Wild Japan 3: Just The Porn

In the dying moments of 2008, there's just enough time for this site to offer its third tip o' the hat to Matt Palmer, the curator of the Wild Japan seasons of movies from outside the standard arthouse canon. Mind you, that's not strictly the case with Wild Japan: Sex In Japanese Cinema Of The 60s And 70s, which has just finished a month-long residency at London's BFI Southbank. As the subtitle implies, we're wallowing in the murkier end of the genre pool here: and if we're frank about it, sexual content has never stopped a foreign film from becoming a mainstream arthouse hit. Quite the opposite, in fact.

While the first Wild Japan was Matt Palmer's personal selection of exploitation and genre classics, the second season took its inspiration from Outlaw Masters Of Japanese Film, Chris D's biographical study of some of the mavericks working within the Japanese studio system. The third season is also based around a book: in this case, it's Behind The Pink Curtain, Jasper Sharp's copiously illustrated history of the Japanese sex film. Sharp takes in both the lowbrow and highbrow ends of the market, and the dozen or so films in this season attempt a similar spread.

Inevitably, we couldn't see all of them. Time pressures, particularly in the month leading up to Christmas, meant that there were several films we simply didn't have time for: plus, we needed to factor in The Belated Birthday Girl's reluctance at being dragged along to a succession of porno flicks. In the end, the half dozen films we ended up catching tended to be more traditional arthouse voyeurism than actual hardcore filth.

According to Jasper Sharp, pornographic cinema evolved in Japan much the same way as it did in the West, meaning that it started with a series of movies in the 1950s that tried to convince you they were using sex purely by accident. So you had endless dramas set in nudist colonies, or sex education films imported from Europe, that sort of thing: which made it such a radical step when Russ Meyer dropped all the pretence and started making films about people who just liked looking at titties.

The Japanese equivalent of the nudist colony film was the Sun Tribe picture, a genre that got its name from Ko Nakahira's 1956 drama Crazed Fruit. These were films focusing on young people who escaped from society to live lives of hedonism on assorted beaches and islands. Double whammy, really: you got to see scantily clad people cavorting around in exotic locations, combined with moralising plots on the new breed of teenagers that was starting to emerge. Crazed Fruit has sometimes been referred to as Japan's answer to Rebel Without A Cause because of that.

It's a rather tame-looking film these days, though it's fun to see that in the late fifties it played in the UK under the title Juvenile Jungle after fifteen minutes of cuts. It's a rather traditionally melodramatic story, too, showing the rivalry between two brothers as they both fall for the same girl on holiday. But there are some interesting indicators of the time and place Crazed Fruit was made in. You can imagine how horrified the Japanese were at this depiction of the moral cesspit their youth was wallowing in: dodging their fares on the train, wandering around with their shirts off, and so on. And the influence of American culture runs through it, from the ambiguous mixed-race character of Frank (ordering Japanese hooch in a bar when all his mates are struggling to pronounce Western drink names) to the sleaze-jazz soundtrack, reminiscent of Russ Meyer's black and white melodramas.

If you're looking for proper dirty Japanese movies, though, you need to wait a few years for the emergence of Pink Cinema, the name given to low-budget domestic porn in the sixties. Your chances of seeing one of these productions nowadays are fairly limited: they had a short shelf-life in those pre-video days, and most of the negatives are probably landfill by now. So you can understand Jasper Sharp's delight at being able to source a new print of Kan Mukai's 1969 Blue Film Woman, so much so that he came to BFI Southbank personally to introduce it. Whereas a lot of the pink films of this period cut costs to the degree that everything apart from the sex was filmed in black and white, Blue Film Woman is luridly coloured throughout, making it a treat to look at.

As for its story, well... in these troubled economic times, it's curious to see the Japanese late 60s equivalent of the credit crunch being used to justify the antics on screen. When a stock market crash drives a man into the arms of a loan shark, the terms of repayment end up including the use of his wife for all manner of sexual unpleasantness, a move which ultimately drives both husband and wife to the grave. Their daughter Mariko vows to take revenge on the loan shark, but until the full nature of her plot is revealed it appears to be based around the limited revenge tactic of go-go dancing for money.

Again, the sex is comparatively inexplicit, and it's more the overall atmosphere of seediness that registers with a viewer today. That, and some of the more berserk contortions of the plot, including a climax in which – and apologies for spoiling the ending, but I've been waiting to type this sentence all day – the loan shark gets his comeuppance when he's anally raped by his retarded son. As for Mariko, her own story takes a randomly tragic turn in the closing minute, leading you to suspect that Japanese cinema can't bear the idea of a woman's sexual enjoyment without consequences. Rather like the rest of the world, really.

Surprisingly, some of the directors showcased in this season of 60s and 70s cinema are still active today. Koji Wakamatsu has been at work for over forty years: in the early part of his career he was known as one of the leading lights in Japanese porn, and as recently as this year's London Film Festival he was still making movies as impressive (and non-pornographic) as United Red Army. The political edge of that film, it turns out, was still visible in his earlier, fleshier work, such as his 1965 production Secrets Behind The Wall (aka Secret Acts Behind Walls, which is a much better title and the one we actually get on screen).

The story behind its making is nearly as fascinating as that of the film itself: Wakamatsu is the sort of director who writes two scripts for a movie, one to show the producers to raise money, and the one that he actually shoots. The resulting movie caused enough of a stink back home, but it caused an international incident when it was shown at the Berlin Film Festival at a time when the Japanese had just spent an entire Olympics persuading the rest of the world how nice they were.

Even today, the opening minutes are pretty radical stuff, so God knows what they looked like to a Japanese audience still scarred from the war: a woman strokes the radiation scars of her heroin addict lover in front of a poster of Stalin, while images of the bomb at Hiroshima go off in her head. These are just two of the inhabitants of a claustrophobic tenement building, and the film interweaves the stories of several more of them, notably a student whose inability to connect with the outside world will eventually explode into violence. (And, along the way, will lead to a peculiar masturbation scene in which a newspaper photo of a corrupt politician is defiled in an unexpected way.) It's the most fascinatingly transgressive of the films we've seen in this season, only really falling down in the conventional nature of its climax: the buildup of tension and frustration is much more interesting than the release at the end.

For the most part, the films we've chosen are melodramas that use sex as a plot motor, rather than explicitly just depicting the act. That's even more true of Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1964 classic Woman Of The Dunes: a film with no real sexual content, but with an overall atmosphere of such bewildering strangeness that you imagine it's all sex. Entomologist Eiji Okada is collecting insects on a beach, and finds himself stranded for the night: on the advice of the locals, he spends the night in the shack of Kyoko Kishida. She lives there alone, and her entire life seems to revolve around clearing out the sand that floods into her home. Gradually, the entomologist realises that he's trapped with her, and isn't the first man who's been lured into the beach community to work as slave labour.

Woman Of The Dunes has the feel of absurdist theatre to it: it just about works as a realist drama, but can also be taken on a variety of symbolic levels. Part of this is down to the unsympathetic nature of the character of the entomologist: he's obviously a bit of a tool when we first meet him, and his antipathy to the woman and the community he's found himself in makes the viewer side with them rather than him. (At that level, it's a little like The Wicker Man, although the resolution of the conflict isn't anything like as extreme here.) With the action largely confined to the small shack, the tension between the man and the woman reaches feverish levels, enhanced by the beautifully photographed sand that surrounds them: it's everywhere, either covering the flesh of the woman as she sleeps or cascading threateningly down the sides of the pit her shack is inside. Despite the tiny amount of actual sex that occurs (just one encounter that doesn't end especially well), this is easily the most erotic film of the six on review here.

Contrary to the impression you may have, I don't write about every Japanese film I see here. Case in point: earlier this year, BFI Southbank held a season called Japanese Gems, a splendid collection of stone-cold classics that allowed me, in particular, to see my first ever film in the long-running series of Tora-San comedies. The season was built around the work of eight Japanese directors who could be thought of as the undeniable masters of the nation's cinema: and yes, two of them appear in this season of sex films as well. Shohei Imamura is represented by his 1966 film The Pornographers, a comedy based around porno filmmaker Ogata (Shoichi Ozawa). He's living a hand-to-mouth existence, shooting dirty films on the run and selling them to anyone who'll take them. He lives with the widow Haru and her two teenage children: inevitably, his personal and professional lives are going to collide with each other in an awkward fashion.

In contrast with the other five films reviewed here, The Pornographers appears to be the only one made by people who like sex. Certainly it's the only one with a sense of humour about the business: there's a lightness of touch that ensures that although things don't get in the least bit explicit, it can take in subjects like incest and paedophilia without causing any particular offence. Despite this, it still keeps a clear-headed view of the nature of Ozawa's trade, making it clear by the time we get to the delightfully ridiculous coda that it's all driven by his personal inability to deal with women. There are neat visual touches all over the place: Haru is obsessed with a carp that she thinks is the reincarnation of her late husband, and Imamura finds endless ways of shooting the action through its tank. The only real problem with The Pornographers is its rambling free-form plot, which can't really sustain itself over a full two hours without running out of steam every so often. But there are enough great moments in it to make it a worthwhile watch.

For an article about Japanese sex films, this has been a little light on actual filth, hasn't it? I thought so too. So (with the objections of The Belated Birthday Girl noted) I'm finishing off with the elephant in the room, the one Japanese sex film that everyone knows about: Nagisa Oshima's 1976 In The Realm Of The Senses. As we couldn't fit in any of the BFI screenings, this was watched on my ancient American DVD copy, picked up nearly ten years ago in the same shameful porn shopping binge as Caligula. (The US Fox Lorber edition is best avoided, frankly: it's fuzzily mastered, badly cropped to 4:3, and has subtitles that have drifted five seconds out of sync by the end of the film. And it dates back to a time when people thought that quoting Madonna on the cover - “It turns me on because it's real” - would help you sell more copies. As of a few years ago a better quality DVD is now available in the UK, albeit with a small amount of tweaking to get around Britain's pesky child pornography laws.)

I first saw In The Realm Of The Senses at the Scala cinema in London, back in the days when it was banned in the UK and could only be shown under club screening conditions. It was in a double bill with Oshima's 1978 followup, Empire Of Passion, and I seem to recall at the time I found Passion to be the better film: still based around the theme of sexual obsession, but without the hardcore distractions of its predecessor. (Jasper Sharp disagrees with me violently, dedicating a dozen or so pages to Senses but dismissing Passion in one paragraph.) Thirty years after its first screening, Senses certainly still has the power to shock, as we watch the relationship between serving girl Eiko Matsuda and master of the house Tatsuya Fuji spiral violently out of control. The film's sometimes known by its Japanese title Ai No Corrida, literally Bullfight Of Love: an upfront warning that by the end, one of the protagonists will be walking away with both ears and the tail.

It's still a very problematic film to watch. The heavy involvement of European producer Anatole Dauman – who, depending on who you believe, may or may not have given Oshima the simple brief “let's make a porno” - draws your attention to the way Senses plays up its Japaneseness at every possible opportunity. The lavish costumes, the unusual relationships between the social classes, the use of a traditional Japanese score when most other films from the country were using Western-style music - all of these feel like exploiting the otherness of Japanese culture for a foreign market. But, for better or worse (and to summarise The BBG's position on the film: worse), its main aim is to tell a story through the medium of sex - each encounter reveals the characters a little more, along with the incompatibilities that will ultimately destroy them. It's at its best in the earlier scenes, beautifully conveying the whacked-out exhaustion of sexual delirium: less so in its painfully claustrophobic last half hour, as we watch two people locked in a room making increasingly bad decisions about each other.

Wild Japan 3's a fascinating collection of films, showing the depiction of sex in Japanese cinema though all its degrees. Unlike the previous two seasons, it doesn't currently appear that there are any plans to take it outside of London: keep an eye out at your local artyplex to see if it turns up there, or wait and see if Matt Palmer writes to me again. In the meantime, here's a new year's resolution for 2009: I'll try to cut down on the number of porn reviews on the site next year. I'm relying on you all to hold me to that one. Being a monkey, and all.

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