H72.1118 Contemporary Japanese Cinema
Professor Jung Bong Choi
October 18, 2009
A peculiar kind of photosynthesis permeates and energizes Shinya Tsukamoto’s cityscape. If the source of sight or the eye is taken to be the sun, when it illuminates Tsukamoto’s cityscape, the eye will eroticize male and female bodies fused with technology. There is actually plentiful magic that a gaze can do, but with Tsukamoto sexuality seems crucial.
Presumably, most of Tsukamoto’s films take place in Tokyo. Whether or not Tokyo is indeed the way he portrays, certain features do not escape the popular imagination of the city. Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a good example of this because it catered to the desire of seeing modern Japan in decadence outside Japan. Without foregrounding Yatsu’s metal fetish, the film opens with the scene where Yatsu inserts a metal tube in his thigh. The stark lack of explanation immediately taps on spectators’ imagination of Japan as a technology-saturated modern country. The answer to why a man goes through excruciating pains to fuse metal with his body is only made clear: he wants to and he needs to. The film clenched an award at FantaFestival in Rome in 1989, which is the heyday of Japan’s economy. Apparently, a character with a metal fetish was more relevant than exotic at that time. Two other Tsukamoto’s films, Tokyo Fist and A Snake of June, also won awards at foreign film festivals. In them, Tokyo is presented as a concrete jungle facilitated by neat and fast modern transportation. The setting up of such a milieu is crucial to the understanding of the stories because the cityscape needs to be constructed before any subsequent “chemical” reaction takes place.
Tsukamoto confesses that he has always “wanted to make a film in which every image is infused with eroticism” (Mes 167). This seems to be a problematic statement against what Tom Mes argues earlier in his book, Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto. Mes writes that “this element of eroticism, so overt in Tetsuo, would be almost entirely absent from his later work until…A Snake of Jane,” and “[t]he maturation of Tsukamoto’s themes would go hand-in-hand with the disappearance of eroticism from his work” (Mes 66). Maybe I have overlooked the subtle difference between eroticism and sexuality, but it is very unlikely that the themes of body, gender, technology, and cityscape all vitiate with that of sexuality. They probably coexist and are over shone by a particular gaze in all of Tsukamoto’s films. My confidence in saying this is based on Catherine Russell’s paper “Tokyo, the movie.” Even though this passage refers to an entertainment district called Yoshiwara in the Edo era, it speaks powerfully to contemporary Japan too: “Known as the floating world, its residents cultivated an attitude of resignation to a life of enforced inactivity, in which aesthetics and erotic indulgences provided the only imaginary escape from a very restrictive and repressive social structure” (Russell 214). In a way, the narrow space in Tetsuo’s apartment, the stiff architecture of Yukio’s house, the dried well that Yukio is stuck in, and the physical confinement that Tsuda constantly experiences all pave way to sexual liberation, which is the only way that the protagonists will ever set themselves free. Ian Buruma, who has written extensively on Japan and has influenced many others, makes a point that the Japanese seek occasional outlandish fantasy releases because they are otherwise always buttoned up and contained. I think his point is true for Tsukamoto too.
