|
Japan Beginning in the early '60s and running through today, Japanese filmmakers combined sex with violence to make a product far nastier than that allowed by America and many European countries. One early title well sums up the Japanese idea of eroticism, The Joys of Torture.In Kaneto Shindo Onibaba, two nymphomaniacs lure warriers into traps before raping and eating them. In Kiyonori Suzuki's Nikutai no Mon, a group of prostitutes living in an abandoned house punish each other for break house rules. Some victims are suspended from the ceiling and whipped, others are shaved and placed in a net for public view. Suzuki's films of the early '60s - The Brute, The Woman Sharper, Flower and Blood - took place in the slums of Tokyo. His characters are prostitutes, pimps and gangsters. On the verge of bankruptcy, Japan's oldest studio saved itself in 1972 by producing "roman poruno" - romantic pornographic films. At the time, Japan's slumping box office forced five major production companies out of business. Nikkatsu Corporation used respectable bugets, innovative camera angles, superb acting and strong plots to produce high quality "roman porno" movies which won acclaim for their quality. Japan's young directors faced unusual restrictions - Japan's Motion Picture Code of Ethics Committee prohibited exposure of the genitals or the pubic regions, so their sex scenes had to stay soft. In response to restrictions on sex, Japanese directors responded like their peers around the world, and poured on the violence. Japanese porn of the 1970s through today overflows with rape, bondage and sado-masochism. "Pink films," as softcore exploitation films are known in Japan, had been around for decades. The year 1972 however ushered in real movies about sex. Love Hunter and The Smell of the Wildcat passed the Ethics Committee screening board in 1973 but police seized the prints. In a famous obscenity case, the courts ruled that the films could be shown, guaranteeing large audiences. According to Magill's Survey of Cinema, director Noboru Tanaka "merges harsh worlds and expressive images with a poetic lyricism and a sense of surrealism" in his films. Tatsui Kumashiro is known for creating works of pure sensual pleasure, such as The World of Geisha which recreates geisha and teahouse life in Tokyo's gay headquarters in 1918. Using the small tatmi mat room as a symbol of closed-space sex, this witty film features sensual photography through a mosquito net on a sweltering summer night. In The Peculiar Triangle, Kumashiro describes the twisted relationship between a foppish University of Tokyo graduate who discovers he's gay, a gangster and a bar hostess who brings home her customers. Tatsumi satirizes his breed of filmmakers looking for loopholes in Professional Specialists, a comedy with erotic moments. In Flowers and Serpents, director Masaru Konuma transforms bondage and torture into ecstasy while making a black comedy more bizarre than Kon Ichikawa's 1959 classic Odd Obsession. Koyu Obara takes torture seriously in Trapped, which depicts atrocities of military police during World War II, and The Inside Story of a Women's Prison. In The Naked Seven, 1973, Yasuharu Hasebe uses a group of attractive Amazon warriors to spoof a classic samurai story. The Story of Sada Abe tells the same story of Japan's internationally best known porno - In the Realm of the Senses. They were the Japanese sensations of the mid '70s, dramatizing the true story of a World War II era Japanese prostitute. The hardcore scenes in Senses had to be airbrushed in Japan. Magill's Survey of Cinema calls 1976's Senses a "fascinating study of radical extremes... Sada (Eiko Matsuda) and Kichi (Tatsuya Fuji) engage in incessant and shameless copulation which excites servant girls, geishas and other around them bound to the workaday world. Kichi becomes increasingly anxious to please Sada, and, to prolong his erections, she repeatedly strangles him, until, as they both seem to foresee, he dies." Director Nagisa Oshima was a leading figure in the Japanese New Wave in the early 1960s. Another leading member in the movement observed, "I'm a country farmer; Nagisa is a samurai." Oshima belongs to the radical school of Jean-Luc Godard and Dusan Makavejev, "a product of the clash between surviving folk traditions, feudalism, industrialization and Westernization." (Magill) "The Japanese seem absolutely fascinated with bondage, torture and sexual status," writes William Rotsler in his 1973 book Contemporary Erotic Cinema. "Or so it seems from their exported sex films and magazines. It is always the women who are tied and tortured and I wonder if this is a manifestation of the rise of women crying for their rights in a country that historically has relegated women tot he lowest social rung. perhaps the Japanese male feels threatened by this upsurge and gets gratification in seeing woman after woman humiliated, hurt, subjected to violent rapes, tied helpless, cut, beaten, tattooed, and whipped. Rotsler interviewed an American Valerie who stripped in Japan, Saigon, Singapore and the Philippines. "The Orientals are so much into that male-superiority shit that they just don't care about you," said Valerie. "While I was in Tokyo I was offered this part in a film... They were supposed to drag me into this torture chamber at their stronghold and in I went, wearing only this dumb rag tied around me and these actors copping feels on my tits and ass whenever they could. "I was tied to a waterwheel and half drowned. They spun the wheel and held me upside down under water until I was supposed to give up... I couldn't move. The ropes and knots were real! The water was real! I was really drowning! "I did one [film] in the Philippines where I didn't take my clothes off but all the rest were nudies. I never had any leads... I was just a body. I was raped a lot. They really like rapes over there, especially white girls. "In Hong Kong I heard about some white girls doing pornography for these Chinese guys from Macao, which is one of the really evil places on this earth! I heard, too, that some of the white chicks have never come back from there!" From the chapter "An Actor in Japanese Pink Films: An Interview with
Koichi Imaizumi." Book - "Queer Japan." Compiled, translated and edited
by Barbara Summerhawk, Cheiron McMahill, and Darren McDonald. Norwich,
VT: New Victoria Publishers, 1998. $16.95. Pink films, which the non-Japanese observer might consider soft pornography, recently have managed to attract a cult following. For some, pink films represent a space within which sexuality can be expressed as an art form. This is the impression that can be obtained in discussions with Imaizumi, an actor in pink films. As a lead-in to the main interview, pink film actor Koichi Imaizumi made it a point to explain just what pink films are. Here, in summary, is how he defined them: Pink films started being made in 1961. Three pink films are screened
together as a set at movie theaters for a total of between sixty to ninety
minutes. A few years ago there were five companies involved in the production
of pink films, but today there are only three. Two of these companies
faced financial difficulties and so started to produce pornographic films
from around 1970. These films, called roman pornography, were different
from pink films. Roman pornography films were produced with larger budgets
and were filmed over a period of a week to ten days. Though the lengths
of the roman pornographic films, or One major difference is that when filming there is only one take for each scene. Pink films are considered pornography, but the sex scenes are only simulated. In adult videos, which do have actual sex in them, the sexual organs are blurred over with a mosaic so they cannot be seen. In pink films, the mosaic is not used. But because Japanese law prohibits the showing of pubic hair and sex organs, of course pink films are filmed in a way so that none of this can be seen. This is done mainly because of budget constraints; there is not enough money to edit in the mosaic after the filming. With the increase in popularity of the adult videos over the past few years, the popularity of pink films has dropped. |