2007年01月26日 23:27
9.11-8.15 Nippon Suicide Pact
The travellers in the wilderness of images search for escape routes, through the loopholes of globalism. Has there been a film like this ever existed? – Shunsuke Tsurumi (Philosopher)
An avant-garde documentary film
9.11-8.15 Nippon Suicide Pact
(145min. 2005 Japan)
KUNITACHI STUDIO Production
Director/ Scenarist/Editor : OURA Nobuyuki
Cinematographer/Editor : TSUJI Tomohiko
Sound Engineer : KAWASHIMA Kazuyoshi
Korean language Supervisor : FURUKAWA Mika
Music : PAK Kun-john
SInger : NAKAYAMA Rabi
Performer
HARIU Ichiro SHIGENOBU May UKAI Satoshi SAWARAGI Noi TSURUMI Shunsuke
OKABE Marie SHIMAKURA Fuchimu OHNO Kazuo KIM Jiha
Outline
This documentary film reconsider modern Japan in relation to the 9-11, the simultaneous terrorist attacks in U.S. on September 11th, 2001 and searches for the ideal figures of Japan and the world by new expression of coalescence of documentary and symbolic images.
In this film, we think the issue inside the 9-11 attacks with the issue related to the “war pictures” that many were drawn in Japan at the time of World War Ⅱ, then recapture the matter of “freedom” that human soul searches for fundamentally.
As a main character of the film, Mr. Ichiro Hariu, the art critic who has been acutely criticizing the situation of post-war Japanese culture, and Ms. May Shigenobu, who have Japanese mother and Palestinian father are featured. The conversation among the art critic Mr. Noi Sawaragi, the thinker Mr. Satoshi Ukai, and the philosopher Mr. Shunsuke Tsurumi, the dialogue of Mr. Kim Jiha, the Korean antiestablishment poet also helps our search into the issue. The process of our search along the theme is not only filmed in the style of ordinary documentary of conversation and interviews but also depicted with overwhelming images of symbolic landscapes, war pictures, Japanese avant-garde drawings, mysterious drama, dance of Korean shaman, and the Butoh dance with all his might of Mr. Kazuo Ohno, the leading Japanese Butoh performer.
This film is the mythical “road movie” that of emerging soul of characters in the kaleidoscope of fascinating images, and the documentary of evolutional new style.
Story
In January 2001, an aged maverick art critic Ichiro Hariu set off to the journey to review the situation of Japan after the World War Ⅱ. He visits his friends and young philosophers, and continues his journey.
Around the same time, May Shigenobu, who was born in 1973, also started her journey. May’s mother is Fusako Shigenobu, the former leader of Japanese Red Army once frightened the world. May’s father was the activist of PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and has been assassinated in the conflict. May left her country of birth, Lebanon, and came to Japan, her mother’s country. Then she set off to the journey of searching her identity that was torn in between Arab and Japan.
Meanwhile, there is a man who doggedly draws the “war pictures” in this modern age of Japan. As if he is obsessed by something, he keeps asking himself the way of Japan after the defeat in war by his drawing pictures of “war and death”.
And then, on September 11th 2001, the simultaneous terrorist attacks were occurred. As the 9-11 being momentum, their journeys has been accelerated its speed. Peculiar resemblance of blue sky of New York on September 11th and blue sky of Japan on the day of unconditional surrender on August 15th 1945 make them got lost in between the darkness of distant time and space with the strange daydream.
As the time rolled by, Ichiro Hariu and May Shigenobu landed South Korea as if they were derived. It is said that there is secretly a fundamental “original form of East Asia” although the place is out of phase from Japan. Their journeys came to the period for meeting Kim Jiha, the poet who lives in South Korea and searches for the “original form of East Asia” by staking his “life”.
When they finally have nostalgic encounter beyond time and space, the light emerged from the darkness illuminates the figures of modern Japan and the world.
What can be seen at the time? Is that Hope? Or Despair?
CAST
Ichiro Hariu Art & Literary Critic
Hariu was born in 1925, in Sendai, Miyagi. As an adolescent, he was influenced by the leading literary critic of the time Yojiro Yasuda (who was a central figure in Nippon Roman-ha, (Japanese Romanesque movement)), and discovered the world of Man-yo Shu and Kojiki (Japan’s oldest collection of poetry and history book in existence, respectively) through Waka, a type of the traditional poetry. He graduated from the Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Tokyo in 1954.
Changing a direction after the war, Hariu joined the Communist Party in 1953, and began his criticism on the post-war art in Japan. He got expelled from its membership in 1960 for criticising the leaders during the Japan-US Military Alliance struggle. In 1962, Hariu, artist Taro Okamoto, and other critics together began to pursue Japan’s new discipline and creativity freed from authoritarianism through their art, literary and social criticism. With admiration for Walter Benjamin and scenting out Dadaist and Surrealist theories, Hariu continues his attempts to change the social systems with a viewpoint from the “history of deceased”, i.e. a notion of history created by the culmination of ordinary people’s energies lined with “mythicality”, “ancientness” and “magicality”, rather than the “history of living” as a systematic violence created by the authority. He also advocates the popular art movements born out of the people at the bottom of society in Japan and Asia.
His remarks have always been great influences in the post-war Japan, especially to the young artists as their ideological backbone. Scalpelling the issues lurking in the deeper layers, they often strike at various contradictions of our time.
Today, the revaluation of Ichiro Hariu, “the critic with action” and his body of work over the last fifty years is gaining momentum.
Hariu has also worked as a planner for international art exhibitions, i.e. commissioner for Venice Biennale 1966, and for Sao Paulo Biennale 1977. He directed “Art and Human Rights” exhibition at Gwangju Biennale 2000 in Korea. In 2002, a film “Nippon Shinju, Ichiro Hariu— ì˙ñ{Çä€Ç≤Ç∆ï¯Ç¶çûÇÒÇ≈ǵNjǡÇΩíj” was released. Director Koji Wakamatsu was so impressed by the film that he invited Hariu to play a cameo role in his “ÇPÇVçŒÇÃïóåiÅgÅ@(2005). Currently Hariu’s continuing activities are charged with more and more importance.
May Shigenobu Journalist
Shigenobu was born in 1973 in Lebanon. Her mother was the leader of the Japanese Red Army, and her father was a member of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was assassinated at the Israeli’s missile attacks when Shigenobu was very young. Her birth was never declared at the time, hence she had no nationality until she was 28. In 1997, She graduated from American University of Beirut, proceeding to the Graduate School to study International Politics. She acquired a Japanese nationality on 5 March 2001, and on 3 April, stepped on its land for the first time.
Shigenobu plays one of the central characters in the film as the “contemporary medium”, who roams about the other characters and sceneries, connecting them on the way. She, who has built-in memories of human sorrow, flies into the world of ideas and melt into them, then lands back onto the world of reality with her monologue, revealing her true self. She is portrayed as an embodiment of the past and the future, dream and reality, nihility and hope, discontinuity and solidarity. Through her acts of illusory, the layered factors from the depth of her mind begin to surface in the midst of the reality, piercing through the skin of this world.
Shigenobu has nurtured an eye for the weak, ethnic and other minorities throughout her tough and extraordinary life. She is currently playing an active role in the international journalism, objecting to the fundamental mistakes in the US led world politics and globalism.
Satoshi Ukai Professor of French Literature
Ukai was born in 1955. He graduated from the Graduate School of Literature, University of Kyoto, and is currently a professor at Graduate School at Hitotsubashi University. Ukai is an Asian high disciple of the leading philosopher Jacques Derrida’s, and an authority on Jean Genet who carried the darkness of the modern literature. Having studied for four and a half years in Paris, he returned to Japan in February 1989— incidentally, at the time of the death and the funeral of Showa emperor Hirohito. He is also a leading figure in supporting movements of Palestine in the current thought world. His logic and enthusiasm have moved people from time to time— his activity as a committee for Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi’s 1980 feature “Fertile Memory”, criticising Iraq War, screening the Holocaust film “Shoah” in Japan, participating International Writers’ Parliament, also acting as a bridge between people in North and South Korea, helping their thought exchanges. A stern philosophy, delicate literature, radical activism and wide range of friendships cohabit naturally within this person.
Attempting to dissect the modern and contemporary that are rigid systems, which are blocked in the space between the nation called Japan and its race, he even walks far out from it, and gradually proceeds into “the foreign land”, which the world conceives within itself— through the chain of his act, with his “spiral thoughts” towards human’s original contradictions.
Based on his firm principle, he discusses the contemporary world with a refreshing sense. He argues, “The true terrorists are America, Israel, and Japan— and we are all hostages of theirs. Palestinians are fighting for the release of such hostages.” He is today’s living thinker. His most famous books are “An Invitation to Resistance”, “Archaeology of Atonement”, Genet “Prisoner of Love” (translation), Derrida “Memories of the Blind” (translation), among others.
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Noi Sawaragi Art Critic
Sawaragi was born in 1962, in Chichibu, Saitama. He graduated from faculty of literature at Do-shisha University, and is an assistant professor at the faculty of arts, Tama University of Art.
In his most important book “JapanÅEContemporaryÅEArt”, he dismantled the contemporary art into Japan, contemporary, and art, and reconstructed it. Based on various criticisms, not only within the realm of art, he also persisted to reveal that what had been generally thought of as soul of the Japanese culture was actually an ideology for concealing the segmentations of the place called Japan, which was still in its “unfinished modern age”.
In the same perspective, he argues that the “post-war art” has never been able to have a history, but keeps circular movements around the “bad places” of repetition and oblivion.
In his part of the film which was shot just after the 9.11 incident, he rings an alarm bell on our lazy awareness of peace, and provokes that it is a “war within”.
His most famous books are “Simulationism”, “JapanÅEContemporaryÅEArt”, “War and Expo” etc..
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Kazuo Ohno Dancer
Ohno was born in 1906, in Hakodate, Hokkaido. He began studying modern dance at Baku Ishii’s before the war, and gradually freed himself of the Western modern dance method and found his own avant-garde style by adopting the bodily expressions born out of the Japanese climate of spirituality. While his root was in the localities of Japan and Asia, he managed to arrive at the basic universality through his expressions of the unity of the body and the spirit, and sublimated them into “Butoh”, which constructs Kazuo Ohno’s own inner universe. It bore fruits such as La Argentina, a ceremony of rebirth, born out of memories, and “My Mother”, which fumbled inside mother’s womb. He taught Tatsumi Hijikata, Akira Kasai, and is still influencing many others. His age has decayed his flesh, however, it has sublimated a purity in his dance, on the contrary.
Shunsuke Tsurumi Philosopher
Tsurumi was born in 1922, in Tokyo, and he moved to the United States at the age of 15. When he was studying philosophy at Harvard University, he was arrested on charge of anarchism, but he managed to finish his thesis and graduated. Japan and the US, the environments in which his character was formed — totally different world-views and languages— decided his later doctrine as a philosopher. He came back to Japan during the war, and he was sent to Java as a civilian employee of the navy.
Soon after the war, he started the philosophical magazine Shiso no Kagaku (Science of Thought) with Masao Maruyama, Mitsuo Taketani, Shigeto Tsuru, aiming to rebuild the Japanese thoughts that were dismayed at the time by the war. Their analysis and criticism of the current thought movements were not about just theorising the thought but consider it as human’s autonomous activity when they live their social realities, and they established a viewpoint to look at the inner side of the person who advocates it, rather than his or her right wing/left wing ideologies.
“A Cooperative Research Project” started from his self-analysis when he recognised his own change of awareness during the war. The main subjects of his research were the pre-war intellectuals’ conversion from liberalism to the militarism during the war, and the militarists’ conversion to the pacifism and liberalism after losing the war. The study documented their transitions and collapses. In his more recent “Recantation: A Cooperative Research Project”, he has amended his opinion that conversion was caused by the loss of identity, and it is now treated with a sense of integrity as a standard. He also looks at the continuation of their thoughts before and after their conversion.
His 1956 essayÅ@“Studies of Marginal Art” already managed to foresee today’s art in dismay and points out its problems. It focuses on the origin of human art, which surrounds our living and art, and analyses subjects such as graffiti, chit-chats, nicknames, and card games. It also discusses fine arts in relation to the popular arts as it sheds light on the ones pushed into the corner, and others positioned on the border of art and non-art, or the ones that have been forgotten from the world. We were first introduced to Marginal Art as we played when we were young, then we get opportunities to see the popular arts and fine arts. The moments of development for both arts are held in Marginal Art. Such original viewpoint and thought process were due to his having had an influence of pragmatism in the US, and digested it in his own body. He pre-collaged familiar things in his life and the fragments were culminated into his thoughts. In 1960, he turned against the revision of the Japan-US military alliance treaty and formed The Group of Voiceless Voices, and in 1965, he also joined The Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam (Beheiren). He recently formed the Board of the Article No.9 (of Japan’s Constitution) Association (Kyoujo no Kai) with Shuichi Kato, Kenzaburo Oe and others, warning us and criticising today’s Japan’s way towards re-armament. He says, “I am picking up the things that have been left behind in Japan’s modernisation. I am interested to know how they are living in the given society.” Here is a conscience of Japan stirring.
His most known books are “Complete Works” (12 volumes), “A Psychohistory of Postwar Japan”, “A Cultural History of Postwar Japan, 1945-1980”, “The Legend of Amenouzume”, “Studies of Marginal Art” among others.
Kim Ji-ha Poet
Kim was born in 1941, Moppo, Korea. He was a student at the faculty of arts, Seoul University when he joined “4.19 Revolution”, which overthrew I Seungman administration. In June 1970, he was arrested in breach of anti-communism law for his poem “Five Tribes”, satirising corruption of the authorities under Park Chung-Hee’s dictatorship. The following December, his anthology— a wail of the race— entitled “Yellow Soil” was published, and in 1972, another piece “ÂîåÍ” which led to his second arrest and imprisonment. In 1974, he was sentenced to death at the Court Martial as he was allegedly in charge of a student riot plan. Kim spent 8 years behind the bars until he was released in December 1980, thanks to a worldwide campaign to save his life. After the release he began to write about his awe of life, and his 1984 essay is highly rated as the first book ever written to open up bioethics. Later he also got involved in the nuclear issues, organic farming and environmental movements. Kim Ji-ha has always dared to fight against dictatorship and for democracy since 1960’s, and his words echo in the space like a divine revelation with a total reality.
“The capitalism and global civilisation of our time are in Big Chaos right now. What we really need to do is to rediscover the unity of man, God and the subject— i.e. to discover “New Human”, the unification of heaven, earth and human, who is the “endlessly wide-open subject”, inside a human being who is the subject and the other at the same time. Through the “subject who is becoming the other and the other who is becoming the subject”, we can establish “New Human” as a human concept that is like “globalised ethnic subject”, or “universalised individual subject”. We will create again places where Music of Universe is played and its orders— the music led by the universal feminism based on the Global Matrix, where we give kindness, love and mutual benefit beyond ethnicity, countries and encampments. What I am longing for is to establish such an idea that corresponds to the world and the nature.”
Such words of Kim Ji-ha’s contain a clue to help us cut off the concept called “the world” that we are bound by, and the modern illusions of self brought by the systems. His message sent from a corner of East Asia with a dream of the new social unity will be sinking deeply into the viewer’s heart.
Fuchimu Shimakura The Painter
Shimakura was born in 1940 in Niigata. He was studying printing when he joined the art department at Toho Film Studios. He later worked on the films of the leading directors’ such as Akira Kurosawa, Akio Jissoji, Juzo Itami. He won the Japanese Academy’s Special Award in 1992. He is a director of Atelier Kumo (Cloud), and his themes are clouds and skies!
Marie Okabe The Girl
Okabe was born in 1984 in Tokyo. She joined Theatre Wakakusa where she learned acting, classic ballet and piano. She was selected for one of the main roles in the drama part in “Nippon Shinju” (2001) when she was sixteen. She played a lovely but strong girl, and her loneliness presented a female role model buried in the ancient Japanese psyche. In the new film, her role was something like May Shigenobu’s other self to begin with, but she slips out and becomes a shaman who connects Japan and Korea.
There oozes Han emotion (bitterness, grudge), which is giving the film more depth and perspective.
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Nobuyuki Oura Director/Producer
Born 1949 Toyama, Japan.
Oura took up painting at the age of 19, and began making films at 24. He lived in New York from 1976 until 1986, and during this time he was an assistant to a painter Shusaku Arakawa. On his return to Japan he began making sculpture.
A series of 14 prints featuring the emperor entitled “Keeping Perspective” invited the Japanese censorship, and his 14 works in the collection of Toyama Museum of Modern Art were sold off, and 470 copies of the catalogue were burned and destroyed. Oura took the museum to court, but in December 2000, after two trials the Supreme Court totally rejected his appeal. However, he managed to raise the questions of freedom of expression, also about Japan’s emperor system and its taboos and censorship in the art world, the press and the society.
He went on to make a film “Keeping Perspective” (1995, 87min.), in which he attempted to capture the darkness and distortion of contemporary Japan by reflecting them back onto his own subconscious and depicting them strictly as his personal and subjective vision.
In “Nippon Suicide Pact Part 1” (2001, 90min.), an art and literature critic Ichiro Hariu plays the main character. Weaving together his talks and mystic images, Oura displayed Japan seen through self, that is an integration of experience and encounters with others, in the depth of its history beyond his own subconscious. The film opened at an art theatre in 2002, and made a record hit, followed by touring in the whole country.
“9.11-8.15 Nippon Suicide Pact” introduces a new character May Shigenobu. Oura this time attempts to point us to the future that it should be, by culminating his consciousness and creative imagination evoked by the depth of history, and throwing it into the ever-changing world of today. He is currently preparing for his next film.
Tomohiko Tsuji Cinematographer/ Editor
Born 1970, Wakayama, Japan.
After graduating Nihon University College of Art, Tsuji became interested in shooting documentary and changed his capacity from direction to cinematography. He joined a TV production company and got trained as a documentary cameraman. He has been working with Oura since his last film “Nippon Suicide Pact”, for which he won Special Jury’s Award at the Japanese Society of Cinematographers.
Sound Recording Kazuyoshi Kawashima
Kawashima was born in 1947 in Okayama. He left Iwanami Film Production in 1975, and became freelance. He is a man of bold experiments; he recorded live sound for the whole picture ofÅuÉEÉìÉ^É}ÉMÉãÅ[Åv, and he tried mobile recording without wind shield on “Kishiwada Shonen Gurentai”. He also gave full play on Claude Ganion’s latest film “Kamataki”.
Korean Language Supervisor Mika Furukawa
Furukawa was born in 1961, Tokyo. She graduated from Faculty of Education at Waseda University in 1984, and from Korean Language Institute, Yonsei University in Korea in 1991. Her knowledge of Korean art and culture keeps her with the common people’s viewpoint. She contributes her accessibility to the rich resources buried in the mythical everyday life, to the East Asian cultural collaboration.
Some Comments to “9.11-8.15 NIPPON SUICIDE PACT”
The travellers in the wilderness of images search for escape routes, through the loopholes of globalism. Has there been a film like this ever existed? Shunsuke Tsurumi,Philosopher
A masterpiece with extracts of the conversations that rock the origins of our soul, and the sceneries of strange humidity. Tomohiko Tsuji’s camera captures Tokyo waterfront and Seoul cityscape as the original sceneries of the East Asia. The visions of avant-garde art, war-paintings, and shaman dance in those sceneries woven with the words from the exceptional intellectuals such as Kim Ji-ha gave me dizzy sensations. The thinkers’ words will spark up a flame, and urges the viewer to awake. Makoto Sato, Filmmaker
I was so surprised to see it is possible to make such a film. This is a thought film, a philosophy film. It talks about state, war, the emperor system, and the US, and it talks about their own history and life, that are personal and convincing. These are the people who protest to the current world situations, here in Japan. I was touched by the journeys of Hariu’s and Shigenobu’s in search of origins of their souls and freedom. The heated words of Ukai’s, and Tsurumi’s. Kim’s words with weight. They just make us stop there and listen. Fujita’s war painting questions us. The film reminded me of the word “anti-establishment”. I was excited to see how they are battling. It is anti-establishment, but not anti-Japan — they are talking so hot, and so particular about Japan and its emperor system. It is a little painful. They think of committing suicide with Japan. Dying together is an ultimate love. They are concerned so much, and they cherish Japan so much. The love moved me.
Kunio Suzuki, writer, advisor to Issuikai
Nobuyuki Oura’s new work “9.11-8.15 NIPPON SUICIDE PACT” was not at all inferior to his previous film of 2002, in fact, it was such a well made piece of work. Ostensibly the camera crew follows the art critic Ichiro Hariu and the subjects he meets, but it is organised in discontinuous manner, which makes it post-systematic.
In the film, Oura directed May Shigenobu to read her own writing. It is slightly hard to understand at times, but there are clearly traces of Walter Benjamin’s reposed dialectics. By their discontinuations, thoughts come and unlimited possibilities of making constellations begin here. Amongst all the devices, her conversation with Kim Ji-ha hinges onto Shigenobu’s navigation of the rest of the film. Luckily, she has been abdicated the role by Kim. It’s an abdication from Hariu, the time wanderer, onto the woman who has been forced to wander in space.
This scene with Kim brings about various issues; for instance, Japan’s war responsibilities in the fifteen-year war, the theory of the Japanese emperor’s lineage originated in Korean peninsula, Zainichi(Korean immigrants in Japan) poets’ complex emotions towards Japan, Han (feeling of bitterness and grudge, one of the most prominent racial characteristics of the Korean), and so on. Kazuo Ohno’s sacred hands of the ruins gesture applause and the end of the waves at the same time, and his space becomes the mystery of another dimension. Only imagination can point us to the right direction in this road movie; get back to the ethnic origin of East Asia, i.e. chaos, and urges us to overthrow violently.
The ever-changing mysterious visions, the creation of Ma (moment of beat), the outstanding sound design, the significant elements dotted around the whole film……, despite the appearances of the sincere thinkers, it is as if being tricked into hearing the dances and stirs from another dimension. The film turns us into a mirror, and we find ourselves as wanderers in space.
The film urges our imaginations to participate, and it quietly suggests that we grasp again with our free spirits, our history, origins, and our common people. Yoshiaki Abe, film critic
