The Actuality of Wakamatsu: Repetition, Citation, Media Event

THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU CHAPTER 4 The Actuality of Wakamatsu: Repetition, Citation, Media Event Yuriko Furuhata

On November 25, 1970, the famed novelist Mishima Yukio and his private army, the Shield Society (Tate no Kai), occupied the general’s office at the Ichigaya headquarters of the Self-Defense Forces in broad daylight. To a rather indifferent crowd of soldiers gathered below the balcony, Mishima delivered his passionate plea to take part in the direct action he staged and to die with him in the name of patriotism. Television crews and journalists who had been called in by Mishima himself were also present at the scene. In spite of the spectacular and meticulously planned staging of his speech, replete with the on-site television cameras and news reporters, the soldiers refused to join his cause. Mishima’s speech was broadcast live, and the subsequent ritual suicides by Mishima and another member of the Shield Society, which took place inside the general’s office and away from the eyes of journalists, were immediately and widely reported. The news of his anachronistic ritual suicide and failed coup were on the front pages of every newspaper the next day. For the following weeks, the incident made repeated appearances on television programs, in the headlines of newspapers, and on the front covers of weekly magazines. The incident became one of the most wellknown media events in the history of Japan. Less than a month later, a black-and-white film entitled Sexual Reincarnation: Woman Who Wants to Die (Segura magura: Shinitai onna, 1970) made its quiet appearance in small movie theaters.1 With ample, formulaic erotic scenes, the film looked like any ordinary Pink Film or soft-core erotica, but with one notable exception. It included several montage sequences composed of re-photographed press photographs and headlines from newspapers and weekly magazines reporting on Mishima’s failed coup and subsequent suicide. As would have been evident to viewers at the time, and as is evident from a close reading of the film’s citational strategy, the film operates as a parody at mul
149 FURUHATA Figure 14: Sexual Reincarnation. tiple levels (including the parody of the media event that capitalized on Mishima’s suicide in its immediate aftermath). The film implies, for instance, that one of the protagonists was a member of the Shield Society. This character fails to participate in Mishima’s attempted coup as he spends a night with his girlfriend. Moreover, this motif of “failure” to take part in the historic event is one which Mishima used in his novel Patriotism (Yukoku, 1961) and its 1966 filmic adaptation. The film Sexual Reincarnation was directed by none other than Wakamatsu Koji, a Pink filmmaker renowned for his political radicalism and formal experimentation. It was scripted by his close collaborator, Adachi Masao, and released by Wakamatsu Productions.2 Sexual Reincarnation not only makes direct reference to Mishima’s spectacular suicide, but also the manner in which it draws the spectator’s attention to this media event is anything but subtle. Montages composed entirely of still images culled from newspapers and magazines flash across the widescreen. The film’s overt strategy of visually incorporating or “citing” journalistic images circulated by the mass media is eye-catching. This striking use of journalistic images is part and parcel of the style of Wakamatsu’s work produced in the 1960s and early 1970s; a number of his films from this period similarly appropriate, remediate, and directly cite then current news and media events. It is this citational strategy that confers on his work an uncanny sensation of actuality. Certainly, we who watch these films more than 40 years later may not immediately recognize the actuality of their journalistic reference, as the spectators of the time would have done; the topicality of the news may be lost on us. At the same time, what
150 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU we ineluctably sense is the strange openness of the films and their lack of closure. Despite being fictional, the diegetic worlds of Wakamatsu’s films are contiguous with the historically “real” world outside the screen. Yet these films also strike one as askew in their referential openness to the “real.” For the “real” they open up to is already mediated by journalism before its entrance into narrative cinema. By foregrounding the referential connection between the cinematic image and an on-going media event, such as the Mishima Incident—which was contemporaneous to the production of his film and hence still vivid in the minds of many filmgoers—Wakamatsu’s work brings together two economies of the image. On the one hand, it intervenes in the economy of the production, circulation, distribution, and consumption of journalistic images. On the other hand, it intervenes in the comparable economy of cinematic images. While these economies of the image are not identical, they overlap and intersect. A fundamental difference between the two, however, is temporality. The pace with which the image gains currency and exhausts it is much faster within the economy of journalistic images. By contrast, the economy of cinematic images moves slowly, especially when it comes to the production, circulation, and consumption of narrative films. Wakamatsu’s work creates a link between the two by playing up the temporal proximity between the media event and its calculated repetition. That is, his films attempt to minimize the time lag between the two economies of the image. It is thus the calculated timing of the cinematic repetition of the media event that generates the sensation of actuality that is unique to Wakamatsu’s work. My argument is that the critical edge that gave Wakamatsu the reputation for being a political, avant-garde filmmaker derives from this calculated timing of his citational practice. In what follows, I will first examine how this citational strategy allows Wakamatsu to present an immanent critique of the mediatization of politics. I will then discuss how Wakamatsu’s work intervenes into the journalistic and cinematic image economies.



151 FURUHATA Figure 15: Sexual Reincarnation. The Pink Film and the Citation of the Media Event The timing of Sexual Reincarnation was, indeed, well calculated. Wakamatsu and Adachi began working on the script while watching the evening TV news about the Mishima Incident the very night of that shocking event.3 As film critic Hiraoka Masaaki observed at the time of the film’s release, the speed with which Wakamatsu Production made Sexual Reincarnation was on a par with tabloid journalism. By November 29 (four days after the incident) Adachi finished writing the script. By December 9 the production crew finished shooting the film on location at a small inn in Minakami, a remote town located in the northern part of Japan. According to Hiraoka: “Merely two weeks after the incident, the film was complete. Its pace was comparable to that of weekly magazines.”4 The film indeed appears to be quite self-conscious of its temporal and referential proximity to tabloid journalism. For instance, one image that is inserted twice in the film—once at the beginning and once at the end—is a two-page spread taken from the weekly magazine Shukan yomiuri’s “emergency special issue” dedicated to Mishima’s death, published on December 11.5 The film reproduces the press photograph of Mishima placed next to an arresting headline that reads “Madness or Sincerity? A Shocking Hour and a Half ” in a tight close-up. Within two weeks from this date the film was already showing at theaters.6 All of this suggests an exceptionally journalistic sensibility towards timing on the part of Wakamatsu and his crew. The film is actual, up-to-date, and topical on all
152 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU fronts as it holds a tight referential relation to the sensational media event that it unabashedly appropriates. Since Sexual Reincarnation falls into the generic category of the Pink Film, and since many of Wakamatsu’s films that bear the same journalistic elements are said to belong to this genre, we may surmise that this proximity to journalistic media has something to do with the generic structure of the Pink Film itself. As Donald Richie points out, during the height of the production of Pink Films most production companies were shooting one film per week on average.7 This seems to explain, at least partly, the strong affinity between journalism and Wakamatsu’s work. To be sure, Wakamatsu’s work was not always shown at movie theaters specializing in soft-core pornography. Theatre Scorpio in Shinjuku programmed the special screenings of Wakamatsu’s films as early as 1968, one year after the screening of Adachi’s experimental film Galaxy (Gingakei, 1967), which inaugurated the opening of the theater. Wakamatsu’s collaboration with Art Theatre Guild (ATG) in Ecstasy of the Angel (Tenshi no kokotsu, 1972) also indicates his foothold in the art-cinema circuit. But this is not to say that Wakamatsu stopped being a Pink filmmaker and became an art filmmaker. As Sharon Hayashi compellingly argues, the controversial showings of his earlier Pink Films, such as Secret Acts Behind Walls (Kabe no naka no himegoto, 1965) and The Embryo Hunts in Secret (Taiji ga mitsuryo suru toki, 1966) at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1965 and 1966, attest to the permeability of generic boundaries that demarcate “sex film” from “art film”.8 The special screening event, aptly titled “Wakamatsu Koji’s Soulful Demonstration,” which featured six films including Secret Acts Behind Walls and The Embryo Hunts in Secret at Theatre Scorpio in August and September 1968, suggests that the same kind of generic permeability existed in Japan at the time. The history of the Pink Film industry indicates that the timely appropriation of topical, sensational news events (especially those involving violent crimes) was a common industry practice. Given the history of this generic practice, it is worth starting our analysis of the temporal economy of Wakamatsu’s work with a consideration of the Pink Film as a genre, to see if it had something to do with his calculated remediation of journalistic materials.


153 FURUHATA The Economy of the Pink Film Kobayashi Satoru’s Market of Flesh (Nikutai ichiba, 1962), which is said to be the first Pink Film, is based on an actual rape incident that took place in the Roppongi ward of Tokyo in October 1961.9 As Eric Schaefer suggests in his study of the American “exploitation film”—a genre comparable to the Pink Film—this kind of referential practice was also common among exploitation films in the United States. Schaefer notes, “Because exploitation films often drew on the headlines for their story material, they emphasized timeliness in their ads.”10 Being on the low end of film production, Pink Films share many of the same characteristics of exploitation films: they low budget, produced in a short span of time (often less than a week) by small independent production companies, and habitually focus on adult-only themes and “forbidden” spectacles (mainly nudity and violence). They are usually distributed and exhibited through independent venues and rarely through major film studios or their distribution channels.11 In fact, this last point on distribution is key to the generic definition of the Pink Film. Coined by Murai Minoru, a news reporter and a film critic, the term pinku eiga (“Pink Film”) was explicitly used to differentiate independently produced and distributed soft-core pornographic films from similarly themed films made by the major studios. As the film critic Suzuki Yoshiaki reminds us, films such as Imamura Shohei’s Insect Woman (Nippon konchuki, 1963) which was hailed for its tasty eroticism, did not qualify to be called “Pink” because Nikkatsu, one of the major five studios of the time, produced and distributed it.12 Another element that is indispensable for distinguishing the Pink Film from other erotic or pornographic films is its postwar origin. Its putative “beginning” is traced back to Kobayashi’s Market of Flesh, the first independently produced soft-core erotica made after the establishment of Eirin (Japanese Motion Picture Code of Ethics Committee), a non-governmental organization that sets Japan’s self-regulatory rating system.13 The Pink Film is also a product of the era when television eclipsed cinema and led to the decline of major studios, which in turn allowed small independent companies to gain more control over the circuits of production and distribution. In this sense the Pink Film is not strictly equivalent to what Schaefer has called classical exploitation films (sex-hygiene films, science films, burlesque films),
154 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU though these pre-Pink erotic films were frequently screened in Japan long before the emergence of Pink Film in the 1960s.14 In addition to its growing popularity among young male audiences, the Pink Film, with its marginalized status and its constant struggle against censorship, benefited from an aura of oppositionality in the 1960s. In order to understand the habitual association of Wakamatsu’s work with the New Left, one cannot overlook the ideological positioning of the Pink Film as defiant and oppositional to the mainstream cinema. The historical situation of the 1960s—the general decline of the film industry, the increased militarization of the New Left student movement, and the explosion of countercultural and underground art activities—had much to do with this perception of the Pink Film in general and Wakamatsu’s work in particular. Interestingly, Oshima was first among the critics and filmmakers who took this politicized view of the Pink Film. Oshima compared the marginalized position of the Pink Film to the victims of social and economic discrimination in the essay, “Wakamatsu Koji: Discrimination and Carnage,” published in the October 1970 issue of the film journal Eiga hihyo II. Despite their stylistic and institutional differences, Oshima and Wakamatsu worked in similar social circles and by the time Oshima’s essay was published in Eiga hihyo II, their paths had begun to run in parallel. After graduating from the elite Kyoto University, Oshima began his filmmaking career at the major Shochiku studio, and was soon applauded by the media as the leader of Japan’s New Wave generation. Wakamatsu, on the other hand, started his career in the burgeoning television industry after spending a few years as a day laborer, a yakuza, and even some time in prison. Wakamatsu’s directorial debut was a minor Pink Film, Sweet Trap (Amai wana, 1963), produced by the independent production company Tokyo Kikaku, for the meager amount of $1,800.15 Meanwhile, Oshima left Shochiku in protest against the repressive measures taken by the studio against the screening of his film Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri, 1960). Throughout the 1960s, Oshima and Wakamatsu similarly dealt with polemical issues such as militant political activism, crime, sex, and the emperor system. They often shared the same actors (e.g., the Situation Theater actor Kara Juro) and the same crews (e.g., Adachi Masao, who worked as a scriptwriter for both Wakamatsu and Oshima), and the two directors both collaborated with ATG. Wakamatsu also produced Oshima’s In the Realm of
155 FURUHATA the Senses (Ai no koriida, 1976), a controversial hardcore film that reignited debates about pornography and censorship in Japan. It is within this historical milieu that we should place Oshima’s sympathetic portrayal of Wakamatsu as an oppositional filmmaker. In “Wakamatsu Koji: Discrimination and Carnage,” Oshima introduces Wakamatsu as a fellow outcast who poses moral and political threats to the mainstream film industry and who is thus constantly “purged” from it. The decline of the Japanese film industry that began in 1959 necessarily led to the birth of the so-called Pink Film, though the industry continues to discriminate against it. The most horrifying fact is how unaware the Japanese film industry is about its own discriminatory attitude toward the Pink Film. I repeat: the Japanese film industry gave birth to this bastard child, the Pink Film. The form of discrimination expressed in this relation is the archetype of every mode of discrimination. And Wakamatsu Koji continues to be discriminated against as the very symbol of this form.16 The metaphor of discrimination against the internal “other” that Oshima uses in this essay shrewdly aligns Wakamatsu with the leftist discourse on minoritarian politics, a gesture that other critics seem to repeat and Wakamatsu himself cultivates retroactively. But the representation of leftist politics in Wakamatsu’s films is more ambivalent than it first appears. Consider the example of Sex Jack (Seizoku, 1970), a film which was selected for screening at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1971.17 Sex Jack draws on the notorious airplane hijacking known as the Yodogo Hijacking Incident (Yodogo haijakku jiken). In this incident, the members of an ultra-Left communist group, the Red Army Faction, hijacked a commercial airplane and defected to North Korea on March 31, 1970. Three months later, on June 15, 1970 when student-led street protests against the imminent renewal of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (ANPO) were at their height, Wakamatsu began shooting the film. It opens with a long sequence of documentary footage of helmeted student protesters gathering and marching at Yoyogi Park on the day of the renewal of the ANPO. Given the film’s timely release in July 1970, we can safely assume that the topicality of its reference to these two events was not lost on its initial audience. The film’s reference to the Yodogo Hi
156 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU Figure 16: Sex Jack opening title. jacking Incident is made even more explicit by its direct appropriation of the hijackers’ manifesto, including the famous passage, “We are Tomorrow’s Joe,” in which the young hijackers compared themselves to the hero of the popular contemporary manga, Tomorrow’s Joe (Ashita no Jo) by Chiba Tetsuya.18 The fictional narrative of Sex Jack revolves around a group of leftist student activists (implied to be Red Army Faction members) who regard themselves as a militant vanguard for the masses, along with the young protagonist—a lone unemployed laborer—who lives on “the other side of the river.” As Oshima astutely points out, the term kawamuko (the other side of the river), used by this young protagonist to introduce himself, functions as a subtle signifier of social discrimination: it is a term used to describe and invoke the image of the poor neighborhood where social and ethnic minorities, shunted from the eye of the general public, live. Using this topological framework of the divided city, the film juxtaposes the idealist student activists to the pragmatic proletariat who clandestinely carries out solitary terrorist attacks on police stations and the Communist Party headquarters. After a dramatic shoot-out between the policemen and student activists (all of whom the protagonist eventually kills), the film cuts to a striking color sequence. Since the film is shot mostly on black-and-white stock, this sequence delivers a sudden visual jolt. Here the camera slowly pans upward from drops of red paint (“blood”) spattered on the muddy riverbank to the horizon, taking the point of view of the protagonist who stands on the “other side” of the river. The film cuts to a close-up of the lower body of the protagonist who zips up a red jacket. Then the film cuts to the celebrated
157 FURUHATA final shot: the handheld camera mimics the subjective point of view of the protagonist who walks across the bridge. For Oshima and other critics who enthusiastically hailed this particular shot as a metonymic gesture of social resistance, the defiant act of crossing the river is more politically subversive and provocative than the student activists’ purported revolutionary action.19 Matsuda Masao goes a step further and proposes an anarchist reading of the final sequence. He argues that the invisible target of assassination hinted in the closing shot is none other than the Emperor, as indicated by the location of the bridge. According to Matsuda, the ultimate violence that the film condones is anti-state terrorism: the violence aimed at the body of the symbolic sovereign.20 In spite of the film’s explicit reference to the Yodogo Hijacking Incident, its focus is displaced from the militant form of student activism that envisions the worldwide uprising of the proletariat. Instead, the film foregrounds the solitary act of violence exhibited by the lone protagonist who refuses to join the organized revolutionary movement. While it is possible to interpret this narrative as a critique of social and economic discrimination (Oshima) or a critique of the sovereign power (Matsuda), I want to approach it from a slightly different angle in order to highlight the tension that exists between the film’s generic structure and its representation of violence. This entails rethinking the gender politics inherent in the genre of Pink Film in relation to the political violence, which the film’s topical reference to the Yodogo Hijacking Incident evokes. This examination of gender politics is notably absent from Oshima and Matsuda’s analysis of Sex Jack, a film that presents gratuitous scenes of nudity and pornographic images of ecstatic women and men. Their appraisals of the film also do not question the taken-for-granted primacy of the male hero as the agent of resistance and narrative action. As the feminist film scholar Saito Ayako rightly points out, women’s bodies in the work of Wakamatsu (as well as Adachi) are frequently put on screen simply to provide a blank canvas on which to paint vivid pictures of social contradictions.21 The women thus occupy the position of the passive object, an inert surface for masculine inscription. Recurrent representations of violated women in Wakamatsu’s films seem to corroborate this reading. From The Embryo Hunts in Secret (1966), which portrays a captive woman who gets constantly whipped by the middleaged man (named Marukido Sadao, a pun on the Marquis de Sade), to Violat
158 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU ed Angels (1967), in which nurses are murdered by an adolescent boy, Wakamatsu’s work shares the narrative tendency in classical Hollywood cinema to sadistically punish women who assert their sexual desire and agency, a disposition that has been roundly critiqued by feminist film scholars such as Laura Mulvey.22 However, focusing solely on the on-screen representation of violated female bodies on screen would risk overlooking the historical specificities of these pornographic films. For instance, as Sharon Hayashi insightfully argues, the films of Wakamatsu Production from the 1960s onward engage in a close dialogue with emergent discourses on gender and sexuality in Japan by foregrounding a particular set of problematics (e.g., infertility, impotence, sexual reproduction, and abortion) present in these discourses.23 In addition to their conscious engagement with topical issues such as sexual reproduction and abortion, Wakamatsu’s films often blur the boundary between sexual violence and political violence. In spite of its apparent endorsement of male dominance, his work often oscillates between the representations of the violated female body and those of the male body that gets “perversely eroticized through exploration of its weakness and vulnerability.”24 The images of violated male bodies are prevalent and the male protagonist frequently takes on the vulnerable position of the bearer of sexual violence. As Andrew Grossman argues in the essay “All Jargon and No Authenticity?—A Phenomenological Inquiry into the Pink Film,” included in this volume, the logic of perversion, including masochism so prevalent in the Pink Film still tends towards depoliticization insofar as the Pink Film industry, as part of the culture industry, still operates within the structure of capitalism. Nonetheless, it is precisely the spectacle of the violated male body that complicates the representation of political violence in films like Go, Go, Second Time Virgin and Sex Jack, prompting us to reconsider the conventional alliance between the leftist politics and Wakamatsu’s films. The solitary protagonist in Sex Jack is exemplary in this regard. The unemployed, working-class “outcast” who lives on the other side of the river and carries out a series of terrorist attacks against the authorities is also the one who is subjected to sexual humiliation and violence. His vulnerability is accentuated in the scene where he is coerced into having sex with the female member of the activist group. The protagonist’s physical struggle against this coercion and his ultimate refusal to enter into sexual relationships with
159 FURUHATA women becomes pivotal to the film’s allegorical depiction of another kind of violence: the violence inherent in the purportedly democratic structure of consensual politics. One way to complicate the generic structure of Wakamatsu’s films is hence to focus on this tension between political activism and sexual activities, and to ask why this tension is accompanied by unremitting topical references to actual incidents of violence, including airplane hijackings, terrorist bombings, homicides, and other sensational crimes.

The Mediatization of Politics and the Police Order The 1960s saw an intensified mediatization of politics through the proliferation of television. It is worth repeating that this decade in Japan also opened, in 1960, with the first televised assassination—the assassination of Asanuma Inejiro, the head of the Socialist Party, by a young ultranationalist right-wing activist—which was followed by countless spectacles of violence relayed by television, from the images of armed riot police clashing with workers and student protesters to the images of U.S. military aggression in Vietnam, of the civil rights movement, and of the spread of decolonization struggles in Latin America and Africa. This was also the decade that witnessed the most air hijackings, seajackings, and other direct-action tactics carried out by media-conscious militant activists. It was within this general atmosphere of media saturation that Kim Hiro staged his hostage crisis, the Yodogo hijackers stole the Japan Airline’s flight 351 and defected to North Korea, and Mishima Yukio staged his failed coup d’état and performed his ritual suicide. Like Oshima and Matsumoto Toshio, avant-garde filmmakers who frequently appropriated high-profile media events in the 1960s, Wakamatsu was quick to incorporate these sensational news items into his films often with the help of Adachi’s clever scripts. In the course of this decade the process of consuming violence through the mediation of spectacular images and imaging politics through violence became thoroughly imbricated. The mass media greatly contributed to the state’s management of the public’s perception of politics. Japanese media had historically engaged in institutionalized activities of regulating, censoring, and soliciting news consumption, which contributed to the production of a dis
160 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU ciplined, productive population during the wartime period and the Occupation period. The postwar growth of the private sector of the journalism industry seemed to liberate the news media from the grip of the state, but arguably it developed a much subtler yet equally effective means of policing the population. The news media under the regime of liberal governance in postwar Japan operated with the principle of democratization, but the power of the media to shape, manage, and delimit the perceived definition of politics stayed firmly in place. The introduction of television in the 1950s not only reinforced this power, but also amplified its reliance on the rhetorical force of liberalism and consensual democracy. This confluence of the postwar democratization of the media and liberal governance at the height of Japan’s economic growth forms the historical background for Wakamatsu’s incessant appropriation of news media. Understood in this context, his appropriation of widely reported incidents such as the Yodogo air hijacking and Mishima’s coup attempt—actions that directly affronted the security and authority of the state—in Sex Jack and Sexual Reincarnation appears as more than a timely citation of the sensational news. For the media’s dissemination of these incidents as defining images of political violence and criminal action works together with a broader mechanism of policing, which operates within and without the institutionalized apparatuses of law and order. To return to the point I made earlier, then, it is not enough to simply attribute the actuality-effect of Wakamatsu’s films to the generic structure of the Pink Film. Rather, the strategy of remediation and the temporal proximity to journalism present in Wakamatsu’s work need to also be placed within this larger historical context of the intensified mediatization of political violence in the 1960s. Only then can we fully understand the particular intervention his work makes in the parallel economies of narrative cinema and journalism. If Wakamatsu’s engagement with journalism goes beyond a mere sensationalist appropriation of topical news, and if it is historically grounded in the era of an intensified mediatization of political violence, how might we understand its significance? One way to answer this question is to step back and think about the kind of political actions made visible through Wakamatsu’s citational use of journalistic materials. In order to analyze this point, I want to turn to the theoretical distinction between police and politics made by Jacques Rancière.25 Following Michel Foucault’s work on the historical
161 FURUHATA development of the modern police, Rancière makes a useful distinction between two ways of understanding politics; he separates what he calls the general order of “police” from the genuine acts of “politics”, reserving the latter term to denote a broader range of activities that contest, disrupt, and question the very conditions of possibility that undergird the perceived social, economic, and legal orders in society, including the ostensibly democratic ones. Rancière hence uses the term policing—not politics—to refer to what commonly goes by the name of politics: the institutionalized activities of governance, regulation, and the exercise of power including the system of electoral politics: “Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems of legitimizing this distribution. I propose to give this system of distribution and legitimization another name. I propose to call it the police.”26 Accordingly, his concept of the police significantly expands the narrow understanding of the police as an agent of law enforcement, surveillance, and legally sanctioned violence. What he calls “the police order” is a more general regulatory order of sense perception, of which the institutional apparatus of the police as the agency of law enforcement is just one element: “The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise.”27 In contrast, what Rancière calls politics refers to activities that upset this regulatory police ordering of the sensible and the exclusionary distribution of social roles and bodies in society.28 Against this regulatory order of the police that predetermines what one can see, say, and do, as well as who can speak for a given political community, Rancière defines what he calls politics in the following manner: “Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where there was only place for noise.”29 In so doing, such political activity can expose the structure of inequality, which is constitutive of democratic society and at odds with the supposed equality among its members.
162 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU Figure 17: Wakamatsu combines riot police and protesters in the opening montage sequence of Running in Madness, Dying in Love (Kyosojoshiko, 1969). Wakamatsu’s timely appropriation of media events, such as the Yodogo Incident, could be productively understood in relation to this gap that exists between the police order and political activity. Instead of focusing on political actions that appear obvious and self-evident, Wakamatsu often shifts his emphasis onto a more ambiguous element. For instance, how might we read the film’s final staging of the protagonist’s river crossing in Sex Jack? This act might be read as an attempt to dislocate and redistribute bodies from their assigned places in society rather than as a simple act of defiance against the state. The protagonist’s act of crossing the river is at once a physical and symbolic gesture that exposes the benign violence enacted by the democratic society. That is, the violence, which allocates his body “on the other side of the river,” the marginalized space of minorities whose presence is concealed from the public and whose voices are not heard by elected politicians and activists who speak in their name. What the film makes visible through its engagement with sexual and political violence is the uncomfortable truth that these leftist student activists are on the side of the police in Rancière’s sense of the term. Their critique of the state and capitalism notwithstanding, the student activists in Sex Jack are in fact complicit with the dominant police order that forecloses the participation of those who have no political voice in representational politics, and who are excluded from the media’s theatrical staging of political dissent. The protagonist’s refusal to participate in the consensual model of democracy presented in the student activists’ rhetoric of free sex is emblematic in this regard. While hiding inside the dilapidated apartment of the protagonist, the stu
163 FURUHATA dents pass their idle time by debating the merits of revolutionary violence, complaining about the apathy of workers, and engaging in group sex, which they call “rosy solidarity” (barairo no rentai). This campy caricature of solidarity depicted in the form of a run-of-the-mill, pornographic scene is suggestive; it discloses the policing power of their political vision. The policing power of the students over the protagonist is foregrounded through this seemingly democratic rhetoric of free sex, as they invite and then pressure the protagonist to engage in the act of rosy solidarity. The camera work in this sequence drives the point home. Taking a high-angle position, the camera looks on the contorted face of the protagonist who helplessly screams as he is held and stripped of his clothes. His refusal to participate in this erotic game of solidarity is interpreted diegetically as a pathetic gesture of cowardice and impotence. But if we were to understand the police order as consisting of “the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved,” then this scene works as a critique of this very police order, which works through a depoliticized system of consensus and in the name of liberal democracy.30 Read in this allegorical manner, the film Sex Jack reveals a much deeper ambivalence towards New Left student activism than it may first appear. This kind of ambivalence that reveals the contradictory alliance between the police order and leftist politics is what makes Wakamatsu’s work from the 1960s and early 1970s particularly interesting. His work is commonly interpreted as either regressively pornographic or progressively radical, and the political stance of his filmmaking from this period is predictably aligned with the New Left and with its stance of the anti-establishment. 31 As noted by film historian Hirasawa Go, the participation of young collaborators such as Adachi Masao in Wakamatsu Production helped ground Wakamatsu’s personal hatred of police officers in a more theoretical framework of the critique of the state.32 Wakamatsu also invited and hired former student revolutionaries and New Left activists into the production team. However, films like Sex Jack suggest that the question of politics in his work is much more ambivalent and even contradictory. If so, what does the textual ambivalence of Wakamatsu’s films tell us about cinema’s proximity to journalism? In order to answer this question, the next section will look more closely at the types of journalistic material appropriated by Wakamatsu.

164 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU Appropriating the Spectacle The textual ambivalence of Wakamatsu’s films begs the question of cinema’s complicity with the existing police order that codifies our perception of political violence. Wakamatsu directly cites and remediates topical materials circulating in the journalistic economy of information, and the information appropriated by him is often quite spectacular. In so doing, his films tread a fine line between self-serving publicity and critique. By referencing then current news and media events, his work gains much needed publicity as it piggybacks on the sensational values of these events. Yet, at the same time, films like Sex Jack and Sexual Reincarnation also draw attention to the policing power of journalistic media through their calculated remediation of news. It is the delayed repetition of the already consumed spectacles of sensational events that opens up a productive space of critique, even as it capitalizes on their value as publicity. Exemplary in this regard are the montage sequences in Sexual Reincarnation, which remediate news reports and press photographs concerning Mishima’s attempted coup and his suicide in close-ups. Noteworthy here is the fact the purported “political” nature of this news is aligned with the ultra-right nationalist wing of militant activism. When read together with films like Sex Jack, Season of Terror, and Ecstasy of Angels, which explicitly deal with the militancy of the New Left activists, Wakamatsu’s handling of journalistic materials in Sexual Reincarnation reveals a formal consistency; regardless of the ideological orientation all the news pertaining to the political activism of the Left and the Right are formally presented in the same manner. The direct remediation of headlines and photographs published in newspapers, magazines and print advertisements as well as the audio sampling of radio and television news are recurrent formal techniques used in many of his films. This indiscriminate treatment of journalistic information pertaining to the political activism of this period suggests that the policing function of mediatization is not wedded to any particular ideological orientation. This is a process that undermines the purported difference between the Left and the Right as it homogenizes the spectacular images of staged dissent and resistance into palatable commodities. The attempted coup by the Right and the attempted revolutionary uprising by the Left become equivalent as information; their images become exchangeable as they circulate in the media. It is this leveling force of commodification that undergirds the smooth flow of
165 FURUHATA the journalistic economy of the image. However, when the same news is appropriated by cinema, it interrupts the flow of information. By creating redundancy, the cinematic repetition of the news draws attention to the policing nature of the spectacle itself. Some of the films made by Wakamatsu in the late 1960s appropriate topical news and sensational media events, though the main narrative does not directly reference either the New Left student movement or the right-wing political activism. For instance, the film Violated Angels—invited to the Cannes International Film Festival along with Sex Jack—draws on the famous mass killing of student nurses by Richard Speck in Chicago in 1966, an incident that received much news coverage during his trial the following year.33 Wakamatsu produced the film with his own funds in 1967, and invited Kara Juro, the founder of the underground theater troupe, Situation Theater to perform the lead role. The decidedly non-Pink status of the film may account for the experimental look of the work. However, its handling of journalistic materials is still consistent with his other films from this period. As in Sexual Reincarnation, the film Violated Angels includes eye-catching montage sequences composed of still images extracted from newspapers and magazines, though this time these images are not directly linked to the original incident involving Speck on which the narrative is based. More precisely, the film opens with a montage sequence that mixes erotic photographs of women taken from pornographic magazines with still photographs of Kara. The film closes with another striking montage sequence, which alternates a freeze-frame shot of two policemen with raised truncheons with a series of remediated images from newspapers and weekly magazines, many of which reference then current news about the massive student protests against the Vietnam War. The formal structure of the opening and the closing sequences suggest two things: first, the sensational crime of Richard Speck is syntagmatically linked to pornography on the one hand and to political activism on the other; and second, pornography and political activism are rendered equivalent to one another insofar as they circulate as commodities in the economy of journalism. Scholars of Japanese cinema have failed to analyze the connection between the film’s timely appropriation of the crime of Richard Speck and the wider journalistic economy of news. In his discussion of Violated Angels, for instance, Noël Burch makes a cursory comment on these montage sequences
166 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU and the journalistic sensibility of Wakamatsu: “The film was inspired by the notorious massacre of the ‘Chicago nurses’ and is said to have been shot within a week of that horrendous event. Actual, recent events have often provided the raw material for Wakamatsu’s fantasies, as they did for Adachi Masao, his new script-writer, who was to influence the new direction of his work.”34 While Burch’s observation about Wakamatsu and Adachi’s appropriation of “actual, recent events” is correct, his analysis of the film misses its critical intervention into the journalistic economy of the image. Burch hastily concludes that the film creates a “mechanical association of unbridled sexual fulfillment with revolutionary politics, an association which characterizes not only much independent film-work, but also the ideology of certain ultraLeftist groups in Japan.”35 But, as we saw in Sex Jack and Sexual Reincarnation, it is precisely such a mechanical association between sex and revolutionary politics that Wakamatsu’s work leads us to question. If sex and revolutionary politics are associated, it is because the news media have already transformed both into spectacles of equivalent value. Moreover, Burch’s interpretation of the opening and closing montage sequences overly psychologizes their significance. He argues that the “two essentially extra-diegetic sequences [are] meant to ground the hero’s psychosis in social reality, to designate it as emblematic of social and political repression and revolt.”36 Burch remains skeptical of the film’s purported distancing effects, and notes that it simply draws a homology between “sexual alienation” and “the economic, political and ideological alienation” endemic in capitalist society. However, this reductive reading obscures the crucial difference between the police order and politics proper that Rancière articulates. Politics in Burch is reduced to a one-dimensional sphere of repression, alienation, and senseless revolt. Burch also posits sex and politics as categorically different elements—as if one is “private” and the other is “public”—and the connection between the two is assumed to reside in the classical Marxist framework of alienation. Yet, if we were to consider the mediatization of political activism that blurs the boundary between the Left and the Right, such a simple analogy between sex and politics based on the concept of alienation does not hold. At stake in Violated Angels, as well as other films made by Wakamatsu in the 1960s and early 1970s, is the policing effect of this mediatization itself, which renders political activism and sex as equivalents at the level of spectacle. Once they
167 FURUHATA enter into the journalistic economy of the image, spectacles of politics and sex equally command the attention of the consumers. Understood in this manner, the relation between the pornographic photographs used in the opening montage sequence and the still images of policemen and student protests in the closing montage sequence becomes clear; this is the relation of exchangeability. By formally treating sex and politics as exchangeable spectacles, Violated Angels also directs our attention to the mediating role of journalism. This is done through the timely remediation of sensational images extracted from the newspapers and magazines. What becomes visible through this process is the power of journalistic media to flatten the difference between different types of spectacles in accordance with the commodity logic of exchangeability. Another film that directly references a violent crime is Go, Go, Second Time Virgin made in 1969, two years after Violated Angels. Stylistically, this film closely resembles Sexual Reincarnation in its use of a rapid montage sequence that flashes across the screen without a clear narrative motivation. As in the case of Sexual Reincarnation, this sequence parades shocking images concerning the murder of the American actress Sharon Tate by the followers of Charles Manson in 1969. The news reports and press photographs about Tate’s murder alternate with comic book images that graphically depict scenes of death and violence. In his analysis of Go, Go, Second Time Virgin, Desser also comments on the film’s citational strategy. Like Burch, he too focuses on the narrative effect of this sequence and reduces it to character psychology: “As in Violated Women [Violated Angels], Wakamatsu shows still images drawn from commercial exploitation forms, except in this later film, he shows them at the end, forcing a kind of retrospective understanding of the hero’s motivations.”37 However, explaining this sudden intrusion of nondiegetic journalistic materials through the framework of the character’s motivation misses the point. The graphic violence in this montage sequence functions in the same way as the opening and closing montage sequences in Violated Angels. They guide the spectator’s attention to the journalistic production of spectacles that equates crime, sex, and politics, which then circulate as information commodities. In so doing, these montage sequences put the cinematic remediation of these journalistic materials in quotation marks, as it were.
168 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU In order to better understand the efficacy of this citational gesture, we may note the temporal proximity between the original news and its reappearance in the film. As with Sexual Reincarnation and Mishima’s infamous spectacle, the time lag between the release date of Go, Go, Second Time Virgin and the date of Sharon Tate’s murder is quite small. One month after the news of Tate’s murder, the film was already playing in theaters. Citational practice of remediation in relation to the speed of the journalistic economy of information, especially news, bears further investigation here. Remediation presupposes repetition, and the cinematic repetition of journalistic information implies its belatedness. This belatedness of repetition suggests a critical gap between journalism and cinema; it is this gap or the time lag that interrupts an otherwise smooth flow of news as information. The lag is short enough for the film’s citational gesture to appear timely and actual, but long enough to prove that the temporality of the two economies of the image is not exactly the same. It is this temporal element of proximity—very close, but not simultaneous—that heightens the spectator’s awareness of the marked difference between the journalistic economy of the image and the cinematic economy of the image. Two months after the release of Go, Go, Second Time Virgin, Wakamatsu released yet another film, Season of Terror, which again opens with a memorable montage composed of remediated press photographs and newspaper headlines. The sequence begins with an enlarged snapshot of riot police clashing with demonstrating students. The rough, grainy texture of the image and the vertical lines running across it suggest that the photograph is printed on inexpensive newsprint. The film cuts to a partial image of a newspaper headline and an accompanying photograph of a burning building. The montage proceeds to other stills, which include more images of the riot police, mass protests, arrests of demonstrators, and the military training session of a right-wing group. Meanwhile, the fragments of headlines report on the record-breaking number of student arrests, riots, and inter-factional conflicts among the militant New Left students. Although the sequence itself is composed of still images, the use of fast fade-in and fade-out adds an optical rhythm, generating a subtle impression of movement. However, as if to remind the spectator of the status of this sequence as citation, the sequence ends with a cut to a shot in which a magazine featuring a right-wing nationalist group on its front cover is thrown down on the table
169 FURUHATA by an invisible hand. The film then cuts to a long shot of a housing complex and the fictional narrative of the New Left activist finally begins.38 The artifactual effect of this sequence seems to be the same as the ones discussed earlier. It indicates that the images of political activism presented in the film are crucially inflected through the mediation of journalism, which the film belatedly cites. But this citation is neither faithful nor simultaneous: the fact of repetition renders it different and threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the original. Taken as a whole, Wakamatsu’s films from the 1960s and early 1970s consistently play with this temporal lag between the journalistic production of information and the cinematic reproduction of it. In so doing, they draw attention to the artifactual nature of the information and the spectacularity of political activism, sex, and crime when mediated by journalism. The recurrent motifs of political activism, sex, and crime in his work are also deeply implicated in the differing economic structures of attention management in cinema and journalism. The cinematic production of spectacle is inseparable from the economic management of attention. As Jean-François Lyotard notes, the management of attention in cinema is doubly economic as it attempts to secure a financial return by imposing the good order (in a sense of oikonomia), channeling the libidinal investment of the spectator into the narrative order through the staging of the mise-en-scène and the calculated processes of editing and framing.39 Moreover, the effective orientation of the spectator’s attention often works through the combination of stillness and movement, and thus the commanding power of the spectacle in cinema often takes advantage of the freeze-frame. As Mulvey and others have noted, the attention-commanding power of the cinematic spectacle is especially heightened when the image remains still and thus halts the flow of the moving image.40 Something similar happens with the deliberate mixing of the journalistic economy of the image and the cinematic economy of the image. Wakamatsu’s calculated remediation of already spectacularized images of sexual and political violence, such as Tate’s murder, the anti-Vietnam war protests, and the Yodogo Hijacking Incident, halts the flow of the journalistic economy, reorients its direction, and commands critical attention from the spectator as it plays up the temporal gap between these two modes of image consumption and circulation. In so doing, it suggests that the temporal structures of cinema and journalism are not the same. This brings me to the final point of my analysis: the issue of expiration.
170 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU Cinema and the Logic of Expiration With this issue of expiration, we are back to the question of journalistic actuality, which requires us to rethink this concept of actuality in relation to the temporal attributes of news. As we saw earlier, Wakamatsu’s well-timed appropriation of high-profile media events and sensational crime news is marked by the belatedness of their repetition. This idea of belatedness deserves scrutiny if we are to fully understand the temporal difference between the cinematic and journalistic economies of the image. As Tosaka reminds us, “A news report stops being news if it loses its current relevance.”41 The concept of journalism, which etymologically suggests a link to the cyclical concept of the diurnal (diurnalis in Latin), is inseparable from this temporal attribute of being current or existing now; this attribute is what he calls “actuality.”42 As is often noted, journalistic information loses its value as time passes; the actuality of news quickly becomes obsolete. The value of information so central to journalism is time-sensitive. This temporally bound value of information in the journalistic economy has been repeatedly pointed out by scholars such as Walter Benjamin, Mary Ann Doane, and Niklas Luhmann, to name a few. To repeat Benjamin: “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new.”43 What defines the obsoleteness of journalistic information is, in short, its status of being out-ofdate. Conversely, the temporal attribute of actuality that defines journalism is threatened by its expirability; the inevitability—and threat—of expiration is constitutive of journalistic actuality. Journalistic actuality is thus defined by this capacity to expire, and it operates in a particular mode of temporality punctuated by the cyclical rhythm of news production. This is why the notion of actuality is opposed to the notion of eternity.44 The logic of expiration that structures the production of news and the expirable nature of actuality define the temporal economy of journalism. Yet, a third element also defines this temporally bound economy of journalistic information. This is non-redundancy. According to Luhmann: “Information cannot be repeated; as soon as it becomes an event, it becomes noninformation. A news item run twice might still have its meaning, but it loses its information value.”45 In other words, repetition is detrimental to the “actual” value of the journalistic information, as it creates redundancy. If we take this point seriously, the time lag that Wakamatsu introduces between the cinematic and journalistic economies of the image through his citation and
171 FURUHATA remediation of news gains new significance. The repetition opens up a critical interval between journalistic actuality and cinematic actuality, and this interval allows the viewer to distinguish between information and citation. Coming out of the Pink Film industry, which capitalizes on a fast cycle of production, Wakamatsu’s work seems to align itself with the journalistic economy of the image. Yet his work is also counterproductive to journalism, as the sensational news quoted and repeated by his films loses its information value as news. Accordingly, we may surmise that the dissemination of newsworthy information is neither the goal nor the intended effect of his remediation strategy. On the contrary, the divestment of information value seems to go hand in hand with the investment in something properly cinematic. Here, Wakamatsu’s work urges us to consider another important historical shift that took place concurrently with the mediatization of politics: the changing perception of cinema by the general public. Cinema changed from being a temporally bound commodity stamped with a short expiration date to being a timeless work of art worthy of being archived and appreciated time and again. Japan in the 1960s witnessed the dramatic decline of the major studios, which in turn helped small independent film productions to thrive and alternative modes of distribution and exhibition to flourish. The complementary developments of the Pink Film and art cinema (which is exemplified by the establishment of ATG, which specialized in the distribution, exhibition and production of art films) indicate the changing configuration of the Japanese film industry at the time. Wakamatsu’s work straddles these two fields of filmmaking, which diverge significantly in terms of their temporal logics. The turnover time of the Pink Film market critically differs from that of the art cinema market. While the fast-and-cheap production and exhibition cycle of the Pink Film in the 1960s maintained the journalistic speed of the so-called program pictures, the production and exhibition cycle of art films did not follow the weekly cycle of the program picture. In this regard the establishment of ATG, in 1961, was groundbreaking, as it clearly set the non-journalistic pace of production, distribution, and exhibition. In addition to fostering close interactions among avant-garde and more commercially oriented filmmakers, ATG made a particularly noteworthy contribution to the transformation of the cinematic economy of the image. It revolutionized the exhibition cycle, adopting the so-called long-run screening
172 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU Figure 18: Mishima and his Shield Society stage ritual sex before the decisive day in fantasy sequences from Sexual Reincarnation. style. As Roland Domenig points out, “One of ATG’s basic rules was to show each film for at least a month, irrespective of attendance. In the 1960s, the repertoire was usually changed weekly, and a four-week run was exceptional even for box-office hits.”46 ATG thus deviated and broke free from the previously dominant temporality of the cinematic economy of the image grounded in the weekly cycle. This dramatic shift in the exhibition cycle was significant, since it freed cinema from the structure of periodicity that the system of the program picture established and maintained during the 1950s. It is here that our earlier examination of the journalistic logic of expiration becomes relevant. The Japanese film industry in the 1950s produced films that were branded with an expiration date. Films as commodities had to be consumed—much like news—within a particular time span and according to a periodic cycle. Cinema had a parallel temporal economy to journalism during the 1950s when the system of the program picture was upholding the industry, insofar as the cinema, like journalism, was based around a cycle of expiration. Arguably, however, the temporal distance between cinema and journalism became greater in the 1960s, when independent production companies and avant-garde filmmakers started to generate an alternative circuit of production, distribution, and exhibition. In this regard it is suggestive that in 1961 Oshima published an essay entitled “A Challenge to Vulgar Beliefs about Cinema,” an essay in which he protests the general public’s perception of cinema as a commodity “that dis
173 FURUHATA Figure 19: Mishima stages his own fantasy sex before committing ritual suicide in his experimental film entitled Patriotism. appears in a week or two.” He squarely contests a conception of film as a journalistic commodity branded with an expiration date. Japan is now finally entering the era of big budget, long run filmmaking. This reflects a logical demand of the time, since we are finally realizing that a film cannot entertain without aspiring to be an artwork, a quality without which cinema cannot compete against other forms of entertainment. Accordingly, a work of film that attains this artistic quality does not lose its value after a short period of time, which is why it generates a demand for the long run exhibition of great films.47 Oshima presses his point that the vulgar conception of cinema as a mere commodity needs to be abandoned if cinema were to survive its competition with television. Oshima’s affirmation of cinema’s artistic value over its journalistic value is an argument for its timeless quality over its expirability. It is precisely this shift from being an expirable commodity to being a timeless art
174 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU work that marks the cinema’s liberation from its subordination to the temporal economy of journalism. As if to echo Oshima’s sentiment, Wakamatsu argues that the filmmaker is always responsible for his work, and that “there is no statute of limitations or parole for a filmmaker.”48 As the legal metaphor of the statute of limitations suggests, Wakamatsu’s positioning of cinema as something timeless foregrounds not its artistic merits, but the responsibility of the filmmaker for his work. Yet, both Oshima and Wakamatsu share the belief that the temporality of cinema must be distinguished from that of journalism; it is not dictated by the logic of expiration. Wakamatsu’s cinematic experiments of the 1960s must be analyzed in relation to this changing conception of cinema’s own temporality and its economy of the image, which are no longer subordinated to and modeled after journalism. Crucial here, once again, is the difference between the two types of image economies that Wakamatsu’s films make visible. In conclusion, it would be instructive to return to Sexual Reincarnation, a film which openly parodies the Mishima Incident. This film directly draws on the most sensational aspects of Mishima’s failed coup attempt and suicide, by remediating numerous photographs of Mishima clad in the uniform of his private army and even his handwritten death poems. Importantly, Sexual Reincarnation parodies not only the media event that occurred on November 25, 1970, but also Mishima’s film Patriotism. This reference to Patriotism is made explicit by the character traits of the protagonist, a right-wing nationalist and member of Mishima’s private army who was described as having failed to participate in Mishima’s actual coup attempt. Furthermore, not only does Wakamatsu replicate the whole setup of the young man who misses the historic opportunity to participate in a coup d’état, but he also appropriates Mishima’s own appropriation, in Patriotism, of an actual historic event, the famous February 26 Incident. This incident, which took place in 1936, also was a failed coup, carried out by young ultranationalist officers of the Imperial Japanese Army who revolted against the government in the name of their loyalty to the emperor. Several top cabinet members were assassinated and martial law was declared, putting Japan under a state of emergency. In the end the Emperor refused to support the insurrection, just as the soldiers of the Self-Defense Forces refused to respond to Mishima’s anachronistic vision of restructuring Japan.
175 FURUHATA Key to this layering of references is the untimeliness of the action taken by those who envision revolutionary change. The trope of failure to participate in major revolutionary actions, a point made by both Patriotism and Sexual Reincarnation, is bound to the untimely nature of actual insurrections that failed to make history. In this regard Mishima’s deliberate staging of his coup attempt as a media event appears self-conscious. He orchestrated this historic event for the camera, called the Mainichi newspaper and NHK television reporters, and thus anticipated timely responses from journalists.49 The media indeed responded to this call for timely coverage and collaborated with Mishima to stage his final act, a political spectacle that clearly echoed and imitated the fictional ending of the spectacular suicide in Patriotism. Nonetheless, Mishima failed to realize his attempted coup d’état. What Sexual Reincarnation parodies, then, is not simply the Mishima Incident of November 25, 1970, but the mediatization of politics in which journalists and revolutionaries equally participate. Even the unlikely choice of classical music used by Wakamatsu in Sexual Reincarnation is a reference to Mishima’s film Patriotism, which uses the score of Wagner’s magnanimous opera, Tristan und Isolde. By remediating the journalistic coverage of Mishima’s coup attempt and his subsequent suicide, and by appropriating Mishima’s fictional work that prefigured these actions, Sexual Reincarnation exposes the fundamentally theatrical—and artifactual—nature of actuality staged for and through the media. Through its layered reference to the artifactual nature of the Mishima Incident, Sexual Reincarnation also directs our attention to the ironic gap between the untimeliness of revolutionary acts and the timeliness of journalistic reports. As we saw in this chapter, Wakamatsu’s work competes with the journalistic economy of information and the image, but never coincides with it. This element of belatedness that marks his work, which relentlessly cites, parodies, and remediates sensational news and media events, allows us to see the critical difference between the temporal economies of journalism and cinema. While Wakamatsu’s films display the generic traits of the Pink Film and may appear to stand apart from more straightforwardly experimental works of filmmakers such as Matsumoto Toshio and Oshima Nagisa, their work shares something fundamentally similar: a critical attitude towards the proximity between cinema and journalism. Wakamatsu’s work constantly evokes and plays with an intersection between the two modes of the image
176 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU economy. In so doing, it draws our attention to the critical potential of cinema to interrupt the smooth flow of the journalistic economy. This calculated intervention into the journalistic economy of the image during the height of the intensifying mediatization of politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s is what makes Wakamatsu’s films so provocative, insofar as they complicate the presumed alliance between political activism and the cinema of actuality.

NOTES
1 Wakamatsu, Wakamatsu Koji: Ore wa te o yogosu, 116. 2 Because of their close association and the importance of Adachi and other Wakamatsu Productions members I will refer in this essay not solely to Wakamatsu alone but instead Wakamatsu Productions as the collective agents responsible for the production of these films. 3 Wakamatsu, Wakamatsu Koji: Ore wa te o yogosu, 116. 4 Hiraoka, Angura kikansetsu, 135. This essay was originally published in a publicity brochure for the film Sexual Reincarnation and was subsequently anthologized in Hiraoka’s Umi o miteita Zatouichi. While the temporality of the film and the weekly magazine may be comparable they are not the same. There is a gap in the temporality between the two, and this gap is precisely where the politics of Wakamatsu’s filmic repetitions of media events reside. 5 “Kinkyu daitokushu,” 20-21. 6 Wakamatsu, Wakamatsu Koji: Ore wa te o yogosu, 116. There is a conflicting account. The film is sometimes credited as being released in 1971, but Wakamatsu notes that it was shown in December. 7 Richie, “The Japanese Eroduction,” 334 in this volume. 8 Hayashi, “The Fantastic Trajectory of Pink Art Cinema From Stalin to Bush,” 48. 9 Suzuki, Pinku eiga suikoden, 12. 10 Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!,” 108-9. 11 Ibid., 6.
177 FURUHATA 12 Suzuki, Pink eiga suikoden, 35. This is why Kobayashi’s Market of Flesh, which was produced and distributed by Okura Mitsugu, a former benshi and the founder of the Okura Eiga studio, qualifies as the first Pink Film. Established in 1961, Okura Eiga began specializing in the production and distribution of Pink Film and continues to specialize in pornography today. Murai may have also borrowed the term “Pink” from its usage in the United States. According to Schaefer, “The adults-only designation, also known as ‘pinking’ after the color of the Chicago permit that forbade the admission of children to a film,” was already used in the United States before World War II (“Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!,” 124). 13 Ibid., 4. Eirin, short for Eiga rinri kitei kanri iinkai (Film Ethics Regulation Control Committee), was founded by the film industry personnel in 1949 during the Occupation. In 1956 the committee extricated itself from the industry, and established the self-regulatory rating system run by a third party. It changed its name from Eiga Rinri Kanri Iinkai to Eiga Rinri Iinkai (which is now translated as Film Classification and Rating Committee) in 2009. 14 Ibid., 15. Like the exploitation film, the Pink Film is also differentiated from hardcore pornography. 15 Suzuki, Pinku eiga suikoden, 26. 16 Oshima, “Wakamatsu Koji: Sabetsu to satsuriku,” 104. The term Oshima uses is onigo (“demon child”), which indicates a lack of resemblance between the parent and the child. In order to get the nuance across, I have translated it as “bastard child.” 17 Wakamatsu also brought another film, Violated Angels (Okasareta byakui, 1967), to the Cannes International Film Festival in 1971. These two films were invited to Cannes, together with Oshima’s The Ceremony (Gishiki, 1971). 18 The manga version of Tomorrow’s Joe was serialized in the weekly magazine Shukan shonen magazine, from 1968 to 1973. While the Yodogo Incident was unfolding, the TV anime version of the work went on the air. 19 Oshima, “Wakamatsu Koji: Sabetsu to satsuriku,” 105. 20 Matsuda, Fukei no shimetsu, 201. 21 Saito, “Adachi eiga to feminizumu,” 165. 22 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 23 Hayashi, “Shikyu e no kaiki,” 97.
178 THE ACTUALITY OF WAKAMATSU 24 While this is a phrase that Linda Williams uses to analyze Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, the questions of perversion and sadomasochism that she raises in reading this film are, arguably, equally applicable to some of Wakamatsu’s films. See Williams, Hard Core, 222. 25 Rancière, Disagreement, 28. Rancière also invited Wakamatsu to the conference, Où va le cinéma?: Cinéma et politique, held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2008. Due to a strike at the Centre Pompidou, Wakamatsu was, in the end, not able to attend. I thank Hirasawa Go for informing me of this event. 26 Rancière, Disagreement, 28. 27 Ibid., 29. 28 Rancière plays on the double connotation of the French word partage (“distribution” or “partition”), which suggests an act of division as well as the sharing of something in common. This concept of partage relates to his concern with equality and his critique of consensus. He writes, for instance, “I call the distribution of the sensible [le partage du sensible] the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts” (Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics,12). With regard to this ambivalent concept of partition or distribution (partage), Étienne Balibar’s following observation about the difference between the police and politics in Ranciére’s work is useful: “Policing, in general, is a matter of demands; it seeks to give everyone a fair share in the distribution of the common good, by authoritarian or contractual procedures. Democratic politics, in contrast, has as its unique criterion the ‘share of the shareless’: that is, the requirement of equality set off against social identity or personal merit.” See Étienne Balibar, “What Is Political Philosophy?” 101. 29 Rancière, Disagreement, 30. 30 Ibid., 28. 31 Wakamatsu’s antipathy towards the police is directly linked to his personal experience of being imprisoned for a petty crime. He notes, “I wanted to take revenge against the police by killing many policemen in my films.” Yomota Inuhiko and Hirasawa Go, “Wakamatsu Koji intabyu,” 176. My translation. 32 Hirasawa Go, “Radikarizumu no keizoku,” 159.
179 FURUHATA 33 Violated Angels is not the only film to reference this infamous murder case. The German film, Naked Massacre (Die Hinrichtung, aka Born for Hell, 1976) directed by Denis Héroux is based on the same incident. Gerhard Richter, a German painter and visual artist known for his artistic remediation of sensational news materials, also produced Eight Student Nurses (1966), a painting based on the portrait photos of eight nurses killed by Richard Speck. 34 Burch, To the Distant Observer, 352. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 354. 37 Desser, Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema, 104. 38 To this list of films that make direct references to the news media, especially newspapers, we may also add Wakamatsu’s most controversial film, Secrets Behind the Wall (Kabe no naka no himegoto, 1965), which was invited to the Berlin Film Festival and was denounced as a “national disgrace” (kokujoku) by Eirin. This film also makes ample use of journalistic materials and includes numerous close-ups of actual newspapers and magazine headlines, which suggests that the news was still current at the time of the film’s release. 39 See Lyotard, “Acinema,” 349-359. See also Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, CounterMemory,” 96-107. 40 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 186. For an insightful discussion of cinema, attention and economy, see Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production, 2006). 41 Tosaka Jun, Tosaka Jun zenshu 3, 133. 42 The German word Tosaka frequently uses is Aktualität. 43 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 251-64; Luhmann, The Reality of The Mass Media. 44 Tosaka, “Ideorogii gairon,” 122. 45 Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, 19. 46 Domenig, “A Brief History of Independent Cinema in Japan and the Role of the Art Theatre Guild,” 11. 47 Oshima, “Eiga zokusetsu he no chosen,” 80. This essay was originally published in the magazine Gendai no me in 1961. My translation. 48 Wakamatsu Koji, Jiko nashi, 202. 49 DNA Media, “Mishima Yukio no shi wa, toji do ronhyo sareta ka,” 19.
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