Art, Riot, Terror: The 60s Tokyo Avant-Garde: Mishima, Hijikata, Oshima Read online

  In Funeral Parade Of Roses, the urban space of Tokyo is seen by its characters as being involved in a process of disintegration, reflecting the widespread perception of the time in Japan that rapid urban proliferation, together with pollution and the exhausting of natural resources, had radically destabilised the environment of the country, whose precarious existence was also mediated by the culture of violent protest against the country’s presence of US military power. Urban space constantly fragments in the film. In one of its sequences, the funeral takes place of the manager of the Bar Genet, who has committed suicide out of jealousy about the relationship between Eddie and the bar’s proprietor. After the funeral has ended, Eddie notices that much of the vast, decrepit cemetery has become waterlogged, and that many tombs have subsided, vanishing below the water. That disintegration of the cemetery is explicitly that of Tokyo itself, and Eddie exclaims that he wishes that not only Tokyo, but the entirety of Japan, would sink below water and disappear. The city is moving in precarious transits between moments of past disappearance, such as that of its destruction by firebombing in 1945, to future moments in which its excess, or the violence generated by its protest movements, may also entail the vanishing from sight of its space.

  The title of a film directed by Shuji Terayama in the same era incites its spectators: Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go Out Into The Streets. However, the young revolutionaries of Funeral Parade Of Roses are never seen in the streets of Tokyo, and decline to participate in the demonstrations taking place at the moment in which the film is set. Instead, in company with Eddie, they remain enclosed in interior spaces, engaged in wild sex parties, and watching the television news broadcasts which show images of the ongoing confrontations between young protesters and riot-police. They also make films of the television news images, and then project those films, of the media images of riots, to themselves, in the same room, with the film-images distorted by technological processes of replication, in a parallel way to those which Chris Marker includes as the contents of the ‘Zone’, in his film Sunless. Matsumoto anticipates a global obsession with media images of conflict, and the loss of a direct physical contact with urban protest. Revolution has been abstracted, and transformed into ever-diminishing media images, which form a source of excitation, for sexual acts or for the filmmaking process itself, but not for social activism.

  Matsumoto also demonstrates the estrangement and familiarisation of urban space through film, by including a number of interview sequences in Funeral Parade Of Roses, clearly resonant of those in films by Jean-Luc Godard, and which insurge into the film, as documentary elements, to intentionally fracture its linear narrative consistency. In those sequences, Matsumoto conducts dialogues with young transvestites in the avenues of Shinjuku, filming them at night against the background of the district’s illuminated buildings.

  Most of the interview sequences follow a set framework, in which the same questions are posed and the same answers are given, so that they form a repetitive element of the film, providing a sense of stability within the disintegration and furore which the narrative itself carries. In part, that stability is provided by the recognisable urban presence, of the familiar plazas and hoardings of the Shinjuku district. The city may be eroding and submerging into riots, and the film’s characters are all heading into death, but the distinctive urban aura of Shinjuku allows momentary coherings of filmic space.

  Oshima’s film Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, filmed around the same period as Funeral Parade Of Roses, opens with a sequence set in the same Tokyo location: the plaza alongside the Shinjuku railway station, where a theatre company are staging an open-air performance. In fact, the film never leaves the Shinjuku district, focusing on a narrow psychogeographical area which the film relates to the interior journey of its central character, Birdey, a young book-thief who steals books from the shelves at the huge Kinokuniya bookshop, located directly alongside the Shinjuku plaza. In many ways, the film attempts to generate a narrative element from the particular resonances of that urban location, and its reputation as a site for counter-cultures and sexual experimentation, in the way that filmmakers of the same era might have selected as locations the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, or the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin, in order to conjure a parallel aura of urban exploration.

  Oshima’s film is concerned more explicitly than Funeral Parade Of Roses with making connections between sexual acts and revolution, cutting directly between sex-scenes and shots of the street-riots in Shinjuku; the film ends with an extended sequence of rioting, so that its narrative is one that is left open, as though prised-apart by the engulfing violent uproar of the period.

  However, one factor which unites the two films is their obsession with the work of the French writer Jean Genet, whose novels are cited in both films’ titles, and whose film Un Chant d’Amour, from 1950, had been distributed internationally via filmmakers’ co-operatives and seen by directors in Japan; it exerts a strong stylistic influence on the filming of sexual acts in Funeral Parade Of Roses. The naming of the nightclub where Eddie works in that film forms a homage to Genet, and when Birdie steals books from the Kinokuniya bookshop, he heads directly for the works of Genet, who had himself been a book-thief and was imprisoned several times for those thefts. Genet was at the height of his international reputation in 1969, engaged in that period in his support for the Palestinians, for the Black Panther movement in the USA, and for the rights of immigrant workers in France itself; all of his novels had been translated into Japanese, and he was a seminal figure for many of Tokyo’s experimental filmmakers, artists, choreographers and theatre directors, as he remains in contemporary Tokyo. By an aberrant urban coincidence, Genet spent part of 1969 in Tokyo, where he visited his friend Jackie Maglia, and took part in several of the largest and most violent of the confrontations between the student movements and riot-police, in November and December of that year. Maglia recalled Genet’s participation in the demonstrations: ‘People hooked up to one another… so they’d be harder to arrest. Genet pretended to be ‘’reviewing’’ the masked soldiers who’d come to control the crowd. He looked each soldier squarely in the eye (many of them were handsome).’(3) However, Genet declined to meet filmmakers and artists while in Tokyo.

  Even more than Matsumoto’s film, Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief is a film of urban fragments, in which narrative elements are disconnected and subordinated to the exploration of urban space. The film comprises a set of momentary encounters, transits and pursuits, between the book-thief and a female assistant at the Kinokuniya bookshop who arrests him in the act of theft, and between them and a theatre director played by Juro Kara. As with Funeral Parade Of Roses, the film focuses on the ability of the mobile camera to scan the surfaces and subterraneas of the city, and collect traces and residues, including those imprinted upon exterior walls and buildings in the forms of graffiti and advertising hoardings, which then amass, to form a representation of the city, in many ways allied to those created by neo-realist works, as one in a state of crisis.

  Although the exploration of urban space is largely accorded the work of defining and carrying the film – to the point at which, in Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, the characters occasionally appear peripheral to the film’s preoccupations – that urban space is itself one which is seen as disintegrating, subject to perpetual amendment, and presented as a sequence of fragments which will never cohere.

  In both Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, the revolutionary aspirations of the protesters are treated by the filmmakers with a degree of irony, and linked to the ideas of revolution as an art of performance which Genet had developed in his theatrical work. The revolutionary ‘cell’ in Matsumoto’s film never leave their room, and become consumed by the media images of the riots taking place in the avenues outside; the sexual imperatives around the relationship between the two characters in Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief also render them largely oblivious to the riots which finally engulf the entire film. This preoccupat
ion with an oblique, ambivalent relationship to activism and revolutionary commitment is also present in films by the director Koji Wakamatsu, who analysed the rapport between sexual and revolutionary acts in his films of the same era, structured in the form of exploitation or pornographic films. Wakamatsu was also preoccupied with the connections between the protest-culture of late-1960s Tokyo and the terrorist movements which emerged, directly or indirectly, from that culture; he visited the Palestinian liberation movements in 1971, and recently made a new film, United Red Army (2008), which looks back at the terrorist groups of 1970s Japan and at their implosive internal dynamics. Both Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief appear prescient of the aftermath of the urban riots in late-1960s Tokyo, in their depictions both of an all-consuming apathy, and of forms of terrorism whose imageries and definitions could be endlessly manipulated and distorted.

  In that same period, the Tokyo-based filmmaker Donald Richie made his film Cybele, which, like Funeral Parade Of Roses, adopts a mythic narrative structure and uses a cemetery location, that of the vast Yanaka cemetery in eastern Tokyo, to explore its concern with urban and cultural disintegration. In the final sequence of his film, Richie depicted a group of naked figures who appeared to have been slaughtered and piled-up on top of each other – images which led to the censorship and banning of the film in numerous countries. In some ways, those images intimate an overturning of the sense of exhilaration and often-playful experimentation which had occupied Tokyo-based filmmakers during the second half of the 1960s, and resonate instead, even against the filmmaker’s intentions, more directly from wartime images such as those of the results of the US firebombing of the city in 1945. Those unexpected transits across time, in Japanese cinema of the late 1960s, are as revealing as the perpetual movements through urban space which propelled those films’ narratives and determined their distinctive stylistic texture.

  The images of Tokyo’s urban space, in a state of violent turmoil, remain resonant ones for filmmaking and for digital arts in contemporary Tokyo, evident, for example, in the work of the director Shinya Tsukamoto and the mutating megalopolis of his films, such as Tokyo Fist. The films of Takashi Miike carry an allied preoccupation, to those of Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, with the city’s Shinjuku district as a unique urban environment in which events habitually occur that would otherwise be impossible and unconceivable, and which need to be seized at speed. The particular ethos of late-1960s film-production and distribution structures in Japan, exemplified by the Art Theatre Guild, still survives in Tokyo through institutions such as Image Forum. After being rarely seen for many years, Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief were, in many ways, resuscitated by the DVD medium, which allowed viewers the opportunity to reconstruct the time and space of their fast-moving urban transits. Even though the urban space of Tokyo, including that of Shinjuku, is now largely unrecognisable from its late-1960s documentation in films such as those by Matsumoto and Oshima, it still presents an open environment for filmmakers and digital artists preoccupied with the scanning of urban mutations, and with the exploration of pivotal moments of disquiet and unease with the forms of the city.

  That filmic exploration often took the form of an intimate examination of urban surfaces, and their interaction with the human figures poised against them. The urban surfaces of Tokyo, at the end of the 1960s, mediated a set of traces and indicators, about memory and conflict and sexual dynamics, that appeared precarious and unstable, and had to be recorded with both urgency and flexibility, in movements across the face of the city, generating films which enduringly appear as vital archives, of the forms of urban space in a state of uproar and transformation.

  Notes

  (1) Donald Richie, Tokyo: A View of the City (Reaktion Books, London and Washington DC, 1999), p.27.

  (2) Andrei Tarkovsky, Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986 (Faber and Faber, London, 1994), pp.43-44.

  (3) Edmund White, Genet (Chatto and Windus, London, 1993), p.596.

  MISHIMA : DEATH-FRAGMENTS

  In a television interview recorded in 1969, the year before his death by self-disembowelment and decapitation by one of his acolytes, Yukio Mishima spoke of how ‘an extreme form of eroticism’ had always driven his life, unleashed by his experiences of Tokyo under warfare and the sensation of imminently-expected death he experienced there, and carrying him far beyond the stratified parameters of Japanese literary and cultural life, as though that life had been choreographed towards death, by his close friend of the 1960s, the instigator of Ankoku Butoh dance, Tatsumi Hijikata – as a set of compulsive gestures, simultaneously pathological and exquisite, and propelled, too, outside the anticipated boundaries of the corporeal and the rigorously annotated sensory categories of Japan, always a hairsbreadth away from both orgasm and erasure.

  Three years before his death, Mishima wrote The Way Of The Samurai from his lifelong engagement with the Hagakure, an eighteenth-century manual on samurai life, compiled in the form of fragments imparted by a now-retired samurai (who had expected to be allowed to commit ritual suicide on the death of his master, but through an anomaly, was prevented from doing so, and chose instead to distance himself from life) and transcribed by a young auditor. The Hagakure is a set of austere interdictions about the necessity of the samurai’s readiness for death at every moment, but it also contains elements of gratuitous contradictions, black holes of nihilism, as though the profound rigour of samurai life, and its ultimate futility (as in the comparison the manual draws with puppetry-gestures) together form part of the same movement of implosion.

  In exploring the Hagakure, Mishima refines the material that is vital for his own death: the act of death that engulfs every gestural act, every creative act, every sexual act, reversing in time to simultaneously validate and erase all of those prior acts. Mishima is always irresistibly compelled, almost unable to restrain himself for another instant, from his act of death; as in the theoretical texts and novels of Georges Bataille, if every act of outrage, excess and death-obsession cannot be concentrated into an identical moment of life, now, then everything must be done to ensure that it will happen in the next moment of life. What French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva learned from their reading of Mishima is that, if death cannot be carried through immediately (the state of perpetual suspension which is that of the samurai’s life), then it must, at least, be made the sole focus of representation: representation with its own cancellation engrained within the obsession to expose, to transmit, to project.

  The year before writing The Way Of The Samurai, Mishima had co-directed a film which represents and anticipates his ritual suicide, acted by himself, though without the participation of his private army of erotically-uniformed young men, the Shield Society, who accompanied him in 1970 on his death-mission to the Ichigaya barracks in Tokyo.

  The pre-eminent writer on contemporary Japan, and close friend of Mishima, Donald Richie, attended the shooting of Mishima’s film, and remembered: ‘In time, he asked me to come to the Daiei film studio… The movie, The Rite Of Love And Death (Yukoku), based on the short story ‘Patriotism’, was already half-completed and this was the second day of filming. A container of pig intestines stood ready and after rehearsal, these were packaged inside Mishima’s trousers. When the knife seemed to enter the author’s abdomen it actually cut into the plastic sack containing the guts… This transformation was strong.’

  Mishima’s film is pitched so tightly at the interstice between orchestrated sexual bliss and blood-drenched corporeal chaos, with its loving shots of his own thighs, muscled chest, barely-covered penis, immediately before the act of self-laceration, that it exceeds and annuls all linear narration, and projects itself in the form of a sensorially-attuned sequence of fragments – exactly the same form he sets to work in The Way Of The Samurai for his exploration of the Hagakure. All language, all image, must be dismantled, disassembled, into the form of the fragment, so that it d
etaches itself from its tainting by its habitual social misuse, in order to become the medium of pure obsession, perpetual orgasm, with the instant of the onrush of death sustained into infinity.

  In The Way Of The Samurai, Mishima contrasts the eighteenth-century samurai era with that of contemporary Japan (that of 1967, a year poised between the two ratifications of the US-Japan Security Treaty, which had rendered Japan an obsequious client-state of the USA, and shortly before the great end-of-the-decade era of violent street-riots which Mishima lived to witness, but rejected as just one more void consumer-experience), tellingly castigating a city in which consumerism-induced frenzies have overridden the grandeur and stature he wants to accord to the corporeal, in its moment before death: ‘Throughout Tokyo, pygmy romances are rampant today.’ In doing so, he creates a parallel with the temporal system of the Hagakure, in which the retired samurai laments an era, thirty years before, in which samurai warriors had been authentic, and had not been consumed only by thoughts of wealth and ‘effeminacy’. A gap of time must always be generated, in Mishima’s obsessions, in order for the contemporary moment to be conjured into such vilification, that the only recourse is death.

  Mishima experiences those boundaries of time as spatial boundaries, too. In his conversations with Donald Richie, he projected himself into the excessive time and space of imperial Rome, but also into a contemporary space of Tokyo denied to him: that of the sexual and alcohol-driven sensory furore of the down-at-heel San’ya district. Donald Richie recalls: ‘Mishima sometimes said he felt so cut off from the things he really liked. He said that some time in Rome under Tiberius would have been interesting. Or maybe Diacletian – he was thinking of Sebastian. He toyed with the idea of reincarnation – not seriously, but as a kind of joke, wondered if he hadn’t been a Persian slave boy in an earlier life, or an indulgent emperor. As for San’ya (a district something like the Bowery of Tokyo, home of the proletariat worker), here the barrier was spatial, not temporal. He could not go there because of who he had become. He would have been recognized.’