Two events signaled an end to the turbulent years of the 1960s. In 1970, the writer Mishima Yukio committed ritual suicide after the failure of an apparent attempt to mobilize the Self-Defense forces in a right-wing coup. And in 1972, the United Red Army not only took hostages at a lodge on Mt. Asama, but also, as would be revealed later, killed some of its own members out of revolutionary fervor. With these two events, the student movement quickly lost momentum, and society became basically conservative once more.1 Within the cultural arts as well, the experimental and scandalous withdrew from the forefront, and criticism became increasingly cynical and aloof.
In the world of Japanese cinema, by this time, the decline of the studio system was clearly unstoppable. In 1971, 367 films were produced for theatrical release. Going by numbers, this amounted to 70 percent of 1961’s output. But the six studios dropped to five, and the number of films these studios would produce dropped more precipitously from 520 to 160. In their place, the low-budget Pink Films that had just emerged came to occupy 40 percent of film production with 159 works. In contrast, only forty-eight works were produced independently, a marked increase from a decade earlier. Let us begin with a brief overview of the trends of Japanese cinema in the 1970s.
Nikkatsu went bankrupt, but it restarted with the union at its center. From 1971, it made a firm decision to concentrate on a program of producing Roman Porno films, which ultimately led to their ability to buy back the studio. Daiei was also revived in 1974, but it was never able to have its own studio and remained a small, independent production company. Tōhō and Tōei rationalized their production and concentrated on making spectacle films and war epics, but these are not significant in terms of film history. Shōchiku got through this decade by clinging to its money-making It’s Tough Being a Man (Otoko wa tsurai yo) series.
But it was not only the studio system that was on the verge of extinction. The star system died along with it during the 1970s. Actors no longer belonged exclusively to production companies and came to sign new contracts with each work. Stars formed their own production companies one after another. The film world was just getting by and was no longer capable of developing new talent and so, instead, it called in television celebrities and singers. The training of technical personnel was increasingly unstable from around this time.
The 1970s was also characterized by the fact that all of the directors who showed such astonishing vigor during the 1960s fell quiet or were otherwise stifled. Kurosawa ceased shooting in Japan with Japanese capital and sought producers abroad. Ōshima did the same. Imamura moved away from film and toward television documentaries. Suzuki Seijun, Yoshida Yoshishige, and Teshigahara Hiroshi were all silent, and Nakahira Kō died in mid-career. Aside from at Nikkatsu, no new outstanding film artists appeared. In contrast, both documentary and animation showed considerable development, which laid the foundations for their contemporary flourishing.
When the newly revived Nikkatsu announced its entry into the production of Roman Porno2 films, many of the actors and directors that had belonged to Nikkatsu—Japan’s oldest film studio—abandoned it. Kobayashi Akira and Watari Tetsuya switched over to Tōei where they continued to star in action films, and Shishido Jō became famous by appearing in dramas on television about gangsters. Meanwhile, many of the directors who had long been serving their apprenticeship in the shadows and who had no opportunity to direct feature films emerged into the light. The studio began to gather actresses who were willing to do primarily nude scenes—actresses like Miyashita Junko, Katagiri Yūko, Isayama Hiroko, Tani Naomi, Shirakawa Kazuko, and Kazama Maiko. Roman Porno followed the example of Pink cinema but had budgets several times the size of the typical Pink Film. As long as it included a certain number of obligatory sex scenes, directors were free to make the rest of the movie as they wished. This was enormously appealing to young directors, and many films were filled with anarchic energy in the early days. In 1972, three films were seized by the Metropolitan Police Department for violation of public decency, but this claim was rejected in a subsequent court case. Roman Porno is extremely important as these films continued to be made until 1988, at a pace of two films every two weeks. In the following, I introduce some of the most outstanding directors.
The theme running through all the works of Kumashiro Tatsumi (1927–1995) is the way that Japanese people have always accepted sexuality with an indulgent openness and a festival spirit. His representative works include Ichijō’s Wet Lust (Ichijō Sayuri, nureta yokujō, 1972), which followed the life of a sensational genius stripper who took the world by storm; The World of Geisha (Yojōhan fusuma no urabari, 1973), which depicted the joys and sorrows of prostitutes in a brothel during the prewar period; and Dannoura Pillow War (Dannoura yomakura kassenki, 1977), an absurd Rabelaisian take on the climactic battle between the military Genji and Heike clans in the twelfth century, transposed to the world of the sex lives of aristocrats and samurai. Many women appeared in Kumashiro’s films, and they always are colorful, optimistic, and earthy figures who win out with no difficulties. The men, by contrast, are melancholic and cowardly; but sometimes they become the protagonists of picaresque episodes.
Oh! Women: A Dirty Song (dir. Kumashiro Tatsumi, 1981).
Tanaka Noboru (1937–2006) channeled the grotesque and decadent aesthetic of late ukiyo-e woodblock prints and became known for his cruel eroticism. In works such as The Hell-Fated Courtesan (Maruhi: Jorō seme jigoku, 1973),3 Secret Report: Sex Market (Maruhi: Shikijō mesu ichiba, 1974), and Rape and Death of a Housewife (Hitozuma shūdan bōkō chishi jiken, 1978), he depicted the human drama that is produced by extreme conditions of sexuality. Sone Chūsei (1937–2014), with works such as My Sex Report: Intensities (Watashi no SEX hakusho: Zecchōdo, 1976) and Angel Guts: Red Classroom (Tenshi no harawata: Akai kyōshitsu, 1979), honed a thrilling style, which he used to focus on the politics that can become visible only through abnormal sexual acts. Konuma Masaru (1937—), in works such as Afternoon Affair: Kyoto Holy Tapestry (Hiru sagari no jōji: Koto mandara, 1973); Noble Lady, Bound Vase (Kifujin shibari tsubo, 1977); and Wife’s Sexual Fantasy: Before Husband’s Eyes (Tsumatachi no sei taiken: Otto no me no mae de, ima …, 1980), exposed a strange inverted eroticism that recalls Alain Robbe-Grillet. In addition, such veteran directors, including Ohara Kōyū, Nishimura Shōgorō, Takeda Kazunari, and Katō Akira, showed how they could use their craftsmanship in this genre of films as well.
Nikkatsu also produced excellent youth pictures. Murakawa Tōru, with The Play of White Fingers (Shiroi yubi no tawamure, 1972), vividly depicted the process of a young woman who is a pickpocket maturing through sex. With the series Aa!! That Pep Squad (Aa!! Hana no ōendan, 1976–1977), Sone Chūsei earned praise for his humorous narratives of strenuous training and affection in a college cheerleading squad. The youth film director at Nikkatsu who had the strongest support among young people at the time, however, was Fujita Toshiya (1932–1997). Even before Nikkatsu had started making Roman Porno, he had lovingly depicted a small community of young people in their confrontations against the power of adults with the Stray Cat Rock series (1970–1971). In 1974, he also shot a trilogy starring Akiyoshi Kumiko—Red Paper Lanterns (Aka chōchin), Younger Sister (Imōto), and Virgin Blues (Bājin burūsu)—that depicted a young girl coming to the big city and, with beautiful lyricism, showed the process of how she found her individuality.
During the 1980s, the initial anarchic appeal of Nikkatsu Roman Porno began to fade, and the films were gradually growing stagnant. Nonetheless, the genre gave opportunities to new directing talent like Ikeda Toshiharu, Nakahara Shun, Kurosawa Naosuke, and Kaneko Shūsuke. If the Nikkatsu of the 1950s and 1960s essentially adopted a male-centered way of making movies, in which women were always treated as an afterthought, the Nikkatsu of the 1980s might be said, to the contrary, to be making more women-centered films. The designation of the films as “pornos” initially caused befuddlement for more than a few “conscientious” film critics. But it would be impossible to overstate the importance of the role of Nikkatsu during this period, especially given Kumashiro’s reception at the Berlin Film Festival in 1990s as Japan’s foremost woman’s director.
Once the student movement declined, Tōei Kyoto’s ninkyō films seemed old-fashioned. Instead, the contemporary action film series from Tōei’s Tokyo side that had long been relegated to second-tier status produced fascinating offerings. Naitō Makoto’s Wolves of the City (Furyō banchō, 1969–1971) series was an early example of Japan’s Hell’s Angels cinema with its picaresque narrative of youth gangs, while Itō Shunya’s Scorpion (Sasori, 1972–1973) series viewed the state and authority from the perspective of female prisoners inflamed with hatred and a spirit of vengeance.
The most notable director to emerge at Tōei in the 1970s was Fukasaku Kinji (1930–2003), director of the five-part Battles Without Honor and Humanity (Jingi naki tatakai, 1973–1974) series. The style of the Tōei Tokyo studios was epitomized by this series and was called jitsuroku (“true record”) film, a strong contrast in multiple ways to the conventional ninkyō films produced in Kyoto. True record films utterly rejected melodramatic pathos and nostalgia for a traditional, formalized world. Battles Without Honor and Humanity portrayed the gangs who came to rule over the underworld of postwar Japan. Every time one of the characters appears on the screen, on-screen titles announce the name of the character as if it were a documentary and, like the news, dispassionately explain what happens to that character after that. The poles of good and bad have disappeared completely; the only reality is the constant battle for dominance among the gangs, captured with raw immediacy by the movements of the camera. Unlike Takakura Ken, the hero of yakuza films of old, the boss of the new gangs of Hiroshima played by Sugawara Bunta is a ruthless realist who thinks nothing of betrayal. He burns with ambition to overturn the social order. By contrast, Kitaōji Kin’ya embodies the tragic beauty of a yakuza running full bore to his destruction. Fukasaku made parallel works to the series as well, such as Graveyard of Honor (Jingi no hakaba, 1976) and Yakuza Graveyard (Yakuza no hakaba: Kuchinashi no hana, 1976). In the Nikkatsu films of the 1960s, Watari Tetsuya was the embodiment of bright cheerfulness, but in these movies, Fukasaku forced him to play an ominous half-crazed yakuza.
Since his film The Third Leader of the Yamaguchi Gang (Yamaguchi gumi sandaime, 1973), Yamashita Kōsaku (1930–1998) created a stir by making one work after another based on research into the lives of actual yakuza. In Violent Archipelago Japan: The Killers of Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe (Nihon bōryoku rettō: Keihanshin koroshi no gundan, 1975), Yamashita focused on zainichi Korean yakuza, which all of the “conscientious” and “progressive” directors had refused to touch, brilliantly tracing the conditions of those placed at the edges of postwar society. Nakajima Sadao (1934–), in the three-part series Nihon no don (1977–1978), aimed at a grand narrative that could be a final compilation of the series of jitsuroku films. This aim, however, harbored a certain danger: even the slightest misstep threatened to push the work into the territory of the lyrical epic that was the specialty of social realists like Yamamoto Satsuo, meaning that the kind of force and shock the genre held at the outset had dissipated by the end of the 1970s.
Once the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series settled down a bit, Sugawara Bunta appeared in Suzuki Noribumi’s Torakku Yarō (“The Truck Guy”) series, playing a rough truck driver who nonetheless is very human and kind. Aiming to revive their specialty of jidaigeki, Tōei had Fukasaku Kinji direct such big-budget historical epics as The Fall of Akō Castle (Akōjō danzetsu, 1978), Yagyū Conspiracy (Yagyū ichizoku no inbō, 1978), and Samurai Reincarnation (Makai tenshō, 1981). Achieving Tōei’s long-held wish to restore the vitality of the 1950s in jidaigeki, however, proved to be too much even for Fukasaku.
At Shōchiku, after the first film in 1969, the It’s Tough Being a Man series became so popular that it could almost be said that it was beloved by all the Japanese people. The protagonist of the series, Kuruma Torajirō, popularly called “shiftless Tora” (fūten no Tora) is a traveling salesman and showman born in the Shibamata neighborhood of the Katsushika area of Tokyo. Each episode is essentially the same. Tora travels through the country and falls in love with a “Madonna” (played by a star actress) in that particular place with disastrous results. Then he returns periodically to his home in Shibamata, causing difficulties for his long-suffering family. When Yamada Yōji (1931–) first created the protagonist, it was clear that he intended this to be a reflection on the history of Japanese performing arts. The name Kuruma recalls that of Kuruma Zenshichi, who ruled over outcaste groups of entertainers known as gōmune during the Edo period. Furthermore, the name Torajirō refers to Saitō Torajirō, the preeminent director of comedies at Shōchiku during the prewar period.4 The series was celebrated for its nostalgia for a no-longer-existing world of shitamachi, with its overflowing human warmth, and a worldview that people are intrinsically good; the series thus continued for nearly thirty years, and a total of forty-eight films were produced. As a result, it has been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “longest running film series in the world” since 1983.
More important to film history than even Yamada, however, was Morisaki Azuma (1927–), who had been involved as a secondary figure in the earliest days of the It’s Tough Being a Man series. In contrast to Yamada’s praise of the life of the common people as a kind of utopia, Morisaki focused on the hidden rage of everyday life. Ever since Comedy: Women Need Guts (Kigeki: Onna wa dokyō, 1969), he has presented comedies that could be described as black humor. What is present in Morisaki and absent in Yamada is the sense of crisis that “the family,” or “the people,” are no more than ideas that were constructed in the past. After he eventually left Shōchiku, he went on to make Nuclear Gypsies (Ikiteru uchi ga hana nano yo, shindara sore made yo tōsengen, 1985), setting it in a slum that was rapidly becoming multiethnic, a comedy overflowing with the spirit of anarchism.
At Shōchiku there was also Maeda Yōichi (1934–1998), whose stock in trade was nonsense comedies, which he shot one after another. In particular Make Way for the Jaguars (Susume Jagaazu: Tekizen jōriku, 1968) was a strange work that will be remembered as Japan’s first Godardian slapstick parody. While staying within the tradition of human comedies at Shōchiku, the director Yamane Shigeyuki (1936–1991) was heavily influenced by the sensibilities of Nikkatsu’s Suzuki Seijun and enjoyed creating estrangement effects through the use of colors and subtitles on screen. Yamane directed some of the best of the youth pictures starring Gō Hiromi and Akiyoshi Kumiko, including Farewell to the Summer Light (Saraba natsu no hikari yo, 1976) and Suddenly, Like a Storm (Totsuzen, arashi no yō ni, 1977).
If there is something worth remembering produced at Tōhō, it is the idol films of the pop singer Yamaguchi Momoe (1959–). Nishikawa Katsumi, who had shot the true love films at Nikkatsu in the 1960s starring actress Yoshinaga Sayuri, was called in to direct the same kind of pictures once more, including Dancing Girl of Izu (Izu no odoriko, 1974), another film based on Kawabata Yasunari’s classic novel; Shouting (Zesshō, 1975); and Sea of Eden (Eden no umi, 1976). As a singer, Yamaguchi gradually grew increasingly extreme and experimental, but in film, producers never considered her as anything more than an actress suited for remakes of old standards. Nonetheless, with Flag in the Mist, which is also known as Sweet Revenge (Kiri no hata, 1977), Nishikawa had her play an astonishing femme fatale. Yamaguchi retired completely from the entertainment business after her last film, Ichikawa Kon’s Old Capital (Koto, 1980).
Sweet Revenge (dir. Nishikawa Katsumi, 1977).
Without a doubt, in the 1970s, despite the unstoppable decline in studio pictures, ATG provided the richest creative opportunities for filmmakers.
Masumura Yasuzō, who had completed his final film at Daiei, Play (Asobi, 1971), showed the almost-frightening perfection of his skills at ATG with Music (Ongaku, 1972), Lullabies for the Earth (Daichi no komori uta, 1976), and Love Suicides at Sonezaki (Sonezaki Shinjū, 1978). Masumura’s picture of women with fierce individuality and a desire for life that did not waver even in the face of their own destruction was crystalized in its most ideal form in the actresses Harada Mieko and Kaji Meiko.
Kuroki Kazuo (1930–2006), who started in the field of documentary film, visited Cuba in 1969, where he shot Cuban Lover (Kyūba no koibito). Just as Masumura was fascinated by desire, Kuroki was obsessed with factional politics. He made Evil Spirits of Japan (Nippon no akuryō, 1970), which showed the shift in policy of the Japanese Communist Party in the early 1950s in the style of a ninkyō film, and then seemingly made a drastic switch with The Assassination of Ryoma (Ryōma ansatsu, 1974), which focused on terrorism in the political struggles among youth just before the Meiji Restoration. Outside the movie theaters, new left activists isolated themselves from trying to ignite the public and instead were preoccupied with infighting that led to killings. Kuroki experimented with confronting this situation through a jidaigeki, showing a similar situation in the past. Higashi Yōichi (1934–), in contrast, shot No More Easy Life (Mō hōzue wa tsukanai, 1979), which featured a group of men who feel a temporary sense of exhaustion stemming from their despair over the student movement, alongside a group of women of the same generation who doggedly survive by overcoming their idleness. Overnight, Momoi Kaori, who played the heroine, captured the empathy of this generation.
Following the collapse of the studio system, many filmmakers who had been active in independent and experimental cinema were invited into the world of feature film. Takabayashi Yōichi (1931–2012) depicted a world of languorous eroticism in Doll in the Shadows (Hina no kage, 1964), becoming an independent filmmaker drawing international attention. He shot Death at an Old Mansion (Honjin satsujin jiken, 1975) and The Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji, 1976) for ATG. Ōbayashi Nobuhiko (1938–), who had been shooting pastiches of horror film as independent works since the 1960s, began making vibrant creative work in the world of thirty-five-millimeter feature films with his comedy-horror film House (Hausu, 1977). At the root of this work was an unending nostalgia for the time of one’s youth. This longing for a past that can never return was crystallized brilliantly in films like Transfer Students (Tenkōsei, 1982) and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki o kakeru shōjō, 1983).
The independent filmmaker whose cinematic talent blossomed most fully during the 1970s was undoubtedly the playwright and poet Terayama Shūji (1935–1983). In the range of his artistic activities and the way he courted scandal, as well as his obsession with his mother, he recalls Pasolini. Originally a poet, Terayama entered the film world at the beginning of the 1960s as a screenwriter for Shinoda Masahiro. He then led an underground theater troupe—Tenjōsajiki—and, using them as a foundation, he made several experimental films in the late 1960s. Many of these films had a conceptual humor at the core—in one, the screen rips open and the character who had been in the film suddenly emerges in the flesh. In another, a hand gropes for the light switch in a dark room. When he finds it and turns on the switch, the lights in the theater all go on and the movie is over. But in the 1970s, Terayama made real feature films. Throw Away Your Books! Take to the Streets! (Sho o suteyo machi e deyo, 1971) does not actually have a storyline, but it mobilizes all the members of the Tenjōsajiki theater troupe to show urban anonymity and the self-expression of the younger generation in underground culture. Instead of the city, by contrast, To Die in the Estuary (Den’en ni shisu, 1974) is set in the director’s home area of Aomori and focuses on the sinfulness of rural life, the karma of the family, and the attempt to escape from infinite evil.
At the end of the 1970s, ATG experimented with youth films of an even-younger generation. This trend is represented by Ōmori Kazuki (1952–), the director of Disciples of Hippocrates (Hipokuratesu tachi, 1980). The end of the 1970s saw a dearth of new directors in studio pictures. New figures, however, appeared from Pink Films, including Takahashi Banmei (1949–), Nakamura Genji (1946–), and Izutsu Kazuyuki (1952–). Takahashi made Tattoo (Irezumi ari, 1982) using materials on actual bank robbers. Izutsu directed two memorable films with a strong style that intensely evoked Osaka’s ethnic and cultural diversity: Empire of Punks (Gaki teikoku, 1981) and Empire of Punks: A Rowdy War (Gaki teikoku: Akutare sensō, 1982).
Before closing this chapter on cinema in the 1970s, I will discuss the extremely radical developments in documentary cinema that occurred during this period. Two figures were at the center of this development: Tsuchimoto Noriaki (1928–2008) and Ogawa Shinsuke (1935–1992).
In Exchange Student Chua Swee Lin (Ryūgakusei Chua Sui Rin, 1965), Tsuchimoto showed in great detail the persecution of an exchange student from Malaysia for political reasons by the authorities of Chiba University. He then took up the political struggles of the student movement on the campus of Kyoto University with Prehistory of the Partisan (Paruchizan zenshi, 1969) before developing a long engagement with the issue of pollution in Minamata.5 In Minamata: The Victims and Their World (Minamata: Kanjasan to sono sekai, 1971), a work that focused directly on the anger at the pollution, Tsuchimoto trained his focus on the bitter attacks at a shareholder’s meeting at the Chisso Corporation, the company responsible. Coming to feel that it was necessary to research and report on Minamata disease as a medical issue, he made a three-part science film on the topic, before moving on to record with sensitivity the everyday lives, worldviews, and statements of victims in The Shiranui Sea (Shiranui kai, 1975). Tsuchimoto’s long engagement with Minamata continued after that as well, existing not only as a monument of documentary cinema but arguably as a forceful criticism of the century of Japanese modernity in toto.
Sanrizuka: Peasants of the Second Fortress (dir. Ogawa Shinsuke, 1971).
Ogawa also began by shooting a documentary on the topic of student activism with Forest of Oppression: A Record of the Struggle at Takasaki City University (Assatsu no mori: Takasaki keizai daigaku tōso no kiroku, 1967), but then, rather than turning to fishing villages, as Tsuchimoto had, Ogawa turned toward Sanrizuka, where farmers’ battles against the appropriation of their land to build Narita airport were in full swing.6 As an integral part of his way of filming, Ogawa and his crew settled in the communities where they filmed, and in 1968, he shot The Battle Front for the Liberation of Japan: Summer in Sanrizuka (Nihon kaihō sensen: Sanrizuka no natsu). Ogawa refused to exploit a hidden camera, and instead, he placed his camera clearly and openly on the side of the farmers, choosing to represent the riot police head-on as the enemy. He continued through 1973, making six additional works in the same manner as a series. Initially, these documentaries were full of fury toward the enemy, but gradually, as the number of films increased, they also took on a calmer tone and an understanding and affirmation of the farming communities as they became increasingly perceptible. Especially around the time of Sanrizuka: Heta Village (Sanrizuka: Hetaburaku, 1973), greater focus was placed on the lush, verdant paddy fields and the story of each individual farmer, and the film project took on the aspect of anthropological fieldwork. The amount of information on political struggles dropped rapidly. The utopian political vision that originally animated the movement came to seem like science fiction and was replaced by the reality of the farming community, which could be affirmed unconditionally. This metamorphosis was more than enough to move urban critics, but in the future, it must be carefully examined whether this idealized image of farming villages actually surfaces every time Japanese ideology shifts.
