The limits of fiction: politics and absent scenes in Susumu Hani’s Bad Boys (Furyōshōnen, 1960). A film re-reading through its script

This text proposes an updated analysis of Susumu Hani’s Bad Boys (1960) through the director’s theoretical contribution and the re-reading of his script. This film, made within the limits of reality and fiction, was instrumental in the cinematic language of the sixties in Japan. Hani implemented herein a style that he developed during his earlier decade as a documentary maker for Iwanami Eiga studios. Hani based his filmmaking method on a philosophical pragmatism extracted from the practices of an amateur writing called seikatsu kiroku (life document) that appeared in the early 1950s. In fact, Bad Boys is a loose adaptation of Tobenai Tsubasa (Wings that Cannot Fly) an example of seikatsu kiroku consisting of a compilation of experiences written by inmates from the Kurihama reformatory. Hani responded to the demands for a new realism of the time with this film, which he made collectively with the former inmates of that reformatory. Additionally, a close analysis of the script reveals significant ‘absent scenes’ of student demonstrations, which are similar to those Oshima and Yoshida used in 1960. This fact evidences Hani’s shared concern with other filmmakers of the time about the necessities of bringing cinema closer to topical issues

Gambling with the nation : heroines of the Japanese yakuza film, 1955–1975

A revamped period-drama film genre surfaced after the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–1952), featuring androgynous comic heroines who cross-dressed to perform male and female yakuza roles. By the late 1960s, they had been replaced by increasingly sexualized figures, and later by the ‘pink’ violence of the ‘girl boss’ sub-genre. Yet masculine themes in the ‘nihilistic’ yakuza films of the late 1960s and 1970s have been the focus of most scholarship on the genre, with scant attention paid to the female yakuza film. This article offers an iconographic reading of the heroines of the yakuza genre, arguing that the re-imagining of a postwar ‘Japaneseness’ was conducted as much through the yakuza genre’s heroines as its heroes. Through analysis of key visual motifs, narrative tropes, and star personae, the image of the female yakuza can be read as a commentary on social conditions in postwar Japan. We can see the rapid social and political changes of postwar Japan reflected and mediated through the changing image of the female yakuza heroine during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s

The Interstitial Feminine and Male Dominance in Rashōmon

Kurosawa Akira’s 1950 film Rashōmon is frequently understood as an exploration of truth in the face of four irreconcilably conflicting testimonies. Frequently missing from the critical conversation is the originary crime of rape committed against the wife which is an absent presence in the film: despite its suppression, we are keenly aware of its essential role in driving the narrative and its simultaneous effacement from what we see on the screen. The trace it leaves exists in, and because of, the historical context of Article 14 in the Japanese constitution, yet this promise of gender equity in Japan was not achieved in Rashōmon. This unrealized promise provides one avenue for apprehending the rape’s implications. Linguistic intimations and visual hints, subtle yet omnipresent in the male narratives that seek to occlude the wife’s tale of rape, ask the audience to consider the role of the wife and the crime against her in the face of a stifling phallocractic order that seeks not liberation but the status quo in which the male narratives are dominant. In this way, the visual and linguistic confront the sexual power dynamics at play in Rashōmon and offer both a record of the difficult struggle gender equality will face, and an intimation that the struggle might succeed