged by directors from the avant-garde movement that began to appear in the 1950s.

The Emergence of a New Left Subjectivity The JCP was able to rely on a high degree of credibility in the early years following the Second World War because of the anti-fascist stance of several of its members. Nevertheless, a series of events generated a split within its ranks, one which nurtured the rise of a revolutionary movement at odds with the established Left. This fracture became irreparable around 1960, when what came to be known as the Japanese New Left, or just the New Left, burst onto the public scene, an event echoed in the film industry during this period with the appearance of avant-garde directors opposed to humanist cinema. In 1950, a few months after the People’s Republic of China was established and just before the Korean War, Moscow and Beijing heavily criticized the moderate strategy of Japanese communists, urging them to carry out a militant, violent, socialist revolution. It was at this moment that the JCP, without pausing for internal reflection, exchanged the ballot box for arms and completely overlooked the differences between the Chinese and Japanese contexts. Thus began what is known as the ‘molotov cocktail era’ (Matsunami 1970: 55), during which the party incited people to use violence against the authorities, while sending student guerrillas to the countryside. The year 1955 was a turning point in this strategy. During the previous year, the international scenario had changed significantly: the US withdrew from Korea and the peaceful coexistence policy, endorsed by the

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new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, was adopted. Once more following foreign and geopolitical dictates, the JCP decided to renounce violence completely as a political means in order to again focus on the ballot box. A feeling quickly spread through the ranks of young Japanese communists that the JCP had sacrificed them in vain, robbing them of their youth. Hundreds had put their lives on the line, risking everything to follow the party’s directives. In their eyes, these sacrifices now had no meaning. Somewhat similar to what had happened as a result of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, this engendered a widespread sense of injustice coupled with the need to hold someone accountable. Just as the military regime was believed by many to be solely responsible for the war, now the JCP was seen to be responsible for having dragged its young members into a meaningless, violent quest. A majority felt so disillusioned that they abandoned all radical action. However, there were various activists who, despite feeling betrayed, had no regrets about what they had done. They generally assumed responsibility for their actions and did not renounce radical undertakings (Hasegawa 2003: 78). This sector of young activists became the breeding ground for the New Left. From this point on and as a result of other events, particularly the Sunagawa Struggle4 (1955–57) and the Hungarian Revolution (1956), there was a growing opposition to the JCP’s official party line. Significant numbers of members abandoned its ranks, creating the Japan Revolutionary Communist League (JRCL) in 1957, and a group of students founded the Communist League (CL) or ‘Bund’ in 1958. The following year this student organization took control of the Zengakuren (National Federation of Student Self-governing Associations), which had been run by the JCP since 1948. The New Left,5 spearheaded by these student movements, burst onto the public scene at the end of 1959. During the protests against the renewal of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security (popularly known as Anpo) between the US and Japan in 1960,6 this political movement carried out a series of direct actions against the authorities, with great media impact, in order to awaken the public opinion. In general, the anti-Anpo movement feared that the Japanese would become victims of a new authoritarian regime or of a war in their own land. The JCP were not only opposed to direct action tactics but were also unwilling to accept the idea of students playing a leading role in the protests. From their orthodox point of view, only workers could take a leading role in mobilizing the masses. In contrast, the New Leftist factions believed that revolutionary thinking was not necessarily intrinsic to the working class and that the students were capable of militant struggle. The JCP’s attitude towards the student movement also implicitly embodied

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a clash between generations: the party remained in the control of older party members whose careers predated the war. Demonstrations and serious clashes continued on 15 June 1960. At one point during that day’s protest, thousands of students confronted the police, setting fire to dozens of police vans, and managed to gain entry to the Diet’s (Parliament) compound. Kanba Michiko died during this battle, sparking renewed aggression from the students, who continued fighting until dawn. Her death became a symbol of their resolve to oppose the treaty and stood in stark contrast to the inertia of the JCP, who were more concerned with projecting an image of responsibility and civic opposition in order to attract the medium-term support of Japanese moderates than they were in urgent efforts to prevent the treaty being renewed. Despite the mass opposition, the treaty was eventually renewed, although the impact of these protests forced the then prime minister, Kishi Nobusuke, to resign. The JCP and some progressive intellectuals denounced the students’ invasion of the Diet as anti-democratic. However, many activists believed that the Diet’s passing of a bill to renew a treaty of this nature in spite of the mass demonstrations was truly undemocratic. While for some this confirmed their scepticism towards a representative bourgeois democracy, for others this led to a profound disillusionment with such a system. Rather than expressing dissatisfaction at the treaty’s renewal, the JCP focused on expressing their satisfaction at having gained the support of so many people in the demonstrations and took credit for Kishi’s resignation. Similarly, many of the progressive intellectuals considered the struggle a success because the Japanese people had demonstrated their capacity to mobilize against the government. In contrast, the New Left emerged from all this feeling profound anger, disappointment and betrayed. Thus there were two distinct left-wing movements fighting for substantially different programmes. Ultimately, the aim of the JCP and the progressive intellectuals was to preserve the existing democratic system; they were also driven by the fear of an eventual return to a prewar military regime and becoming its victims. On the other hand, the New Left did not limit themselves to only attacking premodern or reactionary aspects but also pointed the finger at institutions such as bourgeois democracy and the traditional Left as modern sources of alienation. Then from 1965, after the US began bombing Vietnam with Japan’s logistical support, the feeling that their nation was an accomplice and not a victim of imperialism spread among Japanese social movements. The emergence in Japanese society of the consciousness that they could be oppressors, already a tenet of the New Left, provided this movement with a fertile field on which to grow: the universities, where they eventually

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became ingrained. A strong sense of ‘self-negation’ (jiko hitei) was developed there, a notion that called for the questioning of the position the self occupies within the network of dominant social relationships. This peaked in 1968–1969, the most intense period of student protest, and it had a strong influence on the Nūberu Bāgu’s formation.

Ōshima Nagisa and the Modernist Subjectivity of Nūberu Bāgu In 1956, as a result of a film adaptation of the novel Taiyō no Kisetsu (Season of the Sun) by Shintaro Ishihara, movies about the Taiyōzoku (Sun Tribe) youth became popular. Their themes revolved around rebellious youth and how their values clashed with those of adults. The very same year, another film based on a novel by the same writer was also produced and became a major box office hit: Kurutta Kajitsu (Crazed Fruit), directed by Nakahira Ko. From here on it was clear that there was a new cinemagoing public in Japan. Taiyōzoku narratives, rooted in postwar disenchantment rather than humanism, introduced into Japanese cinema the nihilistic spirit that had surfaced in Japanese literature a decade earlier. Now disillusionment was caused not only by fascism and war but also by the experiences of the postwar period. The films within this category openly exalted the subject in the form of the rebel without a cause: a hedonistic individual raging against society in general and their parents’ generation in particular. The consolidation of this new youth cinema occurred after the success of Kuchizuke (Kisses, 1957) and Kyojin to Gangu (Giants and Toys, 1958), directed by Masumura Yasuzo, who was heavily influenced by Italian neorealism. Masumura’s films distanced themselves critically from the postwar humanism by means of a style that did not encourage sentimental empathy with any of the characters. Moreover, it gave priority to the interaction of individuals based more on desire than on rational reflection, over and above narrative engineering or the weight of circumstances. Masumura’s success demonstrated that there was a substantial youth market with new tastes for producers to exploit. One of the most important production companies at this time, Shōchiku, had specialized in producing melodramas aimed at women, mainly housewives, who with the advent of the television began to frequent cinemas less regularly. Confronted by this situation, Shōchiku made a note of youth cinema’s success and decided to reinvent itself by entrusting projects to young, generally inexperienced directors. Until this point Japanese production companies had been governed by a rigid infrastructure in which anyone

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who aspired to become a director had to spend many years as a director’s apprentice. Shōchiku put its new policy into practice in 1959, just when the struggle against the Anpo was taking shape, and gave Ōshima Nagisa his first opportunity to direct. This was the symbolic beginning of the Shōchiku Nūberu Bāgu7 in Japanese cinema, which is also associated with the films of Shinoda Masahiro and Yoshida Yoshishige. To a certain degree their output represents the generation gap Japanese society was experiencing at that time, as well as the political ideology of the New Left. Paralleling the trajectory of many New Left activists who had spent their early political life as part of the JCP, only to reject its rigid influence, many Nūberu Bāgu directors had served as assistants to established directors for a few years, and when they were able to start making their own films they rebelled against their mentors’ cinema. As noted above, while humanism had been the approach commonly adopted by the previous generation of progressive Japanese directors, whose essential concern was to break with feudalism and fascism, the radical spirit of this new movement in Japanese cinema – to which Ōshima belonged – grew out of the disenchantment with the bourgeois democratic system, the JCP and postwar progressivism. Like other Nūberu Bāgu directors, Ōshima had had first-hand experience with the student movement in the 1950s. One of the reasons why he had decided to study at Kyoto University was the impression Kurosawa’s Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi (No Regrets for Our Youth, 1946) had made on him when he was a teenager. The film was based on the real events involving Takikawa Yukitori, a lecturer at Kyoto University, who was fired by the military regime in 1933 for his liberal ideas. When Ōshima began at Kyoto University, Takikawa had been reinstated by the Occupation forces and was the university dean. Takikawa, represented in Kurosawa’s film as a hero who stands up against fascism, had been a very inspiring figure for Ōshima, but as a dean he was now the person responsible for quelling the student movement at Kyoto University after the protests against the Emperor in 1951. Ōshima believed that Kurosawa had shown signs of naivety in his portrayal, a contrast with other Kurosawa films such as Rashōmon (1950) and Ikiru (To Live, 1952), whose scepticism, to some degree, set a precedent for modernist Nūberu Bāgu cinema. In Rashōmon there is no omniscient point of view; instead, each character recounts the events from their own point of view. In Ikiru, the main character is dying of cancer and lives out his last days trying to find meaning in his life.8 This critical scepticism and emphasis on experience, which Standish (2011: 50) calls a ‘crisis of truth’, are the very foundations from which Japanese modernist cinema evolved. This crisis can be explained by the

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fact that the majority of the Nūberu Bāgu directors had seen how Japanese society’s moral references had crumbled away. As children, they had been taught that they were servants of the Emperor and they should dedicate their lives to him. When Japan lost the war, the authorities then told them that these values were false; that peace and democracy were the most important ideals. When tensions rose during the Cold War, the very same authorities began to openly act against the democratic and pacifist principles they had been preaching. Meanwhile the JCP, which had epitomized the hopes for progress in Japan, was increasingly proving to be excess baggage. The appearance of the Nūberu Bāgu in the same year as the Anpo protests was a turning point for politically motivated young directors, who began to openly attack a cinema characterized by an obsessive resistance to any recollection of the feudalism and totalitarianism in which Japan had once been immersed. As previously noted, the majority of Japanese who joined the Left during the immediate postwar period were driven by anti-fascist sentiments rather than by any profound understanding of Marxist doctrines (Kelman 2001: 81–82). In contrast, during the mid-1950s the political education of many young Leftists, such as Ōshima, was influenced by a less simplistic Marxism that understood reality as being based on subjective factors and that stressed the alienation of the individual as a modern form of oppression. Ōshima worked from the same premise as that of Masumura and the Taiyōzoku youth cinema: making the individuals’ interactions the departure point for the story. He was not interested in the external social circumstances that might explain or even determine people’s actions, nor was he interested in cause and effect plots, in the unitary personality of the individual or in rational inner reflections, beliefs or hopes. In Sartrean terms, existence took precedence over essence. However, what did constitute a real revolution in the cinema world was the step of combining this anti-humanist modernism with clear political intentions. Until the Shōchiku Nūberu Bāgu appeared on the scene, many modernist works had appeared in the spheres of literature and cinema during the postwar period, but generally speaking they had not gone much beyond nihilism. Ōshima himself acknowledged Masumura’s influence but felt that this director had not managed to fully develop his own subjectivity, because he had turned his initially innovative features into static cult objects without searching for renewal or trying to surpass himself (Mestman 1998: 42). The most political film by Ōshima in his early years as a director was Nihon no Yoru to Kiri (Night and Fog in Japan). Shot in 1960 just after the Anpo treaty was renewed, the struggle against which had left a deep impression on him, the film was a scathing criticism of the JCP’s role

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during this battle, as well as a critique of how the New Left had acted. It did not, however, offer moral solutions or fixed points of view to appease anyone’s conscience. Nihon no Yoru to Kiri was a call for individual responsibility despite the constraints imposed by the group on one’s autonomy; these were constraints imposed as much by the totalitarian regime during the war years as by the political organizations of the democratic era. The film’s title was taken from Alain Resnais’ documentary, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), about Nazi concentration camps, which held Europeans responsible for allowing themselves to be led by the Nazis and for not having prevented such atrocities. Ōshima’s film worked from the same premises, holding the Japanese responsible for having allowed themselves to be led by the establishment and being unable to prevent the renewal of the Anpo. In Nūberu Bāgu, the subject was ultimately responsible for their own reality and therefore it was not appropriate to endow the film’s structure with explanations or exonerations, whether in the form of a collective account, a system of beliefs, an institution or a political organization, and Ōshima also had taken these precepts to heart. The director had already run into problems with the Shōchiku executives when they forced him to use the title Ai to Kibo no Machi (A Town of Love and Hope, 1959) for his first film, the meaning of which contradicted the film’s narrative. In order to avoid interference from Shōchiku, who were unwilling to finance political films, Ōshima filmed Nihon no Yoru to Kiri in just ten days so that the producer would not find out exactly what he was shooting. Displeased with Ōshima’s audacity, Shōchiku withdrew the film from the cinemas four days after it premiered. In protest, Ōshima left the production company some months later and ended up establishing his own concern, as had other avant-garde directors at that time. Breaking with the system of major production companies and creating independent companies were the necessary steps taken in order to develop a truly avant-garde cinema that would allow directors to give voice to an unrestricted subjectivity. By the end of the 1960s, when many of these independent production companies had consolidated, numerous avant-garde directors introduced a more radical subjectivism into their films. This coincided with the New Left protests from 1966 to 1971, a period known as the ‘season of politics’ (seiji no kisetsu, see Furuhata 2013: 1–2). A parallel can be drawn between this cinema’s type of radical subjectivity and that of the New Left. It was precisely in this period that the films that questioned one’s own observations and memory made their appearance, breaking definitively with realism by chaotically and ambiguously intermingling past and present, reality and the imagination, consciousness and subconsciousness and lucidity and onirism. In so doing, this form of the avant-garde refused to

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provide the Japanese with an explanation for historical events or to free them from the destabilizing effects of their collective trauma. While humanist cinema can often be considered inexplicit because it tries to suppress or naturalize all traces of enunciation, in Nūberu Bāgu productions discourse became more and more explicit (Standish 2011), becoming artificial and fragmented, reminding the audience that what they were watching was a filmic construction. It could be said that this modernist cinema, rather than focusing on presenting the events themselves, focused on the perception, and memory, of events (ibid.: 56). Ōshima’s Kōshikei (Death by Hanging, 1968) can be seen as one of the most representative of such Nūberu Bāgu productions. Kōshikei was released during the occupation of the main university campuses by students, who were protesting the Vietnam War, a critical moment for the New Left movement, one in which the awareness of self-negation was at its most mature point. In this sense, the film precisely reflects the mood and spirit of that time, constituting an experimental and lucid reflection upon the subjective perception of reality and memory. Kōshikei not only premiered at this crucial moment, but it also made Ōshima’s name as a director in Europe. The film embodies the characteristics of the Nūberu Bāgu both in terms of content and form as an artistic analogy to the most libertarian ideology of the New Left. The story is based on the Komatsugawa Incident, which began when Ri Chin’u, a young Korean resident (Zainichi) in Japan, made an anonymous phone call to the Yomiuri newspaper offering details about the death of a Japanese schoolgirl who had been raped and murdered a few days previously. The call was recorded, so the police broadcast it on the radio in an attempt to identify the caller, which meant that public opinion became caught up in this case in a very particular way. Ri Chin’u was arrested, tried for the crime, sentenced to death and hanged in 1962. Ōshima based Kōshikei on this event partly because of the intense media debate, involving differing ideological positions, which had incited public opinion. This offered him the opportunity to develop an analytical perspective that questioned collective narratives and contrasted them with a subjective awareness of reality. As in other Nūberu Bāgu films, in Kōshikei Ōshima used sex and crime to explore and develop subjectivity in opposition to humanist cinema, which often included a love story in order to juxtapose the will of the individual against the constraints imposed by society. Influenced by the political movement of the New Left, Ōshima and other Nūberu Bāgu directors did not see romantic love as subversion of dominant ideology but rather as the quintessential bourgeois expression of sexual desire and feelings.

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Sex and crime afforded avant-garde directors such as Ōshima the opportunity to represent individuals who were free from idealizations, in narratives that offered no sentimental empathy with its characters. At the same time, sex and crime were a means to subversively juxtapose the individual with authority and its taboos. One of the New Left’s ideological maxims was that everything that was personal or quotidian was political; thus, Ōshima portrayed sexual pathologies and commonplace crime as manifestations of a rebellious subjectivity that carried a seed of political awareness but that were expressed through deviance due to the individual’s alienation. Kōshikei begins with a direct question appearing on the screen: ‘Are you in favour or against abolishing capital punishment?’ Thus, from the outset it requires the spectator to adopt a reflective position, to actively participate and abandon the role of mere consumer. This question was taken from a poll, the results of which are then shown: ‘16% in favour, 71% against and 13% undecided’. Immediately, the following words appear on the screen: ‘But you, the 71% who are against abolishing capital ­punishment, have you ever seen a hanging?’ Once the audience has been shown these questions, Ōshima as narrator describes the execution chamber in detail and introduces the witnesses who were present when the condemned man was read his last rites as well as those who attended the execution: various members of the prison staff, the Public Prosecutor, his secretary and a priest. The narrator gives a detailed explanation of the final formalities and how capital punishment is carried out. He then stops speaking and the following phrase, written by hand on paper, appears on screen: ‘R’s body refuses to be executed’. This is the title of the first of the seven parts into which Ōshima’s film is divided; such explicit statements throughout the film corrupt any naturalness in the account that unfolds. Through this and other devices, the audience is reminded that they are watching a contrived film that refuses to set itself up as an objective account. Similar to the first part, the second – ‘R does not accept that he is R’ – anticipates the unravelling of a surrealistic situation: the condemned man survives the hanging but has lost his memory. So that they can hang him again, the witnesses are compelled to remind him of who he is and of the crime he has committed. R resembles an empty vessel that each person in the room tries to fill according to their own interpretation of the crime so that he can yet again become aware of having committed it. Referring to him simply as ‘R’ divests the condemned man of any traits that make him a person and reduces him to an object; this is further reinforced by his total lack of facial expressions and mechanical movements, like those of a theatre puppet. However, it is not only R who acts in a theatrical manner

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but also, to one degree or another, all the other characters. Ōshima’s careful staging of this film gives it an air of artificiality, which makes the distinctions between reality and fiction relative. The customs and social roles commonly seen as natural are made to appear strange in the audience’s eyes thus revealing their ideological function. The film attempts to maintain a Brechtian ‘distanciation’ (Turim 1998: 43) between the audience and what they are seeing that does not let them comfortably lose themselves in it. In their attempts to make the condemned man aware of his crime, those witnessing his execution at first limit themselves to reciting the events. These accounts prove inadequate, so they begin to stage the crime as if it were a play. The staging of the crime likewise fails to make the condemned man accept that he is R; therefore, in the next part, entitled ‘R perceives R as another person’, the witnesses go on to describe his origins. They explain that he is Korean (although he does not know what this means); they tell him about the harsh environment in which he grew up and play the role of his family. The pathetic portrait these characters paint of R’s past is based on a stereotypical bourgeois view of poor families. Ōshima, in an attempt to distance himself from this simplified view that goes no further than to turn the condemned man into a victim, has R say, with an air of ironic criticism: ‘I understand. There was this poor Korean boy with this bad family, and so he killed a girl and then was condemned to death.’ Nevertheless, R fails to recognize himself as R and ends up taking part in the theatrical representation of his own story in an attempt to better understand. This leads to the next part, ‘R tries to be R’, and here the scenes are charged with symbolism. The execution chamber has been redecorated to represent the hovel where R lived with his family: the walls are covered with newspapers, and on one of them there is a window through which the Public Prosecutor can be seen, seated at all times like an observer; there is a large Japanese flag behind him with the US flag at its side and, in the background, traditional Korean music can be heard occasionally while the prison staff act out the clichéd roles of R’s family and tell him how to act. All of this represents the bourgeois account of the condemned man’s circumstances, publicized by the media and encouraged by the State; the newspapers that cover the walls represent public opinion shaped by the major media channels, and the window symbolizes supervision by the State. With this stage design, Ōshima appears to convey the idea that the events presented as real are, to a large degree, a contrivance by the powers that be and resemble the way a drama is constructed. This representation of reality as ideological is filmed as a long take interspersed with close ups that frame R, thus conveying his subjective and discordant perception

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of what is being enacted around him. He appears apathetic and isolated from the performance, which is reduced to scenes of family conflicts. At one point, R imagines and acts out a pleasant family walk, but the Education Officer puts an abrupt end to this enactment because it does not fit the official version. In this way, the authorities make continued efforts to turn R into the pre-established model of R and thus erase his subjectivity. Next, the Education Officer calls upon R to leave the hovel so that he can re-enact the crime of which he is accused. From this point onwards, the film becomes more surreal. Each character’s reality and imagination, as well the present and memory, are no longer juxtaposed but become fused. R’s story is no longer represented through an explicitly artificial staging but takes place on the city’s streets. R sets off followed by all the witnesses, although the audience is well aware that such a situation is impossible. R relives the moments just before the murder, with the Education Officer interpreting each and every one of his acts as leading to the crime that he is going to commit, telling him how he should act, although R pays little attention to him. It is worth noting that all this parody of the action as a lineal and causal storyline is not only a criticism of the simplification of the bourgeois view of the events but also of how humanist films narrate events. R, mechanically and disinterestedly, readies himself to re-enact the crime. The Education Officer, who is supervising the action, becomes more immersed in the role of R than R himself and ends up committing the murder, consequently providing a brilliant twist: the authorities’ zeal for the crime to be perpetuated makes them accomplices (Kovacsics 2013: 72). The next part begins: ‘R demonstrates that he is Korean’. This scene returns to the execution chamber, and it seems as though everything is once again within the realm of the real. However, one element has been surreptitiously slipped in from the previous scene: the body of the schoolgirl that they have just murdered is now laid out in an open coffin. Only the Education Officer and R can see her, but they do not see exactly the same corpse. R sees a naked girl with the Japanese flag strewn across her, while the Education Officer simply sees a girl wearing a school uniform. The next person who is able to see the coffin is the priest, for whom the body of the dead girl appears half naked and in a subtly sensual position. Those who are unable to use their imagination do not manage to see the dead body. The fact that everyone imagines things differently, rather than recreating the official version, jeopardizes the execution. At first this infuriates the chief warden; however, shortly afterwards he also manages to see

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the corpse: this time it is covered as if it were the body of a dead soldier, alluding to his past. He then orders the prison staff to get rid of the body, and the Education Officer begs them to keep quiet about the murder he has just committed; thus, the authorities refuse to accept any responsibility for the crime. Meanwhile, the film takes another surrealist twist: the corpse sits up, gets out of the coffin and becomes R’s older sister dressed in traditional Korean dress – a sister he never had. When she speaks to R, the Public Prosecutor’s secretary is now able to see her, as now can almost all the characters. This imaginary sister represents an intersection between the JCP’s perceptions and Korean nationalism. While the bourgeois account attempted to make R fit the stereotypical model of a Zainichi in order to accuse him, Korean nationalists and the JCP use the same clichés in order to exonerate him, arguing that the crime was the direct consequence of Japanese imperialism, racism and poverty. Both discourses try to make the subject R fit into an ideological model of R, negating his subjectivity. The sister tries to convince R that he is R, and at first the prison staff thank her for her help. The explanations she gives to her brother try to construct him as a subject based on nationality. During their conversation, the priest imagines an incestuous relationship between them and describes it to the doctor, who still cannot see the girl. Ironically, the priest is only able to imagine her through his own sinful desire. Suddenly the Public Prosecutor’s secretary describes what he imagines to those who cannot envision her: he quotes what appear to be history textbook explanations about the oppression suffered by Koreans, as if he cannot conceptualize this without the help of an historical account. Nonetheless, the doctor prefers to listen to the priest, whose imagination is based on carnal desire, and he finally manages to see the girl. Possibly Ōshima chose the physician as the last character who manages to imagine her because doctors are scientists who tend to give ‘rational’ explanations for social facts. The sister’s demagogic discourse causes R to distance himself from her, since he cannot manage to feel like R on the basis of listening to the nationalist principles she is spouting. When he refuses to assume the identity of R, his sister disowns him, and she is subsequently hanged by the executioner, since she serves no further purpose for the authorities. After this, the penultimate part begins, ‘R finally becomes R’, in which the witnesses hold a party in the execution chamber after the imaginary sister is hanged. They sit on the floor, eating and drinking, surrounding R and his sister, who surprisingly is not dead, yet no longer seems to be the same person. Both are lying naked on the floor underneath a large Japanese flag. She no longer talks to him from an external and abstract

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standpoint; she is naked, stripped of her traditional Korean dress and speaks from the same position, oppressed by the same piece of cloth bearing the rising sun. Consequently, this time R states: ‘If you are my sister, then I am truly R’. Then, helped by his sister’s mere presence, R forges his own subjectivity. He tells his sister that until he had met her, he had preferred to live in an imaginary world rather than in a dehumanizing reality. This version of R’s sister is presented as more real than the other: we see typical images of her; anecdotes are told that make her more human, and we learn that she went to find him in his hovel to talk to him. To some degree, hanging the older version of the sister symbolizes the death of the JCP, with its links to nationalism, leading to the rise of the New Left, which is represented by the appearance of the new sister, whose activism is based on quotidian, direct action rather than discourse. The final part is ‘R accepts he is R for everyone’s sake’. The condemned man acknowledges he is R but not the same person as the others have been discussing. He does not accept his guilt, as he no longer considers himself to be the same R who committed the crime, nor does he accept the legitimacy of the nation that holds him responsible. However, despite the fact that he does not feel guilty, his new subjectivity means that he does not shirk responsibility for his own deeds: R decides to accept the punishment of his own free will, but in so doing, he refuses to play the sacrificial victim. This decision should be interpreted as an act of rebellion rather than as a form of martyrdom. With his last wilful act, he turns the  common crime he has committed into an act whose consequences lead to political awareness. In the last shot, just before the trapdoor opens, the noose appears but not the body. His disappearance symbolizes that, to some degree, R has prevailed as a subject against the Japanese nation state (Fujiwara 2013). With this image on the screen, we once again hear Ōshima appealing to the audience’s subjective conscience: Thank you so much. You have done a fine job. Education Officer, thank you for taking part in this execution. Executioner, thank you for taking part in this execution. And to you. And to you. And to you. And to you. And to all of you, dear spectators, thank you for taking part in this execution.

Kōshikei offers no clear conclusion beyond that of constantly appealing to the subjectivity of the director as well as that of the characters and the audience, insisting on continual reflection. Consequently, this is a film that denies its existence as a consumer product and sets itself up as a means by which to awaken a revolutionary subjectivity. Seen thus, the movie’s narrative represents and crystallizes on film the ideology of

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the most libertarian of the New Left, whose protagonism and radicalism within the Japanese sociopolitical scene was at its most crucial moment when Kōshikei was first shown. Ferran de Vargas is a PhD candidate in Translation and Intercultural Studies: East Asian Studies as a FI grant holder (AGAUR, Generalitat de Catalunya) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). He graduated in Political Science and holds a master’s degree in the Study of China and Japan. His research focuses on the ideology of cultural productions, particularly in the field of Japan’s cinema. The research that has led to his chapter in this volume has been supported by the Research Group GETCC (R+D Project FFI2014-52989-C2-1-P) and by the Research Group GREGAL (2017 SGR 1596) at the UAB.

Notes This chapter is based on my research entitled La Nūberu Bāgu como Correlato Artístico de la Nueva Izquierda Japonesa at the PhD Programme in Translation and Intercultural Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). My research was supported by the Research Group GETCC (Grup d’Estudi de la Traducció Catalana Contemporània) as a FI grant holder (AGAUR, Generalitat de Catalunya) within the framework of the Research Project FFI201452989-C2-1-P, by the Research Group GREGAL (2017 SGR 1596), and by the Department of Translation and Interpretation and East Asian Studies at the UAB. 1. Nūberu Bāgu is the Japanese pronunciation of the French term Nouvelle Vague. The film production company Shōchiku began to use it to refer to a new form of politics at the time Nouvelle Vague erupted on the scene in France. 2. Although the term feudal is often used to refer to non-modern aspects in Japanese culture after the Meiji Restoration (1868), to some degree it needs to be put into perspective in order to allow for the fact that it refers to what Nygren (2007: 30, 36) terms ‘the adaptive continuation of multiple traditions in Japan in their mythologized unitary form’. 3. Desser (1988: 15–16) divides pre-1970s Japanese films into three broad categories: the classic, typical of the 1930s; the modern, typical of the 1950s; and the modernist, typical of the 1960s. Clearly there were time frames in which these paradigms coexisted. Moreover, this classification, although useful when it comes to a global view of the history of Japanese cinema, is only an abstract model: no film fits neatly into a single category. 4. The Sunagawa Struggle was a protest movement led by the Zengakuren against a US military base’s expansion in the city of Tachikawa, western Tokyo. On this issue and the Tachikawa of today, see Guarné (2018). 5. The term New Left began to be widely used from 1969 onwards (Andrews 2016: 92). 6. In 1952, the year in which Japan formally recovered its sovereignty, a treaty had been signed with the US that obliged Japan to billet US weapons and troops, whose mission was to combat communism in Asia. For the majority of Japanese, this treaty was seen as a violation of national sovereignty and put peace in the region at risk while resurrecting the ghosts of its past military regime. Anpo made provisions for a first renewal in 1960, a year that saw more mass protest in Japan than at any other point in its history.

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7. These filmmakers gradually left Shōchiku to make their own films, and by the end of the 1960s several directors co-produced their works with companies such as Art Theatre Guild (ATG). The films of that late period assumed the most paradigmatic features of what came to be known as Nūberu Bāgu, which should be critically differentiated from Shōchiku Nūberu Bāgu. Dropping the word ‘Shōchiku’ highlights the difference between both stages. 8. See Martinez’s Chapter 1 in this volume.

References Andrews, W. 2016. Dissenting Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture from 1945 to Fukushima. London: Hurst & Company. Buruma, I. 2015 [1994]. Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. London: Atlantic Books. Desser, D. 1988. Eros plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Dower, J.W. 1993. ‘Peace and Democracy in Two Systems’, in A. Gordon (ed.), Postwar Japan as History. California: California University Press, pp. 3–33. Fujiwara, C. 2013. ‘Post-history: Tokyo Senso Sengo Hiwa [The Man Who Left His Will on Film]’, in Q. Casas and A.C. Iriarte (eds), Nagisa Oshima. Estella: Donostia Zinemaldia and Filmoteca Española, pp. 213–25. Furuhata, Y. 2013. Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Guarné, B. 2018. ‘Escaping through Words: Memory and Oblivion in the Japanese Urban Landscape’, in B. Guarné and P. Hansen (eds), Escaping Japan: Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-first Century. London: Routledge, pp. 90–121. Hasegawa, K. 2003. ‘In Search of a New Radical Left: The Rise and Fall of Anpo Bund, 1955–1960’, Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs 3(1): 75–92. Kelman, P.G. 2001. ‘Protesting the National Identity: The Cultures of Protest in 1960s Japan’, PhD dissertation. Sidney: University of Sidney. Kovacsics, V. 2013. ‘First, the Revolution’, in Q. Casas and A.C. Iriarte (eds), Nagisa Oshima. Estella: Donostia Zinemaldia and Filmoteca Española, pp. 67–75. Matsunami, M. 1970. ‘Origins of Zengakuren’, in S.J. Dowsey (ed.), Zengakuren: Japan’s Revolutionary Students. Berkeley: The Ishi Press, pp. 42–74. Mestman, M.E. 1998. ‘Nagisa Oshima: Cine, Vanguardia y Política en torno a 1960’, Secuencias 9: 27–44. Nygren, S. 2007. Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Standish, I. 2011. Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group. Turim, M. 1998. The Films of Oshima Nagisa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Filmography Ai to Kibo no Machi (A Town of Love and Hope), dir. N. Ōshima, Japan, Shōchiku Eiga, 1959 [DVD]. Ikiru (To Live), dir. A. Kurosawa, Japan, Toho Company, 1952 [DVD]. Kōshikei (Death by Hanging), dir. N. Ōshima, Japan, Art Theatre Guild, 1968 [DVD]. Kuchizuke (Kisses), dir. Y. Masumura, Japan, Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1957 [DVD]. Kurutta Kajitsu (Crazed Fruit), dir. K. Nakahira, Japan, The Criterion Collection, 1956 [DVD]. Kyojin to Gangu (Giants and Toys), dir. Y. Masumura, Japan, Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1958 [DVD]. Nihon no Yoru to Kiri (Night and Fog in Japan), dir. N. Ōshima, Japan, Shōchiku Eiga, 1960 [DVD]. Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), dir. A. Resnais, France, A Contracorriente Films, 1955 [DVD]. Rashōmon, dir. A. Kurosawa, Japan, Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1950 [DVD]. Taiyō no Kisetsu (The Season of the Sun), dir. T. Furukawa, Japan, Nikkatsu, 1956 [DVD]. Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi (No Regrets for Our Youth), dir. A. Kurosawa, Japan, Toho Company, 1946 [DVD].

Part II

The Past in the Present

Chapter 4

Recreating Memory?

The Drama Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai and Its Remakes Griseldis Kirsch

War Memory and Japanese Media Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai (I Want to Be a Shellfish), the story of a soldier unfairly tried for war crimes, is one of Japan’s longest running media franchises. First produced as a television drama by the private station KRT (later called TBS)1 in 1958, it borrows motifs from the 1953 essay Kurueru Senpanshikeishū (A Mad War Criminal on a Death Row) by Katō Tetsutarō (2007), himself a pardoned BC (lesser crimes) class war criminal,2 and was turned into a film in 1959. After the original drama, TBS remade it in 1994; and later Nihon TV also jumped on the bandwagon and produced it again in 2007; before the last version, another cinematic adaptation, was released in 2008. In a sense, the material has become a ‘cultural memory’ (Assmann 2006), as it is a narrative that has been handed down the generations without losing relevance. But it is more than that. With new actors and slightly altered storylines, the five manifestations of Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai are also perfect vehicles for analysing how Japan’s mass media and its postwar history have developed in tandem and how the memory of the war has changed within that time. What elements make this narrative so fascinating that it has entered the Japanese collective consciousness to such a large extent? Unlike the original essay, which conveys the thoughts of a man who has been sentenced to death because he did not give prisoners of war medication that he himself might not even have had (Katō 2007), the visual adaptations deal with the life of a barber, drafted into the war and tried for a crime he committed under orders from his superior officers. Therefore, it offers an

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explanation of how so many atrocities, which might seem inconceivable to anyone not involved with the war, could have occurred. It also shows that not all Japanese were ‘bad’ to the core; that ordinary soldiers had somehow slipped into committing crimes because they could not disobey orders. Thus, this material is very relevant when it comes to looking at how Japan has come to understand its actions during the war – and how this coming to terms has been represented in a franchise that stretches over five deades. While the past is always in the present (Gluck 1993), the memory of the Second World War is also highly political, never static and always fitted to the contemporary political situation. The politics of memory are particularly visible in the Japanese case, since the memory of the war remains a contested terrain (Seaton 2007). The Japanese have often been criticized for emphasizing only their victimization. The war that the Japanese fought on the Asian mainland is rarely mentioned in the Japanese context, although it has become more present in recent years (Buruma 1995; Igarashi 2000; Saaler and Schwentker 2008; Seaton 2007). Historical narratives of the war in Japan have focused mainly on the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or on the fighting in the Pacific, without taking into account the Japanese crimes committed during the Second World War – in this respect Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai is significantly different as it does deal with arbitrary killings and how they were dealt with during the war crimes trials. Consequently, if one looks at the popular media, one might expect to see only the least controversial discourses, as both television and film need to attract audiences and thus will seldom be radical (Duncan 1994). Within such a restrictive medium as television, drama is considered to be particularly tame – and tends to shy away from topics that are too contentious. This has not always been the case: in the early days of Japanese television, dramas were often political and confronted Japan’s wartime past head on. The first version of Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai is one such drama. However, the boom of controversial dramas was to be short-lived; in 1961 protests by sponsors, who then practically ruled over private broadcasting stations,3 resulted in one drama never being aired although it had already been produced (Hirahara 1991). That the television station in question had avoided conflict and simply shelved the drama opened Pandora’s box, and more and more critical programmes vanished in the aftermath (ibid.). However, taking a historical perspective, the first version of Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai still is of particular importance because it was broadcast when television was but five years old, and the relationship to politics was not yet as cosy as it became in the later years. The second version was produced directly after the Tsubaki Incident4 of 1993, and we

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might assume that this could have made an impression on the production. The third televised production was broadcast in 2007 to yet another generation – again, we might expect the representation to be different, as the temporal distance from the Second World War had increased. Despite this passing of time and in spite of the focus being on societal issues, the Second World War has not vanished from the small screen. Every now and then, mostly in relation to an anniversary, it is the subject of a drama (Seaton 2007). The second television adaptation of Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai, produced in 1994, shortly before the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, is an example. However, the 2007 version of Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai was not produced for any anniversary, and the material became another film in 2008, making a total of five different productions of the story. With the latter two, the distance from the Tsubaki Incident is also significant enough that they offer scholars the opportunity to ask whether or not the representations have changed and whether they have taken a moral, critical stance. Therefore, looking at a story that deals with war crimes and that has been remade five times in two different media could illuminate significant instances in the appropriation process of this controversial topic over time and lead to the question of whether it is truly correct that television (drama) always goes for the least controversial representation. In contrast to television, cinema is generally considered to be the medium where there is more ‘freedom’ (Richie 2001) in terms of having more artistic leeway. In 1959, when the first adaptation of Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai was produced, Japanese cinema still had a larger audience share than television (Nojiri 1991) and was technically more advanced. Cinema audiences declined with the rise of television, as they did elsewhere, and slowly but gradually the studio system in which ‘big bosses’ dominated what was being produced vanished. Television became the hot spot for stars, and although studio bosses had prohibited their stars from appearing on the small screen at first, they now had to vie for audiences and to look for different sources of income to avert bankruptcy (Richie 2001). With only a few studios surviving each sought their niche, and today hardly a Japanese blockbuster film is produced without the backing of a major TV station. Stars now cross media, but to be a star you have to have made it on TV (Painter 1996). Thus, in contrast to the first cinematic adaptation, the second version of Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai was co-produced with TBS and with stars mainly known through their televised appearances. Rather than just looking at television productions, this chapter will attempt to work out how the material was adapted for the small and big screens, taking into account how the adaptations developed and what implications this may have had for the media as such, but also what it

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may reveal about the social and political situation at the time of production. Katō’s original essay shall not be looked at, as other than the now famous final sentences of the drama – namely that the barber would like to be a shellfish if reborn – the visual versions and the essay bear little resemblance.

The ‘Simple Man’ – Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai, 1958 The drama Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai was the highlight of 1958. Awarded the prestigious Geijutsusai (Art Festival) Prize by the Ministry of Education, it was also technologically innovative, as it was one of the first dramas to use video recording, hence it was a milestone in the increasing quality of this medium (Hirahara 1991). What is it that makes this drama worthy of attention, aside from its artistic value and technical achievement? The story is simple enough. Shimizu Toyomatsu (Sakai Frankie), the main character, is a barber in a small town on the island of Shikoku and a person who would not hurt a fly. Yet there is a war going on, one that for him is distant until he is drafted. During his training, he becomes part of a home defence unit and, as such, is asked to go looking for American pilots who have been shot down to ‘dispose’ (shobun) of them, even though as prisoners of war they are protected by international law. When his unit finds the Americans, Shimizu, who has been the target of his superior’s bullying due to his not very soldierly behaviour, is ordered to stab one of the pilots. Going against his conscience, and coerced by his superior officers, he complies with the order. When the war ends, Shimizu returns to his former life and, like everybody else, happily abuses the military elites that had led them all into trouble. Suddenly, he is arrested for the murder of the pilot and tried as a war criminal. During the trial, in which he struggles to make himself understood and to show how he had been forced to execute the order, Shimizu is vilified by an American judge, who always is shot from a low angle (thus making him overwhelming), from behind a desk (evoking distance and authority), and is convinced that Shimizu wanted to kill the pilot. He doubts that there ever was an order to kill a POW, and, if so, there would be written evidence. Shimizu becomes enraged at this accusation and replies that the judge knows nothing about Japan. In the end, Shimizu is sentenced to death for having followed orders. The execution of his sentence takes him by surprise, as he had relied on the success of an appeal made for him by Yano, the superior officer from whom the order originated. His final words in a letter to his wife are that he wants to be a shellfish if reborn, not a horse or a cow, because these are

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also bullied by humans; no, a shellfish because he then would live at the bottom of the sea without having to worry about war. In the drama, the perspective of an ‘ordinary soldier’ is assumed, making Shimizu the centre of focus and attention. All the officers that appear are somewhat distant, except for Yano, who feels responsible for having issued the order. After Yano’s apology and assurance that he is writing an appeal to get him freed, Shimizu warms to him, and the two start an unlikely friendship. However, Shimizu is also depicted as representative of his generation. Drafted into a war he supported as a citizen, he ends up being made responsible for having acted against his conscience as a soldier. In this respect, the drama can thus be regarded as an apologetic legitimization of Japanese soldiers’ actions during the war but also shifts the blame towards the military elite that made ordinary Japanese do horrible things. Hence, it raises the question of who bears the ultimate responsibility for the war and what the personal guilt of each individual might be, thereby turning Shimizu into a ‘tragic hero’5 who dies for the wrong cause. Shimizu’s final statement is a pacifist one, highlighting how the war had become hated among the immediate postwar generation – and how the Peace Constitution was promoted in the media. Broadcast in 1958, only thirteen years after the war’s end, the drama seemingly hit a nerve with audiences, consisting of people able to sympathize with Shimizu, as they could presumably see themselves in him – and could recall how they had been treated during and after the war. The drama is thus in line with the national discourse on victimization, but Shimizu is doubly victimized: by the Americans for having him stand trial in an unfair way (there is no evidence that he even has a lawyer) and by his superiors, acting as pars pro toto for the Japanese military elite. Examining the trial scenes in particular, and the representation of the Americans throughout, the political message of the drama becomes clear. During the trial, all Japanese are shown in full shot, telling the judge about the order and how they dealt with it. So a superior officer, who takes responsibility for having been vague, and middle-ranking and petty officers, who uneasily answer that they had just ‘passed on’ the order, all appear in turn before Shimizu, who was forced to execute it. Unlike the others, his interrogation is actually shown. All the questions that he is asked are in English – and the translator does not do a very good job,6 as the translations of the judge’s questions, as well as Shimizu’s answers, are badly converted into the respective target language. Shimizu’s wellmeant explanations that any order from a superior officer was like an order from the Emperor and that he did not have a choice are lost on the judge – and in translation. Thus, the trial becomes a farce. This representation is very much in line with how the Tokyo Trials were viewed in 1958,

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as it appeared to be an example of victors’ justice because the Americans did not truly make an effort to understand the plight of ordinary Japanese soldiers, who were caught up in having to execute orders they did not approve of. Behind this, there is also a subtle critique, namely about the fact that the person who was at the centre of it all, the Emperor, did not stand trial. An audience in 1958, remembering the war and with the debates about the role of the Emperor still in their minds, would have been able to read this message. Furthermore, in a second scene set in prison, Shimizu and Yano, the superior officer who gave the order to kill the pilots, discuss the creation of the Keisatsu Yobitai (The Special Police Force created in 1950),7 the predecessor of the Jieitai (Japanese Self-Defence Forces, JSDF). Yano issues a subtle warning, namely that he would want those who had founded the Keisatsu Yobitai to see how military commands might conflict with people’s consciences, especially if they have to be forced to follow them. Although these thoughts are lost on Shimizu, he nonetheless comments that Yano is certain to have a leading position again, subtly criticizing the Keisatsu Yobitai for being nothing more than a successor to the Imperial Army, another discussion at the forefront of the 1958 audience’s minds. In the end, Shimizu is hanged just as rumours about an amnesty fly about, making his demise particularly tragic. In a voice-over, Shimizu reads out the words that he would want to be a shellfish if reborn.

Adapting the Narrative for a Mass Audience – The 1959 Cinematic Version The first version for the big screen was produced just a year later. It is quite clearly more like a copy than a remake, as some actors are cast in the same roles, most notably Sakai, who again plays Shimizu. At that time cinema was technically better than television, so from a purely visual point of view, the film version makes the TV drama look ‘old’ and rather sloppily done. Consequently, as the 1958 drama was fairly successful – and the material valuable and important – the cinematic adaptation was less about competing with the original drama and more about making it available to a larger audience. Nonetheless, there are notable differences in the story and plot. Although most of the dialogue is identical, the trial scene and Shimizu’s time in prison differ considerably. Again, he struggles to make himself understood, but this time he has a lawyer who steps in when the prosecutor’s interrogation goes too far, thereby making the trial look less arbitrary, and a lot fairer. Also, during his time in prison, Shimizu does

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not sit back and wait for the outcome of Yano’s appeal but actively writes appeals himself with the help of his lawyer. He is by no means as passive and submissive as in the 1958 version but very active and very outspoken about being sentenced to death without actually having done anything wrong. These are not the only notable differences between the two versions. While in the TV drama the Americans remain distant and one-dimensional, one of the guards in the cinema version is very friendly towards the prisoners, giving them cigarettes and passing messages between them. In his first talk with Yano, Shimizu actually says that there are ‘kind people among the Americans, too’, a statement that would have been out of place in the televised version because the Americans appear too distant. It could be argued that remaking this material as a film led to a considerably whitewashed version with softer messages. One possible reason for this is certainly that it had to attract as many people as possible – and hence it would not have been a good idea to be too controversial. Turning the messages into something as soft as this shows that at that time cinema was the medium that attracted more people than television, which apparently allowed for more radical representations by the latter.8

Fighting for One’s Life – The 1994 Version of Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai What about the first televised remake? On the cover of the 1995 video tape, the drama is advertised with the catchphrase ‘Sensō no shinjitsu o anata wa shitteimasu ka’ (Do you know the truth about the war?), thus clearly addressing a generation that did not have first-hand knowledge of the war, unlike the audiences of the previous versions. The plots of the 1958 and 1994 dramas are identical, even the dialogue is more or less the same, give or take a few lines. However, there are also striking differences. While the 1958 drama contextualizes the Tokyo war crimes trial – in the first few minutes we see former prime minister and general Tōjō Hideki, among others, being sentenced to death – the 1994 version contextualizes all the war, starting with Japan’s attacks on Shanghai and Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Midway and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Another difference is in the characterization of Shimizu, this time played by the comedian Tokoro Jōji. While in the 1958 drama version Shimizu remains passive, relying on an appeal being made by Yano, Shimizu is again more active and writes to President Truman to explain his situation, similar to the cinematic adaptation of 1959. Consequently, rather than sitting back and waiting for events to unfold, he tries to influence their

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outcome and prevent the execution of his sentence. That it is to no avail makes him also a tragic hero (see also Standish 2000), but it is important to the message of the drama. Again, Shimizu becomes a victim of the military elite in both countries. Additionally, the idea of victimization is further enforced by actually showing the bombing of Hiroshima and other air raids. Together with this, the representation of the Americans also differs notably. In the 1958 televised version they are overwhelming and distant; they tend to treat Shimizu brutally and are indifferent to Japanese culture. In the 1959 movie, they are friendly and helpful, whereas in the 1994 adaptation they are playful but slightly childish characters. In particular, the prison guards are no longer brutal wardens but enjoy having fun, even with their prisoners. Additionally, Shimizu actually learns some English in order to communicate with them, something he did not do in the 1958 version. A lot had happened in between 1958 and 1994. In 1958, TV drama was still a very political genre, but in 1994, TV Asahi had just been punished for meddling too much in politics, and so some of the edge has gone from the original version, such as the harsh stance in representing the Americans. The ‘ugly American’ was no longer part of the contemporary discourse, as after many years of an intense US-Japan relationship it was not possible to depict the Americans as too large a threat. Furthermore, 1990s audiences might have found it difficult to relate to someone as passive as the Shimizu that was portrayed in the 1958 version, since the war drama genre had seen more proactive characters. However, due to the fact that the air raids are shown more often, victimization also becomes more present than in the 1958 version – which shows that this view of the Second World War had become much more prevalent in the decades in between. Shimizu remains doubly the victim of his superiors and the American judges, but another layer is added to that double victimization, namely that all of the Japanese suffered from the air raids carried out by the Americans, thus possibly making the order that Shimizu received easier to understand for the 1990s audiences.

Always the Others – Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai, 2007 The newest televised remake is, strictly speaking, a non-remake. Produced by Nihon TV in 2007, it is the story of Katō Tetsutarō, the author of the essay from which the three previous versions borrowed their title. The reason why it has to be included is that it makes clear allusions to the other versions and it should therefore be seen in line with them. Even the title

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Shinjitsu no Shuki. BC-kyū Senpan Katō Tetsutarō. Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai (A True Record. The BC Class War Criminal Katō Tetsutarō. I Want to Be a Shellfish) puts it in clear line with the two productions by KRT/TBS but promises more than that; namely, to give us a true record of it all, again by borrowing motifs from the essay as well as the preceding dramas/films. Additionally, the phrase Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai is supposed to ring a bell with the audiences, who would expect a story similar to the previous versions, thus at the same time ensuring good ratings. Unlike Shimizu, Katō (played by the Kabuki actor Nakamura Shidō II) is a well-educated man. He gets drafted into the army after working for a trading company in China and becomes part of a platoon that is sent out to find Chinese resistance fighters. When they come across a youngster who can only stammer in Chinese that he is no resistance fighter and innocent, Katō translates it for his superiors. They, however, think Katō has crossed a line and start abusing him. Like Shimizu, Katō is given an illegitimate order – to kill the Chinese civilian – which he refuses to obey. When someone else executes the order, Katō has to be dragged away by other men, as he wants to prevent the execution of the boy by all means possible. From that, we jump onwards to 1944, when Katō has become a commander in a POW camp in Niigata. He treats his American prisoners kindly and tries to support them wherever he can. One day, shortly before the end of the war, one prisoner is shot, possibly while trying to escape – it remains unclear whether it was an accident or done on purpose by one of the guards. As superior officer, Katō takes responsibility for it and goes on the run because he is certain that he will be tried as a war criminal. Reading a newspaper, he learns that his unit has received relatively light punishments, which he takes to mean that the Americans will sentence him to death once they get hold of him. When he is finally arrested, Katō is indeed sentenced to death. There are notable differences in his trial from the fictional adaptations because Katō just remains silent when his verdict is pronounced, knowingly taking on full responsibility for an act that he neither ordered nor approved of. Even though he is fluent in English, he does not defend himself and waits patiently for his execution, sacrificing himself for the wellbeing of his subordinates. In his stead, his younger sister starts to fight for his life. Tirelessly, she compiles a file of statements from the soldiers in the camp in which her brother served and finally brings it to General Douglas MacArthur in order to get her brother’s case reopened. Eventually, Katō’s sentence is changed to lifelong imprisonment, and he is pardoned after the end of the Occupation in 1952. In the final scene, which is set in present-day Japan, Katō’s sister and one of the prisoners in Katō’s camp shake hands over his

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grave, and we learn that Katō has died after a lifetime spent working to promote Japanese-American relations. The trial scene, especially, is depicted very much the same as in the previous versions, and anyone knowing the older versions would immediately recognize it. However, there are also some differences. In the 2007 version, unlike in the previous accounts, it does pay to be active; even General MacArthur is shown as approachable and willing to interfere in order to prevent the execution of an unfair sentence, thus softening the rather harsh messages of the previous versions considerably. It is interesting to see how far the narrative has come. Shimizu has no choice but to execute the order to stab the American and says he would have been shot if he had not; Katō is free to refute an order without facing charges – and even ends up as a commanding officer. The judges in Katō’s trial condemn the one who had ostensibly given the order to shoot the prisoner while letting all his subordinates off the hook. Consequently, the verdict seems fairer and more understandable. In the end, Katō is an honest character without any edges; he is innocent to the last and endures (gaman) until he is released from prison. It is always the others that commit crimes and never the hero, while in the previous versions, the heroes are forced to act against their conscience and thus become ‘tainted’. While Katō’s way of being certainly makes him more approachable for a present-day audience, it is also strongly idealized.9 The role of the Americans also differs decisively. They seem friendlier and open towards the Japanese and are not characterized as a threat. Thus, the two countries seem to be on a more equal standing than in the other versions, with reconciliation and a common future as the possible political messages. Even though this drama is not a ‘remake’ in the strictest sense, many motifs are still shared across the three versions. Yet all of them allow us to see how the memory of the Second World War has changed from being a narrative of ‘guilt’ and ‘responsibility’ to a softened, easily digestible drama in which ‘anything goes’ and the blame lies always with the others.

An Innocent Man – The 2008 Movie The most recent remake of Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai returns to the original TV drama. Produced by Geneon Universal and TBS, it is a clear example that blockbusters rarely are made without a major TV station in the background. Starring the boy band SMAP’s leader Nakai Masahiro alongside Nakama Yukie, both already famous through their appearances on television,10 it shows how much the lines between various media are

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blurring. Furthermore, apart from more panoramic shots, there are hardly any differences from the 1994 television film, even when it comes to the camerawork. Casting Nakai, publicly perceived to be a ladies’ man, already makes Shimizu a different character when compared to the portrayals of Sakai and Tokoro, or even Nakamura, offering the possibility of identification with a star who is a well-known (television) persona to whom people can relate (Horton and Wohl 1956), and also sympathy for the character in this particular situation. Unlike the other versions, Shimizu has a limp and is actually unfit for service. Nonetheless, he is drafted. Furthermore, rather than just remaining at the back and watching, he bravely stands up to his superior’s bullying in order to save his friend Takita11 during military training – only to become the new target for harassment. However, as it turns out, during his training, Shimizu does not quite have the knack when it comes to wielding a bayonet; he always misses the area that he is supposed to stab. Hidaka, the captain in charge of his unit, is much more adept at it and shows him how to do it properly. This leads to a completely different outcome when it comes to the actual stabbing. When Takita and Shimizu are ordered to execute the two Americans who are tied to a cross in front of a Buddhist temple – the scene now looking like a clash of religions – it all seems to parallel the previous versions. Shimizu and Takita are bullied into following the order, but after the trial it turns out that Shimizu – as usual unable to wield the bayonet – had injured the American but did not kill him. The next morning, the American is found stabbed to death but not by Shimizu, hence leaving the audience to assume that it had probably been Hidaka. Thus, Shimizu is completely innocent, not just for having followed the order without wanting to but for not killing the American in the first place, making the miscarriage of justice even worse than in the other versions. The trial scene as such, however, differs only in nuances. Again, the Americans are filmed from below, giving them a slightly threatening appearance, and again, they make fun of Shimizu’s well-meant explanations and condemn him for a crime that he did not even commit. Strangely, there is no further mention of this in the film, and the plot proceeds as in the other examples. He also begins a friendship with Yano, the superior officer who had given the order – but there is no subtle criticism at all. Although it is said that the best thing about the new Constitution is that in it Japan renounces the right of belligerency (markedly, he does not say that Japan should not have an army, the JSDF have probably become too accepted), the criticism that any order leads to moral dilemmas is no longer heard. The scene ends with Yano saying that he would like the public to see that the vast

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majority of the A class war criminals were people like Shimizu – clearly making it more apologetic than the previous versions. Furthermore, when Yano is executed, his last words to his executioners are a criticism of the Americans’ actions during the war, rhetorically asking them whether or not it was also a crime to destroy civilian homes, taking lives by the thousands. To add to this, a firestorm raging in a city and many burnt-out cityscapes are also shown. Compared to this, Yano’s crime (a vague order) and Shimizu’s crime (the supposed killing of one American pilot) seem insignificant. However, the film does not only include an accusation aimed at the Americans, as in the 1959 cinema version, there also is one friendly guard who supports his prisoners wherever he can. When Shimizu is finally executed, the guard can barely conceal his tears. This is probably to show that there are also good and bad people among the Americans; it does not necessarily take away the sharpness of the accusation, nor does it help to minimize the American crimes. Audiences are thus invited to make this comparison; namely, that the Americans have got away with supposedly much greater crimes, whereas they charged the Japanese for supposedly much lesser crimes, possibly evoking the feeling that they are morally unfit to judge. This film thus turns every possible progressive view present in the original version completely upside down – and the narrative has changed from being a drama that subtly critiqued the war to a conservative representation, putting Japan’s victimization at the forefront. Shimizu’s innocence merely adds to that.

Conclusion Comparing the three dramas and two films with each other, it is clear that the narrative has changed a great deal. From a subtly critical, haunting tale of a man forced to act against his conscience, who subsequently is caught up in a miscarriage of justice; via two tragic heroes who do everything in their power to be freed but are hanged nonetheless; to two innocent heroes, one of whom emerges from the war as upright and honest as before while the other has to die. Whether or not this can be read as how Japan has reinterpreted its history in recent years12 may be open to debate. However, what does become clear is that history, or memory, can be a commodity – and that the appropriation of this commodity can change according to the needs of the generation for which the dramas and films are produced, thus mirroring mainstream discourses. For a generation that needed to come to terms with their own actions during the war and whose memory of it was then still fresh, the historical context was not

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so important; what was needed was a drama that helped explain how the atrocities could have happened. For an audience in 1994 that had no idea what war felt like, the producers aimed to create a drama promising its audiences to tell the ‘truth’ about the war but was in line with the then dominant discourse of the Japanese as victims of the war. Finally, for an even more distant generation, it was possible not only to show the killing of Chinese civilians, a much contested memory in Japan that has long been shunned in public discourse, but also soldiers who acted morally; therefore, constructing the image that the war may not have been so bad, as at least some people remained upright, honourable and ‘truly Japanese’. Finally, in making Shimizu an innocent man and in directly comparing the actions of Japanese and American soldiers, it shows that the discourse of victimization is the only one left – and that Japan has gathered enough self-confidence to stand up against anybody claiming differently, at least in the media. Furthermore, the Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai versions also clearly map the shifting images of the Americans in Japan’s postwar period. They range from a portrayal of dominant victors via more human, slightly childish and nihonjinron-influenced characters to one in which audiences can actually feel superior to their US partners. For these audiences, the war does not matter anymore and everything is forgiven. In a way, the friendly guard is a concession to that image, but when it comes to war memories in the final version, it is now Japan that accuses America of not confronting its past. Thus, each drama is firmly located in the political discourse of the time in which it was produced. Fiske (1987) has argued that each member of the audience ‘reads’ the message of the drama that is available to them vis-à-vis their background. Certainly, one could argue that the five different versions seem to go for the least controversial representation – it is just that what constitutes a controversial topic has changed over time. However, there is more to the material in terms of potential for progressive thought. In the first version, television could afford to be radical – and film could not. By 1994, this had changed, and TV had become the more popular medium and hence came under more scrutiny. In 2008, the most apologetic version of all is produced in the seemingly more open medium of film, albeit with the involvement of television. Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai hence also maps the media history of Japan, showing what the dominant discourse was in which medium at which time. Every message carried in the media is open to different interpretations, and, indeed, we do not mean to imply that there is a single audience with a single background. When it comes to the policies of memory regarding the war, one may find considerable differences even within the establishment.

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Consider the differences between Emperor Akihito’s address and Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s speech in the commemoration of the seventy years since the end of the war in 2015. While the first expressed unmistakable deep remorse, the latter resorted to long-winded analogies with the colonial projects of Western powers to rationalize how Japan had every right to pursue such colonial endeavours as well. While public opinion is admittedly an abstraction, the JSDF have earned a widely shared favourable consideration thanks to their performance during national emergencies such as the Hanshin and Tōhoku earthquakes (1995, 2011). Many of the ideas that Abe Shinzō wanted to push during his 2006–7 term as prime minister when he clamoured in the Diet for a Japanese rewriting of the Allied-imposed Constitution, seem more and more feasible – especially when it comes to calling a referendum that might do away with Article 9’s provision that ‘land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained’. On the other hand, polls still show that the Japanese citizenship is quite adamant about protecting the pacifist spirit also enshrined in Article 9: ‘the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes’. Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai reveals, to paraphrase Nietzsche (2009), that history and memory are indeed man-made, always serving the needs of the living and allowing us to forget and remember whatever is needed whenever it is needed. What is crucial in this respect is thus what is remembered and what is forgotten. In the course of the fifty years between the broadcasting of the first and the last version of Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai, the Japanese memory of the war and how these memories are dealt with changed. From an accusation aimed at the Japanese military elite to an accusation concerning the Americans, with the Japanese elites remaining kind and upright, the newest productions seem to follow a need to establish a link with the past to allow younger generations to see what dilemmas their ancestors had faced.13 Again, it highlights that the media do not necessarily represent historical fact (Creeber 2001) rather they can convey a certain ideology (Fiske 1987). In that sense, television becomes a lieu de mémoire (Nora 1989), a site of remembrance, as politically influenced as are other such sites, with its representations always ­recreated to fit the concurrent politics of memory. Griseldis Kirsch is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Japanese Culture at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests include television culture and (self-)censorship as well as war memory in Japan. She is the author of Contemporary Sino-Japanese Relations on Screen: A History,

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1989–2005 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and co-editor of the volume Assembling Japan: Technology, Modernity and Global Culture (Peter Lang, 2015; with Dolores P. Martinez and Merry White). She has also published papers on nationalism and identity in the media in Japan and Europe.

Notes  1. KRT is short for Kabushikigaisha Rajio Tōkyō, Radio Tokyo Corporation. In 1960, KRT was renamed Tokyo Broadcasting Systems, TBS, the name by which it is still known.  2. The Tokyo war crimes trial grouped soldiers by severity of their crimes, with the A class reserved for the highest ranking soldiers and those most implicated in war crimes. The classification BC would hence refer to a war criminal who had committed lesser crimes but still was facing at least an extended prison sentence. On the Tokyo war crimes trial, see Totami (2009).  3. Japanese television operates within a dual system of public and private broadcasting stations. The public broadcasting station Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK for short) is solely financed by licence fees, whereas private television stations have to look for revenue from commercials and sponsorship of programmes.  4. This refers to an event 1993, when the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost the election for the Lower House for the first time since their formation in 1955. The then Prime Minister, Miyazawa Ki’ichi, was over 70 when he stood for re-election. His opponent was the much younger Hosokawa Morihiro who knew what to do when facing a camera. Challenged by the journalists on the popular private station TV Asahi, Miyazawa made promises he could never keep – and did not make a good impression. The journalists Kume Hiroshi and Tahara Sōichirō, known for their outspoken manner, rhetorically asked the audiences whether they truly wanted to be governed by someone like this – and when the LDP lost the election, it was put down to their influence. To make matters worse, Kume and Tahara’s superior, Tsubaki Sadayoshi, admitted during a private meeting that he had given them corporate backing; that he was glad that the influence of television was so great that the outcome of the election had been altered and the LDP had lost power. When this news broke, the LDP threatened to revoke the broadcasting licence of TV Asahi (which coincidentally had been up for renewal), saying that the station had violated the broadcasting laws. Tsubaki apologized and resigned – and TV Asahi got their licence renewed. Without Tsubaki’s statement, Kume’s and Tahara’s outspoken-ness could have been put down to Freedom of Speech; with the statement, it became a problem. This event, commonly known as the Tsubaki hatsugen jiken (Tsubaki Statement Incident), is now firmly in every textbook on Japanese media (see Altman 1996 and Sugiyama 2000).  5. See also Centeno’s Chapter 2 and Treglia’s Chapter 5 in this volume.  6. For audiences in 1958, this would have been evident only for a few people whose English was good enough to understand that the translation and original did not match. However, the Japanese sentences the interpreter uses to convey the questions to Shimizu are short and in very simple Japanese, so it is clear, even without understanding English, that something is going wrong during the interrogation. Likewise, when he translates Shimizu’s answers into English he also only uses short sentences.  7. The Keisatsu Yobitai was legally only a police force but quickly became an armed force and was subsequently renamed the Japanese Self-Defence Forces. The Constitution of 1947 does not permit Japan to have an army, but with the growing threat of communism in Asia it became clear that if Japan was to be a stronghold against communism in Asia,

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 8.  9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

it also had to have an army. The Keisatsu Yobitai were a way around this dilemma, but the constitutional problems remain to this day (see, for example, Frühstück 2007). According to the Internet Movie Database, the film was only released in the US in 1971, so it was not made with foreign audiences in mind, at least not initially (information retrieved 16 December 2012 from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0202919/releaseinfo). In conducting an internet search for Katō, contrasting narratives emerge. English sources describe him as a brutal commander of the camp in Niigata (see Hadley 2012 and NCM 2012), whereas Japanese sources mainly refer to various versions of Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai – except for Wikipedia, where an account of his life can be easily found (http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8A%A0%E8%97%A4%E5%93%B2%E5%A4%AA% E9%83%8E, last accessed 28 July 2018). Setting aside obvious problems with Wikipedia, the introduction to the latest edition of his work (Katō 2007), which was written by his sister Fujiko, portrays him as a kind and selfless person. It is hence impossible to assess to what extent this drama takes the liberty of reinterpreting his life, but it would certainly be in line with how his family would have wanted him to be seen. Nakama has starred in many ‘blockbuster’ TV dramas and her face is well known. Nakai is both the leader of the ‘boy group’ SMAP and hosts many talk shows, but he also has made frequent appearances in dramas himself. In all versions that deal with Shimizu, Takita has always been the other soldier to receive the order to stab the second pilot. His sentence, however, is never alluded to, but since they meet up in Sugamo prison in Tokyo, one can assume it is the same. In this particular situation, however, the superior bullies Takita because he has never carried anything really heavy – then Shimizu interferes, saying that he, as a barber, has also never carried anything heavier than scissors. On this notion see in particular McCormack (2000). The five versions of Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai are not the only examples of this – the 2005 drama Hiroshima Shōwa 20nen 8gatsu 6ka also sports essentially modern characters in front of a historical background and is clearly aimed at getting a younger audience to relate to the Japanese wartime past (see Kirsch 2012).

References Altman, K.K. 1996. ‘Television and Political Turmoil’, in S. Pharr and E. Krauss (eds), Media and Politics in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 165–86. Assmann, J. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Buruma, I. 1995. The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Japan and Germany. London: Vintage. Creeber, G. 2004. Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen. London: British Film Institute. Duncan, B. 1994. ‘American vs. Canadian Television Families’, Mediacy 16(2): 10–11. Fiske, J. 1987. Television Culture. London: Routledge. Frühstück, S. 2007. Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Gluck, C. 1993. ‘The Past in the Present’, in A. Gordon (ed.), Postwar Japan as History. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 64–95.

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Hadley, G. 2012. ‘Niigata POW Camp Pictures and Video’. Retrieved 17 December 2012 from http://www.nuis.ac.jp/~hadley/main/niigata5b.htm. Hirahara, H. 1991. ‘Television Drama in the Thirties of the Shōwa Era (1955–1965)’, in M. Sata and H. Hirahara (eds), A History of Japanese Television Drama: Modern Japan and the Japanese. Tokyo: The Japan Association of Broadcasting Art, pp. 19–71. Horton, D. and R.R. Wohl. 1956. ‘Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction, Observations on Intimacy at a Distance’, Psychiatry 19(3): 215–29. Igarashi, Y. 2000. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Internet Movie Database. 2012. ‘Release Dates for Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai (1959)’. Retrieved 16 December 2012 from http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0202919/releaseinfo. Katō, T. 2007. ‘Kurueru Senpanshikeishū [A Mad War Criminal on a Death Row]’, in Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai: Aru BC kyū Senpan no Sakebi [I Want to Be a Shellfish: The Outcry of a BC Class War Criminal], 3rd ed. Tokyo: Shunjusha. Kirsch, G. 2012. ‘Memory and Myth: The Bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima in German and Japanese TV Drama’, Contemporary Japan 24(1): 51–70. McCormack, G. 2000. ‘The Japanese Movement to “Correct” History’, in L. Hein and M. Selden (eds), Censoring History: Memory and Citizenship in Japan, Germany and the United States. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 53–73. Nietzsche, F. 2009. Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil [sic] der Historie für das Leben [On the Use and Abuse of History for Life]. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam. Nojiri, H. 1991. Medien in Japan: Der Einfluss neuer Medien auf die Entwicklung traditioneller Medien in Japan [Media in Japan: The Influence of New Media on the Development of Traditional Media in Japan]. Berlin: Volker Spiess. Nora, P. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Memory and Counter-Memory (Special Issue) Representations 26: 7–24. NCM (North China Marines). 2012. ‘Niigata’. Retrieved 16 December 2012 from http://www.northchinamarines.com/id52.htm. Painter, A.A. 1996. ‘Japanese Daytime Television, Popular Culture and Ideology’, in J.W. Treat (ed.), Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 197–234. Richie, D. 2001. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History with a Selective Guide to Videos and DVDs. Tokyo: Kodansha. Saaler, S. and W. Schwentker (eds). 2008. The Power of Memory in Modern Japan. Folkestone: Global Oriental. Seaton, P.A. 2007. Japan’s Contested War Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical Consciousness of World War II. London: Routledge. Standish, I. 2000. Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political Reading of the ‘Tragic Hero’. Richmond: Curzon. Sugiyama, M. 2000. ‘Media and Power in Japan’, in J. Curran and M.J. Park (eds), De-Westernizing Media Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 191–201. Totami, Y. 2009. The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Filmography Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai (I Want to Be a Shellfish), Japan, KRT (now TBS), 1958 [DVD]. Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai (I Want to Be a Shellfish), dir. S. Hashimoto, Japan, Toho Company, 1959 [DVD]. Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai (I Want to Be a Shellfish), Japan, TBS, 1994 [VHS]. Shinjitsu no shuki. BC-kyū senpan Katō Tetsutarō. Watashi wa kai ni naritai (A True Record. The BC Class War Criminal Katō Tetsutarō. I Want to Be a Shellfish), Japan, Nihon TV, 2007 [DVD]. Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai (I Want to Be a Shellfish), dir. K. Fukuzawa, Japan, Geneon Universal and TBS, 2008 [DVD].

Chapter 5

From Myth to Cult

Tragic Heroes, Parody and Gender Politics in the 1960s–1970s ‘Bad Girls’ Cinema of Japan Laura Treglia

Within Japanese media productions and postwar genre cinema in particular, gangster films (yakuza eiga), especially the chivalry films (ninkyō eiga), played a key role both in modern myth-making and the reworking of cultural meanings. Amongst these meanings, ideas about the nation state, ‘tradition’, modernity and the West were articulated in chivalry films principally through the ‘tragic hero’ narrative. This myth of a tragic, heroic masculinity is an integral part of the politics of nostalgia at play in ninkyō eiga, which gripped postwar audiences. Moreover, the yakuza hero mythology tended to reproduce specific models of femininity, generally in the form of compliant and self-sacrificing, or innocent and victimized, women. The parodic reworking of the ninkyō canon, couched within the decidedly erotic character of a cycle of programme pictures now known as ‘pinky violence’ films, which were released between the late 1960s and early 1970s, worked to mock and partly deflate this mythic quality and the heroic masculinity it promoted. Bold, hearty women capable of spectacular action are the protagonists in these films, which also display a markedly anti-authoritarian character and use of social satire. This chapter examines the impact of this shift from a gender studies angle. On the one hand, it examines how women are granted a wider scope of action and agency in what is seen as a typically masculine genre, thus breaking with conventional patterns of female characterization and the ideals promoted by chivalry films. On the other hand, such parodic reversals produce an ambivalent effect, which may be ascribable to the sensational nature of the films.

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The definition of parody is slippery and contested, as is the notion of genre. Hutcheon’s approach (2000) to parody is interesting because she reassesses the elements of laughter and subversion while emphasizing the contextual and intentional aspects of parody as a communicative process. She defines it as a repetition with an ironic, critical distance (ibid.: 20) that may also reinforce and renegotiate what is being parodied. Her approach to the concept proves useful for the analysis of the female action films cycle, particularly with respect to the heavily codified formulas upon which studio productions generally relied – especially those referring to yakuza films. Furthermore, Hutcheon’s (2000: 5) emphasis on the decoding ability of the receivers relates to the practices of production, consumption and programming of genre films, including Japanese genre cinema. Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro (2000: 207) has noted that genres satisfy audiences’ demand for a repetition not of sameness but of difference, which resembles Hutcheon’s definition of parody. Harries (2000: 37, 121), moreover, suggests that parody itself denotes a self-reflexive phase in the life cycle of a genre. The structural or ironic inversion which Hutcheon points to as a fundamental characteristic of parody well describes a core characteristic of the films I am discussing. That is, women are portrayed as the protagonists in violent, action-packed scenarios (traditionally masculine contexts), transforming these into highly sexualized spectacles. Thus, this particular cycle of films has a parodic relationship to the canons they cite. This spectacle is markedly erotic and is articulated principally through the amalgamation of different generic codes. Finally, Hutcheon (2000: 26) argues that ‘[parody’s] transgression is always authorized. In imitating, even with critical difference, parody reinforces’. An analysis of selected film sequences will demonstrate that transgression, irony and mockery are indeed central elements in these films – although in some more than others. On the one hand, the mixture of elements may produce an impression of inconsistency, awkwardness and nonsense. On the other, it gives the films a brisk pace that makes their spectacle more entertaining while generating ambivalent implications in terms of gender ideology. In order to make my argument, however, I need to discuss the yakuza film conventions that were being parodied.1

Yakuza Film Conventions, ‘Tragic Heroes’ and the Construction of Gender Roles In his seminal article on the topic, Schrader outlines different phases in the development of yakuza films. According to his periodization, the first

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phase, when the genre’s structuring codes and formulas were established, lasted from 1964 to 1967 (Schrader 1974: 10). The 1960s coincided with its golden era (Schilling 2003: 23), dominated by chivalry films. Tōei Studios was the undisputed leader in the production of yakuza eiga, which almost exclusively constituted its output from about 1965 onwards (Yang 2004: 193–94). Successful films were developed as series and a huge commercial success was achieved with the Abashiri Prison (1965–72), starring Takakura Ken and directed for the most part by Ishii Teruo. A second phase from 1968 to 1971 constituted the pinnacle of the genre’s artistic maturity, made with larger budgets and gaining a wider audience. Theatre of Life: Hishakaku and Kiratsune (1968) is regarded as a masterpiece of the ninkyō subgenre and reunites its ‘triumvirate’ (Schrader 1974: 10) of stars: Tsuruta Kōji, Takakura Ken and Fuji Junko. A shift to the truerecord, or docudrama, yakuza film subgenre (jitsuroku eiga) marked the last phase of this genre’s popularity, starting just before the mid-1970s. Its most representative work can be identified in the saga Battles without Honour and Humanity (1973–76). The jitsuroku eiga, stylistically and thematically different from earlier ninkyō films, were characterized by realistic camera work, outdoor sets and a contemporary setting. Visually, they featured crude scenes of torture and bloodletting. In contrast to period films (jidaigeki eiga), mainly set during the Tokugawa era (1603–1868), ninkyō films are usually set in the Meiji (1868– 1912), Taishō (1912–26) or early Shōwa (1926–89) eras, classically falling between 1915 and 1935 (Schrader 1974: 10). The main characteristics of period films that persist within the yakuza film formula are essentially the following: 1) a struggle between clearly identified good and evil characters/parties; 2) choreographed (sword) fights; 3) violence as the means to solve conflicts as in Westerns; and 4) the star’s character is always sympathetic and moral (Yoshimoto 2000: 229–31). Schrader (1974: 14–15) outlines a series of ‘set-pieces’, which he saw as forming, in various combinations, the ninkyō cinematic formula. This list includes, among others, the gangsters’ ritual greetings and the climactic all-out fight (ibid.). Another central motif that yakuza chivalry films adapted from samuraithemed and other period pictures is the moral conflict between social duty (giri) and humanity (ninjō) faced by the hero. However, Satō Tadao (1982: 50) points out that there is an important difference between the samurai code of ethics (bushidō)2 and the code of honour (ninkyōdō or jingi) that gangsters were portrayed as following in the yakuza films. In the latter, loyalty obligations can be ignored for the sake of a greater good. This worked to keep honour a viable theme in films dealing with outlaws and marked the passage from jidaigeki to early yakuza films. Schrader (1974: 10) acknowledges the mythic stature of ninkyō films, and Standish’s (2000)

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analysis of the ‘tragic hero’ narrative also points to the yakuza film genre’s mythical structure and nostalgia-based appeal of the values it upheld for its target audiences, who were drawn to empathize with the hero’s rebellion. Saitō Ayako (2009: 100) points to the continuities between period and ninkyō films. A chivalry film, she writes, is not just about good yakuza fighting against evil yakuza. Keeping the ‘reward the good, punish the evil’ (kanzen chōaku) moral underpinning that is typical of period films based on samurai ethics, the battle between good and evil overlapped with the ‘lost good old traditional Japan’ versus ‘modernizing Japan’ dichotomy at the same time as the first term of this dichotomy was associated with the chivalrous ethic of giri-ninjō. Revenge and the stoical acceptance of death are common themes, both closely linked to the moral conflict between giri and ninjō. Typically, the ninkyō hero is one of the few old-school yakuza who still follows the way of chivalry, as opposed to some other boss who is involved in a dishonest business, backed by corrupt government or military officials. The hero’s final choice to obey the principles of humanity rather than duty comes with an acceptance of his doom. Prison and/or death are the only possible outcomes of his decision to finally right a great wrong. The outcast heroes populating yakuza films were modelled after folk heroes who were celebrated in Kabuki plays, popular literature and period films from the 1920s through the early 1960s (Kaplan and Dubro 2003; Schilling 2003; Tansman 2001; Thornton 2008). They were portrayed as champions of the poor against the oppression of the upper classes and the government; therefore, these stories conveyed a strong critique of the predicament of the powerless, which could in turn be seen by contemporary audiences as resembling their own postwar circumstances. A typical narrative involves the wandering gambler (nagaremono). This strand of yakuza stories centres on young men setting off on long journeys and roaming across the country as they help women and the weak in general. They are usually separate from any yakuza group, often being ostracized lone wolves (ippiki ōkami) – they are the last keepers of the old values – liminal, living on the margins of both the legitimate and criminal worlds. Morris (1975) has discussed this Japanese fondness for failed heroes. From historical figures raised to mythical status, to the male protagonists of period and, later, yakuza films, all can be seen as articulations of a masculine archetype that embodies tragedy and emphasizes failure, death, vengeance, and paternalism (Thornton 2008: 50–85). Standish’s (2000) analysis of these figures clarifies the ideological functions of this ‘pre-generic plot structure’ and highlights the relevance of the yakuza hero’s masculinity to the sociopolitical position of many young

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and alienated bachelors in the audiences. This narrative form is seen to be based on the Forty-seven Rōnin story (Chūshingura) of revenge and loyalty that has been told in countless versions across the whole media spectrum, thus assuming a legendary status. Standish (2000) points out that this story, and consequently the tragic hero’s tormented figure, is articulated through the two dominant themes of loyalty and rebellion, which can be linked with the issues of duty and humanity described above. The yakuza hero, especially as construed in the ninkyō films, expresses an ideal of manliness that blends death, beauty and purity of intent. He is stubborn, untamed, respectful of honour and humanity, stoic and able to endure extreme levels of pain as well as psychological pressure. In the jitsuroku eiga, as Standish argues, a ‘crisis of patriarchy’ (2000: 184) leads to a shift in the meaning of the hero’s death, which becomes pointless, as he fails to restore order. Thus, postwar anomie is symbolically rendered within yakuza films through the disappearance of the good leader (oyabun) figure and, therefore, of all the traditional values he represents. The values upheld by the hero, with which the spectators are invited to sympathize, are inspired by a conservative, Confucian-derived value system. In these films, an idealized and nostalgic construction of the past centred on a mutually supportive male collectivity that is organized around the master-follower (oyabun-kobun) principle is structured in opposition to a foreign-influenced, profit-driven present in which iniquitous men succeed (ibid.: 181). The battle that is allegorized in these 1960s yakuza films, as Standish (ibid.: 167) explains, is actually ‘not … between the “good” and “bad” per se, but between competing organisations or factions which are cast in either “good” or “bad” roles depending on their commitments to tradition’. Violence is the symbolic solution to this social conflict, although it ultimately suggests an accommodation to change symbolized by the hero’s tragic fate. These tragic heroes are similar to the star-crossed protagonists of the successive iterations of I Want to Be a Shellfish analysed by Kirsch in Chapter 4. They are also trapped in the clash of opposing forces: tradition, loyalty and personal convictions vis-à-vis foreign interference and demands associated with crass modernity. There is also a romanticisation of the outcome, of which the protagonists are victims but also the winners of a moral victory earned on ethical and cultural codes. These preferred readings also redeem defeat and make any social punishment a badge of honour and, in yakuza films, valour – since the result of the protagonist’s violent resolution is mostly predictable but he chooses to embrace the most honourable course of action nonetheless. The number of yakuza eiga productions released in the 1960s and 1970s points to consumption trends veering towards individual betterment

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rather than shared aspirations for political change.3 In this era, the economic miracle was being consolidated and the postwar era’s family model became widespread. However, in this configuration, the father was the breadwinner but not a figure of real authority, either at home or the office. Consuming narratives of tragic heroes who took destiny in their own hands, who willingly made sacrifices and whose violent actions were perceived to be legitimate became a cathartic activity. Male audiences could enjoy the screenings in a place removed both from work and home: the cinema. The intimacy of the site overlapped with the familiarity of the genre topoi. In yakuza films, the hero’s shyness with women leads to an unconsummated heterosexual romance. As Mellen (1976: 126) notes, these films revolve around men’s homosocial relationships and the principles they ideally call upon are male-centred and essentially patriarchal. Women, on the other hand, generally play supporting roles, which Saitō (2009: 93) defines as ‘appendages’ (soemono), a term that aptly conveys the idea of something supplementary and ornamental. The gender ideology of ninkyō films hinges upon the ideal combination of the stoic and chaste hero, keeping to yakuza etiquette, and a woman (usually a geisha or the good boss’ daughter) who falls in love with him. As Anderson (1973: 12) puts it, she ‘understands [the Japanese hero’s] actions all too well’– that is, in order to be his ideal counterpart she needs to endure the suffering that results from her man’s choices and to abnegate her own desires. Her forbearance and self-sacrifice match the hero’s essential attributes. However, while in his case they reflect a mythical, monumental light, the female character’s containment and anguish evoke a melodramatic form of femininity that is fundamentally helpless and pitiable. Adding to the tragic quality of the hero’s circumstances, even heightening it, her characterization complements the hero’s epic representation – through her despair the hero’s own stoicism and nobility are reflected and magnified. Ultimately, these ‘appendages’ are not just supplementary but fully functional in the reproduction of ninkyō eiga’s typically gendered heroism.

Japanese ‘Bad Girls’ Cinema: Female Yakuza and Other Outlaw Women Between the late 1960s and early 1970s a more aggressive and sensual kind of women appeared on the screen of cinemas, although they featured mainly in B movies – at least among the studio productions. Many of the psychological and iconographic traits distinguishing these figures can be traced back to folktales and Japanese plays about avenging female ghosts

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(onryō) and to specific female antagonists appearing in prewar modern theatre and silent jidaigeki films such as the poisonous women (dokufu) of Meiji-period stories, later reworked along the Western-style temptress (yōfu) model (Barrett 1989; Shimura 2005). Motomura Toshihiro (2008: 404) cites a few other prewar films featuring female gangsters, including Dragnet Girl (1933), underlining how these characters were ‘worlds apart’ from those who appeared on the scene during the 1960s and 1970s. Other predecessors of the ‘pinky’4 violence heroines can be found in the sensational, low-budget pictures produced by Shintōhō studio under Ōkura Mitsugu’s presidency (1955–61). Like the series Queen Bee (1958–61), these films featured studio starlets such as Mihara Yōko playing tough women who inherit a yakuza group’s leadership – a theme later employed in female chivalry films. Other films more forcefully exploited the actresses’ curvy figures by having them play nightclub dancers or pearl divers, shot in skimpy outfits. Titles alluded to suggestive, noirish scenarios, but the films were only lowbrow entertainment providing mild erotic titillation. In the 1960s the number of films starring women as yakuza leaders and gamblers increased; the best-known examples being directed by ninkyō eiga specialists such as Makino Masahiro and Katō Tai. The two undisputed queens of the genre were Enami Kyōko, based at Daiei Studios, and Fuji Junko at Tōei. In particular, Fuji’s performance as ‘Oryū, the Red Peony’ in the Red Peony Gambler series (1968–72) established her as an icon. However, she also played secondary roles in chivalry films where the main character was always one of the male stars of the genre; in these she frequently played a geisha who supports her man. In this way, Fuji had come to embody the pure-hearted, gentle Japanese girl typical of ninkyō eiga female characters, a legacy that proved hard to shake off (Saitō 2009: 92). This image curbed any potential development of Oryū’s character beyond the strictures of chivalry films’ traditional heroism. Thus, while the Red Peony series did open a Pandora’s box in terms of affecting the genre formula and its gender politics (Saitō 2009), inaugurating a new wave of action women that was to develop in different ways, Oryū’s character worked within and for the patriarchal economy of the ninkyō eiga (Saitō 2009; Standish 2005; Yamane 2008). However, films featuring female yakuza are part of a heterogeneous group of studio productions that sprang up between the 1960s and early 1970s, featuring various types of violent women. These included not just swordswomen in period settings but also female gang leaders (sukeban), bikers, juvenile delinquents and former convicts. These figures were a departure from the more established stoic and idealized women, leaning towards the more streetwise, less pure-hearted and more scantily dressed tough girls of Tōei erotic-action, or Nikkatsu ‘new

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action’, films. This genre, especially the pictures that Tōei turned out in great numbers as part of their erotic (kōshoku rosen) and delinquent youth programme films, is now informally known as ‘pinky violence’ (pinkī baiorensu). This phrase, coined in Japan during the 1990s (Mana 2009), refers to B movies that were usually shown on double bills with yakuza films. They mixed violent action with adult content in an effort to replicate the success of the independent soft-core pornography film productions (pinku eiga) in the 1960s. The most popular actresses in pinky violence pictures were Ōshida Reiko, Ike Reiko and Sugimoto Miki (frequently cast together as foes/friends in the sukeban films), and Kaji Meiko, who starred in the series Stray Cat Rock (1970–71), Lady Snowblood (1973–74) and Female Prisoner Scorpion (1972–73).5 Pinky violence films feature figures on the fringe of society (pickpockets, hookers, teenage runaways and delinquents) while including at least one subplot involving corrupt institutional figures and violent mobsters. Erotic and sometimes humorous overtones accompany a restaging of chivalry films’ motifs – the revenge theme; the self-introduction scenes; the gambling game, or some other challenge, scene; and brawls and punitive incursions. Noticeably, this time, women gamblers, prostitutes or schoolgirls’ gangs lead the action. Many films in this group tend to mix a variety of codes that makes it difficult to position them squarely within well-defined genres. Elements from gangster, noir, detective, horror and erotic films are often blended in a sort of a generic hodgepodge. Yet, most of the films have a formulaic quality, deriving from a reoccurring pattern. This structure consists of an initial injustice/trauma at the hands of the antagonists; the sexual abuse or violent death of someone close to the protagonist and the resulting plan for revenge; the pursuit of the perpetrators; the formation of alliances with other persons or groups; duels between two female leaders; scenes of sadistic torture inflicted on women; soft-core elements or undressing scenes; and a final gory showdown where women exact their revenge without being killed. Especially in the films strongly evoking gangster films’ conventions, the chivalrous imagery (male and female) is ‘sullied’, melodrama is reduced and tragic pathos quickly overcome by the fast-pace action and brutal violence, which resembles the new jitsuroku yakuza films’ style. Stoic heroes are replaced by femmes fatales, sensual women who emphasize the erotic dimension of the film. Young male actors usually play supporting roles as their allies, losing their chivalry-style epic characterization for a funnier, more sardonic stance. Especially in non-period works, they play easy-going fellows sporting trendy Westernized looks, who occasionally show their weaknesses. In period films, these men

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are represented as rebellious figures, sometimes in an overtly political, anarchic fashion.

Erotic Parodies On a narrative level, the revenge theme allows for another structural inversion through which women metamorphose from victims to perpetrators, although this affects their representation in an ambivalent manner. The deflation of older canons of heroism, to a certain extent, is achieved at the expense of women’s representation. Sexist and misogynist discourses are indeed rearticulated through the reproduction of feminine stereotypes and via visual exploitation. As Hutcheon (2000: 14) says, parody may be used ‘as much to resacralize as to desacralize’. The narrative and spectacular action that focused on male ninkyō loners is shifted onto women. The moral leitmotif of protecting the weak and crushing the wicked still drives the narrative; however, what actually prompts women’s violent revenge is a grudge originating in a personal trauma or loss. Not infrequently, a rape-revenge pattern is woven into the traditional kanzen chōaku story. As in the Red Peony, the protagonists are able to take care of themselves by seizing the initiative and fighting back. However, if chivalry film heroines worked within and supported a patriarchal, familial and sexist economy of values, the pinky violence film heroine is coded as a clever young woman, although she is unscrupulous and unattached to corporative interests. Allusions to the cinematic chivalric lexicon and syntax are more evident in the female delinquent cycle of pinky violence films. For example, the jail trope (as the place where loyalty bonds are formed) is recontextualized within reform schools, where the girls band together against the institutions’ disciplinary systems and mission to re-educate them in line with socially appropriate canons of femininity. The Abashiri Prison series and other Takakura Ken films are often quoted, both visually (as in the Delinquent Girl Boss series, 1970–71) and in the girls’ dialogues (Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom, 1973). The solitary wandering gambler’s theme (nagaremono) is evoked, especially in comic re-enactments of the self-introduction ritual at the encounter between two rival girl gang leaders: here the heroine may boast about having wandered from school to school (Sugimoto in Lynch Law). Pinky violence female characters do not comply with the rigidly gendered ideology that relegates women to complementary and reproductive tasks. Nor are they interested in preserving their virtue for its own sake (Washitani 2009). Sexual agency is a crucial factor in the parodic and erotic

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recasting of heroic masculinity and action in this cycle of films, although the commercial value of this must be recognized. If the chivalric heroes remained untainted by sexual desire, their female counterparts in this sensational line of films are not just objects but also subjects of desire. Knowing how men are easily bewitched by their charms, they trick them into helping them out of a tight spot, or to achieve another goal. While this might represent a positive development in terms of agency, due to the nature of these pictures, women (and the actresses themselves) tend to be reduced to their bodies. The films starring Ike Reiko as the female lone-wolf gambler Ochō, Tale of a Bad Lady Boss: Inoshika Ochō (1973) and Tale of a Stray Lady Boss: General Lynching (1973), both foreground the idea that a woman’s most powerful resource is her own body. Thus, unlike earlier female chivalry films, there is an overt eroticization that is often given either a comedic or violent connotation. Nonetheless, women respond favourably to flirtation only when emotionally involved or in order to control the situation to their own advantage. In a scene from Tale of a Stray Lady Boss, Ochō channels the audience’s gaze and desire. A reverse angle shot shows her peeking from behind the curtains of a seedy inn, watching couples lying in bed. In line with the ambience of the film, Ochō jokingly comments on the women but also on her own desire, saying: ‘Give me a break, I am single!’ Ochō’s earthy language, disenchantment and general brazenness set her light years apart from an always composed and bashful heroine. Conversely, men’s bodies, their sexual ability and lechery become the target of biting sarcasm and ridicule. Men’s sexual anticipation is often stymied, even punished, and such scenes become comic interludes. In fact, women react violently to unwelcome sexual proffers and objectification. The male gaze (Mulvey 1989) is frequently blocked, thwarted or defiantly returned with the promise of violent retaliation (Treglia 2018a: 145–6). This is the case, for example, in a voyeuristic sequence from Tale of a Bad Lady Boss. Ochō is initially filmed from behind, while bathing. As soon as she realizes that somebody is spying on her, Ochō throws her Japanese ­playing cards as if they were knives and blinds one man. Instead of evolving into a torture session or comedy sketch, the scene escalates into a one-againstall fight (tachimawari), with Ochō swirling and slashing around  – still undressed. Violence is eroticized, carnage mixed with nudity. Ochō’s fixing her eyes on the source of the gaze is significant, as this occurs in other films of this type. In Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972), for example, the prisoner nicknamed Sasori (scorpion), played by Kaji Meiko, gouges out a sadistic warden’s eye. In what has become an iconic trait of Kaji’s powerful performance in the series, she is frequently shot glaring straight into the camera. Sasori’s visual breaking of the fourth

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wall also could be likened to her sighting down a rifle’s barrel, preparing to shoot. Schubart (2007: 112) compares the frequent close-ups of Kaji’s eyes to a sort of counter-camera: ‘In feminist film theory the gaze belongs to men … However, Matsu returns this male gaze with her black eyes wide open.’ Frequently, Sasori’s hair hangs over her face leaving only one eye visible. Also, she usually dresses in jail tunics or a trench coat with a witch-like hat. Such images recall the iconography of Japanese vengeful ghosts and other one-eyed monsters (yōkai) of folk tradition, which are also found in later horror films such as Ringu (1998) – a point to which I shall return. To give another example of the parodic recasting of ninkyō staple genre situations and moods into erotic scenarios, I consider another scene from Tale of a Stray Lady Boss. Ochō is trying to infiltrate the Ōgi clan to investigate their shady drug business. She asks boss Gōda (Endō Tatsuo) to let her become a partner in a ring that uses women as drug mules. Here is the dialogue from the scene: Gōda: If you were a man, I would enter into an honest (lit. naked) relationship with you. [Omē-san otoko naraba, hadaka to hadaka no tsukiai [wo]shitekureta.] Ochō: Boss, even if we are man and woman, we can still have an ‘honest’ relationship. [Oyabun-san, otoko to onna demo, hadaka no tsukiai wa dekiru deshō …]

The expression hadaka no tsukiai normally refers to an open, frank relationship between peers; in the context of yakuza films it may well allude to gangsters’ ‘brotherhood’ bonds. However, this brief and ironic exchange transforms it into a double entendre, playing on hadaka meaning ‘naked’, which in turn suggests a sexual encounter, and thus taints the reference to male bonding (extolled in yakuza films as noble and pure) with a (hetero-) sexual innuendo. Simultaneously, women’s erotic charm is depicted as dangerous and potentially ‘defiling’ to men. This play on words is reused when Ochō forms a truce with her former adversary, lady boss Hanten no Baba (Negishi Akemi). This scene links the classic ninkyō theme of avenging the death of the good boss to the goal of liberating women from the yoke of evil men. Ochō recites an oath using the same ‘naked relationship’ phrase, this time to indicate women’s solidarity against their common (male) foes in an underworld war of the sexes. The literal sense and sexual allusion of the word naked is visually rendered, nonetheless, as a long shot shows Ochō and lady boss Baba facing each other fully clothed while all the other girls line up around them with their breasts exposed.6 While the use of this expression does contribute to the overall erotic parody of classic ninkyō film situations, it also keeps validating the sexist

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and essentialist gender ideology in which a truly egalitarian and sincere relationship can only be established among men. In this film, wicked powerful men are ridiculed and ultimately defeated. Yet, this goal is achieved through the sexualization of women’s bodies, while solidarity among female outcasts and their engagement in violent retaliation is still treated as hilarious. In a long soft-core sequence that follows Ochō’s proposal to Gōda, Ike’s body is visually segmented and fetishized for the audience’s pleasure. This pleasure/desire is mediated by the boss’ underlings, who watch the couple’s erotic games through a translucent paper screen. At the same time, in a manner equivalent to the examples mentioned above, where the male gaze is rejected and punished, male sexual power is mocked. After the elderly Gōda boasts about his performance to Ochō (How was it, my technique?/Dō datta, ore no gijutsu wa …), the camera cuts to her face, in medium close-up, looking down on him from behind. Sneering, she mutters to the camera: ‘It was just theatre, idiot!’ (Shibai da yo. Baka!). Her goal is noble – gathering information on the late boss’ daughter’s whereabouts  – however, this scene reinforces sexist stereotypes that depict women as cunning and deceiving.

Grotesque Bodies and Terrifying Visions In pinky violence films, striving for justice coexists with the erotic spectacle of sexy protagonists. These unruly figures are incompatible with the notion of masculine heroism developed in yakuza eiga, with their idealized women. On the one hand, the hybrid character of this genre, where gangster films’ elements are mixed with soft-core, horror and comic codes, facilitates the processes of parodic reversal. As I have shown, these parodies may have subversive effects on the genre conventions to which they refer, as in the case of chivalry films. On the other hand, the very same coalescence of generic codes helps to disguise the reproduction of old gender stereotypes under a garish new formula of sassiness and ‘coolness’. Being independent and taking the initiative (sexual or violent) is coded as weird or comic at best, indecent and unwomanly, even scary and demoniac. As discussed above, the theme of the deceived woman whose suffering is caused by a man and her subsequent quest for revenge revives a centuries-old archetype of vengeful female ghosts and she-devils deriving from indigenous folklore, which has inspired theatrical productions and horror films over time. In Tale of a Stray Lady Boss, for example, Ochō and Yoshimi are not regarded as women by men unless they show themselves

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to be sexually available. For example, Jōji (Uchida Ryōhei), the man who is searching for the late boss’ daughter out of loyalty to the clan to which he once belonged, makes a pass at Yoshimi. When she rejects him and draws a blade, he gives up saying that she is not a woman and that he is no longer attracted to her. In contrast, when Gōda thinks he has finally won Ochō over, he is overjoyed and declares: ‘So you are a woman, after all!’ (Omē mo yappari onna da). Such scenes further underline the sexist reduction of women to their bodies; biological sex and heterosexuality work as essential ‘proofs’ of their womanhood in cases where their gender is obviously confusing. Washitani Hana (2009) notes that these action women are scary rather than heroic, an impression further conveyed through their iconography in these films. In many of the erotic and grotesque (ero-guro) exploitation films made by Ishii Teruo for Tōei, for example, women’s tortured bodies are aestheticized and the visuals of their naked bodies splattered with blood are far closer to contemporary horror films than to the mannerisms typical of chivalry films. The final battle scenes in Tale of a Stray Lady Boss, or in Lady Snowblood, exhibit such aesthetic choices, which are also noticeable in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol.1 (2003). The shots of a woman fighting with fake claws in the first one, for example, can be considered a visual reference to the monster-cat women of older ghost films (kaibyō eiga). Lady Snowblood, together with the Sasori series, is perhaps one of the best examples of Japanese cinema epitomizing Creed’s (1993) notion of the ‘monstrousfeminine’ and its terrifying and abject iconography. Consider Yuki, or Lady Snowblood, who is a trained assassin, conceived by her mother in order to avenge herself against her husband and son’s killers – she is quite literally the daughter of a grudge. In the film, she cold-bloodedly proceeds to kill each of her family’s murderers. Her fury is demoniac; she appears to be endowed with almost superhuman powers. Yuki confronts hordes of men by herself and even slashes through the hanged corpse of a woman, enraged that she did not kill her. On other occasions, she does not hesitate to desecrate the grave of one of her father’s killers nor to run through her own lover’s body to kill her last foe, who is hiding behind him. The finale, showing that the heroine survives, represents a haunting promise. This scene calls to mind an earlier Tōei release, Female Demon Ohyaku (1968), which ends in a similarly threatening manner. After having successfully wreaked her bloody revenge, Ohyaku (Miyazono Junko) escapes on horseback; the last shot is of her in close-up, eyes front and saying to herself: ‘I will never be defeated … I will go forward’.

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Tragic Heroes: Demise or Disguise? Beginning in the mid-1950s, the major Japanese studios scouted and groomed young stars, who came to embody new forms of action masculinity. Nikkatsu, for example, established its hardboiled action/crime line featuring heartthrobs such as Ishihara Yūjiro and Kobayashi Akira. Between the 1960s and early 1970s, Tōei progressively switched from its icons of chivalry and stoicism, personified by Tsuruta Kōji and Takakura Ken, to tormented and difficult types in the passage to docudrama yakuza films. In accordance with the new realistic approach of these films, the period setting of earlier chivalry films was set aside together with their ‘mythological baggage’ (Schilling 2003: 14). As the title of Battles without Honour and Humanity hints, these new gangster films cast a disenchanted eye over the postwar gang wars, as well as on the cruellest and most infamous aspects of the criminal underworld and its inhabitants. Consequently, the moral codes of chivalry films were discarded, while the implosion of the once-celebrated bonds of loyalty was highlighted. In Schilling’s words: ‘A new hero appeared, whose loyalty was conditional and who lived for himself … the hero was no longer a romantic lone wolf but a self-destructive loner in rebellion against the human race’ (ibid.). As mentioned above, pinky violence film protagonists’ male allies exchange, in non-period movies, their traditional Japanese garb, katana swords and tattoos for 1970s Western fashions (leather jackets, sunglasses, long hair and sideburns). In some cases, they are spurned by women, as is Jōji in Tale of a Stray Lady Boss, or feminized and subjected to comic treatment. Nevertheless, in-group loyalty, brotherhood bonds and familial ties continue to be referenced, although in the form of nostalgic longing.7 In other films, the tragic hero image coincides with that of rebellious figures. In the second instalment of Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance (1974), Yuki sides with an anarchist, Ransui (Jūzō Itami), against corrupt officials of the Meiji government. The scenes shot in Ransui’s room feature a portrait and the books of prominent Russian anarchists such as Bakunin and Kropotkin. In Tale of a Bad Lady Boss, set at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ochō’s desire for revenge against the corrupt villainsturned-politicians is shared by Hiiragi Shunsuke (Naruse Masataka), a political dissident whose characterization evokes the real-life Meiji period socialist and anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui. In ninkyō period films, the good yakuza gangs usually fight with exploited labourers against early industrial capitalists, who are frequently depicted as colluding with predatory politicians, officials of the establishment or the military and yakuza gangs,

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all of whom are portrayed as having been corrupted by a Westernized lifestyle and a modern notion of progress. The bent for anti-establishment, anarchic subtexts was already present in late 1920s period dramas and mass literature (Satō 1982; Yoshimoto 2000). This inclination is maintained and amplified in the sukeban or woman gambler sub-cycles, where female outlaws and their male allies are pitched against law enforcement figures such as policemen, corrupt politicians, representatives of educational institutions and their ‘bad yakuza’ sidekicks. Audiences could connect this recurring fantasy of heroes struggling against an overwhelming and authoritarian power to the social rifts brought about by postwar high-growth economic policies and to the counterculture movements emerging in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s (Treglia 2018a: 156–58; 2018b: 57–58). Schrader (1974) argues that yakuza heroes’ ethos appealed to both left- and right-wing activists of the time. While keeping the antisocial, justice-seeking theme, some female delinquent films include a sociopolitical criticism that acts as a counterpoint to the general sleaze. At least two films, for example, reference the students’ clashes with the police and critique the atrocities committed by Japanese troops in Asia during the Second World War. The grand finale of Lynch Law is a full-scale standoff between the police and the female students of a school rebelling against the staff’s hypocritical morality. In Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972), male tourists on board a Tōa tours bus (evoking Japan’s wartime imperialism in East Asia) recall and nastily boast about the sexual abuse of women in Manchuria. Later, they assault and kill one of the female convicts on the run with Sasori and her fellow runaways, but their crimes finally catch up with them when she and the others violently punish them and requisition the bus in order to escape.

Conclusion: Revolutionizing Canons, Restoring Norms In this chapter I have shown how, on the one hand, the erotic parodies of male action canons in outlaw women films explode the myth of ninkyōdō and the place it assigned to women in chivalry films. On the other hand, however, it cannot be denied that this is done via the cinematic exploitation of the female characters themselves and the reproduction of sexist stereotypes. The restaging of traditional yakuza films’ visual and narrative elements by featuring impudent, sexy heroines who adopt unusual fighting techniques and weaponry (cards, hairpins, their own bodies) debunks the sacred aura of chivalric motifs and reduces them to comedy. At the same time, the figure of an independent, non-compliant, sexually active

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woman is clearly portrayed as a potentially uncontrollable, feral force, which echoes (also iconographically) terrifying archetypes from the past. As Hutcheon argues, parodic re-enactments need not end by being subversive and mocking. Parody also leaves space for a renegotiation of the ideal being parodied: masculine templates of heroism never really disappear; rather, they mutate into updated and more appealing configurations. Loosely taking up an old tradition of social realism that goes back in Japanese cinema to the 1920s, these films contain several references to the hardships and exploitation of society’s underdogs, especially women. Depending on the particular film being examined, this issue may be treated critically or represented as natural. If the violent outbursts by yakuza films’ doomed heroes constituted a cathartic climax and a powerful fantasy of social redemption, pinky violence films deflate these films’ nostalgic pathos and accentuate their anarchic tendencies, while the kanzen chōaku narrative blurs into a rape-revenge trope and tragic heroes become undefeated avenging women. Although legitimizing their temporary empowerment, the cinematic rendition of women in pinky violence films has some ambivalent implications in terms of their representation. Gender, sex and sexuality are often conflated in an essentialist way, thus favouring the reproduction of clichés such as women and their bodies as treacherous, men’s inability to cope with their own impulses and a subdivision of women in accord with moral standards. Moreover, women’s violent rebellion against their victimization still allows for cinematic techniques that invoke laughter, fetishization or visual abjection. Laura Treglia is a researcher in gender studies, with a focus on Japanese cinema and culture. She holds an MA in Japanese Studies and a PhD in Gender Studies (both from SOAS, University of London) and has lectured at the University of Chester (UK) and HBKU (Doha, Qatar). Her research interests include feminist film and media theory; Japanese films, society and popular culture; and genre and cult cinemas. She has contributed book chapters to volumes published by the University of Chester Press and Wiley-Blackwell, and she has published an article in the Film Studies journal.

Notes 1. For more context on women in yakuza and gangster films, see Treglia (2018c: 377–394). 2. Translated as ‘the way of the warriors’, bushidō refers to an unwritten code of practical and spiritual conduct that ideally informed the lives of medieval Japanese warriors

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(bushi), who held political power from the Kamakura (1185–1333) until the end of the Tokugawa era (1603–1868). It was comprised of practical and moral precepts that drew elements both from Zen Buddhism and neo-Confucianism. By 1972 the Left thus had lost hold of many of its most evocative peace issues, see de Vargas’ Chapter 3 in this volume. Pink films (pinku eiga) is the Japanese term for films featuring nudity and sexual content. Kaji’s body was not revealed in these films, however. She left Nikkatsu when the studio reconverted its main production line to romanporuno, and was invited to join Tōei as Fuji’s heir (Mana 2009: 182). In fact, the role of sexual object is often played by the secondary female characters. There is, nonetheless, a mild eroticization of her characters, although this is not frequent and is less relevant than action as a spectacular element. Mana Yaeko (2009: 182) notes that a sort of hierarchy is recreated in these films whereby star actresses, although equally the object of a sexualizing gaze, also act violently according to their narrative function. Actresses playing secondary roles, instead, are shown disrobed much more often, forming a sort of sexy background to the films’ action. This is clearly visible in the final showdown of this film, where all women fight naked except for their female leaders: Ochō, Yoshimi, and Hanten no Baba. Gallagher (2006) identifies a similar process in late 1960s and early 1970s American action films, in which new conflicted masculinities were being represented. Cultural markers emphasizing unconventional, anti-authoritarian and rebellious behaviours were used in these films to represent new heroic masculinities that would appeal to the emerging market of American youth counterculture. He argues that a traditional white, heterosexual and paternalistic worldview was still accommodated within these new articulations of masculinities. In this way, the films in question ended up reinstating conservative ideas as superior, suggesting a nostalgia for the past.

References Anderson, J.L. 1973. ‘Japanese Swordfighters and American Gunfighters’, Cinema Journal 12(2): 1–21. Barrett, G. 1989. Archetypes in Japanese Film: The Sociopolitical and Religious Significance of the Principal Heroes and Heroines. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press. Creed, B. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Gallagher, M. 2006. Action Figures: Men, Action Films, and Contemporary Adventure Narratives. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Harries, D. 2000. Film Parody. London: BFI. Hutcheon, L. 2000. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Kaplan, D.E. and A. Dubro. 2003. Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld, expanded ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mana, Y. 2009. ‘Kedakaki Rashin no Musumetachi: Tōei Pinkī Baiorensu’ [Noble Nude Girls: Tōei Pinky Violence], in I. Yomota and H. Washitani (eds), Tatakau Onnatachi: Nihon Eiga no Josei Akushon [Fighting Women: Female Action in Japanese Films]. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, pp. 179–216.

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Mellen, J. 1976. The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan Through Its Cinema. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Morris, I. 1975. The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan. London: Secker and Warburg. Motomura, T. 2008. ‘The Poisonous Women of Meiji, Taishō and Shōwa: Do Not Touch Me, I Am Dangerous’, in R. Cueto (ed.), Japón en Negro: Cine Policíaco Japonés/Japanese Film Noir. Donostia/San Sebastián: Donostia ZinemaldiaFestival de San Sebastián, pp. 402–11. Mulvey, L. 1989. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 14–26. Saitō, A. 2009. ‘Hibotan Oryū Ron [An Essay on Oryū, the Red Peony]’, in I. Yomota and H. Washitani (eds), Tatakau Onnatachi: Nihon Eiga no Josei Akushon. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, pp. 84–149. Satō, T. 1982. Currents in Japanese Cinema: Essays, trans. G. Barrett. Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International. Schilling, M. 2003. The Yakuza Movie Book: A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Schrader, P. 1974. ‘Yakuza-Eiga: A Primer’, Film Comment Jan/Feb: 9–17. Schubart, R. 2007. Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970–2006. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Shimura, M. 2005. ‘Vanpu Joyū Ron: Suzuki Sumiko to wa Dare Datta no ka? [An Essay on Vamp Actresses: Who Was Suzuki Sumiko?]’, in K. Iwamoto (ed.), Jidaigeki Densetsu: Chanbara Eiga no Kagayaki [Period Drama Tales: The Splendour of Swordplay Films]. Tokyo: Shinwasha, pp. 191–219. Standish, I. 2000. Myth and Masculinity in The Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political Reading of the ‘Tragic Hero’. Richmond: Curzon. _______. 2005. A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film. New York, NY: Continuum. Tansman, A. 2001. ‘Where’s Mama? The Sobbing Yakuza of Hasegawa Shin’, in D.C. Washburn and C. Cavanaugh (eds), Word and Image in Japanese Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 149–73. Thornton, S.A. 2008. The Japanese Period Film: A Critical Analysis. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Treglia, L. 2018a. ‘Sexing up Post-war Japanese Cinema: Looking at 1960s/1970s ‘Pinky Violence’ Films’, in K. Harrison and C.A. Ogden (eds), Pornographies: Critical Positions. Chester: University of Chester Press, pp. 141–66. ______. 2018b. ‘Mondo-ing Urban Girl Tribes: The Boom of 1960s–70s Erotic Cinema and the Policing of Young Female Subjects in Japanese sukeban Films’, Film Studies 18(1): 52–69. ______. 2018c. ‘Yakuza no Onnatachi: Women in Japanese Gangster Cinema’, in G.S. Larke-Walsh (ed.), A Companion to the Gangster Film. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 377–394. Washitani, H. 2009. ‘Satsueijo Jidai no ‘Josei Akushon Eiga’’ [‘Female Action Films’ in the Studio Period], in I. Yomota and H. Washitani (eds), Tatakau Onnatachi: Nihon Eiga no Josei Akushon. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, pp. 20–55.

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Yamane, S. 2008. ‘Genealogía de las mujeres guerreras de Toei’, in R. Cueto (ed.), Japón en negro: Cine policíaco japonés/Japanese Film Noir. Donostia/San Sebastián: Donostia Zinemaldia-Festival de San Sebastián, pp. 87–103. Yang, H. 2004. ‘Ninkyō Eiga Rosen ni Okeru Tōei no Seikō: Terebi ni Taikō Shita Eiga Seisaku (1963–1972Nen) wo Chūshin ni’ [The Success of Tōei Studio’s Chivalry Films: Focusing on the Film Productions (1963–72) that Competed with Television], Tagen Bunka-Multicultural Studies 4: 191–202. Yoshimoto, M. 2000. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Filmography Abashiri Bangaichi (Abashiri Prison) Series, various directors, Japan, Tōei, 1965–1972 [Blu-Ray Box Set]. Furyō Anego Den: Inoshika Ochō (Tale of a Bad Lady Boss: Inoshika Ochō; a.k.a. Sex and Fury), dir. N. Suzuki, Japan, Tōei, 1973 [DVD]. Hibotan Bakuto (Red Peony Gambler) Series, various directors, Japan, Tōei, 1968–72 [DVD]. Hijōsen no Onna (Dragnet Girl), dir. Y. Ozu, Japan, Shōchiku, 1933 [DVD]. Jingi Naki Tatakai (Battles without Honour and Humanity), dir. K. Fukasaku, Japan, Tōei, 1973–76 [DVD Box Set]. Jinsei Gekijō: Hishakaku to Kiratsune (Theatre of Life: Hishakaku and Kiratsune), dir. T. Uchida, Japan, Tōei, 1968 [Film]. Joōbachi (Queen Bee), Series, various directors, Japan, Shintōhō, 1958–61 [Film]. Joshū Sasori (Female Prisoner Scorpion) Series, various directors, Japan, Tōei, 1972–73 [DVD]. Kill Bill Vol.1, dir. Q. Tarantino, US, Miramax Films, 2003 [DVD]. Kyōfu Joshikōkō: Bōkō Rinchi Kyōshitsu (Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom), dir. N. Suzuki, Japan, Tōei, 1973 [Panik House DVD Box Set]. Nora Neko rokku (Stray Cat Rock) Series, various directors, Japan, Nikkatsu, Hori Production, 1970–71 [Blu-Ray Box Set]. Ringu (Ring), dir. H. Nakata, Japan, Ringu/Rasen Production Committee, 1998 [DVD]. Shurayukihime (Lady Snowblood) Series, dir. T. Fujita, Japan, The Criterion Collection, 1973–74 [DVD Box Set]. Yasagure Anego Den: Sōkatsu Rinchi (Tale of a Stray Lady Boss: General Lynching), dir. T. Ishii, Japan, Tōei, 1973 [DVD]. Yōen Dokufu Den Hannya no Ohyaku (Tale of a Poisonous Seductress: Female Demon Ohyaku), dir. Y. Ishikawa, Japan, Tōei, 1968 [DVD]. Zubekō Banchō (Delinquent Girl Boss) Series, various directors, Japan, Tōei, 1970–71 [Panik House DVD Box Set].

Chapter 6

Collective Remorse for the Past

Japanese Film and TV Representations of the 1960s Student Movement Katsuyuki Hidaka

Nostalgia and Memory Memories, according to Hodgkin and Radstone (2006: 23), result in conflicting meanings because ‘the past is not fixed, but is subject to change: both narratives of events and the meanings given to them are in a constant state of transformation.’ In contrast, White (1981: 13–14), analyzing the development of historical narratives from medieval times, argues that ‘every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats’. Memories of the recent past acquire particular meanings, or even new meanings, when they are represented in media because ‘museums, films, and other such media are places not only for memory but [also for] intervention’ (Hodgkin and Radstone 2006: 174). In practice, Japanese media products have repeatedly renegotiated the meanings of the society’s postwar trajectory as well as those of the Second World War (Seaton 2007).1 Since the advent of the twenty-first century, there has been a boom in Japanese media nostalgically representing the 1960s, and occasionally the 1970s, as the heyday of high economic growth.2 This phenomenon is called ‘Shōwa 30s nostalgia’ – because the 30s (1955–64) in Shōwa (1926–89) correspond to the 1950s and 60s of the Gregorian calendar. Although a yearning for the late Shōwa period existed as early as the 1990s, an unprecedented boom came about after the blockbuster success of the 2005 film Always – Sunset on Third Street. This film went on to become an unexpected smash hit at the box office, with an attendance of more than two million. As a result, more than two hundred theatres extended the film’s screening. The film was not only a big hit but

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also received critical acclaim, winning in twelve categories out of a total of thirteen nominations at the 2005 Japanese Academy Awards, including those for Best Film, Director and Screenplay. Two other Shōwa nostalgia films, Hula Girls (2006) and Tokyo Tower: Mom and Me, and Sometimes Dad (2007), also received the 2006 and 2007 Best Film awards, respectively, as well as many other awards at the Japanese Academy Awards. This indicates that Shōwa nostalgia films dominated Japan’s major film awards for three consecutive years. These films reflect a yearning for the postwar era when Japan had just begun to experience economic recovery. However, at present, the most prevalent target of the media is not the Shōwa 30s but the Shōwa 40s (1965–74). There seems to be a focus on and around the year of 1968, with a particular highlighting of the student movement at that time. As in the United States, France, West Germany and Italy, Japan underwent an era of student rebellion during the 1960s.3 In particular, around 1968, Japan’s student movement was as fierce as in the West. Wallerstein (1991: 77) terms what happened in these countries in 1968 ‘the Revolution of 1968’ and notes that it was symptomatic of ‘more than a century of worldwide, organized antisystemic activity’ against capitalism, particularly American hegemony, in the world system. Japan’s student activism, based on New Leftism, was also crucial for Japan’s postwar society. The critic Suga (2006: 19) argues that the demise of the movement was a ‘­turning point’ in modern Japanese history.4 On the other hand, more than a few intellectuals have criticized the compromise and ingratiation of student activists, as well as their quick social adaptiveness within capitalist society. Krauss’ (1974) follow-up study of a sample of activist students found that the majority had given up their political activities after securing employment, although their political beliefs had not fundamentally changed. Based on his extensive questionnaire, Krauss (ibid.: 142) theorizes that ‘organizational roles in Japan are diffuse, particularly in business firms, where great loyalty and dedication to the organization are expected and left-wing political activity is considered antithetical to organizational goals’. He concludes that the compromise of the former student activists was chiefly caused by ‘the dedication, loyalty, hard work, long hours, and interpersonal harmony within the organization that are demanded of the salary man’ and that these are incompatible with engaging in political activity (ibid.: 145). Oguma (2009: 838), a sociologist and author of the book 1968, argues that the end of the student movement ‘dictated Japanese postwar society’s transition to a consumer society’. However, Japan’s unusually rapid economic development resulted in the burst of the bubble economy in the early 1990s; this led to the ‘lost decade’ or ‘lost two decades’, as there have

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been no signs of recovery during this prolonged recession. It appears that the shift of media focus, from a simple yearning for the Shōwa 30s to an interest in the Shōwa 40s, reflects Japan’s harsh economic reality (Asaoka 2010; Hidaka 2010). I have already noted that many current Japanese films and television dramas frequently focus on the student movement during that time.5 They too seriously critique the activists’ subsequent assimilation within capitalist society and their deference to authority; however, in this we see how these media often show sympathy towards the student movement itself. This chapter examines the manner in which these films and television dramas represent the student movement through an analysis of their representations of a legendary robbery in 1968, in order to demonstrate that the setback of the student movement is believed to be an irretrievable loss for Japanese society. Furthermore, the media representations depict the students’ ‘social adaptiveness’ and their subsequent hedonism as being a fatal defeat to the era’s idealism.

The 300 Million Yen Robbery Current Japanese films and television dramas often associate the student movement with the 300 million yen robbery of 1968.6 Some examples include the films First Love (2006) and Lost Crime: Flash (2010) and TV Asahi’s television series Destiny 1969–2010: Once Upon a Time in Tokyo (2010). The 300 million yen robbery, which occurred in a Tokyo suburb in 1968, has achieved legendary status among the Japanese because the amount of money stolen is still the largest in Japan’s criminal history and, more importantly, the real criminal has never been identified despite a massive investigation; also, the statute of limitations on the crime has expired. The 300 million yen robbery occurred on the morning of 10 December 1968, in a suburb of Tokyo, when a bank’s cash transport van was transporting about 300 million yen in New Year bonuses for the employees of an electronics company. The van was stopped by a criminal, who was disguised as a uniformed motorcycle policeman. This bogus police officer told the four bank employees inside the car that their branch manager’s home had been bombed and the bank had also received a threatening letter saying that dynamite had been placed in the cash transport vehicle. Then the bogus police officer told them that they had to get out of the van immediately because it was very dangerous and he wanted to search it. After they disembarked, the robber crawled under the van as if he was trying to locate the bomb, setting off a smoke canister in order to convince

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them that the dynamite had been ignited. After the bank employees lost their heads and ran, the criminal got in the vehicle and drove away. Although the police, who placed the highest priority on solving this unprecedented crime, persistently strove to arrest the criminal by assigning hundreds of investigators and devoting a huge budget to the case, the statute of limitations passed in December 1975 without an arrest. Since the modus operandi of this robbery was very elaborate and the real culprit was not identified, this crime remains a mystery and has become legendary. The fact that there was no evidence that the stolen bank bills were ever used by the criminal also heightened the crime’s mysterious and mythic characteristics. At the time, a national newspaper article stated that the incident ‘gives the impression that it is just like a television crime drama. If a big, intellectual, and speedy crime is a major characteristic of contemporary crime, this case is indeed a typical one’ (Yomiuri Shinbun, 11 December 1968). It must be noted that the media and intellectuals at that time did not condemn this crime but admired it to some degree: the clever ploy used by the criminal to steal the immense sum of money rather endeared him to the public. An Asahi Shinbun (11 December 1968) article noted: ‘One of the reasons why some people think this crime is “cool” is that the victim of this crime is a bank. Banks seem unapproachable to the public because they usually feel self-conscious as if entering a vault. Yet, this crime easily destroyed the “perfect” security of banks’. The renowned poet Satō Sanpei also said: ‘It may sound funny if I say that this is a real theft. I still see in it a virtuoso-like acting skill’ (ibid.). In order to understand this rather favourable reaction to the 300 million yen robbery by both the media and intellectuals, it is necessary to understand the era’s social context. The student campaign against the Japan–US Security Treaty had reached its climax in 1968 just when it occurred.7 Numerous university campuses, including those of Tokyo, Kyoto and Waseda were barricaded by student activists. Intense offensive and defensive battles took place between the riot police and activists on campuses and in various cities. Meanwhile, antipathy towards the overbearing attitude of the riot police increased not only among student activists but also amongst the public. Therefore, there were quite a few intellectuals who argued that the loss of prestige by the police and banks caused by the 300 million yen robbery functioned as a kind of outlet for the public’s frustrations. In February 1969, the monthly magazine Ushio published a conversation between Matsumoto Seichō, one of the most popular mystery writers of the era, and Minami Hiroshi, a renowned social psychologist. Their dialogue reflects this particular social climate.

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Matsumoto: What was stolen was not a personal fortune but the bank’s money. In addition, there was no bloodshed. These are the reasons very few people blame this criminal while numerous people think the criminal is so cool. Furthermore, we must not overlook the fact that people’s antipathy toward banks underlies this admiration. Minami: I agree with you … there is a kind of high praise for such a rationally executed plot. This shows that the Japanese social mentality has changed. Furthermore, although some people argue that the increase of traffic accidents in Japan is the most serious social problem, I would rather argue that people’s growing frustration is of more significance. People’s frustration may not necessarily come from economic circumstances but from problems in human relations. That this incident occurred under these social conditions gives people a kind of ‘surrogate satisfaction’. In short, they did not commit this crime, but they can be satisfied with this crime if they look at this case from the criminal’s viewpoint … This collective antipathy toward social power was also shown in the recent student riot in Shinjuku. This student riot gave real pleasure to numerous people, even those who do not necessarily support student activism. These people merely enjoyed the fact that this riot ‘outwitted the police’. (Matsumoto and Minami 1969: 166–167)

Thus, the 300 million yen robber was seen by the general public as an unusual anti-authoritarian hero akin to Robin Hood. Since the real culprit was never identified, numerous magazine articles on the crime have been published over the years and many novels have been written (see Ichihashi 1999; Kazama 1999; Kobayashi 1985; Miyoshi 1976; Nishimura 1971; Ōshita 1979; Sano 1970; I. Shimizu 1979, Y. Shimizu 1999 etc.). These novels usually do not condemn the crime; rather, they show a keen interest in solving the mystery of who the real culprit is. In other words, these writers are proposing their own competing hypotheses through fiction. Numerous identities for the criminal have been proposed both by the media and novels: juvenile delinquent, youth activist, extremist, police officer, bank employee, gambler, young gay, US military personnel and so on.

Films that Depict the 300 Million Yen Robbery in the Late 1960s and 1970s Many of the films and television dramas that portrayed the 300 million yen robbery were produced just after the incident and throughout the mid-1970s; however, it is worth noting that these representations omit the political implications of the crime although society at that time recognized it as a heroic robbery, viewing it as an anti-authoritarian ‘feat’. These films and television dramas can be roughly classified into two categories:

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comedies or parodies that depict the crime in a humorous manner and pure crime dramas in which police conduct their investigation of the incident. Two films that can be classified as comedic are A Romp by Crazy Cats (1969) and Comedy: The 300 million Yen Robbery (1971). The latter, which is a typical comedy as the title indicates, depicts the whereabouts of the stolen money in a slapstick way. A Romp by Crazy Cats, which features seven members of the then-popular comedian group Crazy Cats, is a preposterous film about criminals escaping into space after stealing a large sum of money. This film gained popularity by parodying both the 300 million yen robbery and the first moon landing by Apollo 11 in July 1969. As far as the crime action category is concerned, Viper Brothers: The 300 Million Yen Robbery (1973), A True Account of the 300 Million Yen Robbery: The Statute of Limitations Runs Out (1975), Catch the Culprit of the 300 Million Yen Robbery (1975) and A Man Like the Devil (1975), a television drama, are well-known. The 1975 film, A True Account of the 300 Million Yen Robbery directed by Ishii Teruo, known for directing the series Abashiri Prison, is a crime movie but is also a typical entertainment film of that time. In this version, a young man who is strapped for cash steals the money to solve his financial problems. The movie ends with the running out of the statute of limitations despite exhaustive investigations. Viper Brothers, directed by Suzuki Norifumi, is one of the numerous yakuza films that enjoyed popularity at that time. This film features Sugawara Bunta, a superstar known for the yakuza film series Battles without Honour and Humanity (1973–1974), and depicts a gang member’s desperate scramble for narcotics worth 300 million yen. Catch the Culprit of the 300 Million Yen Robbery, directed by Maeda Yōichi, is also a typical crime action film in which a master safe-cracker tries to steal 300 million yen from a safe through a carefully thought-out plan. It must be noted that these films are pure entertainment features in which any political undertones to the crime are ignored by film directors known for making numerous B movies. After the mid-1970s, the number of films and dramas that focused on the 300 million yen robbery decreased, and it was not until the beginning of the twenty-first century that the legendary crime began to garner attention from media producers again.

Twenty-First Century Films that Depict the 300 Million Yen Robbery In contrast to the 1970s films, the films and television dramas made in the twenty-first century represent the thirty-year-old crime as an

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anti-authoritarian political offence associated with the New Left student movement of that time. Moreover, these films and television dramas not only depict the student activist criminals as anti-authoritarian heroes but also harshly critique their subsequent compromise with mainstream society. By tying the crime to the student movement, the media is able to symbolically critique Japan’s postwar lifestyle: disparaging how former student activists have kowtowed to authority and the capitalist system despite having had the potential to become social reformers all those decades ago. The burst of the bubble economy in the early 1990s, which has led to a long recession, has caused many Japanese to regret their unquestioning belief in the myth of postwar economic growth and has provoked much soul-searching. The first decade of the twenty-first century saw the introduction of neoliberal policies and legislation regarding the labour market. As temporality and precarity increased so did unemployment and the number of ‘net café refugees’ (homeless people who sleep in 24 hour internet cafes) and working poor. From the standpoint of many university graduates, the students of the 1968 movement were responsible for two historical failures. First, they did not manage to reform the country’s political system or direction, exchanging their aspirations for economic security and stability. Then they failed to preserve an (now-idealized) economic structure that had guaranteed lifelong employment prospects as well as the means to support families. Some of the baby boomers installed in the media industry also shared this assessment and felt responsible. While there was catharsis in the male viewers’ experience of ninkyō eiga (chivalry films) on the reception end of the chain in the 1960s,8 there was a creative catharsis on the production side of the films revolving around the 1960s protests that were released in the 2000s. The most typical example is Itō Shunya’s Lost Crime: Flash, which was released in July 2010. Itō, who was the radical head of the film studios’ labour union in 1960, is well-known for his anti-establishment films. In particular, the series Female Convict 701: Scorpion (1972–73) continues to attract cult followers for their unusual narratives. Ito’s Lost Crime is a serious film that fiercely criticizes police authority just as the Female Convict 701 series does. Lost Crime is set in Tokyo at the beginning of the twentyfirst century when, while investigating a murder, two police detectives find that the crime is related to the 300 million yen robbery. They discover that one of the robbery’s perpetrators was a police officer’s son and also find that the police staged a cover-up at that time because their involvement would have created a great scandal. Although they try to inquire into the crime’s details, the police authorities oversee and obstruct their investigation, continuing the cover-up into the present.

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An actual police officer and the family member of another officer were both among the suspects discussed in the media and novels just after the incident. A high school student, who was a police officer’s son, was suspected of being the robber, and he committed suicide just after being interrogated. The idea that a member of a policeman’s family had been involved in such an unprecedented crime must have seemed perfect material for films. However, it should be noted that it was not until the twenty-first century that filmmakers focused on this scandalous hypothesis. However, what is more important is that the film Lost Crime represents the student activists as the principal culprits of the 300 million yen robbery and heavily criticizes their subsequent selling out to mainstream society. It is rather ironic that both former student activists, portrayed as having committed the robbery, as well as the police authorities, who hide the real facts of the case, are condemned in this film although they had been on opposing sides at the time. In Lost Crime the activists who carried out the robbery have become prominent men and women, including a hospital director named Yoshioka Ken’ichi (Takuma Shin) and a business manager named Mayama Kyoko (Katase Rino). These two unexpectedly become targets of retaliation by an unknown person or persons. One way in which the film implicitly chastises the youth activists who later kowtowed to authority, even if the crime itself could be construed as ‘heroic’, is through the character of Mayama. Having carried out the crime when she was a university student, she is killed by the son of a suspect, who was falsely accused of the crime. The condemnation of Mayama is emphasized through the film’s melodramatic scene in which she is murdered. On the huge Rainbow Bridge, which was constructed in the Tokyo Bay area during the late 1980s and which is a symbol of postwar prosperity, she puts her hands up unnaturally when an unknown man trains his gun on her and, after being shot, she collapses slowly. The background music, a piano piece from Chopin’s Etudes, swells dramatically. This scene stereotypically, but symbolically, implies that Japan’s postwar prosperity was only achieved through a self-deception that valued material wealth over inner contentment. Later, Yoshioka, who has been in love with Mayama since they were student activists, is also brutally murdered. Thus they are punished both for renouncing their left-wing beliefs and their subsequent respect for authority, leading to lives characterized by bourgeois affectation, by someone who represents the ‘pure’ past. We might think of their murderer as a sort of Banquo character, returning for revenge. Discussing Lost Crime, the director noted:

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I know that various kinds of books regarding 1968 have been published so far. In these books, 1968 is looked back upon nostalgically as a very special period. Nevertheless, I am extremely critical about this viewpoint, which merely admires that period. People who were active in the student movement were discriminated against when they entered the employment world. However, many people made colossal efforts [to realize their ideals]; for example, a medical student who felt compelled to work in a rural hospital and not a city hospital later contributed to the improvement of community healthcare. In short, he continued to combat [social problems] by exploring his ideal concept of medical care. However, very few people have lived such lives. I would like to ask a lot of people: ‘What kind of lives have you lived after the student movement?’ Therefore, in this film, I represented the reduced circumstances of the criminal group in the present, as well as their actions in 1968. They are the wrecks of those adolescents. (Kanazawa 2010: 76)

As Itō argues, it is true that a few committed student activists continued to be politically committed after graduating. Conversely, many less active students entered companies and gave up their political activities although most of them still considered themselves progressive and felt ‘the contradictions in capitalism’ (Krauss 1974: 120). The former student activists later became Japanese company ‘soldiers’ (kigyō senshi), who served as the driving force for the unprecedented economic growth in postwar Japan by abandoning their political ideals. It appears that their compromise and social adaptiveness bolstered the advent of the mass consumption society in that, as Oguma (2009: 838) argues, most former student activists ‘allowed themselves to be faithful to their own desires [for consumption]’. It is notable that the 2010 serial television drama Destiny 1969–2010: Once Upon a Time in Tokyo hinges upon a concept very similar to that seen in Lost Crime although this drama does not necessarily use the 300 million yen robbery as its source material. In this television drama, Arikawa Mina (Maya Kyoko) and Shirai Shin’ichirō (Okuda Eiji), both previously enthusiastic activists of the student movement, accidentally meet for the first time in forty years. Although Shin’ichirō has become a big politician, who is recognized as a major contender to be the next prime minister, and Mina has become the head of a large hospital, they are suddenly forced to question their calculating, post-movement ways of life, upon recalling one grim event. In July 1968, the New Left student movement reached a climax as the students occupied and blockaded Tokyo University’s Yasuda Auditorium. Mina and Shin’ichirō, who were student activists at Tokyo University at the time, fell in love when they joined the fierce battle against the riot police. They separated after the movement ended and achieved social success in their lives. By pure coincidence Shin’ichirō’s daughter, Naoko (Uehara Misa), and Mina’s son, Takashi (Kitamura Kazuki), are planning

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to marry although their parents are unaware that their children know one another and are dating. When Mina hears of this marriage proposal, she is extremely surprised and bitterly opposes it because she is worried that there is a possibility that Takashi’s unidentified father is Shin’ichirō. On the other hand, Shin’ichirō wants the marriage to take place, even after Mina tells him that their children might be half-siblings, as he expects that the marriage would enable him to use Mina’s financial resources for his own political fund. Takashi and Naoko marry, as Mina’s fears are apparently groundless. However, both Takashi and Naoko utterly despise Shin’ichirō for his calculating plan, and Takashi makes up his mind to become an incorruptible new-generation politician and to reform Japan’s money-driven politics. I assert that such a serious serial drama would not have had the viewership  – and therefore would not have been broadcast on a Friday during prime time – if Japanese audiences had not been critical of the country’s postwar development. The actual wide-ranging after-effects of the economic recession began to appear in the late 1990s, and there has been no likelihood of recovery. As a consequence, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the media shifted from mere nostalgia for the Shōwa 30s and veered towards criticism, reflecting audiences’ disillusion. Thus, in Lost Crime and Destiny 1969–2010, the ‘apostasy’ of the New Left student activists, who actually played a key role in that political era, is severely excoriated by contemporary media producers. However, these criticisms are direct and simple, despite being harsh. On the other hand, the critique of the student activists in the film First Love (2006), directed by Hanawa Yukinari, is highly complicated and needs to be analysed in detail.

First Love and the ‘Self-Deception’ of the Student Activists First Love is a unique film based upon a novel of the same name by a little-known female writer, Nakahara Misuzu, which takes the form of an autobiography written by the criminal who committed the 300 million yen robbery. Of particular interest is that this film depicts an 18-year-old female high school student as the real culprit of this crime, thus being faithful to the original novel. This film depicts the details of the crime in a docudrama style. The heroine, Nakahara Misuzu (Miyazaki Aoi), has spent her childhood moving from one relative to another after losing her father when young and then being abandoned by her mother. In 1966 Misuzu, who always feels that no one loves or needs her, becomes acquainted with a youth

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group that gathers in a Shinjuku café. This group consists of university students, student activists, juvenile delinquents and students who have failed to get accepted at a university and are eager for another chance. Misuzu loses her heart to Kishi (Keisuke Koide), a Tokyo University student whose intelligence and calmness, for her, somewhat differentiate him from the other members. However, Misuzu is too embarrassed to tell him of her feelings. One day, Kishi tells Misuzu that he is planning to steal 300 million yen in order to seriously damage the prestige of the police force and then asks Misuzu to execute the complicated crime. While being very surprised to hear Kishi’s proposal, Misuzu promises to do it because she feels that it is the first time in her life that she is needed; besides, she loves him. Kishi walks Misuzu through the complicated plot repeatedly in order to design the perfect crime. On the morning of 10 December 1968 Misuzu, who disguises herself as a police officer, takes a police motorbike and carries off the heist. Afterwards, Kishi admires Misuzu and advises her to concentrate on studying for her university entrance exams. At the same time, Kishi gives her an apartment key, telling her to live there alone when she enters university. When Kishi says this, Misuzu is afraid that he might leave her and move abroad. Although Misuzu passes the exam and begins her university life alone in the apartment, she suffers because she hears nothing from Kishi. One day, Misuzu finds Kishi’s diary on the bookshelf in the apartment. In the diary, Kishi had written: May 1966 I met a girl today. This girl has honest eyes. She told me, ‘I don’t want to be an adult’. I fell in love with this girl. This is probably the first and the last love of my life. Yet, I will not tell her my feelings. Because I can only make her life a misery.

Upon reading this entry, Misuzu sobs uncontrollably. Why did Kishi choose Misuzu as his accomplice although she is a senior high school student? That is the question. Kishi is one of the group members who meet almost daily in the Shinjuku café. Although it might be easier and perhaps more reasonable for Kishi to seek an accomplice from amongst some mature male collaborators, he never does and turns to Misuzu instead. It is true that, as Kishi tells Misuzu, it might be more difficult for the police to identify a criminal if they are female because they usually suppose that serious crimes are perpetrated by men. Yet, it must be noted that this is a highly risky, complicated robbery for a teenage girl

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to carry out. Therefore, it appears that Kishi chooses Misuzu for additional reasons that may be more significant. The fact that Kishi is somewhat isolated from the other youth group members may be relevant to the planning of his crime. At the beginning of First Love, Takeshi, a senior member of this group, introduces the members to the audience. Kishi is, according to Takeshi, ‘a very strange fellow’, although Takeshi describes other members as typical student activists, delinquent youths and playboys. While other members usually talk about student campaigns, quarrels among delinquent youths and love affairs, Kishi passes the time reading profound books. This is meant to show that Kishi is quite indifferent to student activism and love affairs, while he philosophizes about the meaning of life in his own way. However, the other members do not necessarily understand Kishi and are sceptical about his true intentions. On Kishi’s part, these fellows do not share his particular concerns nor are they reliable enough to commit the perfect crime. Kishi’s disapproval of his companions seems to indicate that this film is critical of the mainstream resistance – particularly as expressed by student activists – to a postwar society that was dominated by capitalism and that gave priority to economic development; it also argues that they were rather ineffectual in achieving real social reform. First Love creates a critical social narrative in a rather subtle manner by contrasting Kishi and Misuzu with the student activists. Kishi, an elite Tokyo University student and son of an eminent politician, rebels against the political authorities, which include his father. Although Kishi has experienced student activism at school, he keeps his distance from campus activism, as he has found that it is ineffective in achieving actual social reform. Rather, Kishi intends to ruin the police’s credibility – which would have a significant effect on society – by designing the perfect crime: Kishi: I hate social power as all modern youths do. It’s not bad to throw stones at the police. But Misuzu, those in power couldn’t care less about stoning. That is the reason why I would like to pit my wits against those in power. Misuzu: Do you have any good ideas? Kishi: Yes, I do. But I can’t talk about this to anyone but you. You are the only person who can do it. I’m begging you. I don’t need anyone else. I only need you.

The line ‘throw stones at the police’ obviously connotes student activists. In contrast to the student movement, Kishi adopts a rather different approach. Through the intricate mise en scène that emphasizes their innocence and presents it as a kind of self-sacrifice, their actions are represented as a political mission aiming to transform postwar society. The conversation

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quoted above is held in a love hotel (rabu hoteru, a hotel primarily catering to couples who need privacy to have sex). Kishi invites Misuzu there because he would like to talk confidentially with her; they never have sex but instead discuss the crime. It is incongruous that this serious conversation takes place over a bed provided for sex. What is ironic is that when Kishi says ‘I don’t need anyone else. I only need you’, it is not a confession of love; rather, it is an argument for committing a crime. This paradox effectively emphasizes Kishi’s sense of being on a political mission to bring about social change and reveals Misuzu’s self-sacrificing spirit, since her love is unrequited. Furthermore, since the other group members engage in sexual dalliances and there are, in fact, some sequences that graphically depict their affairs, Misuzu and Kishi’s chaste and self-sacrificing behaviour are a stark contrast. Intriguingly, in the immediate aftermath of this love hotel sequence, this film inserts an abstract shot of a red doll floating on the river that is not directly related to the plot. This appears to symbolically indicate Misuzu’s self-immolation and even adds an image of youthful martyrdom. There are various other narrative devices that depict Misuzu and Kishi as heroes rather than criminals. Although the film itself does not straightforwardly admire their crime, the trailer for both theatre and television suggests that its theme is that of social reform. In the voice-over to one of the film’s trailers, Misuzu says: ‘I believed that with you I could change the world’. This shows that the concept of this film coincides with the widely held idea that associates the 300 million yen robbery with the resolution of the era’s social contradictions. In the movie itself, there are similar lines. In the last scene, Misuzu walks along a 1975 Shinjuku street and subtitles appear: ‘The statute of limitations has passed. Yet, none of the bank notes [that were stolen] have ever been used’. The image dissolves to one of contemporary busy Shinjuku streets and fades out. The words ‘Yet, none of the bank notes have ever been used’ indicates that the crime was purely political rather than about satisfying the criminals’ selfish desires. What must not be overlooked are the narrative’s dual themes: crime and platonic love. As far as Misuzu is concerned, her romantic feelings are suppressed although the crime succeeds. The fact that she and Kishi have not used the stolen bank notes further celebrates their ‘heroic’ efforts by highlighting their self-denial. Hanawa Yukinari, the director, said that he did not intend to reconstruct the real 1960s but rather aimed to create an imaginary 1960s by associating the success of the crime with pure love (see Kisaragi 2006). Hanawa stated that ‘Although love must be realized when the 300 million yen robbery is completed, at the same time this would bring about their ruin. In short, the film’s story is absolutely impossible unless the realization of love is also the start of their final parting’

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(ibid.: 69). This supports my argument that Hanawa intentionally created a tragedy in order that the main characters be seen as heroic. Ultimately, First Love suggests that social reform might well be brought about not by politicians or student activists but by an unhappy high school girl. Again, what is important here is Misuzu and Kishi are given a heroic, glorious status for having carried out a social mission. As the criminals involved in the robbery they are completely different from those who appear in the film Lost Crime and the television drama Destiny 1969–2010. In Lost Crime and Destiny 1969–2010, the former student activists are condemned because their subsequent lives are dominated by their greed for money and sex, self-interest and compromise. Contrastingly, Misuzu’s and Kishi’s lives are linked to unselfishness, self-denial, faith and purity. Although there is a disparity between First Love and the other two works, it is worth noting that all of them severely critique the student activists. Of course, it cannot be argued that Misuzu is as deeply conscious of her political mission as is Kishi. However, what is important here is that the distinction being made between Misuzu and the student activists in this film makes it possible to fiercely disparage the activists’ self-deception. In short, First Love has a unique philosophy, arguing that the boldness of a commonplace girl has the potential to change society. In contrast, the student activists are belittled and criticized for their incompetence and foolishness. Their representation in the film is mercilessly cruel: all the main male characters – except Kishi – die young. Through the presentation of the main characters’ personal history in the end titles, we see that only the females live in peace: Misuzu and her friend Yuka. Meanwhile, the men die awful deaths. Ryō, who was a committed student activist, is lynched by right-wing students when he is twenty-four. Rebellious Tetsu becomes a drug addict and kills himself by leaping off a building when he is twenty-nine. Cheerful Yasu is killed in a traffic accident when he is thirty-three. Although Takeshi, who was a leading figure of the youth group, receives a literary award as a novelist, he dies of cancer at thirtysix. Thus, the student activists who had the potential to reform are treated as deadwood in this film. This docudrama style using subtitles recalls the 1970s ‘true record’ (jitsuroku) yakuza film series Battles without Honour and Humanity because these series also used similar end titles to show that the yakuza members died in vain. As discussed above, numerous novels and media articles have hypothesized that the real culprits of this robbery must have been student activists or juvenile delinquents who were rebelling against social authority and have often considered them heroes. However, it is ironic that the student activists are depicted as no good in First Love and that the end titles present us with a moral point: that they merely came to early deaths

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after rather useless short lives, like yakuza. On the other hand, only Kishi is mythicized through the fact that he is still missing. It is not clear if Misuzu lives a happy life, as Kishi never returns, and the movie ends with her saying that ‘there is no statute of limitations on the pain in my heart’. Yet, there is no doubt that she is given a heroic, and even messianic, status as a kind of social reformer.

Conclusion The films and television dramas produced during the late 1960s and 1970s, immediately after the 300 million yen robbery, eliminated the political undertones from this incident and represented it simply for entertainment, in comedy or crime action films, although society at the time hero-worshipped the robbery as an anti-authoritarian feat. However, in contrast with these 1970s entertainment films, the twenty-first century films and television dramas represent this serious crime as an anti-authoritarian political offence related to the era’s New Left student movement. Nonetheless, it is well worth noting that these films and television dramas do not simply depict the student activist as heroes; they also bitterly criticize their self-deception and subsequent compromise with mainstream society. It has become commonly accepted by Japanese intellectuals that the end of the political season in the early 1970s, characterized by the setback of the student movement, led to the development of a full-scale consumerist society based on materialism. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is a kind of collective remorse, or soul-searching, about having turned to the ‘excessive’ materialism that helped sustain Japan’s unprecedented economic growth after the Second World War, which also triggered the burst of the bubble economy that led to the ‘lost’ decades of the recession. This may be the reason why current Japanese films focus on the student movement, which took place fifty years ago, and severely condemn its ‘deception’ and ‘ineffectiveness’ – and fiercely denounce the activists’ subsequent assimilation into capitalism as a treacherous ‘betrayal’. Furthermore, it can be argued that these repeated media representations are a kind of ritual atonement, based on self-criticism, because most active media producers and directors had joined, or at least had experienced, the student movement during their university days. Since the Great East Japan Earthquake on 11 March 2011 and the subsequent Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis, the Japanese have been growing more critical of the postwar governments that depended chiefly on nuclear energy. This nationwide condemnation is often directed at

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the postwar administration as a whole and even postwar Japan itself. For example, the Nobel Prize winning novelist Ōe Kenzaburō (2011: 33) has repeatedly critiqued Japanese society since the earthquake: So far, the Japanese as subjects have not had the determination nor have they been given the option to shape the nation’s future. It is as if Japan has been giving herself a postponement … This actually means that our nation has not corrected its past mistakes yet. We have not taken our responsibility [as modern citizens] until now.

Therefore, the number of Japanese films and television dramas that shed light on the setback of the student movement and the end of the ‘political season’ may well increase, as these events are generally considered to be a crucial turning point for Japanese postwar society. Yet, it is not possible to envisage what an imagined better path might be – movies and television dramas do not present very clearly delineated alternatives. Rather, it could be surmised that these media products just perform a kind of ritual atonement on behalf of a Japanese generation who have abandoned their adolescent purity. Katsuyuki Hidaka is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. He is also a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, from which he received his PhD degree. His papers and books focus on Japanese media, film and politics. His book Japanese Media at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century: Consuming the Past (Routledge, 2017) won the Japan Communication Association’s Best Book Award. He leads the research project ‘Rethinking Japanese Media and Culture in the 1970s’ for the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research programme of the Japanese government.

Notes 1. See also Kirsch’s Chapter 4 in this volume. 2. Since the advent of the twenty-first century, it has become common for the Japanese cultural industry and the academic sector to review 1960s politics, particularly the student activism at that time. Numerous intellectuals critically recall that era and its activism based on their own experiences and life histories (Mainichi Shinbunsha 2009; Oguma 2009; Suga 2006; Tsubouchi 2003; Yomota and Hirasawa 2010 etc.). In literature, the internationally renowned novelist Murakami Haruki wrote Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no mori) in 1987. Although this is a serious novel that focuses on a protagonist who looks back on his university days when he was protesting against the establishment in the 1960s, it became a nationwide bestseller, selling nearly five million copies. Following Norwegian

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6. 7.

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Wood, many other novelists have written books that feature the reminiscences of former student activists. See also Vargas’ Chapter 3 in this volume. All quotations from Japanese sources are my translations. The representative examples include: The films Rain of Light (2001), The Choice of Hercules (2002), First Love (2006), United Red Army (2007), Body-jack (2008), Lost Crime: Flash (2010), My Back Pages (2011) and Norwegian Wood (2010) and TV Asahi’s television drama Destiny 1969–2010: Once Upon a Time in Tokyo (2010). Three hundred million Japanese yen is approximately 2.73 million US dollars (1 US dollar is approximately 110 Japanese yen as of June 2018). However, in today’s currency that 300 million Japanese yen is now worth 1 billion yen. The Japan-US Security Treaty, a basis of the Japan-US alliance, provides for crucial arrangements, including the stationing of US troops in Japan. It was signed between the United States and Japan on 19 January 1960, and the bill was rammed through the Diet by the Japanese government on 20 May although there was a strong opposition movement by citizens against the treaty. There were wide-scale protests again in Japan when the pact was renewed in 1970, but the government ignored the opposition and the protest movements died down thereafter. See also de Vargas’ Chapter 3 in this volume. See Treglia’s Chapter 5 in this volume.

References Asaoka, T. 2010. ‘Shōwa no Fūkei he no/kara no Shisen: Media no Katari no Nakano Shōwa Sanjyūnendai [A View of Shōwa’s Landscape: The Shōwa 30s in the Media Representations]’, Masu Komyunikēshon Kenkyū 76: 23–41. Hidaka, K. 2010. ‘Yearning for Yesterday: Representations of Tokyo Tower within Unfinished Modernity of Shōwa Nostalgic Media’, Ritsumeikan Social Sciences Review 46(2): 25–46. Hodgkin, K. and Radstone, S. (eds) 2006. Memory, History, Nation. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Ichihashi, F. 1999. San Oku En Jiken [The 300 Million Yen Robbery]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Kanazawa, M. 2010. ‘Intabyū, Rosuto Kuraimu: Senkō, Itō Shunya [Interview with Itō Shunya, a Director of Lost Crime: Flash]’. Kinema Junpō 1560: 72–76. Kazama, K. 1999. Shinhannin: ‘San Okuen Jiken’ Sanjyū Ichinen me no Shinjitsu [The 300 Million Yen Robbery: The Truth is Discovered after 31 Years]. Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten. Kisaragi, H. 2006. ‘Hatsukoi: Intabyū Hanawa Yukinari Kantoku [First Love: Interview with Hanawa Yukinari]’, Kinema Junpō June 20. Kobayashi, K. 1985. Chichi to Ko no Honoo [A Father’s and Son’s Passion]. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten. Krauss, E.S. 1974. Japanese Radicals Revisited: Student Protest in Postwar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mainichi Shinbunsha. 2009. 1968 nen ni Nihon to Sekai de Okotta koto [What Happened in 1968]. Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha. Matsumoto, S. and H. Minami. 1969. ‘San Okuen Jiken Han’nin to no Taiwa [The 300 Million Yen Robbery: Dialogue with the Culprit]’, Ushio February: 158–169.

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Miyoshi, T. 1976. Futari no Shinhan’nin: San’okuen Jiken no Nazo [Two Real Culprits: The Mystery of the 300 Million Yen Robbery]. Tokyo: Kōbunsha. Murakami, H. 1987. Noruwei no Mori [Norwegian Wood]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Nishimura, K. 1971. Meitantei Nante Kowakunai [I am not Afraid of the Master Detective]. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Ōe, K. 2011. ‘Watashira wa Giseisha ni Mitsumerareteiru [The Victims are Watching Us]’, Sekai May: 30–33. Oguma, E. 2009. 1968. Tokyo: Shin’yōsha. Ōshita, E. 1979. ‘Shirobai to Beni Bara [White Rose and Red Rose]’, in Gendai no Me Henshūbu (ed.), Gendai Kyojin Retsuden [Lives of Contemporary Great Men]. Tokyo: Gendai Hyōronsha. Sano, Y. 1970. Shosetsu San Okuen Jiken [The 300 Million Yen Robbery]. Tokyo: Kodansha. Seaton, P.A. 2007. Japan’s Contested War Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical Consciousness of World War II. London: Routledge. Shimuzu, I. 1979. Jikō Seiritsu: Zen Kanketsu [Statute of Limitation]. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten. Shimizu, Y. 1999. San oku no kyōshū [Nostalgia for the 300 Million Yen Robbery]. Tokyo: Asahi Sonorama. Suga, H. 2006. 1968 Nen [The Year 1968]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. Tsubouchi, Y. 2003. 1972. Tokyo: Bungeishunjyū. Wallerstein, I. 1991. Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing WorldSystem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Washitani, H. 2009. ‘Satsueijyo Jidai no “Jyosei Akushon” Eiga’ [Female Action Films in the Film Studio Era], in Y. Yoshihiko and H. Washitani (eds), Tatakau Onna Tachi: Nihon Eiga no Jyosei Akushon. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, pp. 20–55. White, H. 1981. ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Yomota, I. and T. Hirasawa. 2010. 1968 nen Bunkaron [Culture of 1968]. Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha.

Filmography Akuma no youna Aitsu (A Man Like the Devil), dir. T. Kuze et al., Japan, Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), 1975 [TV series]. Bodijakku (Body-jack), dir. Y. Kuratani, Japan, Benten Entertainment, 2008 [Film]. Fula Gāru (Hula girls), dir. S.I. Lee, Japan, Black Diamonds, 2006 [DVD]. Hatsukoi (First Love), dir. Y. Hanawa, Japan, GAGA, 2006 [DVD]. Hikari no Ame (Rain of Light), dir. B. Takahashi, Japan, 2001 [DVD]. Jingi Naki Tatakai (Battles without Honour and Humanity), dir. K. Fukasaku, Japan, Toei Company, 1973–74 [Blu-Ray Box Set]. Kureji no Daibakuhatsu (A Romp by Crazy Cats), dir. K. Furusawa, Japan, Toho Company, 1969 [DVD]. Jitsuroku Rengo Sekigun: Asama Sanso e no Michi (United Red Army), dir. K. Wakamatsu, Japan, Skhole Co., 2007 [DVD].

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Jitsuroku San’okuen Jiken Jikō Seiritsu (A True Account of the 300 Million Yen Robbery: The Statute of Limitations Runs Out), dir. T. Ishii, Japan, Toei Tokyo, 1975 [DVD]. Jyoshū Sasori (Female Convict 701: Scorpion), dir. S. Itô, Japan, Toei Company, 1972–73 [DVD Box Set]. Kigeki San’okuen Daisakusen (Comedy: The 300 Million Yen Robbery), dir. K. Ishida, Japan, 1971 [TV Movie]. Mai Bakku Pēji (My Back Pages), dir. N. Yamashita, Japan, Asmik Ace Entertainment, 2011 [DVD]. Mamushi no Kyōdai: San Okuen Jiken (Viper Brothers: The 300 Million Yen Robbery), dir. N. Suzuki, Japan, Toei Company, 1973 [DVD]. Noruwei no Mori (Norwegian Wood), dir. T.A. Hung, Japan, Asmik Ace Entertainment, 2010 [DVD]. Ōruweizu Sanchōme no Yūhi (Always – Sunset on Third Street), dir. T. Yamazaki, Japan, DENTSU Music and Entertainment, 2005 [DVD]. Totsunyū Seyo: Asama Sansō Jiken (The Choice of Hercules), dir. M. Harada, Japan, Asmik Ace Entertainment, 2002 [Film]. Rosuto Kuraimu: Senkō (Lost Crime: Flash), dir. S. Itô, Japan, Kadokawa Pictures, 2010 [Film]. San’okuen wo Tsukamaero (Catch the Culprit of the 300 Million Yen Robbery), dir. Y. Maeda, Japan, Shochiku Ofuna, 1975 [Film]. Shukumei 1969–2010: Wansu Apon a Taimu in Tokyo (Destiny 1969–2010: Once Upon a Time in Tokyo), dir. K. Moriyama, Japan, Asahi Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 2010 [TV Series]. Tōkyō Tawā Okan to Boku to Tokidoki Oton (Tokyo Tower: Mom and Me, and Sometimes Dad), dir. J. Matsuoka, Japan, Dentsu, 2007 [DVD].

Part III

The Persistence of Memory

Chapter 7

Depicting the Persistence of Being Postwar Eden of the East

Artur Lozano-Méndez

Introduction Higashi no Eden, or Eden of the East (henceforth Eden), is a Japanese animation series of eleven episodes that was aired in 2009 by Fuji TV. It was followed by two theatrical releases: Eden of the East: The King of Eden (Higashi no Eden gekijōban I: The King of Eden, 2009) and Eden of the East: Paradise Lost (Higashi no Eden gekijōban II: Paradise Lost, 2010). This animated franchise has been perceived as a highly idiosyncratic and unusual work. Although framed within the category of popular culture, it addresses issues of intergenerational tensions within Japanese society against the backdrop of recent history – it does not just reflect such concerns, but it explores several fictional attempts to redress such strains. In its review of postwar history’s legacy, it also addresses the question of the perception and management of crises within Japanese society. Additionally, some imaginative responses to ongoing crises (or problems conveyed as crises) are explored within the narrative. Though the series can be watched as a stand-alone work, the plot was further developed in two theatrical releases that provide a more satisfactory closure. The series was presented as part of an animation programming segment entitled Noitamina, which is broadcast late at night at Fuji TV (Table 7.1 sums up its broadcast history). The programme caters to a more mature audience in contrast to the average animation shown on children’s airtime. As a series that deals with amnesia, intergenerational gaps and the legacy stemming from the political and economic developments of

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Table 7.1 The Eden of the East animation franchise.

Higashi no Eden, ‘Eden of the East’ TV animation series

Animation movie I:

Animation movie II:

Eden of the East

The King of Eden

Paradise Lost

Original run: 9 April 2009–18 June 2009

Release date: 28 November 2009

Release date: 13 March 2010

Network: Fuji TV. Noitamina: 0:45–1:15h, Thu. Original run: 9 April 2009–18 June 2009 11 episodes Direction & Script: Kamiyama Kenji Music: Kawai Kenji Character design: Umino Chika Studio: Production I.G

postwar Japan, the Eden franchise is particularly interesting to consider within this volume’s themes. The series also brings up matters regarding individual self-representation while at the same time it tackles the perception of the population and its representation in media and hegemonic discourses. Every episode showcases the process of self-representation as a site of struggle, portraying the tension between the individual memory of lived experience and the weight of a collective cultural memory that separates ‘proper’ citizens from ‘failed’ citizens. Society, as a stable shared framework from which to make sense of personal trajectories and available choices, is depicted as fractured. However, a new discourse has not arisen to replace a cultural hegemon out of step with both the labour market and social practices. The old prerogatives, such as upward mobility and ‘stable’ career paths, are still available to some, so everybody is discursively encouraged to pursue them, while many young people will never be able to get a foothold into Japan’s middle classes. This growing rift between a perceived collective Japanese identity and individual achievements is a source of pain and mental stress for the individual (see Allison 2013 passim). Socially, it promotes disenfranchisement, a sense of powerlessness and cynicism. All of this is reflected in the animation, as is the increased susceptibility of the populace to charismatic leaders who proffer both reductionist accounts of reality and simple solutions. Amnesia, which the series’ main character suffers, is not just a narrative MacGuffin; it serves as a device through which to depict the political

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production of collective memory from different angles: myth-making practices that influence quotidian signifying practices; nostalgia; and the allocation and shifting of historical and political responsibilities. Also, through the constant questioning of one individual’s past, the collective’s memory is also re-evaluated.

The Director In his work as a director, Kamiyama (born in 1966) has tried to balance Hollywood real-life action pacing and aesthetics with the style and thematic concerns imprinted by Oshii Mamoru on much of Production I.G’s staff (APA 2011: 3:18–3:39). Before joining Production I.G in 1996, Kamiyama had worked as a background artist in Studio Fuga, which he entered in 1985. In that capacity, he went on to work on such renowned films as Akira (1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (Majo no Takkyūbin, 1989). He then worked as the art director of different animation production companies; among the works he took part in are Roujin Z (1991) and the Genocyber OVA series (Jenosaibā, 1993–1994). As is usually the case with upcoming animation directors, he first cut his teeth by directing a few episodes of an anime series, in this case Medabots (Medarotto, 1999–2000, episodes 34, 41, 48). While his previous works had been adaptations or more collaborative projects, Eden was the first major project where Kamiyama worked with his own original ideas and material. Previously Kamiyama had tried to impress other people in the industry as much as the general audience,1 Eden finds him more relaxed and indulging in humour and cuteness every now and then while steering away from the mainstream pull towards moe aesthetics and tropes.2 Being at the helm of the project allowed him to put forward many of the themes that had only been hinted at or sidelined in his previous work. While some of the subjects can be seen as having been influenced by Oshii and other collaborators, such as scriptwriter Sato Dai, Kamiyama has his own stance on these shared themes: 1. The question of identity and the Subject: is our personality the sum of our memories, or of our actions? Is it a physical avatar, a signifier to a signified that can never be pinned down? 2. The manipulation and reliability of information and memory. 3. The concept of responsibility (both in its individual and social dimensions). 4. Corporate and political power in matters affecting public welfare.

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5. Generation gaps. 6. The criminalization of individuals and even segments of the population through institutional, media and discursive devices. 7. Japan’s relationship with foreign countries. It is not the aim of this chapter to debate whether or not Kamiyama’s attempt to strike a balance between more commercial aspirations and his artistic and intellectual drives is achieved in Eden, or even how successfully it is accomplished.3 My intention is to analyse what were perceived as social problems (shakai mondai, APA 2011: 0:04–1:36) in the media around the time of Eden’s production and how these were tackled by its creators, what discourses around these issues circulated in society at large and what kind of imaginative responses are offered in the animation.

Eden of the East The story begins on 22 November 2010 when ten missiles are launched over Japanese territory. The terrorist act, dubbed ‘Careless Monday’ by the media, does not result in any victims and is soon forgotten. Three months later, Saki Morimi, a young Japanese woman, is visiting the United States on her college graduation trip. Standing in front of the White House in Washington D.C., she gets into trouble while trying to throw a coin over the fence into the south garden fountain inside the premises, but the unexpected intervention of a fellow countryman saves her. This character, who later introduces himself as Takizawa Akira, appears to have lost his memory. He is naked, except for the gun he holds in one hand and the mobile phone he’s holding in the other. The phone is charged with over eight billion yen in digital cash. Saki and Takizawa fly back to Tokyo, and they learn at the airport that Japan has been bombarded again and that this time around there are many casualties. As the plot unfolds, we learn that Takizawa has been drawn into a game for which eleven Japanese, known as the seleção, have been selected as participants. This game is being staged by someone who calls himself Atō Saizō (or Mr. Outside):4 an important figure in Japan’s postwar reconstruction, who reached tycoon status but always has remained in the shadows. As he is now old and nearing death, he has come to feel responsible for the country’s problems, which appear to be growing increasingly worse with each passing year: an ageing society; an increasing number of unemployed and of people dissatisfied with their jobs; entrenched gender inequalities; little economic development; as well

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as people giving up on social life and becoming recluses. In light of these crises, Mr. Outside’s goal is none other than to save Japan and shake it out of its malaise. To this end, Mr. Outside gives each seleção a mobile phone that is loaded with 10 billion yen as a resource with which to achieve this goal. The mobile phones grant access to Juiz, an assistant who manages the seleção’s requests and charges them accordingly.5 Gradually, Takizawa recalls pieces of his past and meets some of the other seleção. All of them have reacted differently to the competition. Each one of them holds a distinct view of what ails Japanese society and each one goes about meeting the challenge using different strategies. Takizawa also befriends Saki’s circle of friends, senior university students and graduates who want to start up a company named Eden of the East but lack funding. The company would launch an upgraded version of a social network site that the group had started to develop while at university. Takizawa gives them funding and facilities, so they proceed with this Eden of the East site, which includes a powerful image recognition engine. Thus, the main premise of the narrative is the question: ‘What would you do to improve life in Japan?’ Or ‘what would you do if you found yourself with the power to affect national politics and the economy?’ Each of the characters’ responses derives from different explanations of the past that validate their own interpretations of the present. Even as the plot might seem firmly rooted in the present as well as in postwar history, it incorporates elements from traditional forms of storytelling that can be traced back to antiquity. These elements include the demiurgic status of Mr. Outside; the perception that historical events form a cyclical pattern; the quest of a hero who will make things right or set the balance straight for the people; and the help of a magical supporting character known as Juiz. It is indeed a myth-making narrative – or, at the very least, a myth-reliant one. The series’ resolution disavows a heroic individual solution, yet its wishful ambition, which implies a rectification of attitudes and lifestyles, aligns with resolutions found in legends and mythical cycles worldwide.

Whose Crisis? The animation foregrounds several issues deemed as problematic by the Japanese media and the Japanese themselves. These problems are perceived as contributing to the nation’s long economic recession. Yet both the crisis’ severity and its effects on different individuals and groups of population were not something that the mainstream media focused on

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even as the calamity was unfolding and taking hold (Allison 2013: 43). While many Japanese acknowledge the domino effects of the recession, most still adhere to the narrative of Japan as a well-off, rich country where supposedly anybody can achieve material wealth. The contrast between official campaigns built around national goals today and the postwar push for economic growth as a cross-cutting and countrywide endeavour (O’Bryan 2009) gives the impression of a national lack of direction. The following observation is speculative by nature, but it could be argued that the high degree of enthusiasm about Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s economic programme both during the 2012 election and the early stages of Abenomics (before its lacklustre results became apparent) is indicative of the population’s desire to recapture the energy and the drive that is associated with the first decades of the postwar period as a refoundation of the country in the social imaginary. In a very interesting declaration at an anime convention, Eden’s producer, Ishii Tomohiko, argued that in contemporary Japan it had become difficult to come up with themes that would engage anime’s audiences. The creative team wanted to reflect the challenges facing the country, but, at the same time, it seemed that the country did not know what it should fight against. According to Ishii, when director Kamiyama decided to address the dilemmas of present-day Japanese, he found interesting ways to represent their concerns (rap779 2010: 2:17–3:39). The anxiety about the lack of a national direction goes back to the changes experienced in the 1990s political landscape. Years of MPs prioritizing the allocation of resources for their own electoral district combined with the short tenure of most prime ministers – who were thus not able to implement long-term policies – and the corruption cases that piled up during the second half of the 1980s all led to a widespread disenchantment with politicians. At the same time neoliberal discourses shifted the focus concerning the responsibility for the nation’s welfare from society at large to individuals. Murakami Haruki reflected on this trend in his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995), through the character of Wataya Noboru, a politics and economics media pundit who endlessly repeats his own interpretation of the will to power. Such social anxieties were exacerbated not just by the number of issues associated with the economic crisis starting in the 1990s6 but also by the fact that most of the recent measures that were adopted to solve them have not succeeded. In Eden, many of the seleção give up any aspiration to change society at all at the very beginning. Instead, they address more specific problems, sometimes in rather whimsical ways. One of the major dilemmas the creators wanted to highlight was that of young people and some social phenomena that tended to be associated

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with youths, such as NEETs (niito, ‘not in education, employment or training’) and the hikikomori.7 Eden opts for a refreshing approach in a media environment that more often than not tends to blame the precariat and their supposed lack of initiative and industriousness for their own unstable situation (Allison 2013: 35–36, 50). Media discourses sometimes imply that the country’s economic stagnation is due to the younger generations’ failure to thrive. In Eden, the characters falling into these categories (and sometimes deliberately choosing to stick by them) are mostly cast in a positive light. It is not as if Kamiyama takes on a situationist approach. We never see any ‘Don’t ever work!’ graffiti like the one that became famous in the May ’68 movement in Paris (Vila-Matas 2007: 142). In a way, had he done that, he would have been validating the criticism reproduced in mainstream media. Instead, he shows young characters struggling to find more fulfilling ways of life than the default path that assumes that university graduates will find work in Japanese corporations. Also depicted are the matters of economic class and an availability of opportunities that influence the behaviour and decisions of the characters regarding their future. Thus Saki Morimi, who is an orphan living with her older sister’s family, and Osugi, a fellow student who comes from a lower income family, both engage in the shūshoku katsudō (job-hunting) period during their final year at university. This involves endless job interviews in order to find work. In contrast, the head at the Eden of the East project, a fellow student named Hirasawa, can afford to delay his graduation but only because his family is able to support him. While it has been argued that the Japanese tend to adopt a self-confident attitude towards these interviews,8 it does not seem that the interviews themselves (even when there is not an immediate rejection of the candidate) are a positive experience. In one of these interviews, Saki is shown to be the subject of verbal derision and has a bowl of noodles poured over her at the company’s cafeteria after the meeting, by none other than the employee that had just interviewed her. In the past, one might cope with unpleasantness for the sake of job stability, but lifelong employment in Japan has all but vanished except for a small percentage of the population. Much has been written about the changes in labour market in the last decade, especially after the Labour Dispatch Law passed in 2004 under the Koizumi legislation.9 There have been claims that ‘young labor market entrants have borne the brunt of resulting burdens’ (Toivonen et al. 2011). [F]or a country that once prided itself on lifelong employment, one-third of all workers today are only irregularly employed. Holding jobs that are part time, temporary, or contract labor, irregular workers lack job security, benefits or

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decent wages. A surprising 77 percent earn less than the poverty level, qualifying them – by the government’s own calibration – as ‘working poor.’ The situation is even worse for women and youths; one-half of all young workers (between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four) and 70% of all female workers are irregularly employed. (Allison 2013: 5; quoting data from Yuasa 2008)

With such poor prospects, fewer and fewer people are willing to invest the time and energy required for chasing a career. Traditional expectations of maturity and masculinity are now being negotiated by both men and women in novel and complex ways (Cook 2013; Toivonen et al. 2011). Toivonen et al. (2011) identify five adaptive categories amongst the young labour market entrants: conformists, innovators, ritualists, retreatists and quiet mavericks. The retreatist category has received much media attention during the last years, and it is often implied that these young people are responsible for the waning future prospects of Japan as a rich, developed country. The retreatists are ‘disillusioned with both dominant goals and means; disengage from mainstream society in various ways; receive no rewards; [and are] burdened by stigma’. Examples are ‘socially withdrawn hikikomori and workless “NEETs”’ (Toivonen et al. 2011: 4). Even without in-depth critical discourse analysis, one can detect an alarmist and overblown tone in much of the media treatment. It often seems that the generation represented by Atō Saizō in Eden tries to pinpoint one singular cause or dominant factor that would serve as an explanation for the different and multifaceted ills that plague Japanese society.

What Generations? It is important to notice that Eden does not set out to establish a bipolar generational rift in black and white terms. As well as the older generation, who recall growing up during the war, and the twenty-first century generation in their twenties, other age ranges are represented. Even amongst the older generation, Hiura, a doctor on the verge of retirement who was also chosen as a seleção, can hardly be accused of being overbearing or judgemental. The only character that qualifies as a child (a female computer whizz nicknamed Micchon) does not even try to represent more transversal age traits. Different cohorts of baby boomers (1947–49, 1971–74) are also portrayed. Most conspicuously, there is former bureaucrat, Mononobe, who is a cynical and manipulative pragmatist; there is also the ‘big sister’ of the Eden of the East student crew, a lawyer with a social conscience; and finally one of the protagonists’ mothers, who has trouble getting by and is slaving away as a waitress, also makes

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a significant appearance. As well there is the generation of those who joined the workforce relatively recently and are in their thirties, portrayed by characters who seem worlds apart: the company manager of a male modelling agency, Diana Kuroha Shiratori, and Saki’s big sister and her husband, who are both hard-working small bakery owners with a baby.10 The story’s main characters are the circle of students we meet through Morimi Saki and Takizawa Akira. While the narrator sometimes focuses externally on secondary characters (such as the corrupt middle-age police officer Kondō, another seleção), the characters on which the narrative focuses most are the young adults Saki and Takizawa. Both were born in January 1989 (Saki on the sixth, and Akira on the seventh), at the very end of the Shōwa era and the economic bubble’s peak, and the series actually foregrounds this fact. The narrator often focuses internally on both characters, portraying them in a positive light. The storytelling also puts other secondary young characters in the spotlight and gives them a voice (such as level-headed Hirasawa, or hikikomori IT genius Itazu, nicknamed Pants). Thus, the anime displays the point of view of many young people towards unemployment and the lack of job opportunities. Granted, Japan’s unemployment rate is 2.5% as of April 2018. In 2009, the rate had reached a peak 5.5%, but it has consistently dropped since then.11 Nevertheless, that is a result of Japan’s dwindling population and labour force. The real problem is the precarity and insecurity of the job market, as well as the lack of career advancement prospects for most of the people joining the workforce (Allison 2013; Japan Times 2017), and that is also reflected in Eden. It is important to remember that young adults are also the show’s main target audience. Still, the earnestness displayed by the main protagonist falls very much in line with the gambarism discourses of giving-it-all efforts.12 This promotion of industriousness has often been exploited by official communications in order to foster conformity and counter critical voices. More often than not, such values are interiorized and spontaneously reproduced by large segments of the population. Such was the case in 2011 after the Triple Disaster: ‘Banners posted everywhere read: Nihon tōitsu (Japan, as one unit), Nippon ganbarō! (Hang in there, Japan!)’ (Allison 2013: 184). Thus, the creators of Eden negotiate different discourses and interpretations when positioning themselves. In interviews, Kamiyama makes clear that the question of prospects and opportunities available to youngsters willing to join the workforce has been on his mind for some time: When I was starting out, I used to bring my drafts to the likes of Sony and the Shochiku film company. They didn’t take me seriously most of the time

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and so I was a frustrated kid. Now I realize that that’s not the way it works. Inexperienced freelance animation directors are simply never taken notice of. In those days, I was so naive. I had no idea. When I look around, my staff provides perfect models: some walking about intently, trying to look smarter; some with low esteem who undervalue themselves; some jumping onto any opportunity they see; and others just toiling away at their given jobs. But everyone is doing his and her best to make S.A.C.13 better. … I guess I was hoping that the positive and ideal aspects of the characters in the anime would transfer onto my staff at the studio. Or perhaps I was thinking that it would be awesome if my staff consciously imitated the characters. (Production I.G. 2006)

Clearly Kamiyama’s age and background also have formed his vision of the world. For one, he is mainly focused on the people who have had access to higher education and hold a degree. Also, his own experience has taught him that even after getting a break, a person has to keep working just as hard, if not more so, than before; and it also taught him that he could not always have things his way, even if he was the project’s director. The end of the quotation also hints at the creator’s awareness of the media’s power to influence or affect the viewers. Their attempt to achieve a balanced, rounded representation of the factors and actors involved in contemporary social issues seems to be a conscious decision by the authors.14

Eden Need Not Be Utopian For almost two decades now, media and public attention to these social problems has been gathering momentum, up to the point where there is now a considerable archive of media products that touch upon hikikomori, unemployment, labour hardships, welfare deficits, cyberbullying and gender violence. All of these are issues are represented in Eden of the East. While most of these topics have been tackled in one way or another by different anime creators in previous decades, Eden does not just focus on one issue and one individual, or on just the internal dynamics of a small group. These are not individual difficulties but rather social phenomena experienced by all of Japan’s population – herein lies the originality of the series and of Kamiyama’s approach. For instance, early in the narrative, Takizawa and Hirasawa, the manager of the Eden of the East social network, plan to set up a new model for companies, one that they claim would embarrass other economic agents more reluctant to innovate. Soon the Eden of the East group finds out that it is easier said than done and that the category of NEET does not

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neatly correspond to the category of misunderstood yet altruistic young people. There is one episode where a few NEETs employed by Takizawa commit burglaries. One of the more economically and socially vulnerable members of the seleção defends the option of starting a war that would wipe away inherited privileges and opportunities, and which also would punish those who have been exploiting the inequalities built into the social order. This plan also suits the former senior bureaucrat Mononobe, who sees the opportunity for another postwar reconstruction of Japan as the way to implement far-reaching reforms. This subplot echoes a 2007 article entitled ‘Kibō wa sensō: Maruyama Masao wo hippatakitai 31 sai furītā’ (Hope is War: A Thirty-One-Year-Old Freeter that Wants to Smack Maruyama Masao), which was published in the journal Ronza. The author and freeter mentioned in the title was Akagi Tomohiro, who stated: During the period of high economic growth after the war, there was temporarily a big opening in class that has since closed up. … But, as Japan has acquired stability [antei suru ni tsurete], mobility (ryūdōka) has also been lost. … It’s been more than ten years now since we, low-wage earners, have been thrown out (hōridasarete kara) by society. Nonetheless, we don’t get any support and we are accused of lacking will and of contributing to the lowering of the GDP. … If peace continues, all of this will stay the same. What can break this stalemate and spur mobility again? There’s only one possibility: WAR. Economically weak people like myself want relief from our travails, social status, the means to support (our) family, and the possibility of earning respect as independent human beings [ichininmae no ningen] from society. Aren’t these natural desires? In order for this to happen, unfortunately, we need war. For, without it, social differences will only exacerbate. War is tragic. It’s tragic because people who have things will lose something. But, for us who have nothing, it’s an OPPORTUNITY. (Akagi 2007: 58, in Allison 2013: 60)15

While Eden does not side with the character that spouts similarly twisted arguments, it does not avert its focus from the fact that there are people who find merit in such lucubration. In the second season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2004–5), Kamiyama had explored the conflation of refugees (nanmin) from other countries with national ‘refugees’ – a sizeable segment of Japanese citizens who felt that they had no hopes for their future, were surviving on a string of precarious jobs and thus believed that they had been displaced from their own country. The occurrences of the term nanmin, together with wākingu pua, ‘working poor’, in the media increased during the second half of the 2000s (see Allison 2013: 47). It would seem that the creative team of Eden was invested in exploring ways for the home-grown nanmin to become political subjects with a say in the direction of the nation.

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The creators also deviate from the usual allusions to Japan’s selective memory regarding its history.16 Amnesia becomes not just a character trait but a storytelling device. As a story moves forward, it also reconstructs the protagonist’s past. Moreover, this amnesia is key to the reflective implications of the narrative. Thus the aggressions that were both perpetrated and experienced during the Greater East Asia War (Dai Tōa Sensō) are conjured in other ways in Eden, most notably through the visual metaphors in scenes from Akira’s reveries, where faceless, emaciated bodies emerge from the empty craters left behind by the missile bombings of Tokyo during the Careless Monday and the following incident – these scenes also connect with the crisis of Japanese masculinities, since the sexless bodies are called johnnies. Nevertheless, those haunting scenes are anecdotal in the overall run­ time of the series and the movies. Indeed, in the story, the war is akin to a mythical event that precedes history. The destruction of historical records by the deposed officials after Japan’s surrender lends weight to such mythologization. The real problematization of historical amnesia focuses on how it enabled the appearance and endurance of a postwar ‘Japanese collective subjectivity’ doxa (Igarashi 2000: 208).17 When it comes to the account of the country’s reconstruction and economic miracle, the series’ creators question the moral high ground adopted by some politicians and media who claim to represent the older generations’ point of view. The character and story treatment vindicate setting the record straight for fairness and truth’s sake. It is presented as part of a Chomskyan drive to cross-check and test sources. The main concern is that the immediacy and fragmentation of attention in the society of the spectacle will result in an spectacularization of historical conscience and future-oriented projects, turning these into commodities alienated from the subject, who is expected to consume whatever understanding of the past and expectations for the future have been pre-packaged and presented as the ‘best deal’. Chapters 1–4 of this volume can be read as explorations of how the Japanese government’s strategies to collectivize both guilt and repentance (cf. Dower 1999: 496 and passim) were considered in postwar media. Certainly, young tribes have been portrayed since early in the postwar period as a liability for the rest of the society (Marx 2015: passim). Moreover, and especially since the 1990s, young women have been accused of endangering the ‘reproduction’ of the nation as soon as some were perceived to be departing from the postwar family system. More and more throughout the 2000s the press and political parties, such as the Liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Japan, targeted youth at large for their lack of self-sacrifice and drive. Younger generations are expected to take

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responsibility for policies they did not have a hand in designing and did not vote for either. It is hard not to be reminded of Maruyama’s remark on the immediate postwar cephalopod tendencies: Since military and civilian officials had spent the previous two weeks destroying incriminating documents, there was a certain perverse truth to the notion that responsibility was, at that very moment, being leveled and collectivized. No one wanted it, no one claimed it. A few years later, the political scientist Maruyama Masao cleverly compared the government’s ‘collective repentance’ campaign to the cloud of black ink a squid squirts out in its desperate attempt to escape a threatening situation [Maruyama, M. 1956: 322]. Although some individuals and groups did take the issue of personal responsibility seriously and engage in harsh self-criticism, the official version of collective repentance – the squid’s ink, as it were – essentially faded away. Few individuals really believed that ordinary people bore responsibility for the war equal to that of the military and civilian groups. ‘This war was begun while we farmers knew nothing about it,’ one irate rural man exclaimed, ‘and ended in defeat while we believed we were winning. There is no need to do repentance for something we weren’t in on. Repentance is necessary for those who betrayed and deceived the people.’ Another member of the hundred million was even terser. ‘If collective repentance of the hundred million means those in charge of the war are now trying to distribute responsibility among the people,’ he wrote to a newspaper, ‘then it’s sneaky’ [Asahi Shimbun, 19 October 1945]. (Dower 1999: 496)

This is enforced forgetfulness and not just amnesia by accident or apathy. It renders part of history as invisible and makes sure that if it were to be remembered its unfolding would not be associated with the wilfully elusive seat of power. While such collective amnesia is condemned, the anime’s narration also makes it a point to prove that individuals should not be too beholden to the past, be it collective or individual. As the story progresses, Takizawa Akira learns that he is not special; he was no genius before the game started, just another youngster with a temporary job. The mystery of whether his father might have been a notable politician is shown to be irrelevant. The only thing that sets Takizawa apart is that he is willing to try things not tried before. He himself is not convinced of the efficacy of the measures he comes up with, but he is willing to take that first step (senri no michi ippo kara, ‘even the longest path starts with one step’). In contrast, many of the other characters are trying to reproduce the past conditions that led to the Japanese economic miracle. Through Takizawa, Kamiyama posits that the past does not hold all the answers for the future and that people need to be willing to try new policies and build a new social contract. While that is hardly a revolutionary proposition, it is certainly not mainstream in a cultural tradition whose philosophical proposals have leant on hundreds

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of years of Buddhist scriptures, Confucian classics and neo-Confucian commentaries, Ancient Studies (Kogaku) and Nativist Studies (Kokugaku) that exalted the oldest Japanese chronicles and poetic anthologies.18 Judging from prevalent collective memories, political discourses and media accounts, it would seem that no generation compares favourably to the one that rebuilt the country during the postwar period. However, Kamiyama draws attention to the different shades of grey in the pictures of each passing generation,19 and he proposes that the social issues affecting the collective environment should be addressed by all members of society instead of merely passing them on to each succeeding generation. The imaginative responses that sprout from Takizawa’s actions consist of the reclaiming of a public space (an abandoned mall) by a small group of young NEETs, who set in motion a few grass-roots economic and employment initiatives with a cooperative bent. Saki informs us that nothing much has changed really, but maybe some deeper change has started to germinate though we may not be able to perceive it yet. For all of the plot’s energy and ambition, the resolution aims more for the moral high ground than concrete policies. It boils down to the need to engage in some sort of action in order to achieve some sort of result. The final instalment of the franchise, Paradise Lost, revolves around the idea of being paid to perform a job or service (instead of becoming the godlike, worshipped costumer who just spends away and pays other people to provide a service) and taking responsibility for one’s own goals and own network of social connections. That is, in a media environment saturated with consumerist messages, the director focuses on the labouring and earning dimensions of modern capitalist economies. The weaving of the narrative itself, together with the paratext of bonus materials (interviews, commentaries) included in the released discs, show that the creators were aiming for the more mature segment of young adults, while at the same time trying to retain ‘charming points’ and avoid alienating a more general, less-invested audience. Each frame in animation is labour intensive, expensive, and that means that a lot of thought had gone into it even before proceeding with the animation itself. The kind of references and allusions that the crew drew upon are a testimony to the saturated and multilayered universe that they strove to create. That being said, there is a difference between aiming for a David Lynch-style atmosphere in an oneiric scene and actually achieving such an effect.20 Also, an Eden viewer might find that the storytelling risks derailment under the weight of so many different plot lines and such a host of characters. Regardless of particular opinions about the narrative merits and the analytical prowess, the results in Eden are undeniably compelling. While there have been lots of anime works revolving around social problems

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before and after this franchise, most are quite contained regarding their subject matter and the roster of characters and points of view. Almost a decade after its first broadcast, Eden of the East stands as an example of the debates and ideas that animated works engaging in ambitious social commentary can foster. Artur Lozano-Méndez is Lecturer of East Asian Studies at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). He holds a PhD in translation and intercultural studies (UAB), specializing in research on contemporary East Asia, particularly in relation to cultural studies with a focus on Japan. His publications include ‘Mamoru Oshii’s Exploration of the Potentialities of Consciousness in a Globalised Capitalist Network’ (Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2015), and he has edited El Japón contemporáneo: Una aproximación desde los estudios culturales (Bellaterra, 2016).

Notes The work conducted for this volume has been supported by the R+D project ‘Paradigmas emergentes, política(s), dinámicas socioculturales y sus consecuencias’ (FFI2015–70513-P) financed by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) from Spain.  1. ‘My dream was to impress people with my work, as I was impressed and influenced by many anime in the past’ (retrieved 14 July 2014 from http://www.productionig.com/ contents/works_sp/02_/s08_/).  2. Moe designates characters that are ‘eager or perky, not overly independent, and call forth a desire in the viewer to protect them and nurture them. The term is also used to describe any preciously cute item’ (retrieved 14 July 2014 from http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/lexicon.php?id=77). For more on moe, see Galbraith (2009). Regarding Kamiyama’s opinion on moe, see APA (2011: 2:43 onwards).  3. While his action scenes and narrative pacing have consistently improved and can be put alongside some Bourne trilogy set pieces, Kamiyama is still accused of having many scenes where characters do nothing but stand around delivering explanatory, expositive speeches. The question of why this is frowned upon by cinema criticism in an age when more and more people soliloquize in real life and social media would make an interesting discussion. Still, it is remarkable that a director involved in high-profile animated productions does not just play it safe by resorting to genre tropes and winks to the fans’ knowledge of the medium and the archive. This in turn reflects the potential target audience in the eyes of the director.  4. The kanji for the character’s name are allegoric (亜東 才蔵), which can be read as ‘East Asian reservoir of talent.’  5. The game is loosely inspired by football, of which Mr. Outside is a fan. There is a referee, the sapōta (supporter) who eliminates any player disobeying the rules, and there are eleven players in the line-up, as in any football team, and there is no opposing team. The hand-picked group is named the seleção, which alludes to the Brazilian national ‘selection’ team. The series uses the term seleção to refer to any individual player separately and not so much the whole team. Juiz is the Portuguese word for ‘judge’ – there

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 6.  7.  8.

 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

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is a different one for each player and they execute the players’ orders. They do not act as referees, but they do make remarks or express disagreement occasionally. Even in the last decades of the Shōwa era (1926–89), the reality of the labour market never mirrored the narrative of Japan as a predominantly middle class society that had developed since the 1970s (Allison 2013: 23, 27; Sugimoto 2010: 1.I.2 and 1.I.3b). Hikikomori is the term that is used to designate the individuals who suffer from social withdrawal syndrome and refuse to leave their homes or, when they live with their families, their room. According to Yamaguchi et al. (2008: 373), the reason for the positive attitude of the interviewees obeys the logic that ‘It would be easy to imagine that self-critical attitudes (stressing one’s shortcomings) would not create a favorable impression on the interviewer.’ For a bibliography of Japanese sources, see Cook (2013: 30). Hiura and Kuroha take a much more focused and contained approach to their task as part of the seleção. Hiura builds a hospital for old people, which also manages a programme of grants that allow for the families of the patients to move to a location near the hospital and to switch jobs to positions near their new dwellings. Kuroha emasculates all male acquaintances who entertain humiliating or degrading their female partners sexually. Her stance bears similarities with the dowager and Aomame characters in Murakami Haruki’s 1Q84 (2009–10). Kuroha calls this johnygari (hunting Johnnys), which is reminiscent of the oyajigari (mugging old men) cases in the mid1990s (see Kinsella 2013). Unemployment information is publicly available at the website of the Statistics Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, at http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/ roudou/index.html. The verb ganbaru means to work hard, to do one’s best, and it is easily one of the most used verbs in Japanese. S.A.C. is an acronym for the IP Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex. Nakamura Satoru, chief animation director, declared in an Anime Expo panel in 2010 that they wanted to impress audiences both with the art but also with the deepness achieved in the story (rap779: 1:28–2:09). Anime Expo is a yearly convention held in Los Angeles, California. Square brackets in this quote are in the original. As a Spaniard, I feel bound to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that Japan is far from being the only country in the world that is still both processing and averting its eyes from the violent events of the twentieth century. Igarashi comments on the nationalistic underpinnings of Katō Norihiro’s (1998) proposal, which he summarizes like this: ‘Katō Norihiro expresses his uneasiness toward the ways in which the images of suffering Asian bodies galvanized the debate in the 1990s over responsibilities for the war. Katō senses the lack of desire within Japan to contemplate the legacies of the past in an everyday context. He locates a void within Japan, a void that prevents its citizens from truly feeling the sufferings of Asian peoples. Katō proposes to fill this void with an ethical and collective subject that would be capable of accepting the legacies of Japan’s colonialism as ‘our’ (watashi no) history. Postwar Japan should not exclusively depend on the exterior for its critical reflections: they must come from within’ (Igarashi 2000: 208). Compare this stance with that of the philosopher Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), according to John Dower: ‘One could hardly imagine a sharper contrast than that between Tanabe’s densely reasoned disquisition on zange, or repentance, and the government’s bromides on the same topic – with the exception of the fact that Tanabe’s ‘repentance’, too, was intensely nationalistic. His passionate reworking of Shinran’s vision emphasized not just self-criticism or criticism of Japan, but criticism of all contemporary nations and cultures. Tanabe accepted

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defeat, acknowledged wrongdoing and despair, demanded repentance, envisioned rebirth – and did all this in a way that emphasized the unique, even superior, traditional wisdom of Japan. He claimed to be illuminating a singular Japanese path to redemption, a transcendent wisdom greater than anything Western thought had produced. For many thoughtful and tormented patriots, here was a sophisticated philosophy of contrition that snatched a kind of moral victory from the jaws of defeat. In the ruins of the most destructive war the world had ever known, for which Japan admittedly bore great responsibility, the path to redemption – and to global salvation as well – lay in the words of a Japanese prophet’ (1999: 497; see also Goto-Jones 2009: 63–65). 18. While I do not forget about the Rangaku (Dutch/Western Learning), or the translation surge of the Meiji era, or the contacts of the School of Kyoto with Western philosophical currents, I am referring here to the notion of coming up with untested ideas rather than adapting pre-existing ones. 19. See Martinez’s Chapter 1 in this volume: Kurosawa felt compelled to do the same during the postwar era. 20. The opening scene of Paradise Lost, the second theatrical release, is a dream sequence. On the commentary track, the creative team specifies that they were aiming for a David Lynch-like impression.

References Akagi, T. 2007. ‘Kibō ha Sensō: Maruyama Masao wo Hippatakitai 31 sai Furītā’, Ronza, January 1: 53–59. Allison, A. 2013. Precarious Japan. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Anime News Network. 2002–2018. ‘Kenji Kamiyama’. Retrieved 19 July 2014 and 22 April 2018 from http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/people. php?id=91. ______. 2008–2014. ‘Eden of the East (TV)’. Retrieved 19 July 2014 from http:// www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=10474. ______. n.d. ‘Moe’. Retrieved 7 September 2014 from http://www. animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/lexicon.php?id=77. APA (Asia Pacific Arts). 2011. ‘Interview with Eden of the East’s Kenji Kamiyama’. Retrieved 19 July 2014 from https://youtu.be/ONsRBDFwyMk. Cook, E.E. 2013. ‘Expectations of Failure: Maturity and Masculinity for Freeters in Contemporary Japan’, Social Science Japan Journal 16(1): 29–43. Dower, J.W. 1999. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. Galbraith, P. 2009. ‘Moe: Exploring Virtual Potential in Post-millennial Japan’, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 9(3). Retrieved 20 July 2014 from http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/articles/2009/Galbraith.html. Goto-Jones, C. 2009. ‘Más allá del Arrepentimiento: La Filosofía de la Postguerra y el Legado de la Segunda Guerra Mundial’, Revista de Occidente 334: 43–68. Igarashi, Y. 2000. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Japan Times, The. 2017. ‘Japan’s Ultralow Jobless Rate Masks Grim Reality’, 31 March. Retrieved 29 April 2018 from https://www.

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japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/05/31/business/economy-business/ japans-ultralow-jobless-rate-masks-grim-reality/. Katō, N. 1998. Sengo wo Sengo Igo Kangaeru. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Kinsella, S. 2013. Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan. London and New York: Routledge. Maruyama, M. 1956. ‘Shisō no Kotoba’, Shisō, March, 381. Marx, W.D. 2015. Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. New York: Basic Books. Murakami, H. 2003. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. London: Vintage. _______. 2011. 1Q84. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. O’Bryan, S. 2009. Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Production I.G. 2006. ‘Interview with Kenji Kamiyama’. Retrieved 27 July 2010 from http://www.productionig.com/contents/works_sp/02_/s08_/. Production I.G. 2009–2010. ‘Eden of the East – The Highly Anticipated Kenji Kamiyama’s New Project is on the Move!’. Retrieved 18 July 2014 from http:// www.productionig.com/contents/works_sp/68_/s01_/index.html. rap779. 2010. ‘AX 2010: Eden of the East Day 1 Panel Part 2’. Retrieved 18 July 2014 from https://youtu.be/x77tEgTCMy8. Ruh, B. 2004. Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Statistics Bureau. 2010. ‘2010 Population Census’. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication. Retrieved 21 July 2014 from www.stat.go.jp/english/data/ kokusei/ and from http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/kokusei/pdf/20111026. pdf. Sugimoto, Y. 2010. An Introduction to Japanese Society, 3rd ed. Port Melbourne and New York: Cambridge University Press. Toivonen, T., V. Norasakkunkit and Y. Uchida. 2011. ‘Unable to Conform, Unwilling to Rebel? Youth, Culture, and Motivation in Globalizing Japan’, Frontiers in Psychology 2. Retrieved 20 July 2014 from http://journal.frontiersin. org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00207/full. Vila-Matas, E. 2007. Bartleby y Compañía. Barcelona: Anagrama. Yamada, M. 1999. Parasaito Shinguru no Jidai [Era of the Parasite Single]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. Yamaguchi, S., et al. 2008. ‘Motivated Expression of Self-Esteem Across Cultures’, in R.M. Sorrentino and S. Yamaguchi (eds), Handbook of Motivation and Cognition Across Cultures. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 369–92. Yuasa, M. 2008. Hanhinkon: ‘Suberidai shakai’ kara no Dasshutsu [Reverse Poverty: Escape from a ‘Sliding Down Society’]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho.

Filmography Akira, dir. K. Otomo, Tokyo, Akira Committee, Mash Room, Toho, Hakuhodo, TMS, 1988 [DVD]. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, dir. K. Kamiyama, Tokyo, Production I.G., 2002–3 [TV Series].

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Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG, dir. K. Kamiyama, Tokyo, Production I.G., 2004–5 [TV series]. Higashi no Eden (Eden of the East), dir. K. Kamiyama, 11 episodes TV series, Tokyo, Production I.G; Texas, US, Flower Mound and Funimation Productions; London, Manga Entertainment, 2009 [Blu-ray]. Higashi no Eden Gekijōban I: The King of Eden (Eden of the East: The King of Eden), dir. K. Kamiyama, Tokyo, Production I.G; Texas, US, Flower Mound and Funimation Productions; London, Manga Entertainment, 2009 [Blu-ray]. Higashi no Eden Gekijōban II: Paradise Lost (Eden of the East: Paradise Lost), dir. K. Kamiyama, Tokyo, Production I.G; Texas, US, Flower Mound and Funimation Productions; London, Manga Entertainment, 2010 [Blu-ray]. Jenosaibā (Genocyber), dir. K. Ohata, Tokyo, C. Moon, Artmic, 1993–1994 [OVA]. Majo no takkyūbin (Kiki’s Delivery Service), dir. H. Miyazaki, Tokyo, Studio Ghibli, 1989 [DVD]. Medarotto (Medabots), dir. T. Okamura, Tokyo, Bee Train, TV Tokyo, 1999–2000 [TV series]. Roujin Z, dir. H. Kitakubo, Tokyo, APPP, 1991 [DVD].

Chapter 8

Rethinking Anime in East Asia

Creative Labour in Transnational Production, or What Gets Lost in Translation Tomohiro Morisawa

Anime and the Global Flow This chapter aims to align an analysis of Japanese animation with the growing body of material on East Asian popular culture, and to ethnographically engage with its transnational production networks in Northeast and Southeast Asia. For scholars of Japanese studies as well as those concerned with the global flows of cultural products, anime today stands as an example of non-western forms of cultural globalization (Allison 2006; Brown 2006). However, the strong focus on anime’s globalizing consumption in this literature has often led to an important analytical omission: today Japanese animation’s production process also constitutes a highly transnational network between studios in Japan and other East Asian countries. Of particular interest to the themes of this book are the possible ways in which this East Asian production process relates to the various discourses of memory discussed in earlier chapters. Does the outsourced production of this ostensibly ‘Japanese’ cultural product evoke the history that continues to haunt the geopolitics of the region today? Or, rather, do the popular appeals of anime characters and visuals form a kind of smokescreen over such painful memories? Are new forms of Japanese identities made, reiterated and somehow maintained in these productions? We shall look at what gets lost in translation and what gets to keep its identity in the transnational production process. Around the mid-1970s, long before its global distribution began to attract academic attention in the 2000s (e.g. MacWilliams 2008; Napier 2001), Japanese animation studios had begun outsourcing parts of their

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production work to East Asian subcontractors, in search of cheaper labour. In the anthropology of Japan, a cohort of writings on the topic of anime first began to appear in the mid-to late-1990s (e.g. Martinez 1998).1 While many scholars have looked at the distribution and consumption end of anime’s globalization in and vis-à-vis the West, anime is equally or arguably more widely spread or better integrated within the popular cultural repertoire of East Asia (Yoon and Malecki 2009). Taking note of this observation, this chapter is an attempt to rethink anime from the perspective of transnational popular cultural production in the region, much of it once part, reluctantly, of the Japanese empire. The dominant theme in this book on Japanese media is the ­interrelation – or interstice – between memory and popular culture in the early decades of postwar Japan. While the past events and phenomena that are filtered through the political and sociocultural optics of the present are today not only limited to the Second World War (see Treglia and Hidaka’s chapters in this volume), Japan’s imperial past and wartime aggression continue to remain the explosive object of mnemonic politics, not only in Japan but also across East Asia.2 In the introduction to Chapter 1, Martinez raises an interesting point about this relationship between Japan’s postwar decades and the shifting significance of its wartime memory politics. Drawing on scholars such as Seaton (2007) and Bourdaghs (2005), she discusses how Japan’s postwar existence, the political, sociocultural and psychological contexts of which continue to affect Japanese society even today, may better be understood more as a particular configuration of postcoloniality in which Japan finds itself in East Asia. For my purpose, this analytical shift from postwar to postcolonial in the analysis of Japanese popular culture is an interesting one. This is because, in some significant ways, Japanese popular cultural products – from film, television dramas, music, literature, anime and manga to video games – are today also consumed widely across Northeast and Southeast Asia. In East Asian studies, the notion of ‘East Asian popular culture’ is something that has gained a certain conceptual currency among scholars working on transnational cultural flows across the region over the recent decade (Cho 2011; Chua 2004; Hillenbrand 2009; Iwabuchi 2002; Kim 2009; Ko 2003). The momentum behind this development has been the idea that ‘[s]ince the 1980s, popular cultural products have criss-crossed the national borders of East Asian countries, enabling a discursive construction of an “East Asian Popular Culture” as an object of analysis’ (Chua 2004: 200). The emergence of this ‘pan-Asian form of pop culture’ (Cho 2011: 383) is taken to be significant because many scholars engaging with this phenomenon find in it a corresponding emergence of a different kind of East Asian identity from the past, which is at once transnational yet

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regional, pointing to a new configuration of imagining and being in East Asia (Hillenbrand 2009). As Iwabuchi (2002) makes clear, however, anyone researching the circulation of Japanese cultural products in East Asia needs to pay careful attention to the region’s postcolonial context. At the same time, in many instances, products such as Hello Kitty (Ko 2003) or authors like Murakami Haruki (Hillenbrand 2009) also appear to transcend such past and present contexts in their popular reception. What sustains the East Asian sphere’s regional cosmopolitan, popular cultural consumption is a relative coevality in its historical temporalities: in industrialization, modernization and urbanization, especially during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Cho 2011; Chua 2004; Iwabuchi 2002). Disjuncture does exist, given the different speeds at which rapid industrialization was achieved in Northeast and Southeast Asia, and given Japan’s problematic position in the twentieth century history as the only non-Western colonizer. Yet, the point of departure here is that through the circulation of Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese or Chinese/ Hong Kong popular cultural products, ‘[c]itizens of Asia from Seoul to Singapore’ come to imagine and participate in a primarily ‘urban and middle-class’ Asia that is ‘comfortably estranged from the demands of family and tradition’ (Hillenbrand 2009: 716). I will engage with this emerging discussion on East Asian popular culture by elucidating what such a transnational regional sphere of cultural consumption might look like from the perspective of the regional production circuit of Japanese animation. The ethnographic materials I discuss in this article are drawn from the doctoral fieldwork I carried out in the Japanese animation industry (2009–10), during which time I undertook fieldwork in Manila, the Philippines, to follow up the industry’s international subcontracting network. Alongside China and South Korea, the Philippines’ standing is unique in the region in that, unlike Euro-American locations, it is both a major production and consumption centre of Japanese animation in the world. Today, while many of the manual and labour-intensive processes of animation production are subcontracted to studios across East Asia, core processes such as character designs and scenario continue to be concentrated in studios located in Tokyo. Thus, while memories of the Second World War and Japan’s imperialist past did not appear to play a discernible role in the way Filipino animation makers went about their work, as creative subcontractors they were implicated in a different kind of political economy. In short, the international division of labour in animation production between Japan and the Philippines was also a creative division of labour. This often placed aspiring Filipino animators in a flustered – and at times also a

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paradoxical – subject position in the transnational production process of Japanese animation.

Outsourcing Animation During my participant observation fieldwork in the Japanese animation industry, I worked as an intern in a major animation production company in Tokyo, which I call Sprite Studios. I started my participant observation fieldwork at Sprite in October 2009, working with the production team for the TV-based series the studio was producing at the time, to which I have given the pseudonym Stardust Girl. Stardust Girl was one of Sprite Studios’ premier productions at the time and chronicled the story of four middle school girls who transform into battling super heroines – stardust girls – and confront the evil forces invading their town from a parallel world. The main target audience of Stardust Girl was female children aged from between four to seven, and the show’s main engine for profit generation was toy merchandizing. The show’s popularity could be glimpsed, for instance, from its merchandizing sales that amassed more than $120 million in the 2009 Japanese market alone. The basic unit of animation production is called a ‘cut’. A cut in animation, as in live action, refers to a single unit of animated footage. An animated film, in turn, is the sum total of its composite cuts. Imagine, for instance, an animated sequence in which a girl walks into her local café and orders a latte. Suppose the scene is depicted as a series of three related sequences of action: the first sequence shows the girl walking through the glass door. The second follows her as she moves over to the counter, and the third sequence depicts a frontal view of the girl’s face and chest as she orders her latte. Those three sequences will make up Cut 1, Cut 2 and Cut 3. Generally speaking, an average half-hour episode of animation in Japan is composed of approximately 300 cuts. One of the most common ways of characterizing the production process of animation in the industry is to conceptualize it as a ‘stream’ (nagare). One may better understand this by looking at the production flow chart in Figure 8.1. At the top of the chart is ‘Project Planning’, and at the bottom is ‘Product Delivery’. At the Project Planning phase, there are only ideas, words and communications for a new animated show. By the time the production reaches ‘Project Delivery’, those ideas are fully visualized, produced and materialized as a complete animated film. What happens in between these two production stages – the planning and the delivery – is a gradual process of visualization whereby the production division that corresponds to each production process contributes different components of

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Figure 8.1 Production flow chart and IB-TP.

labour to the animation cuts. In this, the production process of animation was locally conceptualized as a metaphorical ‘stream’ of production divisions through which the animation cuts flowed as represented in Figure 8.1. The incremental processes of visualization and the enhancement of different visual qualities become visible as the animation cuts travel along the production stream. Commercial animation production in Japan entails a geographically expansive, but disjointed, spatial network consisting of many subcontracting specialist studios. For certain labour-intensive production divisions, this spatially disjointed network stretches far beyond Tokyo’s geographical boundaries and reaches the shores of Northeast and Southeast Asia. Within the matrices of subcontracting relations, most pertinent to this

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outsourcing was the division called IB-TP (In-Betweening, Trace and Paint; see Figure 8.1). At Sprite Studios, a division called the Overseas IB-TP was responsible for handling this process, where roughly 60 to 70 percent of the IB-TP work was subcontracted to the company’s subsidiary in Manila: Sprite Studios Philippines (SSP). Without going into too much technical detail, IB, Trace and Paint are the three finalizing processes in the lower stream of the animation production flow, in which key animation drawings are ‘smoothed out’ by additional in-between drawings, digitized and finally given colours for digital composition (i.e. filming). Animators who take part in the IB process are called ‘in-betweeners’ and differentiated from those in Key Animation, the division immediately above IB. The relationship between the two classes of animators is hierarchical and based on skill and the differential need for creativity. While key animators create the animation by drawing the main sequences of action, the job of the in-betweeners is to trace those animation drawings first and then add assisting drawings in-between the key animations. Since in-between drawings are based on an already drawn key animation sequence, as a rule the IB process requires less skill or creative imagination. It is, therefore, the least skilled and experienced of animators (i.e. novices just entering the trade) who work in the IB division, where the IB process also functions as on-the-job training for future key animators. Depending on the circumstances, IB may be done digitally or on paper. At SSP, the majority of the IB process was carried out on computers with the aid of an advanced pen tablet. Trace and Paint (TP) artists then added colours to the digitized IB drawings using specialist software, a keyboard and a mouse. The term ‘trace’ in the TP process is a legacy from the era of analogue cel animation, whereby the TP artists first had to ‘copy’ (i.e. trace) paper IB drawings onto animation cels before they could paint colours onto the transparent celluloid sheets. In the Japanese industry, this analogue method had ceased completely by the early 2000s, and Sprite Studios spearheaded the digitization of production in tandem with SSP. Whether analogue or digital, IB-TP comprises the most labour-intensive processes in commercial animation production in Japan, and its outsourcing had tentatively begun by the mid-1970s. There are a few sociotechnical and economic explanations for this. First, when key animations are turned into finalized digitized IB, the number of drawings more than trebles or quadruples. Since the in-betweeners not only add the assisting animation drawings but also physically trace, copy and replace all the key animation drawings, anywhere from a few to several thousand drawings need to be completed during the IB process. Even though it is technically less challenging than key animation, the sheer quantity of drawings required renders it necessary to mobilize a substantial number of animators. The

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problem of quantity is common to the TP process, in which there are a few to several dozen different colour parts to be painted per sheet for each of the thousands of IB. Secondly, there is the issue of severely limited time. In today’s Japanese animation industry, the bulk of the available production time is consumed by two canonical upper-stream production processes: ‘storyboard’ and ‘key animation’. By the time animation cuts reach the IB-TP phase, the delivery timeline is so crunched that it is necessary to mobilize large numbers of practitioners from these divisions. However, the procurement of such a large number of in-betweeners and TP artists domestically is highly constrained, both in terms of cost and the limited number of practitioners. This leads, thirdly, to the issue of income. IB-TP, especially IB, is the poorest division in the Japanese industry. Pay is based on the unit price of each IB drawing, usually around ¥250 ($3). Based on this unit price, for a novice animator to earn ¥200,000 ($2,440) monthly, roughly equivalent to the salary for new university graduates, she would have to draw 800 IBs every month. In a division where an artist is usually promoted to key animator as soon as they begin drawing 500 IBs per month, such a high number is often unrealistic. As a result, in 2009 approximately 50 percent of in-betweeners in Japan earned less than ¥1 million ($12,100), and the 40 percent who earned more than this did not reach the ¥2 million ($24,200) mark (Animator Rodo Hakusho, 2009). Those circumstances – the severe shortage of production time, substantial demand for a large number of practitioners and the unfavourable terms of labour – have contributed to the gradual shift of production to nearby overseas locations over three decades. The place of IB-TP in the animation production process is therefore a paradoxical one in today’s industry. On one hand, IB and especially TP are considered two of the less creatively and technically demanding visualization tasks in the lower stream of the production flow. On the other hand, however, the quality of IB-TP has a direct and causative bearing upon the visual quality of the final animation, and it is also the drawings done during these processes that are eventually filmed and broadcast.

Making Animation Japanese Sprite Studios Philippines (SSP) was by no means a small studio. In the years after it started life as a small joint initiative between Sprite Studios and a local Filipino company in 1986, its business had grown steadily and substantially. In early 1989, the local animation industry emerged rather suddenly in the Philippines when a disparate cohort of foreign animation

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studios took interest in the country’s English-speaking and ‘cost effective’ workforce to outsource some of the most labour intensive processes (i.e. IB-TP). The move was initiated by an Australian company called Burbank Studios in 1983, which was followed by others, including major American houses such as Hanna-Barbera Productions (known for the production of Tom and Jerry, to name but one). Sprite first began outsourcing their TP work to South Korea in 1976, but the steady rise in labour costs there soon made the company look still further offshore to Southeast Asia. The Japanese studio’s entry into a subcontracting partnership with the Filipino company in the mid-1980s needs to be understood within the context of an already established outsourcing circuit, for Sprite as the sender and Filipino subcontractors as the receivers of animation work. As the older cohort of workers at SSP attested, it was not unusual during the late 1980s and 1990s for skilled Filipino animators to keep switching between Japanese and American production houses. SSP began in the mid-1980s as a small subcontractor among other foreign subsidiaries, with only 25 TP artists. By the time of my visit in 2010, it hosted a total of 269 workers, comprising 163 employees, 99 contractual freelancers and 4 interns, and was now a wholly owned subsidiary and the chief subcontractor of the parent company in Tokyo. As an animation studio, it now had five major production divisions – Key Animation (KA), IB, Background Art (BG), CG (Computer Graphics) and TP – and was capable of hammering out up to 50,000 IB-TPs per month, roughly corresponding to 10–14 episodes of TV animation a month. So far as the IB-TP production capacity was concerned, therefore, SSP was a far larger production studio than the parent company. Yet it was Sprite’s Tokyo studio that dominated the upper-stream processes of visualization, such as character design, storyboard, key animation and, above all, the director and producer functions. When the drawing work was dispatched from Tokyo, Japanese directors based in the Tokyo studio and a Japanese assistant director stationed in Manila would hold a production meeting over the videoconferencing system. During this initial meeting, all the necessary creative directions were passed on to the Japanese staff at SSP. During my research, an assistant director called Sasakawa Taichi (male, late thirties) was responsible for filling this function at the Filipino studio. A Filipino interpreter called Jocelyn Castillo (late thirties) accompanied Sasakawa at all directorial meetings held between Tokyo and Manila, and after this initial meeting the two held another production meeting with Filipino animators, ­effectively replicating their previous one with the Japanese director(s). As someone who had worked on the creative/visual side of animation production at Sprite for many years, Sasakawa was well versed in

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the nuances and textures of the creative and technical visual directions given by Tokyo directors, but he could only speak Japanese. Jocelyn, in contrast, spoke Japanese, English and Tagalog fluently but had only a limited knowledge of the technical details of animation production. Thus, in the communication process between Tokyo and Manila, Sasakawa and Jocelyn worked together to mediate the complex creative directions from the Japanese directors to the Filipino animators; while Sasakawa interpreted the technical aspects of directions to Jocelyn, she then translated them into English or Tagalog for the Filipino animators. In this, effectively the same production meeting was convened twice, revolving around the pair as the hub of communication, in which the message passed through not only a linguistic boundary but also one of embodied knowledge, ­technical expertise and practical experience. Here we begin to witness the complex layers of communication, translation and interpretation constantly taking place as part of production outsourcing from Japan to the Philippines. These intricate layers of mediation, however, were not necessarily peculiar to the outsourcing process per se. The Japanese animation industry that agglomerated in Tokyo was itself made up of an entangled web of subcontracting. In this respect, the successful management of communication was a key aspect of the directorial function in the animation production flow, regardless of whether the work was subcontracted to a studio inside or outside Japan. However, more barriers stood between Tokyo and Manila than between Tokyo and other Japanese companies, and the layers of mediation often resulted in the production becoming lost in translation. Such traces of miscommunication usually and primarily manifested themselves visually during the production process. In the industry, errors in visualization are termed ‘retakes’, and retake cuts are sent back to the production division from which the error was determined to have originated. The identification of such retakes in a given episode is an episode’s director’s primary responsibility and also functions as a core mechanism of quality control. Formally, this is done systematically in meetings called ‘rush checks’ during the final production processes, when paper drawings of animation cuts are digitized and filmed, thus becoming animation footage. But occasions for detecting and calling retakes are in no way limited to such formalized procedures, and more minor retakes are frequently requested in earlier production phases such as during key animation. Retakes, both major and minor, are therefore neither alien nor rare in the production process. From the perspective of quality control, the director’s responsibility takes on the form of a persistent search for visualization errors that index the miscommunication across production divisions.

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In this some directors even actively create retakes from time to time when there are no technical errors in the cut itself but where minor tweaks would visibly improve the overall quality. Retakes are thus a built-in part of the animation production process and, in principle, occur whether the subcontractor was Japanese or Filipino. That being said, more layers of communication and mediation did increase the possibility of mismanaged visualization, and when retakes were called in during the outsourcing process, the errors detected were prone to be interpreted in terms of the ‘cultural differences’ between Japan and the Philippines. This tended to be a consensus view among Filipino and Japanese practitioners alike. As one Filipino interpreter at SSP (male, early thirties) explained to me in Japanese, ‘kokumin sei no chigai’ ­(differences in national characters) sometimes presented them with many practical difficulties in getting the work done. In a similar vein, Okita Tadashi (male, mid-fifties), the Japanese president of SSP, also elaborated on ‘bunka no chigai’ (cultural differences) to account for unexpected irregularities he encountered throughout his years with SSP. For some time now, researchers of Japanese animation have debated whether or not anime’s meaning/appeal could be understood in terms of being an expression of Japanese culture to some extent, and some also have critiqued the analytical validity and problematics of such a positivistic operationalization of ‘Japanese culture’ (Berndt 2008; Brown 2006: 7; Lu 2008; MacWilliams 2008: 15–18; Napier 2001: 24–26).3 While these are important debates that involve Orientalist ideas about cultural nationalism in Japan, to which academic studies often also fall prey (MacWilliams 2008: 17), the kind of ‘cultural differences’ I discuss now in relation to SSP differ ethnographically from these debates in one significant respect. For those who actually experienced unexpected errors between SSP and Sprite, the cultural differences or Japanese aspects of animation they subcontracted were a pragmatic and hard-earned lesson of international subcontracting, even though ‘culture’ here tended to be used in a relatively fixed and bounded way. Whilst the standardized technical directions in lower-stream processes such as IB were highly schematized, cultural contingency often surfaced, firstly, when upper-stream processes such as key animation were outsourced to a select group of skilled Filipino animators. Take the case of Marlon Matapang. In his early fifties, Marlon was one of the most accomplished animators at SSP, having worked almost twenty years with the studio. With a career spanning two decades at Sprite’s largest subcontracting hub, Marlon’s career trajectory was far from straightforward, however, and one of the issues he had encountered as a novice key ­animator was that of ‘cultural difference’.

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In a series of semi-structured interviews, Marlon reflected on one such incident when his key animation cut was sent back to him from Tokyo as a retake. In the cut, Marlon animated a female character drinking a cup of tea, in which he drew the character picking up a yunomi (a Japanese tea cup) using one hand. The heroine then took a gulp. The retake direction from Tokyo was to 1) draw her picking up the yunomi using both hands, and 2) have her take a slow sip rather than a gulp. The original key animation sequence, according to Marlon, was considered by Japanese directors as ‘ill-mannered’ for that particular female character. He also spoke about the different approaches in animating running sequences. In drawing running characters, Marlon said, he tended to draw the sequence with a strong and athletic running form. However, this sometimes resulted in retakes being called when the character concerned was female and the directors asked him to ‘make her run more “ladylike”’. Indeed, the representation of femininity sometimes presented SSP animators and staff with odd difficulties in visual communication with the Japanese directors in Tokyo. As David Santos, another Filipino interpreter (male, early thirties) put it, culturally specific directions to animate characters as ‘lady-like’ (onna rashiku) or ‘cute’ (kawaiku) often resulted in retakes being called from Tokyo. The habitual movements of daily life often seemed to result in retakes, too. Jocelyn (female, interpreter) reflected on a particular key animation sequence in the Stardust Girl production, in which the heroine came home and walked straight into the house – without taking her shoes off, as would be absolutely required in a Japanese home. At SSP, the Filipino interpreters often had to engage with the double task of ‘cultural’ as well as linguistic translation. An example discussed by Jocelyn was that of drawing kakigōri in key animation. What is one to draw when asked to draw such a thing? Is it actually a thing? What does it even look like? Kakigōri is a type of Japanese cold sweet enjoyed during the summer months: a heap of finely shaved ice flakes with colourful syrups drizzled on top and served typically in a bowl. As with ice cream sellers in Britain, special vans appear in family-oriented public spaces such as parks and amusement complexes throughout the summer, selling, among other ice-chilled treats, kakigōri. These are sociocultural ‘facts’ of which everyone is reasonably expected to have first-hand ‘knowledge’ of in Japan. In general, the visual cues in the storyboard were often not detailed enough to draw full key animation sequences, which was why additional production design drawings accompanied the storyboard to provide precise visual references. These, however, often left out what was assumed to be obvious, and directions for ‘mundane’ items such as kakigōri sometimes

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travelled to Manila without clear design specifications. How could anyone not know kakigōri? ‘It’s very difficult to explain what kakigōri is to Filipino animators’, said Jocelyn. Just explaining what it was or showing a picture, furthermore, did not necessarily mean the animators could draw it. Verbal explanations, and even images, could not substitute for a shared embodied experience, which was what animators really needed to draw. What is it like to eat kakigōri? How would the character react to the experience? How sweet, or how cold, is it? Would it give you a headache if you ate it too quickly? How should one animate such a scene? Jocelyn’s usual strategy in this kind of mediation was therefore to find an analogous Filipino equivalent which was, if not exactly it, close enough for the animators to get ‘it’. In the case of kakigōri, Jocelyn told her animators it was just like halo halo, a similar cold dessert popular in the Philippines. On the SSP production floor, these peculiarities were apt to be construed as idiosyncrasies of the Japanese aspect of the animation. Some of these examples may appear to be comical manifestations of miscommunication between the Japanese and the Filipino studios, but as my interviews proceeded, I gradually came to realize how such discussions of cultural differences at SSP often subtly transformed into a quiet desire for making a more Filipino animation. In both creative and economic terms, Sprite Studios and Sprite Studios Philippines operated in a hierarchical relationship: SSP was a subsidiary, a subcontractor, while Sprite Studios did the project planning and other forms of primary design work. Their hope of creating a properly Filipino production one day at SSP gradually emerged as a common topic of discussion in interviews, where such a pronounced aspiration for an all-Filipino anime tended to be stronger among younger animation makers, along with a handful of senior key animators and managers.

Animated in the Philippines Although talk of anime’s globalization is recent, the Japanese animation industry has had a long and continuous history of export (Poitras 2008: 64). The first domestically produced TV animation, Tetsuwan Atomu, appeared in 1963, and it was exported to the United States as Astro Boy in the same year. By the mid-1970s, the export market had grown to cover large parts of continental Europe, North and South America and Northeast and Southeast Asia. Although the early successes in countries like Italy and France tend to dominate the popular media history of anime in Japan, the reception these Japanese ‘cartoons’ also enjoyed across East

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Asia was, perhaps, more significant in the wider historical context of animation production in Japan. As I noted earlier, the mid-1970s was also the time when Tokyo-based production houses started to outsource lowerstream production work to Asian subcontractors, and by the late 2000s countries such as China and the Philippines simultaneously became major international hubs for the production as well as consumption of Japanese animation. During my interviews, the implications of this historical context were mapped out generationally among the SSP animation makers, whose career trajectories ranged over two decades since the studio’s founding in 1986. By and large, older practitioners who joined in the late 1980s cited their need to support their families and the better pay offered by the Japanese subsidiary as their chief rationale for working here. Younger practitioners, on the other hand, who grew up watching popular anime shows in the 1990s, often said that becoming professional drawers or making it into the animation industry was the bigger drive. Take Analyn Cruz, a young female background (BG) artist in her early twenties, who felt a little disappointed that there was ‘still no Filipino animation, done by Filipino animators, based on Filipino comics’. Analyn joined SSP in 2009 after six months at an advertising agency in Manila making Flash-based animations for the web and said she knew she always wanted to work in animation. Without a degree from an art school, Analyn taught herself to draw, saying that the joy she derived from drawing was ‘a talent given to me’. While she enjoyed drawing backgrounds for Sprite’s premier productions, her long-term ambition was to turn her yetto-be crafted original story into an original Filipino show. That said, she was also a big fan of Japanese anime. The ease with which Analyn navigated the visual and cultural landscape of anime’s international fan base was apparent in the extent of her familiarity with such fan practices as dōjin (Analyn used the Japanese word). Dōjin, which means the amateur production of fan art and comics, is a relatively well-studied topic among scholars of Japanese popular visual culture (see for instance Kinsella 2000). ‘I like Zoro and Luffy in particular’, she told me, referring to two male lead characters from her favourite anime One Piece. In her fan fiction, she transposed the original world of One Piece, a fantastical version of the sixteenth-century Age of Exploration, into a contemporary Japanese high school. This is a well-known fan fiction subgenre in Japan and is called gakuen-mono (school-ization). Analyn’s sister also shared her passion and ‘cosplayed’ characters from shows such as Naruto and Gintama.4 Analyn was certainly not exceptional amongst the younger cohort of SSP employees. In-betweeners like Daniel Reyes (male, mid-twenties) fondly remembered watching Dragonball Z (1989–96) as a

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boy growing up in 1990s Manila, much as I did as a boy growing up in 1990s Kyoto, and remarked that ‘knowing I’m part of the production to create anime’ was the best part of his job. As the 31-year-old male TP artist Felicisimo Quinto simply put it, he was – or they were –‘an anime fan’. In the previous section, I discussed some examples of visualization errors that represented the experience of ‘cultural difference’ between the Philippines and Japan on the SSP production floor. For someone like Okita, who had overseen the growth of the Filipino studio over the previous twenty years in Manila, the issue of ‘cultural difference’ was a routine fact he had to deal with as part of being on the receiving end of outsourcing. In contrast, what the cases of Analyn, Daniel and Felicisimo indicate is that the experience of ‘cultural difference’ often engendered a subtle aspirational paradox amongst the young animators of SSP. For young staff like Analyn, who came to SSP in order to become an animation maker, mastering the Japan-specific aspects of drawing was simultaneously a sign she was pursuing her dream successfully and a reminder that she was still only subcontracting for someone else’s work. How are we to better understand such a situation? Anthropologists have also long debated the issues of cultural difference and most recently about disparity between the conceptual presence of ‘culture’ in their discipline and its actual meaning and experience in the outside world. For one, the objectified notion of culture is today widely localized, theorized and shared by the very peoples anthropologists study and learn from (Candea 2010; Miyazaki 2004: 131; Sahlins 1999). The anthropological aspect of the problem becomes apparent when the concept of culture becomes operationalized as a positivistic essence that gives rise to and accounts for differences between peoples separated by many types of distance. I suggest one way to proceed here is to shift the discussion of existing differences between Tokyo and Manila from being based on culture alone into a wider consideration of subject positions in the political economy between the two countries. That is to say, to take more seriously how SSP’s position was fixed within the relationship of being subcontracted to always work on creatively less demanding tasks compared to Sprite’s Tokyo studio. Caught in this political economy, the Filipino ­practitioners – and only the Filipino practitioners – experienced the issues of cultural difference also as potential or actual disruptions to their creativity. During our casual conversations, I once asked Jocelyn what the most enjoyable part of her work was. In response, she shrugged casually and said that ‘it’s just work like any other’. Then she paused a moment before continuing in Japanese: ‘recognition tte iun desuka’ (I guess it’s called recognition). As she was an interpreter/translator for SSP’s Japanese staff, the news sometimes arrived at Jocelyn’s desk from Tokyo that Sprite’s

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directors were particularly impressed by the work done by the Filipino team. Occasions like these often made Jocelyn glad that she was working as a mediator between SSP and Sprite. In a separate interview, Marlon himself also mentioned this ‘recognition’ from the Tokyo studio as one of his chief sources of motivation in handling everyday work. As a highly regarded animator, Marlon was one of a dozen chief animators selected to check the quality control of key animation cuts for Stardust Girl. The rest were all Japanese animators based in Tokyo. Marlon could thus be considered one of the highest achieving creators at SSP, whose work and position as a Filipino chief key animator pushed the boundaries of a subcontracting relation that had initially been conceived as a way to build a cheaper workforce. Careers such as Marlon’s may also be considered success stories by Japanese standards. Of the few thousand animators working in Tokyo, only a small proportion rise to become a chief animator for studios like Sprite. For Okita, who had overseen the growth of the Filipino studio, however, this also reflected the frustrating glass ceiling between SSP and Sprite. ‘Of course he had talent, but more than talent he worked hard, worked very, very hard’, Okita said of Marlon. ‘In a way, it is really unfortunate – it took him so long to become a key animator. With a career like his, if he had been working in Japan I wouldn’t be surprised if he were already a top animator who did the designing work’. Marlon joined SSP in 1989 when the studio was still jointly owned by the Filipino company. This, coincidentally, was also the year Okita was first dispatched to the Philippines from Sprite’s Tokyo studio. Since his childhood growing up in Manila, Marlon enjoyed watching animation, both Japanese and American. As much as these shows entertained the young Marlon, they also stimulated his curiosity as to how drawn characters could be made to move as though they were alive. This prompted him to start playing around with drawing and creating stories of his own. Marlon started to work as a part-time comic illustrator at the age of seventeen in the Filipino capital, and within a year, his brother Noel told Marlon that an animation studio called Sprite was looking to hire skilled Filipino drawers. The year 1989, furthermore, was when Sprite started looking beyond the TP process in the Philippines and began to develop a programme to train local drawers to eventually outsource the (IB) process also. Marlon thus joined SSP at this key early stage as Sprite’s all-round subcontractor and later became part of the first batch of trained in-betweeners at the Filipino studio. His talent must have been quickly apparent and, as early as 1990, Marlon made his first trip to Tokyo for further training as an IB quality checker. On his return, he was entrusted with the position

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of local assistant director and mediated between SSP’s interpreter and the other Filipino animators while supervising the technical processes of visualization. Throughout the 1990s, Marlon moved back and forth between roles as an IB animator and an assistant director before eventually becoming a key animator in 2001. Looking back at the first half of his career, Marlon reflected that ‘the studio was my second home’. The work was demanding, and the Tokyo studio appeared to give him much responsibility for the commitment and the dedication he had shown. As a result, Marlon regularly worked overtime, and once or twice a week he actually slept at the studio. On the whole, he recollected, he spent more time at work than with his family, which he started when he met his wife, Fatima, who was also a TP artist at the studio. Interestingly, Marlon’s life history as a tale of advancement in one’s craft through hard work and dedication is strongly reminiscent of the kind of master narrative Kondo (1990) documented for contemporary Japanese artisans nearly three decades ago. Unlike Kondo’s master artisans, however, Marlon’s career advancement had not led him to the very top of his field yet, as Okita rather critically suggested, because of the glass ceiling between the Filipino subsidiary and its Japanese parent.

Conclusion Despite its expansive analytical scope and nuanced contextualization (e.g. Chua 2004; Hillenbrand 2009; Iwabuchi 2002), the existing literature on East Asian popular culture currently has a strong focus on its distribution and consumption patterns. This has left a relative lacuna in scholarship on how such products actually come into existence within and across the region on a comparable transnational footing in cases such as Japanese animation. By focusing on the role Filipino animators play in the translocal regional production of Japanese animation, I have examined the creative production processes – outsourcing in commercial animation production – that unfold between two capitalist economies whose scales and relations are not on an equal footing. I have detailed the tensions and mediations in the process of production outsourcing between two animation studios located in Tokyo and Manila. In the everyday business of getting the work done, Sprite Studios were dependent on SSP’s production capacity, especially for IB-TP. Yet, the staff at SSP had to make sure that the linguistic, technical and cultural mediation necessary in the outsourced production work was processed correctly so as to deliver work back in good time. By the time

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subcontracted work was successfully returned to Sprite’s Tokyo studio, the extent of effort and care that went into it at SSP was virtually – and ideally – imperceptible. While contributors in this book have explored the embedded meaning and reception of postwar Japanese media, my article has somewhat departed from this common focus on memory and popular cultural consumption in Japan by looking at the transnational production of Japanese animation. This shift of analytical focus has afforded me a different perspective to rethink the current position of anime as Japanese popular culture in the East Asian context. During the postwar decades, East Asia’s geopolitics and political economy have been heavily influenced by the US Cold War policies and particularly the US-Japanese alliance that has privileged Japan as the capitalist fortress of the region. International subcontracting from Japan to other countries across East Asia over the past three or four decades, in this respect, has been in no way limited only to popular cultural products such as animation. While anime’s current popularity in East Asia appears to transcend Japan’s past as colonizer in many respects, its transnational production circuit could be taken to index, at least to some extent, such a geopolitical legacy and political economy. Yet, such observations are highly incompatible with the current political and cultural discourse surrounding anime. The popular and even diplomatic expectations of twenty-first century ‘Cool Japan’ appear to operate on a field clearly and deliberately ruptured from the past of Japanese colonialism that was, in many ways, East Asia’s first encounter with modern Japan. Whether the discourse of Cool Japan points towards a rebranded new form of cultural colonialism may be open for debate. However, the situation is illustrative of a particularly East Asian ­modality of postcolonialism, in which the apparently economic relations of transnational cultural production inevitably open up the question of the simultaneous blurring and reification of cultural identities. The historical wounds that appear to be forgotten are the palimpsests in the circuit on which the East Asian production of Japanese animation is made possible. In other words, there may well be a parallel to the point made in Chapter 1 that creating ‘a new version of events cannot completely erase’ past relationships. Given the extent of production outsourcing and the dependency of the Japanese animation industry on Asian subcontractors, it becomes an interesting fact that anime today continues to be consumed, distributed and analysed in Japan and elsewhere as a Japanese product – nationally, culturally and ethnically. This fact could itself be a phenomenon that calls forth more engaged rethinking.

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Tomohiro Morisawa holds a DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. After completing a postdoctoral research fellowship at the European Institute of Japanese Studies (Stockholm) in 2014, his interests in creativity and visual culture led him to pursue photography as contemporary art. Tomohiro is currently enrolled at the joint MFA programme in Advanced Photographic Studies at the International Center of Photography at Bard College, NY.

Notes 1. This corresponds to research that was carried out on many forms of Japanese popular cultures throughout the 1990s, from Takarazuka Revue and popular theatre to comic books (Ivy 1995; Kinsella 2000; Robertson 1998). 2. Contributors in this special issue deftly show how popular media such as Japanese film and television dramas have been some of the prime arenas in which the country’s shifting dynamics of wartime memories and postwar identity were enacted, created, negotiated and contested domestically. 3. The spectrum of views on this matter may be better comprehended by looking at the shifting tones of narrative with which anime’s export has been reported in the Japanese media over the years. In 1989, for instance, the Japanese national daily Asahi Shinbun (2 December 1989: 17, evening edition) speculated that ‘the most likely reason behind anime’s popular reception abroad is its non-national (mukokuseki) quality’ devoid of Japanese national or cultural traces. By 2002, reporting Miyazaki Hayao’s winning of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the same newspaper stated that ‘the [cultural] strength of Japanese anime was finally recognized’ (Asahi Shinbun: 19 Feburary 2002: 2, morning edition). 4. Naruto (2002–present) is a popular anime series, a historical fantasy based on a version of Japan in which groups of young ninjas engage in a series of battles and adventures. Naruto is the name of the protagonist boy ninja, and the series is based on an original manga of the same name (1999–present). Gintama (2006–10) is likewise a popular anime series, whose genre may be called a historical sci-fi comedy. The show features characters who look like samurai from Edo period Japan, but the world they inhabit is a mixture of eighteenth-century Japan and space age technology. Gintama, like Naruto, is based on a popular original manga with the same title (2004–present).

References Allison, A. 2006. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University California Press. Animator Rodo Hakusho (White Paper for Labour in Animation). 2009. Japan Animation Creators Association. Berndt, J. 2008. ‘Considering Manga Discourse: Location, Ambiguity, Historicity’, in M.W. Williams (ed.), Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. London: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 295–310.

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Bourdaghs, M. 2005. ‘What it Sounds Like to Lose an Empire: Happy End and the Kinks’, in T.Y. Hui, J. Van Bremen and E. Ben-Ari (eds), Perspectives on Social Memory in Japan. Kent: Global Oriental, pp. 115–33. Brown, S.T. 2006. ‘Screening Anime’, in S.T. Brown (ed.), Cinema Anime. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–22. Candea, M. 2010. Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge, Fieldwork. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cho, Y. 2011. ‘Desperately Seeking East Asia amidst the Popularity of South Korean Pop Culture in Asia’, Cultural Studies 25(3): 383–404. Chua, B.H. 2004. ‘Conceptualizing an East Asian Popular Culture’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5(2): 200–21. Hillenbrand, M. 2009. ‘Murakami Haruki in Greater China: Creative Responses and the Quest for Cosmopolitanism’, The Journal of Asian Studies 68(3): 715–47. Ivy, M. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Iwabuchi, K. 2002. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kim, S. 2009. ‘Interpreting Transnational Cultural Practices: Social Discourses on a Korean Drama in Japan, Hong Kong, and China’, Cultural Studies 23(5–6): 736–55. Kinsella, S. 2000. Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Surrey: Curzon Press. Ko, Y.F. 2003. ‘Consuming Differences: “Hello Kitty” and the Identity Crisis in Taiwan’, Postcolonial Studies 6(2): 175–89. Kondo, D.K. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lu, A.S. 2008. ‘The Many Faces of Internationalization in Japanese Anime’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3(2): 169–87. MacWilliams, M.W. (ed.). 2008. Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. London: M.E. Sharpe. Martinez, D.P. (ed.). 1998. The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miyazaki, H. 2004. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Napier, S. 2001. Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke. New York: Palgrave. Poitras, G. 2008. ‘Contemporary Anime in Japanese Pop Culture’, in M.W. Williams (ed.), Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. London: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 48–67. Robertson, J. 1998. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sahlins, M. 1999. ‘Two or Three Things That I Know About Culture’, The Royal Anthropological Institute 5(3): 399–421. Seaton, P.A. 2007. Japan’s Contested War Memories. London: Routledge. Yoon, H. and E.J. Malecki. 2009. ‘Cartoon Planet: Worlds of Production and Global Production Networks in the Animation Industry’, Industrial and Corporate Change 19(1): 239–71.

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Filmography Dragon Ball Z, dir. D. Nishio, Japan, Fuji Television Network, 1989–1996 [TV series]. Gintama, dir. S. Takamatsu, Japan, TV Tokyo, 2006–present [TV series]. Naruto, dir. H. Date, , Japan, TV Tokyo, 2002–2007 [TV series]. One Piece, dir. T. Fukazawa, Japan, Fuji Television Network, 1999–present [TV series]. Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), dir. O. Tezuka, Japan, Fuji Television Network, 1963 [TV series].

Conclusion

The Persistence of Trauma Dolores P. Martinez, Blai Guarné and Artur Lozano-Méndez

It is a truism to say that social memory is more than a simple collection of images of the past shared by a given community, just as individual bio­graphy is more than the mere assembling of personal recollections one after another. In each case it must be noted that both are political, historical and culturally contingent constructions in which the past is persistently (re)articulated to exorcize the fragmentation of both a society and an individual’s present. This can be done in an attempt to achieve personal and collective redemption when, perhaps, only a traumatic experience of complicity and a decontextualized sense of victimization are shared. Briefly put, the social and personal are interconnected through the idea of social identity: being a member of any group – from a reading group to the nation state – leads to the sharing of experience and a narrative that contextualizes it in order to form a collective history that may be differently interpreted by each individual. At the level of the state and focusing specifically on the social articulation of wartime memories, Seaton (2007) describes the transition from the individual memories of war survivors to the collective cultural memory of the postwar generation. He argues that although conflict and contestation are constitutive factors in this process, it should not be imagined that war narratives compete until (just) one of them attains a dominant place within the national zeitgeist. Rather, this is a dynamic process, involving negotiation and reconfiguration, in which contradictions are gradually harmonized and interwoven to produce a common theme. War memories are thus redefined in a prioritization process that depends more on their proximity to, and identification with, those in power rather than

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on any wider social representativeness. Thereby, Seaton concludes that even in the twenty-first century the level of contestation and national division over the war’s legacy impedes the emergence of a single, shared national memory of a conflict that began for the Japanese in 1937 (see also Hashimoto 2015). The biases of the reporting, and of differing points of view, offered in the postwar accounts of the Second World War facilitated an everevolving description of the Japanese as victims of the very war in which they had been involved to different degrees and in various ways (see Stahl and Williams 2010). Having been the first (and so far only) nation to have atomic bombs dropped on their cities allowed for the development of the sense that they had suffered – that is, had been sacrificed both to geopolitics in order to end the war in the Pacific before the Soviets became involved and to the curiosity of scientific advancement. This led to a selfrepresentation of the Japanese as victims, which found in popular culture a fertile ground in which there flourished countless novels, films, television series and other media representations of a heroine having to suffer through the war, and then having to survive the ordeals of the postwar, while stoically ­supporting her father, husband and children (Harvey 1995). Of course, as in the work of the film director Imamura Shōhei, there were other, more subversive representations of Japanese womanhood (as Treglia in this volume notes), but the resolute postwar female remains a dominant trope; so much so that the 2016 acclaimed anime In this Corner of the World (Katabuchi)1 covered precisely this terrain. Women who represent and save the nation (and sometimes the world) while triumphing in the international arena is not only a theme of many a heroine-centred anime but also one of felt consequences for Japanese viewers of both the 1964 Olympics, when the Japanese women’s volleyball team won the gold (Igarashi 2000: 158–63), and, again, in 2011 when the Japanese team won the Women’s World Cup in football. Igarashi, especially, points to how the 1964 volleyball players ‘became substitutes for wartime soldiers’ (ibid.: 159). In contrast, Japanese businessmen may have appeared to have ‘won the peace’ in the postwar era, but has this changed men’s image? The expansion of national companies into the global arena from the 1970s onwards was met with suspicion not only in East Asia but also in Europe and the US. Japanese salarymen, as samurai, were both praised for their work ethic and then derided for labouring in a society that was seen to support seniority over talent; for prioritizing long hours at work and then socializing with the boss after hours over time spent with family; for being group-oriented and not individuals; and for marriages that were arranged rather than based on love. As Hidaka in this volume comments, they also

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have been critiqued at home as former radicals who have compromised their ideals. Sociologists and anthropologists did their best to unsettle these images (see Roberson and Suzuki 2003), particularly in light of the fact that only about 25–30 percent of men in Japan are white collar employees (see Sugimoto 2014: 45), but to no avail. The Japanese nation, and its men in particular, are caught between Scylla and Charybdis. When successful they are feared: the long postwar has not erased the memories of the brutality of the Japanese empire’s colonial era and the cruelty of its military – China and Korea in particular use these memories to buttress internal cohesion and patriotism. At the same time, Japan’s long recession is seen as proof of some inherent flaw in the men who dominate Japanese society. The latter is often explored through scholarship on Japanese women’s reluctance to marry or to have children: implicit in this is the idea that women think that the men in their society are just not good enough. Both externally and internally, then, the war and being postwar are facts that seem never-ending, a persistent state of being. Foreigners and Japanese call upon the war frequently to explain their modernity – it shapes them as much as being nihonjin (Japanese), a description so broad that, as Sugimoto (2014) points out, it is almost meaningless. Even the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown of 3/11 (the Triple Disaster of 2011) are folded into this discourse: with comparisons being made to Hiroshima by many. If we consider the theme of being postwar as it has been incorporated into being ‘post-3/11’ (see Gerteis and George 2014), we must reiterate the fact that Japan holds a powerful symbolic place as a modern nation state in the Western imagination as well. It is both a nation of exotic tradition and advanced technology; of ferocious warriors and otaku (nerds); it is about cuteness and efficient service; it has gangsters and workaholic businessmen; skyscrapers and homeless men haunting its parks. It is Other even as any one of these elements could be found in any other country (cf. Lozano-Méndez 2010). These ideas are not merely a form of othering, but are the other side of the coin of national identity-making as well. The Japanese were pleased, at first, with the foreign emphasis on how well they appeared to be managing in light of the earthquake’s magnitude and the aftershocks that continued to rock the islands. It well fitted with the idea that they were a unique society, different from other societies where – everyone seemed to assume – citizens would immediately take to the streets to loot and riot. The difficult logistics of handling what has been termed Japan’s most horrific natural disaster in recorded history soon undermined that sense

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of national pride. The meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Fukushima and, later, the treatment of both the radioactive areas and children exposed to radiation were not sources of national pride. Once more, Japan appeared in the foreign media as a nation of contradictions: modern yet inept, harmonious yet prejudiced, technologically savvy but institutionally corrupt. The many articles and books published in the aftermath of the power plant meltdown tend to focus on how Japanese this crisis was (see Gill, Steger and Slater 2013) – a particular confluence of culture mixed with the worst of political and corporate corruption. The Japanese themselves are aware of these issues, and they add to an increased sense of insecurity: with North Korea and China to their West still calling on the past – the former threatening them with nuclear ­missiles – the idea of being a ‘safe’ nation is being stretched to the breaking point. All this requires some explication in terms of thinking about Japan as finally no longer being postwar. Is this really ever possible? Davis (1992), in his influential article on suffering, argues that societies are always coping with breakdowns and attempting to repair themselves. To understand any new catastrophe we need to consider the trauma of lived experience or what Davis terms ‘the normality of pain’ (ibid.: 150). The fact that pain, or trauma, is a part of human existence challenges any comfortable sort of analysis of how a society ‘copes’ with disaster. Experts, such as anthropologists, tend to ignore both how cataclysmic events can become recurrent conditions (drought, famine, migration) and how the breakdown of normal social experience that takes place during war becomes embedded in social memory for generations afterwards. Both types of suffering are ‘continuous with ordinary social experience; people place it in social memory and incorporate it with their a­ ccumulated culture’ (ibid.: 152). Igarashi (2000) calls this process one of re-membering – it is less about a properly recorded history than it is a suturing up of the sites of injury, leaving scars as their only trace. Deamer (2014), among others, argues that the science fiction genre of disaster films in Japan acts indexically, pointing to this scar tissue. So while young people in Japan famously may not know about Japan’s colonial aggressions or properly understand the Second World War, they do know about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what being attacked may feel like. School trips to Hiroshima ensure that they understand the power of nuclear weapons and reaffirm the fact that only Japan has ever suffered such an attack (see Orr 2001). So the events in disaster films are not as hypothetical for them as they might be for other viewers. Whether or not, as Orr argues for Hiroshima visits, these images instil a sense of being heroes is questionable; but we can say that disaster films speak to an historical consciousness that is part of a Japanese social

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identity. Add the experience of earthquakes as almost commonplace and we begin to get some sense of a Japanese reaction to such events – ­disaster cannot be avoided, but it might be managed, contained, studied and somehow mediated. However, as Seaton (2007: 27) points out, mediating all this as victim consciousness cannot be seen as a unifying factor for the memory of war in Japan, especially as long as judgements about war responsibility remain open to debate.2 In fact, victimization is not able to provide a suitable response that could ever satisfy both nationalistic pride and the patriotic fervour of conservative groups, or the liberals’ opposition to war in general and the ban-the-bomb movement. For Seaton, victim consciousness allows, at the most, a modicum of national unity only insofar as the discussions about ‘who the perpetrator “other” might be’ are left sufficiently vague, in a process in which the recognition of who qualifies as victims ‘always depends on the nature of judgmental memory’ (ibid.: 27–28). Consequently, it is ‘more appropriate to use the plurals – victim consciousnesses and victim mentalities – given how identification and ideology render invalid any notion that victim consciousness is a unified phenomenon’ (ibid.: 27). Japanese audiovisual media are some of the major reflectors of the varied multifaceted representations of the war while also negotiating and reshaping it, as well as incorporating the experiences and traumas of postwar disasters. In short, media are the site of re-membering the long postwar in the many configurations presented in this volume. This is not to ignore regional politics (where the war is not forgotten), international business concerns about ‘the Japanese company’, the schadenfreude many foreigners might feel about the long Japanese recession or the academic interest in Japan’s reworking of its history as contributing factors to the ways in which Japan is constantly configured as being postwar. However, our focus has been on the mediation of this state of being, as it has taken many forms over the last six decades: the quest for redemption and the battles over political power in postwar Japanese society (Part I); how the war is constantly re-membered, as well as how honour and loyalty should be best portrayed (Part II); and, finally, how the past affects the present and the coping with current demands (Part III). While our focus has been on the Japanese case, similar arguments about memory, nostalgia and amnesia could be made for many if not every nation state. Recent discussions of the Allies (colonial and European) who were on the beaches at Dunkirk but who are missing from Nolan’s 2017 eponymous film make the point that even the victors like to remember events in their own manner. Much as the British might lament that the US makes films that erase them from the Second World War, so too have the

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former subjects of the Empire pointed out how they tend to be missing from British accounts. To put it in another way: nation states require cogent, if multiple and not always consistent, narratives that show how the nation has suffered, healed and overcome trauma and that evoke a shared past3 – or the hegemony of a shared national identity risks falling apart. As Marvin and Ingle (1999) have argued: the blood sacrifice of war is necessary to create and maintain national sentiment, and this sacrifice of lives in the name of the nation would appear to work equally well for both the winning and losing sides. Their book looks at how the Vietnam War challenged this unity in the US but does not consider all the narratives about trauma, healing and reconciliation that try to recast the war as one in which US soldiers – and by implication their families and friends – suffered greatly, thus bringing the nation together. Consequently, for the winners of any conflict, the sacrifice is recalled as suffering that was endured and involves honouring the lives lost; for the losers it can be a discourse about the struggle to successfully rebuild despite all that they have lost. Thus, the Japanese case is not unique but is perhaps somewhat singular in the way in which it has been so scrutinized, studied and re-mediated, not just by foreign scholars, politicians and media producers but also by its own Left, liberals and intelligentsia. This volume only gives a flavour of the many ways in which we can understand the Japanese case, and we hope it offers ideas for the discussion of being persistently postwar in other contexts. Dolores P. Martinez is Emeritus Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, and a Research Associate at ISCA, University of Oxford. She has written on maritime anthropology, tourism, religion, gender and popular culture in Japan, as well as on women’s football in the US, documentary film and humour in science fiction films. Her latest publications include Remaking Kurosawa (Palgrave, 2009); Gender and Japanese Society (Routledge, 2014); and with Griseldis Kirsch and Merry White as co-editors, Assembling Japan (Peter Lang, 2015). Blai Guarné is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the East Asian Studies Programme at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where he also serves as Secretary of the CERAO. He has also convened the EAJS Media Studies Section. His publications include ‘Japan in Global Circulation’ (co-edited with Shinji Yamashita, Minpaku, 2015), Antropología de Japón (Bellaterra, 2017) and Escaping Japan: Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-First Century (co-edited with Paul

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Hansen, Routledge, 2018). His work in this volume has been supported by the Research Group GREGAL (2017 SGR 1596) at the UAB. Artur Lozano-Méndez is Lecturer of East Asian Studies at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). His PhD was in translation and intercultural studies (UAB), specializing in research on contemporary East Asia, particularly in relation to cultural studies with a focus on Japan. His publications include ‘Mamoru Oshii’s Exploration of the Potentialities of Consciousness in a Globalised Capitalist Network’ (Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2015), and he has edited El Japón contemporáneo: Una aproximación desde los estudios culturales (Bellaterra, 2016).

Notes 1. The film won the 40th Japan Academy Award Film Prize for 2016. 2. Orr (2001) also points out that the rhetoric of victimhood served very different agendas across the political spectrum, ranging from the interests of US administration when legitimating the security alliance with Japan during the Cold War to the pacifist aspirations of Japanese left-wing movements and even to the conservative politicians eager to distance themselves from the militarist regime and evade facing the issue of war responsibility. 3. See the essays in Vlastos’ Mirror of Modernity (1998) for a discussion of the ‘invention’ of traditional Japan as a shared national identity.

References Davis, J. 1992. ‘The Anthropology of Suffering’, Journal of Refugee Studies 5(2): 149–61. Deamer, D. 2014. Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Gerteis, C. and T.S. George. 2014. ‘Beyond the Bubble, Beyond Fukushima: Reconsidering the History of Postwar Japan’, The Asia-Pacific Journal 12(8): 3 (23 February 2014). Retrieved 31 July 2018 from http://apjjf.org/2014/12/8/ Timothy-S.-George/4080/article.html. Gill, T., B. Steger and D. Slater (eds). 2013. Japan Copes with Calamity: Ethnographies of the Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disasters of March 2011. Bern and Oxford: Peter Lang. Harvey, P.A.S. 1995. ‘Interpreting Oshin – War, History and Women in Modern Japan’, in L. Skov and B. Moeran (eds), Women, Media, and Consumption in Japan. Richmond, VA and Surrey: Curzon Press. Hashimoto, A. 2015. The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Igarashi, Y. 2000. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lozano-Méndez, A. 2010. ‘Techno-orientalism in East Asian Contexts: Reiteration, Diversification, Adaptation’, in M. Telmissany and S.T. Schwartz (eds), Counterpoints: Edward Said’s Legacy. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Marvin, C. and D.W. Ingle. 1999. Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. Cambridge: CUP. Orr, J.J. 2001. The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Roberson, J.E. and N. Suzuki. 2003. Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa. London: Routledge. Seaton, P.A. 2007. Japan’s Contested War Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical Consciousness of World War II. London and New York: Routledge. Stahl, D. and M. Williams (eds). 2010. Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Sugimoto, Y. 2014. An Introduction to Japanese Society, 4th ed. Cambridge: CUP. Vlastos, S. (ed.). 1998. Mirror of Modernity Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Filmography Dunkirk, dir. C. Nolan, US, Syncopy, 2017 [DVD]. Kono Sekai no Katasumi ni (In this Corner of the World), dir. S. Katabuchi, Japan, Mappa and Genco, 2016 [DVD].

Index

300 million yen robbery, 12, 124–137. See also under Film, Television 1950s, 1, 10, 24, 28, 33, 42–5, 47, 56, 59n2 and 3, 63, 66, 70–1, 79n3, 116, 122 1960s, 1, 5, 7, 9–10, 12, 24–5, 33, 43, 55, 63, 72, 122, 79n3, 80n7, 103, 105–110, 116–117, 119n7, 122–123, 126, 128, 134, 136, 137–138n2 1970s, 7, 59n3, 103, 105, 107–110, 116–117, 119n7, 122, 126–127, 135–136, 158n6, 162, 167, 173–174, 183 1980s, 129, 148, 163, 169, 174 1990s, 92, 110, 122–123, 128, 131, 148, 154, 158n10, 158–159n17, 163, 169, 174–175, 177, 179n1. See also Twentieth century, Twentyfirst century Absent presence, 11, 26, 29 America. See under US Americans, 27, 47, 88–98 Amnesia, 4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 23–5, 33, 98, 143–44, 146, 154–55, 186. See also Memory Animation industry, 12–13, 143–47, 152, 156, 158n13 and 14, 162, 162–79. See also Anime

Anime, 1, 12–13, 145, 148, 151–52, 155–157, 158n13 and 14, 159n20, 162–178, 179n3 and 4. See also Animation industry, Film Anpo (Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security), 67–8, 70–72. See also US, Japan relations Anthropology, 1, 4, 5, 163 Après-guerre. See under Postwar Art, 36, 44–5, 59n2, 88, 145, 158n14, 174 film as, 46, 55, 80n7, 145, 158n14, 169 sōgō geijutsu (synthetic), 41 Article 9. See War, right to wage Artists, 6, 28, 35, 41, 45, 145, 167–169, 174–175, 177 Atomic Bomb. See Hiroshima, Nagasaki. See also Triple Disaster Atrocities. See under War Audiences, 6–7, 10, 24, 26, 28–30, 32–3, 35, 36n2, 46–7, 49, 69, 73–6, 78, 86–7, 89–97, 99n4 and 6, 100n8, and 13, 103–108, 112, 114, 117, 131, 133, 143, 145, 148, 151, 156, 157n3, 158n14, 165 Avant-garde, 1, 10, 41–59, 59n2 and 4, 63, 66, 72, 74. See also Film, avantgarde

192

Bad Boys. See Film, Furyō Shōnen Buddhism, 25, 28, 33–34, 95, 118–119n2, 156 Bushidō. See Samurai, bushidō Capitalism, 5, 42, 47, 56–7, 64, 116, 123–124, 128, 130, 133, 136, 156, 177–178 Certainty, 10 death of, 23–36 Change, 34, 44, 46, 48, 65–66, 107–108, 123, 126, 156 social, 3–4, 108, 134–135, 148–149 Cinema. See under Film Class, 24, 149, 153, 167 lower, 57, 67, 149 middle 30–1, 144, 158n6, 164, 184 upper, 106. (See also Elites) working, 49, 67, 149–150 Cold War. See under War Colonialism, 4, 10, 13, 24, 98, 158n17, 164, 178, 184–186 Postcolonial, 13, 24, 163–164, 178 Communication, 55, 104, 151, 165, 170–173. See also Mass Media Communism, 60n11, 64–66, 67, 79n6, 99–100n7 Communist League (CL), 67 Japan Revolutionary Communist League (JRCL), 67 Japanese Communist Party (JCP), 11, 44–45, 63–4, 66–8, 70–1, 77–8 Left, the, 10, 35, 45, 57, 59n2, 63, 65, 66, 71, 117, 119n3, 123, 129, 187, 188n2 Shinsayoku (the New Left), 11–2, 41–3, 45, 59n5, 63, 67–8, 70, 72–4, 78–9, 79n5, 123, 128, 130–131, 136 Constitution. See under Postwar Consumerism, 7, 12, 30, 32, 47, 74, 78, 108, 154–156 society, 47–8, 56–8, 123, 130, 136 Consumption, 7, 48, 104, 107, 130, 162–164, 174, 177–178. See also Audiences Crime, 73–78, 116, 117, 132, 124–136. See also War, atrocities

Index

Criminal, 12, 27–28, 54, 106, 116, 124–128, 130–132, 134–135, 146. See also War, criminals Crisis, 2, 10, 13–4, 23, 26, 45, 64, 70, 107, 136, 143, 147–148, 154, 185 Culture, 2–3, 5, 12–4, 23, 28, 33, 50, 60n12, 64, 79n2, 85, 92, 103, 107, 117, 119n7, 137n2, 144, 155, 158–159n17, 162–163, 171–175, 177–178, 182, 185 audiovisual, 1, 6–7, 44, 174, 179, 179n1 circles, 41–43, 45, 59n2 industry, 7–9, 137n2, 162–164, 178 meaning, 7, 12, 103, 107 media, 13, 33, 35, 173 popular, 3, 12, 44, 47, 56, 59n8, 69, 86, 105–106, 125, 127, 143, 162–164, 174, 177–178, 179n1, 2 and 4, 183 reworking, 7, 12, 103, 158–159n17, 186 studies, 1–2, 4 Western, 2, 47, 59 See also Art Death, 3, 23, 25–6, 30, 37n15, 48, 51, 68, 73, 75, 78, 85, 88, 91, 93, 95, 106– 107, 110, 113, 135, 146 of god, 25, 36–7n7, 51 Democracy, 5, 9, 28, 35, 42, 45, 47, 49–51, 58, 60n 12, 64–5, 68, 70–2, 99n4, 154 Desser, David, 24–26, 65, 79n3 Discourse, 1, 2–3, 4, 6, 8–9, 24–25, 30, 42, 44–45, 49–50, 53–54, 57–58, 73, 77–8, 86, 89, 92, 96–97, 111, 144, 146, 148–151, 156, 162–163, 178, 184, 187. See also Mass media, discourse, Narrative Document, 41–2, 58 Documentary. See under Film Drama. See under Film, Television East Asia, 13, 24, 117, 157n4, 162–179, 183. See also Southeast Asia, War, Greater East Asia

Index

Elites, 49–50, 54, 57, 88–9, 92, 98, 133. See also Emperor, Military, Samurai Economics, 4–5, 7, 10, 13, 15n1 and 2, 45, 48–50, 56, 58, 109, 111, 117, 122, 126, 133, 147–148, 152–153, 156, 167, 173, 177–178 bubble, 3, 123, 128, 136, 151 miracle, 45, 56, 108, 117, 122–123, 128, 130, 136, 143–144, 148, 153–155 political, 5, 54, 148, 164, 175, 178 postwar recovery, 6, 14, 42, 48–9, 56, 117, 123–124, 128, 133, 153 recession, 3, 13–14, 42, 124, 126, 128, 131, 136, 146–149, 186 Emperor, 56, 58, 60n12, 98 Akihito, 98 Hirohito (Shōwa emperor, 1901–1989), 3–4, 9, 50–6, 59–60n10, 60n11, 70–1, 89–90 iconography of, 50–54 system (kokutai), 9, 13, 50–1 Empire, Japanese, 13, 16n9, 24, 28, 51, 64, 68, 77, 90, 117, 163, 184, 187. See also Colonialism Evil, 27–9, 32, 37n9, 105–106, 113, 165 Fascism, 5, 11, 28–29, 45, 63–66, 69–71 anti-, 66, 71 Female, 5, 26, 29–32, 34, 42, 47–8, 55–56, 56n7, 59n9, 69, 73, 75–7, 103–104, 108–118, 118n1, 119n5 and 6, 123, 128–129, 130–132, 135, 150, 154, 158n10, 165, 172, 174, 176, 183–4. See also Gender, Heroine Feudal. See under Past, the Film, 1, 7, 10–11, 26–7, 29–30, 35–6, 36n4, 37n11, 41–43, 45, 47–8, 55, 57, 59n1, 6 and 8, 63–66, 69–73, 79n3, 85, 87, 90,-1, 96, 103–118, 137, 154 300 million yen robbery films, 124, 126–136. (See also under Television) avant-garde 1, 10, 41–59, 63, 66, 72, 74 B movies, 108, 110, 127 critics, 41, 43, 46, 55, 157n3 docudrama, 105, 116, 131, 135

193

documentary, 10, 15, 41–58, 59n6, 72 drama 75, 85–98, 124–128, 136–137, 179n2 Furyō Shōnen (Bad Boys), 10, 41–2, 55–9 Humanist, 11, 23, 36n3, 63–66, 71, 73, 76 Ikiru (1951), 10, 23–4, 26, 29–34, 36n5 and n6, 37n14, 70 Jingi Naki Tatakai (Battles without Honour and Humanity), 105, 116, 127, 135 Kōshikei (Death by Hanging), 10, 11, 63, 73–9 melodrama, 69, 108, 110, 129 noir, 27, 37n11, 109, 110 nostalgic, 13, 23–5, 103, 106, 119n7, 122–123, 131 Nūberu Bāgu (New Wave), 11, 63, 69–71, 73, 79n1, 80n7 period (jidaigeki eiga), 29, 34, 36n1, 59n9, 105–106, 109–110, 116–117 pinku eiga (soft-pornography), 110, 119n4 pinky violence, 12, 103, 109–111, 114, 116, 118 Rashomon (1950), 24–26, 29–30, 33, 35, 70 scholars, 1, 23, 26, 42, 87 Stray Dog (Nora Inu, 1949), 26–8, 34, 36n6 Taiyōzoku (Sun Tribe), 56, 69, 71 Tokyo 1958 (1958), 10, 41–2, 45–58 Waga seishun ni kuinashi (No Regrets for Our Youth), 36n6, 70 Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai (1959, 2008), 85, 87, 92, 94–6, 98. (See also under Television) yakuza, 7, 12, 103–118, 109–110, 113–114, 116–118, 118n1, 127, 135–136 See also Animation, Anime, Audiences Forgetting. See Amnesia Furyō Shōnen (Bad Boys). See Film, Furyō Shōnen Gender, 7, 12, 24, 47, 103, 109, 118, 146, 152 heroism, 108–109

Index

194

Gender (cont.) ideology, 104, 108–111, 114 roles, 104–108, 114–115 See also Female, Male, Sex, Sexuality Genres, 12, 26–7, 41, 44–6, 54, 57–8, 92, 103–106, 108–110, 114, 118, 157n3, 174, 179n4, 185 Greater East Asia War. See under War Guilt, 10, 24–6, 28–9, 33, 35–6, 37n9, 66, 78, 89, 94, 154. See also Buddhism, Redemption, Responsibility Hani Susumu 10, 41–8, 54–8, 59n6, 60n14 Hero, 12, 25–9, 31, 34, 51, 70, 94, 103–108, 118, 119n7, 126, 128–129, 131, 134–136, 147, 185 tragic, 12, 35, 89, 92, 96, 103–108, 116–118. See also Male, Protagonist Heroine, 109–117, 131, 165, 172, 183. See also Female, Protagonist Hiroshima, atomic bombing of, 10, 86, 91–2, 100n 13, 183, 184–185 Historicity. See History History, 1–9, 12, 15n1 and 2, 26, 77, 79n3, 123, 124, 135, 143, 162, 164, 173, 177, 182, 184 postwar, 24, 47, 66, 79–80n6, 85, 147 reworking, 96–8, 154–155, 158n17, 185–186 See also Memory Honour, 97, 105, 107, 186–187. See also Samurai, bushidō Humanism. See under Film, Postwar Ideology, 15n1, 29, 65, 98, 186 gender, 104, 108, 111, 113–114 leftist, 63, 70, 73, 78–9 nationalist, 5, 9, 33, 48, 57 nihonjinron (theories of the Japanese) 3, 25, 49, 97 See also Discourse, Emperor, system, Gender Igarashi Yoshikuni, 24, 33, 47–9, 51, 53, 158–159n17, 183, 185 Interpretation, 2, 7, 74, 97, 147–148, 152 Japan. See under Colonialism, Emperor, Nation

Japanese Communist Party. See under Communism JCP. See under Communism, Japanese Communist Party Jidaigeki eiga (period films). See Films, period Jiko hitei (self-negation). See under Self, the Jobs. See Work Kamiyama Kenji, 13, 144–146, 148–149, 151–153, 155–156, 157n2 and 3 Katō Tetsutaro, 85, 88, 92–4, 100n9 Kiroku. See Document Kokutai. See Emperor, system Korea, 66, 73, 75–8, 164, 169, 184–185. See also War, Korean Kōshikei (Death by Hanging). See under Film Kurosawa Akira, 7, 10, 23–5, 27–30, 32–36, 36n1, 36–7n7, 37n8 and 14, 65, 70, 159n1 Labour. See Work Left, the. See under Communism MacArthur, Douglas (general), 51, 53, 93–4 as SCAP, 9–10 Male, 5–7, 10, 12, 15n1, 23, 27–32, 34, 35, 36n1, 42, 54–7, 75, 93–4, 100n10, 104, 106–117, 128–129, 130–133, 135, 150–151, 155, 158n10, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 179n4, 183–184 salarymen, 47, 183 See also Gender, Hero Marx, 1, 15n1, 154 Marxism, 11, 63–4, 71 Mass media, 1, 3, 5–8, 13, 46, 55, 58, 73, 75, 85–87, 94, 97, 107, 122–26, 128–131, 135, 146–147, 148, 150, 152–53, 157, 163, 179, 185 culture, 13, 122 discourses, 3, 7, 10, 128, 146, 149, 156 franchise, 12, 85–6, 143–144, 156–157 and history, 9, 97–98, 173 impact of, 67, 152 industry, 13–14

Index

and memory, 6–9, 85–88. (See also Amnesia) politics of, 1–14, 99, 154 productions, 7, 12, 55, 103, 122, 127, 136–137, 152, 187 remakes, 9, 87 and representation, 12, 49, 89, 122, 124, 131, 136, 144, 154, 183, 186 studies, 1–2, 4, 42 Masumura Yasuzo, 69 Media. See Mass Media Mediation, 6, 8–9, 114, 170–171, 173, 176–177, 186–187 Memory, 4, 8, 10–13, 23–26, 30, 33, 36, 73, 74, 76, 145–146, 162 bodies of, 24, 33, 158n17 collective, 2, 12, 144–45, 182–83 contested, 86, 97 cultural, 3, 85, 182 and history, 3, 13, 96, 98 individual, 24, 72–73, 97, 144 and nostalgia, 122–124, 186 persistence of, 9, 12–14, 143–181 politics of, 3–5, 8, 86, 98 and popular culture, 3, 6–8, 12, 163, 178 recreating, 85–99 representation of, 6–8, 122 social, 2–6, 8–9, 185 of the State, 24, 97, 154 and trauma, 25, 182–88 and war, 1, 85–86, 94, 98, 163, 186 See also Nostalgia Military, 16n9, 79, 88–90, 92, 95, 98, 106, 116, 126, 155, 184 government, 9, 50–1, 56, 59n10, 67–8, 70, 79–80n6 Jieitai (Japanese Self-Defence Forces, JSDF), 90, 99–100n7 Keisatsu Yobitai (The Special Police Force), 90, 99–100n7 Modern, 25–26, 30, 48, 68, 71, 117, 133, 184, 185–86 culture, 63, 65, 103, 109 Japan, 3, 6, 25, 45–46, 79, 123, 178, 181, 189 society, 14, 26, 29–30, 137 Modernity, 6, 9, 11, 29, 43, 58, 65, 107, 189

195

and capitalism, 5, 58, 156 Japanese, 41, 46, 50, 184 and tradition, 47, 49, 103, 106 Myth, 1, 5, 33–4, 58, 59n9, 79, 103, 105–106, 108, 116–117, 125, 128, 136, 147, 154 -making, 8, 12, 41, 103, 145, 147 Nagasaki, atomic bombing of, 86, 183, 185 Narrative, 1, 3–4, 6–12, 14, 23, 25, 32–3, 36n4, 42–6, 49–51, 53–55, 58, 66, 69, 72–4, 78, 85–6, 90–2, 94, 96, 100n9, 103, 106–108, 111, 117–118, 119n6, 122, 128, 133–134, 143–145, 147–148, 151–152, 154, 156, 157n3, 158n6, 177, 179n3, 182, 187. See also Hero, tragic, Postwar Nation, 4, 23, 24, 103, 182, 186–187 Japanese, 4–5, 11, 14, 24, 33, 51, 53, 57, 68, 75, 78, 98, 103, 137, 153–154, 183–186 New Left, the. See under Communism New Wave. See under Film, Nūberu Bāgu Nihilism, 9, 64, 69, 71 anomie, 107 Nihonjinron. See Ideology, nihonjinron Ninkyo eiga (yakuza films). See under Film, yakuza Nostalgia, 1, 3, 8, 11–12, 23–5, 103, 106–107, 116, 118, 119n7, 145, 186 and memory, 122–137 for Shōwa, 122–23, 130–131 See also Amnesia, Tradition, Past, the Nūberu Bāgu (New Wave). See under Film Nuclear. See Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Triple disaster Occupation, the (1945–1952), 9–10, 13, 25–6, 29, 47–8, 50–1, 53, 64–5, 70, 93. See also Postwar Ōshima Nagisa, 10–11, 63, 69–75, 77–8 Past, the 1, 14, 24, 26, 35, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 58, 64–5, 72, 75, 77, 97, 118, 129, 147, 149, 154–55, 163, 187, 188n2

196

Past, the (cont.) feudal, 50, 54, 64–5, 70–1, 79n1, 107, 118–119n2, 122 individual, 135, 147, 154, 155 militaristic, 49, 86, 163, 164, 178, 185 in the present, 49, 86, 98, 137, 158, 163, 164, 178, 186 representations of, 25, 33, 35, 122, 157, 182 See also, Nostalgia, Tradition Peace, 5, 34, 66, 71, 79–80n6, 89, 119n3, 135, 153, 183 emperor as symbol of, 53, 58 Police, 28, 55, 57, 68, 73, 90, 99–100n7, 117, 124–130, 132–133, 151 Politicians, 3–4, 116–117, 130–131, 133, 135, 148, 154–155. 187, 188n2 Politics, 6, 34–5, 53, 57–8, 59, 63–4, 70, 79, 86, 88, 92, 118–119n2, 131, 136–137, 143–145, 147–148, 153–156, 185–186 as criticism, 2, 49, 71–4, 78–9, 92, 117, 126–127, 163 cultural production of, 2, 50–1, 72, 94, 97, 182 economy, 15n1, 50, 54, 163–163, 175, 178 geo-, 24, 67, 162, 178, 183 of identity, 4, 11, 103–118, 181 of memory, 3–5, 8, 86, 98, 103, 163. (See also Nostalgia) of representation, 1–14, 43–5, 54, 56, 58n4, 65, 89, 98 student, 67, 123, 128, 130, 133–135. See also Communism Popular Culture. See Culture, popular Postwar, 1, 4–5, 9, 11–12, 14, 24, 28–29, 36n5, 42, 44, 50, 53–54, 56, 63, 65, 69, 106, 108, 123–24, 128–129, 131, 144, 146, 155–56, 158, 163, 178, 183, 186 constitution, 4, 53, 60n12, 89, 95, 98, 99–100n7 culture, 41–42, 49, 50, 71, 128, 189 end of, 4, 48, 185 film, 32, 103, 178 generation, 23–24, 26, 32–33, 36n1, 89, 182

Index

guilt, 10, 23–26, 36, 89, 94, 154 history, 5, 85, 143, 147 humanism, 11, 23, 36n3, 57, 63–66, 69–71, 76 identity, 24, 27, 47, 50, 58, 97, 143–57, 154, 179, 183–84, 186, 189 media, 5, 12, 26, 154 and memory, 2–6, 24, 49, 184 narratives, 41–59, 183. (See also Narrative) persistently, 143–157, 187 politics, 50, 57–58, 70, 71, 117, 136–137, 148 recovery, 6, 146, 148, 153, 183. (See also under Economics) society, 46, 64, 107, 116, 122–23, 133, 137, 148, 186 and trauma, 10, 24, 186, 189 See also Culture, popular, Emperor, Occupation, the, Trauma Prewar, 1, 10, 35 ideology, 5, 33, 64, 68, 109 leaders, 14, 50. (See also Elites, Emperor, Samurai) politics, 1, 68 values, 9, 33 Prisoners, 110, 112, 117. See also Criminals, War, prisoners of Protagonist, 23, 27, 37n11, 54, 103–104, 106–107, 110–111, 114, 137–138n2, 150–151, 154, 179n4. See also Hero, Heroine Rashomon. See under Film Realism, 10, 13, 41, 43, 45, 57, 72, 118 neo- 69 surrealism, 29, 41, 44, 74, 76–77 Redemption, 8–10, 23, 28–9, 31–33, 36, 53, 118, 158–159n17, 182, 186 Remakes, 9, 11, 36n1, 85–98 Re-membering, 1, 4, 24, 33–34, 185–86. See also Igarashi, Memory Responsibility, 10, 11, 13–4, 25–28, 32, 68, 72, 77–8, 89, 93–4, 137, 145, 148, 156, 158–159n17, 170, 177 collective, 2, 10, 35–6, 65, 67, 145, 148 war, 50, 53, 57, 89, 186, 188n2 Rupture, 10, 45, 50, 178

Index

Samurai, 29, 34, 36n1, 49, 59n9, 105–106, 179n4, 183 Bushido (code of ), 105, 118n2 Seaton, Philip, 24, 163, 182–183, 186 Second World War, 1, 3–5, 26, 28, 32–33, 41, 43, 63, 66–67, 86–87, 92, 94, 117, 122, 136, 163–64, 183, 185. See also War, Greater East Asia War Self, 10, 32, 69, 97, 100n9, 104, 110, 135–136, 144, 149 collective-, 6, 64, 125 -criticism, 136, 155, 158n8, 158–159n17 -deception, 12, 129, 131–136 -introduction 110,111 -negation (jiko hitei), 43, 54, 69, 73, 134–135 -representation, 144, 183 -sacrifice, 34, 64, 103, 108, 133–134, 154 Self Defence Forces. See under Military Sex, 47, 51, 73–4, 104, 110–115, 117–118, 119n4, 5, and 6, 134–135, 154, 158n10. See also Gender Sexuality, 47–48, 51, 115, 118, 119n7. See also Gender Shinsayoku. See under Communism, New Left, the Shinto, 25, 48, 51 Shutaisei. See Subjectivity Society, 6, 7, 9, 12, 15n1, 42, 66, 69, 73, 110, 135, 144, 154, 182 Japanese, 3–5, 25, 28, 34, 46–8, 50, 56–8, 64–5, 68, 70–1, 118, 122–124, 126, 128–130, 133, 136–137, 143, 146–148, 150, 153, 156, 158n6, 163, 183–186 Sociology, 1–2, 42 Sōgō geijutsu (synthetic art). See under Art Soldiers, 5, 27, 86, 89–90, 93, 97, 99n1, 118–119n2, 130, 183–184, 187. See also Samurai, War, veterans South America, 174 Southeast Asia, 162, 163–164, 166–167, 169, 173 Standish, Isolde, 70–1, 105–107

197

Students, 26, 43, 67–68, 147, 149–151 movement, 5, 12, 67–70, 122–137 radicals, 12, 66, 73, 117, 122–137, 137–138n2 See also Politics, student, Youth Subjectivity (shutaisei), 10–11, 24, 42–3, 64, 66, 69–79, 154. See also Self, the Suffering. See Trauma Tashū geijutsu (popular arts). See Culture, popular Television, 1, 48, 55, 57, 69, 86–7, 90–1, 94, 124–125, 136–137, 163, 179n2, 183 300 million yen robbery, 126–128, 130, 134–135, 138n5. (See also under Film) Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai (1958, 1994, 2007) 86, 95, 97–8, 99n3 and 4. (See also under Film) Teshigahara Hiroshi, 41–6, 59n1 Tokyo 1958. See under Film Tokyo War Crime Trials (1946–1948), 10, 29, 85–6, 91, 99n2 Tradition, 2–3, 47–49, 75, 107, 164 invention of, 3, 188n3 Japanese, 12, 107, 113, 155, 184 and modernity, 49, 103, 118 See also Modernity Translation, 89, 162–179 Trauma, 24, 110–111 collective, 5, 14, 24, 30, 35, 42–3, 63–6, 73, 92, 185 and memory, 25, 182–187 representations of, 14, 24, 37n11 and 14, 158n17 and suffering, 5, 10, 14, 24, 65, 77, 108, 114, 132, 158n7, 183 See also Victimization, War, atrocities Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security. See Anpo Triple Disaster (11 March 2011), 4, 16n9, 151, 184–185 Truth, 4, 29, 32–3, 42, 154–155 crisis of, 70, 91, 97 Twentieth century, 1, 3, 42, 116, 158n16, 164. See also 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s

198

Twenty-first century, 1, 7, 32, 122, 127–131, 136, 137–138n2, 150, 164, 178, 183 US, 15, 47–8, 59, 65, 66, 75, 123, 164, 169, 176, 183, 186, 187, 189 Cold War, 178 crimes, 96 military, 26, 64–65, 68, 79, 126, 187 occupation of Japan, 64. (See also Occupation, the) Japan relations, 4–5, 33, 46–7, 51, 53, 67, 68, 79, 92, 97, 125, 178, 188n2 Veterans. See under War Victim, 9–10, 13–4, 57, 67–8, 75, 78, 92, 97, 103, 107, 111, 125, 146, 183, 186, 188n2 Victimization, 10–11, 14, 57, 86, 89, 92, 96–7, 118, 182, 186 War, 1, 5, 9–10, 13, 24, 27–28, 30, 33–35, 45, 48, 57, 71–72, 88–93, 96–98, 113, 116, 150, 153, 155, 158–159n17 aftermath, 8–9, 65 aggression, 14, 154, 163, 185 après-guerre, 27 atrocities, 5, 24, 27, 72, 85–87, 89, 94, 97, 117, 163. (See also Tokyo War Crimes Trials) Cold, 71, 178, 188n2 criminals, 10–11, 85, 88, 93, 96, 99, 102 Greater East Asia War, 13, 154 Korean, 66 memory of, 3, 11, 85–86, 97, 163, 179, 181

Index

narratives of, 86, 91 prisoners of, 64, 85, 88, 91–4, 96 responsibility for, 11, 26, 33, 50–51, 53, 57–58, 67, 69, 158 right to wage (Article 9), 4, 98 veterans, 34, 45 Vietnam, 68, 73, 187 See also Postwar, Prewar, Second World War, Soldiers, Tokyo War Crime Trials Warriors. See Soldiers Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai. See under Film, Television West, 4, 24, 25, 28, 98, 123, 163, 164, 184, 185 culture, 2, 35, 109, 116–117, 159n18, 162 modernity, 30, 56, 103, 116 Work, 5–6, 14, 28, 34, 93–4, 108, 123, 130, 145, 149–152, 163–165, 167, 169–178, 183 workers, 30–31,49, 58, 67, 116, 149–150, 169, 183–184 workforce, 49, 151, 169, 176 See also Class, working, Male, salarymen World War II. See Second World War Women. See Female Youth, 9, 46, 59n8, 67, 69–71, 110, 119n7, 131–135, 150, 154 activists, 126, 129, 133 hikikomori, 149–152, 158n7 NEETS, 6, 149–150, 153, 156 otaku, 6, 184 See also Film, Taiyōzoku, Students