The Osaka spirit

[Aaron Gerow]

Another important director who is not only from Osaka but who features 
Osaka a lot in his films is Sakamoto Junji. Most of his work, from 
Dotsuitarunen to Ote, from Billiken to Shin jingi naki tatakai, is based 
in Osaka, especially the region of Shinsekai around Tsutenkaku. Here's a 
paragraph from a paper I wrote a long time about that mentions Sakamoto 
and Osaka:

****
	The imagination of community appears more on the level of myth in the 
Osaka of Sakamoto Junji's films.  While having worked as an assistant 
director for Izutsu, Sakamoto depicts Osaka as less gritty and 
animalistic than that of Brat's Empire or Boys, Be Ambitious ("Kishiwada 
shonen gurentai," 1996), as less nostalgic as Osaka Story, and as less 
romantic as Twins ("Futarikko," 1996-7--the NHK morning drama that owed 
far too much to Sakamoto's Checkmate ["Ote," 1991]).  Especially in the 
area of Shinsekai around Tsutenkaku Tower, Osaka to Sakamoto is imbued 
with a power that derives from its class-based resistance (to real estate 
developers in Billiken ["Biriken," 1997] or other representatives of 
"decent society"), its rude honesty, and in a curious way, its lack of 
the kind of given camaraderie prevalent in Tora-san's shitamachi.  Osaka 
rarely functions in his films as community acting together; in most 
cases, it is merely a site for the male protagonist to "heal" (iyasu), to 
use Kato Go's word.    What performs the healing is less the human 
community itself--in fact, as in Billiken, it often rejects the hero--but 
rather the geography itself and the mythical culture that resides there.  
As Yomota notes, Sakamoto's Shinsekai features a distinct distaste for 
technology and favors doing it yourself.  It is this spirit that is 
essential for Sakamoto's heroes who, being boxers or chess gamblers or 
kitschy gods, suffer a trauma that only they, on their own (or with the 
help of a very small few), can overcome through a rigorous self-training 
that always borders on the mythical (the colossal chess match on 
Tsutenkaku in Checkmate; the mythical existence of Billiken himself; the 
epic battle between good and evil in Iron Fist ["Tekken," 1990]--set in 
Kochi]).  Sakamoto's Osaka remains fictional (although his use of real 
"heroes" like the boxers Akai Hidekazu [Knockout ("Dotsuitarunen," 1989)] 
and Tatsuyoshi Jo [Boxer Joe (1995)] to play themselves indicates his 
commitment to connect his fictional myths to reality), so it is precisely 
the preservation of the mythical status of a local place that provides 
the groundwork for a self-regeneration that can combat the evils of today 
(this, in some ways, can be said to be Sakamoto's philosophy of 
entertainment cinema).
****

I should note that Sakamoto just finished a video for the Gunma "Eizo no 
jidai" exhibition.  It and contributions by Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Aoyama 
Shinji will apparently be showing at Athenee Francais next month.  They 
showed all three before the Athenee shinnenkai a couple weeks ago and 
Sakamoto's work is appropriately called "Shinsekai."  It basically 
features Harada Yoshio walking around Shinsekai as a musician asking 
people he runs into to sing a song.  What becomes evident in all this is 
the ability of Shinsekai/Osaka to accommodate all the social marginals 
that Japan produces, like gay bar owners, transvestites, etc. Sakamoto 
parodically builds on this by having Harada propose that all the Afghan 
refugees be brought to Shinsekai.  Harada's character, however, who lives 
on the top of Tsutenkaku, is sent off to the Afghan war at the end and 
dies.

(By the way, this and Kurosawa's video are the first two Japanese works 
I've seen to comment on 9.11 and its aftermath.  Kurosawa's work, 
entitled 2001 Eiga no tabi, is an amazing horror production: composed 
mostly of video footage he shot travelling around the globe, in the 
editing, the dominant image becomes one of planes flying through the 
sky--and very close to buildings. Leave it to Kurosawa to play with our 
feelings of horror towards new images.)

Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171