TAKAMINE Gō

(b. November 12, 1948)

高嶺剛

Okinawa’s most distinctive filmmaker, Takamine has devoted his career to exploring the separate regional identity of the southwestern archipelago. He worked initially on 8mm films while a student in Kyoto; his sense of alienation in Japan’s cultural capital spurred him to document the landscapes and cultural heritage of his birthplace, then in the process of reverting to Japanese rule after nearly thirty years under U.S. control. The reversion itself was the backdrop of Okinawan Dream Show (Uchinā imi manegatai, 1974), which consisted of silent documentary footage of the region’s life and changing landscapes around the time of the handover. Okinawan Chirudai (1978) was another impressionistic documentary, focusing on the cultural traditions and ways of life eroded by foreign influence. The term “chirudai” refers to “loafing around” or “chilling out,” but Takamine used it to convey the relaxed Okinawan sense of time, supplanted by clock time with the coming of modernity. A melancholy background to these films was the decimation of Okinawa’s population in World War II. Among Takamine’s more recent documentaries, Kadekaru Rinsho: Songs and Stories (Kadekaru Rinshō: Uta to katari, 1995) consisted of interviews with and songs by the eccentric local folk singer of the title, while Private Images of Ryukyu: JM (Shiteki satsu mugen Ryūkyū: JM, 2003) was another collection of images depicting Okinawan life and culture, woven around a visit to the island by avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas.

Takamine’s narrative films have addressed the same themes in a magical realist style blending Okinawan folklore with the director’s own personal mythology. Paradise View (Paradaisu Byū, 1985) and Untama Giru (Untama Girū, 1989)—the latter named after a local Robin Hood figure—were languid yet pointed fables about the archipelago’s status as a colony of two large and powerful nations. The commentary was not subtle: typical of Takamine’s broad, vivid brand of satire was the scene in Untama Giru in which the American governor receives a blood transfusion from a pig. Nevertheless, the surreal wit of these films made them seem less angry than amused: Tony Rayns described Untama Giru as “doubtless the most spaced-out agit-prop ever filmed.”

The later Tsuru-Henry (Mugen Ryūkyū: Tsuru-Henrī, 1998), about a folk singer and her half-American son trying to adapt a film script left unfinished by a local filmmaker, linked these concerns with cultural heritage and its dilution to a more self-conscious examination of the role of the artist in a colonial milieu. Alas, the use of video rather than celluloid deprived its images of the sensuality with which Paradise View and Untama Giru had recorded the Okinawan landscape. In general, Takamine’s work may simply be too mellow, too lacking in urgency, for some tastes. But he remains a unique and often beguiling voice.

1970 Redman (8mm short)

1971 Dorīmu shō No. 1 / Dream Show No. 1 (8mm short)

1972 Sashinguwā / Dear Photograph (8mm short)

1974 Uchinā imi manegatai / Okinawan Dream Show (8mm)

1975 Sashingwā / Dear Photograph (16mm short)

1978 Okinawan chirudai / Okinawan Chirudai (lit. Loafing Around, Okinawa Style) (16mm)

1981 V.O.H.R.: Ningen kankei no nagame / View of Human Relations (16mm)

1985 Paradaisu Byū / Paradise View

1989 Untama Girū / Untama Giru

1992 Photo on the Stone (16mm short)

1994 A.S.O.P. Shu Lea Cheang no bāi / A.S.O.P. In the Case of Shu Lea Cheang

1995 Kadekaru Rinshō: Uta to katari / Kadekaru Rinsho: Songs and Stories

1998 Mugen Ryūkyū: Tsuru-Henrī / Tsuru-Henry

2003 Mugen Ryūkyū: Okinawa shimauta Pari no sora ni hibiku / Okinawa Island Songs Echo in the Parisian Sky

Shiteki satsu mugen Ryūkyū: JM / Private Images of Ryuku: JM

TAKECHI Tetsuji

(December 10, 1912–July 26, 1988)

武智鉄二

Takechi is mentioned here less for his distinctly modest talent as a filmmaker than for his historical importance in pioneering the representation of explicit sexuality in Japanese film. Predominantly a director of experimental theater, he staged Noh and Kabuki with naked actors during the fifties. His first film, A Night in Japan: Woman Woman Woman Story (Nihon no yoru: Onna onna onna monogatari, 1963), was a semi-documentary about women working as bar hostesses, strippers, masseurs, and geisha, but he achieved notice and notoriety the following year with two Jun’ichirō Tanizaki adaptations: Daydream (Hakujitsumu, 1964) and The Dream of the Red Chamber (Kōkeimu, 1964). Both were sexually explicit experimental films; the latter was heavily cut by the censors. The former recounted the masochistic fantasies experienced by a woman under sedation for dental treatment. Though its minimal plotting and dream logic were innovative, it was clumsy in style, and Tanizaki himself publicly condemned it. Nevertheless, it was commercially successful and obtained international distribution.

Takechi’s next film, Black Snow (Kuroi yuki, 1965) was an account of a young Japanese who murders the black GI who had slept with his prostitute mother. Intended as a satire on the American military presence in Japan, it again displayed scant stylistic finesse, with clumsily choreographed long takes and an undisciplined use of the zoom lens. Takechi claimed that the nude scenes were “psychological nude scenes symbolizing the defenselessness of the Japanese people in the face of the American invasion,” but the film led to a celebrated trial for obscenity (the director was eventually cleared). After making an erotic adaptation of the classical novel, The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, 1966), and the two Cruel Stories, set respectively among prostitutes and artists, Takechi worked mainly in the theater until the eighties. During his last years, he moved from soft pornography to hard; among these late, sexually explicit films were a remake of Daydream (Hakujitsumu, 1981) and an adaptation of Kyōka Izumi’s melodrama The Saint of Mt. Koya (Kōya hijiri, 1983), about a demonic temptress and a Buddhist monk. Oiran (1983) was a Nagasaki-set costume picture-cum-horror film, again loosely inspired by Tanizaki, about a courtesan loved by a street vendor and coveted by a tattoo artist who wants to work on her beautiful skin.

The aesthetic merit of Takechi’s film work is dubious: he was an indifferent metteur-en-scène and has often been dismissed as a dilettante. However, his films retain both historical significance and symptomatic interest.

1963 Nihon no yoru: Onna onna onna monogatari / A Night in Japan: Woman Woman Woman Story / Women . . . Oh Women

1964 Hakujitsumu / Daydream

Kōkeimu / The Dream of the Red Chamber

1965 Kuroi yuki / Black Snow

1966 Genji monogatari / The Tale of Genji

Genjitsu / Parhelia

1968 Sengo zankoku monogatari / Cruel Story of the Postwar Era

Ukiyoe zankoku monogatari / Cruel Story of the Floating World / Ukiyoe

1973 Sukyandaru fujin / The Lady of Scandal

1981 Hakujitsumu / Daydream

1983 Oiran / Oiran (lit. Prostitute)

Kōya hijiri / The Saint of Mt. Koya

1987 Hakujitsumu 2 / Daydream 2 / Captured for Sex

TAKITA Yōjirō

(b. December 4, 1955)

滝田洋二郎

One of the more interesting directors to have graduated from “pink” film to the mainstream, Takita initially came to notice while working on eleven installments of a long-running series of sex comedies, Molester Train (Chikan densha). Such more serious “pink” films as Serial Rape (Renzoku bōkan, 1983) and Daylight Ripper (Mahiru no kirisakima, 1984) had already earned him a cult reputation before he made his mainstream breakthrough with Comic Magazine (Komikku zasshi nanka iranai, 1986), a scabrous episodic satire on the dubious practices of television journalism, inspired by actual news stories and precisely described by Vincent Canby as “a scurrilously funny picture of a technologically advanced society with an insatiable appetite for what’s largely irrelevant.” Certainly, its portrait of the way in which a fascination with the trivial leads people to lose sight of real moral issues is only more relevant in the twenty-first century.

Satiric comedy proved Takita’s most fertile vein. The Yen Family (Kimura-ke no hitobito, 1988) was a critique of the materialism of the bubble era, focusing on a family whose sole priorities are financial: each member runs or helps to run one of numerous small businesses, the kids pay for their room and board, and the parents pay each other for sex. Let’s Go to the Hospital (Byōin e ikō, 1990) was a humorous account of patients and staff in a hospital, while its sequel Love Never Dies (Yamai wa ki kara: Byōin e ikō 2, 1992), blended the theme of patients dealing with illness with a touch of satire on the cult of celebrity, which recalled the concerns of Comic Magazine. We Are Not Alone (Bokura wa minna iki­teru, 1993) and The Tropical People (Nettai rakuen kurabu, 1994) both dealt with the relations between Japan and its poorer Asian neighbors: the former focused on a group of salarymen trying to cut deals with the corrupt government of a fictitious South-East Asian nation, while the latter was the story of a Japanese tour guide in Bangkok who revolts against her dislikeable customers and masterminds a scam selling stolen passports.

More domestic in focus was The Exam (Ojuken,1999), an engaging satire depicting the pressures on the middle class in an era when expectations are high and prosperity precarious. Though slightly sentimentalized towards the end, this story of parents trying to get their only daughter into an exclusive school spoke volumes about the gap between aspiration and reality in modern Japan. Takita also played with conventional family roles in Secret (Himitsu, 1999), a fantasy about a mother fatally injured in a car crash who transfers her soul into her daughter’s body, causing some complications in her relationship with her husband/father. Regrettably, Takita has since begun to concentrate on jidai-geki, producing such stylish but silly period spectaculars as The Yin-Yang Master (Onmyōji, 2001), When the Last Sword Is Drawn (Mibu gishiden, 2003), and Ashura (Ashura-jō no hitomi, 2005). Especially in The Yin-Yang Master, the willingness to bring deceased characters back to life robbed even death of its gravity. Nor were impressive set design, a heavy reliance on special effects, and comic-book action any substitute for the wry observation and unobtrusive intelligence which had characterized Takita’s best work. One may trust he will eventually rediscover these qualities; The Battery (Batterī, 2007) was, at least, a return to the present day, albeit with a relatively conventional story about the experiences of a talented young baseball player.

1981 Chikan onna kyōshi / Molester Woman Teacher

1982 Chikan densha: Motto tsuzukete / Molester Train: Keep Doing It

Kannō danchi: Uwatsuki shitatsuki shigekitsuki / Apartment of the Senses: Superscript, Subscript, Stimulus

1982 Chikan densha: Man’in mame sagashi / Molester Train: All Searching for Beans

1983 Chikan densha: Rumiko no oshiri / Molester Train: Rumiko’s Buttocks

Chikan densha: Keiko no hippu / Molester Train: Keiko’s Hips

Chikan densha: Momoe no oshiri / Molester Train: Momoe’s Buttocks

Renzoku bōkan / Serial Rape

1984 Chikan densha: Shitagi kensatsu / Molester Train: Underwear Ticket Check

Chikan densha: Chinchin hassha / Molester Train: Ding Dick Departure

Gubbai bōi / Goodbye Boy

OL 24-ji: Bishōjo / 24-Hour Office Lady: The Attractive Harlot

Mahiru no kirisakima / Daylight Ripper

Chikan densha: Gokuhi honban / Molester Train: Secret Performance

Chikan hokenshitsu / Molestation in the Nurse’s Office

Za kinbaku / Tightly Bound

1985 Chikan densha: Seiko no oshiri / Molester Train: Seiko’s Buttocks

Momoiro shintai kensa / Pink Physical Check-Up

Chikan densha: Shanai de ippatsu / Molester Train: One Shot in the Train

Chikan tsūkin basu / Molester Commuter Bus

Chikan densha: Ato oku made 1 cm / Molester Train: 1cm Further Inside

Zetsukin gyaru: Yaruki munmun / The Matchless Girl: Fully Willing

1986 Komikku zasshi nanka iranai / Comic Magazine / No More Damn Comics! (lit.)

Za Mania: Kaikan seitai jikken / The Mania: Body Pleasure Experiment

Chikan takuhaibin / Molester Home Delivery

Hamidashi sukūru mizugi / Overflow School Swimsuit

Taimu Abanchūru: Zetchō 5-byō mae / Time Adventure: 5 Seconds Before Climax

1987 Itoshi no hāfu mūn / Lovely Half Moon

1988 Kimura-ke no hitobito / The Yen Family / The People of the Kimura Family (lit.)

1990 Byōin e ikō / Let’s Go to the Hospital

1992 Yamai wa ki kara: Byōin e ikō 2 / Love Never Dies (lit. Sickness Is in the Mind: Let’s Go to the Hospital 2)

1993 Bokura wa minna ikiteiru / We Are Not Alone / Made in Japan (lit. We Are All Living)

Nemuranai machi: Shinjuku same / The City That Never Sleeps: Shinjuku Shark

1994 Nettai rakuen kurabu / The Tropical People / Tropical Paradise Club (lit.)

1997 Sharan Q no enka no hanamichi / Sharan Q’s Success in Enka

1999 Ojuken / The Exam

Himitsu / Secret

2001 Onmyōji / The Yin-Yang Master

2003 Mibu gishiden / When the Last Sword is Drawn

Onmyōji 2 / The Yin-Yang Master 2

2005 Ashura-jō no hitomi / Ashura / Blood Gets in Your Eyes

2007 Batterī / The Battery

TAKIZAWA Eisuke

(September 6, 1902–November 29, 1965)

滝沢英輔

The younger brother of Orochi director Buntarō Futagawa, Takizawa served as scenarist for his brother on Swordfight (Rantō, 1925) and as assistant to Masahiro Makino before directing. He achieved critical acclaim with his fourth film, Sankichi of the Pipe (Paipu no Sankichi, 1929), about a pickpocket who unknowingly causes a diplomatic incident by stealing a pipe in which is hidden a vital scientific formula. During the thirties, he specialized in jidai-geki, including versions of such Japanese standbys as the Chūshingura story and the life of folk hero Musashi Miyamoto. More offbeat in theme was A Tale of Thieves in Wartime (Sengoku guntōden, 1937), based on a script by Sadao Yamanaka about a warrior seeking revenge on the lord who accused him of treachery; the plot was derived from Schiller and transposed to Sengoku-era Japan.

During the war, Takizawa directed some Meiji-period melodramas and contributed to the war effort with The Sun of the Eighty-Eighth Year (Hachijūhachinenme no taiyō, 1941), an account of shipyard workers managing to build a destroyer against the odds. Among his more admired postwar films were The Saint of Mt. Koya (Byakuya no yōjo, 1957), a full-blooded supernatural melodrama based on a Kyōka Izumi novel about a monk beguiled by a demonic temptress, and Six Assassins (Rokunin no ansatsusha, 1955), a samurai film set during the last years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which used the story of a young man’s quest to avenge the death of his pro-Western mentor to mount a critique of bushidō ideals. Though he continued to work mainly with historical material, Takizawa made occasional excursions into other genres: Forever, My Love (Kajin, 1958) and The Last Song (Zesshō, 1958) were both romantic tragedies about lovers divided by illness and war, and Facing the Clouds (Kumo ni mukatte tatsu, 1962) was a political thriller about an investigation into the assassination of a socialist politician. Takizawa remains almost unknown in the West.

1929 Aru onna to gaka / The Painter and a Certain Woman

Shigekazu yāi / Hey, Shigekazu

Kuroi hitomi / Dark Eyes

Paipu no Sankichi / Sankichi of the Pipe

Kiri haruru / The Fog Disperses

1930 Ore wa tensai / I Am a Genius

Gakusei sandaiki / Record of Three Generations of Students

Waraenu gaika / Unsmiling Song of Triumph

Nankyoku ni tatsu onna / A Woman at the South Pole

Aisukurīmu / Ice Cream

Senkō sensen / The Hidden Front

1931 Sanada jūyūshi / Ten Brave Men from Sanada

Akasaya Yasubei / Yasubei of Akasaya

Furisode shōbu / Competition in Long Sleeves

1932 Karakusa Taiheiki / Bur Clover Taiheiki

Ōoka seidan: Jūsan’ya kenbutsu samurai / Ooka’s Trial: A Samurai Views the Moon on the Thirteenth Night

Sukedachi tsuji kōshaku / The Backup’s Street Lectures

1933 Jōshū shichinin arashi / Seven Men in a Storm in Joshu

Bushi jingi / Warrior’s Honor

1935 Hareru Kisoji / Fine Weather on the Kisoji

Taikōki: Tōkichirō sōsotsu no maki / Chronicle of Hideyoshi as a Young Foot Soldier

1936 Kaidai musō / The Unparalleled

Miyamoto Musashi / Musashi Miyamoto

Kaidō hyakuri / 100 Ri on the Coast Road

1937 Sengoku guntōden: Zenpen: Tora ōkami / A Tale of Thieves in Wartime: Part 1: Tiger and Wolf / Saga of the Vagabonds: Part 1: Tiger and Wolf

Sengoku guntōden: Kōhen: Akatsuki no zenshin / A Tale of Thieves in Wartime: Part 2: Advance at Daybreak / Saga of the Vagabonds: Part 2: Advance at Daybreak

1938 Chinetsu / Subterranean Heat

Ōma no tsuji: Edo no maki / Street at Dusk : Edo Reel

Budō sen’ichiya / 1001 Nights of Bushido

1939 Chūshingura (Zenpen; Kōhen) / The Loyal 47 Ronin (Parts 1 and 2)

Gozonji azuma otoko / The Famous Man from Edo

1940 Taiyō no miyako / Capital of the Sun

1941 Kaiketsu / Solution

Hachijūhachinenme no taiyō / The Sun of the 88th Year

1942 Umesato-sensei kōjōki: Ryūjinken / The Life Story of Dr. Umesato: Sword of the Dragon God

1943 Ina no Kantarō / Kantaro of Ina

Himetaru kakugo / Secret Readiness

1945 Nihon kengōden / Great Swordsman of Japan

1947 Osumi no jisankin / Osumi’s Dowry

1949 Kirare no Senta / Scarred Senta

1950 Tsuma no heya / The Wife’s Room

Shinsō gonin onna / Five Well-Dressed Women

1951 Heian guntōden: Hakamadare Yasusuke / Tale of Heian-Era Thieves: Swords and Brocade

1952 Yaguradaiko / The Drumbeat

Kenka Yasubei / Fighting Yasubei

1953 Yasugorō shusse / Yasugoro’s Success

Yūdachi Kangorō / The Vengeance Trail (lit. Kangoro in Evening Downpour)

Tetsuwan namida ari / Even the Mighty Shed Tears

Uwaki tengoku / Fickle Heaven

1954 Kunisada Chūji / Chuji Kunisada

Jigoku no kengō: Hirate Zōshu / Hell’s Swordsman: Zoshu Hirate

Hatsusugata Ushimatsu gōshi / Ushimatsu Appears Through the Lattice

1955 Rokunin no ansatsusha / Six Assassins

Oshun torimonochō: Nazo no amagoten / Casebooks of Oshun: The Mysterious Nun’s Palace

Edo issun no mushi / A Worm Will Turn in Edo

1956 Kuroobi yōjō: Hana to arashi / The Merciful Blackbelt: The Flower and the Storm

1957 Kawakami Tetsuji monogatari: Sebangō 16 / The Story of Tetsuji Kawakami: Uniform No. 16

“Kuruwa” yori: Muhō no ichidai / From “Red-Light District”: The Untamed Generation

Byakuya no yōjo / The Saint of Mt. Koya / The Temptress and the Monk / The Temptress (lit. Enchantress of a White Night)

1958 Kajin / Forever, My Love / The Beauty (lit.)

Shi no kabe no dasshutsu / The Face of Death (lit. Escape from the Wall of Death)

Zesshō / The Last Song / No Greater Love

1959 Inoru hito / The Praying Man

Sekai o kakeru koi / Love and Death (lit. A Love That Wagers the World)

1960 Zassō no yōna inochi / Trodden Blossoms (lit. Life Like a Weed)

Ajisai no uta / Blossoms of Love (lit. Song of Hydrangeas)

Jūrokusai / Sixteen

1961 Shokei zen’ya / The Night Before Execution

Ore wa shinanaize / I Refuse to Die

1962 Dojokko no uta / The Song of the Season

Kumo ni mukatte tatsu / Facing the Clouds

Shirobanba / White Fairy Dust

1963 Kiriko no tango / Kiriko’s Tango

1964 Shutsugeki / Sortie

Shin otoko no monshō: Dokyō ichiban / A Man’s Crest, New Version: The Most Courageous

Otoko no monshō: Hana to nagadosu / A Man’s Crest: Flower and Long Sword

1965 Otoko no monshō: Kenka kaidō / A Man’s Crest: Road of Fighting

Otoko no monshō: Ruten no okite / A Man’s Crest: Vicissitudes of the Law

TANAKA Eizō

(November 3, 1886–June 13, 1968)

田中栄三

Though very few of his films survive, Tanaka is a figure of considerable historical importance for his role in modernizing the technique of Taisho-era shinpa­-based cinema. Working at Nikkatsu from 1917, he often directed films based on Western subject matter: thus, The Living Corpse (Ikeru shikabane, 1918) was a version of Tolstoy’s Resurrection and The Cherry Orchard (Sakura no sono, 1918) was taken from Chekhov. He also adapted such Western-influenced Japanese novels as Yūhō Kikuchi’s Foster Sisters (Chikyōdai), which he filmed in 1918 and again in 1922.

However, Tanaka’s technique was apparently somewhat conservative, using one take per scene and continuing to employ oyama in female roles. Indeed, his most famous film, The Kyoya Collar Shop (Kyōya erimise, 1922), was the last major film to use oyama instead of actresses. Generally considered his masterpiece, this melodrama, about a violent merchant’s obsessive love for a geisha and its destructive consequences for those around him, was praised for its meticulous set design and atmospheric lighting. Novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki commented that it “conjures the atmosphere of a disappearing Tokyo shitamachi in an aesthetic way and brings out the decadent beauty of the onnagata to the utmost degree.” According to Anderson and Richie, it also presaged the “realistic stories of the lower classes” in which Nikkatsu would come to specialize later in the twenties.

Tanaka achieved a further success with Dance of the Skull (Dokuro no mai, 1923); here, he used actresses for the first time in a story about a monk reflecting on his youthful loves. However, his directorial career in silent film came to an end shortly afterwards, and he worked subsequently as an actor and scenarist. Although he directed two minor sound films in the thirties, his main contribution to cinema in his later years was as a teacher of film technique at university level. He also made acting appearances in Tadashi Imai’s Blue Mountains (Aoi sanmyaku, 1949) and Shirō Toyoda’s Wild Geese (Gan, 1953).

1918 Akatsuki / Dawn

Ikeru shikabane / The Living Corpse

Konjiki yasha / The Golden Demon

Sakura no sono / The Cherry Orchard

Kurosuishō / The Black Crystal

Chikyōdai / Foster Sisters

Chichi no namida / A Father’s Tears

Usuki en / Weak Bond

Kyōen roku / Chronicle of Chivalry and Love

Kobonnō / The One Who Dotes on Children

Tsukinu urami / The Unending Grudge

Chichiya no musume / The Girl from the Chichiya

Matsukaze Murasame / Matsukaze and Murasame

Ushio / The Tide

Shiranui / Sea-Fire

Hibiki / The Echo

Onna kuzuya / The Female Rubbish Collector

Kataomoi: Zenpen / Unrequited Love: Part 1

Haha no tsumi / A Mother’s Sin

1919 Onna no inochi / A Woman’s Life

Kachūsha / Katusha

Kataomoi: Kōhen / Unrequited Love: Part 2

Shinobinaki / Silent Weeping

Hikari no chimata / Neighborhood of Light

Osero / Othello

Hototogisu / The Cuckoo

Mayoi no hate / After Wondering

Haru no nagare / Spring Stream

Shin Nozaki mura / New Nozaki Village

Ukishizumi / Rise and Fall

Biwa uta / Song of Biwa

Shinbashi jōwa / Love Story of Shinbashi

Geisha no misao / A Geisha’s Chastity

Kyōgeisha / The Chivalrous Geisha

Zangetsu / The Moon at Dawn

Jitensha Otama / Otama on a Bicycle

Ono ga tsumi / My Sin

Onna majutsushi / The Female Magician

Fushimiya

1920 Wakaki chishio / Young Spirited Blood

Nisei no chikai / The Second Generation’s Vow

Kurokami (Koi no kurokami) / Black Hair (Black Hair of Love)

Ai no uzu / Ripples of Love

Hakuchō no uta / Song of the Swan

Renbo nagashi / Love Floats

Saisōki / Romance of the West Chamber

Chiriyuku hana / The Flowers Will Fall

Kataonami (Awabiuri) / High Waves (The Abalone Seller)

Yahataya no musume / A Girl of Yahataya

Unmei no kage / Shadow of Fate

Asahi sasu mae / Before Daybreak

1921 Shirayuri no kaori / Scent of the White Lily

Nagareyuku onna / The Woman Will Change

Chidorigafuchi / The Palace Moat

Menashidori / Blind Man’s Buff

Ki no shita yami / Darkness under the Tree

Ukishizumi / Rise and Fall

Yae no shiokaze / Yae’s Sea Breeze

Yasaka no homare / The Honor of Yasaka

Shisen no kanata / Beyond the Verge of Death

1922 Chikyōdai / Foster Sisters

Iro tazuna / The Colorful Bridle

Koi no wakaremichi / Love’s Path of Separation

Tsuma to tsuma / Wife Versus Wife

Koi yori shi e / From Love to Death

Kyōya erimise / The Kyoya Collar Shop / The Lapel Shop

1923 Dokuro no mai / Dance of the Skull

Wasurenagusa / Forget-Me-Not

Mittsu no tamashii / Three Souls

Sannin zuma / Three Wives

1932 Namiko / Namiko, “the Cuckoo”

1933 Shōnen Chūshingura / Boys’ Chushingura

TANAKA Kinuyo

(November 29, 1909–March 21, 1977)

田中絹代

One of her country’s finest and most versatile actresses, Tanaka also became the first woman to sustain a directorial career in Japan, realizing six creditable features which, in David Thomson’s words, “displayed the same intelligence, taste, and intensity as her acting.” Yasujirō Ozu, who had directed her in numerous films from the silent period on, paid her the compliment of scripting her second film, The Moon Has Risen (Tsuki wa noborinu, 1955). This story of a widowed mother and her two daughters accordingly had an Ozu-like flavor; more commonly, however, Tanaka worked in a melodramatic vein, imbuing stories of female emotions with contemporary relevance and subtle political undercurrents. Her debut, Love Letter (Koibumi, 1953), used the conventions of romantic melodrama to explore the problems of postwar women, particularly of those driven by material circumstances into unwanted marriages, relationships with foreign soldiers, or prostitution. The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955) was a touching account of a woman poet who divorces an unpleasant husband to pursue her writing career, only to succumb to breast cancer. Girls of Dark (Onna bakari no yoru, 1961) followed the experiences of prostitutes being rehabilitated after their trade was legally prohibited in Japan.

Tanaka also directed two intriguing historical films about women linked by love or marriage to male participants in major political events. The Wandering Princess (Ruten no ōhi, 1960) followed the wartime experiences of a Japanese woman married to the brother of the puppet Emperor of Manchuria. Love under the Crucifix (Ogin-sama, 1962) was about the daughter of tea master Sen no Rikyū and her love for a Christian. Both films focused on the way in which historical events shape individual lives.

Tanaka’s films were all broadly feminist and progressive, but she tended to shy away from their more controversial implications. Thus, the most interesting theme of The Eternal Breasts—that a woman might willingly choose career over marriage—was obscured by the film’s subsequent concentration on her terminal illness. Similarly, in Girls of Dark, the heroine’s choice to work is motivated by the fact that, being an ex-prostitute, she cannot find acceptance as a wife. The Wandering Princess, meanwhile, presented war as an abstract evil, largely ignoring the issue of Japanese responsibility for Chinese suffering.

Stylistically, Tanaka’s films were always tasteful and restrained, without ever achieving a truly individual style. As befits a former actress, her greatest strength was in eliciting subtle, suggestive performances from her stars; particularly affecting contributions came from Yoshiko Kuga in Love Letter, Yumeji Tsukioka in The Eternal Breasts, and Machiko Kyō in The Wandering Princess.

1953 Koibumi / Love Letter

1955 Tsuki wa noborinu / The Moon Has Risen

Chibusa yo eien nare / The Eternal Breasts

1960 Ruten no ōhi / The Wandering Princess

1961 Onna bakari no yoru / Girls of Dark

1962 Ogin-sama / Love under the Crucifix (lit. Lady Ogin)

TANAKA Noboru

(August 15, 1937–October 4, 2006)

田中登

Usually ranked among the most talented filmmakers working on Roman Porno during the seventies, Tanaka served a lengthy apprenticeship to directors such as Shōhei Imamura, Seijun Suzuki, and Kei Kumai, beginning to direct as Nikkatsu switched production to erotic material. He soon earned favorable notice for the visual beauty he brought to this originally disreputable genre in films such as Night-Train Woman (Yogisha no onna, 1972), a story about a woman dangerously possessive of her half-sister. Confidential Report: Sex Market (Maruhi: Shikijō mesu ichiba, 1974), about the grim lives of Osaka prostitutes, was particularly well-received; though exploitative to a degree, it achieved a certain rough integrity thanks to its harsh, mainly black and white cinematography, claustrophobic compositions and atmospheric location work among the city’s seedier districts.

Tanaka himself asserted that he preferred to make films in a less realistic, more stylized vein. Shot largely on studio sets, The True Story of Abe Sada (Jitsuroku Abe Sada, 1975) was an opulent account of a famous love affair that culminated with the woman murdering her lover and amputating his sexual organ. Though more prurient and less psychologically perceptive in its depiction of sexual obsession than Ōshima’s contemporary hardcore version of the story In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korīda, 1976), Tanaka’s film was still powerful thanks to Junko Miyashita’s haunting lead performance. Also interesting, though somewhat less intense, was Watcher in the Attic (Edogawa Ranpo ryōkikan: Yaneura no sanposha, 1976), a visually inventive adaptation of an Edogawa Ranpo story about a bored voyeur spying on the sexual conduct of the tenants of an apartment block.

Leaving Nikkatsu to work freelance in the eighties, Tanaka went to Shochiku to direct the bleak Village of Doom (Ushimitsu no mura, 1983), a non-pornographic film about a country boy who massacres the inhabitants of his village after tuberculosis renders him unfit for military service. The film effectively exposed the roots of violence in a culture which presents the warrior as admirable; regrettably, the handling of the massacre itself undermined this by making the slaughter gripping. After making his last film, another erotic melodrama, Tanaka worked mainly in television. The distinction of his best work probably owes as much to Nikkatsu art direction as to his directorial contribution, and his use of handheld camera and the zoom lens was often heavy-handed. Nevertheless, he was capable of creating very striking compositions, and the limitations of his films are perhaps more those of the exploitation format in which he worked than of his own talent.

1972 Kaben no shizuku / Dewdrops on the Petal

Mesunekotachi no yoru / Night of the Female Cats

Yogisha no onna / Night-Train Woman

Kōshoku kazoku: Kitsune to tanuki / Amorous Family: Fox and Racoon Dog

Kannō kyōshitsu: Ai no tekunikku / Classroom of the Senses: Techniques of Love

1973 Hirusagari no jōji: Henshin / Love in the Afternoon: Metamorphosis

Maruhi: Jorozeme jigoku / The Ill-Fated Courtesan / Confidential Report: Hell of Tortured Prostitutes (lit.)

Mayonaka no yōsei / The Midnight Fairy / Strange Feelings During the Night

Onna kyōshi: Shiseikatsu / Private Life of a School Mistress

1974 Maruhi: Shikijō mesu ichiba / Confidential Report: Sex Market / The Oldest Profession

1975 Jitsuroku Abe Sada / The True Story of Abe Sada / A Woman Called Abe Sada

Kōbe kokusai gyangu / International Gang in Kobe

1976 Edogawa Ranpo ryōkikan: Yaneura no sanposha / Watcher in the Attic / Stroller in the Attic (lit. Edogawa Ranpo’s House of the Bizarre: Stroller in the Attic)

Andō Noboru no waga tōbō to sex no kiroku / The Sex Life and Escape of Gangster Noboru Ando

1977 Hakkinbon “Bijin ranbu” yori: Semeru / Banned Play / To Torture (lit. From the Banned Book “Wild Dance of a Beautiful Woman”: To Torture)

Onna kyōshi / School Mistress

1978 Hitozuma shūdan bōkō chishi jiken / Group of Married Women: Fatal Case of Assault

Pinku Saron: Kōshoku gonin no onna / Pink Salon: Five Amorous Women

1979 Tenshi no harawata: Nami / Angel Guts: Nami

Aiyoku no tāgetto / Target of Sexual Passion

1980 Hādo sukyandaru: Sei no hyōryūsha / Hard Scandal: Sex Drifter

1981 Motto hageshiku motto tsuyoku / Harder and Stronger

1983 Ushimitsu no mura / Village of Doom / A Village at Dawn (lit. A Village after Midnight)

1986 Tsubomi no nagame / View of the Bud / The Sight

1988 Yōjo densetsu ’88 / Monster Woman ’88 / A Woman in the Net (lit. Legend of a Temptress ’88)

TANIGUCHI Senkichi

(February 19, 1912–October 29, 2007)

谷口千吉

Taniguchi’s career has been overshadowed by that of his colleague and mentor, Akira Kurosawa; they had met in the thirties while serving as assistants to Kajirō Yamamoto at PCL (later Toho). After the war, the three men worked closely together, founding an independent production company, Motion Picture Arts Association; Yamamoto and Kurosawa also co-scripted Taniguchi’s first narrative feature, Snow Trail (Ginrei no hate, 1947), a thriller about three robbers hiding out in the Japan Alps, which marked the debut of Toshirō Mifune, who was to act regularly for both Taniguchi and Kurosawa. Its concern with a criminal’s innate humanity and potential for reformation was of a piece with Kurosawa’s humanist philosophy. However, Taniguchi’s mise-en-scène lacked the baroque qualities of Kurosawa’s, displaying a classical economy more reminiscent of Hollywood filmmakers such as Raoul Walsh. This technique made him an ideal director of action material.

Kurosawa also scripted several of Taniguchi’s subsequent films: Jakoman and Tetsu (Jakoman to Tetsu, 1949), with Mifune as the son of a fishing baron defending a Hokkaido village against a powerful criminal; Beyond Love and Hate (Ai to nikushimi no kanata e, 1951), another story about a criminal seeking refuge in the mountains; and Spring Breeze (Fukeyo harukaze, 1953) which sketched a cross-section of postwar society through the characters of the passengers encountered by an idealistic taxi driver. Their finest collaboration was Escape to Tomorrow (Akatsuki no dassō, 1950), a powerful war film about the love of a soldier for a “comfort woman,” which not only condemned the doctrines of militarism, but also surprisingly presented the Chinese enemy as exemplars of humane values. This liberalism was probably Kurosawa’s contribution, since Taniguchi’s subsequent films included such xenophobic stories as the Meiji-period melodrama Foghorns (Muteki, 1952) and the Occupation-set Red-Light Bases (Akasen kichi, 1953), both of which portrayed Americans as sexual exploiters of Japanese women. Among his other fifties work, The Sound of Waves (Shiosai, 1954), based on Mishima’s story of a teenage love affair on a remote island, was notable for its visual beauty; it suffered, however, from the schematic everyman characterizations carried over from its source. Its romantic concerns were somewhat atypical, but it shared with many of Taniguchi’s other films an interest in distant locales, which would be apparent as late as his last film, Asante Sana (Asante sāna, 1975), a Tanzanian-set story about Japanese Peace Corps volunteers.

In the sixties, Taniguchi made occasional forays into comedy, but continued to specialize mainly in action films, directing gangster movies such as Man against Man (Otoko tai otoko, 1960), war films like Outpost of Hell (Dokuritsu kikanjūtai imada shagekichu, 1963), conventional jidai-geki like Chuji Kunisada (Kunisada Chūji, 1960), and period fantasies such as The Great Thief (Daitōzoku, 1963). His work grew steadily less distinguished: The Great Thief was a cavalier mélange of Japanese, Arabic and European decor and plot motifs, aptly dismissed by Tony Rayns for its “bland rejection of the entire Oriental fantasy tradition,” which enabled it to be distributed abroad, dubbed, as a Sinbad movie. This practice may have inspired Woody Allen to make What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, a version of Taniguchi’s Key of Keys (Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi, 1965) redubbed with farcical English-language dialogue. His later decline and the perception that Kurosawa was responsible for the quality of his early work have adversely affected Taniguchi’s reputation. Nevertheless, his best films still rank among the most purely gripping made in Japan, and their terse power was Taniguchi’s own achievement.

1946 Tōhō shōbōto / Toho Showboat

1947 Ginrei no hate / Snow Trail / To the End of the Silver-Capped Mountains (lit.)

1949 Jakoman to Tetsu / Jakoman and Tetsu

1950 Akatsuki no dassō / Escape to Tomorrow / Escape at Dawn (lit.) / Deserter at Dawn

Ma no ōgon / The Devil’s Gold

1951 Ai to nikushimi no kanata e / Beyond Love and Hate

Dare ga watashi o sabaku no ka / Who Judges Me?

Shi no dangai / Cliff of Death

1952 Muteki / Foghorns

Gekiryū / Swift Current

1953 Fukeyo harukaze / Spring Breeze / My Wonderful Yellow Car / Blow! Spring Wind (lit.)

Yoru no owari / The End of the Night

Akasen kichi / Red-Light Bases

1954 Shiosai / The Sound of Waves / The Surf (lit.)

1955 Sanjūsangōsha ōtō nashi / No Response from Car 33

1956 Kuroobi Sangokushi / Black Belt Sangokushi / Rainy Night Duel

Furyō shōnen / Juvenile Delinquents

Hadashi no seishun / Barefoot Youth

1957 Arashi no naka no otoko / The Man in the Storm

Saigo no dassō / The Last Escape / The Last Pursuit

Haruka naru otoko / The Distant Man

1960 Kunisada Chūji / Chuji Kunisada / The Gambling Samurai

Otoko tai otoko / Man against Man

1961 Kurenai no umi / The Crimson Sea / Blood on the Sea

1962 Kurenai no sora / The Crimson Sky

Yamaneko sakusen / Operation Mountain Lion / Operation Enemy Fort

1963 Dokuritsu kikanjūtai imada shagekichū / Outpost of Hell (lit. The Independent Machine Gun Corps Are Still Shooting)

Daitōzoku / The Great Thief / Samurai Pirate / The Lost World of Sinbad

1965 Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi / Key of Keys / International Secret Police: Key of Keys (lit.)

1966 Kigan-jō no bōken / Adventure in Kigan Castle / Adventure in Takla Makan

1967 Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Zettai zettsumei / International Secret Police: Driven to the Wall / The Killer Battle

1968 Kamo to negi / Duck and Leek

1971 Kōshiki chōhenron kiroku eiga: Nihon bankokuhaku / Expo ’70 (lit. Official Length Documentary: Japan International Expo)

1975 Asante Sāna / Asante Sana

TASAKA Tomotaka

(April 14, 1902–October 17, 1974)

田坂具隆

An interesting but erratic director, Tasaka worked under contract at Nikkatsu from the twenties. His earliest surviving film, Town of Love (Ai no machi, 1928), is a superb example of the Westernized cinema of the late twenties, with a visual flair rivaling F. W. Murnau or Frank Borzage: the story was conceived as a political allegory, plotting the reconciliation of capital and labor through the reunion of a working girl with her industrialist grandfather. A similar fusion of social conscience with melodramatic plotting was apparently visible in the lost Behold This Mother (Kono haha o miyo, 1930), Tasaka’s contribution to the leftist keikō-eiga genre, which detailed the vicissitudes of a widowed mother trying to make ends meet as she raises her son.

Most of Tasaka’s prewar sound films are lost, but he seems to have specialized mainly in romantic melodrama: his most popular film in that genre was The Life of a Woman in the Meiji Era (Meiji ichidai onna, 1935), starring Takako Irie. Later, with two films based on novels by Yūzō Yamamoto, he adopted a more realistic approach: A Pebble by the Wayside (Robō no ishi, 1938), a chronicle of the unhappy experiences of a young boy, was typical of the melancholy naturalism prevalent in the Japanese cinema of the time. This remains extant, but today Tasaka’s most famous works of the thirties are two contributions to the war effort, Five Scouts (Gonin no sekkōhei, 1938) and Earth and Soldiers (Tsuchi to heitai, 1939), the latter impressively shot on location in China. These films have been praised for their “humanism,” but they, like the later Navy (Kaigun, 1943), were essentially well-crafted propaganda pieces celebrating duty, sacrifice, and the strength of the group.

Tasaka, who enlisted in the last months of the war, had the misfortune to be training in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945; his injuries and subsequent radiation sickness halted his career for some years. The legacy of the atomic bomb was the theme of one of his earliest postwar films, I’ll Not Forget the Song of Nagasaki (Nagasaki no uta wa wasureji, 1952), in which he struggled to bring conviction to a contrived narrative about an American serviceman visiting the bombed city. Tasaka’s later work tended towards low-key melodrama, a recurrent motif being the experiences of the naive country girl in the big city. The finest example of this motif, and Tasaka’s masterpiece, was The Maid’s Kid (Jochūkko, 1955), a touching account of culture clash told through the story of the relationship between a northern girl and the wealthy Tokyo family for whom she works as a maid. Tasaka captured the visual and behavioral contrasts between the prosperous capital and the traditional, rural north, and elicited an outstanding lead performance from Sachiko Hidari. Variations on the same theme recurred in films of disparate subject matter: for instance, in Street in the Sun (Hi no ataru sakamichi, 1958), a contrived story of a country girl’s encounter with a dysfunctional family, conceived as a vehicle for that icon of rebellious youth, Yūjirō Ishihara; and in Lake of Tears (Umi no koto, 1966), a moving romantic tragedy set in the world of silk manufacture. The same plot formation was also the basis of perhaps Tasaka’s best film of the sixties, The House in the Quarter (Gobanchō yūgirirō, 1963), an intelligent story set in the milieu of a Kyoto brothel, and focusing on the bitter relations between a newcomer, the temple novice she loves, and the businesslike yet compassionate madam memorably played by Michiyo Kogure. This film also echoed Kon Ichikawa’s Conflagration (Enjō, 1958), in dramatising the true story of the disturbed monk who burned down Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion.

Tasaka’s visual style was not particularly distinctive, and even in some of his creditable minor films, such as the late Carpenter and Children (Chiisakobe, 1962), about a carpenter who takes in homeless children after a fire, his tasteful manner could seem bland. Moreover, he was sometimes capable of turning out very substandard films. His best work, however—The Maid’s Kid above all—commands respect for its intelligent realism and complexity of characterization.

1926 Kabocha sōdōki / Trouble about a Pumpkin

Haha o tazunete sanbyakuri / 300 Ri in Search of Mother

Jōnetsu no ukishizumi / Rise and Fall of Love

Ikiten o tsuku / The Spirit Strikes the Sky

Shi no hōko (Zenpen; Chūhen; Kōhen) / The Treasure House of Death (Parts 1, 2 and 3)

1927 Tetsuwan kisha / The Strong-Armed Journalist

Seigi no yūsha / Hero’s Justice

Kurotaka maru / Black Hawk

Arisan no kyōji / A Child of Alishan

Fūfu zenshū / A Couple’s Complete Works

Shabon musume / Soap Girl

Kōsei / Rehabilitation

1928 Kekkon nijūsō (Zenpen; Kōhen) / Marriage Duet (Parts 1 and 2)

Muteppō jidai / The Reckless Age

Chikyū wa mawaru: Daiichibu: Kako hen / The World Turns: Part 1: Past Chapter

Ai no machi / Town of Love

Omoide no suifu / Sailor in the Memory

1929 Kyōen: Daiippen / Banquet: Part 1

Watashi to kanojo / She and I

Nikkatsu kōshinkyoku / Nikkatsu March (co-director)

Ai no fūkei / Scenery of Love

Kumo no ōza / Throne of Clouds

1930 Kono haha o miyo / Behold This Mother

1931 Fukeyo harukaze / Blow, Spring Wind

Kankanmushi wa utau / The Rust-Cleaner Sings

Gonin no yukai naru aibō / Five Delightful Companions

Kokoro no nichigetsu: Retsujitsu hen / Heart of Day and Night: Part 1: Heat of Day

Kokoro no nichigetsu: Gekkō hen / Heart of Day and Night: Part 2: Light of Moon

1932 Hatobue o fuku onna / A Woman Who Plays the Dove Whistle

Haru to musume / Spring and a Girl

Shōwa Shinsengumi / Showa-Era Shinsengumi (co-director)

1934 Tsuki yori no shisha / Messenger from the Moon

1935 Meiji ichidai onna / The Life of a Woman in the Meiji Era

1936 Tsuioku no bara / Memory of a Rose

1937 Shinjitsu ichiro: Chichi no maki / The Road of Truth: Father Reel

Shinjitsu ichiro: Haha no maki / The Road of Truth: Mother Reel

1938 Gonin no sekkōhei / Five Scouts

Robō no ishi / A Pebble by the Wayside

1939 Bakuon / Airplane Drone

Kūshū / Air Raid (co-director)

Tsuchi to heitai / Earth and Soldiers / Mud and Soldiers

1941 Kimi to boku / You and Me (supervision)

1942 Hahakogusa / Mother-and-Child Grass

1943 Kaigun / Navy

1945 Hisshōka / Victory Song (co-director)

1949 Doburoku no Tatsu / Hard-Drinking Tatsu

1951 Yukiwarisō / Hepatica

1952 Nagasaki no uta wa wasureji / I’ll Not Forget the Song of Nagasaki

1955 Jochūkko / The Maid’s Kid

1956 Ubaguruma / The Pram / The Baby Carriage

1957 Kyō no inochi / The Life of Today / Pleasure of Life

1958 Hi no ataru sakamichi / Street in the Sun / Slope in the Sun / The Sunny-Hill Path

1959 Wakai kawa no nagare / The Stream of Youth

1960 Shinran / Shinran

Zoku Shinran / Shinran 2

1961 Hadakakko / Naked Child / Run, Genta, Run

1962 Chiisakobe / Carpenter and Children

1963 Gobanchō yūgirirō / The House in the Quarter / A House of Shame

1964 Same / The Sharks

1965 Hiyameshi to Osan to Chan / Cold Rice, Osan and Chan

1966 Umi no koto / Lake of Tears / A Blighted Love at the Lake

1968 Sukurappu shūdan / Scrap Collectors

TERAYAMA Shūji

(December 10, 1935–May 4, 1983)

寺山修司

Like many modernist artists, Terayama worked in various media, and his film career forms only part of an oeuvre which also encompasses poetry, novels, and plays. In the theater he wrote, directed, and was the founder of the Tenjōsajiki Troupe, a group which pledged to “reform the world through poetry and imagination.” His plays favored audience participation and had actors directly address the audience in order to challenge conventional expectations that assumed an active artist and passive spectator. Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go Into the Streets (Sho o suteyo, machi e deyō), in which teenagers read their own poems on stage, was the basis for one of Terayama’s later films, while The Heathen (Jashūmon) established the recurrent Terayama figure of the monstrous mother.

In the late sixties, Terayama began to script films for other directors, including Susumu Hani’s Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi: Jigoku hen, 1968) and Masahiro Shinoda’s masterpiece Buraikan (1970). These were followed by his first features as director, The Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Tomato kechappu kōtei, 1970) and Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go Into the Streets (Sho o suteyo, machi e deyō, 1971). The former was a playful study of a revolution in which children take power, persecute adults, and assert their right to freedom of action and sexual expression. The latter, loosely adapted from Terayama’s play, was a stylized account of coming-of-age, focusing on a young man’s sexual awakening and troubled family relationships. Both these films were original and provocative, but their low budgets restricted Terayama’s ability to create images as striking as his concepts.

These limitations were overcome in Terayama’s next feature, Pastoral Hide-and-Seek (Den’en ni shisu, 1974), a witty, fictionalized account of his own childhood, which expertly synthesized the influences of traditional Japanese art forms, Freud, surrealism, the circus, and the modernism of the New Wave. This was another account of a boy’s difficult family relationships, centering around his fantasies of murdering his mother; its modernist aesthetic showed in the presence of the adult Terayama admitting that his reminiscences are largely imaginary and trying to influence the actions of his younger self. Colorful, poetic, and darkly humorous, it was arguably Terayama’s masterpiece.

With The Boxer (Bokusā, 1977), Tera­yama fastened his customary conceits to a more conventional narrative about a boy seeking to make it as a professional fighter. Another venture into commercial film was the international co-production Fruits of Passion (Shanhai ijin shōkan: Chaina dōru, 1980), a sexually explicit work set in a Shanghai brothel. With Grass Labyrinth (Kusa meikyū, 1979), however, Terayama returned to the territory of Pastoral Hide-and-Seek in a poetic, loose yet economical recapitulation of his characteristic motifs; less witty than its precursor, it was perhaps even more visually striking. Another recapitulation, containing such classic Terayama elements as the family hoping to stop time by collecting clocks, was the posthumously released Farewell to the Ark (Saraba hakobune, 1984), which charted a century in the life of a single village.

A multimedia artist par excellence, Terayama arguably expressed himself on film rather than through film; his work in cinema displayed a remarkable conceptual sophistication, but while individual images were astonishing, he never really developed a consistently expressive camera style. His most distinguished contribution to the cinema was probably his script for Buraikan, which benefited in realization from Masahiro Shinoda’s more sophisticated mise-en-scène. One might have reservations, too, about the recurrent notion of crime as a liberating force. Nonetheless, Terayama’s films were consistently imaginative and suggestive, and he contrived some of the most extraordinary single moments in Japanese cinema, which was robbed by his premature death of one of its most individual and intransigent talents.

1960 Nekogaku / Catology (16mm short)

1964 Ori / Cage (16mm short)

1970 Tomato kechappu kōtei / The Emperor Tomato Ketchup (16mm; short and feature versions)

1971 Janken sensō / The War of Jan Ken Pon (16mm short)

Sho o suteyo machi e deyō / Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go into the Streets

1974 Seishōnen no tame no eiga nyūmon / Young Person’s Guide to the Cinema / An Introduction to the Cinema for Boys and Young Men (16mm short )

Chōfukuki / Butterfly Dress Pledge (16mm short)

Rōra / Roller (16mm short)

Den’en ni shisu / Pastoral Hide-and-Seek / Death in the Country (lit.)

1975 Meikyūtan / Labyrinth Tale (16mm short)

Hōsōtan / Tales of Smallpox (16mm short)

Shinpan / Der Prozess (16mm short)

1977 Keshigomu / Eraser (16mm short)

Marudorōru no uta / Les Chants de Maldoror (16mm short)

Issunbōshi o kijutsu suru kokoromi / Attempt to Describe a Dwarf / Attempt to Describe the Measure of a Man (16mm short)

Bokusā / The Boxer

Nitō onna: Kage no eiga / Shadow Film: The Two-Headed Woman (16mm short)

Shokenki / The Reading Machine

1979 Kusa meikyū / Grass Labyrinth

1980 Shanhai ijin shōkan: Chaina dōru / Fruits of Passion / The Story of O Continued (lit. Shanghai Foreigners’ Brothel: China Doll)

1984 Saraba hakobune / Farewell to the Ark

TESHIGAHARA Hiroshi

(January 28, 1927–April 14, 2001)

勅使河原宏

A modernist who worked in many media, Teshigahara initially directed documentaries, including some on aspects of traditional Japanese culture such as ikebana and the great woodblock artist Hokusai. He made his early feature films in collaboration with another avant-garde artist, novelist Kōbō Abe, whose fiction distilled existential themes from generic premises. His first and best feature, Pitfall (Otoshiana, 1962), detailed a series of murders in a mining town from the point of view of the victims’ ghosts. Dan Harper has discussed the film’s thematic connection with Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) as a mystery without a solution, but the tone was less of melancholy than of bewilderment, alienation residing in the contrast between the straightforward desire of the dead for an explanation and the ambiguous tangle of motives and intentions among the living. Woman of the Dunes (Suna no onna, 1964) was a parable about an entomologist held hostage by the inhabitants of a village who compel him to sweep away the sand which constantly threatens to cover the community. Though the central irony—the entomologist himself becoming trapped like a fly in a web—was somewhat facile, the film’s investigation of the way in which people use arbitrary tasks to give meaning to their lives was fascinating. Despite their thematic abstraction, these films were anchored in physical reality by their striking black and white imagery and location shooting; the industrial wastelands of Pitfall and the sands of Woman of the Dunes seemed tangible. Also impressive was the unsettling music by avant-garde composer Tōru Takemitsu, who would compose scores for all of Teshigahara’s films.

Teshigahara’s subsequent collaborations with Abe were less remarkable. The Face of Another (Tanin no kao, 1966) was a flawed fantasy about the experiences of a badly burnt man who receives an artificial face. Though Teshigahara’s imagery was again visually startling, the bland characterization of the anti-hero sapped conviction from the interesting thesis that appearance shapes personality. The Man without a Map (Moetsukita chizu, 1968) focused similarly on themes of identity with its story of a detective whose life merges with that of the man whose disappearance he is investigating. These existential concerns may have been more Abe’s than Teshigahara’s. Summer Soldiers (Samā sorujā, 1972), scripted by American writer John Nathan, essayed topical subject matter—the plight of American deserters from Vietnam hiding in Japan—and replaced the stylistic flamboyance of Teshigahara’s sixties films with an informal, improvisational approach influenced by such independent filmmakers as John Cassavetes and Bob Rafelson.

After this, Teshigahara made no features for more than a decade, devoting himself increasingly to the Sōgetsu Foundation, the ikebana school of which he became iemoto, succeeding his father, in 1980. His later films encapsulated the duality of classical and avant-garde influences on his work. Antonio Gaudi (Antonī Gaudī, 1984), a documentary on the Catalan architect, was a tribute from one modernist to another, while Rikyu (Rikyū, 1989), the chronicle of the quarrel between tea master Sen no Rikyū and warlord Hideyoshi, was the clearest evidence in his narrative films of Teshigahara’s background in the traditional arts. At the same time, it was a study of cultural pluralism, depicting such Japanese arts as ikebana, Noh, and tea ceremony, but using Renaissance-style music on the soundtrack, and examining the role of Portuguese traders and missionaries in Momoyama-era Japan. Teshigahara’s interest was in the political function of the arts, and he implied that the aesthetic, even in so abstract a medium as ikebana or ceramics, is inescapably political. His last feature, Basara: The Princess Goh (Gōhime, 1992), was envisaged as a follow-up, narrating events at Hideyoshi’s court after Rikyū’s suicide; though visually beautiful, it was a relatively conventional period melodrama.

Teshigahara’s themes were non-communication and isolation; his characters often share the frame, but inhabit different worlds. This was literally the case with the ghosts of Pitfall, who can neither be seen nor heard by the living. Metaphorically, it applied to the entomologist of Woman of the Dunes, an educated urban professional bewildered by the primitivism of the society under the dunes; to the socially isolated disfigured protagonists of The Face of Another; to the American deserters of Summer Soldiers, helpless in a country where they understand neither the culture nor the language; and to the mutually hostile aesthete and politician of Rikyu. The investigation of these themes from both political and existential perspectives made Teshigahara’s small body of work extremely rich and complex in implication; he was also one of the most imaginative visual stylists of the Japanese New Wave.

1953 Hokusai (short)

1955 12-nin no shashinka / 12 Photographers (short)

1956 Ikebana (short)

1958 Tōkyō 1958 / Tokyo 1958 (short)

1959 Hozē Toresu / Jose Torres (short)

1962 Otoshiana / Pitfall

1964 Suna no onna / Woman of the Dunes

1965 Shiroi asa / Ako (lit. White Morning) (short)

Hozē Toresu: Dainibu / Jose Torres Part 2 (short)

1966 Tanin no kao / The Face of Another

Indirēsu chōhen kiroku eiga: Bakuso / Bakuso (lit. Independent Race: Long Version Documentary: At Full Speed) (short)

1968 Moetsukita chizu / The Man without a Map / The Ruined Map (lit.)

1970 1-nichi 240-jikan / 240 Hours in One Day (short)

1972 Samā sorujā / Summer Soldiers

1981 Ugoku chōkoku : Jan Tingerī / Sculpture Mouvante: Jean Tinguely (short)

1984 Antonī Gaudī / Antonio Gaudi

1989 Rikyū / Rikyu

1992 Gōhime / Basara: The Princess Goh

TOYODA Shirō

(December 25, 1905–November 13, 1977)

豊田四郎

An expert craftsman who flourished under the classical studio system, Toyoda never really developed a personal style, but directed films of considerable intelligence and visual imagination. In the thirties, with films such as Young People (Wakai hito, 1937), about a schoolgirl’s love for her teacher, and The Bush Warbler (Uguisu, 1938)—sketches of events in a rural police station—he contributed to the establishment of the junbungaku (“pure literature”) movement, which looked to prestigious Japanese novels for source material. The bulk of his work after the war, too, was literary adaptation, made mainly at Toho; indeed, the list of authors whose books he filmed reads like an encyclopedia of twentieth-century Japanese novelists.

Though his adaptations were not slavishly faithful to their originals, Toyoda usually strove for a precise rendition of the tone and meaning of his source. Thus, he reproduced the melancholy realism of Fumiko Hayashi in Crybaby Apprentice (Nakimushi kozō, 1938), the story of a neglected child, and the melancholy romanticism of Ōgai Mori in Wild Geese (Gan, 1953), about an unhappy wife’s love for a student. Marital Relations (Meoto zenzai, 1955), chronicling the affair between the son of a wealthy family and a geisha, transposed the tender comedy of Sakunosuke Oda to the screen; A Cat, Shozo and Two Women (Neko to Shōzō to futari no onna, 1956), in which an innocent animal becomes a symbol of the tensions between a hapless man and his first and second wives, successfully dramatized the perverse humor of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki; and Snow Country (Yukiguni, 1957), about a geisha’s love for a selfish, introverted man, captured Yasunari Kawabata’s subtle depiction of sexual tensions. Twilight Story (Bokutō kidan, 1960) was a representation of Kafū Nagai’s Tokyo demimonde of prostitutes and low life, while Portrait of Hell (Jigoku hen, 1969), about an artist depicting hell on a folding screen for a sadistic lord, visualized the macabre aestheticism of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

To the degree that Toyoda’s work manifested any thematic consistency, it was in expressing the recurrent concerns of Japanese fiction. Young People, Wild Geese, Snow Country, Evening Calm (Yūnagi, 1957), and Sweet Sweat (Amai ase, 1964) all focused on the sufferings of women—some unhappily in love, some torn between duty and personal fulfilment or between modernity and tradition. The last-mentioned of these films, “the story of the rise and fall of an utterly commercial woman” (Donald Richie’s phrase), was one of Toyoda’s finest, and was not an adaptation: evidence that the quality of his best work was not merely a reflection of the excellence of his sources, but also a consequence of his sensitivity and good taste. Nor were his virtues purely literary. Wild Geese, in particular, expressed the suppressed emotions of its trapped heroine through an almost mathematically precise use of interior geography, the distances between actors, the patterns of light on faces, and the dividing lines of shōji, slatted windows, sliding doors, and mosquito nets. Much of the power of Snow Country, too, can be ascribed to Toyoda’s grasp of the emotional resonances of interior and exterior spaces.

Other films, such as the bildungs­roman Pilgrimage at Night (An’ya kōro, 1959), based on Naoya Shiga’s semi-autobiographical novel, were more conventionally realized, but Toyoda’s work nevertheless displayed a consistent care and professionalism. The director himself stressed the importance of structure, continuity, and particularly casting, and his films were given depth by the superb acting he elicited from performers such as Ryō Ikebe, Hideko Takamine, Keiko Kishi, Machiko Kyō, Hisaya Morishige, and Chikage Awashima. The last two of these, acting together, made Marital Relations one of the screen’s most mature and compelling depictions of sexual love. Toyoda’s work was also distinguished by its exact atmosphere of time and place: in Wild Geese, the Meiji period; in The Grass Whistle (Mugibue, 1955), a melancholy story of a teenage love triangle, the Taisho period; the suburbs of prewar Osaka in Marital Relations; and Tokyo’s decaying shitamachi area in Twilight Story. Often authenticity was achieved by location shooting: among the dazzling snowscapes of mountainous Niigata Prefecture for Snow Country; in Okinawa for Oyake Akahachi (1937), about a historical rebel who campaigned against the ill-treatment of the peasantry; and in the Inland Sea for Spring on a Small Island (Kojima no haru, 1940), where picturesque island backdrops offset the sombre story of a doctor’s efforts to combat leprosy among the local population.

Though most of Toyoda’s films were quality productions, he was sometimes assigned to commercial potboilers. Legend of the White Serpent (Byakufujin no yōren, 1956) was a special-effects-laden blockbuster, based on a Chinese legend about a man’s love for a demonic woman; Illusion of Blood (Yotsuya kaidan, 1965) was a violent rendition of the old Kabuki standby, The Yotsuya Ghost Story; and The Hotelman’s Holiday (Kigeki: Ekimae ryokan, 1958), a raucous account of events in an inn beside Ueno station, initiated a popular series of broad comedies to which Toyoda later contributed two further installments. His inability to transcend second-rate material exposed the limitations of his self-effacing approach, but his best films displayed a delicacy and discretion which remain wholly admirable.

1929 Irodorareru kuchibiru / Painted Lips

Tokai o oyogu onna / The Woman Who Swims in the City

1930 Yūai kekkon / Companionate Marriage

Kokoro ogoreru onna / The Heart of a Proud Woman

1935 Sannin no josei / Three Women

1936 Tōkyō-Ōsaka tokudane ōrai / Tokyo-Osaka Scoop

Ōbantō kobantō / Senior Clerk and Junior Clerk

Kamata Ōfuna sutajio no haru / Kamata and the Springtime of Ofuna Studios (short)

1937 Minato wa uwakikaze / Harbor of Fickle Winds

Oyake Akahachi

Wakai hito / Young People

Jūji hōka / Crossfire

1938 Nakimushi kozō / Crybaby Apprentice

Fuyu no yado / Winter Lodging

Uguisu / The Bush Warbler / Nightingale

1940 Okumura Ioko / Ioko Okumura

Kojima no haru / Spring on a Small Island / Spring on Leper’s Island

Ōhinata mura / Ohinata Village

1941 Waga ai no ki / The Story of Our Love

1943 Wakaki sugata / Young Figure

1946 Hinoki butai / The Limelight / Cypress Boards (lit.)

1947 Yottsu no koi no monogatari / Four Love Stories (co-director)

1948 Waga ai wa yama no kanata ni / My Love Is Beyond the Mountains

1949 Hakuchō wa kanashikarazuya / The Swan Is Not Sad

1950 Onna no shiki / The Four Seasons of Women

1951 Eriko to tomo ni (Daiichibu; Dainibu) / With Eriko (Parts 1 and 2)

Sekirei no kyoku / The Wagtail’s Song

1952 Kaze futatabi / The Wind Blows Twice

Haru no sasayaki / Whisper of Spring

1953 Gan / Wild Geese / The Mistress

1954 Aru onna / A Certain Woman

1955 Mugibue / The Grass Whistle / The Wheat Whistle / Love Never Fails

Meoto zenzai / Marital Relations / Love Is Like Shared Sweets

1956 Byakufujin no yōren / Legend of the White Serpent / The Bewitching Love of Madame Pai / Madame White Snake

Neko to Shōzō to futari no onna / A Cat, Shozo and Two Women

1957 Yukiguni / Snow Country

Yūnagi / Evening Calm / The Veil of Sin

1958 Makeraremasen katsu made wa / We Can’t Lose Until We Win

Kigeki: Ekimae ryokan / The Hotelman’s Holiday / The Inn in Front of the Train Station (lit.)

1959 Hana noren / Flower Shop Curtain

Dansei shiiku hō / Bringing Up Husbands

An’ya kōro / Pilgrimage at Night / A Dark Night’s Passing

1960 Chinpindō shujin / The Curio Master

Bokutō kidan / Twilight Story / A Strange Story of East of the Sumida River

1961 Tōkyō yawa / The Diplomat’s Mansion (lit. Tokyo Night Story)

1962 Ashita aru kagiri / Till Tomorrow Comes (lit. As Long as There Is Tomorrow)

Ikanaru hoshi no moto ni / Under Any Star

1963 Yūshū heiya / Madame Aki (lit. Plain of Melancholy)

Daidokoro Taiheiki / The Maid’s Story (lit. The Kitchen Taiheiki)

Shin meoto zenzai / Marital Relations, New Version

1964 Kigeki: Yōkina mibōjin / The Merry Widow

Amai ase / Sweet Sweat

1965 Namikage / Shadow of the Waves

Yotsuya kaidan / Illusion of Blood / The Yotsuya Ghost Story (lit.)

Daiku Taiheiki / Tale of a Carpenter (lit. The Carpenter’s Taiheiki)

1967 Chikumagawa zesshō / River of Forever

Kigeki: Ekimae hyakunen / A Hundred Years in Front of the Station

1968 Kigeki: Ekimae kaiun / Better Days in Front of the Station

1969 Jigoku hen / Portrait of Hell

1973 Kōkotsu no hito / Twilight Years (lit. Senile Person)

1976 Tsuma to onna no aida / Between Women and Wives

TOYODA Toshiaki

(b. March 10, 1969)

豊田利晃

Toyoda’s early work has proved representative of a vein of stylish nihilism prominent in twenty-first-century Japanese film. He worked initially as an assistant and screenwriter to Junji Sakamoto, whose boxing film Knock Out (Dotsuitarunen, 1989) had first inspired him to follow a career in cinema; his own documentary, Unchain (2001), focused on a boxer who has lost every bout he has ever fought. However, his first two fiction features, Pornostar (1998) and Blue Spring (Aoi haru, 2002), seemed indebted less to Sakamoto than to the elegant presentation of ultra-violence in the work of such contemporary figures as Shinji Aoyama, Takeshi Miike, and Takeshi Kitano. Pornostar, about a taciturn youth slaughtering yakuza in Tokyo, seemed almost a pastiche of Aoyama’s early crime movies. Blue Spring was perhaps a response to Battle Royale (Batoru Rowaiaru, 2000): while in Kinji Fukasaku’s film anarchic violence breaks out at the command of an adult authority, here violent power structures are seen to be internalized by the kids themselves. Both films, Blue Spring in particular, were visually remarkable, but the succession of startling camera angles often seemed bludgeoning, and hints of social commentary were belied by the artificiality of the premises, not to mention the gusto with which Toyoda filmed scenes of violence.

9 Souls (2003), about a prison breakout by a group of convicts, attempted to achieve greater depth, incorporating certain complexities of characterization and a few reflective moments. Nevertheless, thanks to Toyoda’s penchant for stylistic pyrotechnics and creative bloodletting, it was still rather more style than substance. The Hanging Garden (Kūchū teien, 2005), however, marked a departure from his previous subject matter, starting from the Buñuel-like premise of a family that insists on total honesty in all discussion. Set suggestively in one of the soulless conurbations which have sprung up around Japan’s major cities, this alternately funny and chilling satire was Toyoda’s most successful film, critically and commercially, in Japan. Though still stylistically uneven, it was certainly an advance, and suggested that the director may yet produce outstanding work if he can develop the stylistic maturity to control his undeniable talent.

1998 Pornostar / Pornostar / Tokyo Rampage

2001 Unchain

2002 Aoi haru / Blue Spring

2003 9 Souls

2005 Kūchū teien / The Hanging Garden

TSUCHIMOTO Noriaki

(December 11, 1928 - June 24, 2008)

土本典昭

A onetime student activist, Tsuchimoto sustained a long career making documentary films on progressive themes. He worked initially alongside such talented filmmakers as Kazuo Kuroki and Susumu Hani at Iwanami Productions before raising funds independently to make his first personal film, Chua Swee Lin, Exchange Student (Ryūgakusei Chua Sui Rin, 1965), about the prejudice faced by a Malaysian Chinese student at a Japanese university. Another film with a university setting was Prehistory of the Partisans (Paruchizan zenshi, 1969), a portrait of student extremists at Kyoto University, made for fellow documentarist Shinsuke Ogawa’s production company. Tsuchimoto’s most extensive project was the sequence of documentaries initiated by Minamata: The Victims and Their World (Minamata: Kanja-san to sono sekai, 1971), a haunting record of the sufferings of villagers afflicted by Minamata Disease, a form of poisoning caused by industrial mercury pollution in the seas around the Kyushu town of Minamata. Tsuchimoto juxtaposed footage of the victims and their campaign for compensation with depictions of the traditional lifestyles threatened by industrialization. Thereafter, Minamata became the dominant concern of Tsuchimoto’s cinema: in an extensive series of films, made over the course of decades, he depicted the victims and their families and charted their continuing struggle for compensation. Shiranui Sea (Shiranui umi, 1975), made after their court victory, followed the victims as they continue to deal with the effects of the disease.

Tsuchimoto first broached a concern with Japan’s reliance on nuclear energy in Nuclear Power Scrapbook (Genpatsu kirinukichō, 1982), a short documentary consisting entirely of newspaper clippings on that subject. Nuclear energy was also the theme of his next feature-length project, which, like the Minamata documentaries, focused on a traditional community threatened by progress. Robbing of the Sea: Shimokita Peninsula (Umitori: Shimokita hantō: Hamasekine, 1984) detailed the reactions of villagers to a decision to construct a port for a nuclear-powered ship on the northerly Shimokita Peninsula; Tsuchimoto exposed the indifference of government and big business to local feelings. Subsequently, while continuing to focus on the sufferings of those exploited by established authority, Tsuchimoto widened his focus to the international arena. Working in collaboration with his compatriot Hiroko Kumagai and Afghan filmmaker Abdul Latif, he made Afghan Spring (Yomigaere karēzu, 1989), an examination of society and politics in Afghanistan at the time of the Soviet withdrawal, which now serves as a valuable record of a culture soon after partially obliterated by the Taliban regime.

Although Tsuchimoto’s films were invariably partisan, he acknowledged the dangers of such partisanship, calling the “violent, compulsory power” of close ups a potentially fascistic device, and emphasizing the usefulness of long shots in establishing “a critical point of view.” His frequent staging of interviews in long shot where he himself appeared on screen may be taken as an acknowledgment of his own subjectivity and a refusal to present his position as an uncomplicated truth.

1963 Aru kikan joshi / An Engineer’s Assistant

1964 Dokumento: Rojō / Document: On the Road

1965 Ryūgakusei Chua Sui Rin / Chua Swee Lin, Exchange Student

1968 Shiberiya-jin no sekai / The World of the People of Siberia

1969 Paruchizan zenshi / Prehistory of the Partisans / Pre-Partisans

1971 Minamata: Kanja-san to sono sekai / Minamata: The Victims and Their World

1973 Minamata repōto 1: Jitsuroku kōchōi / Minamata Document: The Central Pollution Board

Minamata ikki: Isshō o tou hitobito / Riot at Minamata: A People’s Quest for Life

1975 Igaku toshite no Minamatabyō: Daiichibu: Shiryō shōgen hen / Minamata Disease: Progress of Research

Igaku toshite no Minamatabyō: Dainibu: Byōri byōma hen / Minamata Disease: Pathology and Symptoms

Igaku toshite no Minamatabyō: Daisanbu: Rinshō ekigaku hen / Minamata Disease: Clinical Field Studies

Shiranui umi / Shiranui Sea

1976 Message from Minamata to the World

Minamatabyō: Sono nijūnen / Minamata Disease: 20 Years On

1977 Shibarareta te no inori / Prayer with Tied Hands

1978 Waga machi waga seishun: Ishikawa Sayuri Minamata nesshō / Our Town, Our Youth: Sayuri Ishikawa’s Heartfelt Song of Minamata

1979 Nihon no wakamono wa ima / Japan’s Young People Now

Shinobu: Nakano Shigeharu / Remembering Shigeharu Nakano

1981 Minamata no zu: Monogatari / Map of Minamata: A Tale

Umi to otsukisamatachi / The Sea and Moons

1982 Genpatsu kirinukichō / Nuclear Power Scrapbook

1984 Umitori: Shimokita hantō: Hamasekine / Robbing of the Sea: Shimokita Peninsula

Hajike hōsenka : Waga Chikuhō waga Chōsen / Balsam, Disperse Your Seeds: Our Chikuho, Our Korea

1987 Minamatabyō: Sono sanjūnen / Minamata Disease: 30 Years On

1989 Yomigaere karēzu / Afghan Spring (co-director)

1999 Kaisō: Kawamoto Terao: Minamata: Ido o hotta hito / Reminiscence: Terao Kawamoto: The Man Who Dug the Well at Minamata

2003 Aishihi no Kāburu hakubutsukan: 1988-nen / Traces: The Kabul Museum 1988

Mō hitotsu no Afuganisutan: Kāburu nikki 1985-nen / Another Afghanistan: Kabul Diary 1985

2005 Hiroshima no Pika / Pika from Hiroshima (co-director)

TSUKAMOTO Shin’ya

(b. January 1, 1960)

塚本晋也

Influenced by and often compared with David Lynch and David Cronenberg, Tsukamoto made 8mm amateur films as a teenager and directed advertisements before making his professional debut with Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Te­tsuo, 1989). This low-budget, virtually plotless film about a man’s inadvertent transformation into a cyborg earned an inexplicable cult reputation which enabled Tsukamoto to obtain funding for a sequel-cum-remake, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992), and a more generic horror film, Hiruko the Goblin (Hiruko: Yōkai hantā, 1991). An interest in fantasy was still apparent in Gemini (Sōseiji, 1999), a visually opulent rendition of an Edogawa Ranpo story about a doctor and his vengeful twin, and, with its Meiji-era setting, Tsukamoto’s only historical film. However, most of his mature films have rejected more obviously fantastic elements to focus on alienation in a modern urban environment. Tsukamoto’s theme, in Tom Mes’s words, is “the rediscovery of the feelings that were numbed by the drudging routine of urban life,” and his most interesting films, like Lynch’s, have explored instincts and desires usually kept suppressed. Thus, he has dwelt upon the way in which routine existence is shattered by a crisis: in Bullet Ballet (Baretto barē, 1998) and Vital (Vaitāru, 2004), by death; in Tokyo Fist (Tōkyō fisuto, 1995) and A Snake of June (Rokugatsu no hebi, 2002), by sexual transgression.

A focus on sexual perversion has proved a consistent feature of Tsukamoto’s work. The theme of Tokyo Fist was sado-masochism, expressed both in the overt sexuality of the heroine and the sublimated sexuality, in the boxing ring, of the male rivals for her affection. The bored housewife of A Snake of June is blackmailed into performing sex acts in public, while Vital hinted at themes of necrophilia in its story of a medical student dissecting the body of the girl who died after they were involved together in a car crash. Though superficially subversive, these films were nonetheless somewhat reactionary in implication: the body horror of Tetsuo was rooted in homophobia and in fear of female sexuality. Such traits were also visible in Tokyo Fist, where female sexuality was the root cause of the crisis, and the liberation of the instincts was seen to result in brutal violence. Similarly, in A Snake of June, the harmless sexual transgression of masturbation initiates the heroine’s ordeal at the blackmailer’s hands. Gemini was politically more interesting in that its horror derived from class conflicts rather than sexuality; here, the vengeful brother represented the urban poor despised and neglected by their “civilized” wealthy neighbors.

Tsukamoto’s style, as much as his themes, has been influenced by David Lynch: his films unfold in everyday settings “made strange” by thrusting camera angles, extreme close ups and fast motion. In his early work the effect was often grotesque: the pyrotechnics of Tokyo Fist dwelt so insistently on physical violence that the psychological complexity of the situation was sidelined. Tsukamoto’s work in the twenty-first century, however, has used the same stylistic idiosyncrasies with a greater discipline: the blue-tinted, rainswept Tokyo of A Snake of June was an appropriately unsettling backdrop to its story of troubling emotions, while in Vital, Tsukamoto’s tenderest film, the self-conscious compositions effectively reflected the dislocated outlook of its protagonist, a recovering amnesiac.

From the evidence of Tsukamoto’s most recent work, the future direction of his career remains uncertain. With Haze (2005), a compact allegory about a man trapped in a labyrinth, he returned to the limited means and claustrophobic settings of Tetsuo. Nightmare Detective (Akuma tantei, 2006), on the other hand, was arguably his most commercial project to date: a glossy horror thriller with echoes of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, Wes Craven) in its story of victims induced to commit suicide in their sleep. Here, Tsukamoto’s fruitful concern with the emotional consequences of physical frailty was underdeveloped; the spectacular bloodletting generated superficial shocks rather than piercing insights. The fact that he is working on a sequel to this film at the time of writing is not a wholly auspicious development. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Tsukamoto will abandon the more experimental aspects of his work. If he has been overpraised in some quarters—even his best films are flawed by stylistic overstatement and dubious sexual politics—he has nevertheless proved himself an intransigent and individual talent, and it is likely that he will continue to surprise his audiences.

1974 Genshi-san / Mr. Primitive (8mm short)

1975 Kyodai gokiburi monogatari / Story of a Giant Cockroach (8mm)

Tsubasa / Wing (8mm short)

1976 Donten / Cloudy Sky (8mm)

1977 Jigokumachi shōben geshuku nite tonda yo / Flying in a Hell Town Piss Lodge (8mm)

1978 Shin tsubasa / Wing 2 (8mm short)

1979 Hasu no hana tobe / Lotus Flower, Fly! (8mm)

1986 Futsū saizu no kaijin / The Phantom of Regular Size (8mm)

1987 Denchū Kozō no bōken / The Adventure of Denchu Kozo (8mm)

1989 Tetsuo / Tetsuo: The Iron Man

1991 Hiruko: Yōkai hantā / Hiruko the Goblin

1992 Tetsuo II: Body Hammer

1995 Tōkyō fisuto / Tokyo Fist

1998 Baretto barē / Bullet Ballet

1999 Sōseiji / Gemini

2002 Rokugatsu no hebi / A Snake of June

2004 Vaitāru / Vital

2005 Female (co-director)

Haze

2006 Akuma tantei / Nightmare Detective