The days were gone when government bureaucrats could simply ban something they didn’t like. Instead, they hosted a National Conference on Children’s Culture. The Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) was persuaded to adopt an ethics code, which included a pledge to preserve constitutional values like public peace and wholesome living. Records should not promote bad customs, crime, injustice, indecency, or anything else that threatened ‘child psychology’. A broadcasting ethics code followed a few years later, continuing a post-war shift towards artistic self-restraint under a combination of political and civil pressure.
Commercial self-restraint was rather harder to guarantee, and here too there were fears about the long-term impact of television. Viewers who found live broadcasts of the Anpo protests – put together by a first generation of intrepid, helmeted TV reporters – a little too harrowing had only to turn the dial to encounter a very different America. Sitcoms like I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best served as a powerful means of product placement – for American values and humour as much as for a hallowed ensemble of family possessions, from telephones and washing machines to fridges, air conditioning and cars. Modest material wealth like this came to mark you out in Japan – as it did in Western Europe during the same decade – as ‘middle class’. And both the LDP and the advertisers who kept most of the country’s television stations on air very much wanted you to have it.
Nothing seemed to stop the march of each new Western trend into Japanese life. Jazz and boogie-woogie gave way first to rockabilly and electric instrumental rock (ereki) and then to ‘group sounds’, thanks to visits to Japan by the American rock band The Ventures (in 1965) and The Beatles (in 1966). There was anger in some quarters at the use of the Budōkan, built to house Olympic judo, as a music venue for the Fab Four. But the wider concern, during the later 1950s and into the 1960s, was what the new styles of dress and behaviour that came with Western mass culture might be doing to the outlook of the nation’s young. For music reviewers, live rockabilly concerts were a source of faint bemusement – one described a performer with his legs bent, guitar thrust outwards, ‘waddling like a child with polio’. For Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) and housewives’ organizations, they threatened the transmission to Japanese children of a violent and sexualized disdain for the adult world. Boys were growing up wanting to be like the rockabilly star Yamashita Keijiro. Girls were rumoured to be throwing their panties at him.
Moral panic was good for business. In 1955, a novel called Taiyō no Kisetsu (Season of the Sun) became the surprise winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature. Parental outcry at its content – sex, sailing, beaches, booze and bare-knuckle brawls amongst wealthy Japanese teenagers – helped to raise its public profile and it was optioned for a film, released in 1956. The book’s young author, Ishihara Shintarō, was contracted by the studio to write a follow-up, and Crazed Fruit was released in cinemas later that same year. It launched the acting and musical career of Ishihara’s brother Yūjirō, while helping Ishihara to establish a lucrative public profile as leader of the ‘Sun Tribe’ (taiyōzoku): young people sporting ‘Shintarō crew cuts’, wearing Hawaiian shirts and generally behaving badly.
Rebellion amongst the post-war young was not, of course, limited to Japan – Yūjirō was routinely compared with James Dean. But when Japanese children called their parents ‘fascists’ they were, in some cases at least, offering historical commentary rather than indulging in throwaway petulance. The political implications were different too. As the progressive politics championed by the likes of Maruyama Masao failed to gain the hoped-for traction, there was a danger that traditionalist voices on the right would dominate the response to moments of apparent social crisis like the taiyōzoku panic. The Japanese public realm, opened up after the war to so much fanfare, threatened to become trapped in a hopeless back-and-forth between an affluent mass culture that tested moral but not political boundaries, and a resurgent conservative establishment keen to use the more debauched elements of that culture as proof of the Occupation era’s corruption of Japanese life – and the need to roll back some of those reforms.
For all that films in the Crazed Fruit mould might have appeared to play into the hands of youth-oriented commerce on the one hand (from Hawaiian shirts to hair products) and conservative politics on the other, they were also a sign of Japanese cinema finding a new voice. Even in the silent era, Japanese film had spoken to its audiences in a tone at once interpretive and didactic. Where Nō theatre had its chorus, bunraku its chanter, and kabuki its narrator, film had a benshi: a man who stood by the cinema screen, often in formal evening attire, describing the onscreen action, performing the voices of each character, and helping people to draw conclusions about what they were seeing.
Those conclusions were usually wholesome ones, but benshi were not strangers to a bit of misdirection, if it helped to preserve the freedom of their art form – in the face of authorities keen to keep an influential new medium in check, not least where foreign content was concerned. One benshi managed to reassure police that full-mouth kissing was simply a standard greeting in America. A second saved a 1907 French film about the Revolution of 1789 from being banned – the guillotining of a monarch being an unacceptable plotline – by miraculously unveiling a brand-new feature in its place. The Cave King: A Curious Story of North America told of a Rocky Mountains robber-baron who is brought to justice by a crowd of good-hearted local people and police who descend en masse on his hideout. Louis XVI had been recast as a criminal, with the storming of the Bastille his entirely lawful comeuppance.
And yet for some reviewers, film didn’t always speak clearly enough. Ozu Yasujirō’s I Was Born, But … depicted the boredom and insecurity of middle-class urban family life in the early 1930s: a father who is domineering at home but subservient at work; children who are as listless at school as their fathers are at the office, and no doubt destined to follow the same grim trajectory into adulthood. The subject matter was cutting-edge – the mixed blessings of the mass society – but detractors found the treatment ambiguous. They wanted a strong, provocative condemnation of modern life, rather than wistfulness and melancholy. They wanted polemic. Ozu offered portraiture.
Ozu’s defenders might say that he was giving free rein to his audience’s inner benshi, to narrate, interpret and draw moral conclusions – or simply to remain blissfully mute. It was thanks to precisely these sorts of qualities that Tokyo Story (1953) ended up helping to put Japanese film on the map. A retired couple make a journey from their rural home to visit their children in the big city, a place of smokestacks, telephone wires and trains trundling over iron bridges. It is soon painfully apparent that their son and daughter’s busy urban lives – one a doctor, the other a beautician – have eclipsed any affection they might once have had for their provincial parents. Dramatic turning points are minimized all the way along, sometimes missed out altogether and simply referred back to later. The focus instead is on what is going on inside and around the characters: the quiet spaces into which brief spoken observations occasionally intrude, opening up more space in the process; the gaps between what is said and what is intended. In one scene, the two parents sit on cushions on the tatami-mat floor of their room at a seaside resort. Ozu uses his trademark low, lingering camera to enhance the sense of their children’s lives, and of life itself, receding gently away from them. Drinking tea at a small table, the two contentedly exchange what would be non sequiturs were it not for all the silent connecting contributions of memory and emotion – as spacious, shifting and endlessly fertile as the expanse of sea onto which they are gazing out.
Respected though Ozu was, Japan’s big film studios – Shōchiku, Tōhō and Nikkatsu prime amongst them – were, by the late 1950s, on the hunt for something new. They were beginning to worry – rightly – about what television was going to do to them. Movie-going in Japan peaked in 1958, with over a billion cinema visits that year, and then dropped precipitously over the decade that f
ollowed. The success of taiyōzoku films prompted studios to try promoting younger directors, in the hope of holding on to a youth audience. For this new generation, Ozu’s artistry was never in question. Instead, it was the old problem, surfacing in a new era: where was the analysis, the anger, the call to arms?
One young film-maker, Ōshima Nagisa, summed up the work of predecessors like Ozu in a single, devastating word: congenial. A graduate of Kyoto University, where he had been heavily involved in student politics, Ōshima wanted his own films to be not ‘products’ but ‘forms of action’. Here was one of the few ways, he thought, in which educated people like himself might reach out to a country in desperate need of painful reflection and radical change. After Anpo, Japan could no longer afford congeniality. One of Ōshima’s early films, Night and Fog in Japan (1960), rammed home the point, showing uninvited guests turning a wedding reception into an inquisition. It was a heated, claustrophobic examination of contemporary politics, group-think and personal culpability, with spotlights used to single people out as they spoke or cowered.
‘New wave’ directors like Ōshima drew inspiration from abroad: from Italian neo-realists like Roberto Rossellini, and from Alain Resnais and the French new wave. Here were two societies riven still – like Japan – by divisions between those who had supported and those who had resisted the totalitarian projects of barely a decade and a half before. But Ōshima’s generation also set themselves up against domestic cinema, vying for movie-goers’ attention not just with the likes of Ozu but with a syrupy and fatalistic war-film genre. Films like Ningen no Jōken (The Human Condition, made in three parts between 1958 and 1961) dealt seriously and unflinchingly with the war, and with what happens when individual responsibility bumps up against authority and big institutions. The latter concern was a major feature of Kurosawa Akira’s films, too, both the period pieces for which he became famous abroad and contemporary dramas like 1952’s Ikiru (‘to live’). But a great many other directors threatened to frustrate the country’s post-war quest for a more independently minded citizenry by focusing on the way that history sometimes stacks the odds against people, in terrible, inescapable ways. As one Japanese critic put it, submission to the ‘world around’ and to a ‘collective self’ began to be lauded again with surprising speed after the war. The romanticizing of the kamikaze was an especially egregious example, in films like Beyond the Clouds (1953) and The Sacrifice of the Human Torpedoes (1955).
Equally discreditable treatment of the recent past could be found in a series of films beginning with Gojira (Godzilla in its later US release). Appearing at the end of 1954, the year of the Lucky Dragon 5 incident, Gojira was directed by an eyewitness to the aftermath at Hiroshima, Honda Ishirō, who envisioned his monster – its name a portmanteau of the Japanese for ‘gorilla’ and ‘whale’ – as nuclear disaster ‘made flesh’. It was a huge box office success, thanks in large part to the special effects work of Tsuburaya Eiji, who had contributed to such an effective cinematic recreation of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1942 that the Occupation authorities had mistaken it for documentary footage. For Gojira, Tsuburaya exchanged King Kong-style stop-motion camera work for something much simpler: a man dressed in a big rubber suit mashing miniature cars and buildings underfoot, with high-speed footage, filmed under intense lights, slowed down to give the impression of a ponderous stomp.
Such features were to become a staple of both film and television in Japan, with fantastical heroes and villains conjured by outlandishly costumed human beings engaging one another in wrestling matches and martial arts-style fisticuffs. Kaijū eiga – monster movies – were critically important to the survival of studios like Tōhō in the television age. And to hostile reviewers, this was all too obvious in the genre’s early years. Despite Honda’s protestations, a film like Gojira seemed to be neither cautionary atomic tale nor pioneering piece of art. It was an attempt, pure and simple, to cash in on memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (increasingly to the fore as the end of Occupation censorship opened up public discussion), providing people with precisely the wrong kind of outlet for their anger and anxieties about nuclear weapons.
Up against these monstrous fantasies, with their monstrous ticket sales, Ōshima’s Night and Fog had its work cut out. And in the end, it wasn’t given much of a chance. Released on 9 October 1960, it was pulled from cinemas after just three days. The film wasn’t at all the kind of thing that Ōshima’s employers, Shōchiku, had envisaged when they assisted his rise through the ranks. But more importantly, it was gazumped by TV. People around Japan were suddenly glued to their screens at home, watching a spectacular piece of contemporary drama. A young man, all of seventeen years of age, and frustrated by his country’s emptiness of purpose, was taking politics into his own hands. He rushed onto a stage where a left-wing politician was giving a speech, brandishing a short-blade sword, and ran him through with it, killing him almost instantly. Viewers were horrified. The attack was not just realistic. It was real. A prominent socialist, Asanuma Inejirō, had just been assassinated on camera.
*
Seventeen stares despairingly at his reflection in the mirror. ‘I’ve turned bluish-black. That’s the face of a chronic masturbator. People probably say: that guy’s a full-time masturbator. Look at the colour of his face. Look at those cloudy eyes …’ Only later, watching an ageing ultranationalist giving a speech, does he feel his self-loathing leave him, his anger turning outwards instead towards the targets picked out by the speaker. ‘Petty officials! Pimps, selling out their country! Traitors! Shameless bootlickers!’ When he hears a group of office girls behind him anxiously tut-tutting at this young ‘Rightist’, his epiphany is complete: ‘That’s it. I’ve touched the essence of myself. I am a Rightist! I scream out at them: “What about us Rightists, then, you bitches?!” ’
Seventeen joins the old man’s organization, the Imperial Way Party. He reads the Kojiki, the ancient chronicle of Japan’s gods and emperors, and devours the poems of the Meiji Emperor. He takes to heart the central message of modern imperial ideology: ‘devotion and selfishness are incompatible’. Blissful liberation, as impotence, indecision and the terror of death all melt away. Now, ‘His Majesty the Emperor makes the choices’. From books the boy graduates to karate and judo. It is summer 1960 and he joins in the fighting against the Anpo protestors. He beats and tramples them, is arrested, then goes back for more. On 12 October that year, he takes up his sword and heads over to where a leftist politician is participating in a televised debate …
The young novelist Ōe Kenzaburō was inspired to create his lonesome, masturbation-obsessed character ‘Seventeen’ both by the murder of Asanuma in October 1960 and by his own sense of hopelessness and defeat at his country’s politics. Characters like Seventeen – young men defined by impotence, voyeurism, sexual submissiveness or extreme sexual violence – appeared with increasing frequency in literature and film during the 1960s. Part of the reason was a turn, by increasingly cash-strapped film studios and distributors, towards the soft-pornography ‘pink film’ genre, which made up around half of new releases by 1965. But that didn’t explain the themes running through some of these films. Takechi Tetsuji’s Kuroi yuki (‘Black Snow’, 1965) told the story of nineteen-year-old Jirō, so traumatized by his mother’s selling of sex to American soldiers at the nearby Yokota airbase that he struggles to form sexual relationships of his own, relieved of his impotence only by holding a loaded gun in his hand. Jirō ends up murdering an American soldier, and then his own mother, before being gunned down by military police.
Themes and protagonists like these reflected a real-life turn in the 1960s towards the primal, the fleshly and the violent. Establishment Japan, in which the Anpo protests had barely put a dent, was increasingly hard to identify simply with state institutions or even with the state in league with nefarious big business and a compliant media. An older generation of progressive intellectuals also had to be included in that category now, their blanket rejection of ‘violence’ du
ring the Anpo protests having revealed to their critics a fear of change. Even ordinary citizens were starting to look like the enemy. They might not love the strictures of their school or working lives, but they could imagine worse – in many cases, they could remember it. Many of them therefore simply ignored the country’s political travails, preferring the consolations of a book or a television programme, a holiday or film, or the ordinary joys of a family life where the risks of a member’s sudden recruitment to a doomed war were now vanishingly slight.
Students and radical artists spent the decade trying to reach around what they saw as this modern, Western-influenced complacency, by exploring in its place a more vital Japanese past. They experimented with romantic cultural nationalisms of the left and right, in some cases dispensing altogether with ideas like progress or the nation. With the optimistic liberalism of the early post-war years tarnished by the Cold War and consumer capitalism – the wartime West’s much-vaunted humanism seemed to have curdled into quiz shows and missile crises – the advantages had rarely been clearer of living in a country built upon more than a millennium’s worth of creative contact around the world – with India, China and Korea, and only latterly with the modern West.
A pre-modern trawl for resources took some artists back to an Edo era fondly recalled as less sanitized than the present day. Others rewound all the way to Japan’s Jōmon period (14,000–300 BC): Okamoto Tarō, enthusiast for the Yomiuri Indépendant exhibition, extolled the ‘smell of Japanese soil’ that Jōmon earthenware gave off. Avant-garde traditionalists – such a thing was possible, in these times – reworked ikebana (flower-arranging), along with folk crafts and a range of Japanese and Chinese philosophies. The calligrapher Iijima Tsutomu talked about cleansing himself of the recent past and returning to the purity of ‘a naked human being’. The work of the folklorist Yanagita Kunio, appropriated not so long ago by militarists, now found readers on the radical left: a means, they hoped, of rediscovering a connection with nature, whose sidelining by Japan’s construction and entertainment industries was yet another source of the bleak present.
Japan Story Page 31
