The post-Aum films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi

Abstract

The films of Japanese director Kurosawa Kiyoshi in the late 1990s and early 2000s capture the malaise of the ‘lost decade’ (ushinawareta jû-nen) of the 1990s, a period characterized by the end of an economic boom that propelled Japan through two decades of unprecedented prosperity. Facing the decline of high-growth, the country for the first time in two decades could no longer ignore the things that it had suppressed to realize progress: the failure of Japan's radical movements of the 1960s and early 1970s and their de-evolution into extremism. As the haze of prosperity dissipated in the early 1990s, Japan was again stunned by a violent uprising more than two decades after the collapse of the student movements – the Tokyo subway gassings in 1995, an event that many associated with the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The attacks served as a reminder of the deep-seated social dissatisfactions that existed among the activist generation and the violence that results from extremism. Utilizing trauma theory, this paper will examine the way Japan's radical past is re-experienced in Kurosawa's films in the years following the gassings. Through an analysis of the cinematic style of Charisma (Karisuma 1999), Pulse (Kairô 2001), and other cinematic works in light of their narrative references to radicalism, this article will flesh out the layered process through which Kurosawa's films engage the past while coping with the trauma of post-Aum Japan.

Keywords:

• Japanese film
• Kurosawa Kiyoshi
• the lost decade
• Aum
• the United Red Army

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘The experience of the lost decade has been traumatic for Japan,’ argue Fletcher and Staden. ‘Observers no longer claimed that Japan was “number one” … the effects of the economic stagnation linger as the nation has not found a way out of its economic purgatory of slow growth over the past two decades’ (Fletcher and von Staden 2012, p. 275).

2. In ‘Trauma and Historical Referentiality in Post-Aum Manga’, Marc Yamada elaborates on the traumatic effects of radicalism, and particularly the URA incident, in his discussion of manga produced in the post-Aum period. This article will read the films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi in a similar context, discussing the layered experience of traumatic events and how they demonstrate the problematic relationship to the past.

3. McCormack and Box (2004) draw connections between the radicalism of both Asama and Aum in ‘Terror in Japan’.

4. Yamamoto Naoki deals with both groups in his manga Biriibaazu (Believers, 1999) and Reddo (Red, 2007–Present).

5. In ‘The Empty Return: Circularity and Repetition in Recent Japanese Horror Films’, Aaron Gerow (2002) reads the repetition of images in Kurosawa's films as a manifestation of Andrew Tudor's notion of paranoid horror. In ‘Fantasies of the End of the World: The Politics of Repetition in the Films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi’, Baryon Tensor Posadas (2014) reads this idea of repetition as both symptomatic of the ‘end of history’, as Francis Fukuyama and Jean Baudrillard discuss, as well as evidence of an attempt to work through the impasse that the repetition creates in postwar Japan.

6. Aoyama identifies references to Shigenobu in Pulse in ‘Rekishi toshite …’ (Kurosawa 2007, p. 60).

7. In her work on ghost films as historical allegories, Bliss Lim (2001, p. 299) discusses the way the ambiguity of ghostly apparitions complicates the understanding of linear history: ‘What haunts us is not written back into certainty as something backward or obsolete that persists in the course of an evolutionary march to universal progress. Quite the converse: the specter shatters the self-evidence of our own world and time.’

8. Kurosawa's view of the ideal horror film resembles Andrew Tudor's classification of ‘secure’ and ‘paranoid’ horror films. In Monsters and Mad Scientists, Tudor (1991, pp. 213–215) defines ‘secure horror’ as films in which the contrast between the ‘known and unknown’ and the boundary between ‘order and disorder’ is ‘rigorously sustained’. In contrast, ‘paranoid horror’, for Tudor characterizes films in which the boundary between these oppositional categories ‘is far less clearly marked’.

9. An early scene in Pulse (2001) consciously references this convention, accentuating early on the function that the camera frame will serve in the film. In the scene, which occurs after the events at Taguchi's flat, Michi checks on Yabe at his apartment to discover that he appears to be fine. As the two converse about work, Yabe drifts off to another room, eventually ceasing to respond despite Michi's attempts to hail him. The camera's fixation on Michi intimates that something dreadful has happened to Yabe. When Michi finally goes looking for Yabe, she finds that he has transformed into a shadow on the wall like the one that Yabe found at Taguchi's apartment. By concealing Yabe's position, in this way, the scene highlights the spatial and temporal impact of the out-of-field on the viewing experience, as both a space that extends beyond the ordered world within the frame and a virtual past that influences the experience of the present moment.

10. Complementing the use of field-of-vision, non-diegetic sound in Pulse (2001) and Charisma (2000) points to a world that extends beyond the limits of the frame. Acknowledging the impact that sound and music have on the interpretation of his films, Kurosawa does not use the soundtrack to accentuate mood or to aid in narrative development. Resisting the directive to match sound with visuals, Kurosawa relies on ambient noises from the real world in his films. This disunity between sound and visuals hints at a spatial and temporal experience that extends beyond visuals and narrative:

I think typically, you could say that in my movies there's less music and more effects. The effects are based on sounds from the real world. I almost never turn to synthesizers or electronics or digital media to generate sounds…. The reason that I rely on these real sounds is that I am trying to express to you the world that lies beyond what is visible on-screen. What does that world look life, feel like—that what's I'm interested in. (Desjardins 2005, p. 220)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marc Yamada

Marc Yamada is at Brigham Young University, Department of Comparative Arts and Letters, 3008 JFSB, Provo, UT, 84602, USA. He may be contacted at [email protected].