Pink Film and Porn Studies 393 Peter Alilunas
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! ! The Pink Book The Japanese Eroduction and its Contexts Edited by Abé Mark Nornes ! This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No-Derivatives 4.0 International License by Abé Mark Nornes 2nd Edition PDF Tsuda Ichiro Photographs Copyright ! 2014 by Tsuda Ichiro All rights reserved. "Remediating Journalism: Cinema and the Media Event," in The Cinema of Actuality, Yuriko Furuhata, pp. 88-114. Copyright ! 2013. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Duke University Press. www.dukeupress.edu “Shall We F***?: Note on Parody in the Pink,” in Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, Julian Stringer. Revised and Reprinted with permission of the publisher. “The Japanese Pink Film: All Jargon and No Authenticity,” in Bright Lights Film Journal, Andrew Grossman. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. A Kinema Club Book kinemaclub.org ! Acknowledgements Thanks to a complicated set of circumstances, this book took far longer than it should have. I must thank the authors—this "strange collection of brains," as Adachi Masao surrealistically puts it—for their gracious patience as the process dragged on and on. Thanks to their efforts, particularly their revisions based on strong feedback from several anonymous reviewers, the resulting book is a wonderfully thought-provoking and heterogeneous take on the Pink Film. I would also like to thank Linda Williams, Phil Hallman, Peter Alilunas, Aaron Gerow and the Kinema Club editorial collective for their support. I feel particularly indebted to Michael Arnold, who is writing a dissertation on this topic. Suspicious of received wisdom, his refreshingly novel perspective on the Pink Film has taught me much. He also contributed a thoroughgoing edit of the final manuscript. Both he and Irhe Sohn were incredibly helpful in the final stages of this DIY publication. This book was years in the making, and was marked with a rough synchronicity with the 50th year of Pink Film. In the course of its preparation, we've seen many veteran producers, directors, staff members and actors pass away. Among the directors I immediately think of are Nogami Masayoshi, Watanabe Mamoru, Ueno Toshiya, and Sakamoto Futoshi. Beyond these names, I must single out two friends. Donald Richie was one of the first people I brought into the project. He was delighted by the invitation, and had plans to write an essay about the transformations he witnessed in the Pink reception context over the course of his lifetime. The other friend was Wakamatsu Koji, who surely has the longest index entry here. As the book took its leisurely course to completion, I regularly checked in Wakamatsu-san. This was usually over Sore Kara shochu at Gingakei in Golden-gai (occasionally joined by Adachi Masao, another of our great supporters). It is painful to think about how neither Wakamatsu nor Richie—with their utterly different relationships to Pink—were able to hold the book in their hands. —AMN ! Table of Contents Introduction 1 Abé Mark Nornes 1. The Market of Flesh and the Rise of the “Pink Film” 17 Roland Domenig 2. Thoughts on the Extremely Private Pink Film of the 1970s 49 Kimata Kimihiko 3. Policing the Pinks 93 Kirsten Cather 4. The Actuality of Wakamatsu: Repetition, Citation, Media Event 149 Yuriko Furuhata 5. Pink Pictures 182 Tsuda Ichiro 6. Shall We F***?: Notes on Parody in the Pink 217 Julian Stringer 7. All Jargon and No Authenticity? 237 Andrew Grossman 8. Marquis de Sade Goes to Tokyo 269 Sharon Hayashi 9. Pink Feminism? The Program Pictures of Hamano Sachi 295 Miryam Sas 10. The Japanese Eroduction—Inside Out 331 Donald Richie 11. On Location 363 Michael Arnold Afterword: Pink Film and Porn Studies 393 Peter Alilunas Bibliography, Index & Contributors 405 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION The Pink Book: Introduction Abé Mark Nornes ! ! Sitting in a theater like the Senbon Nikkatsu, one senses the musty entire- ty of Japanese cinema history.1 It is located in a nondescript Kyoto neigh- borhood just north of Nijo Castle, the 17th century palace of the Tokugawa Shogunate. This is a theater with a history like no other. Originally named the Senbonza, it was built in 1901 on the family land of Makino Shozo, the man often called the father of Japanese cinema. He ran it with his mother, staging performances of both live theater and films. It was the theater troupe of the Senbonza that Makino mobilized when he made his first film in 1908. The following year he shot the great Onoe Matsunosuke’s first film, Goban Tadanobu (1909), on the grounds of neighboring Daichoji Temple. Seventeen years and hundreds of films later, Matsunosuke’s funeral procession passed the Senbonza. This area was one of the pleasure districts of Kyoto. People would stroll the streets—this even had a name: “senbura”—stopping in the Senbonza or one of the other 20 nearby movie theaters. There were other pleasures to be had as well. If you take a senbura today, one sees traces of this past. There is a famous restaurant specializing in the aphrodisiac turtle soup, and the occa- sional home has a second story of all windows—the better to call in male customers in the glory days of the neighborhood—and of course there is the Senbon Nikkatsu theater. After the formation of Nikkatsu a century ago in 1912, the Senbonza came under studio management and changed its name to the Senbon Nikkat- sukan. It featured Nikkatsu product for over 70 years. However, thanks to the anti-prostitution law of 1956, the district’s fortunes changed dramatically. The movie theaters disappeared along with the sex trade, and our theater moved to its current location with a new name, the Senbon Nikkatsu. The studio sloughed it off after the Roman Porno era in the 1980s and its new owners turned it into a Pink Film theater. !1 NORNES Figure 1: The Senbon Nikkatsu Theater in Kyoto. Today the Senbon Nikkatsu is not only the last theater in the district, but it is also one of two remaining Pink theater in the old capital (Fig. 1; the oth- er theater is the Honmachikan). The exterior is moldy, the marquee in tatters. Posters decorate the exterior, featuring crazy titles and half-naked starlets with “come and get it” pouts. The lobby is filled with unused furniture and assorted junk, but the entrance fee is only 500 yen for a triple feature. The latest Hollywood product on the other side of town costs three times as much. The carpet is long gone. On either side of the auditorium no smoking signs blaze away, blissfully ignored by half the patrons. The drab curtain, al- ways open now, has an embroidered advertisement for a local traditional inn with an ancient four-digit phone number. But when the lights dim, the screen lights up in glorious 35mm—one of the hallmarks of the Pink Film. One can palpably feel the whole of Japanese cinema history inscribed in this space, 100 years after the founding of Nikkatsu and precisely 50 years after the appearance of the Pink Film itself. The signs of decline are hard to miss…but also easy to miss in another sense. Here is a quote from a book !2 INTRODUCTION cataloguing Japan’s disappearing Pink theaters, the author waxing nostalgical- ly over the fate of the Senbon Nikkatsu and its filmmakers. There is a film I fondly remember. The theater I saw Oshima Nagisa’s Cruel Story of Youth (Seishun zangoku monogatari, 1960) in was the Senbon Nikkatsu. In those days the Senbon Nikkatsu was a mainstream theater, but today is changed into an adult theater. Nishijin had seven movie theaters, but today all that’s left is the Senbon Nikkatsu and the Nishijin Theater [The latter has since closed down.—AMN] Just as Cruel Story of Youth stole the hearts of young people, Starting Off at 20 (Hatachi no genten, 1973) also had the support of youth in the 1970s, and was even written by a student from nearby Rit- sumeikan University. In some sense, it became something of a bible for young people. In some sense, Pink Films are also a treasury of youth films. I want more films made that turn on the youth of Kyoto. For Pink Film fans as well, go Pinks! Go Senbon Nikkatsu!2 Why cheer on the Pinks like this? What’s to lose in the end? For this par- ticular author, it is surely wrapped up in fond memories of the sexual charge electrifying the films of his adolescence. This is a sentiment clearly shared by this volume’s Kimata Kimihiko, who offers a local history of Pink Film from the perspective of his hometown of Nagoya. What of the other authors rep- resented here? Why write about the Pink Film and why now? The latter question has one initial, easy answer, and this also offers an opportunity to define some terms. It is that the Pink Film seems to be near- ing the end of its half-century run. Some people collapse all sexually explicit filmmaking into the Pink category, but we will use it in a very precise sense: Pink Film is the soft-core, independent cinema of Japan. It started half-a- century ago with the film Market of Flesh (Nikutai ichiba, 1962). Pink experi- enced several iterations as it dealt with competition from both studio soft core and hard core adult video (popularly known as AV). But Pink Film is resolutely independent. It constitutes a parallel industry, with its own produc- tion companies, theater chains, actors and staff. Its sex is simulated; as Tsuda Ichiro’s photographs playfully reveal, the actors use maebari pads to cover their genitals.