by Ian Buruma
Ozu’s plots tended to follow the predictable course of what the Japanese call “home dramas” (Ozu was not much interested in plot): girl takes care of old father; old father tells girl to get married; girl says no, father says yes, girl gets married, both are sad, but such is life. Ozu’s world is like the seasons, hence the titles of many of his films. Harmony and tradition impose their natural order, which it is foolish to oppose. Since chaos is to be feared and freedom an illusion, any attempt to go against the seasons, so to speak, will end in tragedy. To learn this lesson—which Ozu’s characters usually do—is to achieve maturity and wisdom.
Oshima joined the Shochiku studios as a young assistant director just as Ozu was making some of his late masterpieces there. Now, I am sure Oshima would be the first to recognize Ozu’s genius, for, despite his conservatism, Ozu was a master, whose films are deeply moving. But back then, in the late 1950s, Oshima loathed the kind of thing Ozu, and especially the hacks who copied his style, stood for: “I absolutely could not stand the films that were mass-produced by the studio in which I worked: tear-jerking melodramas and flavorless domestic dramas in which imbecilic men and women monotonously repeat exchanges of infinitely stagnant emotions.”
Oshima wanted to destroy the harmony of this artificial world, which was so comforting to a Japanese audience, buffeted by high-speed economic development, Americanized pop culture and the still fresh memories of wartime catastrophe. He hated this hoary naturalism so much that he refused, in his own future work, to use the color green, redolent of gardens, nature, softness. Oshima wanted to express a world of concrete and violence. What was needed was not naturalism but “bold fiction and free structure.” Cameras would be handheld, cuts would jump, and “on a very technical level, I tried to eliminate completely all scenes with characters sitting on tatami while talking.” You can’t get much further away from Ozu than that.
If all this sounds rather un-Japanese, indeed rather French, rather nouvelle vague, this too was deliberate. In the 1960s, when Oshima made his technically boldest films, he felt more affinity with French directors of his age than with his Japanese masters. Yet Ozu, too, had been inspired once by untraditional models. His earliest films, made in the 1920s, were so-called nonsense films, zany comedies, whose gags were so loosely strung together that the effect was often surreal. As a student, Ozu wrote fan letters to Lillian Gish. Like many Japanese, he became more “Japanese” as he grew older.
Oshima’s cinematic style has changed a great deal during his career, from handheld nouvelle vague grit to the almost static aestheticism of Ai No Corrida. But the idea that filmmaking is a form of liberation—political, sexual, social, all three—is a constant theme in his thinking. In 1968 he called the collaborators on one of his best films “my fellow Guevaras.” The picture was Death by Hanging (1968), about the execution of a Korean accused of murder. To make the film at all was to break a taboo of sorts: not many Japanese artists have shown a sympathetic interest in the plight of Koreans in Japan. One of his “Guevaras” on the movie was Adachi Masao, who disappeared soon after. He has been hiding somewhere in the Middle East for the last twenty years, after being involved in Red Army terrorism. Adachi was once a promising director of violent porno films.
Criminality, of one sort or another, is a theme of most of Oshima’s films. His characters include rapists, murderers, sexual deviants and, in the most celebrated case of O-Sada in Ai No Corrida, a passionate maid who cut off her lover’s penis—after strangling him, of course. Interest in underdogs and sympathy for antiheroes were common attitudes everywhere, particularly in the 1960s: Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy, Belmondo in many things, good and bad. One of Oshima’s most interesting essays is about James Dean and his influence on Japanese cinema. But perhaps the idea of the artist as a semicriminal outsider himself is less common—though by no means unknown—in Europe or America than it is in Japan. Indeed, until not so long ago—about a century at most—it was more than an idea: print artists, fiction writers, actors and playwrights really were on the fringe of an underworld. The prostitute, the gangster and the playwright were part of the same scene: the licensed quarters of theaters, teahouses and brothels.
It may have been presumptuous of Oshima to claim, in 1978, two years after he made Ai No Corrida, that he thought “only from the viewpoint of ‘suffering’ women like O-Sada.” But unlike the many Shochiku films about poor, virtuous people battling through life with a tear and a laugh (the so-called shomingeki, or small-folks dramas), Oshima was never sentimental about the downtrodden. Films such as Tomb of the Sun (1960), about life in an Osaka slum, or his debut, Town of Love and Hope (1959), are tough-minded without being politically strident. There is always an element of voyeurism in watching the sordid lives of slum-dwellers in a comfortable cinema, but, even so, Tomb of the Sun is voyeurism of a high order.
Oshima’s interest in criminal outcasts is more than voyeurism, however. He is on their side, intellectually, because he sees crime as a political, or metapolitical, act. In the collection Cinema, Censorship and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, Oshima makes a point regarding Masumura Yasuzo’s movie about a gangster, played by Mishima Yukio, the novelist. Normally, Oshima wrote, Masumura “depicted modern heroes and heroines. He portrays and praises characters who expose their desires straightforwardly and act upon them.” Mishima’s gangster, however, is a wretched figure. This, Oshima implies, is a reactionary view, not at all in keeping with Masumura’s usual standards. Oshima’s criminals are never wretched, even though they might come to sticky ends.* Their crimes represent our deepest desires. Even the “hero” in Violence at Noon (1966), who goes around the country raping and killing women, earning himself the sobriquet Daylight Demon, is not entirely beyond the pale: “At the press conference announcing the production, I said I made the film because I am the Daylight Demon, and Sato Kei, who plays the demon, said the same thing.”
This must be properly understood: Oshima is not so politically incorrect as actually to admire a rapist. His point is that every society deserves the criminals it gets, and that the society, rather than the criminal, is usually at fault. Further than that, he sees crime as the only refuge of people who have no political power to effect change and expand their freedom. Crime, in other words, is a substitute for politics. Crime includes sexual deviance. So is the preponderance of sex and violence in Japanese entertainment a sign of political desperation? I think in some cases it is.
The extraordinary cruelty of nineteenth-century woodblock prints by, say, Yoshitoshi, or the stylized violence of many Kabuki plays, or indeed the celebration of murderous antiheroes in the plays by Tsuruya Namboku (1755–1829), can be read in different ways. One interpretation is that in the imagination—the theater, the brothel, the novel, the print—anything goes. Japanese morals are social, not religious, and so it is all right to fantasize. Indeed, fantasy is the institutionalized escape from an oppressive society. Another interpretation is that the taste for sadism and excess in the early nineteenth century, the fin de siècle, the 1920s and the 1960s was a reflection of a society in great flux. The dates, interestingly enough, correspond pretty much to similar developments in the West.
Both interpretations are plausible. But there is another one, namely that Japanese social life was so politicized—by removing any chance of actual political discourse—that assaults on social taboos were the only way to rebel. Japan under Tokugawa rule, lasting from 1603 to 1867, was a police state, or, more precisely, a spy state. Political opposition to the shogunate was dangerous. There were government informants everywhere. As in totalitarian dictatorships, social control was maintained by circumscribing every aspect of people’s lives, including their dress, the way they decorated their houses, even the manner of their death. Suicide, for example, was a samurai privilege. The many Kabuki plays about love-suicides by commoners were in effect celebrating criminal acts.
It is often said—not least by Japanese themselves—that the Japanese are not a religious
people, and that sex and violence are therefore not subject to religious constraints. Sadean or Buñuelesque or indeed Rushdiean attacks on the Church, one might conclude, have no counterparts in Japan. But in fact they do. Apart from a relatively short period of extreme emperor worship, the presence of an official Church is indeed not so apparent in Japan. But religion, ethics and law were all instruments of political control. To challenge the state was to challenge religion, and vice versa.
It might seem far-fetched to project the social system of Tokugawa Japan onto Oshima’s work. After all, there are no shoguns, no sumptuary laws, no official isolation from the outside world. Japan has a democratic form of government. There is freedom of the press. And so on and so forth. Yet you can see how Oshima’s preoccupation with sex and violence is very much the result of political frustration. You can even trace, in his own films and writings, how and when this came about.
In 1960 Oshima could still write about his film Night and Fog in Japan that it was a “weapon of the people’s struggle,” but he would rarely use that kind of political rhetoric again. The film itself was a New Left critique of the Communist Party in student politics. The political context was the general failure of the left to stop the revised U.S.–Japan Security Treaty in 1960, which was forced through parliament by Prime Minister Kishi, the former vice-minister of munitions during the war. It was an event of crucial importance in postwar Japanese politics, which scarred leftists of Oshima’s generation for life. Never before had so many people come out in protest against government policy, and never would so many do so again. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the treaty itself, it was to be the last serious challenge to the virtual monopoly on power of an elite of bureaucrats, corporations and conservative politicians.
The story, or rather the argument, of this rather talky picture is structured around a wedding. As the ceremony unfolds, the failures of the student movement are rehearsed, over and over, in monologues, in debates, in appearances at the wedding, quite literally, of an accusing ghost from the past. It is an interesting film, with limited popular appeal, but it upset the studio bosses enough for them to pull the movie from distribution. Oshima called this “a massacre.” What killed the film, he wrote in “protest against the massacre of Night and Fog in Japan,” was “the same thing that killed Kamba Michiko and Asanuma Inejiro, and I protest with unrelenting anger.” Kamba was a female student who got trampled to death during a clash between students and riot police in the 1960 antitreaty demonstrations. Asanuma was the chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, who was assassinated by a right-wing extremist in that same year.
So far as political failure was concerned, Oshima knew what he was talking about. He had been a student activist at Kyoto University, where he studied law. His organization was forced to disband in 1951, after the “Emperor incident.” The students wanted to have an open discussion with the emperor during his visit to the university. When this was refused, they demonstrated with a placard imploring the emperor not to lend himself to deification again. As a result, the Kyoto Prefecture Student Alliance was banned. It was revived in 1953, but was crushed after a violent demonstration that followed the university’s refusal to let the students meet on the campus. Oshima’s professor Takikawa Yukitoki published a statement saying that the authorities should have been tougher on the students after the Emperor incident. This was the same man who had been purged in 1933 for writing a liberal paper. Takikawa’s example had inspired Oshima to study law. And now it had come to this.
But 1960 was really the left’s last stand, even though there were to be more student demonstrations during the 1970s. Its failure, which Oshima blames on the authoritarian communists as much as on the repressiveness of the government, bred nihilism and despair. In that year Oshima made another film, apart from Night and Fog in Japan, entitled Cruel Story of Youth. It is about a handsome young man and his girlfriend, whose games of mild sex and violence escalate to the point of death. He gets killed by gangsters; she jumps from a speeding car. All hope is lost, dreams are smashed. Kicks are all that’s left.
It is tempting to compare Cruel Story of Youth to the more famous Ai No Corrida, made sixteen years later. The story of Abe Sada and her lover, Kichizo, is also about a sexual game ending in death, but the spirit is different. Whereas an air of despair and nihilism drives the actions of the young couple in Cruel Story of Youth, O-Sada and her lover, Kichisan, are not nihilistic at all, nor frustrated. On the contrary: they have voluntarily locked themselves up in their passion. Even though freedom, in their small private utopia, proves elusive, sexual love is celebrated with almost revolutionary gusto. Passion is all. They communicate only through their bodies, in the language of sex. When they speak, it is to heighten their passion. What is subversive about the film is that it positively wallows in the power of female sexuality. O-Sada is not a passive tool for her lover’s pleasure, the usual pattern in Japanese porn, where the simpering heroine spends most of her time trussed up in ropes. No, in this case his penis is her instrument of pleasure. She is on top. He gives, and she sucks the life out of him.
But it is a brittle paradise they live in. Obsessions cannot be satisfied: one always wants more. Nor can the lovers completely isolate themselves from the world. In an ominous display of displaced sexual energy, soldiers are already marching outside the sliding doors of Kichi and Sada’s love nest, off toward the war in China. The story took place in the 1930s. However much we might try, we cannot change anything: order will prevail. “I think that our only route to freedom,” Oshima wrote in 1965, “and our only route to pleasure can come after we have first recognized that freedom and pleasure are not possible in this world.” In a way, is this not what Ozu was saying, too?
Well, yes—but only in a way. An important footnote to Oshima’s essay “The Concept of Demons” mentions the work of Wakamatsu Koji. He was at least as deeply involved in the protest movements of the 1950s and 1960s as Oshima was, but, after the defeat, he turned to the production of pornographic films, or “ero-ductions.”
The showing of one of these at the Berlin Film Festival in 1965 caused a rumpus in Japan. The film, entitled The Secret Act Inside Walls, shows people having various kinds of sex in a high-rise public-housing apartment. On the wall, as though watching over the proceedings, is a portrait of Stalin. The idea, so Oshima’s editor guesses, is to show the limitations of the proletarian struggle for power. It is a plausible explanation, in keeping with the almost tragic spirit of many activists turned pornographers.
I am not aware of any of Wakamatsu’s ero-ductions actually being banned in Japan. I suspect it is because they are not taken very seriously. Oshima’s Ai No Corrida, on the other hand, drew so much international attention that the police decided to bare their censorious teeth. The film, produced by Anatole Dauman, was shot in Japan but developed and edited in Paris. It still has not been shown in Japan in an unmutilated form. The bizarre ways in which sex scenes are censored—genitals obscured by black squares, and so on—turn acts of tenderness into something prurient. One third of the film was doctored in one way or another. But at least it was not banned. Then a book came out in Tokyo, containing the script of the film, as well as still photographs. This was the chance for the police to crack down. Oshima, who was not the publisher of the book, was charged with obscenity.
It was the police, and not government censors, who charged Oshima, since obscenity is in the criminal code, as a convenient, ill-defined leftover from prewar days. Censorship is actually prohibited by the constitution. Oshima’s attitude to the trial was as brave as it was succinct: “Obscenity? What’s wrong with obscenity?” The outcome was a Japanese compromise: the charges were dropped, but the book was banned. This compromise was reached because Oshima put his prosecutors on the spot. He asked them to define what was obscene about the book, and they could not come up with a reasonable answer.
Why, in any case, would the sight of genitals, or of adults making love in a wholly conventional manner, offend anybod
y’s sensibilities in a culture that had never connected such matters with sin? The answer is that it wouldn’t, really. Normally the fantasy world of the brothel or the pornographic work is tolerated—even, until not so long ago, institutionalized in special licensed quarters. But once in a while the state must show its power to keep people in their places, to show who is boss. The sight of naked genitals has nothing to do with sin: it is just a convenient peg, as it were, for showing the fist of authority.
In an essay about morality, “Between Custom and Crime: Sex as Mediator,” Oshima describes a meeting with a conservative politician who asks him about the provenance of manners and customs. Mores, says the politician, have more power to change society than politics. Oshima disagrees. It is true, he writes, that manners and customs are changed by “guerrillas,” and that new mores begin as expressions of dissatisfaction with a political system that uses customs to support the status quo. But—and here Oshima puts his finger on the sorest point of Japanese politics—“it is not, as the LDP Dietman said, that mores have more power to change society than politics; rather the forces unable to change society through politics shift to manners and customs.” That is why Oshima makes movies. And the subversiveness of his work explains his cri de cœur that “to make films is a criminal act in this world.”