pink eiga

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still from blind beast (mōjÅ«), 1969, directed by YASUZŌ MASUMURA. daiei studios, japan still from blind beast (mōjÅ«), 1969, directed by YASUZŌ MASUMURA. daiei studios, japan still from tokyo decadence (topāzu), 1992, written and directed by RYŪ MURAKAMI, cinemabrain, japan video distribution, melsat, and ryû murakami office still from in the realm of the senses (ai no korÄ«da), 1976, directed by NAGISA ŌSHIMA, argos films, oshima productions, and the shibata organization still from in the realm of the senses (ai no korÄ«da), 1976, directed by NAGISA ŌSHIMA, argos films, oshima productions, and the shibata organization still from in the realm of the senses (ai no korÄ«da), 1976, directed by NAGISA ŌSHIMA, argos films, oshima productions, and the shibata organization still from ecstasy of the angels (tenshi no kōkotsu), 1972, directed by KŌJI WAKAMATSU, wakamatsu production, art theater guild (atg) still from ecstasy of the angels (tenshi no kōkotsu), 1972, directed by KŌJI WAKAMATSU, wakamatsu production, art theater guild (atg)

essay

by RÓISÍN TAPPONI

 

Born in Ireland to an Iraqi father and an Irish mother, Róisín Tapponi is a film curator, writer, and editor based in London. She also founded Shasha Movies, which supports independent films and videos through programming, curating, and distribution.

 

background – It all began with a kiss, two wet tongues under an umbrella.

In 1946, Yasushi Sasaki caused a storm with his breakthrough film Twenty-Year-Old Youth (Hatachi no Seishun), which staged the first kiss in Japanese cinema. A decade later, in Toshio Shimura’s Revenge of the Pearl Queen (Ona shinju-o¯ no fukushu¯, 1956), Michiko Maeda became a sex symbol and the first Japanese actor to appear fully nude on the silver screen.

The new vanguard had begun.

Japan’s rebellious postwar generation was nicknamed Taiyozoku (the Sun Tribe). The term originated from Season of the Sun, a Japanese novel written in 1955 by Shintaro Ishihara, which followed nihilistic pursuits involving sex and crime. The burgeoning dokuritsu eiga (independent film) scene during the 1950s was a direct outcome of the government’s Red Purge of young, leftist filmmakers from major Japanese film studios. Independent film in Japan emerged from the New Left, co-funded by labor unions.

Following the spirit of disgruntled youth worldwide, from the Nouvelle Vague in France to the Beat Generation in the US, the Taiyozoku produced radical, low-budget films that unleashed an unprecedented sexual frankness into Japanese cinema. Their movement birthed indie classics, most notably Ko¯ Nakahira’s Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu, 1956). The film follows two brothers who compete for the same woman during a seaside summer, perfectly encapsulating the postwar sexual revolution among Japan’s young and privileged.

Soon enough, “pink films” (pink eiga) spurted onto the scene like a cum shot.

 

the 1960s: early pink films and radical cinema

The first pink film was Satoru Kobayashi’s Flesh Market (Nikutai no Ichiba, 1962). Two days after the film opened, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department interrupted a film screening and seized all the prints and negatives. Kobayashi quickly edited a new version from rushes and extra footage, removing some of the more explicit scenes. The new film was an immediate box-office sensation, mainly because of the huge press coverage of the seizure.

The film’s protagonist, Tamaki Katori, became an early pink film star, appearing in over 600 films. However, it was the actress Noriko Tatsumi who became known as the queen of Japanese pink films. She starred in many influential titles, including Atsushi Yamatoya’s cult classic Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (Kōya no datchi waifu, 1967). The film is a hallucinatory mix of erotica and yakuza violence, a dreamlike sex noir set to a wildly atonal jazz soundtrack, with high-contrast cinematography, hypnotic disjunction between sound and image, and surrealist montage.

Empty cinemas across Japan needed something radically different to entice a new generation, and they found that in the sensual, scandalous, and softcore thrills of pink films, which became Japan’s new brand of low-budget, independent filmmaking. The movement’s growth was rapid, as pink film production rose from three films in 1962 to 213 in 1965. In 1965 alone, independently produced pink films constituted 44% of Japan’s box-office income.

Pink films were directed mostly by young filmmakers who had barely graduated from high school. For example, Kōji Wakamatsu was pink film’s most influential director and producer, who successfully reinvented his work across the movement’s many iterations for three decades. He began with hardly any experience at all, and shot eight films in his debut year. Wakamatsu is now best known internationally for films such as Ecstasy of the Angels (Tenshi no kōkotsu, 1972), which is about a militant revolutionary group that descends into paranoia and sexual decadence. Meanwhile, assistant directors at major studios often had to wait 10 or 15 years to direct their first feature film.

Pink film directors possessed a significant level of autonomy unknown within the studio system, which increasingly appeared static and feudal by comparison. In the 1960s, pink films were produced by a large number of small companies that offered pro forma fronts for the directors, subcontracted by a distributor. The director received half the money for the production in advance, and the other half upon completion. The most influential independent studios included Wakamatsu Production, Shintōhō Eiga, Kantō, and OOkura Pictures. OOkura established the first specialized pink film cinemas around 1964 and remodeled the entrances to theaters so patrons could buy tickets without being seen from the street.

These cinemas were dominated by blue-collar male audiences, while middle-class female audiences began to migrate to foreign films shown in more upmarket cinemas. Throughout the 1960s, Nobuko Kawashima, the editor-in-chief of the most important pink film magazine, Seijin Eiga (“Adult Movies”), wrote about the impossibility of watching a pink film in the cinema without immediately becoming the target for groping hands, which led to her watching films only at press screenings. Indeed, for many spectators today, pink films and their emphasis on sexual violence, usually leveled at female characters, remain highly disturbing. Yet, some of the movement’s most valuable cultural voices were women like Kawashima, as well as popular actresses who became national film stars.

Early pink films were characterized by aesthetic experimentation. This is exemplified in the theatricality of Yasuzō Masumura’s Blind Beast (Mōjū, 1969), hailed by Variety as a masterpiece in set design and creative direction, in what it otherwise called a “sick film.” In the film, a young artist’s model is kidnapped by a blind sculptor who wants to use her as his muse. The two soon become lovers, beginning a series of sadomasochistic games. The woman is dismembered, and her corpse becomes a macabre work of art. It is one of the most surreal pink films, as the two protagonists make love amid sprawling sculptures of women’s fleshy torsos, surrounded by walls of plaster eyes, ears, and lips.

The experimental spirit extended to film screenings. Jitsuen was a form of live performance reenactments that were staged in cinemas. It was so immensely successful in the late 1960s that troupes regularly toured the country, and a number of specialized theatre groups formed between 1968 and 1972. Some of the more famous pink film actresses, such as Naomi Tani, later a star of the major studio Nikkatsu’s films, formed their own troupes. The success of jitsuen contributed to developments in experimental theater. Wakamatsu was the first to give avant-garde playwright Jūrō Kara a film role, and prominent pink film actress Keiko Niitaka was involved in the experimental theater troupe of poet Shūji Terayama.

Many pink films, from the early period until the end of the 20th century, were based on novels. For example, Taijiro Tamura’s Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon) was adapted into a film four times, most famously by Seijun Suzuki in 1964. Set in a Tokyo ghetto, a hard-boiled chosen family of female sex workers defends their territory from American soldiers and yakuza. The only rule in the commune: no girl can fall in love. Unfortunately, that doesn’t quite work out. Now available as a Criterion Collection title, the film is viewed simultaneously as an infallible allegorical critique of Japan’s occupation and a pulp drama, a master stroke of iridescent cinematography and raw emotion.

The emergence of pink films was also ostensibly political, due to the revolutionary activism of many of its leading directors and the movement’s anti-censorship stance. The most politically active pink film director was Masao Adachi, whose cinematic imagination was formed by radical student clubs in the late 1950s, which crested with nationwide strikes against the controversial ratification of the “Anpo” treaty, enforcing Japan’s alignment to US Cold War policies despite the country’s precarious geography among neighboring Communist territories. Working as part of a collective, Adachi directed seminal early pink films like Closed Vagina (Sain, 1963) and Birth Control Revolution (Hinin Kakumei, 1967), which were experimental allegories for feminist issues in 1970s Japan.

The complex layering of meaning in Adachi’s student films continued in his shift toward pink film with his collaborator Kōji Wakamatsu, who produced many of Adachi’s films. Following their controversial and outspoken appearance at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, Adachi and Wakamatsu traveled to Lebanon to make a film in support of the Palestine resistance. The result was Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War, a guerrilla resistance film making a fiery call to arms that Adachi himself would follow in 1974 when he abruptly abandoned filmmaking and returned to Lebanon to join the Japanese United Army.

 

the 1970s: roman porno and mainstream success

The second wave of pink films became characterized by studio-produced and commercial box office hits. Having observed the commercial success of independently produced pink films from afar, the major film studio Toei released a film with female nudity, Female Ninja Magic (Kunoichi ninpō, 1964). Following this, Toei producer Kanji Amao designed an in-house “Pinky Violence” line that comprised a series of erotic thrillers, categorized as Shigeki rosen (Sensational Line), Ijoseiai rosen (Abnormal Line), and Harenchi rosen (Shameless Line). With their access to higher production values and talent, many of these films became critical and popular successes.

In 1971, Takashi Itamochi, president of Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest major film studio, decided to stop his company’s production of action films and start focusing on sexploitation films. This shocking switch of the oldest major studio in Japan to the wholesale production of sex films shifted the production values of early pink films that had appeared during the late 1960s and early ’70s. It involved the restructuring of a still fairly open distribution network into a closed circuit based largely on pink film-specialized cinemas and a small oligopoly of distributors.

Most notably, Nikkatsu launched its Roman Porno series of Japanese softcore pornographic films in November 1971. Their first film, Apartment Wife: Affair In the Afternoon (Danchizuma hirusagari no jo¯ji, 1971), was a huge hit and led to 20 sequels in seven years. Nikkatsu made big-budget sexploitation films almost exclusively and at an average rate of three per month for the next 17 years. Due to their profitability, Nikkatsu gave its Roman Porno directors a great deal of artistic freedom to create their films, as long as they met the standardized quota of four sex scenes per hour.

The leading filmmaker of the second wave was Tatsumi Kumashiro, known for directing many of the Roman Porno films. Kumashiro directed successive financial and critical hits that were unprecedented in Japanese cinematic history. Hailed as a box-office triumph and the most successful mainstream pink film of the 1970s, Kumashiro’s The Woman with Red Hair (Akai kami no onna, 1979) was a working-class erotic drama following a redheaded hitchhiker who enters the life of a depraved construction worker.

One of the most sophisticated films in the Roman Porno series was Ichijōs Wet Lust (Ichijō Sayuri: nureta yokujō, 1972), directed by Tatsumi Kumashiro, starring Japan’s most famous stripper at the time, Sayuri Ichijō. A psychedelic, fictionalized account of Ichijō’s life, the film resulted in Ichijō being prosecuted for public obscenity on account of her boundary-pushing performance. Nonetheless, the film reverberated throughout Japan, for both its sensuality and sumptuous images, and was voted by Japanese film critics as the 31st best Japanese film of the 20th century.

Nikkatsu’s sex films stole the pink film market from smaller, independent studios. However, at the same time, pink film was viewed as one of the last refuges of the auteur in Japan, and independent erotic films outside the mainstream pink film market still flourished. Take Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no Korda, 1976). The film was coproduced by Kōji Wakamatsu, via his independent production company Wakamatsu Production. Unlike pink films, the cult classic was produced by Ōshima and Wakamatsu outside Japan — with Gaumont, which supported Ōshima’s vision alongside that of trailblazers like Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman — and it boasted unsimulated sex scenes, which explains why the film had to be made in France.

The opening shot of In the Realm of the Senses is a confrontational stare from Sada Abe (played by Eiko Matsuda), a Japanese geisha, lying alone, her eyes piercing the camera lens. The plot is relentlessly driven by intense physicality. There is minimal foreplay, kissing, or talking between the lovers. Sada Abe’s whole body shakes compulsively between pleasure and pain, as she drowns repeatedly in snow, cum, and salty tears. Kichizo¯ Ishida (played by Tatsuya Fuji) gives her head in the rain. Their bodily senses are constantly alert and hungry. Passion is pursued to its limits, until the death drive kicks in. The all-encompassing physical pursuit of passion becomes so extreme that the body will do anything to acquire it. There isn’t the usual distinction between love and sex, or sex and violence. As the story unfolds, tepid moral boundaries are willingly cast aside.

There’s no mistaking love — love of an almost exclusively sexual nature. Does that even exist, outside cinema? The concluding scene includes a voiceover from the director Ōshima, in the style of Jean-Luc Godard at the end of Vivre sa Vie (My Life to Live, 1962). He delivers a brief history of the real-life historical figure of Sada Abe, who cut off her lover’s penis and carried it around in her kimono, then faced prison and lifelong scandal. Many pink films have been made about Sada Abe, but In the Realm of the Senses is undoubtedly the best. When the film was in development, Ōshima looked for Abe. After a long search, he found her, hair shorn, in a nunnery.

It is important to note that pink film was never considered pornography, and a long-enforced ban on the display of genitals and pubic hair made sure of that. To work around censorship, most pink film directors positioned props such as lamps, candles, and bottles at strategic locations to block the banned body parts. When this was not done, the most common alternative techniques were digital scrambling or “fogging,” shielding the prohibited area with a black box or a fuzzy white spot. These protocols were important; otherwise, the film would not have had a theatrical release with widespread distribution.

 

the 1980s and 1990s: the business of pink film

Following pink film’s mainstream success in the 1970s, it soon lost the ability for the complex constellation of radical opposition and conciliatory consumption that it had once performed within the arena of high-growth Japan. Pink film was soon forced into a consolidation process after Nikkatsu switched its production, distribution, and cinema chain focus to Roman Porno. By 1979, around 80% of all Japanese films released in cinemas were pink films, mainly Roman Porno. There was scarcely any independent distribution left. The movie theater sector’s decade-long recession meant that cinemas were switching to screening exclusively pink films in much larger numbers, often as a last resort to stave off bankruptcy.

Pink films became increasingly standardized in length, at around 60 minutes; they were designed to be shown in triple bills and switched to all-color. Subgenres became much more rigidly formatted, with less variation or mixing. Pink films with a period setting disappeared almost entirely, as did part-color films, jitsuen, and other formal experimentations. There was a general narrative shift away from trauma, represented by sexual frustration and violence, as a site of political metaphor. Instead, still producing hundreds of films a year, the pink film industry shifted increasingly toward pure entertainment.

During the early 1980s, pink film became a training ground for directors in the mainstream cinema industry that had itself stopped recruiting or training staff long ago, and directors such as Wakamatsu began crossing over into regular film production.
The Academy Award-winners Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Yōjirō Takita both began their commercial directing career with pink film. The most interesting pink film directors of the 1980s — including Genji Nakamura, Banmei Takahashi, and Mamoru Watanabe — gained recognition for elevating pink film into art and experimental film. In the 1980s, Japan’s first widely distributed homosexual pink films emerged, led by Beautiful Mystery: Legend of the Big Penis (Kyokon Densetsu: Utsukushiki nazo, 1983), produced by Nikkatsu’s ENK Promotion, founded to focus on gay-themed pink films.

Independent films were increasingly picked up for distribution by Nikkatsu. This included Love Hotel (Rabu hoteru, 1985), an existentialist softcore film about a businessman at a point of despair who hires a sex worker to go to a love hotel with him. He has nothing but sex and suicide on his mind. They serendipitously meet years later, and the two broken souls attempt a tumultuous relationship. Blending melancholic long takes with heady artistic languor, Love Hotel won Nikkatsu’s in-house Film of the Year award. The film also marked a shift for the director Shinji Sōmai, who was far better known for his seishun eiga (youth films) that explored stories about preteens in various coming-of-age scenarios.

Eventually, censorship drove the nail into the coffin.

In 1984, new government censorship policies and an agreement with Eirin, the Japanese film-rating board, added to Nikkatsu’s difficulties by putting drastic new restrictions on theatrical films. In 1988, Eirin dealt a serious blow to the pink film industry by introducing stricter requirements for all sex-related releases. Films without the Eirin mark could not be shown in theaters, according to the rules of Zenkoren, the national cinema exhibitors’ organization. Nikkatsu responded by discontinuing its Roman Porno line. Bed Partner (Beddo pātonā, 1988) was the final film of the venerable 17-year-old Roman Porno series.

However, in avant-garde circles, the energy of pink film lingered. For instance, in 1992, Ryu Murakami directed his S&M classic Tokyo Decadence (Topāzu), featuring a soundtrack by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Murakami was already an established novelist, having written Almost Transparent Blue (1976) while still a student, about promiscuity, drugs, and rock’n’roll among the disaffected 1970s Japanese youth. He later wrote the novel Audition (1997), which was adapted into film by Takashi Miike. The movie won the International Film Critics Awards (the FIPRESCI Prize) and is widely available on major streaming platforms.

Based on Murakami’s own novella from 1988, Tokyo Decadence is about a young student who dissociates through S&M to try to forget the person she loves. The bodily pain inflicted on her by powerful salarymen and cocaine-fueled yakuza bosses helps distract her from her emotional turmoil. Fueled by the emotional decay of her clients, her own self-assurance grows. Due to its graphic content, the film has been banned in Australia, South Korea, and Ontario, Canada. David Cronenberg publicly protested the decision by the Ontario Film Review Board, stating that “even by their own rules, which they invented, it’s clearly acceptable.”

Eventually, Nikkatsu, Japan’s largest producer of pink films during the 1970s and 1980s, filed for bankruptcy protection in 1993, driven by the widespread distribution of VCRs and the consequent emergence of porn films flooding the Japanese market. However, that wasn’t the end of pink film. In 2016, Nikkatsu released Antiporno, directed by Japan’s subversive auteur Sion Sono, as a reboot of their Roman Porno series. With Brechtian inflections verging on satire, Antiporno is a film about film — specifically, exploitation in Japan’s adult film industry, the deconstruction of Japanese gender roles, and cinema as a voyeuristic narrative medium. Condensing four decades of wet dreams, Antiporno shows that pink film history is not over.

END