Remembering Yoshida Kiju: a titan of Japanese… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Remem­ber­ing Yoshi­da Kiju: a titan of Japan­ese cinema

20 Jan 2023

Words by Marcus Iwama

A man in a suit with a gun to his head, surrounded by other suited men in a black and white image.
A man in a suit with a gun to his head, surrounded by other suited men in a black and white image.
The film­mak­er behind Blood Is Dry and Bit­ter End of a Sweet Night, who passed away at the end of 2022, was a found­ing mem­ber of the Japan­ese New Wave.

In the sum­mer of 1960, as Japan’s Anpo protests raged on, near­ly a third of the pop­u­la­tion took the streets in resis­tance to the U.S. Japan Secu­ri­ty Treaty. The great­est impli­ca­tion of the agree­ment was that it allowed the Unit­ed States to estab­lish bases across the Arch­i­pel­ago. For the social­ists, com­mu­nists, women’s orga­niz­ers, and stu­dents who opposed it, this was the boil­ing point of a long­stand­ing bat­tle between peace and the return to mil­i­tarism. The wave crescen­doed on June 15th, when hun­dreds of thou­sands of pro­tes­tors stormed the Nation­al Diet com­pound. As the sun came up slow­ly, Yoshi­da Kiju was busy edit­ing one of the two direc­to­r­i­al debuts he would release lat­er that year. As he reflects in his 2010 man­i­festo: Fin­ish­ing the film on that day was per­haps, in some sense, chance.”

Yoshi­da passed away last month at the age of 89. He was a found­ing mem­ber of what was dubbed the New Wave of Japan­ese cin­e­ma – a cre­ative move­ment that began in the ear­ly 1960s dur­ing a peri­od of vio­lent social unrest through­out Japan. Along with his peers, he chal­lenged pre­vi­ous con­ven­tions through sub­jects like rad­i­cal­ism, sex­u­al vio­lence, and com­mod­i­ty fetishism that under­pinned the bright life” of Japan­ese moder­ni­ty. His sec­ond film, Blood is Dry, is an inter­est­ing case; it was pulled from the pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny just three days after its pre­mière when the leader of the Japan Social­ist par­ty was assas­si­nat­ed on live tele­vi­sion. As such, it is sur­round­ed by an obscu­ri­ty not shared by his anti-melo­dra­mas like Akit­su Springs, or mag­num opus, Eros  + Mas­sacre. Part anti-cap­i­tal­ist reflec­tion, part call to action – Blood is Dry holds its own today as a unique, anti-human­ist voy­age through the dynamism of the Japan­ese 60s.

The film begins when a salary­man named Takashi Kiguchi is laid off from his job; he then makes a dra­mat­ic, failed attempt at shoot­ing him­self in the head. A life insur­ance com­pa­ny gets wind of this sto­ry and decides to hire him as the mas­cot of their new ad cam­paign – lit­er­al­ly sell­ing sui­cide under the slo­gan: It’s high time that you are all hap­py.” He reluc­tant­ly agrees, and after a staged pho­to reen­act­ment, his image is plas­tered all through­out Tokyo. What fol­lows is a nar­ra­tive dance between a slimy paparaz­zo (Hara­da), Takashi’s ad agent (Ikuyo), and Takashi as they set out to exploit, con­trol, and destroy one another.

With the set­ting of Tokyo, Yoshi­da gives form to 1960 Japan through col­li­sions of space, cul­ture, and time. Errat­ic cuts car­ry the audi­ence between blind rooftops and street cor­ners while the inti­ma­cy of the home is breached by voyeuris­tic pho­tog­ra­phy. Mean­while, the cast repeat­ed­ly enters into 1940s Amer­i­can noir through the world of a smokey jazz club. Even Takashi’s pis­tol con­tains a matrix of over­lapped mean­ing, as it is both a rel­ic of impe­r­i­al Japan, and a copy of the gun used to assas­si­nate Franz Fer­di­nand at the start of World War One; it emerges once again into the present as an incon­ve­nient zombie.

It is through such col­li­sions that the film evinces the spa­tial and tem­po­ral inco­her­ence of 1960 Japan: a coun­try that had con­quered vio­lent­ly, and was killed for it; had been turned to ash, occu­pied, and blis­tered; was rebuilt upon the hot lay­ers of itself, and appeared at the doorstep of a new decade as a bud­ding pro­tégé of West­ern moder­ni­ty. Like his New Wave con­tem­po­raries, Yoshi­da reflect­ed on this his­tor­i­cal moment with heavy skepticism.

Japan was democ­ra­tized, yet its labor move­ments were being squashed from above; it was demil­i­ta­rized, yet it had just helped Amer­i­ca wage a vio­lent war in Korea; it was pro­mot­ing a bright life” under cap­i­tal­ism, yet much of the work­ing class had fall­en into debt try­ing to afford tele­vi­sions. What Yoshi­da saw was not a coun­try on the precipice of great­ness, but rather, as Ikuyo mus­es, “… a house of cards,” sus­pend­ed only by the lat­tice of its own contradiction.

As such, Blood is Dry rep­re­sents a piv­otal shift from the human­ism of Japan­ese post­war cin­e­ma; in these films, mankind was para­mount; it con­tained both an inher­ent authen­tic­i­ty, and an infi­nite poten­tial for self-deter­mi­na­tion. In con­trast, Blood is Dry asserts the supreme will of its world. Char­ac­ters are not guid­ed by the pow­er of human spir­it; rather, they exist as ves­sels of the dis­joint­ed objects, places, and con­di­tions that sur­round them.

One way this log­ic man­i­fests is through the char­ac­ter arc of Takashi. Soft-spo­ken and with­drawn, he erupts rapid­ly into pub­lic star­dom. He finds him­self cast as an omnipresent adver­tise­ment, and then as a fig­ure­head of a worker’s union. As his pas­siv­i­ty is replaced by hubris, Ikuyo tries fran­ti­cal­ly to reel him back under her thumb – her­self only a ves­sel for the finan­cial inter­ests of the com­pa­ny. In one scene, they stand togeth­er under the sub­lime pres­ence of Takashi’s bill­board; he stares back at him­self, pos­sessed by head­lights, and bel­lows: This is what I am!”

Headshot of an Asian man wearing a white shirt, looking directly at the camera with a serious expression while holding a cigarette.

In this way, Blood is Dry decon­structs the trope of sto­icism found in films like Kurasawa’s Sev­en Samu­rai. Like these pro­lif­ic heroes, Takashi is ini­tial­ly reserved. Yet instead of cut­ting through the non­sense of the world, this sto­ic nature is stripped naked, and shown to be as muta­ble as any­thing else. When his per­son­al­i­ty frac­tures, we are met with the unset­tling sug­ges­tion that he was nev­er even real to begin with.

Hara­da, on the oth­er hand, exudes con­trol from the very start: I crush any­body I don’t like.” In anoth­er time­line, with his hate of cor­po­ratism and suave demeanor, Blood is Dry could have eas­i­ly billed him as its anti-hero. Instead, when he takes pic­tures, we are giv­en long close­ups of his cam­era, and not him. When he steals pow­er – often through deceit and sex­u­al vio­lence – he is unable to wield it effec­tive­ly, so noth­ing changes. The film does not deliv­er Hara­da to us as a lone wolf; rather, he is unrav­eled as a vehi­cle of class-based frus­tra­tion, func­tion­al­ly adrift, and led most­ly by the will of his camera.

The result is a cast always entan­gled in repet­i­tive loops. Takashi tries to kill him­self, and then spends the rest of the film mim­ic­k­ing that same act for posters and com­mer­cials. Hara­da coerces a famous base­ball play­er to drink, stages inti­mate pho­tos, and then smears their rep­u­ta­tion; he destroys Takashi in much the same way, and in both instances, he is phys­i­cal­ly beat­en as a result. Ikuyo is always beck­oned back to the jazz club, where she dances in cir­cles and even­tu­al­ly goes home with Harada.

In a qui­et moment near the film’s cli­max, they lay in bed togeth­er naked and out­stretched. We lis­ten to the dead rum­bles of a 24-hour fac­to­ry. Ikuyo speaks as if caught in an end­less, cycli­cal dream: I slept with you years ago, today I’m sleep­ing with you again.” She drags a cig­a­rette under the moon­light, It’s as if I did noth­ing. It’s tru­ly bizarre.”

It is here that we arrive at Blood is Dry’s fun­da­men­tal con­flict: a per­pet­u­al inabil­i­ty to reimag­ine the future. For Yoshi­da, liv­ing in Japan dur­ing the six­ties was an, absurd sit­u­a­tion.” It pro­vid­ed tan­gi­ble evi­dence that there was no nat­ur­al state of things – no bedrock of mean­ing on which to rely. Thus, the only path for­ward was to first meet eye to eye with one’s con­di­tions. In the end, he forces us to do this with Takashi’s clos­ing act.

After being defamed and fired, Takashi storms cor­po­rate head­quar­ters. He draws his gun to his head, and final­ly – after count­less imi­ta­tions of the orig­i­nal attempt – pulls the trig­ger. The clos­ing min­utes drag on with our pro­tag­o­nist dead as reporters are sent into a fren­zy try­ing to under­stand why. When his bill­board falls mag­nan­i­mous­ly from its rest­ing place, the cam­era zooms in slow­ly on Takashi’s crum­pled face. He is no longer a man, only the pure, unob­scured image of every­thing that ani­mat­ed him – his job, the adver­tise­ment, and of course, Hara­da and Ikuyo. They watch him, per­haps clear­ly for the first time. Cred­its close over Tokyo and the loop is bro­ken at last.

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