BEHIND THE PINK CURTAIN THE COMPLETE HISTORY OFJAPANESE SEX CINEMA First edition published by FAB Press, September 2008 FAB Press Ltd. 2 Farleigh Ramsden Road Godalming Surrey GU71QE England, U.K. www.fabpress.com
Text copyright © 2008 Jasper Sharp. The moral rights of the author have been asserted. Edited and Designed by Harvey Fenton, with thanks to Francis Brewster for production assistance. This Volume copyright © FAB Press Ltd. 2008. World Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Copyright of illustrations reproduced in these pages is the property of the production or distribution companies concerned. These illustrations are reproduced here in the spirit of publicity, and whilst every effort has been made to trace the copyright owners, the author and publishers apologise for any omissions and will undertake to make any appropriate changes in future editions of this book if necessary.
Front cover illustration: Naomi Tani in Mamoru Watanabe's Naomi Tani: Tied Up! (1977). ©Shintoho Back cover illustration: British quad poster for Nikkat su's Emmanuel/e in Tokyo (Akira Kat6, 1975). Frontispiece illustration: Hotaru Hazuki in Takuaki Hashiguchi's Mansion of the Senses: Wife5 Ascension (2004). ©Shintoho . Title page illustration: The character 'ura: literally 'behind: 'reverse' or 'inside: is used in Japan to mean 'behind the scenes' or 'expose: Contents pages illustrations: First page, top to bottom: Revenge of the Pearl Queen (Toshio Shimura, 1956); Chronicle of an Affair (K6ji Wakamatsu, 1965); Continuation: Chronicle of an Affair (Kan Mukai, 1966); Go Go Second Time Virgin (K6ji Wakamatsu, 1969); The Sun5 Navel (K6ji Wakamatsu, 1965). Second page, top to bottom: New: Chronicle of an Affair (Osamu Yamashita, 1967); Cruel Passion Drawing (Yuki Takeda, 1970); Crevice of Skin (Takahisa Zeze, 2004); Greedy Housewives (Sa chi Hamano, 2003); The Secret Garden (Hisayasu Sat6, 1987).
A CIP catalogue record for th is book is available from the British Library. hardback: ISBN 978 1 9032S4 53 0 paperback: ISBN 978 1 903254 54 7
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FAB
PRESS N;ESEHTATlOH
BEHIND THE PINK CURTAIN
The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema
Jasper Sharp
Contents Introduction
7
Chapter 1 The Japanese Sex Film: Art or Industry?
9
An introduction to the world of pinku eiga.
Chapter 2 Sex, Censorship and Other Positions of Power: New Ways of Looking
79
An introduction to Japan's obscenity laws and censorship history.
Chapter 3 Ama Glamour and the Rise of the Flesh Actress
37
The output of Shintoho, the company most instrumental in introducing sex to Japanese screens during the 1950s.
Chapter4 The Birth of the Eroduction
43
The beginnings of the pink genre and the formation of Kokuei, Okura Productions and the new Shintoho.
Chapter 5 Pioneers of the Pink Film
57
Introducing the early trailblazers of the pink film world and their work.
Chapter6 Pinkos in Pink
69
How the pink film came to echo the radicalism of ultra-leftist groups on the streets ofTokyo.
Chapter 7 79 Emerging from the Underground: Wakamatsu Pro K6ji Wakamatsu's role in bringing avant-garde pop culture, porn and politics to a wider market.
ChapterS Eiga I Kakumei: The Story of Masao Adachi
99
An overview of the career of filmmaking radical and Wakamatsu's partner-in-crime, Masao Adachi.
Chapter 9 The Golden Dawn of the New Porn: Nikkatsu's Roman Porno
723
The Japanese sex film goes mass market with the birth of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno line in 1971.
Chapter 10 Roman Porno: The Films, Their Makers and Their Stars A closer look at some of Nikkatsu's top Roman Porno directors, actresses and their films.
73 7
Contents 777
Chapter 11 Eros International International co-productions and distribution -was the Japanese sex film ever purely for domestic consumption?
203
Chapter 12 I Am Curious (Pink) - An Industry in Flux A look at the major pink film production companies of the 1970s, their staff and their films.
279
Chapter 13 The Decade of Excess Japanese sex films have become notorious for their depictions of violence, rape and sadomasochism, but was it always this way, or was it purely a 1980s development?
249
Chapter 14 The Four Devils and the Pink Nouvelle Vague The pink film renaissance of the early 1990s, following the death of Roman Porno and the arrival of Adult Video.
259
Chapter 15 The Devils Themselves ... An overview of the films of the directors known as the Four Devils.
293
Chapter 16 Girls and Boys Come Out to Play Female viewers, female directors and the gay porno sub- genre.
309
Chapter 17 21st Century Girl and the Seven Lucky Gods The latest new wave of pink directors, known as the Seven Lucky Gods.
33 7
Chapter 18 Final Curtain? In the era of DVD and the internet, is there still a market for theatrical sex films?
34 7
Appendix 1 Films Referenced in Text
377
Appendix 2 Selected Further Reading
38 7
Appendix 3 Japanese Names Index: Personnel, Production Companies and Glossary of Terms
404
Index
Behind the Pink Curtain
Introduction y first encounter with pinku eiga was in 1989. I wasn't even aware I was watching a pink film at the time, nor even that such a genre existed, yet alone what a large part it would play in my later life. The title in question was Violated Angels, directed by Koji Wakamatsu, a figure who looms large within these pages. I wasn't particularly concerned that the film was Japanese either. My main passion at the time was horror movies, and the reason I was drawn to the film, after spotting it in the listings of London's legendary Scala Cinema, was its rather curious inclusion in Phil Hardy's Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror, my bible for movie fandom at the time. True to the Scala's characteristically eclectic approach to programming, it played on a double bill with Shohei Imamura's 1983 Cannes Grand Prix-winner The Ballad of Narayama. Both films appeared to raise far more questions than they answered, especially in the mind of an 18-year-old freshly arrived in the capital from the boondocks of North Devon and weaned on fantasy worlds populated by Lucio Fulci's lumbering reanimated ghouls and the late-night Gothic chills of Hammer. Wakamatsu's film proved particularly perplexing. What the hell was this? A sex film which wasn't exactly sexy, which not only didn't appear to have a story but also had barely any dialogue, and which made oblique references to political circumstances a world and a generation apart from the Thatcher-era Britain I then inhabited. Hardy's explanation wasn't much help: "In common with ultra-leftist groups that turned to terrorism and other irrational cultural and political practises, Wakamatsu conflates the psychopathology of psychosis and its utopian fantasy of dissolution into an oceanic-maternal space (the lost paradise) with revolutionary politics .. . Wakamatsu depicts the logical conclusion of the notion that unbridled sexual activity is a legitimate 'revolt' against sexual/political alienation." Yes, but what did any of this actually mean? I filed away the experience and thought about it no more. And then, through a series of coincidences and misadventures that could fill up a book in its own right, some 15 years later I wound up in Tokyo, which is where the name Wakamatsu popped up again. This book is the fruit of my attempts to unravel the mysteries of an entire cinematic substrata of films whose existence has barely been noted by previous writers in the English language. It comes from the viewpoint that moving images have a life of their own quite divorced from reality, but one that connects with the real world in fascinating ways, and that in moral terms, pornography is neither good nor bad. It just "is': Exactly what it "is" is one question I attempt to address within these pages.
M
It goes without saying that the book you now hold in your hands could never have come into existence without the assistance and encouragement of a good number of people, but I would like to thank Roland Domenig especially for introducing me to this mysterious world and its denizens. His advice and comments on early manuscripts have been invaluable in steering my research. Similarly a huge thank you to Alex Zahlten for so thoroughly picking through the text as it was being written, giving feedback and pointing out errors and inconsistencies, and to my Midnight Eye confrere, Tom Mes, for his help, enthusiasm and vigorous proofreading skills. Certainly the research stage would have been a lot more tricky were it not for the wonderful translation skills of Sharon Hayashi, Michael Arnold and Junko Sasaki, with whom I spent a good deal of my time in Tokyo mulling over these films and talking with their makers. And then there are the directors themselves, who proved endlessly patient with my questioning, and supplied me with their less readily available works: Koji Wakamatsu, Masao Adachi, Mamoru Watanabe, Kazuhiro Sana (thanks also for keeping the shochu flowing!), Hisayasu Sato, Toshiki Sato, Takahisa Zeze, Mitsuru Meike, Rei Sakamoto, Yuji Tajiri, Shinji lmaoka, Yoshitaka Kamata, Tashiro Enomoto, Ryuichi Hiraki, Toshiharu Ikeda, Takashi Ishii, Noboru Tanaka, Hideo Nakata and Taro Araki.
above: Classic eroticism repackaged for a new generation: A 'chirashi; or flyer, for Uplink's line of Nippon Erotics DVD releases.
7
Behind the Pink Curtain
My heartfelt regards also go to Yumeka Sasaki, Hotaru Hazuki, K6ichi lmaizumi, Y6ta Kawase (a memorable night singing Spandau Ballet classics on the karaoke .. .), the incredibly patient Keiko Sat6 of Kokuei, K6ichi Got6 and Akira Fukuhara of Shintoho (especially the latter, who was extremely generous in supplying me with videos and stills, and good conversation during our hikes up Mount Mitake), the ever-helpful Kazunori Sakaguchi of Stance, the wonderful Yasue Nobusawa of Nikkatsu, Shinji Komada of ENK and Kunihiko Tomioka of Planet Studyo + 1 Osaka for arranging some invaluable private showings for me. This book also received invaluable input from Nicholas Rucka, Jason Gray, John Williams, Jom 0' Rourke, Zeni, Dimitri Ianni, Johannes Schonherr, Stephen Cremin and Pete Tombs, who was notably gracious in allowing me to ransack his stills collection and pick his brains on the Filipino sex film industry. I'd also like to acknowledge my great debt to Aaron Gerow and Markus Nornes, both for inspiring me with their own writing and research, and for providing such an essential resource for discussing Japanese cinema in the form of the KineJapan mailing list and annual Kinema Club conferences. And of course Harvey Fenton of FAB Press, for responding so positively to my original book proposal with a record-breaking promptness. And last but by no means least, to all those readers whose encouragement and interest have spurred us on with Midnight Eye since its inception.
8
NB: A note on titles, names and transcriptions.
Transcription of Japanese words follows the Hepburn system, with the use of the circumflex on vowels denoting a long vowel sound (i.e. 6 as in "boat'; a as in "flute"). However, for the sake of clarity I've eschewed this convention for names of film companies known outside of Japan (for example, Shintoho rather than Shint6h6, Toei rather than T6ei, but Ropp6 Eiga and S6z6sha, for those whose names are seldom written in English) and for place names, where I've adopted the familiar international spellings such as Tokyo and Osaka, as opposed to T6ky6 and Osaka (though Kyushu and Hokkaid6 are used instead of Kyushu and Hokkaido). With regard to Japanese names, I have adopted the Western standard of given name first, and family name second. Though the Japanese naming convention states family first, given name second, this book is aimed at a non-Japanese reader. All of the Japanese names listed in the text are listed alongside their Japanese spelling in the appendices. For information about the films' casts, year of release, runtime and Japanese titles, I have drawn heavily from the invaluable online resources of the Japanese Movie Database (www.jmdb.ne.jp), moderated by Y. Nomura, and the homepage for PG magazine (www2u.biglobe. ne.jp/~p-g/menu.htm), moderated by Yoshiyuki Hayashida.
above: 6kura's 'World Masterpiece Theatre' (Sekai Gessaku Gekij6) in Ueno, Tokyo. (picture by Jason Gray)
chapter one
The Japanese Sex Film: Art or Industry? n the shores of a remote lake high up in the mountains, a tribe of topless teens toting machine guns cavort around a trussed-up soldier wearing combat fatigues. A uniformed office lady on a crowded commuter train mews in ecstasy as a moustachioed creep fumbles beneath her skirt. A perverted social outcast lures sailor-suited schoolgirls to an abandoned truck container where he runs a buzzing sex aid over their denuded bodies and spatters their porcelain skins with various hues of spray-paint before brutally murdering them and disposing of their corpses in an acid bath.ln a muddy cowshed in rural Nagano, a farmer sits down at his milking stool to attend to a naked girl on all fours, while on a rooftop high above the centre of Tokyo, a young woman writhes in bliss as the rubbery replica of the finger of none other than the President of the United States of America darts between her thighs and images of war play out on a TV screen behind her.7 These are but a choice selection of some of the more outrageous images to hail from the wild and wicked world of the pinku eiga, or pink film, the genre of low-budget softcore sex movies that has graced specialist adult cinema screens across the Japanese nation, sometimes playing even further afield, since the early '60s. The basic definition of the pink film is an independently-produced movie, shot on 35mm film by professional or semi-professional casts and crews, whose main lure is its sexual content. What 'independent' means within the broader context of the Japanese film industry is one of the ideas this book will be looking at within the ensuing chapters. For now however, suffice to say that over the decades the pink industry has evolved a highly-structured production, distribution and exhibition system all of its own, operating in the shadowy penumbra of the mainstream. "The West knows nothing of these pictures, nor should it,"2 Donald Richie, the doyen of Japanese film criticism, once famously proclaimed. This book avers otherwise. With the mushrooming proliferation of DVD releases and the rise of the international film festival greasing the tracks, so that even the most obscure celluloid oddities manage to transcend the boundaries of time and culture to reach new audiences, an increasing number of these titles are making their way to new overseas audiences and being viewed in arenas quite distinct from those for which they were originally intended. Given the bizarre fan sub-culture and critical discourse that has built up around this sexy underground sector over the past 40 years, both within Japan and outside, some sort of explanation and historical evaluation seems long overdue.
O
From its very inception, these movies have accounted for a healthy chunk of the industry's total output. From the meagre handful of four titles releated in 1962, the genre's popularity peaked in 1965 with a staggering 213 films.3 Though many believe pink to be on the wane, even taking 2003 as a recent sample year, one can note that a significant 89 out of the 287 domestically-produced films that screened in Japanese cinemas fell into this category, with a further 60 or soretitled releases of older pink films (to put the figures in some sort of perspective, 335 foreign titles played Japanese cinemas that same year).4 Many domestic industries in Europe and the Americas can boast of similar, if not quite as sizeable, legacies of nudie flicks and sexploitation quickies in the '60s and '70s, before this particular sphere of filmmaking fell victim to the cheaper and far more profitable medium of video pornography during the '80s. The closest any other Asian country comes to Japan in terms of sex film production for the big screen is the Philippines, which presents a slightly unusual case in that it is the only Catholic state in the region. The 'bomba; 'bold; and 'pene' films were a notable aspect of
above: With tickets as cheap as ¥500 (und er $5), pink theatres are a perfect p lace to get away from the hubbub of the city and gather one's thoughts in t he dark.
9
Behind the Pink Curtain
the Filipino movie industry, and onscreen copulation was even encouraged in the '80s under the Marcos regime in recognition of the fact that it was the most effective way of getting local audiences to see local films. Titles such as Celso Ad Castillo's Virgin People (1984), Elwood Perez's Silip: Daughter of Eve (1985) and Peque Gallaga's Scorpio Nights (1985) enjoyed very prominent releases (the latter played uncut at the Manila International Film Festival)- so much so that it becomes difficult to readily separate 'adult' and 'mainstream' movies into two distinct categories compared with other countries.s (Incidentally, it appears that quite a number of the Roman Porno films produced by Nikkatsu studios played the Philippines during the '70s and '80s, and were highly influential. Certainly one can detect shades of Noboru Tanaka's Watcher in the Attic in Gallaga's film.) Still, with video dominating the pornographic market, the continuing existence into the 21st Century of sex movies actually shot on 35mm film and projected in cinemas may be viewed as something of an anachronism, especially in a country that is often looked to as a technological trailblazer for the rest of the world. Even some Japanese industry outsiders find the phenomenon bemusing: Kenjir6 Fujii's 2004 documentary Pink Ribbon expressed a measure of astonishment in an opening text title stating,"Even now porn theatres are a part of our cities." It is fair to point out that diminishing returns have seen a huge thinning out of the industry since the '80s. While numerous companies have flourished producing these films over the years, at the beginning of the 21st Century five players dominated both production and distribution. The largest of these is OP Eiga (formerly Okura Eiga), founded by Mitsugu Ckura,6 the former company president of the legendary Shintoho studios, after its collapse in 1961. To confuse matters, when the original Shintoho went bankrupt, its name was appropriated by K6ichi Got6, a former staff member of its Kansai branch in Osaka, and the 'new' Shintoho became the second major pink distributor. As well as producing and distributing its own work, this company also theatrically distributes the films of Kokuei, the oldest pink production company, and the one whose films are the most widely circulated overseas. The fourth company, Xces (aka Shin Nihon Eiz6, meaning 'New Japan Images') arose from the ashes of the major studio Nikkatsu after it ceased production of its more elaborately-mounted Roman Porno erotic features in 1988. Last, but by no means least, the Osaka-based ENK has earned itself a distinct position in the market by specialising in the production and distribution of gay pink films, an audience that is also catered for by OP Eiga. Though falling into the category of Adult Films (seijin eiga) and thus carrying the restricted R-18 certificate, the pink film can have a lot more to offer besides the obvious attractions inherent in the sex movie. With the 10
main guideline being to deliver a set number of sex or nude scenes w ithin a running time that became standardised during the '70s to roughly an hour, they can offer their makers the liberty to explore ideas, themes and stylistic avenues cut off from higherbudgeted mainstream productions. Titillation may indeed be the primary purpose, but other important aspects such as performances, story and technical qualities are given a surprising amount of emphasis. With their content encompassing the kinky, the comic, the grotesque and the downright bizarre, pink films have an immediate ability to capture the attention of the casual viewer and strike a wide range of emotional keys. Many of the standout works that will be considered in this book barely seem to conform to standard notions of erotic cinema at all. The abrasive, politically-charged films of K6ji Wakamatsu, for example, have been touted in Noel Burch's seminal academic analysis of Japanese film aesthet ics, To the Distant Observer, as belong ing firmly within the dynamic avant-garde scene of the '60s/ while Takahisa Zeze's Raigyo (1997), with its obscure plot mechanics and one of the most brutal knife murders ever committed to celluloid, hardly seems the stuff wet dreams are made of. As program pictures primarily targeted at an audience whose expectations are generally low, they remain virtually critic-proof. That is to say that mainstream reviewers tend to ignore them and their titles are excluded from listings magazines. Indeed, in recent years newspapers have barred advertisements for pink films. This was not always the case: respectable local critics like Sadao Yamane and Ken TerawakiB wrote often about pink films (and even more so on Roman Porno), and the prominent listings magazine Pia even used to boast a small seijin eiga section during a short period in the early '90s when the genre became moderately trendy. But to the general public nowadays, these films are to all intents and purposes invisible. However, to a small selection of more intrepid movie buffs willing to explore the lower depths of domestic film culture, they have been seen to represent the indie scene at its most fiercely independent. Though their manner of exhibition might cut off individual works from consideration by scholars and critics, the way in which the pink film dovetails within the overall structure of the domestic industry should not be ignored. At its best, the genre represents a vital hotbed of creative energy seemingly unfettered by minuscule budgets and gruelling shooting schedules. For filmmakers working on the peripheries of an industry that receives little government support, pink filmmaking can provide a crucial training ground for their staff before they go on to work on larger, more commercial, productions and the career path from assistant to the director's chair is far more direct than in many other fi lmmaking environments.
The Japanese Sex Film: Art or Industry?
And what of those behind the scenes constructing these lusty fantasies? Most are university graduates, a crucial requirement for anyone wishing to enter the film industry in Japan, and all are linked by the belief that if filmmaking is to be one's chosen profession, then sex movies are as good a starting point as any other.Just ask directors such as Shinji Aoyama, Ryuichi Hiroki, Masahiro Kobayashi, Nobuhiro Suwa and Kazuo Hara, all of whom cut their teeth serving in various capacities within the pink industry before going on to pick up accolades internationally for their more conventional filmmaking workouts. Then there's Masayuki Su6, who made his debut in 1984 with Abnormal Family: Older Brother's Bride, a bawdy pastiche of the work of Japan's most revered director, Yasujir6 Ozu. Years later, Suo's comic ballroom drama Shall We Dance? (1996) became the top-grossing Asian film ever to be released in the US, before being knocked off its perch by the phenomenal success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and suffering the indignity of an insipid Hollywood remake starring Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez. Y6jir6 Takita, the helmsman behind the highprofile releases When the Last Sword Is Drawn (2003) and Ashura (2005) also served out his apprenticeship making pink films. During the '80s he contributed some of the most spirited and debauched romps the genre has ever seen, with the decidedly non-politically correct Molester Train series. Other directors have taken more intriguing career paths. Shinya Yamamoto, one of pinku eiga's early pioneers, took an upwards step into the limelight during the '90s as the genial co-presenter of the late-night TV show Tonight, whisking his viewers on nocturnal tours around the fleshpots of Tokyo. On the other side of the spectrum is Masao Adachi, for whom a relatively short spell making films with titles like Sex Zone (1968) and Sex Play (1969) served as a stepping stone between a couple of highly-regarded experimental works made while still at university and a period of self-imposed exile in the Middle East mingling with members of the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Japanese Red Army (the JRA, or Nihon Sekigun).
above: Up close and personal in Shinya Yamamoto's Molester Night Train (1977). C!Shinto ho
above: A typical shot from t he Molester Train series, in t his case Akira Fukamachi's Molester Train: Flagrant Mischief Maker (1 994). ©Shintoho
This view of the pink industry as a highly independent breeding ground and bastion for auteurs must, however, come with some provisos. It is worth stating straight away that the individual works do vary wildly in their scope and ambition. The vast majority deliver little more than what they promise, their interest limited solely to the lengthy fleshy interludes that remain central to their appeal, with only the most tenuous of narratives to link them. Take, for example, Pantyless Tour Conductor: I Want to Handle You (2004), a typical work from the ultra-prolific Sakae Nitta, and distributed by Xces Film, in which our eponymous Tokyo tour guide livens up her jaunts around the city by exposing her peachy rear whenever local sites such as the Ginza Kabuki Theatre or the Meiji Shrine fail to keep the sightseers in her trust suitably awestruck. Nitta made several films in this nopan (or 'pantyless') series the very same year, including Moistening Housewife: Pantyless Apron, which revolves around the various pairings of a group of four who meet for cooking lessons in each other's houses over a series of weekday lunchtimes, during which they exchange both recipes and bodily fluids. The film features a revolting scene, inspired by JQz6 ltami's cult comedy Tampopo (1985), in which two of the characters pass a slimy raw egg between their mouths as a prelude to their grappling on the kitchen table. The live-in private teacher at the heart of Punishing Home Tutor: Pantyless One-to-One Lessons metes out punishments to the horny highschooler with whom she is entrusted to help pass his university entrance exams by plucking out his pubic hair, offering more enticing forms of encouragement for his successes in equal measure. Prior to the term pinku eiga taking hold, the films were referred to by the monikers of erodakushon eiga or eroduction (a contraction of the words 'erotic' and 'production'), oiroke eiga ('sexy films') and sanbyakuman eiga ('three-million-yen films') due to their shoestring budgets, which it is claimed have remained around the 11
Behind the Pink Curtain
above: Exterior of a typical pink eiga-kan in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Upstairs, the Kokusai Gekij6 ('International Theatre') plays the films of Xces, while the downstairs Kokusai Meiga-za ('International Masterpiece Theatre') plays the films of Shintoho and Kokuei. (pictures by author) opposite: The lower depths: entrances to two ofTokyo's premier adult theatres. (pictures by Jason Gray)
same mark since the humble beginnings of the genre. The average pink film costs ¥3.5 million (roughly $35,000) to produce, though over the years films have found themselves made on both considerably more and less than this rough ballpark figure. This modest sum bought a lot more in the '60s than it does nowadays. These days, three to four-day location shoots are the norm, with their makers often adopting guerrilla tactics in the absence of official filming permits. This mode of production finds its most remarkable application in the long-running Molester Train series, which takes its action onto the crowded Tokyo commuter train network. The no-frills style of the modern pink, marked by a prevalence of long, static takes from a fixed camera position, with a minimum of inserts, close-ups or cutaways, is probably best attributed to these breakneck shooting schedules, rather than any adherence to what is often taken to be the 'Japanese aesthetic: As the director must make do on around six or seven rolls of fi lm, retakes are kept to a bare minimum. Due to the noise created by the Arriflex camera, sound is recorded and dubbed in postproduction, with the assorted slurps, squelches, moans, sighs, cries and whimpers amplified to lend a slightly ludicrous air to the onscreen antics. There's a memorable scene in Pink Ribbon of the actors 'performing' their sex scenes in Yotsuya's Cine Cabin recording studios, the favoured choice among pink production companies, while standing fully clothed wearing headphones and with scripts in hand like the various assorted rock stars in the original Band Aid 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' video. It's an obvious truism that pink films are erotic films. However, it doesn't necessarily follow that all erotic films 12
produced in Japan can be classified as pink. The term is often misused by foreign observers to include any fi lm that features an abundance of sex or nudity, but in its strictest sense, the genre is defined by its means of production and distribution rather than its content. Other independent productions, such as those produced by the Art Theatre Guild in the '60s, like Nanami: Inferno of First Love (1968), or art films such as Onibaba (1964) and Woman in the Dunes (1964), may have rivalled pink film in terms of the amount of bare flesh on display and thus originally found themselves playing the same overseas venues (Variety described Onibaba as "the most nude, sexiest pic to be unveiled in New York so far"9 when it reached American shores in 1965), but they were produced and screened in notably different circumstances. By definition, pink also excludes the work of the major studios, from the groundbreaking early insinuation of sex and savagery into the mainstream in Seijun Suzuki's Gate of Flesh (1964) through the ero-guro horrors of Yasuzo Masumura's Blind Beast (1968) all the way to Toshiharu Ikeda's glossy adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki's The Key (1997) -often cited as the first mainstream Japanese movie to sport a full-frontal view of its leading lady (Naomi Kawashima) apoi/. The majors did react to the increased demand for more sexually explicit adult fare during the late '60s and '70s. For example, at the beginning of the new decade, Toei introduced its own range of sexploitation pictures, retroactively referred to as Pinky Violence, while Shochiku distributed the works of a company named Tokatsu. Though such works essentially fall outside of the scope of this book, they shall be covered in passing to help contextualise developments within the pink industry.
The Japanese Sex Film: Art or Industry?
However, we shall be considering in some depth the influence of the company Nikkatsu and their Roman Porno line which the company initiated in 1971 .Though not technically pink, Roman Porno drew heavily upon the genre for inspiration, and throughout its 17-year run at box offices across Japan, it established something of a symbiotic relationship with the pink industry, circulating many of these independently-produced works as supporting pictures for the main feature, and poaching heavily from the pink film's pool of performing talent. Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses was perhaps the most infamous and widely-seen work by a Japanese director ever to blur the boundaries between art and pornography. As a French production that only initially screened in Japan in a heavily censored version, Oshima's film is another that can't be described as belonging to the pink genre, but it was co-produced on the Japanese side by one of the major players in the field, K6ji Wakamatsu, and also raises interesting points about the nature of censorship in Japan. As such, it will be discussed in a later chapter. And we can exclude from our definition the vast straight-to-video market, comprised of both erotic Vcinema productions shot on film but distributed exclusively for home viewing - typified by the two Weather Woman titles produced by Bandai Visual and directed byTomoaki Hosoyama in the mid-'90s (the first was later reissued theatrically, though not to pink cinemas) - and the prolific output of the Total Media Corporation (TMC), who have circulated a number of the kitschy girl wrestling jamborees of Takao Nakano, one of the few directors from this field to make any sort of overseas name for himself. Finally, there's the lucrative industry based on the production of hardcore pornography that has been around since the '80s, known as Adult Video (adaruto bideo) or by the more commonplace shorthand of AV.
Though many a pink director has dabbled in both areas for extra pocket money, they see their work in this medium as something completely distinct from the selfsustaining world in which they usually ply their trade. It is worth looking a little more closely at pink vis-avis AV. Adults Only cinemas are a rare sight in Western cities nowadays, but in Japan a ticket costing around ¥1800 (approximately $15) will gain the viewer access to a rolling program of three films that change on a weekly basis, each of which runs for about an hour. Prominent posters and hoardings displayed outside the theatres, featuring such tempting titles as Molester Train Married Woman Edition: Wife Is a Pervert, Family Gets Rude Chapter 1: Perverts' Fun and Beautiful Stewardess: Don't Get Your Uniform Dirty, herald the haven of earthy entertainments they harbour within. But compared with the levels of explicitness that Western viewers have become accustomed to in pornography, their content seems subdued, almost coy.
above: Backseat education: Akira Fukamachi's New Widow's Lodgings: Open Inside
and Out (1988). ©Shintoho
13
Behind the Pink Curtain
above: A scene f rom Rei Sakamoto's 21st Century Girl (2001) showing Rina Sasahara, with maebari clearly visible, beneath Y6ta Kawase. ©Kokuei/Shinto ho opposite bottom left: DVD cover art for a typical AV production, a different world enti rely.
For decades filmmakers have found themselves restrained by the relatively rigid censorship laws of the Commission for the Administration of the Motion Picture Code of Ethics, better known as Eirin.JO Until relatively recently, nary a strand of pubic hair was permitted to reach the eyes of the Japanese public, with the offending areas airbrushed from imported magazines (a practice prevalent in Britain in the '50s and '60s) 11 or buried beneath a myopic sea of fog (bokashi) in films and on video, regardless of the context in which they appear. This led to the employment of an ingenious triangular construction of skin-coloured adhesive tape known as the maebari (literally 'hanging in front') within the world of erotic film production. The situation eased off around the mid-'90s, though to the outsider the guidelines about exactly what can and cannot be shown may still seem as vague as ever. Of course, Eirin is not only on the lookout for sexual material. Scenes of extreme violence, drug abuse, or material which causes offence or disgrace to the nation also fall under its watchful gaze, and in preventing them from reaching the Japanese public, Eirin is abetted by other institutions; namely Customs, who have the 14
power to stop such material from making it into the country in the first place, and the police, whose role is to uphold public order and make sure no obscenity laws are broken. It should also be pointed out that though the Eirin seal of approval is necessary for general theatrical releases, there are venues that fall outside its remit where non-rated material can be screened, such as Image Forum (specialising in experimental films), and non-commercial exhibition spaces, public halls etc. (the use of such places is especially common in the world of documentary films). In 2005, producer Genjir6 Arato circumvented the censors by screening Tatsushi Omori's Whispering of the Gods - whose scen~s of sexual abuse within a remote Christian farming community were originally deemed too strong to make it through intact - in a purpose-built theatre on the compound of the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno (although the film was later submitted to and passed by Eirin to screen in more conventlonalvenuesJ In matters of sexuality, the issue is not pubic hair in itself, but what it signifies, which under Article 175 of the Japanese Criminal Code relating to the Public Hygiene Law (K6sh0 eisei-h6), is 'obscenity' (waisetsu). This
The Japanese Sex Film: Art or Industry?
essentially means no explicit depictions of genitalia, or sexual intercourse. It matters not what the activity happening in front of the camera actually is, but merely whether it is overtly shown to be happening. Because of this, it is perhaps misleading to distinguish pink films and AV as belonging respectively to the separate spheres of softcore and hardcore pornography. Essentially, softcore pornography is defined as depictions of simulated sex, while hardcore is the depiction of C!Uthentic sexual activity. The fuzzy area in this split, however, rests not so much on what is actually happening, but how it is presented. There is no doubt that unsimulated sex does occur in pink films, even if there doesn't seem any pressing need for it in terms of what goes up on screen: director Shinji lmaoka insisted on his actors actually 'doing it' for his 2004 production Lunch Box, even though most of the activity occurred off-frame or under blankets. Furthermore, the use of digital mosaics (mosaiku) occluding the action in AV means that, though authentic scenes of intercourse do take place (referred to in Japanese as honban -the 'real thing'), often in leering close-up, its depiction cannot truthfully be described as explicit. Though I shall characterise pink as softcore and AV as hardcore within these pages, the usage of the terms should be understood with this borne in mind. Ironically, what has been considered by many foreign commentators to be something of an idiosyncrasy in the country's censorship laws- namely that as long as this basic definition of waisetsu is adhered to, seemingly anything else goes- has played its own part in ensuring the continued survival of the pink film. Like similar products across the globe, the technical quality and production values of most AV films (though not all) remain low, with the content of the films often stripped down to their mere fundamentals of a girl and a camcorder. Sex is everything, as the camera plunges
unabashedly into the nooks and crannies of its subject matter. Though limited by similar constraints as its celluloid counterparts in what it can portray, these video releases fall under the eyes of a separate industry watchdog, the Nihon Ethics of Video Association, also known as NEVA or bide-rin. lf anything, bide-rin is a little stricter than Eirin. ln many instances in the videos of pink films released in the '80s and '90s for example, it is clear that the bokashi has been superimposed over the offending areas especially for the home viewing market. If the sheer prevalence of AV is anything to go by, most of its viewers don't seem unduly concerned that its graphic depictions of male and female genitalia remain obscured by the ubiquitous digital mosaic. What most AV films offer is unsimulated honban sex at its most raw, or nama, totally devoid of the window dressing of narrative, technical artistry and performance that has proven so important to the pink film. Rather than snuff out its cinematic antecedent entirely, as initially predicted, the arrival of AV has seen pink directors - most notably the generation represented by a quartet known as the Four Devils pushing the genre in entirely new directions as they channel their efforts into giving viewers something that neither hardcore video nor mainstream commercial cinema can provide. Clearly the pink film fulfils a rather different need from merely showing as much as possible. One of the most interesting aspects of pink films is that, while they can be broadly categorised under the catchall banner of 'sex films~ the sexual content itself is only a small part of many of these films' raison d'etre. Even though Eirin now allows full fronta l female nudity to be portrayed onscreen, few of the genre's practitioners working today opt to go down this road. (Rather hypocritically, though male sexual organs have yet to play any part in Japanese erotic films, Eirin has passed by their images un-blurred in foreign arthouse films such as Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers and Gaspar Nee's Irreversible, released locally as Alex (Arekksu) after the name of its central character.) Nevertheless, competition from AV and the increased working hours of the post-bubble economy has seen pink's theatrical venues robbed of many of its original patrons. Though production remains at a high level, the market is now a pale shadow of its heyday in the early '80s. Nowadays the five companies share a meagre dozen such outlets between them in Tokyo, though most of Japan's larger cities boast their own adult cinema. Retroactively charting a chronological history through so vast and nebulous a field as Japanese erotic cinema is an exercise fraught with difficulties. Even taking the time to survey a mere scattering of representative works is a Sisyphean task. Nikkatsu alone produced around 850 Roman Porno titles, and only a fraction of them are readily available on video. When it 15
Behind the Pink Curtain
above: Kaoru Akitsu in Family Gets Rude Chapter 2: Unequalled Limits. IOShintoho opposite: Blushing bride Reiko Ya maguchi gets intimate with her in-laws in Yutaka lkej ima's Family Gets Rude Chapter 2: Unequalled Limits (2004). ©Shintoho
comes to pink, you are considering in excess of five thousand films released in a period of more than forty years. Of these, one can use one's fingers to count those available in subtitled versions overseas, from companies such as Screen Edge and Salvation, but even in Japan the selection is not much better. There is a domestic market for the rental of pink films on video, but it is a small one. Video store owners who place these milder, more stylised, films in the discreet back section reserved for AV find few customers willing to rent them out a second time, after they've been left feeling distinctly short-changed by the misleadingly graphic images that often grace their covers. With so few modern releases making it to video, until recently - with the emergence of internet Video on Demand services such as those provided on the company's own websites, or those of third party distributors like DMM - the only real way to get a proper snapshot of the current state of industry was by watching the films in situ in the actual pink cinemas. As for the older films, companies such as Uplink Factory have made a number of the recognised 16
masterpieces of the genre (both pinku eiga and Roman Porno) available to the sell-through market as part of their Nippon Erotics series of DVD releases, some of which can be found tucked alongside works by other, more reputable, auteur directors on the shelves of rental chains such as Tsutaya.72 But aside from the films of K6ji Wakamatsu, the first two decades in which the pink film proliferated are particularly poorly served. All of this raises the question of how representative these available titles actually are. From day one, t he films were only issued in a limited number of prints that circulated theatres around the country until they wore out (tragically for scholars of Japanese fi lm, this seems to be the case of many productions from the past, and not only those made by the smaller independent studios, but the majors also). Put simply, the early eroductions were simply not made to be kept for posterity and viewed decades after their original runs. Often produced by small fly-by-night companies in operation for only a short number of years, many older titles can be considered forever lost, the negatives junked by their production companies long ago.
•
The Japanese Sex Film: Art or Industry?
There are probably, however, many films out there from this period still existing, uncatalogued or in the hands of private collectors. The recent Uplink releases of two of Mamoru Watanabe's works from 1970, Secret Hot Spring Town: Nightly Starfish and Women Hell Song: Shakuhachi Benten, were only made possible because their director, who originally produced the films through his own company, Kant6 Eihai, had kept his own personal 16mm prints of the films. No such luck for his 1965 debut Hussy, which like so many early works has been lost to the ravages of time. But all of this means that the reader should be wary of those reference books that purport to offer in-depth critiques of these maboroshi (phantom) films from the early days. All is not entirely lost. The company Shintoho provides an interesting case, because it keeps prints of all its films produced within the past 10-15 years on its office premises, reissuing them with different titles to meet the hungry demands of rapidly-changing theatre schedules. Due to a lack of storage space, the company routinely donates large batches of these older titles to the country's National Film Archive, though at the time of writing many have yet to be catalogued. In other cases, even though the existence of the originally
circulated prints can no longer be accounted for, the negatives do still exist, held in the laboratories where they were processed. However, the sheer cost involved in striking up new prints makes this option financially untenable, as ultimately the market for these films on DVD or internet download is just not big enough to justify the effort, and it would take the attentions of a cinephile with the means of Martin Scorsese and the tastes of Quentin Tarantino before any are ever likely to see the flickering light of a projector again. In other words, it's simply not going to happen. There is another factor that influences the availability of many of the titles produced in the '70s: namely their rather liberal use of popular music from the era. The Japanese Society for the Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) is extremely vigilant, and while films released within the underground ghetto of the pink theatrical network several decades ago might have slipped past its notice, it is doubtful whether a widescale re-release nowadays would. Even getting a snapshot of the pink scene over the past few years has presented obstacles. Of the films produced by the major pink companies that dominate the scene today, the ones that make their way out of 17
upon by outsiders as standard-bearers for the industry, even if within the pink film's own enclave their work is seen as something altogether different. The narrative that shall emerge over the course of these pages is therefore primarily dominated by the voices of those still alive or working in the business who I have been lucky enough to talk to and those whose work I've been able to see. I hope it will present a sufficiently full picture of the depth and breadth of the pink film world, as well as highlighting some of the complexities in attempting to draw too many conclusions about its nature. Travelling from the abrasive highly-politicised work of left-wing ultra-radicals during the tumult of the '60s, through the rougher, rawer misogynist fantasies of the Bubble Years of the '80s, into the period of increased reflexivity and soul-searching that marked the turn of the millennium, t here's plenty of interest to be discovered in the world behind the pink curtain. And even beyond the account given within these pages, no doubt there are further tales to be told. Footnotes For the curious, t he films described are Masao Adachi's High School Girl Guerrilla (1969), any one of Y6j ir6 Takita's Molester Train film s (from the mid-'80s), Hisayasu Sato's The Secret Garden (1 987), Daisuke Goto's A Cow at Daybreak (2003) and Mitsuru Meike's The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (2004).
2
See Richie's int roduction to Bock, Audie. Japanese Film Directors (New York: Kodansha, 1990 reprint): 9.
above: Outside Tokyo's Cine Roman lkebukuro. (picture by Jason Gray)
the pinku eiga theatre network are predom inantly owned by just one company: Kokuei. The only company that prepares subtitled prints for festival screenings and actively pursues foreign markets, Kokuei has been active in its attempts at courting a new wave of viewers who wouldn't be seen dead in such unsavoury places, through retrospectives and special screenings under toned-down, less salacious titles in Tokyo's plush arthouse theatres (venues such as Eurospace, the Athenee Fran~ais or the Higashi Nakano Pole-Pole cinema). Both Kokuei and its close brethren at Shintoho have been considerably more open and willing to share information than the other studios, and hence it is their work that shall dominate the pages of this book, just as it did in Kenjir6 Fujii's documentary expose, Pink Ribbon. Kokuei's role in shaping perceptions of what the pink genre is, not only overseas, but also for casual viewers within Japan, is significant, but as we shall see, its films are largely atypical of the genre. In fact, they are often highly unpopular with regular pink patrons and the theatre owners who book the films, especially those outside Tokyo. Nevertheless, it is the directors nurtured by this company- names such as Takahisa Zeze, Toshiki Sat6, Shinji lmaoka and Mitsuru Meike- who are looked 18
3
See Uplink's ho mepage fo r t he Pink Ribbon documentary: www.uplink.co.j p/pinkribbon/ bangai.html. 4 The organisation Unijapan gives st atistics on t he number of fi lms released in Japan, both on it s website and in its yearly catalogues, w hile details about the pink films released since 2000 are listed on t he PG website. The num ber of fi lms categorised as R-18 seijin eiga, most of w hich are pink fi lms, is also listed on t he homepage of the censorship board Eirin. In 2000 this as 11 1; in 2001, 103; in 2002, 97; in 2003, 94; in 2004, 82; and in 2005, 85. 1f t hese figures d iffer from th e num ber of t itles listed on the PG website, this is because Eirin's term starts in April and ends in March of each year.
5
The Filipino sex film is a subject which clearly requires a good deal more research. For now, the very best introduction to the subject is the chapter 'Shoe Queen of Blood Island' in Tombs, Pete. Mondo Macabro: Weird & Wonderful Cinema Around the World. (New York: St. Martin's Griffi n, 1998).
6
Some sources cite t he reading of Okura's fi rst name as Mit sugi.
1 Burch, Noel. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: University of California, 1979): 351 -54.
8
Yamane's numerous writings about cinema include books on Kinji Fukasaku and the jidai-geki actor Raizo Ichikawa, w hile Terawaki is the former General Director of Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkacho). 9 Cited in Hardy, Phil (ed.). The Aurum Encyclopedia of Horror (London: Aurum Press, reprint 1996): 165. Note that I have not been able to t race the original source of the quote, but it does not appear in Variety's original review of Onibaba. 10 The English pages of Eirin's website give t he awkward translation from t he Japanese ofthe 'Administ ration Commission of Motion Picture Code of Ethics'. 11 McGillivray, David. Doing Rude Things: The History of the British Sex Film 1957-1981. (London: Sun Tavern Fields, 1992). 12 Tsutaya's flagship branches in Shinjuku and Shibuya provide a perfect place for those w ho live in Tokyo to start exploring any aspect of Japanese cinema.
chapter two
Sex, Censorship and Other Positions of Power: New Ways of Looking he willingness to immerse oneself in a larger-thansimulacrum, where editing condenses moments in . time, and sensations are intensified through close ups, sound, colour and lighting -this is the essence of cinema's appeal. Cinema is also, as JeanLuc Godard once famously stated, "boys photographing girls'; a theme taken up by Laura Mulvey in her highly influential 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.13 The sex film hones these elements to perfection. The veneration of the female form might well have belonged to an older artistic tradition stretching back to the dawn of civilisation, but once the images started moving, issues as to what exactly was suitable for representation began to dominate 20th Century discourse. From day one, filmmakers in every movieprod ucing nation found themselves locked in a continuous battle with authoritarian censorship bodies so as to validate the content of their work. On 28 December, 1895, at the Grand Cafe in Paris, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, unveiled their Cinematograph machine, one of the first devices capable of projecting life-size images captured from reality onto a large screen where, unlike Edison's earlier peepshow device the Kinetoscope, they could be viewed by more than one person at a time.74 Not two years later, several films sold for distribution in Britain by a character named Philipp Wolff were barred from public exhibition. Quite how explicit they were we shall never know, as, like so much of the output of cinema's first two decades, nothing remains bar the titles. But these in themselves - The Temptation of St. Anthony, The Artist's Model, A Bride Unrobing and A French Lady's Bath- give a pretty good indication that even within these first few years exhibitors were not shy of drawing upon female nudity (or at least its promise) to bring in the crowds. Many of these early 'artistic' nudies were styled along the Neo-Classical traditions of late-Victorian high art, such as the paintings of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Frederic Leighton and Albert Moore, whose exotic classical settings and referencing of the sculpture and mythology of the Antiquity lent their works a certain respectable cachet.JS Moral outrage greeted the arrival in Britain of the new unknown medium of cinema and its 'obscene pictures', initially - at the end of the nineteenth century - via the hand-cranked Mutoscope or the 'What the Butler Saw' machines in travelling fairgrounds, amusement arcades and pleasure pier
Tlife
funfairs. Before the establishment of permanent cinemas, when these sideshow attractions represented the primary outlets for films, exhibition licences were needed for neither projected pictures nor penny-in-the-slot peepshows. Soon enough, the deafening clamour of the chattering classes and the clergy forced the government to react by bringing in the Cinematograph Act of 1909.76 Ostensibly this was for safety reasons: early film stock was very volatile and projection equipment had an unpredictable habit of bursting into flame, in several prominent cases taking theatrical venues with it. The British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) began its activities in earnest later in 1913, with its two central edicts being no nudity and no depictions of Christ.77 At any rate, there must have been something about the celebrated British reserve that kept these 'smoking-room subjects' from dominating the early market, as very few were ever produced in the country, and if they were, the police turned a blind eye, because they would only ever have been exhibited privately, behind closed doors. The French were considerably more liberal about what passed as permissible topics, with titles such as Eastern Slave Market and Borgia Amuses Herself listed among scores of others in the 1905 Pathe catalogue. Across the world, nudity was swiftly shorn from mainstream productions in order to maximise potential for international distribution between territories whose laws and mores differed widely. Giuseppe de Liguoro's 1911 adaptation of Dante's L'inferno, the first Italian feature film and the most expensive ever produced at the time, was either shown cut, or banned outright in several countries, due to its classically-i nspired displays of male nakedness. Hedy Lamarr's famous bathing scene in the 1933 Czech film Ecstasy was pruned for its UK release, while a silent retelling of the life of Casanova from 1927, directed by Alexandre Volkoff, was banned entirely by the BBFC due to its boudoir scenes. Soon the arrival of the talkies made snipping the offending moments problematic, due to the new problem of needing to re-synchronise the soundtrack. However, with the introduction of the Hays Code by the industry-sponsored Motion Picture Producers Association, American cinema, which soon came to prevail throughout cinemas across much of the globe and especially in English language speaking countries, became ever more morally unimpeachable as the decades progressed. Nevertheless, one has only to 19
Behind the Pink Curtain
look to some of the titles produced by the Ufa studios in Germany to see that some countries were more tolerant than others: bare breasts were clearly visible in the erotic nightclub dance sequence in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), while the various callisthenic and athletic sequences ofthe Kulturfilm documentary Ways to Health and Beauty (1925) celebrated the body beautiful in all its naked splendour (this film was actually released in Japan around this time, though with all the nudity cut out). After several decades the nudist camp genre, initiated by the US-produced Garden of Eden (1954), reintroduced bare bodies to conventional cinema screens in Britain and America and inspired further titles like Nudist Paradise (1958), Naked As Nature Intended (1961), My Bare Lady (1962), World Without Shame (1962) and Eves on Skis (1963), all of which similarly sported athletic but markedly asexual images of naked bodies in motion. Unlike the original German film, however, they made creative use of props such as beach balls and picnic baskets to ensure that the genital areas remained strictly obscured; a quaint mannerism that would find itself replicated in Japanese erotic films. Though the decades running up to the nudie revolution of the '50s had ostensibly seen female flesh banished from Western screens, significantly this was only white flesh. (As we shall see in the next chapter,
20
above: Traditional notions of beauty, as emblemized by one of Japan's first female stars of the silver screen, Haruko Sawamura.
such double standards were hardly unique to Britain or America.) The makers of travelogues and ethnological studies were not quite so reticent when it came to depicting topless tribal women, and one can't discount the fact that many viewers must have been drawn to these images by more basic instincts, even if it can be argued that the filmmakers possessed only the noblest of intentions. In any case, many clearly did not. To name but one example, the native bearers clad in nothing but loincloths who accompany the two explorers searching for the abandoned city of Ankhor Wat in a re-constructed documentary account of a 1912 expedition through Cambodia, released in 1935 as Forbidden Adventure by US exploitation pioneer Dwain Esper, were allegedly recruited from a Los Angeles whorehouse, and were clearly of African, rather than Asian descent (this nudity was passed uncut by the BBFC upon the film's UK release as Beyond Shanghai, even though the film was substantially re-edited in many other ways, including the incorporation of a new narration track in the Queen's English). Scenes of beautiful Polynesian girls performing sinuous, shimmying dances in native dress (or rather, undress) provided one of the many attractions of Friedrich W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty's Tahitian-set drama Tabu, a generously-budgeted US production that enjoyed a significant amount of attention from press and public alike when it was released in 1931 . Evidently few at the time considered that such scenes of local colour might have had a more titillatory motive. After all, "Miscegenation, sexrelationship[s] between the black and white races" was a possibility denied by the Hays Office.1B On the other side of the world, things had taken a rather different course. Given its reputation for sex and violence nowadays, it might come as a surprise to learn that prior to the 1950s, Japanese cinema was notably chaste. In fact, women didn't appear onscreen at all for the first two decades, a convention carried on from the traditional theatrical forms of Kabuki and Noh, of which straightforward adaptations formed the raw material for much of Japan's early cinema; women's roles were instead taken by specialised male actors known as oyama (the same Japanese characters, meaning literally 'woman style: can also be read to give their alternative name, onnagata) in makeup and costume. The early movie market in Japan was surprisingly cosmopolitan. During the 191 Os many of the films released were imported titles from Europe and, following the establishment of Universal's office in Tokyo in 1916, also America. In this environment, early moral guardians, as in the West, seemed to have been mainly preoccupied with the pernicious effect these flickering pictures might have on impressionable children. 79 Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset's Zigomar, a French serial whose instalments were released in
Sex, Censorship and Other Positions of Power: New Ways of Looking
France between 191 1-13, provided one particular early cause for concern. 20 Meanwhile, within the country fiercer critics were at work on its cinema's more conservative adherence to prior theatrical standards. Film magazines at the time came laden with decorous images of Western starlets, who clearly provided a major draw for foreign films over local ones. But where were the local equivalents of Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish or Pearl White? The industry final ly reacted by replacing the .oyama with authentic members of the fairer sex, including: Haruko Sawamura, whose appearance in Minoru Murata's Souls on the Road, released 8 April, 1921, was but one of the film's many innovations; Yaeko Mizutani, who graced Nikkatsu's Winter Camellia (directed by Ry6ha Hatanaka and released 24 April, 1921 ); and Sumiko Kurishima, who starred in two films by Henry Kotani released by Shochiku a week apart from one another, with The Poppy coming out on 29 April, 1921 and An Electrician and His Wife on 6 May.27 The latter was apparently banned almost immediately for being "too sexy';22 though with the film long since lost it is difficult to say for sure exactly what the censors took umbrage at. By any measure, these early female stars of the silver screen had a limited shelf life, as their cherished traditional and virginal demeanour soon found itself losing ground to the more threatening Westerninspired figure of the m6ga ('modern girl') as the decade progressed. Exchanging her kimono for a flapper dress, the m6ga modelled herself on American silent screen stars such as Mary Pickford and Clara Bow. She was accompanied by her male counterpart, the m6bo ('modern boy'), who donned fedoras and spivvish tailor-made suits and skulked around any one of the plethora of jazz bars and Parisian-style cafes that had sprouted up seeming ly overnight in Tokyo's chichi Ginza district. Japanese cinema began to increasingly reflect this new Modern Age. For example, in the shomin-geki works (films based on the lives of the lower-middle classes) filmed at Shochiku's Kamata studios during the '20s and '30s, filmmakers such as Yasujir6 Ozu, Hiroshi Shimizu and Heinosuke Gosho looked heavily to Hollywood for inspiration, not only borrowing their films' plots23 but also appropriating Western fashions and music and disseminating images of what 'modern life' should resemble to a new rising class of urban white-collar audiences. Through cinema, newfangled foreign customs were adopted and katakana-ised foreign loan words began to infiltrate the common parlance, their usage considered chic and worldly-wise. By the end of the '30s the Western influence had reached critical mass. On 7 July, 1937, Japanese and Chinese forces clashed in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, escalating a conflict with China that had already been in effect since 1932 and placing Japan in a directly antagonistic situation with those Western powers that had vested interests in
above: 1920s actress Sakuko Yanagi modelling the classic mOga look, a more overtly Western form of g lamour inspired by Ho llywood starlets of t he era.
Asia; namely Britain, America and Holland. The Film Law (eiga-h6) went into effect on 1 October, 1939, bringing the industry closer under state control by restricting the number of foreign films screened, enforcing the showing of newsreel films Uiji eiga or 'current events films') and 'culture fi lm' documentaries (bunka eiga, inspired by the German Kulturfilm ) intended to "contribute to the nourishment of the national spirit and national intelligence'; and compelling the pre-censorship of all feature film scenarios to be produced within the country.24 In 1940, the regulations became even tighter:"slice-of-life films, films describing individual happiness, films treating the lives of the rich, scenes of women smoking, drinking in cafes, etc., the use of foreign words, and films dealing with sexual frivolity are all prohibited."25 Men and women had also been 21
Behind the Pink Curtain
forbidden from sharing the same seating areas in cinemas for some years before the Film Law was passed. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December, 1941, foreign influences were forcibly ejected not only from the screen but also from almost every aspect of Japanese life until the end of the war (although films produced by the Axis and neutral countries were still permitted). Alien concepts such as equality (either sexual or civil) and individualism, as well as any further kind of introspection, were banished in favour of a canonisation of feudal and aesthetic traditions, celebrations of both recent and historical military successes, and righteous justifications of Japan's stated goal of the liberation of Asia from its colonial oppressors. Japan's defeat saw the country occupied for a seven-year period by the Allied forces. In reality the guiding hand of occupational policy was American, in the form of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), General Douglas MacArthur. Aside from rewriting the country's constitution to include the famous Article 9, "the renunciation of war and all instruments thereof'; with the stated ambition of turning Japan into "the Switzerland of Asia'?6 the occupation government's Civi l Information and Education Service (CIE) instigated a system of preproduction censorship for all scripts and potential projects. As well as making sure that no Japanese film ever alluded to the occupier's presence (you'll seldom see American tanks or Gls in Japanese films made between 1946-52), the subjects banned were the ones promoted during the wartime regime; encouraged were the same threeS's of'Sex, Screens and Sport' that conservative nationalists had railed against in the '30s. Ironically, the producers or directors of films championing Western-style democracy during the occupation period were often the very same people who had glorified Japan's military expansion into Asia. On the other hand, with communism representing a new emerging threat to the American way of life, the occupation authorities also waged an internal war to purge all left-leaning figures from the Japanese industry; the very people who had originally opposed the nationalistic wartime government. 'Democratic' activities such as baseball were encouraged in films, and significantly so too were demonstrations of gender equality through more open displays of affection between the sexes. The first hurdle was the screen kiss. Kissing scenes had found themselves cut from imported foreign movies even before the war, "condemned as a symbol of Western decadence." It was not a Japanese custom, the argument went, and the kind of activity that was best conducted behind closed doors, if at all.27 On 23 May, 1946, Daiei Studios released Yasuki Chiba's A Certain Night's Kiss, which bashfully shielded the pleasures promised by its title behind a raised umbrella. Had it 22
not, it would have been the first onscreen kiss ever witnessed in a Japanese film. Instead, that distinction went to a film released on exactly the same day, Yasushi Sasaki's Twenty-Year-Old Youth . According to the director, the kissing scene was included at the insistence of the CIE's David Conde, with the rationalisation that, "Japanese tend to do things sneakily. They should do things openly." The national press was in uproar, as Donald Richie writes: "Was the kiss 'merely commercial' or was it 'artistically motivated'? Was it 'hygienic'? Did it have 'a sexual motive'? And, was it 'Japanese or not'?"2B The films found themselves labelled 'kiss films' (kisu eiga), and it was not until Keisuke Kinoshita's Phoenix was released the following year that critics finally saw an onscreen smooch which was motivated by the plot rather than included as a talking point in itself. After the initial furore had subsided, the kiss became a normalised affair in Japanese film, if not quite as commonplace as in Western cinema. It would be some years, however, before clothes were shed and bare flesh was aired in a mainstream picture. Meanwhile, censorship over Japanese cinema soon passed from American hands to Eirin. Established in 1949 and comprised of figures from within the industry, the new body nonetheless modelled its regulations on the American Motion Picture Production Code. Nudity and sex were still a no-no as far as fictional films went, but sexual subject matter was allowed to be broached in the scientific and educational documentaries that were referred to under a variety of names, including seikyoiku eiga ('sex education films'), osan eiga ('birth films' ),junketsu eiga ('purity or chastity films') and basukon eiga ('birth-control films'). The majority of the early examples of this genre were imported from Germany from the 1920s onwards and were intended solely for the medical community, though in time they came to be made domestically as well.29 Such films were originally permitted under the proviso that they were not shown in cinemas but in medical or scientific institutions, though there were cases when they were surreptitiously snuck out of this specialist circuit. Even in the early days, some of these were undoubtedly more sensationalist in their content and less noble in their aims. In the '50s there was some concern when a number of basukon titles, including The True Nature of Beauty, with its provocative marital condom scene, and Abortion or Contraception, slipped through the net to play outside of their intended venues, including some alluringly advertised screenings in conventional cinemas, where they drew curious audiences in their droves. Roland Domenig writes that,"ln 1952 a cinema in Shibuya, for instance, presented a 'Sex education film festival' (seikyoiku eiga taikai). For an entrance fee of 100 yen the audience could watch four films:Sei no Honno (Sex Instinct), Hana aru Dokuso (Poisonous Plant in Bloom), Ratai (Naked
Body) and Sanji Seigen no Chishiki (Knowledge About Birth Contron. The last one was clearly a basukon eiga that was made in the late 1940s for educational purposes and approved by the CIE, the occupation authority in charge of film regulation. Curiously it was this film which got the cinema owner into trouble. The police confiscated the film because parts of it were considered obscene and thus in violation of Article 175. What had been permitted during the occupation was not necessarily allowed after Japan regained its independence."30 The frankness of sexual expression encouraged by the occupation was not limited to cinema; the period also saw the emergence of cheap print publications known as kasutori zasshi, literally meaning 'dregs magazines: named after an illicit alcoholic brew made from the sediment at the bottom of sake bottles. Titles such as Ryoki ('Bizarre')37 and the more grotesque SM bible Kitan Club proliferated from 1946 onwards, their salacious content not only limited to the kissing films, but also real life crimes, tabloid-style exposes of public figures, and a prurient interest in sex in general. Very few of these publications lasted for more than a couple of issues. In the meantime, the first public striptease show in Japan was staged in November 1947, produced by the Toho Theatrical Company, though its subjects remained immobile behind a large frame, striking artistic semi-nude tableaux poses that sought to emulate traditional Western and Japanese paintings. These shows were similar to those that were permitted at the time in London's first venue of this type, the Windmill Theatre.32 Also permitted was the import of one- or two-reel striptease films from America and Europe. In the one title of this kind I've been able to see, a statuesque troupe of corn-fed American girls, known as the Kimberley Diamonds, take their turns individually to bear their breasts beneath the proscenium, with the banal patter of the compere unnecessarily subtitled in Japanese. Such exotic displays presumably instructed the first generation of Japanese girls in the art of the striptease, and consequently forged the precedent for the emergence of the pink film's precursor, the sh6 eiga (show film). The sho eiga, simple one-reel strip shows staged against exotic backdrops, began to emerge around 1957. Their titles were as unambiguous as their contents: Naked Angel, Strip Tokyo, The Princess Who Got Naked. This field provided the initial momentum for the company Kokuei as it set off on its early sexploitation path in 1958, and Fuji Eiga - a company strongly associated with Mitsugu Okura, the president of the original Shintoho company during the same period - also made them. A large number appear to have been produced for the major studios too, with Shochiku and Toei screening them in their theatre chains.33 23
Behind the Pink Curtain
The DVD release of The Notorious Concubines on the Something Weird label, taken from the catalogue of US exploitation maverick Harry Novak, features two such intriguing cheesecake floorshows among the extras. Produced in Japan on evidently fairly grandiose resources, Sherbet Nude and Red Lights of Tokyo are not only unavailable for viewing in Japan, but also seem to be completely undocumented. No director credits are listed on the prints, and the Japanese Movie Database lists nothing other than the title of Red Lights ofTokyo, a release date of January 1963 and the name of its production company, Koan Pro. Red Lights of Tokyo unfolds as a short string of vignettes shot in full colour on a series of minimally dressed sets bathed in pastel shades of pink and yellow. In the first, a solitary woman rises and does a quick tour around her sofa while shedding her skimpy negligee, before she lies down to relax again.This is followed by a sequence involving a trio of wriggling exotic-plumed dancers in leopard skins banging bongo drums, their breasts clearly visible beneath their colourful feathered halters. Next up is another sensuous bed scene in the same style as the first, and an oriental-flavoured skit in the vein of the Gilbert and Sullivan musical The Mikado, featuring two girls in traditional costume vying for the affections of an ambivalent male by unravel ling layer upon layer of kimono. Sherbet Nude adopts a slightly more sophisticated tack than the one-scene-one-shot approach of the previous title, and even sports a basic narrative and a primitive animation sequence as it follows a group of girls from the moment they rise from their beds through their early morning showers and the daily grind of their office work, then back to the bedroom again by way of a feverish dream of a goldpainted couple in ornate headgear performing an erotic dance. The thing that strikes one immediately about both titles, when taking into account the contents of early pink films made around the same time, is how Western they seem in terms of the sets and costumes, the aura of self-confident sensuality exuded by its wellrounded artistes and the sultry jazzy sax score that plays in the background. With nothing else from this undocumented vein readily available for viewing, one has to wonder how typical of the sho eiga they are. Of course, what has been discussed so far is the official side of film history. But as censors across the world debated what should be allowed onscreen and what should be judged obscene, beneath the surface a widespread pornographic underground had long proliferated. These hardcore stag films, one-reelers shot without sound on 8mm or 16mm film stock, featuring graphic, unsimulated sexual acts, devoid of cast and crew credits and with the bare minimum of artistic pretension, had been around virtually everywhere since almost day one, with the title Le voyeur allegedly representing something of a cinematic first in 190?.34 A number from the first few decades of French cinema 24
Sex, Censorship and Other Positions of Power: New Ways of Looking
were strung together by Michel Reilhac and released theatrica lly in 2002 under the title The Good Old Naughty Days, demonstrating just how quickly these fil ms were overwhelmed by an explicitness that still has the power to cause even the most liberal-minded modern viewers to sit bolt upright. Stag fi lms were not exhibited in regular cinemas, but in private clubs where they were not subject to the usual censorship requirements, and often in the waiting rooms of legalised brothels, where they were aimed at fanning the flames of ardour of waiting clients. These stag films were originally known as waieiga ('obscene films; also referred to as Y-eiga) in Japan, th ough the term buru fuirumu, a transliteration of the Western term 'blue film; came into use in the '50s and '60s. Their distribution was predominantly controlled by t he yakuza, who would accost young men in hot spring resort towns or inner city areas and coax them into tiny four-and-a-half-mat apartments35 where their punters would sit cross-legged on the floor watching explicit scenes of non-faked sexual activity. The possession of such fi lms is stil l strictly il legal in Japan, though one writer, Takuya Hasegawa (hiding behind the penname Miki Mikio), has written about their hidden history in the book Buru fuirumu monogatari - himerareta eiga-shi 75nen ('Blue Film Story: 75-year History of Films Kept Secret'). A series of five videos was also released in Japan, though with all the graphic images masked out by the standard mosaics. There were a number of different groups at work in Japan producing these films from as early as the 1920s, though naturally the survival rate of their resulting output is low. Apparently, connoisseurs can pinpoint with some degree of accuracy which group made which film through such telltale signs as the locations, performers, and the limited range of stylistic flourishes manifest within their running time, which was seldom more than the standard one-reel, or 15-minute mark. Some were shot in colour, but most were black and white, and the repertoire of straight sex, bestiality, fel latio, cunnilingus, etc. seems no narrower or wider than that of similar foreign productions, which were also illegally imported into Japan from America, China and Europe. Video effectively brought an end to the blue film, replacing it with the similarly un-obscured displays of sexual activity of the illegal under-thecounter ura-bideo. The various levels of legality of all of these works across the globe, the poor conditions of surviving prints and their invisible mode of production and distribution saw the stag fi lm effectively hidden from general public view, and for a long period both unrecognised and unregistered by writers and historians. In one of the most important academic studies of hardcore pornography, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the "Frenzy of the Visible", Linda Williams devotes several pages to detailing a number of non-Japanese works viewed from the collection of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex,
Gender and Reproduction in America. In her study, she draws attention to the difficulties in defining the exact nature of pornography, pointing to the word's etymological roots in the Greek graphos, meaning writing or description, and pornei, meaning prostitutes.36 By extension of its literal roots of'writing about prostitutes; we can detect screen pornography's preoccupation with graphic depictions of sexual acts, the rendering of the private public, the invisible visible, and all with the exclusive intention of sexually arousing its consumers. But popular interpretations of the word and its nuances have been more coloured by context than content. The tide may be turning, but traditionally the pornography of 'porno movies: 'porno theatres' and 'porno magazines' comes tinged with a dark and pejorative hue in the English language, rather than with liberating, celebratory connotations, especially during the 70s and '80s when its high-watermark rise in high street visibility and infiltration into households via the new technology of the videocassette saw its producers increasingly pitched at loggerheads with feminist and conservative movements eager to suppress it. From day one, pornography has been charged by its critics with the power to corrupt and deprave its viewers, debase its subjects and incite men into violent acts against women, and those in positions of authority have done their utmost to either restrict its availability or suppress it entirely. Definitions of what the pornographic actually is have historically been coloured by this 'us and them' dichotomy, and so it has been alternatively defined as, "whatever representations a particular dominant class or group does not want in the hands of another less dominant class or group':37 The term poruno has filtered through into the Japanese vocabulary, beginning most notably with Toei's Porno Line (Poruno rosen) in 1968, which featured films from the directors Teruo Ishii and Norifumi Suzuki (in fact, Ishii is sometimes credited with introducing the word to Japan), and a few years later with the films produced by Nikkatsu, which the studio branded as Roman Porno. The word also made its way into titles such as Porno Emperor (1971 ), Porno Pilgrimage (1972), Blond Porno Madness (1972) and Cruel Porno: Showa Era Bizarre Crime Record (1972). But as a foreign loan word it essentially signals little more than the promise of scenes of sexual activity. It comes as much divorced from its associated English meanings as its original Greek derivation. If used, it is as a simple label rather than as a stigma. Japanese sex filmmakers have clashed with the censors on a number of occasions, but the industry as a whole has generally not been viewed by society in the same confrontationa l, semi-legal and threatening light as it has in the West. It is seen more as an accepted facet of modern life. But even if the pink or Roman Porno movie doesn't satisfy the graphic expectations raised by Western 25
Behind the Pink Curtain
hardcore, pornography is as pornography does. As mentioned in chapter 1,Japanese law bars the'obscene' depictions of genitalia from the screen, so by most definitions Japanese erotic films can't really be described as anything other than softcore, but their primary intentions are ultimately the same. In analysing how these films go about achieving their aims of provoking a physical response in their viewers, Williams's analysis of the fundamentals of hardcore pornography still provides a useful framework through which to look at the subject. The distinction between 'Art' and 'Pornography' became a particularly hot topic during the 20th Century, because of the increased fidelity and more immediate relations between the creator and his subject matter that characterise cinema, not to mention the medium's traditionally lowly status as a populist form of entertainment. But many originally saw the detached real-time visual record of live subjects that the camera afforded as of being of more use to the scientific community in the years running up to the mass commercial application of this new technology. A crucial figure in cinema's prehistory is Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), whose pioneering studies in motion were initiated when he was hired by Leland Stanford, a wealthy supporter of popular science and the former governor of California, to help him settle a bet with a friend that at certain points in time all four hooves of a trotting horse leave the ground. Against a plain background, Muybridge set up a row of cameras with shutter speeds of around 1/1000 second, which were triggered individually by the horse passing through a series of tripwires. With this apparatus he produced a sequence of still photographs that showed the animal in various stages of movement. By the time the strip of photos was published on the cover of Scientific American in 1877, Leland had proved his point. Where the human eye had failed, the objective eye of the camera had succeeded in settling a question that had vexed man since time immemorial. Muybridge later put his technique to commercial use, developing the circular zoopraxiscope (or zoogyroscope) to animate these short sequences of moving figures, and creating bands of photos to be sold for use within it. His experiments were of great interest to an artistic community increasingly concerned with correct anatomical representations of animals and human figures frozen in various stages of motion, and in 1887 Muybridge published the eleven-volume Animal Locomotion. Its scientific motivation justified the objective depiction of fully naked human figures, but as Williams notes, its apparent objectivity did not stretch to the women's bodies. While the men run, walk, throw, catch and carry with the minimum of props, in keeping with the aesthetic fashions of the era of Alma-Tadema and his ilk, the women are portrayed draped in semitransparent robes against a number of backdrops 26
(notably beds) and holding cigarettes and fruit baskets, "in traditionally feminine movements of twirling and self-touching."38 In one instance, a naked woman pours water from an amphora into another's mouth. Each woman appears as if in reverie, wistful, inscrutable, a source of mystery and fascination, and as Williams puts it, "embedded in a mise-en-scene that places her in a more specific imaginary place and time."39 Though these short sequences of photographs cannot be said to possess a narrative in themselves (i.e. a beginning, a middle and an end), it's clear that from the very start that women's bodies were being subjected to a notably different gaze. Similar to the way in which Muybridge's experiments revealed what had hitherto been beyond normal human perceptual abilities was the early sequence of images produced at Thomas Edison's laboratories entitled Fred Ott's Sneeze (1894). At a mere 81 frames in length, the film was judged too short to be released commercially for viewing in Edison's yet-to-be-released Kinematoscope peepshow device. The full contents of this "entire record of a sneeze from the first taking of a pinch of snuff to the recovery" were instead published as a series of sequential still photographs in the magazine Harper's Weekly on 24 March, 1894 at the behest of journalist Barnet Phillips, accompanied by an article entitled 'Record of a Sneeze:4o Phillips broke down the various stages of the sneeze into the ten discrete units of 'priming: 'the nascent sensation: 'the first distortion: 'expectancy: 'pre-meditation: 'preparation: 'beatitude: 'oblivion: 'explosion' and 'recovery: Though its subject Fred Ott was a middle-aged man, according to Williams, in an early correspondence with Edison, Barnet had originally a requested, "some nice looking young person'; later elaborating that this should preferably be a woman.47 The spectacle of physical reflex actions captured and controlled on film initiated by Fred Ott's Sneeze is an example of what Williams terms "the frenzy of the visible'; and would prove an early antecedent for more sexually explicit portrayals of involuntary bodily spasms such as the celebratory 'money shot: so often screened in delirious slow motion in hardcore's heyday, as if to savour every split second of the sexual climax. Curiously, in 1895, the very same year that cinema as we know it was unveiled, the X-ray, another discovery that shed light on the limits of human visual capabilities, was discovered by Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen. Though the X-ray camera was to become a device of primarily medical application, in its early days its novelty value also lent it its own distinct popular appeal. One of Rontgen's first demonstrations of the X-ray's power was a photographic plate of his wife Berthe's left hand. But more than just a portrait of the structure of the bones beneath the human skin, the two-dimensional silhouette of the hand's skeletal structure was pinpointed as belonging to a woman through the
Sex, Censorship and Other Positions of Power: New Ways of Looking
opaque mass fused to Berthe's index finger representing her wedding band.42 The image of Berthe's hand put such photographs in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century, and "the female hand Xray became a fetish object par excellence': simultaneously drawing attention to the subject's gender and revealing for the first time the invisible secrets beneath a woman's skin. Though this roundabout digression might all sound a little. clinical, the point being made is that these early antecedents forged the trajectory along which cinematic pornography would evolve: the fetishization of the female figure (either by an exaggeration of the physical differences provided by nature, or by means of external paraphernalia such as high heels, red lips and fishnets), the spectacle of bodies wracked involuntarily in throes of pleasure or pain to provoke a consequent spontaneous response in its viewers, and the attempt to delve beneath the surface of the subject and probe her hidden mysteries. Even when completely unhampered by censorship, hardcore has its own problems in visually depicting the involuntary reflex action of the female orgasm due to the very hidden nature of the feminine pudenda. Filmmakers can only attempt to form a connection with their assumed male viewers by making them feel complicit in the woman's delirious moans and groans through identification with the porn actors, by way of over-the-shoulder viewpoints, inquisitive close-ups of penetration and climactic male cum shots. But while the male actor's faces remain controlled, blank and inexpressive, the woman's face is really the only place for the camera to linger in order to register her sexual satiation in the absence of any further physical evidence. The constraints of screen censorship in Japan have kept the defining traits of hardcore pornography- that is the explicit genital depictions of penises (erect or otherwise), penetration scenes and labial 'pink' shots barred from the pink film. Filmmakers have therefore been able to develop their own form of cinematic shorthand to elaborate more succinctly the genre's basic tenets. A typical example is provided by a 1983 Roman Porno film directed by Masaru Konuma entitled Rope and Breasts. In one sequence, a naked girl has an enema inserted into an orifice (which one exactly is left unclear) and made to squat in a large glass bowl filled with water in front of a crowd of male onlookers. She quivers for several moments as she is forced to hold it in, before violently releasing the viscous fluid into the waters, as her spectators stare on mesmerised in a mixture of curiosity and awe, like kids at a birthday party watching a clown conjuring up balloon animals. Though perverse, this scene is not particularly explicit, though it still gels with many of Williams's observations:"The animating male fantasy [of hardcore cinema] might therefore be described as the
above: Proto-feminism in Roman Porno: two scenes from Tatsumi Kumashiro's
Sayuri lchij6: Wet Lust (1972). The real-life stripper's protegee Harumi demonstrates the 'open stage' technique (top). Behind the scenes Sayuri and Harumi (Hiroko lsayama) compare battle scars (bottom). QNikkatsu Corporation
(impossible) attempt to capture visually this frenzy of the visible in a female body whose orgasmic excitement can never be objectively measured. It is not surprisingly, then, that so much [early hardcore] fantasy revolves around situations in which the woman's sexual pleasure is elicited involuntarily, often against her will, in scenarios of rape or ravishment. In these scenarios the unwilling victim's eventual manifestations of pleasure are offered as the genre's proof of a sincerity that under other conditions might seem less sure."43 It is interesting to compare Konuma's films, many of which focus on bondage and violently sadomasochistic scenarios, with those of Tatsumi Kumashiro, who is considered to be one of t he most accomplished of the directors to work at Nikkatsu during the '70s. Kumashiro's 1972 film Sayuri lchij6: Wet Lust featu res the famous striptease artist lchijo playing under her own name, and marked one of the director's many looks at the imagined behind-the-scenes lives of workers in the sex industry (which also includes another fictionalised biopic of a celebrity stripper, Madoka Mika: The Woman Who Wets Her Finger, 1984). lchijo earned herself a 27
Behind the Pink Curtain
certain notoriety in 1970 when she pioneered the'open stage' or tokudashi (literally 'special appearance') style of striptease, handing out magnifying glasses to leering audiences for the piece de resistance to her act, the 'genital inspection'. Such lack of prudence saw her charged with public obscenity and jailed for a short period that year. The film makes much of her elaborate on-stage performances. In one sequence she elegantly unravels her kimono layer by layer using a samurai sword. In another she drips hot wax on her body (followed by a back stage dialogue scene as she applies slices of lemon to soothe the singes on her bare torso). Unsurprisingly enough, however, screen censorship precluded the kind of unobscured views her original audiences might once have enjoyed. How then to visualise that which can't be shown? The solution lies in one memorably messy image of Sayuri's ambitious younger rival Harumi (Hiroko lsayama) ejaculating milksodden lumps of tissue paper from her vagina over the face of an enraptured spectator in the front row. Again, the shot manifests Williams's "frenzy of the visible'; but in this case Harumi is clearly in control over her own bodily contractions. Images of perversion such as these are rife within the pink and Roman Porno movie, manifesting covertly that which the hardcore film is permitted to show overtly, to stay just that one step within censorship boundaries. Noses wedge themselves between gyrating buttocks; breasts are kneaded mercilessly like lumps of dough; tongues loll around mouths uncontrollably; moistened fingers dart feverishly over skimpy panties, the dark thatch a tantalising shadow beneath the semi-translucent white cotton as they explore the pubic contours; while naked flesh bulges between elaborate filigrees of rope. To some, such clearly-drawn limits are seen as offering their own freedom. As Jack Hunter puts it in his intra to Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood and Madness in Japanese Cinema,"For many European directors the alltoo-easy descent into hardcore pornography inevitably goes hand in hand with the negation of vision and creativity, as the depiction of close-up penetration becomes the sole function of their art. Extreme underground Japanese filmmakers, denied this option, have had to double back upon their own imaginative resources to emulate both the hypnotic impact and total flesh experience that hardcore offers."44 Others have not been so generous. In his essay The Japanese Eroduction, written in 1972, Donald Richie describes his subject matter as, "the limpest of softcore, and though there is much breast and buttock display, though there are simulations of intercourse, none of the working parts are ever shown."45 For Richie the question is, "how to stimulate when the means are missing." His conclusions are that as erotica, the pink film ultimately fails. Which of the writers one agrees with is up to the individual, but it is worth 28
remembering that over 25 years separates the publication of these two opposing standpoints, and the pink film had undergone a vast amount of changes in the interim period. To Richie's and Hunter's comments, I'd like to add another, slightly less polemical, appraisal that I think goes a little further in describing the fundamental difference in approach between Japanese and Western pornography. In an essay on Hisayasu Sate's The Bedroom (1 992}, Pia D. Harritz writes,''lt is a common fact that the pink movies are, generally speaking, more intellectual, sinister and sadomasochistic in their display of and exploration of the female body.The female body is not so 'willing' and 'open' as in so many of the western adult movies (the 'Pornotopian' type) where it is always 'bedroom-time' and where the woman is almost always a 'lusty/busty' and playful blonde. In pink movies it is generally a more repressed, raped, violated, and mutilated female body that is being displayed."46 The question that is sure to arise in the minds of many viewers encountering such films for the first time is, to what extent can we really attribute some of the distinctly odd sexual practices that occur within them to circumventing the censors, and what role do cultural differences play in nurturing the multitudinous scenes of voyeurism, bondage and humiliation? One would be opening a can of worms trying to justify many of the pink film's excesses from any sort of feminist perspective. The lines in the sand between pleasure and pain, and consent and refusal are difficult to gauge, with the oft-repeated cries of yada! ('I don't like it!'), hanashite! ('let me go!'), or yamete! ('stop!') from the actresses often staged to have a touch of the 'meth inks the lady doth protest too much' about them. These films are, after all, made with the intention of pandering to the desires of their male audiences. Justifying such representations with recourse to 'cultural differences' and simplistic East-West dichotomies is a very sticky exercise. The overworked salaryman seeking five minutes of sexual gratification between the office and his return home to his waiting wife and the submissive sensuality of the oriental woman are both hoary cliches well worked within the Western imagination, but such stereotypes are just as often reinforced within the cinema of the nation itself. During the '80s, attempts to explain Japanese films and culture in terms of their deviance from the Western norm (whatever that is) were rife in books such as lan Buruma's A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains in Japanese Culture and Nicholas Bornoff's Pink Samurai: The Pursuit and Politics of Sex in Japan. Both make for highly entertaining reads, each with its own share of illuminating revelations and insights, though they are probably more relevant to the climate of the '80s than nowadays. But the overall case is often so much more complex than it is portrayed, and in any case, perhaps such analyses of male-female gender roles are more
Sex, Censorship and Other Positions of Power: New Ways of looking
the domain of sociologists and psychologists than film critics. Without wishing to brush the issue under the carpet entirely, I'll assume the viewer is mature and intuitive enough to interpret the more outre aspects of Japanese erotic cinema in their own way. For all that, pink film's dark predilection for sexual violence has been somewhat overplayed in the rather vicarious writings of Western observers like Thomas Weisser, both in his Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films and the numerous articles published in his magazine Asian Cult Cinema (formerly known as Asian Trash Cinema), and Jack Hunter in Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood and Madness in Japanese Cinema. Sure, some pink and Roman Porno films do feature atrocious scenes of sexual savagery, but by no means all of them. To such writers sex, violence and death are an integral part of Japanese erotica. As Hunter puts it in his intro, the films offer "a vision of the realm of sex as Hell on earth or, conversely, Hell's confines as the human body and the madness which that mortal incarceration offers':47 Such notions have proven infectious, finding their way, for example, into the gloomy quasi-religious imagery employed by the company Salvation, with their packaging of a number of recent, moderately restrained, pink offerings such as Shinji lmaoka's Lunch Box and Toshiki Sat6's The Lost Virgin in the UK, their covers sporting the lurid catch-line "Baptised in blood Consumed by Guilt- Gratified in Death': The more critical voices also ignore the fact that during the late '70s and '80s, the time in which the bulk of Japan's rougher fare was being produced, fantasies of violence against women played a central role not only in the men-only environment of the hardcore theatre, but also in titles, particularly within the horror market, intended for a wider audience: I Spit on Your Grave {1 978), The Toolbox Murders (1978), Killer's Moon (1978) and The House on the Edge of the Park (1980) are all films that spring to mind. Modern Western audiences may feel distinctly uneasy when confronted with these kinds of images now, especially when staged as a turn-on, but it was certainly not always this way. If Japanese pornography is viewed solely through reductive descriptions of its more outrageous elements, then this indeed makes it a depressingly misogynist and terminally uninteresting field to wade t hrough. As Williams maps out however, American hardcore pornography has changed substantially t hrough the years, and not solely due to the efforts of feminist groups like Women Against Pornography and t he censorious cultural climate of the Reaganite years. Having moved from the theatre to the living room, it has adapted its appeal to take into account more diverse markets of couples, gays and solitary women viewers. Pink cinema is no different, as shall be revealed over the following chapters, and it is the industry's adaptation to fit the economic, political and social climate that lends the subject a deeper interest.
above: Lost in t ranslation: Confusing iconography dominates the packaging of pink from British DVD company Salvation. following page, top: Puppet on a st ring: Kiyoshi Komori's heavily influential Japanese Torture Punishment History (1964}, the first eroduction to make such scenes of torture and bondage its entire raison d'etre.
29
Behind the Pink Curtain
Footnotes 13 Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16, no.3:6-18.
14 The public unveiling of the Lumieres' Cinematograph at the Salon lndienne is most commonly seen as the birth of cinema, but it is rarely remembered that some two months prior, on 1 November, 1895, at the Berlin Wintergarten, the Skladanowsky Brothers, Max and Emil, had projected pictures to the paying public using their Bioscop camera/projector system. 15 Harding, Colin and Popple, Simon. In the Kingdom of the Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema. London: Cygnus Arts, 1996: 62. Other writers have their own ideas about when and in which films nudity first appeared in Britain; for example Tom Dewe Mathews in Censored: The Story of Film Censorship in Britain (London: Chatto and Wind us, 1994: 7) cites an 1897 film entitled How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed. The contents of such films cannot be verified as any prints have long decayed. 16
Mathews, Tom Dewe.Censored:8.
17 Ibid: 70. Mathews points out that the case was a lot more complicated than this. Firstly, the BBFC certainly operated to their own set of internal laws in its first decades, depending on the individual whims of its examiners. Secondly, nudity often did sneak by the censors, either in films that were exhibited without a censorship certificate in private film societies, or in a few cases, such as several of Cecil B. DeMille's biblical epics and Fred Niblo's Ben-Hur, which "were passed without comment by the board: 18
lbid:76.
19 Bernardi, Joanne. Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001) provides a good introduction to Japanese cinema's early years.
20 For more information regarding the banning of Zigomar see Hase, Masato. "Cinema phobia in Taisho Japan: Zigomar, Delinquent Boys and Somnambulism." lconics 4, 1998; Makino, Mamoru."On the Conditions of Film Censorship in Japan Before Its Systemization." In In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honor of Makino Mamoru. Gerow, Aaron and Nornes, Abe Mark, eds. Ann Arbor: Kinema Club, 2001:46-66. Again, the quest for firsts in the absence of surviving evidence is a highly challenging one. These films represented first significant roles for female performers. Worth noting is that Kurishima had already appeared onscreen fifteen years earlier at the age of 6 in the M. Pathe company's New Peach Boy (Shin Momotaro, 1909). Bernardi, Joanne goes into some detail about the early appearances of women in Japanese cinema in Writing in Light.
21
22 Anderson, Joseph L. and Richie, Donald. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982:42.
Imported American comedies such as Ernst Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle (1924), the early works of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, the films of Charlie Chaplin and the melodramas of the Bluebird Company were heavily cited as favourites of the Shochiku directors of the '20s and early '30s.
23
24
Shimizu, Akira,"War and Cinema in Japan" in Nornes, Abe Mark and Fukushima, Yukio (eds), The Japan/A merica Film Wars: WW/1 Propaganda and Its Cultural Contexts. USA, Harwood, 1991: 28-29. The most detailed account of Japanese cinema during the wartime years is High, Peter B. The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years' War, 79371945. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Hirano, Kyoko. Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945-52. Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1992:16.
25
26
lbid:3.
27 Ibid: 154-165. Hirano talks of the emergence of kissing in Japanese films at some length. She also mentions an early anomalous example in Keisuke Sasaki's Women Are in Every World (Onna wa itsu no yo ni mo) way back in 1931 . 28 Richie, Donald. "The Japanese Kiss" in A Lateral View. California: Stone Bridge: 223. 29 Domenig, Roland."A History of Sex Education Films in Japan Part 1: The Pre-War Years." Midnight Eye. www.midnighteye.com/features/ahistory-of-sex-education-films-in-japan-part-1.shtml.
30
30
"A History of Sex Education Films in Japan Part 2: The Post-War Years and the Basukon Eiga."www.midnighteye.com/features/a-historyof-sex-education-films-in-japan-part-2.shtml. 3 1 Is it a merely a coincidence that a fetish magazine with the title Bizarre was founded by the illustrator-photographer "John Willie" in Britain in exactly the same year, 1946?
3 2 The Windmill Theatre was the subject of Stephen Frears's 2005 film, Mrs. Henderson Presents. 33 Kuwahara, letoshi. Kirareta waisetsu: Eirin katto-shi (Yomiuri shinbunsha, 1993). pg 23.
34
In the absence of material evidence, early film history often plays like a game of extended Chinese whispers, and especially in the underground world of pornography. In the footnotes of her Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley: University of California:321 ), Linda Williams mentions this particular title quoted from an earlier 3-volume study, L'erotisme au cinema by Lo Duca (Paris: Pauvert, 1958). Williams sensibly questions how the author has dated this particular film to 1907, but nonetheless draws the conclusion that the first stag movies were probably produced in France. Tom Dewe Mathews, on the other hand, asserts that after a group of adventurous Brazilians got their hands on one of Edison's cameras,"by 1904 Brazil was supplying not only London's smoking room but also the Parisien brothels, and by 1910 South America had cornered the world market in hardcore films" (Mathews: 13). The Wikipedia online encyclopedia however (accessed 2008-1 -1), under the entry 'Pornographic Film; cites Robertson, Patrick's Film Facts (New York: Billboard, 2001 ), which states "the earliest pornographic motion picture which can definitely be dated is A l'ecu d'or ou Ia bonne auberge~ (France, 1908); "the plot depicts a weary soldier who has a tryst with an inn's servant girl." 3 5 The jo, or tatami mat, is the standard unit for measuring apartment size. A small one-room apartment is typically sixjo. Four-and-a-half jo is very small.
36
Williams: 9.
37 Williams: 11, paraphrasing Kendrick, Walter. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987: 92-94. 38 lbid:41 .
39
lbid: 40.
Phillips's article is reproduced in full in Musser, Charles. Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997:88. 41 Williams: 52.
40
42 Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). University of Minnesota, 2005:44. 43 Williams: SO. 44 45
Hunter, Jack. Foreword.
Richie, Donald. "The Eroduction" in A Lateral View: Essays on Culture and Style in Contemporary Japan. California: Stone Bridge, 1971 (reprinted in 1992): 156.
46
Harritz, Pia D. "Consuming the Female Body: Pinku Eiga and the Case of Sagawa Issei." In Media Res. www.medievidenskabodense.dk/index. php?id=57 (accessed 2008-1 -1). 47
Hunter, Jack. Foreword.
chapter three
Ama Glamour and the Rise of the Flesh Actress aturally, the pink genre was not hatched from the void overnight. The years spanning the departure of the American occupation forces in 1952 and the meteoric rise of the eroduction after the appearance of Satoru Kobayashi's Flesh Market in 1962 marked a period of ferment for Japanese cinema. After seven years of occupation censorship and the dark, oppressive years of war leading up to them, long pent-up desires found an ebullient release on the cinema screen. Before the mass proliferation of television, the big screen provided a dynamic and highly effective arena for the people to see their hopes and fears for a new uncertain future reflected, given form and disseminated across the nation, as well as serving as a window onto what was going on elsewhere across the globe. The world was moving forward at breakneck speed, and the newly democratised Japan was keen to make up lost ground on the frontrunners. The popular genres of the home drama, jidai-geki (period drama) and literary adaptation ruled the release rosters, but with over 500 films released annually in its peak years and a market now led more by popular taste rather than steered by a higher authority, it was only natural that more sensationalist material soon emerged. During the '50s the slow insinuation of depictions of sex and nudity into the nation's cinema pretty much mirrored what was happening in Europe and America, as producers tested the waters of what was deemed acceptable, but there was perhaps one important distinction. While the gradual erosion of censorship boundaries in America or Britain came from either foreign imports or the growth of an alternative independent market of arthouses, grindhouses, private cinema clubs and drive-ins, in Japan it came from the mainstream itself. The period we are talking about roughly coincides with what is referred to as Japanese cinema's Second Golden Age (6gon jidai), after a particularly fecund earlier period in the '30s, prior to the disruption of the war. Though separated by two decades, several crucial components are shared; aside from representing periods when the major studios seemed to be more or less in tune with the demands of the cinema-going public, the films of both eras manifest an anticipation of t he future (often tinged with a sense of nostalgia for the past, or undercut by tension between the younger and older generations) and a recognition that Japan is part of the wider world. In an essay entitled 'Perspectives on the Japanese film: Nagisa Oshima, the leading spokesman for the New Wave directors of the '60s, identified this concept of internationalisation as very much a crucial component of modernisation. He also
stated that, though most societies complete their modernisation in one go, because of the route Japan took in the initial process, with the promising early blossoming of East-West relations in the Meiji period ending in the chaos and defeat of the Pacific War, the country was forced to modernise a second time.4B (Of course, it has been the subject of much debate, both internally and externally, whether this second 'lnternationalisation' is better described as 'Americanization') The Second Golden Age coincided w ith Japan opening itself up to the outside world once again, but this time the internationalisation of its cinema was a full two-way process. Though several works by directors including Hiroshi Shimizu, Tomotaka Tasaka and Tomu Uchida had been shown to great acclaim at the Venice Film Festival before the war, until 1951 when Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon next turned heads eastwards at Venice there had really been little recognition in the West that Japan even had a film industry of any note.49 This momentous international success was followed by Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell, which was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival and became the first recipient of the Honorary Award for foreign films (precursor to the Best Foreign Film Category) at the Academy Awards, and Hiroshi lnagaki's Samurai: The Legend of Musashi Miyamoto in 1955. Indeed, the '50s represented Japanese cinema at its prime. With little threat from alternative forms of visual entertainment, cinema attendances reached an all-time high in 1958, and local films claimed a far greater portion of the market than imported ones (although it should be remembered Japan had import quotas for foreign films at the time, allotting only a certain number of films per year to each company.) It is a decade represented by such internationally-feted masters as Keisuke Kinoshita, Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse and Yasujiro Ozu, and one in which the chanbara period swashbuckler was as popular as the Western was in America. There was, however, another side to Japanese cinema that didn't make it so far overseas. During this Second Golden Age, both production and distribution were dominated by six studios: Daiei, Nikkatsu, Shochiku, Toei, Toho, and Shintoho. This is not to say that there was a complete absence of an independent filmmaking sector, but with each of the majors exhibiting their films across the country through their own circuit of theatres, the distribution possibilities for such productions were somewhat limited. By the end of the '50s, the independent sector had all but petered out.SO 31
Behind the Pink Curtain
The newest additions to this roll-call of studios were Toei, founded in 1951, and Shintoho, founded in 1947 after a series of labour strikes atToho Studios sent many of its creative agents scuttling off to regroup under new management: Shintoho literally means "New Toho':s1 Shintoho is often seen as a studio born out of idealism, though it is worth remembering that despite its reputation as a leftist stronghold, ironically it was founded as a production outfit for those employees unwilling to participate in the strike. Still, many of the country's most-lauded directors worked there in the early years.Akira Kurosawa made Stray Dog for Shintoho in 1949; Yasujiro Ozu directed The Munakata Sisters in 1950; Kenji Mizoguchi gave us Life of Oharu in 1952, while Hiroshi Shimizu made a number of late-career works, including Mr. Shosuke Ohara (1949), A Mother's Love (1950) and The Shiinomi School (1955). But the company was relatively small, and in the face of low budgets and strong competition from the other five, under the auspices of maverick producer Mitsugu Okura its release slate soon took the form of more direct appeals to its audience's less sophisticated side. Born 22 November, 1899 (died 15 September, 1978), the onetime benshi (silent film narrator), Okura was drafted into Shintoho in 1955, at a time when the studio was losing over $100,000 a month. Having previously proved his mettle running the small Fuji Eiga rental studios (nothing to do with the camera manufacturer) and his own chain of thirty six theatres, he seemed an ideal choice to turn the company's fortunes around. And this, for the next few years at least, is exactly what he did.s2 So, towards the latter half of the '50s, Shintoho's output became primarily given over to luridlymarketed exploitation flicks commonly referred to as ero-guro (short for 'erotic grotesque') within the horror, youth movie and gangster genres. This is the studio where cult maverick Teruo Ishii started his career, adding spice to the basic yakuza plot several years before Toei had distilled the genre down to its basic elements with its ninkyo films of the '60s. It is where Nobuo Nakagawa primed local tastes for the gory and the supernatural, just as Hammer did in Britain, with his atmospheric kaidan (ghost story) films such as The Ghost of Kasane (1957), Black Cat Mansion (1958), The Lady Vampire (1959) and The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959). And Shintoho had already violated one taboo, which was in depicting the emperor in The Meiji Emperor and the Great Russo-Japanese War in 1957, part of a string of nationalistic and ambitious (not to mention highly profitable) war epics that included Toshio Shimura's God of War Admiral Yamamoto and the Combined Fleet (1956) and Kiyoshi Komori's Pacific War: The Mystery of Battleship Michinoko ( 1960).
Shintoho were certainly not alone in celebrating the female form. According to Anderson and Richie's The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, nudity first crept into Japanese cinema in To the End of the Sun (1954), 32
with Yukiko Shimazaki providing an added frisson to this tale set on Japanese-occupied Ruson Island in the Philippines during the final days of the Pacific War. This independently-produced work was distributed by Shochiku and directed by Satsuo Yamamoto, who had already made several cinematic anti-war statements with a strong left-wing bent that had goaded the occupation authorities, including War and Peace (codirected with Fumio Kamei in 1947 and nothing to do with the Tolstoy epic) and Vacuum Zone (1952). Sex, or at least the promise of it, became an increasing component of the youth film genre that burgeoned after Nikkatsu released Season of the Sun (1956, adapted by Takumi Furukawa from a novel by Shintar6 lshihara53), with the titles that followed including K6 Nakahira's Crazed Fruit (1956) and Hiroshi Noguchi's Resistance of the Flesh (1957), in which Hisako Tsukuba provided the flesh, if not the resistance. Also, the anti-prostitution law or baishun b6shi-h6 of 1956 (which came into effect following year) saw a short-lived boom in the so-called Akasen genre ('red light' films, though the term actually translates as 'red line'), with Mizoguchi's final film Street of Shame (1956) for Daiei being the one outstanding title of a fad to which all of the majors contributed, with films including Keigo Kimura's Women
in the Attic (1956), also for Daiei, and YOz6 Kawashima's Suzaki Paradise: Red Signal (1956) for Nikkatsu. The off-
limits milieu, permeated by the heady charge of sexual currency, proved markedly more contentious when presented on the cinema screen as entertainment than it had done in real-life, and as such these films provoked fierce criticism and debate upon their release. In the early years of its existence, not only had the censorship board, Eirin, been pretty inconsistent with what it had al lowed to reach the screen in domestic productions, it had also been possible for distributors of foreign films to bypass the body entirely. Prosecuting films was never the business of Eirin. If a film was deemed offensive or obscene, this was the business of the police. The main source of resistance to the increased eroticism of '50s cinema therefore came from civil groups across the country, who pushed their rights as citizens to spur the authorities into keeping these pernicious influences from local screens. Being essentially a watchdog simultaneously run by and acting in the interests of the industry, Eirin found itself falling under increasing criticism from such groups at this time. When, in 1954 Yasuki Chiba's Temptation of Pleasure caused protests across a number of regions of Japan, Eirin reacted by introducing the seijin, or adult, category for films deemed as unsuitable for minors.s4 Most of the early films to be branded with this new adult certificate were foreign. It was not until 1962, however, that it became mandatory for all films to be passed through Eirin, and the board's seal of approval, in the form of a five-digit number, became a requirement on all film posters from 1964. Eirin was forced to undergo other changes as well, due to a perceived lack of fairness. In 1956, it was reorganised to include figures from outside of the industry, including professors, lawyers and teachers, and a fee system was introduced, whereby the companies were charged per metre of film submitted. These developments further served to increase Eirin's independence from the major studios, which had such a strong hold on the film business. With the birth of the seijin category, the film companies had increased liberty to explore avenues other than the family market. But perhaps few were as steadfast as Shintoho in their reduction of the company's films' appeal to the basic B-movie fundamentals of ghouls, gangsters, guns and girls during the late '50s. Churned out on a monthly basis and circulating on double or triple bills, the allure of Shintoho's movies was boldly spelt out for all to see in their titles, initiating a tradition that has found its natural home in the pink world. The Military Police and the Dismembered Beauty (1957), Flesh Actress Murder: Five Culprits (1957), The Nude Model Murder Case (1958), Priestess with the Sullied Flesh (1958), Violence Girl (1959), Jailbreak from Women's Death Row (1960), and Female Slave Ship (1960); the general public, needless to say, lapped them all up.
above: Y6ko Mihara lies prone in The Nude Model Murder Case, directed by Nagayoshi Akasaka, one of the many sensationalist quickies produced by Shintoho in the late '50s. Shintoho opposite: Sun, sea and sex: Taiy6zoku ('sun tribe') films such as Nikkatsu's Crazed Fruit (1956), directed by K6 Nakahira and scripted by Shintar6 Ishihara from his own novel, heralded a new age of permissiveness in Japanese cinema. C!Nikkatsu Corporation
Following the bankruptcy of Shintoho in 1961 , many of these titles remain notably absent from chronicles of the country's cinematic history - mere list ings in catalogues. With the decomposing prints sealed up and forgotten in private vaults, their content can only be guessed at from the names on their eye-catching posters. One strain among Shintoho's colourful output that has been picked up on and made available on DVD in Japan is perhaps the most curious subgenre of them all, the ama or 'Girl Diver' films, a series that revolved around the communities of Japan's celebrated women divers who scour the ocean floor for shellfish, most notably awabi (abalone), clams and sometimes pearls.ss The phenomenon of diving girl communities is not actually unique to Japan, finding its parallel in the form of the henya in Korea, as recognised in the 2004 documentary Ms. Ryan, an Ama Diver. However, these Korean counterparts never seem to have been afforded quite the same cinematic status, with one notable exception provided by My Mother, the Mermaid (2004). They have certainly never been rendered elsewhere in such an openly erotic manner as they were in Japanese cinema. 33
Behind the Pink Curtain
above: Reefof the Amo (1958), Nikkatsu's contribution to the girl diver genre, presented Hisako Tsukuba as a rival to Michiko Maeda in t he 'flesh actress' field. ~ N ikkatsu Corporation
Often given a cursory mention in Western texts, but seldom seen, the scattering of titles that Shintoho made between 1956 and 1960 featuring these vibrant and earthy women of the waves are often described as adopting a style heavily indebted to Italian neorealism.56 They in fact owe far more to Roger Corman than Roberto Rossellini, and are certainly no lost classics of Japanese cinema, but are of interest primarily as cinematic curios representative of the lowbrow preeroduction market Shintoho were then courting, and for pushing the envelope as far as it would go in terms of putting female nudity up onscreen where one and all could see it. But even as the ama were being fetishized in their own nation's cinema, they found themselves falling under the prurient photographic gaze of the Western anthropologist. The foundations for this early wave of overseas interest were laid by the publication of the first Western study by Italian researcher and photographer Fosco Maraini. Following his first encounter with his subjects, detailed in the book Meeting with Japan in 1959, came Hekura: The Diving Girls' Island, first published in 1960 in Italy, with an English translation following in 1962. The book unfolded as a first person account of Maraini's voyage to the eponymous island in the Sea of Japan, in an attempt to take a series of photographs and capture a brief segment of film footage of the ama underwater. To be fair, there were plenty of reasons to be interested in the ama other than the purely cosmetic. Culturally they are qu ite distinct from the average Japanese, revealing a heterogeneity within the country that is barely acknowledged. Living dotted around the coastline in small, tight-knit communities, the ama live, or at least they did at the time, in villages quite distinct from other fishing or peasant villages, and they seldom 34
marry outside their kind. Boasting their own dialect and with many of the women considerably taller and more statuesque than the norm, they were once believed to be a different race entirely. But it was the ama's diving skills that attracted the most attention. As detailed in an article by Luis Marden entitled 'Ama, Sea Nymphs of Japan' that appeared in National Geographic magazine in July 1971 , the average underwater foray lasts around 45-50 seconds and is to a depth of around 30 feet, though some have been known to dive twice as deep. All of this is done not only without external oxygen supplies, but also with a bare minimum of accoutrements: just a pair of goggles with a bladder attached to adjust to the underwater pressure, a string bag to stuff their seabed booty in, and a triangular cotton fundoshi (loincloth) jokingly referred to as a kuro-neko (black cat). Only the women dive, while the men sit in the boats above, waiting to haul them up to the surface when they give a sharp few tugs on the ropes tied around their waists; and this is another factor that distinguishes ama communities. In a complete role reversal from the norm, it is the women who are out in the work sphere, there for everyone to see. The men used to dive in former times, but without their female counterparts' thicker layer of subcutaneous fat to protect them from the cold, they couldn't stay under water for so long, and as such were far less profitable and hence less important to the community. The ama are virtually invisible today, their lifestyle and customs having all but died out, just as those of many traditional rural communities have in Japan. Events such as the Am a Mats uri (Ama Festival), still held every summer in Shirohama in Chiba prefecture, in which a shoal of tunic-wearing older ama swim around a large flaming shrine floating in the bay, seem to be staged primarily for tourists. In 1971, Luis Marden wrote that there were around 7000 ama in Japan, though by then the rot had already set in. Caught in the cross-tide between tradition and modernity, the younger generations abandoned the old ways of life as they were drawn to the cities to be swiftly assimilated into the new economic miracle. With pressure from rival fishing boats stripping the seabeds, the short season between May and early September in which it was warm enough for the ama to dive began to bear less and less fruit, and many took work during the long off-season months in fish canneries or as bar hostesses: Hekura: The Diving Girls' Island makes for enlightening reading because it was written at a critical point in Japan's modernisation process when, in a few of the remoter outlying areas, the ama were still living the same lifestyle they had been enjoying for centuries. Ostensibly a travel journal peppered with facts and descriptions of the ama's daily lives, it nonetheless suggests an interest that goes beyond the purely academic and demonstrates a lot about the West's
Ama Glamour and the Rise of th e Flesh A c tr e ss
ongoing eroticisation of the East. Its main selling point w as the glossy colour photos of its majestic maidens, referred to with such gleeful prose as "mythical sea goddesses'; "children of Neptune, companions and handmaidens of Ulysses'; "Valkyries of the sea with mahogany-coloured skins'; "tall, assured, silent, earthenware-coloured, diving girls in their twenties, bare-breasted like goddesses': We can to some extent forgive this mixture of scientific detachment, wide-eyed admiration and w istful romanticism. Maraini's book is clearly the product of a time when few Westerners were travelling to Japan, especially its remoter areas, and the nearest most Europeans had got to an ama was the famous series of woodblock prints by the eighteenth-century artist Utamar6. Many of the ideas he expresses may seem either charmingly na"lve or obvious to the modern reader, as he forges a string of simple dichotomies between 'East' and 'West; 'primitive' and 'civilised; Shinto and Christianity. Side comments such as, "the Japanese rightly scorn our barbarous habit of living in great concrete boxes divided up into compartments in which people live detesting, or at best ignoring, one another" are bound to elicit a chuckle from anyone who has visited Tokyo in recent years. But this was a time of vast societal change in Japan. Already the relatively isolated and undeveloped island community of Hekura sat in stark contrast to what he had found in an earlier trip to Toba village on the Honshu mainland. Here the ama girls worked on cultivated oyster beds, dressed in white cotton bathingcostumes issued by their employers, where they lined up for photos taken by weekend tourists from the big city. In Hekura, with the community unused to such foreign incursions, the old traditions still prevailed. It is intriguing that, though the village denizens are initially suspicious of Maraini and his entourage, treating them with a "polite aloofness'; the barriers are eventually broken down, not by the sight of his Italian female assistant wandering through the village in the same state of candid undress as the locals (at Maraini's insistence), but by the research group offering the vil lage elders the gift of a harpoon gun. Surrounded by women going about their daily business quite unabashedly wearing nothing more t han fundoshi, Maraini makes the following observation: "In the Far East, for instance, up to the first extensive contacts with the West, the human figure was always represented in art more or less clothed. Thus it can be said that in the East the nude is accepted in life but not in art, while in the West it is accepted in art but not in life." This suggests that the emergent class of metropolitan Japanese day-trippers peering through their viewfinders at the scantily-clad workers at the oyster beds ofToba were now aligning themselves with Western values, where the nude was treated as a source of stimulus of a purely sensual nature.
I use the word 'sensual' judiciously to blur the boundary between 'aesthetic' and 'erotic' that usually serves to delineate the spheres of Art and Pornography. In such debates, one can argue about artists' intentions and degrees of fidelity to the real thing until the cows come home, but ultimately what links paintings like Edouard Manet's Olympia to porn films such as Deep Throat, as well as both the tourist snapshots of the ama and Maraini's carefully composed ethnological portraits, is that they are all representations of the same thing - the female body. While it is difficult, in the highest sense of the word, to describe Shintoho's ama films as 'Art' with a capitai 'A; cinema is as much an art form as painting, photography and sculpture, and as such the subject is at the whim of those reconstructing it to provide an image that is often markedly different from its source. Uninhibited and unrefined, dominant and athletic, and graced with a completely natural ambivalence towards their own nakedness as they glisten with sea spray in the waves, the popular conceptions of the ama lend themselves naturally to male fantasy. Like the majority of Maraini's still photographs, Shintoho's films portray young, nubile and vital groups of women at work and at play. But they shy away from the more disagreeable fact that the most experienced and efficient of the ama, and the majority of those working today, are much older, many still diving until they are over 60. "Do you want the best or the prettiest?" asks Shirosaki, the male head of the village fishermen in response to Maraini's request to find suitable photographic subjects. "Why? Can't the two things be combined?" "No, it's most unusual. The prettiest are the young ones, and they are hardly ever very skilful. The best are over thirty." Maraini later found the perfect combination of beauty and ability in the form of 18year-old Taeko on the nearby island of Mikuria during his return voyage to the mainland. Just as the scrawny figures of the more typical woman divers detracted from the romantic vision that Shintoho were t rying to promote, so too did the censorship climate of the time ensure that the filmic ama remained covered up in white cotton shifts in the same manner of those that Maraini had come across in the tourist spots of Honshu. Shintoho's ama were already several steps removed from reality. Why not go the whole hog? The first of the five films cited as belonging to Shintoho's short-lived cycle of low-budget black and white program pictures did not, ironically, feature any ama, though the sinuous underwater diving scenes following the relocation of the action to a remote tropical island midway through set the agenda for the following films. Released in 1956, Toshio Shimura's Revenge of the Pearl Queen was in fact a bemusing crime thriller featuring the Amazonian form of pin-up girl Michiko Maeda. 35
Behind the Pink Curtain
Maeda plays the role of Natsuki, who lands herself in turbulent waters when Kizaki, her lover working for the same company, is framed by his corrupt boss Asamura for a murder and the theft of a large amount of money from the corporate safe. While at sea on a long business trip to America, Natsuki discovers the company president's active role in the crime and confronts him in his cabin. A violent struggle ensues in which Asamura ravishes Natsuki and pitches her overboard into the Pacific. With Kizaki arrested and the sole testifier to his guilt now believed to have sunk beneath the waves, Asamura looks sure to get away with his misdemeanour. Unluckily for him, Natsuki is washed up coughing and spluttering on a deserted island, where she is rescued by a ragged collection of shipwrecked sailors. Her salvation at first seems short-lived, as her provocative presence inflames passions amongst the red-blooded island internees, but against all odds, she manages to fend off their lecherous advances long enough to put her swimming skills to good use, scouring the surrounding reefs for pearls. By the time she is rescued, two years later, she has amassed a great fortune, which she puts to use in order to bring about her lover's release from prison and the downfall of those who put him there. As might perhaps be gleaned from the above description, the storyline of Shimura's film bears more than a passing resemblance to that of a foreign coproduction released but a few years previously, the final work of the Austrian director credited with launching the career Marlene Dietrich, Josef von Sternberg. Entitled The Saga of Anatahan (1953), yet known in Japan simply as Anatahan, it was filmed at Daiei's studios in Kyoto and told the reputedly true story of a group of Japanese soldiers marooned in the South Pacific oblivious to the fact that the war has ended, who discover that two other people also share their island, and one of them is a woman (played by Akemi Negishi). Naturally, it is this woman who emerges as Queen Bee, as the desperate men-folk end up systematically murdering one another in desperation for her favours. Given that The Saga of Anatahan is a far more highlyregarded entry in its director's filmography in Japan than it is anywhere else in the world, it therefore might be tempting, albeit a little cheeky, to posit von Sternberg as one of the mythic Ur-Fathers of the later emerging eroduction genre. Like von Sternberg's film, Revenge of the Pearl Queen features a surprising amount of skin for its time, all of it belonging to Maeda. Anderson and Richie gave her their generous seal of approval as,"a star who consisted almost entirely of mammary glands."57 Certainly Maeda more than adequately fills out the makeshift two-piece swimsuit in which she spends most of her time on the island before returning to Japan as the avenging femme fatale. Standing naked in the distance wringing out her clothes by the sea, or being chased across the dunes, her sarong scarcely covering her rear, 36
she is always the object of the viewer's gaze, and though things seldom get more steamy than shots of her bare back or thighs, the viewer is constantly placed in the same tantalising spectatorial position as the sexstarved sea dogs. In one scene of breathtaking brazenness, the taut cloth covering her bulging breasts slips down an inch to subliminally reveal the dark crest of a nipple as she is manhandled by one of the marooned mariners. Michiko Maeda's groundbreaking appearance saw her immediately hoisted up as Shintoho's poster girl and company delegate to a group known as the nikutaihaj oyO, or the 'Flesh Group Actresses'; the select club of glamour girls who dared to bare more than the rest and whose prominent billing on posters acted as a guarantee of the film's erotic allure. Every company sported their own representative: Yasuko Nakata at Toho; Ky6ko Izumi at Shochiku; Mitsue Komiya at Daiei and main rival Hisako Tsukuba at Nikkatsu. In fact, Tsukuba appeared in a Nikkatsu production entitled Reef of the Ama, directed by Genjir6 Morinaga in 1958, while Izumi also played a buxom girl diver in Masao Horiuchi's Forbidden Sands (1957). However, Shintoho were relatively slow to capitalise on the tumult caused by Maeda's sensational debut as a ad actress, and most of her following roles at the company were supporting ones, with Kiyoshi Komori's Woma n Race Track Magnate in 1956 and Toshir6 Omi's Dry Wife and Dominating Husband in 1957 providing her only significant appearances before she left the movie world to embark on a career in television (though she much later received a prominent billing in Teruo Ishii's Jgoku, a digital ly-shot pre-millennia! reworking of the buo Nakagawa horror classic.) There was, however, one major exception: Shintoho's first bona fide ama movie, The Girl Diver Trembles in Fear. Released the year after Revenge of the Pearl Queen, director Toshio Shimura returned to the helm, expanding the memorable 20-minute island sequence of the previous film to feature length, and capitalising on his main asset, the imposing spectacle of Maeda's slender glistening wet body squeezed into a tight bikini. The background plot is fairly rudimentary, as two local diving girls, Yuki and Chie, from a remote coastal village are kidnapped, during a visit to Tokyo, by a group of dubious looking types driving a flash car and sporting moustaches and panama hats. Their appearance in the village's social hub, the lkari Inn, causes quite a stir, but not half as much as when Yuki's dead body is later found washed up on the shoreline. Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of a passing stranger, dressed in an immaculate sailor's outfit, named Shunsuke, who discovers the gangsters' hideout in a nearby cave. Here Chie is being held, bound and gagged, as a hostage until she can put her diving skills to good use to help recover a trove of riches hidden in the hull of a nearby sunken ship. Maeda played Chie's
above: Masayo Banri {left) and an unidentified girl diver tremble in fear, in Toshio Shimura's The Girl Diver Trembles in Fear {1957).
sister Yon, the female lead joining Shunsuke to pit their wits against the unwanted interlopers from the city. While reprising the graceful underwater sequences of Revenge of the Pearl Queen (though similarly, it looks like a fish-tank has been superimposed over some of the shots), Girl Diver Trembles in Fear actually comes across as far tamer and less voyeuristic than its predecessor, with Maeda's dark, slinky vitality poorly served by her new backseat role, whose main plot function is to fall in love with the blandly-handsome male lead Ryutar6 Amagi. Nevertheless, it forged the template for what was to follow, with its sequences of girls bobbing about in the waves or rolling around in the sand locked in combat, and what became the cycle's most celebrated attraction: the sequences of girls duck-diving beneath the waves in formation and heading downwards to the ocean floor as if performers in an undersea ballet, their diaphanous smocks swirling with the currents to reveal surreptitious glimpses of bare breasts. Shintoho would find a suitably buxom replacement for Maeda in the form ofY6ko Mihara, first appearing in Yoshiki Onoda's intriguingly-titled Cannibal Ama in 1958, a movie which unfortunately appears to be no longer with us. Still, it would appear that by the next entry the series had already sunk into simple repetition of its key elements. Girl Divers at Spook Mansion sees Mihara returning to her ama village where she lodges 37
Behind the Pink Curtain
temporarily at the Aoyama residence, now reduced to one solitary occupant named Yumi after her elder brother fails to return from the sea one night. The Aoyama mansion comes laden with the Gothic trappings of secret panels, sinister servants, black cats springing out of dark corners and a hunchback loitering in the garden, while hushed voices talk of legendary treasure in an underwater cave and a mysterious black pearl. But the final straw is an apparition that periodically pops up to terrify Yumi every time she ventures too near to a bed or a bathtub. The film begins with a delightfully schlocky credit sequence of posed shots of the ama girls covered in fishing nets, seated in lobster pots and clutching skulls, all unfolding in split screen to a suitably spooky score, which gives way to the familiar image of them frolicking in the waves before descending to the ocean floor, with the camera lingering on the flimsy white material clinging to their crotches. But from then on the film descends into monotony, and despite the supernatural expectations raised by its colou rful title, it is actually the most boring of the lot. In true Scooby Doo fashion, the spook at the heart the film is soon revealed to be a ruse by a group of scheming ne'er-do-wells eager to get their hands on the loot and drive away all competition from the denizens of the ama village. The main point of interest lies in the appearance of Bunta Sugawara as the leading man; he would be cast alongside Mihara in several later films at Shintoho, including Female Slave Ship. Sugawara later became one of the country's most popular screen actors, most memorably in his yakuza roles in films by director Kinji Fukasaku during the '70s, like Battles Without Honour and Humanity and Street Mobster.
above: Shintoho glamour girl Yoke Mihara.
38
Ama Glamour and the Rise of the Flesh Actress
With so many scenes and plot elements rehashed from film to film, one might easily be led to believe that they were all shot back-to-back. However, the different crews and supporting casts and the time between their releases strongly suggests that this was not the case. By any measure, the reduced running times as the series progressed suggest that Shintoho at least were aware that the novelty was running out: the final film in the series clocked in at a succinct 56 m inutes. Directed by Gor6 Kadono, Ghost Story: Phantom Ama saw Mihara making way for Masayo Banri, an actress who had played supporting ama roles in several of the previous entries. The film begins strongly, with an atmospheric opening sequence, predating John Carpenter's The Fog by two decades, of shuffling ghost-like zombies, blood streaming from their faces, rising from the waves to drag the workers of a deserted shipyard, swirling with dry ice, to their doom. The ghosts' main target however is the village kingpin, and employer of the local diving girls, Satomura (played by Jusabur6 Akechi). When his wife and youngest daughter are abducted, it is up to his remaining daughter Namie (Banri) and her ama companions to get to the bottom of the mystery, which again revolves around sunken t reasure and a gang of swarthy crooks. Sh intoho's peculiar sub-genre ended with the company's bankruptcy the very same year, with the costly commercial failure of Nobuo Nakagawa's opulent evocation of the torments of Buddh ist hell, Jigoku, usually cited as the final straw. Released in exactly the same month as Nakagawa's film, the lack of funds available for Phantom Ama is evident. Still, never one to let a good thing go, producer Mitsugu Okura gave the ama movie another gasp in The Mysterious Pearl of the Ama, filmed in full-colour cinema scope at his new company Okura Eiga in 1963, and directed by Satoru Kobayashi, a man whose place in Japanese movie history is assured after shooting the first recognised pink film, Flesh Market. But more about both these two figures later. The 6kura-styled ama submerged for a while, though there were a number of other productions that featured ama characters over the next few decades, including Shochiku's The Abalone Girls (d ir. Y6ichi Maeda, 1965, starring the popular singer/ actress Akiko Nakamura), in which "a tourist invasion on a small island off the Japanese mainland turns girl divers into geishas,"58 and no less than five adaptations of Yukio Mishima's coastal -set novel The Sound of Waves (Shiosai), the most famous being the 1975 Toho version starring Momoe Yamaguchi. In the meantime, prompted by the publication of Maraini's book, the exotic figu re of these Japanese sea nymphs resurfaced in the West. The first traces of these women in Western cinema seem to be in a 1961 German documenta ry on Japan above: The new girl diver in town, Masayo Banri.
39
Behind the Pink Curtain
entitled Moshi Moshi- Halla Japan ( 1961 ). However, the earliest title to feature ama that is readily available for viewing now is Violated Paradise, an Italian production released in 1963. Directed by Marion Gering, a Russian emigre who had once been able to boast of a pretty reputable Hollywood career (he worked there during the '30s}, it was based directly on Maraini's Meeting with Japan, and surely counts as one of the more bizarre Western treatises on Japanese culture to have survived to the present day.
AN AMAZING FILM THAT SHOWS AN INNOCENT MAIDEN EXPOSED TO THE FANTASTIC SPECTACLE Of LIFE IN THE RAW
SEE
THE NUDE AMA MAIDENS DIVE FOR PEARLS.
40
IN THE SIN-RIDDEN TOKYO FLESH SPOTS.
The narrative focus of this long-forgotten oddity is Tamako, played by Kazuko Mine.The primary function of her character, a young half-Japanese, half-Ainu born and bred in the northernmost frontier of Hokkaido, is to lead the viewer on an hour-long trip across the country and into the seething under-girth of Tokyo by night as she goes in search of work. Filmed completely without sound, her cod-oriental intonations are provided by an actress known as Paulette Girard, who articulates a variety of Maraini's oft-rehearsed tenets. "For the Japanese, nakedness is next to godliness'; she opines as she reaches her first port-of-call, ama village, and bearing in mind the classic screenwriting adage, 'show, don't tell' Gering does just that, with scenes of the girls baring their torsos to the sun accompanied by an abridged account of Japan's creation myth ("lzanami thrust his spear into the murky depths"). Here Tamako encounters a male villager, Kosunari, but heartbreak has already set in before the end of the first reel, as her quest for employment drives her further south, down to Tokyo. In the city, Girard's sham stream of consciousness is drowned out by the traditional 'Voice of God' narration of Thomas L. Rowe, who heralds our arrival with the unforgettable line,"Tokyo,crossroads ofthe East, city of 39 races, 30 styles of cookery, and 56 ways of making love, of 82 basic odours and 80,000 stinks, of 12 kinds of dirt and 34 vices." Following Rowe's authoritative introduction to the world of Geisha and all its different delineations ("This type sometimes does; seldom doesn't ... "), lengthy documentary footage ensues of assorted cabaret dancers, strippers and bar hostesses, forewarning us of the exact nature of employment that
Ama Glamour and the Rise of the Flesh Actress
awaits a young innocent such as Tamako. After a near loss of virtue following a brush with one of her clients during a stint working as a bar hostess ("the fifth generation of Geisha"), she sensibly hops on the next train down to Atami, where she takes a job at a hot spring resort. Here she is reacquainted with Kosunari, and before too long they are happily wedded and back in ama village. Entertaining as it is, Gering's film is dominated by the hectoring tone of Maraini's original arguments, with its positing of Japan as a primitive paradise contaminated by what he sees as a peculiarly Western form of sexual commodification in which the film itself is quite unabashedly complicit. But Violated Paradise nevertheless stands as a fascinating visual document of a city in the midst of major transition, and comes crammed with vibrant scenes of local colour. More than that, the sequences set in the unspecified ama village clear up the mystery of what happened to the footage Maraini captured during his stay in Hekura, and it is worth the price of admission just to see the incredibly rare authentic underwater shots of the ama girls at work, who are clearly the same subjects as those who posed for the photos in Hekura: The Diving Girls' Island. Ama glamour remained in at least partial vogue throughout the '60s. A few brief snippets of footage of fully-clothed diving girls at work were included in Women of the World (La donna net mondo, 1963), a sensationalist documentary constructed in the same vein by fellow Italians Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi that followed their seminal Mondo cane (1962), while in their most famous appearance, Mie Hama's bikini-ed ama villager led the charge to Blofeld's lair, secreted beneath a volcano, with Tiger Tanaka's troop of ninjas in tow in the Roald Dahl-penned Bond movie You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert, 1967). The ama had not quite yet vacated their role in Japanese erotic cinema however. The shapely forms were to air once more in a string of titles in the '70s, made as part of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno range. With a huge lapse in censorship standards allowing these ripe-bosomed beauties to be displayed with a naked vigour that would have made even Maraini blush, the company embarked on a string of innuendo-laden titles that included Secret Ama Report: Unrequited Lust (1975), Lusty Ama: Stirred-Up Pot (1976), Night-Crawling Ama (1 977), Lusty Ama: Loincloth Festival (1981 ), Marked Ama: Stirred-Up Shell (1982) and Mighty Ama: TightlyO osed Shell (1985). While Shintoho had gone down the road of ghostly shivers and cut-price action sequences in their pulpy programmers, Nikkatsu's more naturalistic approach took full advantage of the habitat of the outlying coastal communities in which the lissom awabi harvesters are the stronger members and the men mere drunken slobs, to depict its female inhabitants in all their raw and savage splendour. A typical work from
above: Masayo Banri. opposite top: Scenes of ama at work feature in the obscure German mondo movie Moshi Moshi- Hollo Japan (1961 ).
1979, Clam-Diving Ama sees crop-haired Saki (Akiko Hyuga) subsidising her diving with evening work as a barmaid at the local izakaya. Saki is the object of many a local stare, especially with her hot-headed trucker husband Seiichi spending long periods away from home on the road. Her brother-in-law,Tamao, is but one of the many men io her orbit smitten by her charm s, and in his daily role of looking after affairs on deck while she is gathering shellfish from the deep, he spends rather more time in her company than is perhaps good for him, attracting the taunts and jibes of the other ama girls in the community in the process. When Seiichi is killed in a traffic accident and a young girl named Moyoko (Yuki Yoshizawa) arrives at his funeral pregnant with his child, Tamao is right at hand to provide a shoulder to cry on. Devoid of the hypnotic underwater sequences that made Shintoho's films so outstanding, the ama milieu here provides the raw material for a more characterdriven drama than might be expected, with Saki spending a good deal more time in the bedroom than at th e seabed. The hot summer seaside setting is instead livened up with some kinky games involving pachinko balls and the queasy spectacle of an abalone squirming in Saki's boat during a bout of on-deck lovemaking. 41
Behind the Pink Curtain
Things had certainly come a long way in a relatively short time since Maraini's first meeting with Japan. But there were still deeper, darker depths to be plumbed, and from the '60s onwards the country's leading sexploitation practitioners no longer needed any cues from Westerners to point them to the sensual pleasures right there on their doorsteps.
50 Anderson, Joseph L. and Richie, Donald. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982: 256.
Footnotes
52 Anderson, Joseph L. and Richie, Donald: 250. The authors point out the irony that at the time Okura already had a few failed business ventures behind him.
48 Oshima, Nagisa. Cinema, Censorship and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima. Cambridge: MIT, 1992: 12.
49 Arthur Knight's rather uncharitable and factually inaccurate assessment of the state of the industry in The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Movies (New York: Mentor Books, 1957) pretty much sums up the thinking of the time:"Until Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 , it was generally assumed that the industry in Japan -like the studios in India or Egypt - simply turned out great quantities of films of dubious merit and purely local interest. Although pictures had been made there since 1904, almost since the time that movies started, few had been seen by the Western World and none had roused any particular enthusiasm. In fact, not until the '30s, when Japan began her campaigns of conquest in the Orient, was there an industry of any size. As so often happens, the films followed the flag. Through wars and economic penetration, Japan had captured for herself a vast potential audience in China, Manchuria, Indochina and Korea, a market long dominated by the European and Hollywood studios. With their particular gift for cheap imitation, the Japanese were soon turning out between seven and eight hundred films a year - mostly pseudo-French romances or American-style crime and action pictures. Through this flood of films,
42
they effectively ousted or undersold all competitors in the Far East, a market that Japan controls to this day." I wish to thank William Drew for drawing my attention to this quote.
51 For more information about the Toho labour strikes, the "Red Purges" of the film industry, and the US Occupation's role in them, see Hirano, Kyoko. Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation 1945-1952.
53 Shintar6 Ishihara later became Governor of Tokyo, often courting controversy with his outspoken views, while his brother Yujir6, on the back of his brief appearance in Season of the Sun, launched a successful acting career beginning at Nikkatsu Studios that lasted up until his premature death of liver cancer in 1987. Kuwahara, letoshi. Kirareta waisetsu: Eirin katto-shi. Tokyo: Yomiuri shinbunsha, 1993:42.
54
Not to be confused with the homophonic word meaning a nun, spelt with a different kanji character than the two characters, umi (sea) and anna (woman) used to spell this word.
55
Macias, Patrick. TokyoScope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion. San Francisco: Cadence, 2001: 173-174. "The Okura-produced Ama (female diver) films, inspired by earthy Italian neorealist films like 1948's Riso amaro (Bitter Rice), tempted folks into theatres with the promise they would show everything. But no actual nudity was on display: audiences had to be content with the decidedly mixed message about the dignity of hardworking Japanese women and the wet actresses in white formfitting outfits."
56
57 Anderson,Joseph Land Richie, Donald.pg 267. 58
"Melodramas from Japan': Continental Film Review January 1968:20.
above: Akiko Hyuga gets carried away in Shinichi Shiratori's Clam-Diving Ama (1979}, one of a number of innuendo-laden Roman Porno titles that reworked the girl diver milieu for a new generation. ©Nikkatsu Corporation
chapter four
The Birth of the Eroduction he story of Japanese cinema is as much that of its studios and the company presidents and producers who steered their courses as it is of the directors who served as their employees. During the '60s this relationship became more complex, as the monopoly of the Big Six started to break down. This slow erosion of the traditional production system was matched by an explosive growth in the independent sector, as new avenues for exhibition sprang up across the country and disenchanted directors left the majors to form their own companies. The movies of these spirited young filmmakers reflected their newly-found autonomy from past filmmaking practices; they were more dynamic, more political and more in touch with the younger generation. And part of the appeal of many of them in no small measure boiled down to sex. The 1950s had seen the significant insinuation of a Western-inspired form of glamour, desire and carnality into the auditorium. Cinema, the most popular form of fam ily entertainment during the post-war period, was rapidly becoming a young person's game, as old-school values were wafted aside in a new breed of movies portraying hedonistic, rebellious youths on the rampage, similar to American films like Laslo Benedek's The Wild One (1954) starring Marion Brande, Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955, featuring James Dean in his most celebrated role), and Richard Brooks's Blackboard Jungle (1955). At first these Japanese seishun eiga, or youth movies, were driven at a popular level by the taiyozoku ('sun tribe') films, instigated by two adaptations of novels by Shintar6 Ishihara, who in his new guise as a politician (and the Governor of Tokyo since 1999) would later court controversy on the wider international stage with his outspoken right-wing views. The movies in question were Takumi Furukawa's Season of the Sun, a beach movie which sparked off an instant cult of celebrity around the author's younger, cooler brother Yujir6, who appeared in a small cameo, and K6 Nakahira's Crazed Fruit, which put the handsome star in his first leading role, in a tale about a teenage girl running riot in a tranquil beach resort. Both films were released by Nikkatsu in 1956, the same year that Daiei brought another, similarly-themed, Ishihara novel to the screen with the Kon lchikawa-directed Punishment Room. Most of the majors reacted in their own way to the new taiyozoku craze, but some more dramatically than others. During 1956-58, Shochiku's 'Ofuna-flavour' family movies - named after the studios near the town of Kamakura where they were made - were coming under criticism as being distinctly old-fashioned. Young people wanted stories that reflected their changing
T
world, not conservative home dramas about the lowermiddle classes or sentimental weepies about the hardships of post-war Japan, such as the films championed by Shochiku's president Shiro Kido and made by Yasujir6 Ozu or Keisuke Kinoshita. Eager not to be left behind, the company gave the green light for three new directors to make their debuts while still under the age of 30: Masahiro Shinoda, Kiju Yoshida (his name can also be read as Yoshishige) and Nagisa Oshima. These three would all become major figures over the next decade as part of a filmmaking movement that was termed by critics as the Japanese New Wave, or nuberu bagu, with Oshima acting as the main ambassador for a collection of filmmakers who challenged the status quo with their avant-garde mixing of pop culture and politics and their selfconscious positioning outside of the commercial mainstream. Though the Shochiku Nouvelle Vague label essentially began as a brand name developed by the company itself, it has been taken by some writers to refer to directors leading broader trends and changes within the country's filmmaking scene. Borrowed from the French term, the directors often seen as assembled under this collective banner were not so much consciously echoing Godard, Truffaut and their ilk, nor the synchronous movement in the United Kingdom made up, among others, of Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, but reacting to their own specific changing social and production circumstances within Japan.s9 In an article written in 1958, entitled "Is It a Breakthrough? (The Modernists of Japanese Film)'; Oshima had said of Crazed Fruit,"ln the rip of a skirt and the buzz of a motorboat, sensible people heard the heralding of a new generation of Japanese film."60 He went on to sing the praises of Kisses (1957), the debut film ofYasuz6 Masumura at Daiei. Masumura's film took its action away from the studio onto the bristling streets of Tokyo, using a free-moving camera technique that lent its story of two motorbike-riding lovers an unforgettably edgy tone. Masumura was just one of the first of this new breed that Oshima saw as marked with a "determination to create works that break with the traditions of premodern Japanese film'; a determination that he himself would manifest with his own 1959 debut, A Town of Love and Hope. Oshima's film told the tale of Masao, a teenager from an impoverished background who, when his mother falls sick, is forced into bringing in the family income through the ruse of selling pigeons that have an unerring ability to find their way back to his home so they can be sold again. One such scam brings him into 43
Behind the Pink Curtain
contact with the other side of the social divide when Ky6ko, the daughter of an electrical appliance factory owner, buys one as a gift for her brother. Shot in monochrome and using real-life locations in Tokyo's slum areas to address such issues as the unequal distribution of wealth and opportunities afforded to certain sectors of the population, Oshima's film shifted the traditional focus of Shochiku to social rather than domestic dramas. As David Desser points out, Oshima's debut more closely resembled the films of the Angry Young Men movement in Britain than the Sun Tribe movies.61 His next two titles, both shot in colour, adhered more closely to the taiyozoku formula, yet adopted an even more overtly political stance. Cruel StoryofYouth is set in the fervid world of student revolutionaries, young thrill-seekers, gangsters and backstreet abortions. Its incendiary depiction of its lowlife milieu established a link between youth, sex, violence and politics that, as Desser asserts, was "the essence of the New Wave and the essence of the '60s." Crucially, it also became the essence of many a pink film, especially those of K6ji Wakamatsu, whose links with radical leftwing political movements and his later association with Oshima we shall soon be looking at more thoroughly. The taiyozoku movies proved a highly influential but ultimately short-lived fad that was all but over by the tail end of the '50s, as Oshima himself perhaps ironically hinted at with the title of his third movie, The Sun's Burial, released in 1960. It was time for the industry to move on, but unfortunately the filmmakers seemed far more eager to break the mould than the studios. Oshima's fourth film, Night and Fog in Japan (1960), took its critique of the same year's newlyrevised Japan-US Security Treaty (or Anpo Agreement) that one step too far. The pact allowed, barely a decade after the end of the occupation, US forces to remain on Japanese soil under the pretext of protecting the country from the threat of communism in South East Asia. Oshima's film is set during the wedding of two young student radicals in the aftermath of the violent protests that unfolded in Tokyo during the signing of the treaty, but rather than toasting the happy future of the newlyweds, the guests' speeches immediately take the form of long political tirades and heartfelt recriminations about the sincerity of each others' involvement in the demonstration. Shochiku pulled the film mere days after its release, claiming such unconventional material was not what audiences wanted from a night at the movies. They probably had a point: to the modern viewer the film seems overbearingly pompous and theatrical, unfolding almost entirely on a single set with Brechtian flashbacks against a plain black background to highlight its political message. Righteously feeling that his creative voice had been stifled, Oshima left the studios acrimoniously. He moved to television for the next few years before setting up his own independent production house, 44
S6z6sha, through which he continued to make a string of highly innovative and challenging works that were to influence an enti re generation. Oshima never worked in the pink industry, though as we shall see he did brush shoulders with this world on several occasions. What his particular case serves to illustrate, however, is the way in which the established vertical system of production and exhibition through the studios' own theatrical networks was being challenged due to the efforts of a small group of individuals. Symptomatic of the manner in which exhibition opened up to new cinematic possibilities was the establishment of the Art Theatre Guild, or ATG. Prior to its foundation in 1961, there had been no significant outlet in Japan for experimental or artistic releases from any part of the world, yet alone domestic productions. Because of the existence of import quotas, foreign art film was rare, and distributors only selected films that would be fairly safe bets. In 1962, ATG established a small chain of ten cinemas across the country for just this purpose, including their flagship venue, Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka, which also became a major centre for experimental performance art and contributed to Shinjuku's status as the main centre for Tokyo's avantgarde arts scene in the '60s. ATG's first release was the Polish film Mother Joan of the Angels (1961 ), and it was followed by a host of similarly uncommercial foreign titles, both recent- such as Jean Cocteau's Le testament d'Orphee (1960), lngmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957), Luis Bunuel's Viridiana (1961) and John Cassavetes's Shadows (1959)and older ones like Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925), Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944). ATG also screened ambitious Japanese independent productions, including Hiroshi Teshigahara's Pitfall (1962), Kaneto Shind6's The Man (1962), Susumu Hani's She and He (1963), and later several of Nagisa Oshima's works. But the most critical impact ATG had on the Japanese theatrical landscape from the early '60s onwards was through its role in producing or co-producing dozens of some ofthe most interesting Japanese films of the next few decades: titles such as Sh6hei Imamura's A Man Vanishes (1967), Oshima's Death By Hanging (1968) and Boy (1969), and Kazuo Kuroki 's Evil Spirits ofJapan (1970), all the way up to Sago Ishii's Crazy Family (1984), J0z6 ltami's The Funeral (1984), and Nobuhiko Obayashi's Bound for the Fields, the Mountains and the Seacoast (1986).62 ATG might not immediately seem relevant to discussions of the genesis and evolution of the eroduction, though t heir films often did feature nudity and adult subject matter. What the case of ATG does highlight, however, is t he backdrop against which independent producers and directors came to carve out a significant niche in a market that had long been in the firm grip of the maj or studios. Both the eroduction producers and ATG offered audiences a chance to see
The Birth of the Eroduction
the type of film that had never really been seen before in Japan, representing a two-pronged assault of art and exploitation against a mainstream sector whose basis was in the family market. Nevertheless, ATG's championing of the lesscommercial ventures was not without major studio support. The greatest part of ATG's founding capital came from Toho, so it's more accurate to view its emergence as a sign of the majors adjusting to a new cultural climate than thinking ofthese art films as being in opposition to the mainstream. In other words, this new alternative cinematic subculture was essentially industry-sponsored. Furthermore, it owed much of its overseas exposure to the efforts of the married couple Nagamasa and Kashiko Kawakita who, from prior to the war onwards, had become the main agents in promoting Japanese cinema abroad through their agency named the T6wa Trading Partnership, and later formed a close partnership with Toho. When Nagamasa died, the Japan Film Library Council which he had founded - an archive of films intended to foster an understanding of Japanese culture abroad through the medium of cinema - became the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute, which is still active to this day.63 ATG did later produce works directed by figures hailing from the exploitation genres of the pink film and Nikkatsu's Roman Porno, with K6ji Wakamatsu's Ecstasy of the Angels (1972) and Eros Eterna (1977), and Banmei Takahashi's Tattoo (1982) representing the pink sector, and Case of the Disjointed Murder(1977) and Youth Part 2 (1979) offering two sojourns from Nikkatsu studios for directors ChOsei Sone and K6y0 Ohara respectively. But by and large, as Wakamatsu pointed out, during the '60s, •ATG was a kind of elite to which I didn't belong ... Even though ATG was showing art films, they were not really interested in minor films. At that time, Nikkatsu produced action movies with new stars such as YOjir6 Ishihara and Akira Kobayashi, and many of them were artistically quite ambitious. I wanted to make films like that, fil ms that reflected my thoughts and likings. Later the fi lms were called pink eiga, but at the time they were just called dokuritsu eiga or 'independent films:"64 An d so, as one side of the new production environment saw itself widely hailed internationally, the other remained hidden in the shadows of critical neg lect. While this was hardly a hindrance in commercial terms to the makers of the immediately popular eroduction movies, it has resulted in an obfuscation in overseas understanding about a sector of the market that would, in truth, sustain the industry over the next few decades, and indeed a sector that was far more dynamic and interesting than it was ever given credit for at the time. The prevailing increase in youthful subject matter at so many levels in Japanese cinema was not solely down to the efforts of a breakaway group of scripters and directors catering for a new post-war generation who
had come of age. It was also a reaction to broader demographic shifts that were threatening to dismantle cinema's traditional family market. Television was held solely responsible for this huge downward shift in cinema-going. By 1965, the new technology had infiltrated 60% of the nation's homes, a figure that would rise to 95% by 1970. This was matched by a correlative drop in cinema attendances, from 1,127 million in 1958 to 1,014 million in 1960. The figure dramatically plunged even further, to almost a third of this in 1965, at 373 million, and the downturn continued into the next decade, where it stabilised at a mere 174 million in 1975. Even though production as a whole hit a record high in 1960, with a grand total of 547 titles made, by 1962 the output of the majors had dropped by 30%.65 All of the major studios felt the pinch, but Shintoho was to fall at the first hurdle. Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku had gone way over budget, with the director sinking his own money into the production to realise his ambitious vision of hell's infernal torments, yet the resulting film failed to make sufficient box office returns when it was released. Shintoho managed to weather the storm for a further few months, in which time a number of other pictures were released, including Nakagawa's final film at the company, Kaa-chan, a grimy depiction of family hardship in occupied Tokyo. But by this t ime the company's downturn was irreversible.
above: "Agony Tears Mad Image Drama!" the posters scream out for this film ca lled Sexual Violence, directed by Toshio Okuwaki and released in 1968.
4
5
Beh i nd the Pink Curtain
above: Sixties glam our g irl Ayako Hitomi graces the cover of Seijin Eiga magazine, aimed at the more d iscerning eroductian viewer.
When Shintoho fell in May 1961 , as if from a hydra's severed head, up sprang two new companies to take its place. The first of these was founded a mere couple of months after Shintoho's bankruptcy by its former president, Mitsugu Okura. In the previous decade Ckura had proven his mogul credentials as someone with an eye keenly on the lower end of the market. While many of Shintoho's earlier directors either moved on to television or found employment with other companies such as Toho, a few stayed on alongside him to oversee the kind of lowly hack work that had originally proven Shintoho's bread and butter. To this aim, Ckura used his own company, Fuji Eiga, to buy up Shintoho's second studios in Tokyo's Setagaya district, and began production. Distribution was arranged through the chain of theatres he owned as part of a separate business concern. He named this new company, quite simply, Okura Eiga. Though few of Okura's early films are available for viewing, the titles suggest a continuation of the more exploitative genres of gang movies, ghost stories and prison dramas with which Shintoho had originally carved out its niche. Ckura was able to capitalise on the decreasing number of films produced by the majors as many theatres, especially those in the outlying provincial areas, were no longer able to fill their double (nihontate) or triple bills (sanbontate), so w ere crying out for supporting works to fill their schedules. He also started 46
introducing what was known as yo-pin, or foreignproduced erotic films, into Japanese cinemas at this time, though it is not exactly clear what these titles were. Meanwhile, across the other side of the country, a young man named K6ichi Got6, originally a Shintoho employee based in the company's Kansai sales office in Osaka, bought the name of the company in a rather complicated arrangement that saw Shintoho's back catalogue ending up in the hands of a company named Kokusai H6ei (Internat ional Television Films Inc.), and the remaining business holdings divided into three sections based in Tokyo, Kansai and Nagoya. In 1964, when he was only 33, Got6 borrowed money to purchase the management rights of the Kansai section, which he renamed and started afresh as Shintoho K6gy6 (Shintoho Entertainment) to differentiate from the company's original name of Shintoho Kabushikigaisha (Shintoho Corporation). The new company initially continued screening those Shintoho films produced by Okura that were still awaiting release at the time of the bankruptcy.The Tokyo branch was renamed Tokyo K6ei (Tokyo Entertainment Pictures), and began work producing and distributing pink films. Later, in 1972, Shintoho K6gy6 relocated to the capital and absorbed Tokyo K6ei to become Shintoho Eiga, under which name it still operates today. The pink film genre had its birth in 1962 with the release of Flesh Market, directed by Satoru Kobayashi, one of the filmmakers who had followed Okura from the original Shintoho. Born 1 August, 1930, Kobayashi had left his home in Nagano, where his family ran a hot spring resort hotel, for Tokyo where he studied theatre at Waseda University. For a while he was heavily involved in the worlds of theatre and Butoh, a modern school of dance that melded traditional Japanese forms with Western influences, and while at university he began writing criticism and working on stage set design. He entered Shintoho in 1954 and started working as an assistant director for such notable names as Hiroshi Shimizu, Teruo Ishii and Japan's first female director, Kinuyo Tanaka, best known for her work as an actress, particularly in the films of Kenji Mizoguchi. Kobayashi made his debut in 1959 with the luridly-titled Mad Lust, and made a further ten works with titles such as Dangerous Temptation (1960), Three Women Burglars (1960), and Phantom Detective: Terrifying Alien (1960), before Shintoho's collapse. Despite t he unambitious nature of much of his oeuvre, Kobayashi's place in Japanese film history is assured if only due to Flesh Market. Though the term had yet to be coined, it is considered by Japanese film historians to be the first pink film. Within two days of its opening, its run was stopped by the Metropolitan Police, who seized all the prints and the original negative in the first incident of its kind since the war. According to the fil m's Chief Assistant Director, Kinya Ogawa, the enterprising producers immediately reassembled a new version from the rushes and leftover footage, minus a
The Birth of the Eroduction
few of the more offensive scenes, and put this out in its stead.66 The film was immediately profitable considering the tiny resources on which it was made (a mere ¥6 million at a time when the average studio production was ¥40-50 million),67 no doubt due to the huge amount of copy the incident inspired in the national press. The term eroduction was immediately coined to describe this emerging strain of minuscule-budget exploitation cinema of the type that Okura would increasingly specialise in, especially after the costly failure of Kiyoshi Komori's war epic The Pacific War and the Star Lily Corps (1962), about the group of hospital nurses stationed in Okinawa, the Himeyuri Butai, and their role in the suicidal final battle against the Americans at the end of the war. It is impossible to say whether Kobayashi's landmark film lives up to its historical legacy, as only a 21-minute fragment of the film remains locked away in the archives of the National Film Centre. According to written synopses, the story concerned a 17-year-old girl (played byTamaki Katori, who we can thus count as the first ever star of the pink film), whose investigation into the mysterious suicide of her elder sister in the Westernised enclave of Tokyo's Roppongi district brings her into the clutches of a group of criminallowlifes.68 The surviving fragments of Flesh Market at least represent 21 minutes more than what remains of most of the pink films produced in the '60s, whose prints were either junked immediately once they'd outlived their usefulness or subsequently wore away to nothing through repeated projection.69 Outside of the works of K6ji Wakamatsu and his colleagues, produced at his own company Wakamatsu Pro - thus allowing the director himself to take care of the original prints and negativesonly about a dozen or so films from this first decade have been released on video in Japan, mostly on the Hummingbird label. Interestingly, a number of pink films long forgotten in Japan have survived in various subbed or dubbed edits solely because they were distributed overseas. The catalogue of the Something Weird label in the US includes a number of such titles not listed in the holdings of the National Film Centre archive, including Tetsuji Takechi's Daydream (1964), Seiichi Fukuda's Boneless (1967) and Toshio Okuwaki's Naked Pursuit (1968). Because of this, much of the knowledge about the early eroductions comes from textual sources like the magazine Seijin Eiga ('Adult Films') which, between the years 1965-73, enjoyed a glorious reign as the primary source of information on the pink film (surprisingly, given its subject matter and its approach to it, Seijin Eiga was actually edited by a woman, Nobuko Kawashima), or the annual reference volumes published by Gendai Eiga Kenkyukai ('The modern film research association'), like Kono 12 nenkan no fOzoku eiga sh0taij6 ('These 12 Years of Sex Films Compendium') or Nihon sekushii eiga zenshO ('Japanese Sexy Films Complete Works'), which list all releases in a given year.
Flesh Market was one of four such eroductions to be made during the genre's first year. One of the others came from a rather more unlikely source. Sojir6 Motogi had been a major power atToho studios from the end of the war onwards, and in the capacity of a producer was behind many classic titles from the '50s, including a number of Akira Kurosawa's most famous, such as lkiru and Seven Samurai. In 1962, Motogi made Free Trade in Flesh and continued directing a further hundred or so films in the pink genre under a number of pseudonyms, the most common of which was Takeo Takagi, for companies which included Okura Eiga,Cine Unimonde,G Pro and Million Film. His movies had titles like Women: Three Hundred and Sixty Five Nights (1966), Devilish Married Woman (1966), Girl University Student: Virgin Play (1968), Peeping Heaven (1974), and Sensual College Girl: I Want to Give It to You! (1977). After just a few years, the output of the eroduction companies rocketed: twenty four such films were produced in 1963; sixty five in 1964; and two hundred and thirteen in its peak year of 1965, after which the figure dropped off slightly.7° In this free-for-all hungry market, the companies that made them proliferated, split, merged, renamed and occasionally disappeared overnight at a rate that is virtually impossible to track (which may well have been their aim, so as to shield the activities of those involved from the taxman). Some of the more prominent names from this first decade are Nihon Cinema, Aoi Eiga, KPC, Ropp6 Eiga, Kant6 Film Distribution (Kant6 Eihal), Kant6 Movie (Kant6 MObil), World Eiga and H6ei. But of all these the most significant to emerge, at least from today's perspective, was Kokuei. Alongside Shintoho and Okura Eiga, it is the only survivor from this first decade, and in fact the company predates the arrival of the genre by several years. CENSORED I . . . By Maryland State Board of Ce CONDEMNED I ... Tanizaki's Erotic Novel BANNED I .. . Venice Film Festival Shocked I "DAYDREAM" Ads Refused in San Francisco FILM FREEDOM GUARANTEED BY SUPREME COURT RULINGS
NOW IT
CAN BE SEEN!
above: Tetsuji Takechi's legendary Daydream (1964) owes its reputation and its survival to its w ide-circulation overseas. (courtesy of Something Weird Video Inc. and Box Office International Pictures)
47
Behind the Pink Curta i n
Founded in 1955 by Teruo Yamoto, a former postoffice employee, Kokuei initially made films for the Min istry of Education (the company's name means 'National Pictures'). According to its current president, Daisuke Asakura, the company first discovered how profitable sex films could be when it,"happened to come across some short films from abroad and ran them on a double bill with Toei and Shochiku.They were huge hits.There wasn't anything like them in Japan back then." These shorts were the same imported recordings of live strip shows, or sh6 eiga, referred to in chapter 2, and they proved a major cash cow for the company from around 1957 onwards. 48
In 1963, Kokuei made their first contribution to the newly burgeoning eroduction scene with Valley of Lust. Nothing survives of this intriguing-sounding film, nor its sequel, Cave of Lust, bar a handful of publicity stills, but the subject matter seems to be something of an oddity compared with other works of its t ime. As Asakura recalls,"Full nudity was out of the question at the time, so we had to do semi-nude. The question was, how to make a woman semi-nude?" The solution was these 'Female Tarzan' movies. They featured a topless lead (Kazuko Mine in the first film), t he sole human amongst a cast of bears, mo nkeys and other
The Birth of the Eroduction
assorted wildlife. The two films were both directed by the former TV director K6ji Seki, reportedly hired for his experience in filming animals for children's nature documentaries. His new employment saw him embark on a completely new career trajectory. Seki was up to his. neck in pink production until 1985, and he was not alone. This was a world that proved tricky to break out of once you were in. Footnotes 59 Desser, David. Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema.lndiana: Indiana University Press, 1988. pg 4. 60 Osh ima, Nagisa. Cinema, Censorship and the State. pg 26-35. Translated from the article in the July 1958 edition of the magazine Eiga Hy6ron (Film Criticism). 61
Desser, David. Eros Plus Massacre. pg 48.
62 See the 174-page catalogue for the ATG retrospective at the 2003 Vienna International Film Festival, entitled Art Theatre Guild:
Unabhiingiges Japanisches Kino 1962- 1984. 63 For more information on Kawakita, see Richie, Donald, A Tribute to the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute. Hawaii International Film Festival catalogue 1991. Also Robinson, David, "Travels with Mrs. Kawakita'; Sight and Sound, Autumn 1987. pg 253-155, and Mellen, Joan, Voices from the Japanese Cinema. New York: Liveright, 1975. pg 59-71. 64 Interview with Hirasawa, Go. "Against the Grain: Changes in Japanese Cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s': Minikomi 70. pg 60.
65 The statistics can be found on the Unijapan website at www.unijapan.org. Out of interest, attendances hit rock bottom in 1996, at a 120 million, but the good news is that they steadily climbed after this, and by 2004 were up to 170 million again. 66
Ogawa, Kinya, interviewed in the documentary Pink Ribbon.
67 lnuhiko, Yomoto provides a wonderful portrait of the cinema-going climate during the '60s in the essay "Deux ou trois chose que je sais d' ATG'; printed in the Art Theatre Guild catalogue that accom panied the ATG retrospective at the Vienna International Film Festival in 2003.
68 See Pink & Porno. Tokyo: Neko Cinema, 2001. pg 160.
69 I have not been able to establish how many prints were typically struck for each film.
70 Homepage for the Pink Ribbon documentary, www.uplink.co.jp/ pinkribbon/ bangai.html.
opposite: Scenes from Kokuei's lost female Tarzan film, Valley of Lust (1963), starring Kazuko Mine. I!:IKokuei this page: Images fro m its sequel, Cave of Lust, starring Aki Ema. I!:IKokuei
49
chapter five
Pioneers of the Pink Film he early development of the systems of production, distribution and exhibition that eventually congealed to form the pink industry bears a curious resemblance to the birth of the global institution of cinema itself. Many of the genre's early works are lost and its exact genesis is shrouded in mystery and myth; this small world was a chaotic, profligate and disreputable one, and much of its output thus went unrecorded and many of its practitioners unrecognised. What we can say is that the '60s not only saw the establishment of three of the major pink companies that would still dominate the scene at the end of the millennium, it also marked the debuts of the first generation of pink filmmakers, many of whom would go on to form their own production companies and continue at the core of their chosen sphere for the next few decades. Many of the early directors emerged from the small-screen medium of television, including Koji Wakamatsu, K6ji Seki, Kaoru Umezawa and Mamoru Watanabe, as well as other, lesser-known, figures like Tsutomu Konno, an in-house director atTBS whose sole contribution to the genre was Naked Insect for Kokuei in 1965. TV at this time provided a stable income for fledgling filmmakers, but it was an anonymous form of filmmaking and was viewed as a poor second-best to earning a living making 'real' movies. The eroduction at least provided a way of making feature films that would be exhibited theatrically. Directors who came from a bona fide background in cinema included Satoru Kobayashi and Kinya Ogawa, both associates of Mitsugu Okura, while Sojir6 Motogi, as previously mentioned, moved to making pink films after producing several of the internationally-renowned classics directed by Akira Kurosawa.Seiichi Fukuda came from Shochiku's Kyoto studios, where he turned out dozens of B-movie jidai-geki and other similar program pictures during the '50s. Shinya Yamamoto originally worked as an assistant director at lwanami Productions, a company that specialised in making industrial PR and educational films, and fostered such important figures in the history of Japanese documentary as Shinsuke Ogawa, Noriaki Tsuchimoto and Susumu Hani (though Hani is perhaps better known overseas for his fictional work). Kan Mukai71 also began with documentaries, making his debut in 1962 with the kyoiku eiga, or 'education film; Two Boys. His first pink film, an omnibus of three sexually-themed stories entitled Flesh, was distributed by Kokuei in 1965. Hajime lzu directed only one film - pink or otherwise - entitled quite simply Woman (1964). Prior to this single title for Kokuei he had been an actor at Toho, with fairly significant parts in
T
above: Kan Mukai's first pink film, Flesh, played widely outside of Japan under the alternative tit le of Naked Flesh. !OKokuei
S1
Behind the Pink Curtain
above: A lost classic? A scene from Naked Insect (1 965), directed by the longforgotten Tsuto mu Konno. ©Kokuei
classic titles like Fumio Kamei and Satsuo Yamamoto's War and Peace (1 947), Teinosuke Kinugasa's Actress (1 947), Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (1 949), and Mikio Naruse's Wife (1 953). Giichi Nishihara enjoyed an even more colourful path into the industry. His early success as a professional boxer saw him making a guest appearance in the Daiei production Street of Iron Fists (1 947), directed by K6z6 Saeki. This triggered off Nishihara's interest in filmmaking and led to a job as an assistant director on Morning Star Song (1949) by the same director, setting him off on a new career path as both a bit player and a freelance filmmaker for companies such as Daiei or NHK television, before he founded his own pink production company, Aoi Eiga, and made his debut with Highway of Passion in 1965 (the kanji used for Aoi is the plant hollyhock, rather than the homophonic word for 'blue: to suggest 'blue film'). In 2002, his memoirs Yakuza Kantoku ('Gangster Director') were published, detailing this eventful life story along with his brushes with the criminal underworld. The early practitioners were unimaginably prolific, with literally thousands of works between them directed over the course of the following decades, a comparatively minuscule number of which are available for viewing. Furthermore, complete filmographies of these early figures remain elusive. The primary source of information - the Japanese Movie Database website (JMDB), which draws its information from previous editions of Japan's premier film magazine, Kinema Junp6 - is frustratingly patchy. For example, Kinya Ogawa is cited in various sources as making well over five hundred films, maintaining a workaholic rate of a film per month for much of his career, which is borne out by the fact that he celebrated this landmark figure in 1994 with the erotic period drama Mystica/48 Positions: PillowPicture Woman, shot on location at Shochiku's studios in Ofuna, and with a budget of 10 million yen (three times the average, making it one of the most expensive pink 52
productions ever). However, the JMDB only (!) credits 41 7 titles to Ogawa's name, and more crucially fails to include his 1973 title Sex Manual of the Human Race. Produced to celebrate Okura's 60th anniversary in the movie business, and more importantly also as a reaction to Nikkatsu's new Roman Porno line, it allegedly cost 100 million yen (over thirty times more than the average pink film), a figure which seems inord inately generous for a film of this type, and has no doubt been inflated by the typically grandstanding claims of its producer. Nevertheless, this exhaustive trawl through mankind's sexual history, a kind of Japanese counterpart to The Nine Ages of Nakedness (1969), is by general consensus the most expensive pink film of all time. Though it seems there are no prints available for viewing today, one source, published nearer to the original release date, calls attention to two naked gaijin self-consciously posing as Adam and Eve, providing at least some indication of the film's contents.72 The eminence of the directors cited today for their impact on the subsequent course of the pink genre is not so much due to their individual fi lms. It is better attributed to the manner in which they carved out a niche for themselves in the evolving market by forming their own companies through which they produced their own films and nurtured new talent, in doing so creating an entirely new movement. The year 1965 alone saw the establishment ofWakamatsu Pro, Aoi Eiga and Mukai Productions, and by the '70s the practice of directors producing their works through their own companies was commonplace. Many of these filmmakers were highly idealistic about what they wanted to achieve, which was not so much fame for their own films, but setting a generation of younger proteges on a path of carrying on what they had begun. Kan Mukai is particularly significant in this respect. His production house, founded in 1979 after the demise of his original Mukai Productions, was called Shishi Pro. Though spelt with the kanji for 'lion: the name was apparently intended as a pun based around the double repetition of the character shi, meaning 'four: signifying his ambition to foster sixteen directors who would go on to achieve success in their own right. This duly happened with, among others, Hisayasu Sat6 emerging as one of the most infamous figures of the '80s pink scene, and Y6jir6 Takita being launched on a highly successful trajectory in mainstream cinema. Other filmmakers to pass through Mukai's company included Takuaki Hashiguchi, Shinji lmaoka, Minoru lnao, Shuji Kataoka, Hirotake Mukae, Sabur6 Naito, Yuji Tajiri, Kaoru Umezawa, Mototsugu Watanabe, Masahiro Kasei, and Takahisa Zeze, as well as a number of ci nematog ra phers. 73 There is a big distinction that should be made here however, between actual production companies like Wakamatsu Pro and Shishi Pro, which employed several directors, screenwriters and other crew members and
Pioneers of the Pink Film
creative agents, and pro forma 'companies' (often not even registered) that directors often form because pink film distributors will not sign contracts with individuals, and in fact are financed by the distributors, not by the company itself. The former situation seems to be very much a thing of the past, and while nowadays it is not uncommon for a director to produce films through his (or her) own company, this company typically takes the form of a small production unit that can be hired for subcontracted work. In many respects, in its formative years the eroduction was nothing like the industry we know today. For a start, the very term pinku eiga had yet to take hold. It was first introduced into movie-going parlance in 1963, when the appearance of the naked jungle goddess at the heart of Valley of Lust prompted Minoru Murai, a journalist for the sports newspaper the Naigai Times, to advocate, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a Pink Ribbon Award for these new eroductions in place of the Blue Ribbon Award, which was given to the year's best mainstream movies as selected by the sports newspapers 74 and sponsored by the Tokyo Film Press Association. The Blue Ribbon Award is still going to this day, but Murai's suggestion would also be taken up subsequently by a variety of specialist publications committed to this new erotic underground, such as Seijin Eiga, ZOOM-UP and, most recently, PG. The choice of colour wasn't based on the Western dichotomy of 'blue for boys, pink for girls;'75 it suggested the rosy flush of sensuality that the works strove to provoke, which is strongly sensed in the Japanese word for the colour momo-iro, meaning quite literally, 'peach-coloured'. Peaches in themselves were an ancient symbol of fertility in Southeast Asia due to their suggestive shape and colour; hence the origins of the Japanese legend of Momotar6 (the Peach Boy) and the banishment from the land of the gods of the simian central character of Wu Cheng'en's 16th Century classic of Chinese literature, Journey to the West (Xiyouj1), for stealing these forbidden fruits. Furthermore, the character used for the word 'colour; which is read iro (or shoku or shiki in compound words) has strong sexual connotations: scholars believe it to be derived from a shape representing one person bending over another bending person.76 It is used in words such as koshoku ('amorousness'), iroppoi and iroke (both essentially meaning 'sexiness'), as well as for specific colours (i.e. cha-iro, literally 'tea colour; for 'brown; or sora-ira for 'sky blue'). The pinku eiga moniker for these films didn't fully catch on until much later in the '60s, so throughout these discussions of this first decade the descriptive label will be used interchangeably with the thenpopular term eroduction. Nor were the early titl es initially released into specialist adult chains, which arrived later in the decade along with other conventions such as the film's one-hour length (many of the '60s films were around the 80-minute mark), the clockwork-
like appearance of the sex scenes, and the films' manner of screening as part of rolling triple-bill programs. Instead, the early eroduction films were released to standard cinemas to fill up shortfalls in theatre schedules due to the waning output of the majors. In the beginning, according to Kokuei's Daisuke Asakura,"Out in the provinces, newly released movies weren't run immediately, and movies that were released in Tokyo took about a month or two to get there. So we'd run ours together with these. And these drew a crowd. So things began in the provinces .. . At the time there were no triple bills, so shooting about six works a year was enough to make a living."77 As the decade wore on and the major studios produced less and less, the demand for such audience-drawing independent productions grew. In April of 1965- the year representing the zenith of pink production, with two hundred and thirteen titles released - Okura's network of contractor cinemas was brought together under one roof to form the OP Chain (OP Chen ), exclusively for the screening of seijin eiga.The original OP Chain (the company was dissolved and reformed on several occasions) distributed t he films of Nihon Cinema (which had been founded by a former member of Kokuei, Hidemaru Washio), Aoi Eiga, Kanto Movie, Kant6 Eihai, World Eiga and Ropp6 Eiga, as well as those of Okura's own production company. Kokuei was also supposed to join originally but, disapproving of Okura's dominance, countered with the establishment of the so-called dokuritsu chen ('independent chain'), which distributed its own films along with those of Nichiei and the new Shintoho (or rather, their Tokyo branch, Tokyo K6ei). This rival network was soon disbanded though, due to disagreements between the various parties. Nevertheless, by the beginning of the '70s the pink industry had developed its own selfcontained system of distribution. Before this however, the majors had also begun taking an active role in picking up these cheap productions to distribute themselves, with Shochiku and Nikkatsu between them showing the early works of Tetsuji Takechi and K6ji Wakamatsu in t hei r own theatres. Sexual subject matter also became more central to these companies' works. Having captured the attention of the new youth market with the first taiyozoku films, the company that unleashed the flood, Nikkatsu, had gone on to take a more populist route, making a string of commercial and initially highlyprofitable light entertainment films that put the most commercial elements of the earlier films - their young and charismatic young stars - to work in a series known as Nikkatsu Action. These films were colourful cocktails that drew heavily from foreign movies of such diverse genres as the musical, romance, gangster movie and even the Western (the so-ca lled 'Miso Western'). However, a couple of films distributed by the company that strayed from this commercial formula proved immensely influential on the pink genre. 53
Behind the Pink Curtai n
The first of these was Insect Woman (1963), directed by Sh6hei Imamura, a hugely important filmmaker in the history of Japanese cinema, whose name is often linked with the Nouvelle Vague due to his documentaryinspired explorations of cinematic technique and his focus on the largely-overlooked lower orders of society: this film's Japanese title, translating as Entomological Chronicles of Japan, highlights the almost scientific detachment with which the director treated his characters. Born in Tokyo in 1926 to a physician father, Imamura came from a fairly well-to-do background. However, as a young man growing up in the wake of the war, he began to stray from the conventional path that his upbringing had prepared him for, dropping out of
54
his guaranteed place at Waseda University (one of the country's most reputable educational institutions), where he was due to study Western History. The occupation period instead saw Imamura pitched into an entirely different environment populated by whores, gangsters and racketeers, as he hawked cigarettes and liquor stolen from US military bases on the black market and became heavily involved with a left-wing theatrical troupe. Both he and the circles he mixed in were highly critical of t he emperor system that had led the country into war, and this is heavily reflected in his subsequent body of work for the screen, which often poses questions about the true nature of the Japanese character and how it was at variance with the official vision that the country was trying to promote. Insect Woman is a pivotal work in his oeuvre, a gritty fanfare to the common man, or rather woman, centring as it does around the earthy figure of Tome (Sachiko Hidari), born in an impoverished rural village in the northerly T6hoku area just prior to the end of the war. The story unfolds chronologically as it charts her rise from lowly hooker to brothel madam after being drawn through financial necessity to Tokyo, with intertitles and location shots of incidents such as the anti-American Anpo protests serving to situate Tome's story within its changing historical context.
top: Shllhei Imamura's arthouse masterpiece, Insect Woman (1963}, widely cited as a huge influence o n the nascent erodudion g enre. C>Nikkatsu Corporat ion above: Sachiko Hidari in Insect Woman, for which she won the Best Actress Award at the Berlin Internat ional Rim Festival. C>Nikkatsu Corpo ration
Pioneers of the Pink Film
One would have thought that few would locate Imamura's film (which was voted the best of the year by the critics of Kinema Junp6 and won Sachiko Hidari, along with her role in She and He - incidentally directed by her husband Susumu Hani- two Best Actress awards at the 14th Berlin International Film Festival) within the pink film genre. However, the director Mamoru Watanabe holds the opinion that it was this title, rather than Flesh Market, whose subject matter and manner of presenting it proved most influential to the typical eroduction narrative/B Viewing the film alongside many of the genre's subsequent works, it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to see the connections. Imamura's distinctive treatment of his fema le characters as the backbone of Japanese society - vivacious, tenacious and assertive - was highly original at the time, and closer to the contemporary reality of most viewers than the refined dramatic archetypes that had hitherto dominated the screen. More importantly, the film trod new ground in its cinematic presentation of its subject matter.Though what precious little nudity there is hardly seems played for titillatory intent, the behindthe-scenes portrayals of brothel life and its matter-offact depiction of sexual activity as something as commonplace and natural as eating or breathing seemed bold and daring at the time. And finally, the external scenes of the fet:~ces surrounding the American airbase outside of which the brothel is located, and its images of protests and of downtown Tokyo in a state of transformation, would become motifs employed within countless pink films during the '60s, most notoriously in Tetsuji Takechi's Black Snow (1965). For the average pink production, there were no studios on hand to film at and so the only option was to shoot on location. The crews never applied for location permits, so were forced to grab their footage guerrillastyle. The filmmakers considered themselves to be outlaws, people whose class and background saw them barred from the traditional studio system. Insect Woman was something that was possible to emulate within these limitations, both in terms of what it portrayed, and also the means with which it portrayed them. It vividly captured the spirit of the time, depicting an environment that would have proved resonant and familiar to many viewers. It is also important to bear in mind the cultural backdrop against which Insect Woman's story is set.The year after its release all eyes became fixed on Japan, when the 1964 Olympic Games were held in Tokyo. The event signalled both the country's emergence on the international podium as a major rising economic power, and also a newly-found confidence among the public after almost two decades spent rising from the doldrums of wartime devastation. The games arrived in the same year the new T6kaid6 Shinkansen ('bullet train') line opened, forging a high-speed link between Tokyo and Osaka. As the capital became the locus for
Japan's rapid industrial expansion, the proliferation of blue-collar workers drawn to the city and living in cramped company dormitories formed the core audience for the eroduction. Sporting a similar plot to Imamura's film, but bringing a more luridly lip-smacking emphasis to the events portrayed in its serialised narrative, was K6ji Wakamatsu's Chronicle of an Affair. Made in 1965, this tells the tale of a young farmer's daughter, Kayo, and her departure for Tokyo from her oppressive small village environment after a violent rape by three local roughnecks leaves her, in one of the genre's most iconic sequences, flailing around naked in the snow. Kayo's arrival in the big city occurs due to her being sold into a brothel run by the yakuza. After managing to escape from the rut of the sex industry via a brief spell working in a sewing factory alongside numerous other girls drawn from the countryside, she finally finds salvation at the hands of a wealthy sugar daddy, but her next attempt at social improvement ends up with her in a police cell, suspected of murder. The story is framed through Kayo's police interrogation, and though, typically for the genre, much of its critique of patriarchal authority is manifested by the sensationalised depictions of the protagonist's suffering at the hands of her many exploiters, ultimately she is seen as strong, wily and gaining the upper hand. With films such as this, Wakamatsu became the first director in the pink genre whose name on the poster would in itself be enough to draw audiences. His masterstroke in this film, and one of the keys to his early popularity, was in staying true to his own experiences. Like both Imamura's heroine Tome and, more importantly, Wakamatsu himself, Kayo hails from the region ofT6hoku at the north of Japan's main island of Honshu. Th is area plays an important role in Wakamatsu's narratives, both in eroduction works such
above: Midori Chigusa, in the oft-emulated but never equalled rape scene that sets Wakamatsu's Chronicle of an Affair (1965) in motion. ©Wakamat su Pro
55
Behind the Pink Curtain
as Running in Madness, Dying in Love (1969) and the director's more recent non-pink film, Cycling Chronicles: Landscapes the Boy Saw (2005), in which a 17-year-old boy drifts aimlessly across Japan on a bicycle after murdering his mother. The timeless and majestic mountainous panoramas of Kayo's birthplace are juxtaposed with the transforming backdrop of a capital swarming with construction workers and commuting salarymen. This use of contrasting landscapes to depict the individual as a product of a specific time and place would be adopted, adapted and deployed in a more theoretical manner later by one of Wakamatsu's key collaborators, Masao Adachi, and became known as 'landscape theory' (fOkei-ron). The films ofWakamatsu, Adachi and their associates will be looked at in more detail in the following chapter, but it is first worth pointing out the sardonic final scene in Chronicles of an Affair, which sees Kayo walking free from the police holding cell as a neon sign behind her displays a scrolling message to the effect that America will protect Japan, articulating the increasingly domineering light in which the country's former occupiers were coming to be seen by certain sectors of the population. This view would inform the political agenda of many of the eroduction films of this time. Chronicle of an Affair formed a template that would be reductively repeated in the pink film of the '60s, depicting women drawn by hardship from the provinces to the big city, where they would find themselves browbeaten and overwhelmed by the forces of patriarchy and capitalism. It lead directly to two films, also produced by Kokuei and going under the same name, that followed a similar format, though with the images of debasement increasingly overwhelming proceedings: Kan Mukai's Continuation: Chronicle of an Affair (1 966) and Osamu Yamashita's New: Chronicle of an Affair (1 967), in which a young ama girl is raped on a beach and attempts to start a new life as a nude model in Tokyo.
56
above: Kan Muka i restaged Wakamatsu·s infamous gang rape on a beach in his unofficial sequel to t he original, Continuation: Chronicle afan Affair(1966}. Wakamatsu Pro
Emerging from the Underground: Wakamatsu Pro
lull during the '70s, for various reasons that will soon become apparent, he continued to lens other films produced by Wakamatsu, including Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses and Akitaka Kimata's adaptation of Tanizaki's The Key (1983). Along with K6ichi Saito, whose talents are best evidenced in the films of Takahisa Zeze during the '90s, lt6 is one of the most important cinematographers to work within the field of the pink fi lm. The most crucial component in the story of the evolution of Wakamatsu Pro, however, has to be Masao Adachi. The name of Wakamatsu's closest aide has remained arguably one of the best-kept secrets in Japanese cinema history for decades. From the mid-70s to the dawn of the new millennium, he was fighting a different battle on the other side of the world, in the Middle East. Before this however, he left behind him what can only be described as some of the most perplexing, idiosyncratic, and politically contentious works of the period, and not just within the field of pinku eiga. When he finally returned to his homeland after almost three decades, it was under rather ignominious circumstances. Adachi's childhood is charted in some detail in the book Eiga I Kakumei ('Film I Revolution'), comprised of a series of interviews with the director conducted by G6 Hirasawa and published in 2003. Born in 1939 in Yawata, one of several cities amalgamated in 1963 to form the larger urban hub of Kita-Kyushu on the most southerly of Japan's four main islands, Adachi had similar workingclass roots to Wakamatsu. The region, which later fostered the filmmakers S6go Ishii and Shinji Aoyama, as well as a healthy punk scene in the late '70s, had its economic base in heavy industries such as mining, and indeed Adachi's father worked in a steel mill, although he died when Adachi was still young due to lung problems caused by breathing in the polluted factory air. Growing up with nine elder siblings in a one-parent family was tough but, nevertheless, Adachi graduated from high school and in 1959 entered Nihon University in Tokyo, the country's largest institute of higher education. Here, Adachi soon became an active member of the Nihon University Film Study Club (Nihon daigaku eiga kenkyu-kai}, commonly referred to by its abbreviated name, Nichidai Eiken. The group included names like Katsumi Hirano, Motoharu J6nouchi and lsao Okishima. The latter joined Wakamatsu Pro around the same time as Adachi, and though little known outside of experimental filmmaking circles, did make one film for the company in 1969, entitled New Jack and Betty. Alongside more playful projects like Document LSD (1961 ), in which J6nouchi filmed his own experiences under the influence of mind-bending drugs, one of the early activities in which the fledgling filmmakers immersed themselves was documenting the Anpo protests. As G6 Hirasawa, an expert on Japanese
underground cinema from the period writes, however, the films were never made with the intention of being completed, nor even as even being a record of the struggles, but their making, "gave birth to a methodology that presented images as a process of action." 724 Put simply, it seems that while none of the group were hoping for a career in the commercial industry, finding their satisfaction in the act of filming in itself, even in these early days there was a heavy ideological rhetoric surrounding their creative endeavours, which was carried through into Adachi's first major work, Rice Bowl (1961 ).125 Though this cryptic 25-minute, 16mm experimental piece was initiated by Adachi, it is a point of debate whether he really can be said to have directed it . Throughout its production, the traditional hierarchies of filmmaking were idealistically dismantled so that no one single person received a directorial credit and the roles of the individual crew members, from assistants to camera operators to the director himself, were swapped continuously. Such utopian visions of communal filmmaking may have proven chaotic, but they at least bore fruit, and so Adachi, along with four other Nichidai Eiken students, established the VAN Film Science Research Centre, a filmmaking commune that soon became a hangout for a wider artistic community of musicians, performers, photographers and other artists. For their first project, VAN carried on the same working methodology used for Rice Bowl, combining the previously shot Anpo riot footage with staged scenes of Michiko Kanba's death at the hands of the riot police.The resulting film, Document 6/ 15, was premiered in 1962 in a large tent at a Zengakuren rally held to commemorate the first anniversary of Kanba's death. Its projection was intended as a one-off'happening; a multi-media frenzy that featured, among other things, slides of Western paintings projected onto the screen, objects dangling from the roof obstructing the projection, and two intentionally unrelated soundtracks blaring over one another, one of which, due to a technical hitch, could only be heard outside the tent by the gathered throngs who were unable to fit into the tent and see the projected images.f26 The student participants in the previous year's protests outside the National Diet Building had expected something a little more faithful to the events the film was supposed to be portraying, and were not particularly impressed with the end results, although the film was screened again at a gathering the following year. Not long after the VAN group's Document 6/ 15 project, Adachi and several of these early collaborators, including lsao Okishima, made another experimental work called Sain. According to Hirasawa, its production process involved, "LSD experiments, black mass ceremonies and the like': and "symbolized the blocked up times after the 1960 Security Treaty defeat through the image of a woman's congenitally constricted 87
Behind the Pink Curtain
above: Hatsuo Yamaya p lays the em otionally troubled sadist in The Embryo Hunts in Secret. \OWakamatsu Pro bottom right: Experimental imagery in the disturbing The Embryo Hunts in Secret. C!Wakamatsu Pro
vagina." (The Japanese word Sain refers to this medical condition). Sources vary as to when the film was actually completed, with most sources giving its release year as 1965, but the JMDB lists the date and venue of its premiere as 3 November, 1963, at the Zen-Nihon Gakusei Eiga-sai, or 'All Japan Students Film Festival' presumably linked in some way to Zengakuren. Whether the film can actually be described as 'premiered' as such is a moot point. Like Document 6/ 75 it was intended as another counter-cultural 'happening: entitled Sain no gi ('The Ceremony of the Blocked Vagina'), this time involving live music, performance and liberal dosages of mind-altering substances, but the day it was supposed to be screened, the film itself went missing, believed stolen. The 'happening' went ahead in true Dadaist fashion without its centrepiece, unfolding in the riotous, unruly fashion no doubt intended before being cut short by a visit from the riot police, who were aware of the members' involvement with the student protestors. After judging the screening to be a 'political gathering: the audience was promptly dispersed. In 1965, Sa in was shown at ATG's flagship cinema, the Shinjuku Bunka, which is how Adachi and Wakamatsu came into contact. As Wakamatsu recalled in an interview with Dimitri Ianni, "One day I saw an enormous queue outside the Shinjuku Bunka. Someone told me it was for the projection of the film Sain, which has been directed by Masao Adachi when he was a student at Nichidai. He wanted, it seemed, to become my assistant. I was 29 and Adachi was 26, and I went to see this film, which I couldn't understand at all, but I nonetheless found interesting. I thought that this director had qualities which I didn't have, so I asked him to become my assistant on The Sun Is Redder Than Blood."127 88
Adachi made his presence felt immediately after starting work at Wakamatsu Pro:"ln fact, I have to say he was a really bad assistant. One day we had to shoot a scene in which one of the characters was holding a sword. He forgot to bring the sword, and replaced it with a wooden baton. I was so furious I sent him home and told him never to come back. Several days later he came to see me with a bottle of sake; at that moment I began to appreciate him and entrusted him with the job of a scriptwriter."728 Adachi may have made a useless assistant, but as a scriptwriter he proved tremendously inventive, hyperefficient and, one can only assume, immensely influential. There's a notable difference to Wakamatsu's films made in the second half of the decade, as he drifted from the more realist, plot-driven narratives of Chronicle of an Affair and Secret Acts Behind Walls into more elusive, experimental, not to mention darkly sadistic territory. Considering that the change is manifest after the period Adachi came onboard, writing his first screenplay for Wakamatsu with The Embryo Hunts in Secret in 1966, it is a little ironic that titles such as this, Violated Angels, A Womb to Let (1968), and Go Go Second Time Virgin are viewed as archetypal Wakamatsu films. Incidentally, though The Embryo Hunts in Secret was written using Wakamatsu Pro's customary penname of Yoshiaki Otani, this was soon replaced by a mysterious screenwriting credit that began to appear on the titles of the company's films not long after, spelt with characters that effectively mean 'Out the Exit: and which can be read alternatively as lzuru Deguchi, Deru
Deguchi or De Deguchi. The Deguchi moniker was not the exclusive property of Adachi: Atsushi Yamatoya used it for Violent Virgin for example, and it was also used for screenwriting groups headed by Adachi. But it is with Adachi himself that the name is most associated. The change in style from his earlier films is also partially attributable to the decreasing means Wakamatsu had at its disposal now he'd gone independent. At under ¥2 million, The Embryo Hunts in Secret represents one of Wakamatsu Pro's tiniest budgets, with only the Yamatoya-scripted Violent Virgin, released a few years later, being produced for less. Its dark mood and indeed its very concept were born out of the shoestring funds at disposal for its production. After deciding to shoot in his own office, one night, while in a particularly morose frame of mind, Wakamatsu was struck by the impression of the rain outside, streaming down the window panes. He discussed his ideas for the film with his new screenwriter, and Adachi immediately went away and wrote a scenario for what was essentially his first non-student production, boasting a lavish finale in which the walls of the building exploded dramatically. Wakamatsu was impressed, though evidently less excited about the prospect of blowing up his own production office, so sent Adachi away to come up with something a little more manageable, which he duly delivered in an extraordinarily quick time. Less than a week later, the film was in the can. Opening with religious choral music and a quote from the book of Job before laying out the credits over a series of stills of foetuses, the drama begins with a man bringing back a young lady to his apartment. We can assume they're strangers, as he only gets round to asking her name after she has disrobed for him. Then,
what begins as a straightforward seduction soon develops sinister overtones, as he binds her to the single bed which provides the room's only furnishing, and keeps her imprisoned for several days, periodically exerting his pent-up misogynist urges on her using rope and whip. What Noel Burch describes as the "torture scenes which are the film's only narrative structure" 729 are interleaved with flashback,s initially insinuating that the man is reliving some traumatic primal scene, but later revealing that his rage has been transposed from a prior conflict between him and his wife over their unborn child.
this page: Masao Adachi and K6ji Wakamatsu's first collaboration, The Embryo Hunts in Secret (1966) featured only two performers, Hatsuo Yamaya and Miharu Shima. The film was shot on a minuscule budget in Wakamatsu's own production office. Nikkat su Corporatio n
shipped over by Toei for The Insatiable, and Andersson appeared alongside her in several local productions. There don't appear to be any more of these Swedish titles made by Nikkatsu, but it seems strange that the films, which to all intents and purposes must look like European ones, never appear to have been issued for the home viewing market in Japan, and the latter two are only mentioned in passing in Sadao Yamane's otherwise comprehensive reference book on Roman Porno, Kanno no puroguramu pikuchaa - Roman Poruno 1977-1982 zen eiga.219 It is as if they are not truly considered to be Japanese films, and yet they don't appear to have left any traces overseas either. As the decade wore on, Europe began to offer something more than just a pool of different coloured casts to draw upon. As the Nikkatsu 'obscenity' trial, prompted by the police seizure of Love Hunter and the films that had played alongside it, continued throughout much of the '70s, countries like France, Italy and Sweden appeared to offer considerably more liberal production environments for filmmakers for whom anything more sexually frank than images of bums and boobs ran the distinct risk of a spell in jail. Ultimately, no Japanese director was ever convicted for violating Article 175 of the penal code, but in 1976, 188
another prominent figure from the film world found himself in court answering the same charges as Tetsuji Takechi had done in the '60s. There are severa l interesting aspects to the particular case we are about to look at. The first is that the man in question, Nagisa Oshima, had publicly lent his support to Takechi during this earlier obscenity trial and was a highly articulate critic of any form of state control, not j ust film censorship. Secondly, Oshima was not being prosecuted for an actual fi lm, but a book containing its script, several essays and 23 glossy fullcolour stills from it. And finally, though the director was Japanese, the film in question was, strictly speaking, not. L'empire des sens, hereafter referred to by its more commonly known English-language title, In the Realm of the Senses220 (its Japanese release title was Ai no korida, meaning 'The Bullfight of Love'), might well be the one t itle in this book that those with neither any particular interest in sex films, Japanese cinema, nor world cinema in general have heard about or seen. Though shot at Daiei Studios in Kyoto227 with an all-Japanese cast, the film was a French-funded production. Additionally, the film stock was imported from France, with the unexposed 'obscene' footage filmed by Oshima shipped back to Europe for processing. In the Realm of the Senses had its genesis due to a friendship forged through Oshima's various excursions to Cannes. The producer Anatole Dauman (1925-98) was a Polish emigre born into a family he himself described as "a vast Russian-Polish drift that came to a halt in Baity in Romania, then in Warsaw, Nice and Paris according to the fluctuations of the bourgeoisie's fortunes in the jazz ages':222 He had formed his own company, Argos Films, in 1949 along with his partner Philippe Lifchitz, initially for "the production, rental and world distribution of short films';223 but which later moved into the production of what he later described as, "literary cinema: a cinema not of literary adaptations but of cineastes who invent an exceptional relation between the text and the images." In short, Dauman specialised in producing the works of auteurs, and by the time he met Oshima, the titles linked with his name included: Night and Fog (1955) and Hiroshima mon amour (1959) by Alain Resnais (the latter representing Dauman's first encounter with the East); a number of films by Chris Marker, including his best-known work La jetee (1962); and Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin-feminin (1966) and Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967). Dauman's initial association with the Japanese director came through his role as distributor for Death By Hanging and The Ceremony in the West.224 According to Oshima, the provocative opening gambit that ultimately led to In the Realm of the Senses occurred thus: "It was the end of the summer of 1972. I stopped over in Paris on the way home from the Venice Film Festival, where I had taken Dear Summer Sister. Dauman suddenly came out with it in the anteroom of a small
Eros International
private showing room called Club 70. 'Let's collaborate on a film, a co-production. A porno. l'llleave the content and the actual production all to you. I'll pay for it, that's all."'225 Dauman later contested Oshima's recollection of the discussion, claiming the word 'pornographic' never so much as crossed his lips/26 although his mind was probably working along these lines, because he also produced Walerian Borowczyk's envelope-pushing portmanteau Immoral Tales in 1974, with its intended fifth section, The Beast, released in expanded form the following year. Nevertheless, from this mis-imagined exchange (mediated by T6wa's Kazuko Kawakita and Shun Shibata, the president of a French film company, acting as interpreters), the germs of an idea began to emerge. Dauman was to look after the financial side of things, while Oshima was given almost complete creative freedom to do what he wanted. It has to be remembered that in the early 70s, Oshima was experiencing some difficulty finding funding in Japan for his intellectually-ambitious strain of art cinema, especially after Dear Summer Sister had bombed at the box office. The offer to work on a foreign production with no strings attached must have been irresistible. Oshima initially wrote two treatments. The one Dauman opted for was based on a notorious reallife scandal in which, on 21 May, 1936, a lowly geisha named Sada Abe was found wandering around the streets of Tokyo with a strangely serene expression on her face, and holding a knife, a rope and a severed penis. It immediately transpired that the latter object, kept secreted in her handbag, belonged to her lover Kichiz6 Ishida, referred to by her more familiarly as Kichi, who had been the owner of the inn where she was working. The two had just spent a month together, locked in a passionate amour fou, barely emerging from the bedroom to engage with the real world. As Sada's love became more obsessive, she took to throttling him to maintain his ardour, eventually seeking to possess him entirely. It was during one such moment of heightened passion that she (accidentally?) asphyxiated him, and then removed his penis. The incident and resulting court case caused a national scandal that kept newspapers busy long after Sada found herself convicted of manslaughter and was sentenced to six years in prison. She was released in 1940. Though the incident was shocking, even at the time Sada was not without public sympathy for her plight. Born into a poor family in 1905, after years of plying her trade as a low-ranking geisha (in reality little more than a prostitute), she had begun working in various menial jobs in order to pay off the significant debts she'd accumulated, which had kept her tied to the geisha house where she'd trained. It was in this way that she came to be working at Kichi's restaurant. Their intense but short-lived affair, conducted quite openly and initially right under the nose of Kichi's wife, might therefore be seen as an equal union between man and woman, a moment of
liberation played out in a realm wholly indifferently to the chauvinistic apparatus of a society in which many women are essentially little more than chattel. And so Sada Abe came to be mythologised as a source of fascination and danger to men, while simultaneously becoming something of a feminist icon. She was a woman who took control of her destiny and emerged victorious from the power play inherent in the sexual act, the selfish pursuit of individual pleasure that unfolds ritually behind closed doors ('the bullring of love' referred to by the Japanese title, apparently suggested by Dauman).227 As the newspapers at the time gleefully reported, before abandoning his emasculated corpse and wandering out into the streets, Sada had scrawled the words "Sada Kichi futari kiri " ("Sada Kichi together alone") in his blood on his body and the sheets. Oshima once said "Sada's name is so popular in Japan that it suffices to pronounce it to touch on the most serious sexual taboos. It is quite natural that a Japanese artist should want to dedicate his work to that marvellous woman."22B Oshima was not the only person to draw upon this figure for artistic inspiration. In his book Public People, Private People, Donald Richie paints a poignant and
above: Publicity material for the Korean release of Nagisa 6shima's noto rious In the Realm of the Senses (1976).
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poetic portrait of the woman during the years after her release, when she was working at The StarChrysanthemum-Water Bar (Hoshi-kiku-sui) in downtown Tokyo,229 while prior to Oshima's film, her story was first told in one of the instalments of Teruo Ishii's Meiji Era, Taisho Era, Showa Era: Bizarre Woman Crime History (1969), with Sada played by Yukie Kagawa and the true-life woman actually turning up in a cameo. More importantly, just prior to In the Realm of the Senses, Nikkatsu director Noboru Tanaka presented his take on events with A Woman Called Abe Soda (1975), which featured Junko Miyashita in the title role and Hideaki Esumi as Kichi. The third and most recent version - and the first time Sada's story has been told in a format that can aptly be described as mainstream - came with Nobuhiko Obayashi's Soda (1998). Oshima's film is one of those masterworks that inspire different, often contradictory thoughts and feelings in all those who behold it. It does what most pinku eiga and Roman Porno rarely even dream of doing. It engages the intellect while simultaneously indulging, indeed over-indulging, the senses, to such an extent as might be considered confrontational. The question as to whether it is 'art' or 'pornography' is something of a moot one, although one around which much discussion of the film apparently revolves.l30 Oshima himself stated during his trial that, "I 190
completely oppose the viewpoint so often evident at past trials involving Article 175 of the Criminal Code and the question, 'Is it art or is it obscenity?' I have absolutely no intention of asserting, 'Because this is art, it is not obscene."'l37 It is certain that a large proportion of its viewers, both Japanese and foreign, were, and continue to be, drawn to watching it out of prurient curiosity about its levels of explicitness rather than any real interest in or understanding of Oshima's artistic vision of the insanity that he saw symptomatic of pre-war Japan. If the erotic is what resides in the imagination, while the pornographic is what is presented explicitly, then the film can no doubt be described as pornographic. "I want the gestures and words to come from one single discourse: the sexual discourse'; Oshima said of the film in response to the observation by a French interviewer that, "The action of the film is presented as an uninterrupted act of love; only the places where it happens change according to an itinera ry which allows the lovers no respite whatever. We come across twenty different decors in this way, twenty love-rooms, places enclosed like an arena consecrated to a deadly ritual. "l32 The relationship between Kichi and Sada is never portrayed as anything other than a sensual one, with no dimension to their dialogue that can be described as intellectual.
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However, if pornography is defined as appealing directly and exclusively to the senses, giving little for the viewer's mind to work with, then such a dismissive charge seems misplaced here. There is certainly considerably more than meets the eye behind the explicit parade of genital depictions, fellatio, penetration shots and t he legendary castration at the end of the film. But context plays a significant role here, and it takes a degree of familiarity w ith Japanese history, film culture and censorship perhaps to appreciate more fully just what this might be. Many have taken on trust the idea that Oshima's film emerged as something of a kickback against Japanese screen pornography as it existed at the time, without exploring more fully the conventions and restrictions of the pink film and Roman Porno genres - namely those imposed by budget, censorship, audience expectations and the ta lents and aspirations of the individual directors working within the field. In this respect, a comparison with Noboru Tanaka's A Woman Called Abe Sada is highly fruitful in shedding further light on what exactly Oshima was trying to achieve, because in many respects we might describe In the Realm of the Senses as something of an anti-Roman Porno film.233 (Ironically Nikkatsu immediately cashed in on the notoriety of Oshima's film a year after its Japanese release, with a film directed by Masaru Konuma whose title translates as Corrida of Sex and Love).
Oshima's rendition of the tale arrived soon enough after Tanaka's to raise interesting speculation as to what extent one influenced the other. We should take into account that In the Realm of the Senses took over three years to reach the screen- a relatively lengthy period of pre-production planning and rigorous rewrites - while the average Roman Porno film would have been scripted, shot and in cinemas within a matter of weeks. Tanaka might have gotten wind of Oshima's planned international debut and attempted to pre-empt it. Just as likely, is that the arrival of Tanaka's film prompted certain artistic decisions in Oshima's film that influenced its final form. We should nevertheless probably attribute their close arrival to coincidence, and that many of the more memorable scenes must have been reconstructed from documented facts from the case and knowledge about the era in which it occurred, for example: the erotic food-play between the couple; the scene in which Sada snips off a tuft of Kichi's pubic hair; and the images of soldiers marching through the streets outside, whose significance we'll come to shortly. Nevertheless, as very little of Nikkatsu's output travelled overseas during the Roman Porno years, Tanaka's version was completely overlooked outside of Japan until the late '90s, when it was aired as part of several retrospectives of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno films around the world, such as the one held at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1997. Tanaka remained more than slightly disappointed that
above: Junko Miyashita and Hideaki Esumi in the deadly love match t hat will leave one of them dead in A Woman Called Abe Sada (1975). ~Nikkatsu Corporat ion opposite top: Written in blood, "5ada Kichi futa ri kiri" ('Sada Kichi together alone'). Junko Miyashita in a scene from Noboru Tanaka's A Woman Called Abe Sada (1975). IONikkatsu Corporation
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above: Original poster art for Noboru Tanaka's more refined A Woman Coiled Abe Sada (1975). ~N ikkatsu Corporation
few in the wider world were even aware of his film, and that, even after its belated discovery, his should be considered the lesser version of the tale.234 As noted, the taboo-breaking nature of Sada's story made it particularly fitting for treatment by a company as focused on adult-themed material as Nikkatsu, and Tanaka himself was known for his more artistically ambitious projects at the studio. We also know that Oshima's attitude to erotic cinema and its practitioners was not one of condescension, nor moral or intellectual superiority as such, as his association with K6ji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi amply demonstrates. But he was also keenly aware of the limitations of the genre, writing in 1973 for example that, "the majority of Nikkatsu's so-called roman poruno films take sex as their subject matter and not as their theme. The themes of their most highly regarded films tend to be something like adolescent rebellion; sex is merely the seasoning. This old method has been used for a long time; it is precisely why these films are attractive to superficial critics and young film buffs."235 The film that inspired Oshima's essay, incidentally, was Tatsumi Kumashiro's World of Geisha, which as previou sly noted had tackl ed th e issue of stat e suppression by looking at the infamous literary work 192
Under the Four-and-a-HalfTatami Sliding Door, banned in the Taish6 period. In the essay, Oshima criticises Kumashiro's film for being "a little too refined. It fails to realise the effect of pornography. Since the authorities would presumably be in a bind were people to lose the desire to do 'it' and stop having children, they probably did not mean to ban pornography; rather they were concerned about its becoming too refined."236 Unsurprisingly, A Woman Called Abe Soda comes across as the more "refined" and conventional piece of erotic cinema in comparison to Oshima's more oppressive and claustrophobic rendition. It was realised within a studio system to fit an established product line that was marketed on sex. Within this context, the performances are strong and the film is solidly crafted, inventively staged and elegantly presented in tune with the aesthetics of the era. Stylistically speaking, it is the more sophisticated work, but in this it is helpful to take into account the dictionary definition of the word, as "altered from or deprived of natural simplicity or innocence; falsified to a greater or lesser extent; not plain, honest or straightforward."237 For Tanaka's approach is also highly artificial and more than a little self-conscious, with the narrative beginning with Sada's voiceover being set against a plain blank screen and told in flashbacks. Authentic newspaper clippings of the notorious case also appear onscreen, initially providing a backdrop to the film's title. Though not'pornographic' by the consensual understanding of the word nowadays, like all pornography it is disingenuous in as much as it is less concerned with authenticity than with presenting the sexual act packaged for audiences. Lighting, shot composition and performance are prioritised to give optimum vantage of Miyashita's naked breasts and thighs during the love scenes, and it goes without saying that the viewer is targeted as being male. It is significant in this respect that many viewers claim that they don't find Oshima's film erotic or arousing, even though it is considerably more graphic in its depictions of the sexual act. Aside from this sheer explicitness, one remarkable aspect of In the Realm of the Senses is that it rejects the standard voyeuristic nozoki position, or rather it subverts it so that most of the scenes are witnessed by women, as opposed to men, and often involuntarily. This is apparent as early as the significant first encounter, when Sada catches Kichi's eye as she and a fellow waitress stumble upon him being luxuriated upon by his wife one morning. Sada later not only asserts dominance in the bedroom; she more or less 'performs' with Kichi for the benefit of the various female third parties of Kichi 's employees, and the geishas, chambermaids, and other assorted hotel staff who find themselves in the same orbit as the couple, providing obvious stand-ins for the off-screen viewer. Throughout their flight from civilised society, Sada essentially forces these otherwise passive witnesses to acknowledge their affair directly. Oshima arguably rather over-emphasises
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this particular editorial detail, but the point he is making is that the sex acts occurring within the film are not being staged for the benefit of the male gaze, and it is Sada who exerts the sexual dominance. Aside from Kichi, men are rather excluded from this world: An early scene shows a group of local woman gathering curiously around a recumbent aged drunkard, one of Sada's former patrons. As one playfully parts his kimono to reveal his privates to the tittering ensemble behind her, a young boy throws a snowball at his withered manhood. One in the eye for the assumed Roman Porno viewer, and this is way before the gruesome climax, which in a pornographic context might be seen as a direct reference to the eyeball-slicing image of Bunuel's Un chien Andalou. Oshima not only addresses the visual component of the sexual act, which along with sound is the only one that can be conveyed directly in cinema; his film also evokes the other three senses of touch, taste and smell, as exemplified in the near-legendary scenes such as the one in which Sada dips a mushroom between her legs with chopsticks, coating it with her vaginal juices, before feeding it to Kichi.238 The film's original French title, L'empire des sens, is a direct reference to the philosopher and semiologist Roland Barthes's book, L'empire des signes (known in its English translation as the Empire ofSigns), which had just been published in 1970. Barthes's book was the author's attempt at delivering an epistolary account (i.e. one conveyed purely in written language) of a visit to the country, in which his status as a foreigner, and thus unanchored within the culture, restricted any interpretation or attempts at conveying the truth or essence of his subject to just its observable phenomena. By depicting this alien world of shifting signs and symbols, and within the purely symbolic form of words, Barthes's book deliberately foregrounded the alien ness of what it attempted to describe, thus drawing attention to both the author and the reader's role in reconstructing this world within their imagination. He especially emphasised that it was impossible to access the 'reality' of Japan with all the preconceptions and the structure of thinking of the West, which could only Westernize it by subjecting it to Western theory. By staying entirely within the realm of signs and fantasy, one could thereby come closer to the real 'truth' of Japan. Just as Barthes attempts to describe the reality of his world through his written signes, so does Oshima through the sensual language of cinema, a language which is experienced by the viewer before it is interpreted. In this, he also emphasises how Sada and Kichi's withdrawal from the purely rational world into their own private and unmediated realm of the senses ultimately results in destruction for them both. The word 'Empire' (translated from the French to 'Realm' for the English title) also has its own connotations pertinent to what Oshima is trying to convey.
Within the context of the world around them, Sad a and Kichi's irrationalism might also be their salvation. Like many others, Oshima saw the Sada Abe incident as symptomatic of the madness of the era. It occurred only a few months after the thwarted military coup known as the ni-ni-roku (two-two-six) incident, named after the date it took place: 26 February, 1936. On this day, 1400 soldiers occupied a number of key buildings in the centre of Tokyo, and several prominent politicians were killed (the event is referenced in the coda of Seijun Suzuki's 1966 film Fighting Elegy). Japan was also just about to begin its war of aggression on the Asian mainland, triggered by the so-called Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7 July, 1937- a war that would spell ruin for the country. As mentioned, images of imperial soldiers marching in the streets occur on several occasions in Tanaka's film, viewed with curiosity but without any further comment from the hotel room window by the protagonists. Oshima evokes this motif only once, in perhaps the film's crucial scene, as Kichi walks down the street, lost in his own private (and probably sexual) thoughts, a smile playing upon his lips, and seemingly oblivious to the parade of soldiers marching in the opposite direction being cheered on by the rest of the public. If Kichi is mad with love, then the scene reminds us of Friedrich Nietzsche's observation that "Madness is rare in individuals- but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."239 These are but a few of the ways in which the two films differ. Another lies within the casting. In stark contrast with Junko Miyashita's more forceful interpretation, Eiko Matsuda's haunted look strikes a perfect note as a woman driven to insanity by her obsession, sexually potent yet destructively so: a point stressed in one pivotal scene that has proven the most problematic of all in some countries in recent years, in which she tugs rather forcefully on the penis of a young boy she is playing with, making him cry. The scene is included to indicate the point at which she first transgresses the realms of all reasonable behaviour, as well as portending Kichi's later demise.240 Kichi is also pitch-perfectly played, by Tatsuya Fuji, a former star of Nikkatsu Action films during the '60s and still acting to this day, with one memorable recent appearance in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future (2003). Suave, laconic and completely given over to the pursuit of sensual pleasure, he passively allows himself to be relieved by Sada of his social status, his masculinity and ultimately his life, carrying across one of the key points contained within the film; the sublation of rational common sense by overwhelming, irrational passion. Somewhat ironically, neither of the two leads ever appeared in any Roman Porno or pink movies. Fuji's last credit at Nikkatsu occurred literally months before the company committed itself along this line in 1971 . On the evidence here, we can safely assume that modesty 193
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was not the reason for his departure, and that like many actors employed by the studio during the '60s, his contract was cut, forcing him onto pastures new. Eiko Matsuda's case is a little sadder, in that after a sparse handful of films immediately following her debut in this film, including Shogun's Floating World Bathhouse (1977), directed by lkuo Sekimoto at Toei's Kyoto studios, and K6ji Wakamatsu's Eros Eterna (1977), released by ATG, she quickly faded from Japanese screens, although she is credited as appearing in a French film from 1982 entitled Five and the Skin, about which few further details appear to be available. Maybe her performance was that little bit too convincing. A good proportion of the rest of the cast is comprised of familiar names more known for their roles in adult films, suggesting Oshima's familiarity with this world: actresses such as Aoi Nakajima, Meika Seri, Hiroko Fuji and Yasuko Matsui, as well as the veteran actor K6ji Kokonoe, who started his career in the mid-'50s at the original Shintoho run by Mitsugu Okura. In the Realm of the Senses marks his final screen appearance, as Sada's elderly patron Omiya, although most of his roles were in pink films. As well as these performers, Katsue Tomiyama, founding member of Image Forum, the country's leading institution dedicated to experimental film and video, infamously played a young geisha in one of the scenes. The film does have one other significant link with the pink genre. On the Japanese side, K6ji Wakamatsu took the reigns as producer, bringing with him his regular cinematographer Hideo Ito. Most foreign language writing on this film neglects to mention Wakamatsu's role in the production, but we have already noted the relationship between this pioneering figure, who had emerged from the eroduction world, and Japan's mostinternationally prominent director of left-of-centre arthouse films in the '60s. It is also worth emphasising how, even as early as 1965, Wakamatsu's overseas production of The Sun's Navel and his arrival in Berlin with Secret Acts Behind Walls - not to mention his later exploits in the Golan Heights in the early '70s - had indicated a far more internationally-minded outlook than other Japanese filmmakers of the era, and certainly more than his peers in pinku eiga. He was also a man who got things done, and was certainly not averse to taking risks or courting controversy. One ofWakamatsu's most interesting decisions for In the Realm of the Senses was employing a young filmmaker named Y6ichi Sai as assistant director. Sai's previous experience had been working as an assistant director on a politically-charged short 16mm documentary whose title, Indictment: Report of Government Crimes Against Korean Residents in Japan (1974), reflected his own background as a zainichi
(Korean resident in Japan), and consequent outsider status. The zainichi issue in Japan is a complex one, as few people are able to physically distinguish between Koreans and 'pure-blood' ethnic Japanese, and Korean 194
residents in Japan have been historically forced to adopt Japanese names. But even if a third- or fourthgeneration Korean is born on Japanese soil, speaks only Japanese and has no connection to Korea, they are still unable to carry a Japanese passport. Discrimination against zainichi was tackled in the '80s in the independent films of Yoshihiko Matsui, and later in the pink films of Matsui's associate Kazuhiro Sa no, as we shall see in a later chapter. It later became a hot topic in commercial cinema, with films like lsao Yukisada's Go (2001) and Kazuyuki lzutsu's Pacchigi! (We Shall Overcome Someday) (2004) all owing their existence to one of the key titles that drew attention to the plight of such 'foreigners' in Japan, All Under the Moon (1993), which is about a zainichi cab driver and his girlfriend, a Filipino barmaid. It was Y6ichi Sai who was the director behind this highly influential popular title, voted best film of the year by the Kinema Junp6 critics. Incidentally, alongside a number of mainstream titles for the Kadokawa company in the '80s, Sai had directed one Roman Porno film, Sexual Crime (1983), a gritty erotic thriller that highlights both the versatility of Nikkatsu's format in the right hands and also the studio's part in the early careers of directors who would later become key players in the industry. Y6ichi Sai's appointment on In the Realm of the Senses is a significant one in that, in his 1994 television documentary 100 Years of Japanese Cinema, Oshima pinpointed the emergence of hitherto suppressed voices such as zainichi into the mainstream as one of the more significant trends in Japanese cinema, and explicitly cites Sai as an example. Films like All Under the Moon were important in disrupting established notions about Japanese homogeneity, and presented a more complex picture of the individual and their relationship to the state (either 'state' as a fictional construct or as a tangible authority), which was one of the recurrent motifs in Oshima's cinema, most evident in films like Death By Hanging (1968) and certainly pertinent to any discussion of In the Realm of the Senses. "Isn't this the first time people have wanted to see one of your films so badly?" Oshima quotes his wife as saying in an essay contained within the book containing the script and images from the film published in 15 June, 1976, with her comments following the hype built up by its premiere at Cannes in May that year.247 Even though it only played in a heavily-censored version upon its theatrical release in Japan on 16 October, 1976, In the Realm of the Senses caused an immediate scandal. Like the flagrant behaviour of its central couple, its very existence was a complete affront to the assumed mores and social codes of the Japanese that the censors and customs officials were trying to protect. It had been released in Paris a month before, on 15 September, where it played unedited. Hardcore pornography had been legalised in France on 26 April, 1975, and soon stories became rife of Japanese tourists travelling all the way to Paris to watch the film uncut. Oshima claimed
that Dauman had estimated that within 17 months of its release, between 70-80,000 of the 350,000 people who saw it were Japanese. The film fared less well in other countries: the print was confiscated from the projection room by the Criminal Investigation Police Department during the 1976 Berlin Film Festival, and similarly banned before its scheduled US premiere at the New York Film Festival the same year (though it was later released uncut, and proved especially popular in the various cities that were part of the Japanese tourist itinerary, both on the American mainland and in Hawaii). In the UK, it was refused an 'X' certificate, and though it could be seen at various repertory cinemas in London during the following 15 years, it was not awarded a formal BBFC release certificate until 1991. In many countries it remained unreleased altogether until even later. Ironically, it was the book of the film that led to Oshima being tried for obscenity, and as such he was accompanied in the dock by its editor, Hajime Takemura. Oshima based his defence around the legal definition of obscenity and the vague wording of his charge, and whether he could even really be held responsible. After all, shouldn't the photographer rather than the film director be accountable for the production stills that were taken on the set?242 Meanwhile, because the wheels of justice move so slowly in Japan, and as it was not actually the film that Oshima was being prosecuted for, it was issued on VHS by Toho Video in 1977. This version has a stated length of 106 minutes, suggesting that very little, if anything, has been cut, although according to the scholar Paul Berry, there are at least 45 instances of bokashi or other means of masking. Ever the provocateur (and even more the opportunist}, Wakamatsu issued a 'special' edit, also through Toho Video, with a stated running time of a meagre 30 minutes, to take advantage of all the publicity while making a blunt point about the arbitrary nature of Japanese censorship - although two thirds of the film had been cut, including those containing crucial exposition, five instances of bokashi remained.243 The trial was customarily drawn out, but in 1982 Oshima and Takemura were finally acquitted. It was the last incident of its kind. While the trial was still running, Oshima made one more film for Dauman, which despite the claims made in his book that,"l do want to make one more pornographic film, completely different in format from In the Realm of the Senses';244 failed to create much of a stir (although it did win Oshima the Best Director Award at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival). Very little has been written about Empire of Passion (1978) in comparison with its predecessor, and it is not so difficult to work out why. It is simply not a particularly interesting film, and any similarities with the previous film are limited to the title and the casting ofTatsuya Fuji as the male lead. Set in a small rural village during the Edo period, the story plays something like a kaidan version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, with a pair of adulterous 195
Behind the Pink Curtain
lovers bumping off an inconvenient husband only for him to return from beyond the grave. Despite some passionate love scenes, which certainly never reach the same censor-baiting intensity as the earlier work, it is not particularly relevant to any discussion of pink cinema. Oshima's part in this history of eroticism in Japanese film effectively comes to an end here. For the next decade, he continued to work overseas, hooking up with another prestigious producer, Jeremy Thomas, to make perhaps his best-known work, the wartime POW drama Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) with Tom Conti, David Bowie and a very early role for Takeshi Kitano. He later ditched all Japanese elements in Max, man amour (1989), a bizarre comedy of manners with a script by Belle de jour screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, that sees Charlotte Rampling playing a British diplomat's wife who conducts an affair with a chimpanzee. After a lengthy hiatus he made his longawaited return to Japanese cinema with Gohatto (1999), the tale of homosexuality and infighting within the ranks of the law-enforcing squad known as the shinsengumi, which was formed to protect the Shogun from the rabble just prior to the dawn of the Meiji Period. Ironically, the film was produced by Shochiku, the very studio Oshima had stormed out of almost three decades before to embark on one of Japanese cinema's most fascinating cinema solo careers. Sadly, a stroke saw Oshima directing this last film from a wheelchair, and it looks certain to be his last. Though relevant to the subject, few of the titles mentioned in this chapter can be accurately described as pink films, produced as they were by major studios, and as we've seen, even labelling In the Realm of the Senses as a Japanese film is not strictly accurate. There were other directors who also headed to Europe in the mid-70s and went the whole hog, working purely with European casts, crews and locations, as well as European money. Since many of these stretch the definition of the pink film well past its remit, I'll mention them only in passing. Firstly there was Masuo Ikeda (1934-97), an artist, painter, engraver, potter and novelist - in fact generally a creative Jack of all trades, and while it might be a little harsh to quip "and master of none'; on the evidence provided by his two Italian feature 196
productions, clearly film was not among his more successful endeavours. Ikeda's original novel, Dedicated to the Aegean Sea,24S had earned him the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature in 1977. Following Oshima's lead, he headed to Europe to film his tale of a young Greek art student called Nikos, whose innocence is corrupted by his predatory landlady and her retarded daughter. Shot on location in Rome and Greece, the film's most interesting aspect is its cast, which consists of some of the biggest names from the world of Italian exploitation cinema at the time: those familiar with the country's giallo thrillers, horror and softcore sex films from this period will keenly note the presence of: Olga Karlatos, the victim of the infamous eyeball-skewering scene in Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh-Eaters (1979); Stefania Casini, who played Jessica Harper's confidante in Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977); and Hungarian-born Ilona Staller, a colourful character who later achieved a certain infamy under the name of Cicciolina as a hardcore performer and nude model as well as the one-time wife of the American artist Jeff Koons (Cicciolina was also a politician, democratically elected to Italian parliament for her stance on environmental issues and nuclear disarmament). Ikeda's film featured scenes of a sexual nature that were considerably stronger than were considered acceptable back in Japan at the time, and the customs authorities were ready and waiting to intercept the imported print. The film went out on release in his home country in a considerably censored version. Ikeda later returned to Italy to make Rome from the Window (1982), a thriller co-produced with Shochiku starring Claudio Cassinelli and the Japanese idol of the moment, Kimiko Nakayama, whose full frontal nude scenes also ended up shaded in all Japanese release versions. Though unknown overseas, the two films have been issued on video and DVD on a fairly regular basis in Japan. But still, Ikeda's name seldom crops up in a filmrelated context nowadays, and he never made anything else, so one can discount him from exerting much influence on the course of the nation's film history. Rome seemed to have been the favoured hotspot for Japanese directors aiming to add a bit of European pizzazz to otherwise uninteresting films. Yasuz6 Masumura's penultimate feature saw him returning to the Italian capital, where his film career had begun some thirty years earlier, studying at the Centro Sperimentale della Cinematografia. Despite its entry in Thomas Weisser's Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films, the Italian-Japanese co-production of Garden of Eden (1981 ), also known as Giardino deii'Eden, is not so much a pornographic work as a Franco Zeffirelli-esque tale of young love between Alessandra, the seventeen-year-old daughter of an illustrious art dealer, and Michael, a teen tearaway from a family of petty thieves, who are brought together by a stolen wallet and an Etruscan vase. Weisser is right to draw comparisons with the Brooke Shields vehicle The Blue Lagoon (1980), but his interpretation of
Eros International
what actually occurs between the"two youths who burst into puberty and become sexually aware of each other's bodies after being stranded on a deserted island"246 would appear to have more to do with wishful thinking than anything that occurs onscreen. What actually happens is that Michael engineers a night away for the overprotected daddy's girl at a secluded beach he knows, and then pretends his motorbike is broken, forcing her to stay with him (it is not even his motorbike in fact- he stole it.) Within this idyllic setting, where the class divide means nothing (the Eden of the title), she eventually succumbs to his crude advances and there ensues a surfeit of slow-motion sequences of the two running naked hand-in-hand before the outside world, represented by both their families, intrudes upon their happiness.The brief moments of full-frontal nudity that develop from their discovery of one another's blooming bodies, while presented naturalistically, are all obscured by the standard black blotches in Japanese release prints. However, following a playful nude body-painting session a few frames of the pubic regions of the aptlynamed Leonora Fani did in fact make it to Japanese screens, so in this respect Masumura succeeded where Oshima had failed. A better-known name to overseas connoisseurs of highbrow adult art cinema was ShOji Terayama who, like Oshima, emerged as one of the leading figures of the Tokyo avant-garde scene of the '60s, although his background was as a playwright and poet rather than a commercial filmmaker.247 Terayama has been mentioned in passing in previous chapters, but it is worth considering here that, just like Oshima, his reputation abroad was largely established due to the strong sexual content of his later films. In 1979, he contributed one of the instalments of an omnibus movie called Private Collections, with the other sections directed by two men indelibly associated with highgloss French softcore pornography, Walerian Borowczyk and Just Jaeckin. lts producer, Pierre Braunberger (190590), could boast of a career stretching back to the silent era, and had been instrumental in bringing the films of such luminaries as Jean Renoir, Robert Florey and Alain Resnais to the screen, but like Dauman he clearly had come to see sex as viable means of cinematic expression over the course of the '70s. At 50 minutes in length,Terayama's section, The Grass Labyrinth, was the longest of the three, and it was in fact eventually released as a standalone work in Japan, five years after it was made. A surreal trip into a young man's pre-Oedipal subconscious as he searches for the second verse to a nursery rhyme his mother told him as a child, the film unravels in a series of dreamlike images filmed in the director's customary prismatic spray of colours. It culminates in a scene that may have provided inspiration for Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (1996), in which a girl's naked body is adorned with calligraphic characters. The film is based upon a work by Ky6ka Izumi
(1873-1939), whose stories had provided the raw material for works by, among others, Kenji Mizoguchi (the 1933 silent film The Water Magician) and Teinosuke Kinugasa (two late-career Meiji Period colour dramas, White Heron from 1958, and Disordered Hair from 1961 ). Many of Izumi's works, as Seijun Suzuki's disorienting adaptation of Heat Haze Theatre (1981) demonstrates, also relied heavily on a strong fantasy element. Incidentally, one of these also served as the inspiration for a degenerate feature made by Tetsuji Takechi at the tail end of his filmmaking cycle, a work that we might also ascribe as having an 'international' element. The story of a Buddhist monk taunted by a demonic temptress, The Saint of Mount Koya (1983), as Thomas Weisser writes, was filmed as a hardcore feature and released uncut, unfogged and altogether unexpurgated in the US territory of Guam, where Japanese obscenity laws didn't apply. Here it played for over a year, mainly to Japanese tourists.24B It is unclear whether it was ever shown anywhere else, but it has certainly never been released in Japan, and therefore its details are unlisted in the usual sources, such as the JMDB. While there seems to be no one who has gone on record as having seen the film, a few internet · sites do seem to offer telecined bootlegs of this maboroshi title, so one can only assume it must actually exist. Terayama's next French co-production gave producer Anatole Dauman another chance at creating an arthouse hit on the same scale as In the Realm of the Senses. Fruits of Passion (1981) was loosely based on the novel Retour Roissy, first published in 1969 and written by Pauline Reage as a sequel to her infamous 1954 work, Histoire d'O. The first book had been the subject of a glossy cinematic makeover by Just Jaeckin in 1975, which was considered something of a triumph in peddling a young woman's sadomasochistic fantasies to mainstream audiences. In Terayama's filming of the sequel, the action is relocated to a brothel in the Chinese concession of Shanghai249 during the late 1920s, a time of political turmoil for China. It is here that the two main characters from the original story arrive at the beginning, as Sir Stephen, played this time by Klaus Kinski, is accompanied by his personal sex slave 0, whom he immediately locks up in a rudely-furnished boudoir in his brothel for trai ning. The girl's one-character
a
above and opposite top: Scenes from Nagisa Oshima's Empire ofPassion (1 978). -9tJ ")-It! .t;
, Kokuei/ Shintoho
Tandem provides many fine examples of the "ellipses and digression" cited by the critic Fukuma, including one comically staged set piece where Shinichi's scooter finds itself on a collision course with a pushbike at a traffic intersection. It is typical of Sate's approach, in which incidents are leapfrogged over in favour of their implications to achieve a pared-down continuity without any unnecessary links. This focusing on the before and after lends the stories a compelling air of unpredictability, with not a single redundant scene or line of dialogue.The viewer, too, is kept actively involved as they are dumped into the middle of scenes without knowing how they really got there.364 Marking the debut of Nikki Sasaki - the younger sister of Yumeka - The Lost Virgin follows the life and loves of Chisato over three summers separated by fiveyear intervals as she tries to balance her hunger for new sexual adventures with attempts to be something more than just an object or appendage to the guys she becomes involved with. The film, whose subtitle, Yamitsuki enjo k6sai,365 translates to something like 'resigning oneself to compensated dating', charts Chisato's course from virginal schoolgirl to bored Office Lady to a seemingly contented member of staff at a 278
gyOdon (beef bowl) fast-food restaurant. The film opens with the text 'Ten Years Before; as the viewer is first introduced to our young unsullied protagonist, clad in her baggy school uniform, in the middle of an exchange between a smartly-dressed white-collar stiff. The two are standing facing one another expectantly in a Love Hotel bedroom as part of a paid date arranged via a telclub (terekura) phone dating service. After discussing payment, her prospective partner immediately slaps a pair of handcuffs on her, explaining that it is because "virgins go too wild the first time': Fortunately, she manages to make her getaway from this ruffian, minus her shoes, and is rescued by classmate Takashi, who takes her under his wing, removes her handcuffs, lends her his trainers and later rather unceremoniously relieves her of her virginity. Chisato immediately celebrates her arrival into the adult world by visiting a karaoke booth with her schoolgirl buddy Mari, where they both sing the film's nonsensically-titled "furu furu" theme song.366 She is later left pining on the sidelines, however, when she discovers that Takashi already has a girlfriend, named Hikari. These characters all pop up in each of the successive episodes, the highs and lows of each of their lives
The Devils Themselves ...
counter-pointing Chisato's emotional journey. Next time they meet, Takashi and Hikari are married with a four-year-old daughter, but now working as a barman, Takashi seems reluctant to settle down. Good-time girlfriend Mari's efforts to lead Chisato astray meet little resistance, though their frolicking threesome with a stranger in a motel room ends in a long, tired walk back home and leads, fairly understandably, to Chisato's break-up with her cohabiting boyfriend. Slight but sprightly, The Lost Virgin takes all its best attributes from those of its lead actress, Nikki Sasaki, with her rasping, husky voice, her elastically expressive face and her wiry frame kitted out in clothes one size too large for her.The film ends on a poignant note, with Takashi and Chisato making a return visit to the now-abandoned bedroom where she was set off on her sexual odyssey. "I wonder what will happen in the future," Takashi muses. "About what?" she replies."To Japan.""That's right. We've got a long time ahead of us." Throughout his career, Sat6 has been particularly well-blessed by his collaborations with some of the genre's most talented screenwriters. Both Empty Room and The Lost Virgin were written by Shinji lmaoka, now among the most highly-regarded figures working in the pink industry, but the initial impetus to Sate's wider recognition came from the figure of Masahiro Kobayashi, who started his career writing television dramas as well as erotic films. Born in Tokyo in 1954, after various jobs as a folk singer and a postal worker, Kobayashi penned the script for Sate's debut, Dream Woman, in 1989, as well as early films such as Abnormal Ecstasy (1991 ), Adulterous Wife's Sex: Pleasure Hunting (1992), Tandem, and the majority of the Apartment Wife titles. Kobayashi is to Toshiki Sat6 what Shiro Yumeno is to Hisayasu Sat6 and Kishu lzuchi is to Takahisa Zeze (note that Sano writes his own scripts), and like these fellow unsung heroes of the pink new wave, his work has not been confined to the sex film genre. In fact, Kobayashi is now a fairly prominent director in his own right, at least on the international arthouse scene. Four of his titles have aired at the Cannes film festival: Bootleg Film (1999), on which Mitsuru Meike was assistant director, and the Hokkaido-set drama Man Walking on Snow were both presented in the UnCertain Regard section in 1999 and 2001 respectively; Film Noir was included as part of the Directors' Fortnight in 2000; and Bashing, the controversial story of an aid worker returning to Japan to near universal condemnation after being freed as a hostage in Iraq, screened in competition in 2005. Unlike most other figures to emerge from this world however, Kobayashi seems somewhat uneasy about his sex film background. His biography in the Cannes festival catalogues and on his own Monkey Town website367 omits any mention of his pink film work, making much instead of his position as a "former assistant director of FranKokuei/Shintoho
21st Century Girl and the Seven Lucky Gods
-
good reason why the Seven Lucky Gods don't warrant the same amount of individual attention as the Four Devils; the auteurial identities of each of them are less rigidly defined. Whereas the works of Hisayasu Sat6, Takahisa Zeze et a/ were readily identifiable as belonging to that particular director, the new breed have less i~ the way of a signature style, and it is therefore not so immediately easy to distinguish the work of one from another. This is largely because they are far less prolific. In the early years of the new millennium, the output of the pink industry as a whole had shrunk back even further than during the previous decade, and with Kokuei producing only five or six titles a year, most of the Seven Lucky Gods count the numbers of individual titles in their filmographies in single figures. To pluck two extreme examples from either group, while Hisayasu Sat6 has made around 60 pink films, Rei Sakamoto boasts only four to his name and, like his associates, continues to work as an assistant on the films of his fellow Kokuei directors. In general it is important to note that none of these new directors can count on directing pinku eiga as a means of earning a living, and it is certainly not a way to get rich, as it once might have been during the '60s. They make their films for the love of making films, and when top: President Bush manifests himself to Sachiko in The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanoi (2004). ©Kokuei/ Shintoho above: Chirashi for the non-pink theatrical release of the same film. ©Kokuei/ Shintoho
3 21
Behind the Pink Curtain
above: ToshirO Enomoto's Withered Flowers (2000), made d irectly for Shintoho and released to pink theatres as Comforting Angel: White Robed Mascot. IOShintoho
they are not doing so, earn their livings by other means, either anonymously directing corporate or 'How to' instructional films, karaoke videos, Adult Videos, or working in non-film related employment. This also sets them apart from many of the directors working in the industry today whose approach to their craft is more pragmatic, such as Yutaka lkejima, Sachi Hamano, Akira Fukamachi or Sakae Nitta. If the directors manifest less consistency in terms of choice of topics, genres and approach, it is largely because they have been less able to experiment or work through personal thematic agendas as rigorously as Zeze's generation. They have therefore been eager to try out new things and work with new scriptwriters from film to film. They don't want to be pigeon-holed as making one sort of film, and one sort of film only. Mitsuru Meike's follow up to the overblown slapstick satire of The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (2004) with the altogether more mature Bitter Sweet (2004) provides a perfect example of this, but there are others, too, as is shown by the relatively small oeuvre of Rei Sakamoto who, born in 1973, is the youngest of the seven. Sakamoto is a graduate of the Nikkatsu Visual Arts Academy, and first became aware of the possibilities within jJinku eiga after seeing Zeze's films at the first Biographies of New Japanese Artists of Principle screenings at the Athenee FranShintoho
331
Behind the Pink Curtain
above and opposite: AV idol Aoi Sora in a rare pink film appearance in Uniform Beauty: Shag Me Teacher! (2004), directed by Hidekazu Takahara.IOShintoho
comprised of films made by a number of directors connected with Kokuei, while Vol. 2 was devoted to Shinji lmaoka.Therefore the focus on Takehora is significant in that it was for an OP Eiga director. We've encountered Yutaka lkejima, the director of the third favourite at the 19th Pink Taish6 awards, on several occasions so far, though not yet really focused on his activities as a director. Born in Tokyo on 30 March, 1948, and a graduate of Waseda University's literature department, as an actor lkejima worked on stage as part of ShOji Terayama's Tenj6 Sajiki troupe, though for his screen performances he has worked exclusively within pinku eiga and AV, making his screen debut in 1981 in Genji Nakamura's Document Porno: Married Woman Prostitution Techniques. His acting credits, of which there are literally hundreds, include titles by Hisayasu Sat6, Ryuichi Hiroki and Y6jir6 Takita, and he is still appearing in pink films to this day. As a director he has been just as busy. Since his debut with The Masturbating Lesbians for Xces in 1991, he has kept up a steady output far in excess of any of the Kokuei directors, averaging half a dozen films per year, and has so far accumulated a body of work consisting of more than a hundred titles. He produces his films through his own Cement Match 332
company, which, maintaining theatrical activities in parallel with its filmmaking ones (as well as staging regular plays, they also shootjishu eiga), might be better described as an entourage than a production house. While most of lkejima's pink films are commissioned by OP Eiga, he has had titles released by all the current major pink companies. He has also produced films by other directors, including Daisuke Got6 and Shigeo Moriyama, and oversaw the production of the ENK omnibus The Gays in Wonderland (1 997). Though none of his films have ever played overseas, lkejima is spoken of as being the most successful figure in the industry today. He makes films cheaply, reliably and in a variety of styles that are popular with both the regular denizens of the seijin eiga theatre and the younger alternative audience who appreciate the genre for its cinematic aspects. And his films certainly don't skimp on the erotic side of things either. lkejima's Family Gets Rude diptych, released by Shintoho in 2004, sees the pink film at its most efficient and entertaining, with the two parts making up for any lack of artistic ambition with a healthily goodhumoured, if a little kinky, sense of rambunctious fun. Chapter 7: Perverts' Fun begins when timid and tongue-
Final Curtain?
tied Takashi (Naohiro Hiragawa) heads to a Go-Con social mixer in search of marriage material. He finds plenty of potential prospects to fill this hole in his life, but settles on the poised and elegant Ry6ko (Akane Yazaki). Within months, he is married and has been taken into her family household. But these are no ordinary in-laws. His new mother-in-law, Masumi (Azusa Sakai), engages in cryptic conversations over the breakfast table, warning him not to go through the upstairs trapdoor from which a mysterious red light streams, leading into the attic where father is said to keep his ominous "collection': Meanwhile, Ryoko's mad sister (Lemon Hanazawa) remains locked in her bedroom, kept as a shrine to Leonardo DiCaprio, and periodically emerges to roam around the house wearing a skimpy white cotton shift and a garland of flowers on her head. Just as Takashi begins wondering whether he made the right decision to marry, he bumps into Sakura (Reiko Yamaguchi), his second potential choice from the girls present at the blind date where he met his perverted young bride. Chapter 2: Unequalled Limits takes place in a parallel universe to the first film and uses the same characters, as Takashi heads to the same Go-Con party and comes away with a different choice of bride. In fact, his mind is more or less made up for him by the vivacious Sakura who, within minutes of them meeting, has feigned a
drunken dizzy spell in order to lure him to the toilets. Barely six months later, with a ring on her finger, she is firmly ensconced within his family home, occupying the seat of matriarch of the house, a role that had previously been taken byTakashi's recently deceased mother. But if our beleaguered hero was originally expecting marriage to complete his life of salaried stability, then it's time to think aga in. As Sakura's increasingly outlandish sexual demands see him scuttling, terrified, to the office every morning, he soon begins to rue his decision, especially when he bumps into Ry6ko, the more refined eager beaver who lost out to Sakura at their first fateful meeting. Meanwhile, his lusty wife is busy back at the house working her way around the rest of the family, putting a smile back on the face of father (Kikujir6 Honda), raising his decrepit grandfather from the near dead, and even subduing the jealous pout of his sister (Kaoru Akitsu). OP Eiga's dominance, both in the 2007 fan awards and more generally in the number of titles it produces every year, suggests a better angle from which to look at the true face of the pink film industry. OP Eiga has remained steadfastly indifferent to overseas possibilities, although its films could prove popular if it did try and push them abroad. Neither has it tried to foster an equivalent 'movement' to the shitenno or the shichifukujin. 333
Behind the Pink Curtain
above: The Rampo-esque Pervert in the Attic: Peeping Lewd Beast (2003), one of many titles d irected by the p ro lific Akira Fukamachi for Shintoho.
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Cast: Katsu ONDA, Yuki, Haruhisa KAT6, Nikki SASAKI, Mame YAMADA 2003, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 64m. Availability: lnterlilm (Japan, no subtitles)
Films Referenced in Text
Despite All That (Soredemo)
Tan IIDA
Yutaka IKEJIMA
Portrait of Passion (HichO: onna ukiyo soshi) Trans. Secret Notebook: Female Storybook of the Floating World
Adulterous Wife's Dirty Afternoon (Furin-zuma no midara na gogo)
w~
:txt-r.i!!::tit~
Cast: Ryoji HAYAMA, Hiroshi NAWA, Toshie NIHONYANAGI, GenshO HANAYAGI, Tokiko MITA 1968, Aoyama Pro I Nikkatsu, colour, 80m. Tokyo Bath Harem (Onna ukiyo buro) Trans. Female Bathhouse of the Floating World
:txf-ll.i!tl!\8 Cast: Ryoji HAYAMA, Jiro OKAZAKI, Toshie NIHONYANAGI,Takako UCHIDA,Miki HAYASHI 1968, Aoyama Pro I Nikkatsu, colour, 87m.
Masuo IKEDA Dedicated to the Aegean Sea (tgu-kai ni sasagu) Orig. Dedicato a/ mare Egeo
.:x:.-if#/!1::'1$ F~~Cl)r¥
Cast: Motoko SASAKI, Noa TSUKISHIMA, Rio MOCHIZUKI, Kikujiro HONDA 2003, OP Eiga, colour, 60m.
H'H11ftfNI~
Cast: MayumiTERASHIMA, Asako KURAYOSHI, Yuka ASAGIRI, Mitsuo NAMIHEI, Izumi SHIMA 1981 , Nikkatsu, colour, 68m.
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it-?. 1-E:v'
Love Me Danger (Abanaku ai shite) JTI;tt O.H.- ~ L 0 V E ME DANGER Cast: Makoto SUGIMOTO, Kimitake HIRAOKA, Shiro NOGUCHI 1996, ENK, colour, 60m. The Masturbating Lesbians (Za ONANIE Resu) -r · ONA lE v;( Cast: Kyoko HASHIMOTO 1991 , Xces Film, colour, 60m.
-tn-c: t . Orig. Sopping Wet Married Teacher: Doing It in Uniform (Gusho-nure hitazuma kyoshi: seifuku deidaite) ~ L. J: lb.n.A.~jlj&~ifi - flilm -c:1§", ~ Cast: Mitsuyo SUWA, Takeshi ITO, Atsuko SUZUKI,Mikio SATO 1999, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 62m. Availability: Salvation (UK, English subtitles) Falling in Love (Ai suru)
ilt:i"0 Orig. Wife Stirred-Up with Sexual Desire (Aiyoku midare-zuma) ~W\l7-t::n~
Cast: Mitsuyo SUWA, Yoji TANAKA, Ken NAGAI, Juri ASAOKA 1999, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 63m. Availability: Broadway (Japan, no subtitles) Frog Song (Kaeru no uta)
n'*- 0 C7)? t.:. Orig. Paid Companionship Story: Girls Who Want to Do It (Enjo kosai monogatari: shitagaru onna-tachi)
-~~~·- L.~~Q~/~~~
Cast: Konatsu, Rinako HIRASAWA, Mutsuo YOSHIOKA, Takeshi ITO, Yota KAWASE 2005, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 6Sm. Availability: Salvation (UK, English subtitles) Lunch Box (Obent6) :JO#~
Orig. Mature Woman: Rutting Ball-Play (Jukuj6: hatsuj6 tamashaburi) ~{\. 31:
• 5effl ?'"' L. ~;; I)
Gen. Bowling Ball (Tamamono)
t.:.
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Cast:Yumika HAYASHI, Mutsuo YOSHIOKA, Lemon HANAZAWA, Takeshi ITO, Kiyomi ITO, Yota KAWASE 2004, Kokuei I Shintoho,colour, 65m. Availability: Salvation (UK, English subtitles) Uncle's Paradise (Ojisan tengoku)
Men Who Love (Ai suru otoko-tachi) ilt:i"093t:~
Cast: Masaya SAKURAI, Hiroshi TAKEMOTO, Shiori KAWAMURA 2002, OP Eiga, colour, 61 m.
:JOC~!vJCOO
Orig. Mighty Extreme Woman (Zetsujin zetsujo) ~-~31: Cast: Shiro SHIMOMOTO, Mutsuo YOSHIOKA, Minami AOYAMA, Takeshi ITO 2006, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 64m. Availability: Salvation (UK, English subtitles)
Shinji IMAOKA Sex Hunter (Sekkusu hantci: sei karyOdo)
t::;?.:;U,/?'-
t£~'fA
Cast: Erina MIYAI, Ayako 0 TA, Nobuyuki INOUE, Teruo MATSUYAMA, Seru RANDO 1980, Nikkatsu, colour, 67m.
Demeking (Demekingu) 7:!-~/:1'
Orig. Molester Train: Benten's Butt (Chikan Densha: Benten no o-shiri) ~i!A!m•
Sukeban Mafia: Flesh Punishment Lynching (Sukeban mafia: nikukei rinchi) ?,JrF
-17.!:: ~ v'
L. J:
Cast: Sojiro ARAI, Aiko NAKA, Takeshi ITO, Setsuko ABE 1995, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 63m. Availability: Uplink (Japan, no subtitles)
345
Behind the Pink Curtain
Takashi ISHII
Seiji IZUMI
Angel Guts: Red Lightning (Tenshi no harawata: akai senko)
New Bride: Mixed Up Figure (Niizuma: midare sugata) m~ · i5Ln~ Cast: Mako AOKI, Jun KOSUGI, Chiyako MISUZU, Kenji AOKI 1974, Pro Taka, colour, 67m. Availability: Ace Deuce (Japan, no subtitles)
:Rff:O)I'J: G bt::.
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Cast: Maiko KAWAKAMI, Noriko HAYAMI, Shingo TSURUMI 1994, Argo Pictures, colour, 87m. Angel Guts: Red Vertigo (Tenshi no harawata: akai memai) :Rf~O)I'J:Gbf::.
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Cast: Mayako KATSURAGI, Naoto TAKENAKA, Jun IZUMI, Hirofumi KOBAYASHI, Yuho YAMAUCHI 1988, Nikkatsu, colour, 74m. Availability: Artsmagic (US, English subtitles)
:tU::ti: Cast: Aya SUGIMOTO, Renji ISHIBASHI, Hironobu NOMURA, Kenichi ENDO, Misaki 2004, Toei Video, colour, 11 Sm. Availability: Media Blasters (US, English subtitles) Flower and Snake 2: Paris I Shizuko (Hana to hebi: pari I shizuko)
:tr: c ft2 /{ !.) /flt-T
Cast: Aya SUGIMOTO, Joe SHISHIDO, Kenichi ENDO, Fujiko, Mieko ARAI 2005,ToeiVideo,colour, 113m. Availability: Media Blasters (US, English subtitles)
Kiyomi ITO The Gays in Wonderland (Fushigi no kuni no gei-tachi)
Hajime IZU Woman (Onna)
::10/vf,t Cast:YOko KASHIWAGI, Sh6jir6 OGASAWARA, Michiko HOSHI 1964, Kokuei, B/W, 86m.
Ghost Story: Phantom Ama (Kaidan ama yCtrei) t£~#ii~lll!l~
Cast:Jusabur6 AKECHI, Masayo BANRI, Ky6ko OGIMACHI, Katsuko WAKASUGI, K6ji KOKONOE 1960, Shintoho, B/W, 56m.
KAJINO Sabaku Trans. Bound in Chains f¥1~
- SABAKU -
Cast: Kazuhiro SANO, Kazuhiro TACHIZAWA, Takatoshi TONEGAWA, Mikio SATO, Kiyomi ITO 2000, ENK, colour, 60m. Availability: Bryce (Japan, no subtitles)
Yoshitaka KAMATA
Yokohama Cheyenne: Woman Swamp Zone (Yokohama shaian: onna no shicchi-tai)
No Woman No Cry (No Ctman no kurai)
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Orig. Dangerous Affair: Drool of the Beast (Abunai joji: kedamono no shitatari) ;t;,.S::tt H \lfll= W(O) L..J::.t::. VJ Vid. Sighs of a Wicked Woman (Akajo no sasayaki)
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Cast: Midori SUGA, Ai MISUZU, Masayoshi NOGAMI, lchir6 YOSHIOKA 1974, Pro Taka I Million Film, colour, 66m. Availability: Ace Deuce (Japan, no subtitles)
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Kazuyuki IZUTSU Assault Demon Pearl Torture (B6k6-ma shinju-zeme) ~rr~J.tn~~~
Cast:Takeshi ITO, Harumi KAJIMA, Mayuko SASAKI, Daisuke IIJIMA, YOji SAWAYAMA 1998, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 6Sm. Availability: Airfield (Japan, no subtitles) VHS Sara
Cast:Takuma IKEUCHI, Yuichi MINATO, Rei OKAMOTO, Hibari NAKAHARA 1979, Shintoho, colour,61m. Availability: Video Maker (Japan, no subtitles)
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346
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fr~ Cast: Rumi TAMA, YOichi MINATO, Kazumi SAWA, MikiOGAWA, Keiko TAKAHASHI, Hiroko FUJI, lchir6 YOSHIOKA,Jir6 SAGAWA 1975, Million Film, colour, 62m. Availability: Ace Deuce (Japan, no subtitles)
iJ.*- ffijj 0) 9'J .[,, ""(' 7 .-{ a-Ill~ /v Cast: Kazu ITSUKI, Shintar6 TANAKA, Kozue AOKI, Takao NAKANO, Shiro NOGUCHI, Masayoshi NOGAMI, Taro ARAKI 1997, ENK, colour, 58m. Availability: Cam Video (Japan, no subtitles) VHS
Cast: Sei Ran Rl, Renji ISHIBASHI 1988, Nikkatsu (Ropponica), colour, 96m. Availability: Geneon (Japan, no subtitles)
Sex Document: Serial Rapists (Sekkusu semi dokyumento: renzoku fujo b6k6-ma)
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Trans. The Mysterious Land of Gays Pt 1.Echika - dir. Kiyomi ITO :x."f-jJ Pt 2. Nursing at Home (Zaitaku Kaigo) - dir. Ky6ko GODAI 1'£~11-~ Pt 3. The Beast Who Screamed 'Love' in the Middle ofa Movie (Eiga no chCtshin de ai o sakenda kedamono) - dir. Keiko SORBONNE
The Prosperity of Vice (Akutoku no sakae) j!;~O)**-
GoroKADONO Red Cave (Akaik6d6) ~v'~illil Cast: unknown 1972, Pro Taka, unknown, unknown
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Flower and Snake (Hana to hebi)
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Akio JISSOJI
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Orig. Young Wife: The Fragrance of Adultery (Waka-zuma: furin no kaori) ~~
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Cast: Y6ta KAWASE, Yumeka SASAKI, Sh6ko KUDO, Takeshi ITO 1998, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 63m.
Koji KAMOTA Go Go Might Guy: The Anguish ofSexual Awakening (Yuke yuke maito gai: seishun monmon) fTI;IIJ Cast: Natsuki UMEDA, Chie UMEDA 1991, ENK, colour, 60m.
Hideo KIJO Married Women Who Want a Taste (Ajimi shitai hitozuma-tachi) 1!4; Jl. l.J::: v'A ~lf:t.: t;, Cast: Kaori, Ruri TACHIBANA, Asami SAKURA, Kenichi TAJIMA, Daisuke IIJIMA 2003, ENK, colour, 60m.
Akitaka KIMATA Human Flesh Market (Jinniku no ichi) Alt. Esc/aves du Plaisir A~O)m
Cast: Eri ASHIKAWA 1969, Pro Taka, colour, unknown
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Cast: Keiko NIITAKA, Kuniko MASUDA, Yukari YAMABUKI, Hiroshi IKAIDA 1967, Yam abe Pro I Kanto Eihai unknown, 69m. Note: Co-directed with lchiro KYODO
Yukio KITAZAWA I Thought About You (Omoide wa anata dake) }~,v'l:l:i!i:>ftt.:t;::lt
Abo u t
~ I
T h o u g h t
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Cast:Yota KAWASE, Osamu SHIMOGAWA, Kyosuke SASAKI, Hajime MAO, Hotaru HAZUKI 1997,11ZUMI Production I ENK, colour, 61 m. Korean Masturbation Special: Self-Pleasuring Mania Women (Kankoku onani supesharu:jii mania na onna-tachi) •oo~~=--:A ~~~~
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:9: t.: t;, Cast: Hana, Ji-m in Min, Wonbok Kim 2002, Total Media Corporation (V), colour, 60m.
The Key (Kagi) ~
Cast: Masumi OKADA, Kiyo MATSUO, Shingo EGAMI, Yuo TAGUCHI, Fumio WATANABE, Hatsuo YAMAYA 1983 (director's cut 1997), Wakamatsu Pro I Toei Central Films, colour, 98m.
Korean Wives: Hard and Wild (Kankoku hitozuma-tachi: hageshiku, midara ni) •oo O) A~U.:i?
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Cast: Hana, Hyon-su,Ji-min Min, Wonbok Kim 2002,11ZUMI Production I Xces Film, colour, 60m.
347
Behind the Pink Curtain
Wet Virgin: Obscene Assault (Waisetsu shojo: Waisetsu book) ~ht;: ~:9:
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Lusty Ghost Story: Rutting Woman Phantom (Shikiyoku kaidan: hatsuj6 anna yurei) ~tt :k i? nit'
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Cast: Naomi HAGIO, Utako KOI, Kazuko TAKAHARA, Shiro SHIMOMOTO, Kazuhiro SANO, Yutaka IKEJIMA 198S, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 63m.
Cast: Nao SAEJIMA, Kinako, Yumi YOSHIYUKI, Ryoko MOMOI, YOichi MINATO 199S, Okura Eiga, colour, 60m. Availability: E-Net Frontier (Japan, no subtitles)
Masahiro KOBAYASHI
The Mysterious Pearl of the Ama (Ama no kai-shinju)
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Cast: Hotaru HAZUKI, Yota KAWASE 2000, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 62m.
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Cast: Joji UMEWAKA, Kyoko IZUMI 1963, Okura Eiga, colour, 87m.
Absolutely Secret: Girl Torture (Gokuhi: onna g6mon)
Peeping Assault (Nozoki b6k6)
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Cast: Naomi TAN I 1968, Tokyo Koei I Shintoho, part colour, 80m.
Cast: Ei SH0BUN, Risa AOKI 1977, Tokatsu I Shochiku, colour, 67m.
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Japanese Torture Punishment History (Nihon g6mon keibatsu-shi)
Satoru KOBAYASHI
Pervert's Pitfall (Chikan no otoshiana) ~~(7)~l.,/\
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Cast: Ayako OTA, Rie KITAHARA, Junko MIYASHITA, Asami OGAWA, Yuri YAMASHINA, Hideaki ESUMI, Aoi NAKAJIMA, Masayoshi NOGAMI, Akira TAKAHASHI 1980, Nikkatsu, colour, 67m. Sayuri lchij6: Wet Lust (lchij6 Sayuri: nureta yokuj6) Alt. Following Desire - ~ ~ 19> IJ
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Cast: Sayu ri ICHIJO, Hiroko ISAYAMA, Kazuko SHIRAKAWA, Akira TAKAHASHI, MoekoEZAWA 1972, Nikkatsu, colour,69m. Availability: Geneon (Japan, no subtitles)
Lady Karuizawa (Karuizawa fujin) ll!f#~~.A
Cast: Miwa TAKADA, Takayuki GODAI, Yumi YOSHIKAWA, Akemi NEGISHI, Yoshio TSUCHIYA, Y6ko AZUSA 1982, Nikkatsu, colour, 93m. Availability: Geneon (Japan, no subtitles) Rope and Breasts (Nawa to nyub6)
Tatsumi KUMASHIRO
Street ofJoy (Akasen tamanoi: nukeraremasu)
Black Rose Ascension (Kuro-bara sh6ten)
Cast:Junko MIYASHITA, Keiz6 KANIE, Kunio SHIMIZU, S6ichir6 MAENO, Naomi OKA, Toshihiko ODA, Moeko EZAWA, Meika SERI, Akira TAKAHASHI, Ai YOSHINO, Aoi NAKAJIMA 1974, Nikkatsu, colour, 78m. Availability: Hanzibar Films (UK, English subtitles)
(/F~EEO)#
.W.tUHI-.:R Cast: Shin KISHIDA, Naomi TAN I, Meika SERI, Akira TAKAHASHI, Hatsuo YAMAYA,Terumi AZUMA 197S, Nikkatsu, colour, 72m. Availability: Geneon (Japan, no subtitles)
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Cast: Nami MATSUKAWA, Izumi SHIMA, Akira TAKAHASHI 1983, Nikkatsu, colour, 69m. Availability: Geneon (Japan, no subtitles) Tattooed Flower Vase (Kashin no irezumi: ureta tsubo) Trans. Tattoo of a Pistil: Mature Pot {t:C,O)ijilj~
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Cast: Naomi TAN I, Takako KITAGAWA, Shin NAKAMARU, Genshu HANAYAGI, Mami YOKI, Tamaki KOMIYAMA 1976, Nikkatsu,colour, 74m. Availability: Kino (US, English subtitles), Allocine (France, French subtitles) as La vie secrete de Madame Yoshino
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The Key (Kagi) ~
Cast: Hideo KANZE, Yuki ARASA, Tokuko WATANABE, Kenz6 KAWARAZAKI, Moeko EZAWA 1974, Nikkatsu, colour, 90m. Availability: Geneon (Japan, no subtitles) Life of a Striptease Lover (Kaburitsuki jinsei) Trans. Life at the Front-Row Seat of the Theatre Alt. A Thirsty Life
iJ'lP IJ 0~ .AI£ Cast: Hatsue TONOOKA, Shizu NIWA 1968, Nikkatsu, colour, 94m.
Twisted Path of Love (Koibito-tachi wa nureta) Trans. Lovers Are Wet
?J:..At;: '!:_,l;l:~fl,f;: Cast: Rie NAKAGAWA, Moeko EZAWA, Chizuyu AZAMI, K6ichi HORI, Akira TAKAHASHI, T6ru OE 1973, Nikkatsu, colour, 76m. Availability: Geneon (Japan, no subtitles) Wet Desire: Special Appearance 2 7 People (Nureta yokuj6: tokudashi 2 7-nin) ~nt::W.:M'
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Cast:Yuko KATAGIRI, Meika SERI, Moeko EZAWA, Yoshinori FURUKAWA, Akira TAKAHASHI, Ai YOSHINO 1974, Nikkatsu, colour, 77m.
349
Behind the Pink Curtain
Wet Lips (Nureta kuchibiru)
Kiyoshi KUROSAWA
~ht:.~
Kandagawa Pervert Wars (Kandagawa inran sens6)
Cast: Moeko EZAWA, Keiko AIKAWA, Yuri YAMASHINA, Hajime TANIMOTO 1972, Nikkatsu, colour, ?Sm. Woman with the Red Hair (Akai kami no onna) ~v'~O):tz_-
Cast:Junko MIYASHITA, Renji ISHIBASHI, Ako (2), Miyako YAMAGUCHI, Moeko EZAWA, Hatsuo YAMAYA, Yoko ISHIDO, Akira TAKAHASHI 1979, Nikkatsu, colour, 73m. Availability: Kino (US, English subtitles), Geneon (Japan, no subtitles) Woman with the Red Hat (Akai b6shi no onna) Alt. Die Frau Mit Den Ruten Hut ~v'ljl'@-=f-0):9:
Cast:Toshiyuki NAGASHIMA, Shigeru IZUMIYA, Kristina Van Eyck, Erhart Hartmann, Bernd Stephan 1982 (Germany: 1984) Wakamatsu Pro I Herald Ace I Monopteros Film, colour, 104m. Woods Are Wet (On na jigoku: mori wa nureta) Trans. Woman Hell: Woods Are Wet :tz:tili~itt
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Cast: Usagi ASO, Makoto MINO, Hoen KISHINO, Miiko SAWAKI,Tatsuya MORI, Masayuki SUO 1983, Director's Company I Million Film, colour, 60m. Availability: Uplink (Japan, no subtitles)
World of Geisha 2: The Precocious Lad (Yoj6han fusuma no urabari: shinobihada) Trans. Behind the Sliding Door: Chaste Skin ll!l:I:::¥W!O)~'*I)
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Cast:Junko MIYASHITA, Hideaki ESUMI, Naomi OKA, Moeko EZAWA, Meika SERI, Akira TAKAHASHI, Ai YOSHINO 1974, Nikkatsu, colour, 81 m. Availability: Geneon (Japan, no subtitles)
Minoru ~UNIZAWA iJ& v\~ < vc
Vi d. Sex* Beast* Battle* Front (Sei * ju* sen* sen)
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Cast: Ruri TACHIBANA, Kei MIYAZAWA, Ryoko ASAGI 2003, OP Eiga, colour, 60m. Availability: Uplink (Japan, no subtitles)
350
Mitsuru MEIKE
Girl Divers at Spook Mansion (Ama no bakemono yashiki)
Orig. Concentrated Adultery: Taken Woman (Noko-furin: torareta onna)
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Cast:Yoko MIHARA, Bunta SUGAWARA, Reiko SETO, Masayo BANRI 1959, Shintoho, B/W, 81m. Availability: Geneon (Japan, no subtitles)
Chise MATOBA See Sachi HAMANO
From Flower and Snake: Rearing the Flesh (Hana to hebi yori: niku no shiiku) ~cttJ:~J
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Cast: Konatsu, Kin ISHIKAWA, Yumika HAYASHI, Kazuhiro SANO, Takuya FUKUSHIMA, Minami AOYAMA 2004, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 58m. Availability: Salvation (UK, English subtitles) The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (Hanai Sachiko karei na sh6gai) ~# ~
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Orig. Horny Home Tutor: Teacher's Love Juice (Hatsuj6 katei ky6shi: sensei no aijiru) 5Effl*l%~flili ;'i:;:!£0)~7+ Cast: Emi KURODA, Kyoko HAYAMI, Kanae MIZUHARA, Takeshi ITO, Yukijiro HOTARU, Tetsuaki MATSUE, Yota KAWASE 2004, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 90m. (originally 6Sm.) Availability: Uplink (Japan, English subtitles), Rapid Eye Movies (Germany, German subtitles/ dialogue), Palm Pictures (US, English subtitles)
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Cast: Naomi TAN I, Koju RAN, Mari IWAI, Shohei YAMAMOTO, Kenji MIYASE 1968, Yamabe Pro, colour, 67m. Note: Co-directed with Shintaro KISHI
It Don't Mean a Thing IfIt Ain't Got That Swing Alt. Swing Orig. Swapping Night: Dangerous Flirtation (Suwappingu naito: abunai na tawamure)
Devilish Married Woman See listing under Sojiro MOTOGI
Cast: Hotaru HAZUKI, Takeshi ITO, Yuki, Takashi MIZUNO, Mutsuo YOSHIOKA . 2002, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 67m. Availability: Salvation (UK, English subtitles)
.7-9~~~~ · ~-11-
Wet Woman (Nureta onna)
'rittiht:.:tz: Cast: Keiko TACHIBANA, Keiko YAMANAKA, Yasuko MORI, Hiroshi IKAIDA, Shohei YAMAMOTO 1965, Tokyo Kikaku, B/W, 77m. The Whip and the Perverted Beast (Muchi to inju)
¥!fcJ!2;;W: Cast: Naomi TANI,Joji NAGAOKA, Hiromi YAMAURA 1968, Yamabe Pro I Million Film colour, 73m.
Irresistible Angel: Suck It All Up (N6satsu tenshi: sui tsukushite) t&J~:Rfie:
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Cast: Aya MUSO, Sho NAMIKI, Masaki WATANABE, Minako TANAKA 1982, Aesthetic Kikaku / Toei Central Films, colour, 58m.
Bitter Sweet (Bita suito)
Jiro MATSUBARA World of Geisha (Yoj6han fusuma no ura-bari) Trans. Behind the Four-and-a-HalfTatami Sliding Door IZ!H1:-¥~0)~* IJ Cast:Junko MIYASHITA, Hideaki ESUMI, Hatsuo YAMAYA, Naomi OKA, Moeko EZAWA, Meika SERI 1973, Nikkatsu, colour, 72m. Availability: Kino (US, English subtitles), Geneon (Japan, no subtitles)
White Does (Shirai mejika-tachi)
Morihei MAGADANI
~~i~ht:.
Cast: Hiroko ISAYAMA, Rie NAKAGAWA, Hatsuo YAMAYA, Yuri YAMASHINA, Koichi HORI, Moeko EZAWA, Akira TAKAHASHI 1973, Nikkatsu, colour, 6Sm. Availability: Uplink (Japan, no subt itles)
Roses, the Sea and the Sun (Bara to umi to taiy6 to) t~Wicmc:t:~c Cast:Tatsuya NAGATOMO,Toru NODA 1982, World Eiga / Toei Central Films, colour, 59m.
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Nurse's Diary: Twice and Three Times While Still Wet (Byakui in ran nikki: nureta mama ni-do, san-do) s:iXv'lvGiviHC. f.-tht:.**=.lt, .=.~t Vid. Rookie Nurse Confession (Kokuhaku shinjin kangofu) 15-s~.A~~~!lffi-
cast: Mariko YOSHIOKA, Satoru JITSUNASHI, Kikujiro HONDA, Mai KAWANA 1997, Shintoho, colour, 60m. Availability: Airfield (Japan, no subtitles) VHS Secondhand Love (Sekonhan rabu)
Yasuji MATSUURA
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The Constellation of Roses (Bara no seiza)
Orig. The Naughty Office Lady: Stay in Me Until Morning (Tain OL: as a made nukanaide)
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Cast: Shigekazu NAKAJIMA, Takeshi YOSHIMOTO, Masayoshi NOGAMI, Ryuji YAMAMOTO 1982, Gendai Eizo Kikaku / Toei Central Films, colour, 58m.
Cast: Yumeka SASAKI, Yota KAWASE, Masataka MATSUBARA, Shiori KAWAMURA, Meg uri MATSUSHIMA 2000, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 63m.
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Films Referenced in Text
Shameful Family: Pin Down Technique (Harenchi famiri: newaza de ippatsu) r--t..... /7
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Cast: Kazuhiro SANO, Junki KONNO, Yoshimi KIN UTA, Kanae MIZUHARA, Hidehisa EBATA, Motoko SASAKI, Kikujiro HONDA 2002, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 61 m. Snow/Woman Orig.Adulterous Wife: Flaming Passion (Furin-zuma: j6en) /Fffifl~
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Cast: Yota KAWASE, Kiyomi IT6, Shiori KURODA, Kikujiro HONDA, Shiro SHIMOMOTO 2000, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 62m. Availability: Salvation (UK, English subtitles) (STOP USING) SEX AS A WEAPON+ (JUST LIKE) STARTING OVER (Maru de saishuppatsu) Q '"('f!i/il~ (STOP USING) SEX AS A WEAPON+ (JUST LIKE) STARTING OVER Orig. Sopping Wet Beautician: Horny Lower Quarters (Gusho nure-biy6shi sukebe na shimohanshin)
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Cast: Yumeka SASAKI, Yoji TANAKA, Yota KAWASE, Tomomi AIZAWA, Kenichi TAJIMA 1998, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 65m. Availability: Uplink (Japan, no subtitles)
Hideki MIKI Code ofLove (Shokud6 jingi) @.ili1=~
Cast: Masayoshi NOGAMI, Shohei YAMAMOTO, Koji SATOM I, Hachiro TSURUOKA, Morio CHIKUMA, Yuichi MINATO, Joji ICHIMURA, Hiroshi NIKAID6,Jun KITAMURA,Jiro KOKUBU, Setsu SHIMIZU, Nami KATSURA, Naomi TAN I, Miki HAYASHI, Mari NAGISA, Koju RAN, Noriko TATSUMI, Yukari YAMABUKI 1968, Yamabe Pro I Nih on Cinema colour, 69m. When a Woman Gets Satisfied: Devilish Wife (Onna ga michitasareru toki: mash6-zuma) :9,"7)~7l!Jt:.
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Cast:Yuka KATO, Yuna NAKAZATO, Shoichi YOKOSOKA, Seiji NAKAMITSU, Yasushi TAKEMOTO 2002, OP Eiga, colour, 60m.
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Cast: Kyoko OGIMACHI, Keiko TACHIBANA 1964, Kokuei, B/W, 86m. Menses and Pregnancy (Seiri to ninshin)
Sex Manual of the Human Race (Jinrui no seiten)
Kyoko QGIMACHI Yakuza Geisha ~r Y /"~.A
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Cast: Yuriko YAMAMOTO, Hiroshi NIKAID6, Masayoshi NOGAMI 1974, Prima Kikaku I Nikkatsu, colour, 65m.
Hisayasu SATO Angel in the Dark Orig. Raw Real Performance: Drink Up (Nama honban: nomihosu)
TV**
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Cast: Yuri ISHIHARA, Koichi IMAIZUMI, Yumika HAYASHI, Satoe MIZUSHIMA, Hiroyuki KAWASAKI 1993, Shishi Pro I Xces Film,colour, 61 m. The Bedroom Orig. An Aria on Gazes (Shisen-jo no aria) m~J:0)7 !J 7
Last Bullet (Saigo no dangan) :l!k~~O)ij!jl.j[,
Orig. Confinement: Obscene Foreplay (Kankin: waisetsu na zengi) ~~
!7-1-e~ttM~
Cast: Kazuhiro SANO, Kanako KISHI,Junko ISHII, Chinatsu MINAMI NO, Taro ARAKI 1989, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 59m.
Orig. Promiscuous Wife: Disgraceful Torture (Uwaki-zuma: chijoku zeme)
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Cast: Kiyomi IT6, Takeshi IT6, Momoka ASANO, Mineo SUGIURA, Ky6ko NAKAMURA, Issei SAGAWA, Taketoshi WATARI, Koichi IMAIZUMI 1992, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour,64m. Availability: Screen Edge (UK, English subtitles)
Films Referenced in Text
Birthday (Tanjobi) ~1::13
Orig.Molester Train: Dirty Deeds (Chikan densha: iyarashii koi) ~i!/.fll!1ll:
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Cast:Yumika HAYASHI, Koichi IMAIZUMI, Kiyomi lTC, Yuri ISHIHARA, Hiroyuki KAWASAKI 1993, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, S4m. (directed as Hisakazu HATA) Distorted Sense of Touch (Kurutta shokukaku) ll:-?t.::Mt~
Orig. Violent Love! Secret Lolita Hunting (Gekiai! Rorita mitsury6) ~~!o!J-~4to~
Cast: Kiyomi lTC, Taketoshi WATARI, Naomi HAGIO, Shiro SHIMOMOTO, Yuichi MINATO, Yutaka IKEJIMA, Bunmei TOBAYAMA 1985, Shishi Pro I Toei Central Films, colour, 63m. The Fetist: Hot Breath (Fetisuto: atsui toiki) 7 :r. 7 --r .A 1- ilr-1\v'u .±g Cast: Yoshihisa NEMOTO, Yuichi ARAKI, Yoji TANAKA, Kunio MASAOKA 1998, ENK, colour, 65m. Availability: Bryce (Japan, no subtitles) Fuga Music for Alpha and Beta (Alpha to beta no fuga) 0: ~ {3 (/)7-jf Orig. Pervert Ward: SM Clinic (Hentai by6t6: SM shinryo-shitsu) ~ti!H~~ S M~~* Cast: Kazuhiro SANO, Kiyomi lTC 1989, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 54m.
RR. Married Woman Debauchery Training: Stimulating Torment (Hitozuma inran ch6ky6: itaburu shigeki) .A.~t¥!LWM~
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Cast: Rio SERIZAWA, Yuri HI ME, Kyoko NAKAMURA, Mineo SUGIURA, Koichi IMAIZUMI, Yutaka IKEJIMA 1992, Shishi Pro I Xces Film, colour, 58m. Love-Zero=lnfinity Orig. Dirty Wife: Getting Wet (lyarashii hitozuma: nureru) ~'~G 1..-V'.A.*
/ID;h,Q Cast: Kiyomi lTC, Takeshi lTC, Ryumei HOMURA, Koichi IMAIZUMI, Shiro SHIMOMOTO, Hiroyuki KAWASAKI 1994, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 63m. (directed as Hisakazu HATA) Availability: Artsmagic (US, English subtitles) Lustmord Orig. Genuine Assault (B6k6 honban)
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Cast: Nanako FUJITANI, Narutoshi ISHIKAWA, Kiyomi lTC, Yui HOSHIKAWA, Asami YOKI, Bunmei TOBAYAMA, Yutaka IKEJIMA 1987, Shishi Pro I Shintoho, colour, 57m. Muscle Lunar Eclipse Theatre (Gesshoku eiga-kan) .FIIm~ii!iimr
Hunter's Sense of Touch (Karyudo-tachi no shokkaku)
Orig.Mad Ballroom (Kurutta buto-kai)
~'1' .A. t.:: i? (J) Ml:It
Vid. The Madness Night Cast:Takeshi lTC, Shimon KUMAI, Kiyomi lTC 1989, Shishi Pro I ENK, colour, 60m. Availability: Strand Releasing (US, English subtitles) VHS Poaching by the Water's Edge (Mitsury6 no migiwa) 4t.~(J)rr
Intoxication Game (Tosui yOgi)
Orig. Horse and Woman and Dog (Uma to onna to inu)
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Cast: Shotaro SAWADA, Takahiko KOBAYASHI, Toru MATSUMURA, Ryuji YAMAMOTO 1989, ENK, colour, 60m. Kyrie Eleison Orig. (Raw) Wiretapping Report: Sex Talk ((Nama) t6ch6 repoto: chiwa) ~JU!\!)
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Cast: Kanako KISHI, Kazuhiro SANO, Yuri SASAKI, Emi UEHARA, Takahiko KOBAYASHI 1990, Media Up I Shintoho, colour, 58m.
~~
Cast: Kiyomi lTC, Takeshi lTC, Mako, Koichi IMAIZUMI, Mineo SUGIURA, Momoka ASANO 1993, Shintoho, colour, 60m.
Rafureshia Orig. Slut Wife: While Husband's Away (Sukebe tsuma: otto no rusu ni)
Labyrinth ofPrimary Colours (Genshoku no meikyO)
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Orig. Human Torture: Three-Grade Punishment (Ningen gomon: sandan zeme)
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(Japan, no subtitles)
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Osamu SATO
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Cast:Yukinojo, Rie ASAI, Mineo SUGIURA, Koichi IMAIZUMI, Takahiko KOBAYASHI 1991, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, S8m.
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Orig. Apartment Wife: Moans from Next Door (Danchi-zuma: tonari no aegi) Cast: Mao NAKAGAWA, Takeshi ITO, Yuji TAJIRI, Yumeka SASAKI, Tsukasa SAITO 2001, Kokuei I Shintoho, colour, 69m. Availability: Salvation (UK, English subtitles), Broadway (Japan, no subtitles)
Apartment Wife: Adulterous Passion
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Orig. Sisters Serial Rape: Scoop Out! (Shimai renzoku reipu: eguru!) ~ili:M:ii~ v -1 7' ;t Q ! Cast: Marino FUJISAWA, Reika KAZAMI, Narutoshi ISHIKAWA,Taketoshi WATARI, Kiyomi ITO 1989, Shishi Pro I Xces Film, colour, 6Sm.
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Empty Room (Akibeya)
Simple Story (Tanjun na hanashi) lj! ~·titt ~~ Orig.Adulterous Wife~ Sex: Pleasure Hunting (Furin-zuma no sei: kairaku asari) /F~~O)fi£
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Cast: Kanako KISHI, Saki KURIHARA, Mineo SUGIURA, Yasunori ETO, Toru NAKANE, Daikei SHIMIZU 1992, Outcast Produce I Shintoho, colour, S9m. Availability: Uplink (Japan, no subtitles)
!l!k lttctO) Cast:Toru NAKANE, Mayu ASABUKI, Kiyomi ITO, Daikei SHIMIZU, Kyoko NAKAMURA 1989, Burst Brain Products I Shintoho, colour, 60m. Availability: Eve (Japan, no subtitles) VHS
Tandem Orig. Molester Train Married Woman Edition: Wife Is a Pervert (Chikan densha hitozuma-hen: okusama wa chijo) mir!/Hltli!.A~~
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Cast: Daikei SHIMIZU, Hotaru HAZUKI, Maya OGI 1994, Shintoho, colour, S9m. Availability: Screen Edge (UK, English subtitles) Note: A reel appears to be missing from the Screen Edge DVD release.
Films Referenced in Text
That's Hentai-tainment: Abnormal SEX Complete Works (Zatsu hentai-teinmento: ij6 SEX taizen-shii) ~~y~~T~/7/~ ~~
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1991, Outcast Produce I Shintoho, colour, 58m. Note: "Greatest hits" compendium of pink film clips directed along with Takao Nakano and Toshiya Ueno.
lkuo SEKIMOTO
Takae SHIN DO
Oniroku Dan: Rope Torture (Dan Oniroku: nawazeme) Sj)t/,1'; m\:rfQ) Cast: Mika TAKAKURA, Kaori TAKAHASHI, Kazuyuki SENBA, Hajime INOUE 1984, Nikkatsu, colour, 71 m. Availability: Geneon (Japan, no subtitles)
Abortion Surgery (Chuzetsu shuj utsu)
Woman of the House: Going to the Class Reunion (Danchi no okusan: d6s6kai ni iku) SJf.1!!0)~~1v. [ii]rE-~1-:.rr