Why Meiko Kaji’s cult characters are still… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Why Meiko Kaji’s cult char­ac­ters are still sub­ver­sive in their strength

25 Aug 2022

Words by Sam Moore

Young woman with dark hair styled in an elaborate updo, wearing a blue-green velvet jacket, against a blurred background of trees.
Young woman with dark hair styled in an elaborate updo, wearing a blue-green velvet jacket, against a blurred background of trees.
As Female Pris­on­er 701: Scor­pi­on turns 50, Meiko Kaji’s fem­i­nist action hero­ines are as thrilling to watch as ever.

As the super­hero movie has become the dom­i­nant face of both genre and block­buster cin­e­ma, the def­i­n­i­tion of what a strong female char­ac­ter” has changed along­side it. Now, strength is tied into some kind of super­pow­er – think Cap­tain Mar­vel arriv­ing to save The Avengers once their ene­mies become too strong and oth­er­world­ly for Earth’s Might­i­est Heroes to han­dle – with the pol­i­tics of that strength shift­ing in turn. These super­heroes are so often estab­lish­ment fig­ures, fight­ing to main­tain the sta­tus quo, or for the insti­tu­tions of the powerful.

On the oth­er end of this spec­trum are the char­ac­ters that define the career of Japan­ese actress Meiko Kaji: the epony­mous Lady Snow­blood, Mat­su in the Female Pris­on­er 701: Scor­pi­on series, and a selec­tion of ever-chang­ing girl gang lead­ers across the Stray Cat Rock fran­chise. These char­ac­ters are more sub­ver­sive than the con­tem­po­rary ver­sions of this arche­type that came in the wake of Kaji’s roles. What makes the char­ac­ters so com­pelling is the way in which they define strength: less about pow­er, and more about ideas of sol­i­dar­i­ty, often with an explic­it­ly polit­i­cal edge. Kaji’s char­ac­ters nev­er com­pro­mise in order to exist on the same terms as male­ness, but instead expand the idea of what strength can look like.

The ways in which Kaji’s char­ac­ters chal­lenge the rela­tion­ship between pow­er and gen­der are at their most clear in her var­i­ous appear­ances across the Stray Cat Rock series. Each film focus­es on a girl gang, and Kaji plays their leader. In the first of the series, Delin­quent Girl Boss (1970), her gang are placed in direct oppo­si­tion with an all-male gang – the ten­sion that exists along gen­dered lines is vital to the ten­sion of the film. What’s strik­ing is that through­out this film Mei (Kaji) and her gang nev­er needs to com­pro­mise in order to com­bat to the Seiyu Group – who Mei sees as being cru­el and vio­lent, aligned with right-wing pol­i­tics – a stark dif­fer­ence to the more con­tem­po­rary female pro­tag­o­nists who so often are made to define them­selves and their strength using the lan­guage of male­ness; more recent­ly in the fraught Black Wid­ow plot-line in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Across the Stray Cat Rock series, the inter­sec­tion between pow­er and gen­der is explic­it­ly pol­i­tics, with Kaji’s ever-chang­ing char­ac­ter often fight­ing against an oppres­sive polit­i­cal force; most explic­it­ly in Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970).

Woman in white kimono with flower pattern, standing with one arm raised.

With­in the third film in the fran­chise, Kaji’s lat­est char­ac­ter, Mako, faces off against a gang that are vio­lent­ly racist; bring­ing their jeeps and weapons into town with dark pur­pose of invok­ing mil­i­taris­tic fas­cism. As this gang extend their reach, it feels like a dec­la­ra­tion of war. The vil­lain­ous Baron (Tat­suya Fuji) laments the lack of decent women” and tries to get Mako and her gang to act docile” at what he calls a gentleman’s par­ty” but is in actu­al­i­ty him sell­ing off the girls to be used or assault­ed. As the film moves towards its cli­max, and Mako and her gang chal­lenge both the racist Eagles and Baron, she insists I’m fight­ing back, our way” a line that cap­tures the thing that makes Kaji’s char­ac­ters at once so endur­ing and sub­ver­sive: that their strength is deeply polit­i­cal, a chal­lenge to the tra­di­tion­al struc­tures of pow­er, rather than co-sign­ing it.

The vio­lence of the sys­tems that Kaji’s char­ac­ters rebel against is best embod­ied in her title role as Mat­su in the Female Pris­on­er #701: Scor­pi­on series. Like Stray Cat Rock, Scor­pi­on is a fran­chise that dives into the weeds of a clas­sic exploita­tion sub-genre – where the for­mer is focused on girl gangs, the lat­ter is all about women in prison.

From the very begin­ning Kaji’s Mat­su is estab­lished as an anti-estab­lish­ment fig­ure; not only does the film open with a scene of prison offi­cers get­ting a com­men­da­tion, but the film’s open­ing cred­its show how vio­lent those offi­cers are.hey humil­i­ate and degrade the women that they’re watch­ing over, mak­ing them walk naked along a stair­case while the guards stand beneath star­ing up at them. Like Delin­quent Girl Boss, Scor­pi­on asso­ciates a very spe­cif­ic kind of cold, abu­sive pow­er with male­ness and the insti­tu­tions that prop it up. What’s strik­ing about Scor­pi­on here is the oth­er women in prison – those in orange jump­suits – side with the guards for a taste of that pow­er, with one even forc­ing Mat­su onto her hands and knees, telling her to eat like a dog”.

What makes Matsu’s acts of rebel­lion here so defi­ant – and what con­tin­ues to add a polit­i­cal edge to the pow­er and fury of Kaji’s char­ac­ters – is a con­tin­ued refusal to fall in line with the world as it is. Not only does she fight against these insti­tu­tions (the prison itself is prac­ti­cal­ly in ruins by the end of the film) but she also fights against the death of emo­tion that it seems to rep­re­sent. Even when Mat­su is try­ing to escape she still turns back in order to save fel­low pris­on­er Yuki (Yay­oi Watanabe).

For Mat­su, and Kaji’s var­i­ous girl gang lead­ers in Stray Cat Rock, their strength comes from acts of lib­er­a­tion, find­ing pow­er in the asser­tion of agency. It’s no won­der that fight­ing back my way” in Sex Hunter is so impact­ful – it cre­ates a path­way to strength in a way that doesn’t require doing so on the terms of those who would make these char­ac­ters weaker.

In all of these films, the idea of strength is about more than just phys­i­cal pow­er, or super­hu­man abil­i­ties. Instead, it’s root­ed in ideas of agency and sol­i­dar­i­ty – some­thing that’s much more sub­ver­sive, and loaded with polit­i­cal pow­er. With Kaji’s title role in Lady Snow­blood (1973) embark­ing on a quest for bloody vengeance to get jus­tice against the prison guards that tor­ment­ed her moth­er, the ice queen demeanour and dark­ly fem­i­nist edge of Kaji’s per­sona exists effort­less­ly in her char­ac­ters from both the 19th and 20th cen­tu­ry. To see con­tem­po­rary cin­e­ma defin­ing strength in such nar­row ways only serves as a reminder for how sub­ver­sive – and time­less – Kaji’s char­ac­ters are.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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