In 1960, 547 Japanese films were produced, and this was the peak of glory for Japanese cinema as an industry. A full 99 percent of these were program pictures, made by the six major studios and shown to viewers at the rate of about two per week. But this turned out to be its highest point, and the film industry then began a precipitous decline. Shin Tōhō could not keep up with this pace and ceased producing films in 1961. The number of viewers had already peaked in 1958 at more than 1.1 billion; after that, the numbers of people watching movies got smaller gradually, but steadily, and by 1963, it was already less than half that, dropping to more than 500 million.
The cause for this decline was the same as it had been in America ten years earlier—the rapid spread of television. Japanese television, which had begun broadcasting in 1953, was a part of most ordinary households by 1959, a trend spurred by the wedding of the Crown Prince and Princess. In 1964, color sets became common because of the Tokyo Olympics. Cinema tried to retain its audience by incorporating attractive innovations that could not be copied by television. Cinemascope1 was developed, and through the 1960s, widescreen movies were produced that filled the large, rectangular screens of movie theaters. What is fascinating is that in the 1980s, this trend was completely reversed. Keeping secondary content for television and video in mind, production companies started shooting in standard size or Vistavision2 from the start. Color became another factor. In 1960, the percentage of films in black and white was still higher than in color. To keep down production costs, some studios shot only certain important scenes in color, dubbing this “part color,” something that later became a common practice in the world of Pink Film. By 1970, just ten years later, black-and-white films were almost nonexistent, and, apart from using black and white for specific scenes for some special reason, black-and-white filming disappeared altogether.
Yet, in spite of all its efforts, the film industry could do little to halt its decline. In 1969, Nikkatsu sold off its studios and, by 1971, had to cease production. Daiei also ended production in 1971.
It probably will seem overly generalized to present it all at once in this way. But provisionally, we can summarize the atmosphere of each company during the 1960s as follows. Tōhō presented the bright world of the petit bourgeois, that is, the urban world of private university students and businessmen. The world of Daiei was somewhat more countrified, focusing on people from rural areas. Shōchiku concerned itself with the warm, human atmosphere of the shitamachi neighborhoods of Tokyo. Tōei concentrated on traditional rural cities. And Nikkatsu largely focused on either cosmopolitan harbor towns or on people living in the country where space was sufficient to ride around on horseback.
This decade was an age in which a whole group of the après-guerre generation of directors appeared at once and immediately started doing excellent work. These directors include Nakahira Kō, Suzuki Seijun, Masumura Yasuzō, Kurahara Koreyoshi, Ishii Teruo, Okamoto Kihachi, Imamura Shōhei, Ōshima Nagisa, Matsumoto Toshio, Yoshida Yoshishige, Shinoda Masahiro, Yamashita Kōsaku, Fukasaku Kinji, and Teshigahara Hiroshi. In this group of new and vibrant directors who made their debut between 1956 and 1962 and produced noteworthy films, some of them voiced their complete rejection of such preceding masters as Mizoguchi or Ozu and others sowed the seeds of scandal with every new work. There were a variety of relationships with the existing studio system. If there were some who remained within the system of program pictures without abandoning their commitment to a particular thematic concern, there were others who were fired abruptly by their companies, or broke out of the system to immediately forge their own production companies.
Even though the new filmmakers were extremely varied, they were all decisively distinct from the directors who got their start in the independent productions of the 1950s. They no longer held any hope or fantasies for social realism or the enlightenment of the masses. They did not have a naive faith in ideas of democracy. Those with wartime experience did not view it simply with the existing stereotyped responses but still held onto that wartime experience as something vital and formative. Those who saw postwar society as an empty sham criticized it cynically. With the example of contemporary Hollywood and the New Wave before them, these directors wanted to seal off and ignore the legacy and traditions of prewar Japanese cinema as much as possible. The renovation of the themes, narrative styles, and language of Japanese cinema by these directors, even as they often worked under difficult conditions, is what characterizes the 1960s.
At Tōhō, following the Shachō series, the Musekinin (Irresponsible) and Nihon ichi no—otoko (The top—man in Japan) series began.3 Both series featured Ueki Hitoshi and the comical musical group Crazy Cats, and Furusawa Kengo directed most of them. These were bright, nonsense musical comedies that made gentle fun of Japan during the era of high economic growth, and they captured quite keenly the feeling of those days. The Big Man on Campus (Wakadaishō) series, starring Kayama Yūzō, was a remake of the cheerful university sports stories that Shōchiku specialized in during the 1930s. These series at Tōhō were welcomed by ordinary middle-class Japanese holding fantasies of someday achieving this kind of carefree prosperity.
Both kaiju films and Kurosawa Akira were as vigorous as ever. In the fight scenes in Yojinbo (1961)—the title literally means, “the bodyguard”—Kurosawa used new, extreme filming techniques, which had not appeared in conventional jidaigeki sword-fighting scenes. These techniques came to exert a strong influence on martial arts films throughout the world and spaghetti westerns and Hong Kong wuxiapian responded right away to them. With High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku, 1963), Kurosawa created a schema of total opposition, something rare in Japanese cinema, and he followed it up with Red Beard (1965), a surprisingly successful effort to make a jidaigeki without sword-fighting scenes. The protagonist, played by Mifune Toshirō, a doctor helping out people of every station, lived by the ethical ideal that he should heal not only the bodies of individuals but also that of society as a whole; he was a figure Kurosawa had long fantasized about. Meanwhile, Mishima Yukio mocked Kurosawa’s humanism as “philosophically at the level of a junior high school student.”4 In 1970, Kurosawa set out to make his first color film, Dodesukaden, a work that depicts the daily life of people who live in a garbage dump on the outskirts of Tokyo. In everything from the clothing of the characters to the color of the soil, the director used artificial colors, completely eschewing the use of natural colors.
Okamoto Kihachi (1924–2005) gave the war film genre his own touch, making the nonsense comedy Desperado Outpost (Dokuritsu gurentai, 1959), which satirized both the Japanese and Chinese armies. He liked to gaze at the vulgar comedy of human desire, and his sensibility approached that of the most interesting spaghetti westerns; however, he was also recalling his own experiences as a student soldier. He shot Japan’s Longest Day (Nihon no ichiban nagai hi, 1967) at Tōhō, a film that depicted the process leading up to Japan’s unconditional surrender, but he was totally dissatisfied because it had to be made in accordance with the standards of an officially approved production. In reaction, with his own funds, he made The Human Bullet (Nikudan, 1968), a comedy about a student soldier who is called up to be a kamikaze pilot just before the end of the war.
Daiei, which was the most ambitious studio in terms of developing color films during the 1950s, produced the seventy-millimeter epic Shaka (directed by Misumi Kenji) about the historical Buddha Sakyamuni in 1961, beating out the other studios. They constructed enormous sets and went as far as India for location shooting, making it arguably the peak of Daiei’s achievements. During the 1960s, Daiei focused on producing series—the Bad Name (Akumyō), Blind Swordsman (Zatōichi), and Hoodlum Soldier (Heitai yakuza) series starring Katsu Shintarō and the A Certain Killer (Aru koroshiya), Sleepy-Eyes of Death (Nemuri Kyoshirō), and Nakano Spy School (Rikugun Nakano gakkō) series starring Ichikawa Raizō. In addition, he produced the Great Demon God (Daimajin) series that featured a giant haniwa statue of an ancient warrior that comes to life and the kaiju series Gamera.
Katsu Shintarō (1931–1997) was initially brought into Daiei as a leading actor, but while Ichikawa quickly became a charismatic star, Katsu’s path to stardom was not quite as smooth. As a result, he chose to play neither the handsome matinee idol nor the lead, but rather, a character belonging to neither category—the zatō. A zatō was a blind man during the Edo era who had a nominal rank as a Buddhist priest and usually worked as a masseur. In Mori Kazuo’s The Blind Menace (Shiranui Kengyō, 1960), he played the lead, an evil kengyō,5 and it would be a major turning point for him for it gave birth to the Zatōichi series (1962–1971). The titular Ichi, a blind man, wields his brutal cane-blade like a master and is without peer at the gambling table, a man monstrous and terrifying. Ichi wanders throughout Japan, dispatching evil power mongers across the land and helping mothers reunite with their children—this narrative constituted the core of the series. The series, which featured a handicapped outlaw as its protagonist, was even adapted for television during the 1970s, and it earned popularity from several countries in Asia and Latin America. That a blind master of wuxiapian would appear in Hong Kong cinema was also thanks to the Zatōichi series. In 1989, what could be called the definitive version of Zatōichi was directed by none other than Katsu Shintarō himself.
Fight, Zatoichi, Fight (dir. Misumi Kenji, 1964).
Ichikawa Kon (1915–2008) demonstrated his prowess by making movies at Daiei starring Ichikawa Raizō set in the contemporary age. Such works as Conflagration (Enjō, 1958), a film version of Mishima Yukio’s Kinkakuji (The Golden Pavilion) and Broken Commandment (Hakai, 1961) based on Shimazaki Tōson’s classic novel about discrimination against the former outcast class, were part of Daiei’s string of adaptations of famous literary works. In addition, Ichikawa directed a remake of Yukinojō Henge as An Actor’s Revenge, its vibrantly colorful palette serving to commemorate the three-hundredth role of its star, Hasegawa Kazuo (1908–1984). It had been nearly thirty years since Hasegawa had first appeared in Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Yukinojō henge. For the same actor to perform on screen in the same narrative separated by such a gulf of time was something globally unprecedented, to say nothing of the fact that in both films he played the role of a Kabuki onnagata, a man who must look beautiful and feminine. That no one thought this strange reveals the continuing influence of Kabuki’s way of thinking about theater. Ichikawa was then tapped to direct a documentary about the Olympics in Tokyo the following year, 1964, which he did by deploying extremely avant-garde techniques and showing little concern for Japanese gold medals. As a result, he was harshly criticized by nationalists, and he was forced to re-edit it against his will, inserting several scenes in which Japanese players triumphed.
If one had to choose one director to represent Daiei in the 1960s, that honor would undoubtedly fall on Masumura Yasuzō (1924–1986). Masumura, who studied filmmaking at the Centro sperimentale di cinematografia in Rome, gave a merciless critique of Japanese film upon his return, citing its tendencies toward sentimentalism, harmony, and a sense of resignation. He became an assistant director to Mizoguchi Kenji, but the barbs of his critique were aimed even at his great teacher. Debuting in 1957 with Kisses (Kuchizuke), Masumura passionately depicted Japanese actresses in a way akin to actresses in Italian films, as independent subjects of desire. With A Wife Confesses (Tsuma wa kokuhaku suru, 1961), Manji (1961), adapted from the 1928 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō novel Quicksand, and Seisaku’s Wife (Seisaku no tsuma, 1965), all starring Wakao Ayako, Masumura was as ambitious and dynamic with her as Von Sternberg was with Dietrich, and his direction is overflowing with vivacious eroticism.
Mizoguchi and Kinugasa had once turned to the shinpa of Izumi Kyōka as a source for their films. Masumura eschewed the frailty of Kyōka and aimed to recreate the world of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō in cinema. A onetime classmate of Mishima Yukio at Tokyo University, he shot Afraid to Die (Karakkaze yarō, 1960) starring Mishima as the protagonist, the personification of a man who wants to be in the limelight. Mishima himself gave further life to his experiences of that time, penning the short fiction Star and directing himself in his own work, Patriotism (Yūkoku, 1966).
Partly because Daiei owned few theaters for the exhibition of its films, it could not survive the decline of the film industry, and it finally collapsed in 1971. Masumura’s Play (Asobi, 1971), produced during the studio’s final days, ends with the scene of a young man and woman who climb into a boat with a hole in it, rowing out aimlessly. We can see in this the dedication of Daiei’s staff who sought hope within the prevailing despair.
At the end of the 1950s, Shōchiku lost vigor and direction. Producer Kido Shirō, having produced shōshimin films in the 1930s, now went to search for talent from the new generation to ward off the innovations of Tōei and Nikkatsu. When Ōshima Nagisa (1932–2013) caused controversy with the release of his film Town of Love and Hope (Ai to kibō no machi, 1959), journalism dubbed this the Shōchiku Nouvelle Vague, raising expectations for several directors with him in the lead. The next year, Ōshima released Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri, 1960). It was a work in which students who failed to prevent the passage of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 and citizens of the generation who had experienced despair when the Japanese Communist Party changed its policies in 1952 happen to be at the same wedding, debating one another as they share their reflections on their respective experiences. The film employed experimental techniques, including the extensive use of sequence shots—a long take that constitutes a single scene in one shot—as well as shots in which time moves freely back and forth within a single shot. Just at that time, a deep sense of pessimism floated among young people following their defeat in the battle against the security treaty, and it was considered politically an extremely delicate issue for someone to direct a film that took this as a theme. Ōshima, as far as this point was concerned, was an exemplary forerunner of the Greek director Theo Angelopolous, who shot The Travelling Players (O Thiassos, 1975). Shōchiku stopped the screening of the film four days after its release, and Ōshima resigned in protest.
In the wake of this event, Ōshima started his own production company (Sōzōsha) and with Violence at Noon (Hakuchū no tōrima, 1966), Ōshima depicted the moment at which sex, violence, and madness cross paths by assembling nearly two thousand shots. When we consider that Battleship Potemkin, the film that pioneered montage theory, was composed of fifteen hundred shots, we can see how daring Ōshima’s plans were. Furthermore, with Sing a Song of Sex (Nihon shunka kō, 1967) and Three Resurrected Drunkards (Kaette kita yopparai, 1968), Ōshima took up zainichi Koreans, a subject that had been verboten in Japanese film to that point, going so far as to have one of his characters make the scandalous remark that the origins of the emperor system are in Korea. This tendency of Ōshima’s reached its peak with Death by Hanging (Kōshikei, 1968), which constitutes the moment when Japanese cinema came closest to Brechtian burlesque. As the decade wore on, Ōshima deviated ever further from the conventions of cinematic narrative. In The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Tokyo sensō sengo hiwa, 1970), which he made with the cooperation of an eighteen-year-old filmmaker named Hara Masato, the aesthetic concern with cinematic self-reflexivity came to overlap with political radicalism, and its very frame as a work of art was pushed nearly to the point of its own dissolution.
In the end, the Shōchiku nouvelle vague did not last more than a few years, but it did produce excellent directors in addition to Ōshima. They remained at Shōchiku for a period, but once they left it, they largely borrowed the 10-million-yen-film system by Art Theater Guild (ATG) and made experimental works. Shinoda Masahiro (1931–), with Terayama Shūji (1935–1983) as his screenwriter, depicted the loneliness of a terrorist youth in Dry Lake (Kawaita mizuumi, 1960), and then he shot independently Love Suicide at Amijima (Shinjū ten no amijima, 1969) based on Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s puppet play. He introduced the representative system of the classical Japanese art of Bunraku puppet theater into film in a critical manner, while also demythologizing Chikamatsu melodrama. In addition, with Akitsu Hot Springs (Akitsu onsen, 1962), Yoshida Yoshishige (1933–) made a love story, making full use of the potential of the actress Okada Mariko. Simply by depicting the eroticism of water as a material thing, Yoshida ensured that his name would be remembered in Japanese film history. His vivid sense of direction stands in stark contrast to the quiet sense of the master Ozu Yasujirō. This film raises the antagonism between the aesthetics of Ozu and Yoshida to the level of myth. As for Yoshida, once he left Shōchiku, he pursued the points of contact between eros and terrorism that had appeared in modern Japanese history, standing on a point offering a grand view of the past, present, and future with the works Eros Plus Massacre (Erosu purasu gyakusatsu, 1969), Heroic Purgatory (Rengoku eroika, 1970), and Coup d’etat (Kaigenrei, 1973).
Following the departure of these directors, Shōchiku returned once more to tedious melodramas and to a world of everyman comedies that could be summarized with the words “Sunny Shitamachi.” Taking the name from the location of one of the branches of the studio, these were referred to as the “Ōfuna style.” Nomura Yoshitarō, with Dear Emperor (Haikei tennō heika sama, 1963), had Atsumi Kiyoshi play a poor, simple youth who is thankful that no place is more comfortable to study than the army. Nomura’s pupil, Yamada Yōji, gave the role of a good man of a low class ripe with human sentiment who is optimistic and boorish (this typical Japanese character first appeared in Inagaki Hiroshi’s Muhō Matsu the Rickshaw Man in 1958) to Hana Hajime in A Complete Fool (Baka marudashi, 1964). The offspring of this convergence was the It’s Tough Being a Man (Otoko wa tsurai yo) series, directed by Yamada and starring Atsumi Kiyoshi, which first appeared in 1969.6
If one more director at Shōchiku during the 1960s should be noted, it is Kobayashi Masaki (1916–1996). From his focus on those falsely accused of low-level war crimes in The Thick-Walled Room (Kabe atsuki heya, 1956), all the way to Tokyo Trial (Tokyo saiban, 1983), he remained steadfastly committed to the question of wartime responsibility. After completing the six-part series The Human Condition (Ningen no jōken, 1959–1961), with its epic unfolding against the backdrop of the Japanese military invasion of China, he confronted directly the code of the samurai itself with Harakiri (Seppuku, 1962). With Kwaidan (1964), he teamed up with the composer Takemitsu Tōru, creating an experimental symphony of sound and imagery. The theme of his life’s work was the tragedy and pathos of the individual crushed under institutions and power, which was rooted in his experience as a war prisoner during the battle of Okinawa.
Throughout the 1950s, Tōei Kyoto steadily continued to compete with jidaigeki, but at the beginning of the 1960s, a new trend emerged: ninkyō eiga—films about idealized yakuza (gangsters). These films were set between the prewar and postwar periods and featured yakuza as protagonists.
Sawashima Tadashi’s Theater of Life: Hishakaku (Jinsei gekijō: Hishakaku, 1963), costarring Tsuruta Kōji and Takakura Ken, often is taken as the beginning of ninkyō yakuza film. The combination of Tsuruta, as a type that is anguished over the disappearance of human relationships based on traditional society, stoic in the face of adversity, and the younger quick-tempered Takakura, who, even as he is conflicted by his social obligations and personal desires, recklessly sacrifices himself in the end, appealed to audiences that were getting tired of jidaigeki. Once this combination was joined by actress Fuji Junko, whose pure spirit shone all the more brightly in the shadow of all the masculine virtuosity, and Wakayama Tomisaburō, who tended to play a crude but sentimental buffoon, this world was complete. Series such as Cruel Stories of the Showa Era (Showa zankyōden), The Walls of Abashiri (Abashiri bangaichi), and Red Peony Gambler (Hibotan bakuto) flourished between 1965 and 1972.
Ninkyō yakuza films were not terribly diverse in terms of narrative. In a typical story, the protagonist, a wandering yakuza, gets caught up unexpectedly in some conflict, obligated because he has accepted a meal and a night’s lodging. Between the factionalizing of his cowardly comrades, as well as the betrayal of the boss he had trusted, the hero bears repeated affronts until he finally sets out on a raid of the bad boss’s gang. At this point, another man appears unexpectedly and offers to join him. The protagonist, after surviving the grand raid, winds up being sent back to prison.
Several significant directors made ninkyō yakuza films. The veteran Makino Masahiro (1908–1993) was the person most conversant with the lifestyle of yakuza, and his films had a humanist flavor. Yamashita Kōsaku presented a solemn world, whereas Katō Tai deployed a baroque formalism, and Suzuki Norifumi maintained a humorous, parodic spirit.
Films from the prewar period with rebellious late Edo period heroes, such as Kunisada Chūji or Jirōkichi the Rat, as protagonists had already evoked a populist spirit. Around 1930, directors like Itō Daisuke, who sympathized with those communists who were driven underground when the Communist Party was declared illegal, would even send hidden signals of support to them when shooting films about outlaw bandits hounded by military police. The currents of ninkyō yakuza film during the 1960s, however, were different from the tales of outlaw bandits in jidaigeki. To be sure, the protagonists in both cases were imbued with a warm, humanist sentiment, embodying a Confucian sense of values with a particular Japanese sensibility. Although these stories were historical nonsense, yakuza were depicted as if they were the sole inheritors of Edo-period samurai morals living in the post-Meiji modern era. Modernization here was nothing but a moral backwardness. The good gangsters, always dressed in traditional Japanese garb and wielding short swords (dosu), faced off against the bad gangsters, who invariably wore cheap Western suits and used guns as their weapons. They aimed to return to traditional communities based on a sense of honor lost to today’s society, and it was this consciousness in the world of ninkyō yakuza film that stoked the highest utopian spirit. Such nostalgia for the premodern era was not possible in jidaigeki in the prewar and postwar periods. It was only after undergoing high economic growth in the 1960s that this kind of sentimental perversion appeared. Those who enthusiastically supported ninkyō yakuza films were student radicals of the new left and Mishima Yukio. The reason for this is simple. Both were in search of a community they could sink into without abandoning their individualism, and a ritual-based system that could guarantee their self-identity was nowhere to be found for these children of the postwar era.
In contrast to Tōei’s fall into pre-modernism, Nikkatsu, through action films, continually affirmed the present moment of the postwar world. In the first half of the 1960s, this took on an increasingly cosmopolitan air and strong sense of hybridity, making free use of everything from Hollywood westerns to Italian neorealism, to the French nouvelle vague, all remade according to Japanese style. The tendency is to limit Nikkatsu cinema during this period specifically to “borderless action” (mukokuseki akushon) films and to refer to Nikkatsu cinema more generally by that term. The prototype of borderless action was the Wandering Guitarist (wataridori, “wandering bird”) series, which was produced between 1959 and 1962. With guitar in hand, the drifter played by Kobayashi Akira visits various regional towns. There he witnesses Asaoka Ruriko being exploited by an evil local operator, and he becomes her ally. As the archenemy, Shishido Jō gets caught up in this entanglement, like Burt Lancaster in Vera Cruz (1954). In the end, after he has rescued Ruriko, he sets off once more for parts unknown. It is perfectly obvious that this narrative pattern is a rehashing of the western Shane (1953), directed by George Stevens. Hokkaido, or the base of Mt. Aso, served as a setting for such Japanese-style westerns, while trading port cities like Yokohama or Kobe were the preferred setting for gangster films.
Ishihara Yūjirō began to transform his image away from the aimless youth of Sun Tribe films, and by the mid-1960s, acted in sweetly sentimental love stories dubbed “mood action.” Ezaki Mio was the most representative director of such films and made Thank You Again Tonight, Evening Fog (Yogiri yo kon’ya mo arigatō, 1967), a superior adaptation of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942). It is a story in which Yūjirō does his best to help smuggle Southeast Asian revolutionary Nitani Hideaki out of Yokohama. Shishido Jō was touted sensationally by the ad-copy as the “third fastest draw in the world!” and would come to walk the hardboiled path alone. In Nomura Takashi’s A Colt Is My Passport (Koruto wa ore no pasupōto, 1967), we can see him as the most austere manifestation of nihilism. Viewers called him “Joe the Ace.”
What supported Nikkatsu action were the workman-like directors, such as Saitō Buichi, Masuda Toshio, and Kurahara Koreyoshi. The one who stood out the most, however, was Nakahira Kō (1926–1978). He was responsible for Yūjirō’s debut, and once he had sufficiently turned Yūjirō into a mythical, larger-than-life figure, Nakahira then went on to establish Nikkatsu’s “pure heart” line of pictures (junjō rosen), beginning with A Pure Heart Spattered with Mud (Doro darake no junjō, 1963), starring Yoshinaga Sayuri and Hamada Mitsuo. Just as he finished shooting Plants in the Sand (Suna no ue no shokubutsu gun, 1964), he moved to Hong Kong during the late 1960s, and then worked in South Korea during the early 1970s, remaking his own films and, in this way, expanding the world of Nikkatsu action throughout Asia. During this period, not only Nakahira but also Inoue Umetsugu actively shot in Hong Kong and both frequently organized coproductions between Hong Kong and Japan. The seeds would come to fruition with the great flowering of Hong Kong noir in the 1980s and finally with the great expansion of Hong Kong film personnel in the world of Hollywood action films during the 1990s.
We cannot forget one true genius in the world of action: Suzuki Seijun (1923–2017). Suzuki, while continuing to shoot B pictures for Nikkatsu, which is to say, the bottom half of a double-bill, became an idol to cinephiles through his mannerist attention to surfaces, combined with a grotesque imagination. With such works as Tattooed Life (Irezumi ichidai, 1965) and Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin, 1967), he built a highly eccentric world, deploying an assemblage of garish primary colors, extreme close-ups, highly formalized killing scenes in the style of gekiga,7 and an apocalyptic sense of nihilism. In 1968, when Nikkatsu forcefully removed him from his contract for making incomprehensible films, cinephiles took to the streets, stirring up a ruckus akin to the Henri Langlois incident in France.8
Nikkatsu’s glory did not last long, however. When confronted with the sensational ninkyō yakuza films produced by Tōei, Nikkatsu was compelled to shift its own programming little by little. The genre of the idealized gangster in a series like The Symbol of a Man (Otoko no monshō, 1963) was perhaps more suited to the later emergence of Takahashi Hideki; and the Burai/Zenka (Outcast/Criminal Record) series, which began in 1968 and starred Watari Tetsuya, was full of dark, bloody battles, utterly removed from the kind of idyllic shootouts that characterized the initial output of Nikkatsu action films. This trend was called “New Action” and gave Sawada Yukihiro and Fujita Toshiya their start as new directors.
Before finishing the discussion of Nikkatsu, I will address two essential filmmakers who bore no connection to action films: Imamura Shōhei (1926–2006) and Urayama Kirio (1930–1985). Imamura held tight to a worldview affirming the earthiness of women as a source of vitality in such films as Pigs and Battleships (Buta to gunkan, 1961) and Insect Woman (Nippon konchūki, 1963). He then came to be charmed by the pathos-laden, premodern world of rural customs gradually disappearing from Japan during the process of modernization. After leaving Nikkatsu, he went to Okinawa where he shot Profound Desire of the Gods (Kamigami no fukaki yokubō, 1968), in which he layered over the present a narrative of incest between a brother and sister that appears in world creation myths (needless to say, the villagers that Imamura filmed were completely dumbfounded by the sentiments of this man who had traveled there from the mainland). Gradually, Imamura would come to shoot everything himself, including interiors, on location, and his interest would shift gradually from theatrical feature films to documentaries. After he shot Postwar History as Told by a Bar Hostess (Nippon sengoshi: Madamu onboro no seikatsu, 1970), he disappeared from the world of film for a while.
Urayama Kirio awakened Yoshinaga Sayuri as an actress with Foundry Town (Kyūpora no aru machi, 1962), and with The Woman I Abandoned (Watashi ga suteta onna, 1969), he depicted the consciousness of sin and the profound gulf that separates men from women. These were films that brought a logical end to the long line of Nikkatsu melodramas beginning with My Sin (Ono ga tsumi),9 based on Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899). Urayama was far from a prolific artist, but in the 1970s, he made a two-part film, Gate of Youth (Seishun no mon), in which he presented the life of a character based on details from his own biography.
In 1971, Nikkatsu temporarily ceased production. The last film to be released that year, Fujita Toshiya’s Wet Sand in August (Hachigatsu no nureta suna), featured amoral high school students aboard a yacht in the coastal Shōnan region, quite strongly reminiscent of Nakahira’s Sun Tribe film Crazed Fruit (1956).
At the start of the 1960s, the major studios completely controlled the market through a block-booking system; as a result, only one or two independently produced works were produced each year. Once the film industry began its decline, however, opportunities for talented directors to work independently outside the studio system began to increase slowly but surely. Shindō Kaneto (1912–2012) of the Kindai Eiga Kyōkai (Modern Film Association) put out such ambitious works as The Naked Island (Hadaka no shima, 1960), Onibaba (1964), and Live Today, Die Tomorrow! (Hadaka no jūkyūsai, 1970) while contending with economic hardship. Among those filmmakers who learned their trade under Mizoguchi Kenji, Shindō followed a path that was directly opposite that of Masumura Yasuzō. His passion leaned not toward the affirmation of individual desire itself, but rather toward the observation of desire as a class product within a social context. Teshigahara Hiroshi teamed up with Abe Kōbō to present works such as Pitfall (Otoshi ana, 1962), Woman of the Dunes (Suna no onna, 1964), and The Face of Another (Tanin no kao, 1966). Each film was based on a biologistic perspective that viewed human beings as though they were biological specimens, a perspective reminiscent of Bunuel, depicting a world replete with absurd black humor.
Woman in the Dunes (dir. Teshigahara Hiroshi, 1964).
In 1962, the Japan ATG was formed. That it held its own theaters in urban centers dedicated to art-house cinema had tremendous significance in terms of the distribution of Japanese independent productions. ATG’s production budget was 10 million yen, around one-fifth that of the major studios, and they adopted a policy of tapping experimentally minded directors to make a single film at a time. This is how the aforementioned avant-garde films by Ōshima, Shinoda, and Yoshida were produced. This is also how Matsumoto Toshio’s Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no sōretsu, 1969) and Jissōji Akio’s This Transient Life (Mujō, 1970) were made, the first films in Japan to deal openly and directly with queerness, gender, and incest. In addition, although it is not a product of ATG, we must also note the anti-American film Black Snow (Kuroi yuki, 1965). Its director, Takechi Tetsuji (1912–1988), incorporated his profound insights into traditional arts into his filmmaking.
Finally, I would like to touch on the genre of Pink Film, which was established during the middle of the decade. By 1970, it had come to occupy nearly half of film output as a whole. In Japan, pornographic films, by traditional definition, had been made since the prewar era. Postwar, in the 1950s and 1960s, the collective known as “Kurosawa Group” formed in the city of Kōchi, secretly shooting and producing eight- and sixteen-millimeter films depicting sexual acts between men and women. This is an important fact for the history of personal film in Japan. While dealing with sex scenes, Pink Film bore no relation to these underground movements; instead, they were produced for theatrical release by small production companies like Shin Tōhō, Ōkura, and Wakamatsu Pro. It is significant that this genre, up to the present day, has maintained in its own way the studio system of program pictures, even while filming under poor working conditions with minuscule budgets and fast shooting schedules.
Violated Angels (dir. Wakamatsu Kōji, 1967).
Within this world, Wakamatsu Kōji (1936–2012) was a director who was dubbed the “king of the Pinks.” When his work Secret Within Walls (Kabe no naka no himegoto) was screened outside Japan’s officially represented works at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival, Japanese journalism was in an uproar over this national scandal. Unbowed, Wakamatsu went on to make such works as The Embryo Hunts in Secret (Taiji ga mitsuryō suru toki, 1966), Violated Angels (Okasareta hakui, 1967), and Violent Virgin (Shojo geba geba, 1969)—films full of violence, sex, and rebellion as well as the desire to return to the womb. He assembled numerous young talents under him, including Okishima Isao, Adachi Masao, and Yamatoya Atsushi, creating an atmosphere akin to the Ryōzanpaku or Mt. Liang, the mountain hideout of the bandits in the Chinese novel Water Margin (Suikoden), where all the strongest fighters gathered.10
Adachi, who presented a string of filmic images overflowing with tension with Closed Vagina (Sain, 1963), ultimately left the world of film, and in the 1970s, joined the Palestinian fight for liberation as a soldier of the Japanese Red Army. Wakamatsu worked with Adachi to direct the documentary PFLP: Declaration of World War (Sekigun—PFLP: Sekai sensō sengen, 1971).
An array of personal filmmakers in the 1960s nested at the Sōgetsu Cinemateque, founded by Teshigara Hiroshi. They included Takabayashi Yōichi, Ōbayashi Nobuhiko, Iimura Takahiko, and the scholar of Japanese film Donald Richie. Finally, when Hara Masato debuted at seventeen years of age with A Parade of Sorrow, Colored by Sadness (Okashisa ni irodorareta kanashimi no parēdo, 1968), many took this as a sign of hope. After inspiring Ōshima Nagisa, who was working as his assistant director, Hara completed the eight-millimeter work The Sacred God of Japan (Hatsukuni shirasusumera mikoto, 1973). Through a steady gaze at the typical landscapes of Japan, he interrogated their political meaning.
Between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, a storm of protest movements swept through the world, with students at its center. Japan was no exception, and the influence of these movements appeared immediately in film. Students within the new left, enamored of ninkyō yakuza films, called out from their seats as if they were watching Kabuki in a theater. Theories of political agitation appeared frequently in film journals. Film critique became much more lively, expanding in an interdisciplinary fashion. When we look back over the twentieth century, this period, alongside that of the late 1920s, convulsed with avant-garde and experimental impulses around the world contemporaneously. What destroyed the glory of the 1920s was fascism, but what brought down the glory of the 1960s was a highly organized consumer society. The Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini condemned the latter as the new face of fascism, before his untimely death in 1975. Japanese cinema of the 1960s continued to spiral downward as an industry, but in terms of the production of idiosyncratic filmmakers, it was a most fruitful decade indeed. People optimistically held out hope that the political and artistic avant-gardes could work together, but when the film fanatic Mishima Yukio killed himself by seppuku in 1970, the act seemed to dash their hopes.