Content warning: This post contains discussions of rape; the film contains explicit scenes of rape and other sexual violence. 

Oshima Nagisa is the Jean-Luc Godard of Japanese cinema — the midcentury enfant terrible who forcibly throttled his country’s film industry into political and formal evolution and became the darling of film critics and pretentious art cinema geeks for the next 60 years. If you study Japanese film, you encounter him a lot — starting with Cruel Story of Youth (1960), his films repeatedly appear on critics’ (and his own — he is a renowned self-aggrandizer) lists of the most important Japanese films. 

Nearly all of them have a rape scene. Or at the very least, a scene of a man violently abusing a woman. 

I struggled a lot with this. In recent years, people have become much more aware of the problems with exploiting rape as a plot point in media. It’s a cheap tactic for titillation and trauma, often more about a male protagonist who defends or avenges a female victim than it is about the woman. Certainly, it is not usually about the many real-life survivors of sexual violence and abuse who might be watching from the audience. Even when the purpose of the rape scene is to develop a character’s backstory or to show the horror of rape (often framed as “the worst that could happen” or “a fate worse than death,” also not an attitude that helps survivors in the slightest), the rape itself is often filmed in a way that seems like it’s meant to arouse the audience, letting viewers play with identifying with both attacker and victim. The power dynamic of rape is, to a certain extent, coded into how we shoot and read sex scenes in mainstream film: the “correct” type of filmic sex scene focuses on male pleasure at a woman’s expense, while explicit depictions of female pleasure often push a film into the NC-17 level of unmarketability. 

In Oshima’s films, there’s a veneer of artistic and political statement; to me, this makes the inclusion of an unexpected rape scene, disjointed from the rest of the narrative and frequently the whole reason a female character is included, even more disturbing. Films that are self-importantly trying to Tell Me Something and which generations of academics and critics are insisting to me are Saying Something — the only thing they seem to have to say about women is that we’re objects for the violent sexual use of Oshima’s politically disaffected youths. I’ve frequently said I prefer a sexploitation film — a film that is straightforward about what it’s about — to an art film where the director is working out his own horny issues unaware. 

Rather than writing off Oshima as a misogynist with some good films (though he might be that!), I wanted to think about why he repeatedly uses rape scenes. This led me to Sing a Song of Sex! (日本春歌考, sometimes translated as A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs, 1967), a messy film which could be said to contain Oshima’s grand theory of sex, violence, and politics. 

Sing a Song of Sex! starts out as a dark school comedy, following four high school boys around as they take university entrance exams, harass girls, and go out to eat with their teacher, Mr. Otake, who gets drunk and sings bawdy folk songs from around Japan. The film takes a dark turn when Otake dies ― poisoned by carbon monoxide from a gas heater which one of the boys, Nakamura, had seen fallen over and, out of seemingly pure apathy for anything in the world, had left as it was. 

From there, the film breaks down into a series of fantasies and reenactments. The boys fantasize about raping a girl they saw in the exam room, No. 469, which they use in place of her name. They fantasize about telling her their rape fantasies. In both cases, none of them can go through with the act even in the realm of a fantasy they completely control. They lie to the high school girls who idolized Otake and say they murdered him. When Kaneda, the girl they all dismiss as the ugly one, returns to ask if it was a lie, Nakamura confesses that it was and wasn’t: he could have saved him and didn’t, a passive act of violence more than a murder. Then Nakamura reenacts the night of Otake’s death with Otake’s girlfriend Tanigawa in his place, a reenactment which ends with them having sex. In each of these moments, we have a group of young men who are unable to complete an act — they cannot, in fact, rape, they cannot, in fact, tell No. 469 their horrible fantasies, and they cannot, in fact, kill their teacher. 

This impotence connects to their political disaffection. Mr. Otake had been a political activist in his student days with the leftist groups of the late ’50s and early ’60s; his comrades gather at his funeral to debate publishing his writings and whether his death was a protest against the reactionary revival of National Foundation Day. His students, on the other hand, don’t care about any of this ― Nakamura interrupts their dour protest songs with the bawdy songs Otake sang the night of his death. The others sing the same song during an anti-Vietnam War protest they crash to find the mysterious Girl No. 469. Though they (and the filmmakers) don’t realize it, they are about to enter the university world of 1968, a time of student activism and protest which now far overshadows Otake’s generation in the memories of the Japanese public. But these violent teenagers can’t even act in their fantasies, making them failed political subjects; at the same time, their horny intrusions into political spaces expose the pomposity and hypocrisy of the political activists, who deny the realities of sex and violence. 

In the final third of the film, we shift again from fantasizing and play-acting to action. The political thrust of the film here emerges through the gradually telescoping focus on Japan’s violence against Korea. This was the central political project of Oshima’s works in this period and through much of his career. This film, Death By Hanging (1968), and Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968) are sometimes known as Oshima’s “Korean trilogy”; along with his still-frame photo documentary short Diary of Yunbogi (1965), these films comprise an examination of Japan and -Korea’s shared history, both as a colonizer and colonized and as cultures with deep connections underneath the violence. 

Kaneda, the ugly girl from the boys’ high school, insistently overtakes the Vietnam War protest with her “women’s song” of a sex worker inviting in a Japanese man in colonial Manchuria. The students quickly accept our main boys when they accompany her, asking who wrote it, if it’s a new contemporary folk song, or if it’s from Africa or Japan. Though they are here protesting American incursions in Asia, they lack the visceral memory of Japan’s own colonial history on the continent. While the boys are praised, Kaneda herself is carried away by the boys in the protest group to be raped offscreen; while her song brings the main group of boys acceptance into the political group, it brings her pain. Within the male-dominated political sphere, female activists are only valued as outlets for sexual release, a power dynamic denounced by Tanaka Mitsu in her 1970 essay “Liberation From the Toilet,” considered a founding manifesto of the separation of women’s liberation from the mainstream New Left student movements. These student activists, tellingly, unlike the film’s main boys, are able to go through with the rape, but in the horror of Kaneda’s tears, we see this ability to act on violent desire is so much worse than the paralysis of the boys in their fantasies. 

After her rape, Kaneda appears in the hanbok, (traditional Korean clothing); Nakamura says “it’s hers,” suggesting that Kaneda is of Korean descent, Japan’s largest ethnic minority group, many of them descended from people forcibly brought over during the colonial period as laborers. The rape and conscription into sex slavery of colonized women by Japanese forces, known sometimes by the disturbing euphemism “comfort women”, has become an internationally-recognized war crime, though Japan itself has never sufficiently acknowledged its culpability. Suppression of the stories of comfort women and other Japanese war crimes has been one of the major campaigns of the Japanese right wing since at least the 1990s; researchers who use a victim-centric approach to the comfort women issue, one which affirms this crime as a mass rape, are frequently targeted by Japanese right-wing activists today, often supported by the right wing in America and other countries. 

During the final scene, the boys attempt to rape No. 469 in reality. She — her name, they now know, is Fujiwara Mayuko, a name which echoes classical Japanese aristocracy — dares them to. While they struggle with her, Tanigawa interrupts their bawdy songs again and again with historical theories which intertwine Japanese and Korean origins. Kaneda in her hanbok watches with accusing eyes. Eventually they give up their protests; while the other boys are overcome, Nakamura strangles Fujiwara in the film’s abrupt and enigmatic ending. 

Nakamura, marked by the moment he has sex with Tanigawa, seems to be on the trajectory from a child frozen in violent fantasies to a man who can act on his violent desires. In a different film, there could be a sense that the ability to “act” makes one a politically-active subject, who can transform the world, touching on a debate in Japanese philosophy and criticism on whether or not Japanese people can be individual “subjects” (主体, or shutai) in the same sense Westerners can. The stakes in this debate, for Japanese writers, were whether or not Japan can even participate in the world on the same level as Europeans and Americans, or if, in order to advance, Japan must first build its own subjectivity (based on a Western philosophical history of the individual and the political subject, now frequently criticized as racist and sexist). But here, when Nakamura becomes able to “complete” an action, it’s the final scene’s strangulation of Fujiwara, where the violence of base desire overruns the lectures and protests of women with access to the truth of Japan’s origins. What worth is subjectivity, the ability to act, if founded on a hypocritical denial of colonial violence? 

Rape and murder of women, in this instance, becomes a stand-in for the violence of war as a whole, the rage of men without direction, and the ultimate silencing act against women and colonized people who would remind Japanese men of the imperial crimes on which the modern nation of Japan is founded. But, though I think this analysis works for this film and the other intersections of rape, politics, and colonialism in Oshima’s works, I want to backtrack to some points in the film which might point to a broader theory on sex and violence, particularly through the use of fantasy.  

The “treatise” of the Japanese title is given by Otake during his drunken singing: these bawdy folk songs are an expression of the desires of the Japanese laborer, to whom no political voice is accessible. Therefore, the songs of sex express their rage, conflating lust and rage because of the intensity of the desire behind both. Tanigawa further elaborates on the significance of the songs to Nakamura later: Nakamura expresses a nostalgic longing for the time of simply having sex in a rice paddy or a mine shaft, like in the songs, but Tanigawa explains that it was never easy. Sex was always complicated; that’s the reason people had to make up the songs, to excite the passions and codify the ways we make love. She supports this theory with a story of a male miner who fell in love with a female miner only to find that she had been long dead; he still married her memorial tablet and took care of her parents. This marriage to a ghost, which Nakamura connects to his own fantasy of raping No. 469, is an act of fantasy which nonetheless has real repercussions. The songs, rituals, and fantasies are what make the act itself possible.

In this theory, fantasy is necessary for action, especially any political action; we must be able to frame our suppressed desires in some form in order to act on them. Oshima, starting around the time of this film, begins to repeatedly play with fantasy, repetition, rewinding, and mediated retelling in his films, creating stories which are often framed and reframed within themselves, most prominently in the “resurrections” of Three Resurrected Drunkards. Along with the necessity of fantasy, violence also seems to be an underlying necessity to politics in many sequences in Oshima’s films. One reason for the repeated return to rape as a plot device could be as a revelation of the underlying contradiction between the controlled political subject and the violent fantasies within — the possibility that we are engaged with revolutionary politics is because, underneath, we desire destruction, both of others and ourselves. 

I can’t say this reading makes me comfortable with Oshima’s use of rape in his works, but it does help me to realize he’s struggling with questions of fantasy, violence, and politics similar to what I’ve struggled with in my own research. The next step is to think about this in conjunction with In the Realm of the Senses (1976), which could be called Oshima’s treatise on obscene Japanese media: the story of two obsessed lovers that ends with the woman castrating and murdering the man. Wow! Good times! Not really!