Lineup announced! Guests announced! Tickets on sale! Japan Cuts 2013 is finally here!

The mystery is over and our final lineup has been unleashed on the public. There are so many films here we’re excited for, and we’ll be taking closer looks at individual movies in the weeks leading up to the festival.

At the moment, however, I’d just like to highlight our festival’s opening film, Toshiaki Toyoda’s new movie, I’M FLASH! Toyoda will be in attendance to introduce this remarkable film - about the leader of a cultish religious sect whose life begins to spiral out of control following a car crash - and will stay for a Q&A following it. Afterwards, all will be welcome to stay for the I’M FLASH! opening party.

For more information, and to purchase tickets, check out the official announcement on our website: http://www.japansociety.org/japan-cuts-2013

Cinema Konzai: Edo Cool on Camera: Ukiyo-e Artists and Art in Film

Chris on “Edo Pop”

Many of you will know that the Japan Society is currently hosting Edo Pop: The Graphic Impact of Japanese Prints. This exhibition, organized and curated by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Japan Society Gallery Director Miwako Tezuka, juxtaposes classic examples of Edo era ukiyo-e prints by such artists as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige with contemporary Japanese artists who have been influenced by these colorful “Pictures of the Floating World”. This exhibition is the perfect opportunity to take a look at some Ukiyo-e artists whose lives have not only been explored in film, but also how their bold yet delicate style has influenced some key contemporary Japanese films.       

While ukiyo-e prints have now gained a place in the high art canon the world they depicted was a rough and risqué one. The prints sprung from the red light districts of Edo era Japan, such as Edo’s (present-day Tokyo’s) Yoshiwara and Kyoto’s Shimabara, urban areas crammed with brothels, bars, kabuki theaters and tea rooms. Many of the prints were sold as pin-ups of the stars of this world, or created as posters advertising some of these districts’ most popular dens. The customers of these districts often came from the ruling class of society, samurai and politicians, people who could easily afford to pay to indulge their basest desires; but it was the meeting of the upper class with the lower class — merchants, actors, prostitutes – that created a cauldron of artistic culture.

One artist who sprang from this world was Utamaro (1753-1806). Although there is scant accurate biographical information on his life it is commonly accepted that Utamaro was the son of a tea shop owner, possibly in the Yoshiwara itself. Like most Ukiyo-e artists his repertoire consisted of the above-mentioned posters and prints, plus he also created numerous erotic illustrations and a number of portraits of geisha and courtesans. Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1946 film Utamaro and his Five Women (above left) focuses on this specific theme in Utamaro’s work and has actor Minosuke Bando, like some Edo era Toulouse Lautrec, finding himself becoming involved in the lives of his models. The production of the film was a troubled one though. Immediately after WW2 all Japanese movie studios, including Shochiku, the producers of Utamaro and His Five Women, were under the purview of the rigorous Civil Information and Education (CI&E) Section, the censorship board of the U.S. Occupying Forces. Under their rigorous criteria all depictions of samurai and Japan’s feudal past were forbidden. This left Mizoguchi to fight every inch of the way to bring the life of one of his favorite artists to the screen.

Unlike Mizoguchi, Japanese New Wave pioneer Hiroshi Teshigahara was able to produce his own cinematic portrait of one of Japan’s best known artists, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), without incident. 1953’s documentary short Hokusai (above right) not only explores the life of the man who brought us such defining works as The Great Wave of Kanagawa and the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, but also the world which he inhabited. Like Utamaro, Hokusai had meager beginnings. His father was a mirror maker in old Edo and it has been speculated by some that his mother was a courtesan. While he would apprentice in the traditional methods of woodblock printmaking he would also be influenced by European prints brought into Japan by Dutch traders. Instead of recreating Hokusai’s world using actors and costumes Teshigahara chose instead to let Hokusai’s own artwork do the storytelling, and Hokusai is created using loving close-ups and panning shots of the artist’s own prints.  

Masahiro Shinoda, another founding filmmaker in Japan’s 1960’s New Wave, took inspiration from the world of ukiyo-e prints when he made his 1969 film Double Suicide, even though the film itself was designed to bring a very different form of Japanese art to the screen. Based on the 18^th century bunraku puppet play The Love Suicides of Amijima written by playwright Monzaemon Chikakatsu the film is set in Osaka’s historic pleasure quarter of Shinmachi and follows a paper merchant who bankrupts himself trying to by the freedom of a courtesan. Shinoda ingeniously carries over elements of the traditional bunraku puppet theatre to tell the tragic tale of these two lovers, but he also takes visual cues from the world of ukiyo-e prints. Not only are there direct references to ukiyo-e compositions in many shots, but Shinoda even chooses to feature various prints, blown up to dwarf the actors, as backdrops for multiple scenes in the film.

Although the film itself has divided critics, one of the best visual examples of using ukiyo-e aesthetics in the creation of a cinematic red light district is Mika Ninagawa’s 2006 adaptation of Moyoco Anno’s manga Sakuran. The film stars pop idol Anna Tsuchiya as a young woman who rises from obscurity and enslavement to become the most sought after courtesan in the Yoshiwara. Throughout the film we are dazzled by bold and colorful costumes and elaborately decorated backdrops that vividly recreate Japan’s Floating World. There is even a brief but telling scene in which we see patrons of the Yoshiwara eagerly buying up ukiyo-e posters of star courtesans and geisha. It’s interesting to note that director Mika Nanagawa began her career as a commercial and fashion photographer. Considering that this entails capturing popular stars and the fashion elite at their most beautiful, as well as capturing the milieu of contemporary cool Japan, Ninagawa’s day job doesn’t stray far from the basic modus operandi of Utamaro’s or Hokusai’s prints, albeit it with a camera instead of a brush or woodblock.

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Chris is a film blogger, programmer and writer. He is the editor and chief ofThe J-Film Pow-Wow, as well as the Co-Programmer and Co-Director of The Shinsedai Cinema Festival, an annual showcase of independent Japanese film In Toronto, Canada. He is also the editor of World Film Locations: Tokyo, published in 2011 by Intellect Books. 

Mark Schilling talks Shintoho with Cinema Konzai/Chris Magee

Mark Schilling talks Shintoho with Cinema Konzai

by Chris MaGee

If you think about the golden age of Japanese film there are a number of indelible images and scenes that come to mind – Toshiro Mifune’s snarling bandit from Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, the radiant beauty of Setsuko Hara in the films of Yasujiro Ozu and Machiko Kyo’s equally beautiful restless spirit in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu. Films like these, released through such well known movie studios as Daiei and Shochiku shared the landscape of 1950’s Japanese cinema with another upstart entity: Shintoho Studios.  Founded in 1947, Shintoho introduced Japanese movie audiences to a whole new cast of bad guys, beauties and frightening ghosts through such films as Michiyoshi Doi’s The Horizon Glitters (above left), Toshio Shimura’s Revenge of the Pearl Queen (above middle) and Yoshiro Ishikawa’s Ghost of Otama Pond (above right). Before Shintoho shuttered its doors in 1961 it had produced 500 feature films, many of them totally unknown to non-Japanese audiences.  Author and Japan Times film critic Mark Schilling has curated a rare program of some of the best and criminally unacknowledged titles from the Shintoho archives. Between February 27th and March 10th audiences will have a chance to enter the world of this long defunct studio with Into the Shintoho Mind Warp: Girls, Guns & Ghosts from the Second Golden Age of Japanese Film. Cinema Konzai’s Chris MaGee chatted with Mark Schilling about this not-to-be-missed program.    

CK: Shintoho means “New Toho”.  The studio was founded by former employees from Toho, isn’t that correct? What caused the split?

MS: Shintoho was not the result of a rebellion against Toho. In fact Toho organized the company itself. The history is complicated, but basically after a prolonged period of labor strife, Toho found itself with three unions -one was radically Marxist, the other two were not. These later two were formed into the production unit that become Shintoho.

CK: How popular were the Shintoho films with everyday Japanese audiences? Were they big money-makers, or would they be better described as a cult phenomenon?

MS: The most popular Shintoho film under the Okura [Mitsugu Okura, head of Shintoho from 1955 to 1961] regime was Emperor Meiji and the Russo-Japanese War (Meiji Tenno to Nichiro Daisenso), a 1957 pic that broke the taboo against portraying the Emperor on the screen and became the studio’s biggest ever hit. Other nationalistic war pics were also money-makers. The sort of films in the Shintoho series were also box office earners, but not to the extent of the big-budget Meiji. The business plan was basically to make low risk, low cost product for steady, if not spectacular, returns. One problem was that Shintoho never had a big enough theater chain to do more than scrape by. Also, it had no megastar like Yujiro Ichihara at rival Nikkatsu — its competitor for the youth market.

CK: Shintoho closed up shop in 1961, a lot earlier than other studios like Daiei and the 1971 restructuring at Nikkatsu. What caused its downfall?

MS: Why did Shintoho fail? It was struggling anyway when a fire in April 1960 destroyed two studios. Also, Okura’s planned merger with Daini Toei, a Toei spin-off that was also making exploitation films, fell through, with Toei claiming that Okura was putting his own interests ahead of the company. Finally, the company found itself in a labor dispute when it delayed salary payments. The bottom line is that Shintoho was already the weakest of the six studios financially, so when it hit these sort of headwinds, with the gathering storm of television on the horizon, it became the first to fold.

CK: You’ve previously brought obscure Japanese pop cinema films to English-speaking audiences with the Nikkatsu Action retrospective. What about Japanese action, genre and exploitation films from the 50’s and 60’s that you feel is important and needs to be shared with movie audiences?

MS: Why do I think these films are worth showing? First and foremost, they’re still entertaining and not just in a “so bad they’re good” way. They were made to a certain template, but also with a certain freedom, giving talented directors like Nobuo Nakagawa and Teruo Ishii leeway to developed their own styles, interject their own concerns — and obsessions. At the same time, they had to churn them out cheaply and efficiently with one eye on the box office. Yes, they were working on an assembly line, but they could also improve their production methods— and the product itself, as they went along. Their audiences mostly wanted 90 minutes of action, sex and chills — not necessarily at the same time! — and Shintoho delivered with a boldness and energy that makes the best of their films still watchable today.

They are also important as a sort of “alternative history” of postwar Japan, illuminating the dreams (including the wet dreams) of the common people. One parallel are the “ero guro” woodblock prints of the Edo era, which were scorned as cheap and disposable by the era’s taste-makers, but were later snapped up by foreign collectors.

Finally the Shintoho films are ground zero for the horror and erotic genres — which later become hugely important to the local industry, as well as serving as an entry point to Japanese cinema for many foreign fans.

Globus Film Series 2013, Into the Shintoho Mind Warp: Girls, Guns & Ghosts from the Second Golden Age of Japanese Film runs at the Japan Society New York from February 27th to March 10th. Tickets can be purchased there: Get you Mind Warp On

Cinema Konzai: Donald Richie, A Personal Appreciation

Chris, about Donald Richie (1924-2013)

I was in Japan in 2010 to attend Tokyo Filmex, an annual event which showcases not only new film from Japan but from around the globe. Satisfied, as I’ve always been, to stay on the sidelines of such events, I was planning to skip the opening ceremony and film in favor of having a few drinks with friends. One of these, a Tokyo-based film producer convinced me to be her “date”, though, at least for the opening ceremony. Without tickets we ended up crashing the ceremony and standing at the back of theater.

Introductions were made by the festival organizers, that year’s jury was brought on stage. Then a special introduction was made. In the audience, as I was told later had been the case for most of Filmex’s then 11-year history, was Donald Richie. I was surprised because a mutual friend in Toronto had kept me updated on Richie’s precarious health for quite some time. It was my understanding that Richie had been gravely ill just a short time before, but when Filmex director Kanako Hayashi acknowledged the debt that the festival owed to Richie the then 86-year-old Japanese culture and film scholar stood up, a little unsteadily, and accepted a unanimous round of applause. It was applause well earned.

At that point I had been caught up in what I’ve called a “marriage” to Japanese film for the better part of a decade. I think I may have cribbed this term from Donald Richie himself. The vast majority of Japanese scholars (and Japanophiles) have found themselves in this same situation — drawing a line back to Richie and his 30-plus books, including such definitive works as The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (co-written with Joseph L. Anderson) and A Hundred Years of Japanese Film. While these are go-to works for me, what has always been most important to me about Donald Richie was the example which he set.

Richie was just an Ohio boy, 23-years-old and a typist with the Pacific Stars and Stripes when he first arrived in Japan in 1947. Despite the U.S. military police forbidding fraternization with the locals, Richie made surreptitious forays into the ruins of Tokyo’s Asakusa Rokku District and it was here that he was first introduced to Japanese film. Richie later recalled that, in contrast to the larger-than-life heroes and heroines of Hollywood that he’d grown up with, the “people on the screen and the people in the theater were so much the same.” He obviously had to learn more.

Most former GI’s in the late 40’s and early 50’s mapped out their lives with steady jobs, clean new suburbs and the “nuclear” family. Not Richie. Undeterred by an uncharted life and spurred on by the impetus of Japanese film he headed to Columbia University “because that institution was among the first to be convinced that cinema was more than entertainment.” He would be befriended by international film distributor “Madame” Kashiko Kawakita, as well as a who’s-who of Japanese filmmakers and go on to be the film critic for The Japan Times and the film curator for MOMA between 1969 and 1972 — but he accomplished so very much more.

If I were to randomly pull books or DVDs off my shelves invariably they would have some connection to Donald Richie. Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story: Richie had to wrestle with Shochiku execs to have a selection of Ozu’s films screened at at the 1963 Berlin Film Festival. Richie won out and now Ozu has influenced filmmakers worldwide. Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha: as having established a friendship with Kurosawa, Richie was asked to write the subtitles for this film, as well as Dreams and Red Beard. A DVD of the work of butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata: Richie would be among the first to recognize Hijikata’s briliance and would feature the legendary choreographer in two of his own short films, Gisei (Sacrifice) and War Games. Even Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House: the Criterion release of this madcap horror film is accompanied by Obayashi’s early experimental film Emotion, which is narrated by Richie.

Donald Richie paved the way and showed me a life working with japanese film was possible, so I had very good reason to be star struck when I saw him at Tokyo Filmex. I remember leaving the opening ceremony and saying to my producer friend, “I’m not normally nervous about speaking to people, but I’d be nervous about meeting Donald Richie.” Still, in the same way that you can play six degrees of separation between Donald Richie and any number of Japanese films, you can do the same with Richie and the Tokyo film community.

One day during the festival I had another friend turn to me and ask, “Have you ever met Donald?” I believe I froze. It’s difficult to recall, but suddenly Richie was beside me, a bit gaunt, a little stooped but smiling, his wheelchair being pushed by his longtime companion. “Donald, this is Chris MaGee from Toronto.” What followed was mostly me stammering, attempting to justify why I was here in front of one of the biggest influences of my life. I took two things away from that encounter. One was a photo of Richie that I keep to myself as a treasured memento. The other is saying to Richie “There would not be people like me if it weren’t for people like you.” Donald Richie gave a self-deprecating chuckle and patted my hand kindly.

Many of my friends and colleagues have had deeper and more involved relationships with Donald Richie over the years. With the news of Donald Richie’s passing on February 19th they’ve given eulogies and written obituaries that are more insightful than this account of my brief meeting with him. Still, I feel that the few minutes that I got to spend with Richie was a summing up of all the hours (and months and even years) that I’d spent learning from him though his work and through his sincere love for Japan and its film and filmmakers. It’s a very sad prospect living and working in a post-Donald Richie world, but, as I mentioned to Richie during that meeting, there would be no world for us to inhabit had it not been for his remarkable life.

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Chris is a film blogger, programmer and writer. He is the editor and chief ofThe J-Film Pow-Wow, as well as the Co-Programmer and Co-Director of The Shinsedai Cinema Festival, an annual showcase of independent Japanese film In Toronto, Canada. He is also the editor of World Film Locations: Tokyo, published in 2011 by Intellect Books. 

Cinema Konzai: Master of Cinema Nagisa Oshima, 1932-2013

Chris MaGee’s homage to Nagisa Oshima.

The beginning of the new year saw the loss of one of Japanese cinema’s seminal creators, filmmaker Nagisa Oshima. While best known by select North American moviegoers for such provocative art house hits as In the Realm of the Senses and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Oshima’s reputation at home in Japan as a cinematic and cultural innovator and agitator was legendary. Having been in an enforced retirement since 1999 following a series of debilitating strokes, Oshima succumbed to pneumonia on January 15th. He was 80.

Born in 1932, Oshima courted controversy from the beginning. While studying law at Kyoto University he became involved in the burgeoning left wing student movement. Attracted to cinema, he began to write for film journal Eiga Hihyo, and in 1954 he began his filmmaking career as an assistant director at Shochiku’s Ofuna Studios. Shochiku was famously the home of such venerable filmmaking masters as Yasujiro Ozu; but Oshima almost immediately questioned his predecessors’ “congenial, older mode” of film narrative. His first film, 1959’s Tomorrow’s Sun, was a 6-minute mock trailer which satirized everything from musicals to action films. This was followed up by a trio of youth films, A Town of Love and Hope (1959), Cruel Story of Youth, and The Sun’s Burial (1960), released under the the banner “nūberu bāgu”, coined in part by Shochiku then head Shiro Kido using a transliteration of France’s “nouvelle vague”. It wasn’t until October of 1960, though, and the release of Oshima’s fourth feature, Night and Fog in Japan, that the then 28-year-old director had to face the first of many career controversies.

Night and Fog in Japan chronicles the meeting of a group of leftist students at their friend’s wedding. The reception dinner goes from happy occasion to an examination of their political impotence in the face of the U.S. Japan Mutual Security Treaty. The ideological clash on screen mirrored the tumult in the streets where hundreds of thousands of Japanese were protesting the continued military presence of American forces on Japanese soil post WW2. The premiere of Night and Fog in Japan would also coincide with the assasination of Japanese Socialisy Party leader Inejiro Asanuma; and fearing that it would fuel further protest Oshima’s film was pulled from theatres by Shochiku after only four days. Outraged, Oshima left the studio. Many young filmmakers such as Shohei Imamura, Masahiro Shinoda and Yoshida Yoshishige would also leave Shochiku, an exodus that would truly begin Japan’s cinematic New Wave.

Outside of the studio system Oshima was free to tackle any number of political and social themes. These would include the plight of an African-American POW held in rural Japan (The Catch, 1961), prejudice faced by Korean-Japanese (Death by Hanging, 1968), protest against the Vietnam War (Three Resurrected Drunkards, 1968), and Japanese militarism (The Ceremony, 1971), amongst many others. Oshima was also free to collaborate with Japan’s underground theatre and film scene. The best example of this is Oshima’s 1969 film Diary of a Shinjuku Thief. The wildly experimental film features pop artist Tadanori Yokoo as the title character, a book thief in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward, as well as Juro Kara, the leader of Tokyo’s Jokyo Gekijo, or “Red Tent” avant-garde street theatre troupe. Oshima also established ties with pink film pioneer Koji Waklamatsu. Wakamatsu would assist Oshima, along with French producer Anatole Dauman, in the creation of the most infamous title in his filmmography.

In the Realm of the Senses tells the story of the 1936 murder and castration of Tokyo restaurant owner Kichizo Ishida by his mistress, former prostitute Sada Abe. It starred Eiko Matsuda and Tatsuya Fujiwara as the doomed lovers and featured both actors in scenes of unsimulated sex. This was met by outrage by Japanese authorities, and Oshima was forced to smuggle the un-edited footage of the film to France where In the Realm of the Senses was completed. Now ackowledged as one of Oshima’s most accomplished films, upon its release Senses was heavily cut (or banned for a time) in the United States, Germany and Canada; and was also the subject of an obscenity trial at home in Japan; a trial which Oshima thankfully won.

In the Realm of the Senses marked the beginning of Oshima looking outside Japan for inspiration and talent. Famously quoted as saying that he hated “all of” Japanese film, Oshima began to seek creative partnerships with foreign actors and stars. This was famously the case with Oshima’s take on Afrikaner author and intellectual Laurens Van der Post’s war era biographies, released under the title Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983). The cast was a combination of untested Japanese talent (electronic musician Ryuichi Sakamoto and comedian Takeshi Kitano) and British actor Tom Conti and rock icon David Bowie. Oshima would follow this international hit with the truly idiosyncratic French produced Max Mon Amour (1986) which starred actress Charlotte Rampling as a woman in love with a chimp.

Leaving the public eye after his 1999 homosexual-themed samurai drama Gohatto (Taboo), Oshima’s legend and influence only grew, and his passing earlier this month, while not a surprise after years of ill health, shocked filmmakers and fans alike. Oshima is survived by his wife, actress Akiko Koyama, and a filmmography that has helped redefine Japanese film, and cinema at large.

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Chris is a film blogger, programmer and writer. He is the editor and chief ofThe J-Film Pow-Wow, as well as the Co-Programmer and Co-Director of The Shinsedai Cinema Festival, an annual showcase of independent Japanese film In Toronto, Canada. He is also the editor of World Film Locations: Tokyo, published in 2011 by Intellect Books. 

Cinema Konzai: Chris MaGee’s 2012 Top Ten Japanese Films

2012 has drawn to a close. The turning of one year to another is marked by reflection on and inventory of the past twelve months for many of us, but for film lovers it also means annual “Best Of” lists. Cinema Konzai is no different. It’s been a rollercoaster year for Japanese film, with strong showings at international festivals and the passing of such legends as Kaneto Shindo and Koji Wakamatsu, amongst others. It also marked the release (or in some cases below theatrical screenings, etc.) of the following ten films, personal favorites of mine. Many of them you’ll be familiar with. Some you may not. Then again, those hidden gems are the point of these lists. Read on, enjoy and here’s to seeing you all throughout 2013!    

1. The Cowards Who Looked to The Sky/  ふがいない僕は空を見た

Director Yuki Tanada returns to filmmaking after a four year absence to bring Misumi Kubo’s novel to the screen. Few recent films from Japan have been as insightful and unsentimental as The Cowards Who Looked to The Sky, a manga-inspired love story that morphs into an examination of the role of women in society and thoe living below the bottom rung of Japan’s economic ladder.     

2. GFP Bunny

After a nine year break Yutaka Tsuchiya, the man who brought us such documentaries as The New God and Peep ‘TV’ Show ushers us into the 21st century with GFP Bunny. Loosely based on an actual case where a high school girl systematically poisoned her mother with thalium, GFP Bunny is a kaleidoscopic look at genetic manipulation, body modification, the search for the fountain of youth in today’s Japan.

3. Our Homeland/ かぞくのくに

Documentarian Yonghi Yang already introduced us to her Korean/ Japanese family in her two films Dear Pyongyang and Sona, The Other Myself. Now she impressively makes the shift to fiction with her feature film debut Our Homeland. A Korean family welcomes back their son from Pyongyang, but his trip, ostensibly to seek emergency medical treatment, is more than it seems. Evocative, heartbreaking and beautiful.

4. Encounters/ エンカウンターズ

Few films from this past year were as much fun as Takashi Iitsuka’s half-hour action film Encounters. The 27-year-old Iitsuka rejigged and retrofitted a menagerie of action figures and plastic toys to create an adventure in which two friends battle a mad scientist and his army of “monsters”. Hilarious and ingenious, Encounters will hopefully be the first of many amazing films by the young talent.

5. The Woodsman and the Rain/ キツツキと雨

Director Shuichi Okita follows in the tradition of such crowd-pleasers as Juzo Itami’s Tampopo by bringing us behind the scenes of the world of Japanese indie filmmaking. The Woodsman and the Rain follows a lumberjack (Koji Yakusho) who finds himself literally wandering onto the set of a low-budget zombie movie. The unlikely friendship that sparks between him and the movie’s meek, young director is utterly charming.

6. Goodbye or Not/ もしかしたらバイバイ!

The directing team of Quanah Takahata and Hirohito Takino bring us the story of Yukiko, a surly, promiscuous girl who has become the scapegoat of her family. Her mixed up life is further complicated when a mysterious “Crying Man” appears in her neighbourhood. Takahata and Takino have openly said they want to make films like their mentor Sion Sono, but they shouldn’t settle for mimicry. Funny, sweet and quirky, Goodbye or Not takes Sono’s style as a starting point and creates something totally unique.

7. 663114

It has been estimated that since the combined tragedy of the March 11th, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear disaster there have been roughly 3,000 films (shorts, features and documentaries) made on the subject. Few of these have been as incisive and frightening as Isamu Hirabayashi’s 663114. Hirabayashi’s first step into animation, 663114 focuses on a beetle who emerges from the earth every 66 years. It is loyal to and dependent on its  homeland, but all this changes (and it doesn’t) after a nuclear disaster. In 8 minutes 663114 does more than most films do in 120 minutes.

8. I’m Flash

After a duo of challenging comeback films director Toshiaki Toyoda “returns to form” with I’m Flash. Following a religious cult leader and his yakuza bodygaurd who retreat to an Okinawan island after a car accident I’m Flash brings us everything that we’ve come to expect from Toyoda — stylish visuals and some of the best use of music around — with what made us love the now 43-year-old filmmaker  back in the early 00’s.

9. End of the Night/ 夜が終わる場所

Kiyashi Kurosawa protégé Daisuke Miyazaki makes an impressive feature film debut with his self-proclaimed “noir” hitman drama End of the Night.  A veteran killer abducts a baby at the scene of one of his jobs and rasies him to be a cold-eyed assassin, but an encounter with a beautiful woman may change his fate. While so many young indie filmmakers in Japan are content to make sluggish, one-shot, one-take navel gazers End of the Night dares to be something different and succeeds.

10. Is Anyone Alive?/ 生きてるものはいないのか

Veteran indie helmer Sogo Ishii returns to filmmaking with a new name — Gakuryu Ishii — with the screen adaptation of a stage play by Shiro Maeda. While this ensemble piece, which charts the outbreak of a mysterious plague on a university campus, divided critics. Still it is hard to deny the power of the film’s morbid humor. Here’s hoping that this is the first of many more films in Ishii’s career third act.

Cinema Konzai: Focus on Actress Makiko Watanabe

For Japanese film to continue making strides in theatres and festivals worldwide it needs to evolve, to break new ground and to challenge the preconceptions of international audiences. Despite the seemingly instantaneous help of the internet and the tireless efforts of international writers and film programmers, the view of Japanese film by average moviegoers often lags behind the exciting reality of what is happening right now in places like Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Yubari, Yamagata, etc. It takes bold new visions from directors and daring new onscreen talent to cut through to global audiences’ hearts and minds. There are few actresses working at the moment who are as capable of doing this than Makiko Watanabe. Not heard the name before? Maybe you haven’t, but if you’ve been watching films from Japan during the past decade you will know Watanabe immediately by the challenging, often unglamorous, but always fearless depictions of today’s Japanese woman.

Watanabe’s career started as many Japanese actresses’ do, not in front of the movie camera but in front of a fashion photographer’s lens. During the late 80’s her distinctive pout graced the covers of such fashion magazines as CUTiE; plus she flirted with chart stardom singing in the pop duo The Orchids. Watanabe’s appearance, then, in the 1988 omnibus comedy Bakayarō! Watashi, Okottemasu wouldn’t vary much from the career template of so many young Japanese tarentō. It wasn’t until 8 years later, though, that Watanabe would break this career mould in the films of director Nobuhiro Suwa. Suwa, who began his career working with such independent film luminaries as Sogo Ishii and Masashi Yamamoto, employed improvisation in creating his first two films, 1996’s 2/DUO and 1999’s M/OTHER.  These films, both featuring Makiko Watanabe, both capturing the failings of modern relationships and family, would draw heavily from the cinematic legacy of American indie visionary John Cassavetes. Watanabe, along with Hidetoshi Nishijima and Tomokazu Miura, were encouraged to “forget” their scripted lines and react to their characters situations using their own instincts. It was this improvisational style of filmmaking that led Watanabe to share the Best Screenplay Award for M/OTHER with Suwa and Miura at the 50^th Mainichi Film Concours, and for the film to be honored with a FIPRESCI Prize at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.

Suwa’s films, and Watanabe’s performances in them, helped cement the Cassavetes influence in contemporary Japanese jishu eiga, or indie filmmaking. (It’s an influence that Suwa and Watanabe still acknowledge, with both co-hosting the 7^th offering of A Night of John Cassavetes in Tokyo this past June.) It’s been in this cinematic laboratory of uncompromising visions and near zero budgets that Watanabe has been able to perfect her craft; and it was while starring in Toshiki Sato’s 2002 film Perfect Blue (Yume nara samete) that Watanabe would meet another filmmaker who would define her career. The screenplay for Perfect Blue (not to be confused with the Satoshi Kon animated thriller) was penned by Masahiro Kobayashi. Starting out as a screenwriter in the world of pink films, Watanabe has created a minimalistic, art house aesthetic in his work; and he chose Watanabe to star opposite himself in his 2007 film The Rebirth. This simmering story of guilt and redemption, which saw Kobayashi portray the father of a murdered daughter and Watanabe as the mother of the killer, ended up being awarded the Grand Prix at the Locarno Film Festival. It also saw the beginning a series of creative collaborations with Kobayashi, including 2009’s Where Are You? and 2011’s Women on the Edge.

Now at 44 Makiko Watanabe has been able to ingeniously side step the supreme challenge faced by so many actresses in their 40’s – being relegated to playing uninteresting supporting roles as mothers and matrons – and may be entering into the most vital stage of her career. In one of her latest roles Watanabe does in fact play a mother, but a mother in a truly provocative dilemma. GFP Bunny, directed by underground filmmaker Yutaka Tsuchiya retells the real-life incident of a high school girl who poisoned her own mother to death. Amidst the hallucinatory mix of documentary footage and Youtube inspired video effects Watanabe’s uncertain, youth-obsessed mother epitomizes the superficial commercial world that her onscreen daughter, Yuka Kuramochi, seeks to escape using a mix of body modification and genetic manipulation. With the help of Watanabe’s deceptively simple performance GFP Bunny won the top prize in the Japanese Eyes category of this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival.    

Makiko Watanabe may have not yet gained the same international and critical acclaim as fellow Japanese actress Shinobu Terajima, whose daring and often sexual performances have grabbed attention and trophies at festivals worldwide; but it is easy to see this type of global success coming for her soon. While so many mainstream Japanese actresses are (seemingly happily) caught in the mill of performing in manga spin-off films, TV melodramas, and appearing on panel programs Makiko Watanabe is doing the work that must be done to push Japanese film into this next century – taking on roles that redefine women’s roles on screen and off.

Chris MaGee.

Chris is a film blogger, programmer and writer. He is the editor and chief of The J-Film Pow-Wow, as well as the Co-Programmer and Co-Director of The Shinsedai Cinema Festival, an annual showcase of independent Japanese film In Toronto, Canada. He is also the editor of World Film Locations: Tokyo, published in 2011 by Intellect Books.    

Cinema Konzai: Filmmaker and revolutionary Koji Wakamatsu, 1936-2012

Hope everyone’s keeping warm, despite Sandy, snow storms, etc. Here’s another piece from Chris, enjoy!

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The month of October saw a tragic loss for Japanese cinema with the passing of pink film pioneer and revolutionary icon Koji Wakamatsu. Early on October 17th rumors began swirling that the director of such films as Go, Go Second Time Virgin and Caterpillar had been struck by a taxi while crossing the road in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward. Wakamatsu had just returned to Tokyo after attending the 17th annual Busan International Film Festival where he was honoured with the Asian Filmmaker of the Year Award. It was confirmed later that day that Wakamatsu had died of his injuries. He was 76.

Wakamatsu’s beginnings hardly hinted at the cinematic history he would make later on. Born in 1936 in Wakuya, Miyagi Prefecture Wakamatsu, like many young men during Japan’s 1960’s “Economic Miracle”, transplanted himself to Tokyo to seek his fortune. Here he found himself drawn into the underground world of the yakuza, an affiliation that would eventually land Wakamatsu in prison. Upon his release the 23-year-old Wakamatsu found work as an assistant director for various television productions. With only this limited training, and assistance from his underworld associates, Wakamatsu would begin his filmmaking career in 1963 with the exploitation film Sweet Trap for Nikkatsu Studios. Wakamatsu would follow up his first production with a string of violent and erotic films which culminated in 1965’s Secrets Behind the Wall. Chronicling an affair between a housewife and a leftist survivor of Hiroshima the film featured nudity, voyeurism and bloodshed, and Secrets Behind the Wall would spark controversy when it screened in competition at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival (without having been submitted to Japanese censors). The film would begin to create the blueprint for what would later be called pinku eiga, plus it would end Wakamatsu’s time at Nikkatsu.

1965 would see Koji Wakamatsu founding his own company, Wakamatsu Productions, and meeting director/ screenwriter Masao Adachi. The Fukuoka native and graduate of the Nihon University Film Studies Program was a perfect foil for Wakamatsu’s raw, untrained direction. Adachi’s screenplays for films like The Embryo Hunts in Secret (1966), Violated Angels (1967) and Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969) would introduce an added level of the experimental and the surreal into Wakamatsu’s productions; but it was the two men’s ferocious anti-establishment, leftist beliefs that would form a personal and creative bond that would last until Wakamatsu’s death. While Japan would continue to boil with anti-ANPO Treaty and anti-Vietnam  protests Wakamatsu and Adachi would become involved with Japan’s Red Army Faction. During the early 1970’s when the Red Army would be responsible for hijacking a Japan Airlines Flight and taking it to North Korea, taking part in a massacre at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport and holding tourists hostage at the  Asama Mountain Lodge in Nagano Prefecture Wakamatsu and Adachi were waging their own cinematic revolution. 1971 would see Wakamstu Productions release the agit-prop documentary Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War and in 1972 Wakamatsu and Adachi would release Ecstasy of the Angels, a bloody erotic film that depicted the disollusion of a fictional Red Army terrorist cell.

Wakamstu’s and Adachi’s commitment to their Red Army compatriots would come with a heavy price though. Wakamatsu Productions would close its doors for a time after it’s most inflammatory early 70’s productions, and Adachi would fully commit to the struggle; joining the Red Army in Lebanon and eventually serving prison time. Still, during these years Wakamatsu would prove hugely influential  and remain highly controversial.  Wakamatsu would act as the producer for Japanese cinema’s most sensational and devisive films, Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses. The film, which used unsimulated sex to depict the real-life Sada Abe murder case, would be banned and heavily censored across the globe and spark a famed obscenity trial. During the 1970’s Wakamatsu would also foster the next generation of independent filmmakers, including Sachi Hamano, Kan Mukai and Banmei Takahashi.

In the past decade Wakamatsu enjoyed a career renaissance with a series of independently produced films which explored the darker aspects of Japan’s 20th century history. This began in 2008 with the 3-plus hour historical drama United Red Army (in which Wakamstu blew up his own small cottage for a shot). The success of United Red Army was followed up by 2009’s Edogawa Rampo screen adaptation Caterpillar (which reunited the director with Masao Adachi) . Actress Shinobu Terajima won Best Actress at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival for her depiction of a a wife who takes revenge on her abusive husband, disfigured after returning from the 2nd Sino-Japanese War. Most recently Wakamatsu had released two films: the erotic Petrel Hotel Blue and the Yukio Mishima biopic 11.25: The Day He Chose His Own Fate.  The late career success hadn’t tamed Wakamatsu at all though. During interviews at this year’s Busan International Film Festival he  openly criticized the Japanese film industry for not doing neough to foster young filmmaking talent. He could have also been getting ready for one of his biggest, and possibly most controversial, film subjects of his career: an exposé of the mishandling of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster by the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation and Japanese governmental authorities.  

Chris MaGee.

Chris is a film blogger, programmer and writer. He is the editor and chief of The J-Film Pow-Wow, as well as the Co-Programmer and Co-Director of The Shinsedai Cinema Festival, an annual showcase of independent Japanese film In Toronto, Canada. He is also the editor of World Film Locations: Tokyo, published in 2011 by Intellect Books.   

Cinema Konzai: after the fests, more fests

This past summer North America enjoyed its annual influx of Japanese films via such festivals as Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival, Toronto’s Shinsedai Cinema Festival, and the New York Asian Film Festival, plus the Japan Society’s own Japan Cuts. With summer turning to fall, though, a whole new crop of Japanese film has been (and will be) making its way to the screen, leading up to Japan’s award season a few months from now.

Penance

Japan’s big studios and name stars were out in force at the falls two most influential film fests — the 36th Toronto International Film Festival and the 69th Venice Film Festival. Festival favorites Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takeshi Kitano had their new films screen on both sides of the Atlantic. Kiyoshi Kurosawa had been quietly teaching at Tokyo’s University of the Arts since winning trophies and accolades for this 2008 drama Tokyo Sonata. Four years later he brings us a 4.5 hour mini-series, originally produced for Japanese cable network WOWOW, titled Penance. An extended study in mood and mourning Penance is based on a novel by Kanae Minato, the same author whose Confessions was adapted to the screen by Tetsuya Nakashima. Tokyo Sonata star Kyoko Koizumi reunites with Kurosawa as the mother of a murdered girl. The girl’s friends are tasked by the mother to discover the killer of her daughter, or pay a penance of her choosing.  Eschewing mood for simple bloodshed Kitano’s Outrage 2 reintroduces us to the yakuza thugs that peopled his successful 2010 gangster movie, Outrage. Kitano returns as veteran yakuza Otomo, who once again finds himself in the middle of a blood-soaked Machiavellian war involving the Sanno crime family.

Kurosawa’s and Kitano’s films were joined by a heady mix of mainstream and left-of-center films at the Toronto International Film Festival. Fest programmers indulged audiences taste for comedy with screenings of Hideki Takeuchi’s screen adaptation of Mari Yamazaki’s mega-hit manga Thermae Romae and Kenji Uchida’s screwball role reversal romp Key of Life, plus Sion Sono took home the inaugural Netpac Award for Best Asian Feature for his post 3/11 melodrama Land of Hope; but the real winners of Toronto’s Japanese line-up came via two female filmmakers — Yuki Tanada and Miwa Nishikawa. Tanada, director of such low-key comedy/ dramas as Ain’t No Tomorrows and One-Million Yen Girl, returns with The Cowards Who Looked to the Sky. What ostensibly starts out as the story of frustrated housewife (Tomoko Tabata) who indulges in a cosplay-fueled affair with a high school boy (Kento Nagayama) branches out into a mini-epic which examines the downtrodden lives of a group of midwives, overbearing mothers, convenience store workers and a sex offender. Miwa Nishikawa has carved a career out of depicting similarly eccentric characters, albeit it with a little more sunshine than Tanada’s dark and lusty visions. With Dreams for Sale Nishikawa treads the same fraudulent territory as her international hit Dear Doctor. A wife (Takako Matsu) and husband (Sadao Abe) must turn to marriage fraud in order to financially recover from the destruction of their family restaurant.

Nishikawa’s Dear Doctor enjoyed immense critical success at Montreal’s World Film Festival, the fest that also recognized Yojiro Takita’s Departures before it went on to win Oscar gold in 2009. Since then the Montreal World Film Festival has been an important venue for international premieres of Japanese titles. There were a few standouts amongst this year’s strong showing of Japanese content. Japanese-Korean filmmaker Yonghi Yang follows up her two documentaries, Dear Pyongyang and Sona, The Other Myself, with her debut dramatic feature Our Homeland. Based roughly on Yang’s real-life family ties to North Korea the film stars Arata as a man who is allowed to visit his family in Japan while receiving life-saving  medical treatment. This heart-wrenching/ heart-warming drama has been selected to represent Japan in the race for Best Foreign Language Film at the 85th Academy Awards in Hollywood. Joining Our Homeland at MWFF were playwright and actor Masaaki Akahori’s The Samurai That Night, the portrait of two men facing the anniversary of a violent hit and run accident, and veteran director Yasuo Furuhata’s drama Dearest, starring fellow vet Ken Takakura as a man who receives two mysterious letters from his late wife. Dearest ended up winning a Special Mention of the Ecumenical Jury.

The Japanese film industry doesn’t just spend autumn premiering films overseas though., in fact some of Japan’s best new filmmaking talent get a chance to shine in September and October. The 34th Pia Film Festival, the event that has fostered and recognized the early work of Sion Sono, Kenji Uchida, Naoko Ogigami and Yuya Ishii, amongst many others, will once again be bringing brave new cinematic visions to the screen in late September. Following fast on the heels of PFF will be the 25th Tokyo International Film Festival. While Tokyo IFF features major titles like Clint Eastwood’s new film Trouble with the Curve, the real strength of the 10-day fest is its Japanese Eyes programme, which features the best in new independent Japanese productions. This year nine films highlighting everything from  existential road movies to a magical Christmas drama will premiere in the Japanese capital, but it’s the return of one of Japan’s most promising indie helmers that is the big news. Yutaka Tsuchiya, who lensed such edgy socio-political documentaries as The New God (1999) and Peep “TV” Show (2003) returns after a nearly decade long break from directing with GFP Bunny. The film, based on the real-life case of a high school girl who attempted to poison her mother, promises to take viewers on a kaleidoscopic journey into the underbelly of contemporary Japanese society, a world filled with body modification artists, biologists and plastic surgeons.

Chris MaGee.

Chris is a film blogger, programmer and writer. He is the editor and chief ofThe J-Film Pow-Wow, as well as the Co-Programmer and Co-Director of The Shinsedai Cinema Festival, an annual showcase of independent Japanese film In Toronto, Canada. He is also the editor of World Film Locations: Tokyo, published in 2011 by Intellect Books.  

Cinema Konzai, end of summer 2012

Recently the Japan Society New York announced their 2012/ 2013 performing arts season. Normally one would think that the world of the stage and the world of the screen would be two separate things, but this month it’s the job of Cinema Konzai to bridge that gap; and when you have an artist like playwright and theatrical director Oriza Hirata and his Seinendan Theater Company this connections between mediums is easy. Hirata and members of Seinendan will be in New York City in February presenting the Osaka University Robot Theater Project (Sayonara and I, Worker) at the Japan Society, but besides these two cutting edge one-act plays Hirata and his troupe have made more than one foray into film.

Members of Seinendan starred in Koji Fukada’s 2010 satirical feature film Hospitalité, the story of the Kobayashi’s, a married couple whose work-a-day existence is turned upside down when Kagawa, an unemployed drifter, takes the spare room over their small print shop.  At first paying homage to the domestic dramas of Yasujiro Ozu, Hospitalité veers off into Mack Sennet slapstick territory when an army of “gaijin” descend on the Kobayashi’s home. Fukada’s light-hearted examination of Japanese xenophobia ended up winning him the top prize in the Japanese Eyes programme of the 2010 Tokyo International Film Festival.

Koji Fukada himself joined the Seinendan Theater Company in 2005, working in the directing division while also making numerous short films and a debut feature. With the help of producers Kousuke Ono and Kiki Sugino (who stars as the quietly suffering wife Natsumi Kobayashi) Fukada transformed the screenplay of what was meant to be yet another short film into his sophomore feature. Working on a very tight budget Fukada had to turn to those he knew best to people the quiet Tokyo back streets of Hospitalité — the actors and actresses of Seinendan. 

Seinendan veterans Kenji Yamauchi, Kanji Furutachi and Kumi Hyodo all appear in Hospitalité, while one of the most distinctive members of the troupe, 24-year-old Oxford graduate Brylery Long, portrays Kagawa’s young wife Anabel.  Long, who originally hails from the U.S., had only been a member of Seinendan for a few months when she was cast in Hospitalité. While Fukada tasked her to portray the film’s lusty foreigner she was also making stage history at Oriza Hirata’s Komaba Agora Theater. Hirata, in conjunction with Osaka University robotics expert Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro, had Long star opposite an android in Hirata’s Sayonara. Long will make a Stateside homecoming when she again stars opposite her robotic colleague when Sayonara is staged at the Japan Society.

While Hirata ended up receiving an artistic director credit on Koji Fukada’s Hospitalité, he and Seinendan will soon be the main focus of Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Kazuhiro Soda’s new two-part documentary Theatre. Soda, who shot to fame with his 2007 “observational” documentary Campaign, has been chronicling Hirata and Seinendan for nearly four years, amassing hundreds of hours of behind-the-scenes footage. Theatre 1 and Theatre 2, as they have been titled, winnows this footage down to a still sizeable 5 hour and 40 minute portrait of Hirata and his troupe. The genesis of Sayonara is captured, as are the day-to-day operation and creative mechanics of the Komaba Agora Theater. Kazuhiro Soda’s Theatre will be released in Japan this October, more than enough time for jet-setting New Yorkers to catch it in Tokyo before Hirata and his Seinendan Theater Company arrive in the city.

Chris MaGee.

Chris is a film blogger, programmer and writer. He is the editor and chief ofThe J-Film Pow-Wow, as well as the Co-Programmer and Co-Director of The Shinsedai Cinema Festival, an annual showcase of independent Japanese film In Toronto, Canada. He is also the editor of World Film Locations: Tokyo, published in 2011 by Intellect Books.