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I don�t know to what extent the student protest movie is its own genre; certainly, I suspect they don�t get made with much frequency in the United States, where people haven�t done much protesting since the �60�s. And perhaps the genre isn�t that popular in Japan either, but the fact remains that I�ve seen three Japanese student protest movies since January, versus zero American student protest movies. The movies in question are: Masahiro Shinoda�s Youth in Fury (1960), Nagisa Oshima�s Night and Fog in Japan (1960), and Koji Wakamatsu�s United Red Army (2008). A disclaimer right off the bat should be that I�m potentially stretching the definition of �student protest movie� by including United Red Army, which is really more of a �young people in affluent countries becoming terrorists� movie, in the recent tradition of The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008) and Olivier Assaya�s miniseries Carlos(2009). But I�m including Wakamatsu�s movie in my �student protest movies� because there�s just enough student protesting in it to place it in the tradition established by the likes of Oshima and Shinoda back in the �60�s, and because his film emerges out of the same historical ferment first documented by Night and Fog in Japan and Youth in Fury. The events depicted in United Red Army are the outcome of the events in the Oshima and Shinoda films, as will become clear once we establish the historical context in which these films were made.
What I find especially striking about the Japanese student movement is that it first arrives on the scene at least half a decade before the student movements in the United States, Mexico, and Western Europe, which seemed to emerge more in the mid-60�s and reached their plateau in 1968 and continued at a similar peak of emotional intensity through the early seventies (depending on the country). There were a number of contributing factors to these student upheavals, including: opposition to the American war in Vietnam and to the global capitalist order which left-leaning youth saw as sustaining it; the frustrations faced by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, which led to the adoption of militancy by certain black groups, most notably the Black Panthers; the assassination in the United States of Martin Luther King Jr.; the perception amongst European leftists that the governments of France, West Germany, and Italy were stagnant and hopelessly reactionary; a similar sentiment in Mexico led to the student protests in the lead-up to the Mexico City Olympics, which the Mexican authorities suppressed by murdering and disappearing dozens of people and sending the military in to occupy the National Autonomous University of Mexico (an event described in vivid detail in Roberto Bola�o�s novel Amulet); the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia; the killing in late 1967 of Che Guevara in Bolivia; the Cultural Revolution in China; and I�m sure all sorts of other things that I�m overlooking. But hopefully this list conveys the sense of ferment that obtained at the time, and if you were a student on the far left, it must have seemed like an unprecedented opportunity for revolution.
But if we go back to the Japan of, let�s say, 1959, none of these things were happening; (amazing how quickly things do happen, if you think of all the changes in politics and culture that took place between 1959 and 1968). But the Japan of 1959 found itself faced with a pressing issue unique to its political situation, and one that would set the stage for so much of what was to follow: the immanent signing of the 1960 U.S.-Japan security treaty, officially called the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, which would regularize the continued large-scale U.S. military presence in Japan and provide for Japan�s defense within the context of the Cold War. Now, if you were a member of the far right or a member of a wider spectrum of the left in Japan, you likely opposed this treaty, albeit for different reasons. The far right, first off, was still pissed that Japan had lost WWII and saw the continued American military presence as a national humiliation. Under the post-war constitution, the Japanese were prohibited from having an army and renounced the right to make war (the first country in the world to do this, by the way; certain countries have disbanded their armies or just never had them, for various reasons�Haiti, Costa Rica, Iceland�but Japan was the first country which explicitly prohibited itself from having an army. Now, granted, given that Cold War thing that I just mentioned, the Japanese couldn�t be completely defenseless, so they were allowed to create the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, which could act in a purely defensive capacity (repelling a Red Chinese amphibious landing, for instance) but which couldn�t be deployed abroad. Now, this is still a de facto army, but as I mentioned in my Tokyo Sonata post, it�s not called an army, so technically Japan doesn�t have an army (it�s not the best logic, but that�s how it is). Now, to the Japanese far-right, which feeds itself upon stories of past Japanese martial glory, the notion that they were prohibitedfrom having an army, and by the American occupiers, no less, was intolerable.
Another sticking point�and the left was vexed by this as well�was the status of Okinawa. Although Japan proper had regained its sovereignty in 1952 (the treaty of San Francisco ending the occupation was signed in 1951 and came into effect in 1952), the U.S. still retained full control over Okinawa until 1972, during which period they heavily militarized the island and the Okinawans were made to bear a disproportionately heavy burden of the American military presence in Japan (even today, Okinawa carries 66% of America�s military presence of Japan while possessing just 1% of Japan�s territory). Well, if you were a right-winger, here were the Americans, still occupying Japanese territory, and that couldn�t be tolerated. And if you were a leftist, the continued occupation of Okinawa was an example of American military imperialism.
And it was the perception of America as an imperial hegemon which rankled the Japanese leftists, many of whom were communists sympathetic variously to Trotskyism, the Soviet Union, and/or China. These communists saw themselves as acting in solidarity with the other communist states as well as oppressed colonized peoples around the world. They saw the U.S.-Japan security treaty as cementing Japan�s participation in America�s global imperial order. They objected not so much to perceived American imperialism in Japan, but rather to Japan�s participation�and complicity�in American imperialism in Asia and in the world in general. They had already seen Japan utilized as a staging ground for the American war in Korea and their suspicions that Japan was being exploited as an American imperialist pawn would be confirmed by the American use of Japanese bases in the Vietnam War (more on this later).
So in the lead-up to the signing of the 1960 treaty, this is the context in which both left and right in Japan were seething with discontent and it sets the stage for the action in Masahiro Shinoda�s Youth in Fury (1960, also known as Dry Lake). Our hero is a disaffected youth named Takuya Shimoji, an affluent college student associated with a communist student group (it�s difficult to tell what particular brand of communism they subscribe to, although one of their members complains, �I�m sick of being called a Trotskyite�). Takuya has his own apartment where he takes his various sexual conquests, and the wall beside his bed is decorated with magazine photos of political figures (mostly communists�Mao, Che, Fidel Castro�but also, in a position of prominence, Hitler, which foreshadows Takuya�s ambivalence about leftism). As the movie unfolds, we see Takuya engaging in various forms of debauchery and petty criminality as his student group plans their street protests and other acts of civil disobedience against the security treaty.
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| Our troubled protagonist, Takuya. It should be noted that the movie is in color, but this is the only still from it that I could find online. (I have yet to master the "screen capture" technology; don't just me). |
What we have in Takuya, the former communist, is a budding fascist, as illustrated with striking effect in a scene midway through the film, in which Takuya watches a group of rugby players training on a pitch (a pitch? wherever the hell they play rugby) outside his apartment. As the players march and jog to military-style orders, Takuya has a fantasy in which the players are metamorphosed into soldiers, and he himself is their commander, and he drills them and exults in their submission to his will. He recognizes in them the power that can come from dissolving humanity into a mindless group (and he also sees the pleasure of directing that group, rather than disappearing into it himself). As he shouts orders, the language in which he gives them shifts from Japanese to German, and we are reminded of the picture of Hitler displayed prominently on the wall near his bed.
So Takuya leaves the student movement because, among other reasons, he thinks they�re just engaged in ineffective gestures. And, although they might not have known this going into it, they generally were. Because despite their efforts, the security treaty was signed and its provisions went into effect and the Japanese student protestors of 1960 accomplished nothing. It�s in the aftermath of the failed student movement that Oshima situates his Night and Fog in Japan. The film is set at the wedding of two former student activists, now evidently about to enter into a distinctly more bourgeois lifestyle. The wedding is attended by their formerly militant friends, who all have mixed feelings and a sense of guilt about the failed protests. Eventually troublemaking uninvited militants start showing up�those who refuse to settle back into complacency, finish their university educations, and embark upon remunerative bourgeois life�and the film plays out as a series of flashbacks to the student movement, with all sorts of recriminations, resentments, and disappointments. And imagine how disappointing it must have felt, to think that you were on the verge of effecting dramatic political change, perhaps even a revolution, and then it all fizzles out, and you�re expected to just go on with life (this is the sense of despair and ennui explored by Philippe Garrel in his 2005 film Regular Lovers, which charts the aftermath of the Paris student uprising of May, 1968, for a group of would-be student militants). Oshima�s film is very much a film about �who sold out,� but the conclusion is fairly ambivalent, because (a) most people sold out and (b) the few who didn�t are engaged in a quixotic fight that�s doomed to failure, and are thusly just deluding themselves; perhaps the sell-outs were wise to sell out.
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| The Newlyweds of Night and Fog in Japan don't look particularly happy. |
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| The controversial kepi in Night and Fog |
So Oshima takes the individual disillusionment of Takuya in Youth in Fury and projects it upon an entire generation of young people in Night and Fog in Japan. These young people set the precedent for political disillusionment that would be repeated by their successors in the student movements of 1968 and �69, which will be chronicled at the beginning of Koji Wakamatsu�s United Red Army. But before we discuss that film, let�s have a brief overview of some of the events that occurred in Japan and globally between 1960 and 1968 which led to Japan�s second student movement.
As mentioned above, one of the biggest catalysts for student movements around the world in 1968 was opposition to the American war in Vietnam. In Japan, however, the Vietnam War became bound up with the continuing American occupation of Okinawa. The Americans used Okinawa as a base from which to launch long-range bombers on air raids against targets in Vietnam. So if you�re an Okinawan, not only do you object to the continued American occupation on principle, but now the Americans are dragging you into their highly controversial war. There were many Okinawan activists who feared that, should the war escalate�should China or the Soviet Union intervene, for instance, and who knows, then we have World War III�then Okinawa would be a prime target for a Soviet or Chinese nuclear strike or even just a deadly conventional air strike. Because, from a military perspective, Okinawa would be a tempting target for Chinese communists seeking to disrupt the American attacks in Vietnam. The problem is that bombs�nuclear or otherwise�don�t discriminate between American imperialists and the Okinawans who live in the territory they happen to be occupying; this is especially the case on a relatively small island where population growth has led to housing developments bumping right up against the American military installations that dot the land.
Furthermore, in Japan proper, the leftists� worst fears about the U.S.-Japan security treaty have been realized, as Japan is now complicit in America�s imperial wars in Southeast Asia. And so we have a second student movement and they end up with the same main goal as their predecessors in 1960: blocking the U.S.-Japan security treaty, which was coming up for renewal in 1970. Throughout the whole of the 1960�s, even before the rebirth of the student movement, the prospect of refighting the treaty battle in the lead-up to 1970 had hung over the political landscape, swaths of which, on both the left and the right, had been increasingly radicalized by the events of 1960. It was under these circumstances that Japanese Socialist party leader Inejiro Asanuma was assassinated by a far-right wing seventeen-year-old with a sword in 1961.
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| The assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, caught on camera by the photographer Yasushi Nagao. |
It was this climate which led Yukio Mishima to found his �Shield Society� (Tatenokai) in 1967 and to stage his theatrical coup attempt and seppuku in 1970 (perhaps I�m getting a bit ahead of myself here, but one has to mention Mishima somewhere, and he doesn�t really figure in United Red Army). The leftist Japanese youth of the period would also have been aware to varying degrees of what their Chinese counterparts were up to with the Cultural Revolution, which had started in 1966. Now, as I�ve mentioned in previous blog posts, the Cultural Revolution was a fundamentally barbaric bloodbath, but if you�re a young person in 1968 and your interpretation of world events is being filtered through red-tinted lenses, and you think the �bourgeois� media is full of lies, it�s not too surprising that you�re going to think the Cultural Revolution is something to be emulated rather than reviled (even a right-winger like Mishima was excited by the youthful dynamism he thought he detected in China�s Red Guards).
So in 1968 and especially in 1969, students throughout Japan stage protests and uprisings, taking over university buildings and clashing with the police in the streets. This is where Koji Wakamatsu�s United Red Army begins.
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| Communist students taking to the streets in United Red Army. |
What distinguishes United Red Army from Youth in Fury is that the former has far more Takuyas at its disposal. Wakamatsu�s docudrama depicts the dozens of militant Japanese youth who were not content to settle into bourgeois complacency (as had the newlyweds of Night and Fog in Japan) and who determined that, the non-violent student movement having failed, the time had come for revolutionary violence. In 1960, there wouldn�t have been much of a precedent for this, but in 1970, the Japanese militants had examples from around the world of left-wing students in capitalist countries turning militant. The militants of the 1970�s were internationalists (how very Trotskyite of them) and they all linked their emerging �struggles� with that of the Palestinian cause. And so, even though the revolutionary fervor of �68 and �69 had largely fizzled out, communist true-believers amongst the students decided that the 1970�s was the time for direct revolutionary action in the capitalist countries (and so some of the wealthiest counties in the world found themselves plagued by terrorists inspired Mao�s particular brand of peasant-based communism and the anti-colonial struggle of terrorist groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Wakamatsu�s film, one could argue, begins with the tragedy of young people irreversibly committing themselves to violence with the collapse of the student movements, and it continues with the tragedy of that violence destroying them and others.
It is noteworthy that, while the Shinoda and Oshima movies mentioned above were filmed almost immediately after the events they depicted took place, Wakamatsu�s film comes about forty years later. This is likely due in part to Wakamtsu�s close involvement with the events that unfolded around that time, which led him to openly support the Japanese Red Army and to direct, along with the militant/terrorist Masao Adachi, the 1971 film Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, which I have not had the opportunity to see, but which seems to be just as propagandistic and incendiary as the title would suggest. It�s especially surprising if you consider that Koji Wakamatsu had been, up to that point, a director of pink films�that brand of Japanese pseudo-pornography that has all the sex of a pornographic film but which also includes the story-teling, characterization, and general artfulness which one would not at all expect to find in pornography�I say, a director of pink films with delightful titles like The Embryo Hunts in Secret, Ecstasy of the Angels,and Go, Go, Second Time Virgin (some of these movies have been released on Region 1 DVD, but they seem to be lamentably out of print). But anyway, Wakamatsu may have been a militant at the time, but he was clearly disillusioned at some point, as any viewing of United Red Army and the psychotic violence into which the militants� degenerate would seem to indicate. Perhaps the forty or so years between the establishment of the Japanese Red Army and the production of the film can be attributed to the difficulties that any true-believing militant would find in reconnecting with reality.
What do these three �student protest� movies have to tell us today, as American would-be protestors �occupy� Wall Street, as students stage massive protests in Britain, Quebec, and Chile, as the eurozone collapses and crippling austerity measures produce an inevitable backlash? Well, I think they tell us to be really, really pessimistic. For most protestors, the anti-establishment energy tends to burn itself out and they decide to just carry on with their lives (and that�s not inherently wrong, lives need to be lived, not squandered in ineffective protest movements). There�s always the risk of a militant subset of the protestors turning to violence but, in America at least, that doesn�t seem likely. Obama assassinates American citizens and bombs funerals, and the general population is acquiescent, and in many cases actually supportive (because Obama is being strong, he�s being tough on terrorists; fuck, read pretty much any Glenn Greenwald column to see how fucked up this dynamic is). People aren�t even willing to protest over that, so I certainly don�t think there�s a risk of them turning militant; I suppose certain Muslims could turn militant, but the establishment feeds on that: Obama blows up a bunch of Muslims, and surprise-surprise, this generates Muslim terrorism, which can in turn be used to justify further blowing-up of Muslims, and the cycle just repeats itself, and the establishment gets to have its endless war, and the majority of the American people is either unaware of it or supportive of it (because the blowing-up of Muslims makes them feel �safer,� apparently). James, are you suggesting that people need to turn militant? Not at all; all violence is repellant to me. What I am suggesting is that, deeply flawed though American democratic institutions may be, Americans dohave mechanisms at their disposal to apply pressure on the government to change its policies. Hell, Nixon was driven out office, after all, so there is some limit to the level of Washington criminality that the American people will tolerate, if they�re made aware of it, and if they apply pressure to put a stop to it. I think these movies tell us to not become complacent but also to not become so impatient that we resort to militancy. As William T. Vollmann says in his magisterial Rising Up and Rising Down, �the means must justify the ends.� One advantage that I think we (by which I mean we, the anti-austerity, anti-neoliberalism, anti-militarism crowd) have going for us is that our cause is far more coherent than that of leftist protestors of the �60�s, so many of whom were bogged down in various forms of Marxism, which has no place in the modern world (talking to you, Tariq Ali and Slavoj �i�ek, among too many others). It�s hard to take people seriously (both morally and intellectually) if they think there�s something defensible or even desirable about Maoism. The demands of today�s protestors�for rational restraints on capitalism, for social democracy and a compassionate society�are intellectually coherent and morally correct.
