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Despite the hype, Oshima's film had little impact. Hardcore and story have generally gone separate ways since the VCR. "To call the film a masterpiece," writes San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Edward Guthman, "is way off-base. Oshima's film wouldn't be enjoying a re-release if it weren't for the fact that it shows male and female genitalia, and depicts actors in a series of sex acts -- fellatio, coitus, lesbian sex, asphyxiation, sex with food -- that eventually numb the viewer with their repetition. "Was it a calculated effort to win himself the international attention that he later received? It's worth noting that none of Oshima's subsequent films -- ``Empire of Passion,'' ``Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence'' and ``Max Mon Amour'' -- has caused much of a wave, or offered evidence of an enduring, world-class talent." (SF Chron 11/24/95) Beginning in the early '60s and running through today, Japanese filmmakers combined sex with violence to make a product far nastier [though lacking explicit sex] than that allowed by America and many European countries. One early title well sums up the Japanese idea of eroticism, The Joys of Torture. Japan's 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 sex films of the 1970s through today overflows with rape, bondage and sado-masochism. 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." Critic Richard von Busack recommends Senses to persons in the second half of life. "Older viewers will have realized that death is not this cool thing that happens to other people but something awful that will happen to them presently. Sex becomes darker, and all the more precious, because of this insight." "In the ecstasy of love," notes Oshima, "the cry is 'I'm dying.'" But as one becomes older, the cry becomes "Kill me now." 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." A prolific writer of manifestos, Oshima despised the traditional work of Akira Kurosawa, Yasufjiro Ozu and the other postwar humanists. Born in 1932, Nagisa was a leftist student radical who ultimately rejected communism for nihilism. "I am not a Marxist. I find Marxism and Christianity to be the same thing, and both of them are bad." 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) "I no longer know who I am," says Nagisa. "That's the subject of my films." The surrealist filmmaker loved to explore criminal and deviant behavior. Senses was his first and greatest commercial success, the Japanese film of 1976. Oshima hated the Judeo-Christian ethic and its notions of order and rationalism. Nagisa believed in an ethics and "a cinema of subjectivity." His work glorifies violence, irrational passion and the destruction of tradition, family, community, and the sacred. Nagisa sought to separate passion from thought, "relocated so as to render it more mysterious, more inexplicable, dissolving the name of the empire into a realm congruent with that of nature, with that of roots asleep deep beneath the ear, and which spring forth as an immense tangle of trees." Oshima did not worship God, he worshiped nature. In 1983, Oshima made Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and in 1986 Max My Love. In 1997, he's recovering from a stroke. He wants to finish his film Gohatto, a samurai drama of homosexual love, jealousy and violence based on a novel by Ryotaro Shiba. "Best known to television audiences as the kimonoed, bespectacled, sometimes prickly tarento of innumerable game and talk shows," writes Mark Schilling, "Oshima's reputation abroad is based on works such as the 1968 Death by Hanging…. Through-out his career, Oshima has adeptly courted controversy and media attention." A maven of Japanese film writes: Japan's oldest studio, Nikkatsu, welcomed talent and produced mainstream films, topical drama, genre films such as gangster movies, teen gang films and other stock types. In the 70's they also pioneered movies about sexuality. These range from serious films on mature topics, comedies, historical drama, to exploitation and are the called "pink movies" they are softcore and of course pre-video. Lots of them are surprisingly good. Often they have underlying themes of freedom vs conformity or criticism of feudalism or fascism or traditional Japanese values including the subordination of women. At the same time they mirror Japanese social values including stoicism and hard work Some unconsciously mirror the tortured inner workings of a modern corporation in deep financial trouble. Nikkatsu was always in trouble with its bankers. Nikkatsu owned a chain of hundreds of movie theaters and also by contract supplied product weekly to hundreds more mom and pop movie houses in small towns. It produced hundred of films a year on a studio system with contract directors and actors. This was a circumstance that provided opportunity for talent and mentoring, apprenticeship and practice and attention to craftsmanship and regular workaday production rather than "deals" and blockbusters.. As Nikkatsu approached bankruptcy they began to shoot pink films with real sex but censored. Still with stories production values and a sense of craftsmanship etc. Before they went under they pioneered censorship and video technology and many of their personnel and even starlets went into adult video. Now remember this was a LARGE mainstream film studio that existed since the silent era. This early relation to the legitimate movie industry is very different from how things developed in America. Erotica was long a part of Japanese art and literature and the culture has little religious baggage to say on the topic. Certainly nothing like Protestant Puritanism. Yes government regulated prostitution and adult entertainment since the 1700s and would periodically censor to keep things in bounds or if political inuendo or satire became too pointed. Shintoism, the state cult is in its origin a Shamanistic fertility cult (like Baal worship in the Bible). Images of the phallus are still paraded in rural folk festivals or honored in shrines. Later Buddhism was adopted also by many to provide personal and ethical guidance and the advantaged of a more sophisticated "higher religion". Even that did not make a big deal about sex. During the American occupation society was reformed and modernized. Much of the "middle ages" was destroyed in WWII Censorship of pubic hair and sex organs was based on General MacArthur's off-hand remark on what is suitable to see in a "democratic society". What does all this have to do with Oshima? He is the heir to those bright young samurai who began secretly reading European books in the 1790s and imagining a more open society. By releasing two films in 1976 about Sada Abe, the WWII era prostitute, Nikkatsu the studio hoped to break the back of the ridiculous censorship by winning world acclaim and thus "shaming" the government into a general relaxing of the full nudity restrictions. A clever and worthy idea that almost worked. After winning at Cannes in the end they were allowed to have a few uncensored screenings for the art crowd to take the edge off the criticism but the general release was censored. Nikkatsu also was making at this time lots of genre films. About half of these were "sex" movies which included comedies, social dramas, cautionary tales, T&A, action, youth films, A percentage of these have medieval levels of sexual violence in them or deal with corporate abuse of power or have other non-consentual plot elements. Sometimes they are moral but not moralistic. Some are attacks on the conformist and disciplinarian education system Only the totally teacher run Japanese PTA openly campaigned against Nikkatsu. Nikkatsu countered with scores of "teacher by day, hooker by night" flicks and several long popular series of "rape the teacher dramas". Sometimes pink films depict victims coming to like or enjoy abuse. Sometimes they depict "the war of the sexes" or various psychopathologies. Unlike serious art films they have clear plots and are not "preachy" or pretentious. All this time Japan, which is in many ways quite a repressed society, has had extremely rates of violent crime.
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