Wakamatsu Koji's "United Red Army"

[Mark D. Roberts]

The Tokyo International Film Festival opened this past weekend, with  
Wakamatsu's Koji's new "United Red Army" as one of the first films  
screened in Roppongi. Wakamatsu and many members of the cast (itself  
a small army) were on hand for Q & A and a press photo op. The film  
treats at the infamous Asama-Sanso incident of 1972, during which  
members of the Japanese Red Army in flight from the police entered a  
mountain lodge in Karuizawa, took the innkeeper hostage, and then  
held off the police for ten days.

In a brief statement before the film, Wakamatsu suggested several  
objectives. The film would explore the reasons behind this incident,  
the reasons that university students became involved in the radical  
movement and eventually chose to fight the police directly at  
Karuizawa. He noted that the two previous films treating this  
incident were more from the point of view of the police, and implied  
that this was really inadequate for a deeper understanding of it.

Over three hours long, "United Red Army" indeed elaborates and frames  
the incident, which itself comprises only the last third of the film.  
The first portion of the film is almost entirely newsreel footage  
showing the history of violent conflict between the student movement  
and the Japanese government in the period 1960-1970. Beginning  
logically with the Anpo-t?s?, this includes many minor clashes and  
effectively creates a context for understanding what is to come.  
Rather than focusing mostly on the conflict around Anpo, this  
sequence emphasizes the continuity of struggle throughout the decade.  
Clashes with police, the occupation of university buildings, the  
occupation of Shinjuku station, the construction of barricades ? all  
of this is shown and described by voice over. Dates and the number of  
arrests (often in the thousands) for each incident are given using  
superimposed text. Where the films of the generation of Oshima and  
Shinoda tend to represent the Anpo-t?s? as a kind of peak, followed  
by malaise and disillusionment of the militant Left, Wakamatsu shows  
it more as a point of focus and amplification in a longer and more  
pitched struggle.

Wakamatsu's own dramatization begins in the later 1960s, first  
showing the various rifts in the student movement, and the formation  
of the more extreme communist tendency that would soon declare war  
against the Japanese government. There are a few scenes of conflict  
with police in a university setting, but the emphasis is more on the  
internal dynamics of the groups. At this point, we leave the newsreel- 
based depiction of the conflict and begin to follow some of its key  
players. This is somewhat confusing, because we leave the realm of  
mass protests, and enter a story of would-be revolutionaries  
themselves. While the film is a dramatic (and thus in some respects  
fictionalized) re-creation, all of the characters are based upon real  
people and there is still much historical detail used to assemble  
this segment. Interestingly, Wakamatsu does not try to create a  
seamless transition between them, but instead subtly emphasizes their  
discontinuity. The "documentary" parts of this first segment of the  
film are all in black and white, with some treatment of the video  
image (cropping, horizontal compression), while the dramatized  
portions are in muted color.

With its declaration of war, the Zenkyoutou undo goes underground and  
begins a phase of preparation for armed conflict. The film's action  
now moves to a network of safehouses and bases created to shelter  
members of the movement. A series of brazen robberies are  
orchestrated to gather cash and weapons. As the movement builds  
itself and seeks to further escape the police, the key players move  
to bases in the countryside. The film now focuses on the one cell  
that will eventually be involved in the Asama-sanso incident, and we  
get a clearer sense of their life underground. What is most striking  
in this middle portion of the film is their emphasis on practices of  
increasingly violent "self-critique". Here, Wakamatsu spares us  
nothing, and captures a very strange dynamic of bonding and  
bloodlust. The group's leaders prove themselves to be utterly  
ruthless, especially with some of the younger members and the women  
involved. The meaning of "critique" becomes completely distorted, and  
is eventually used as justification for savage murders. While  
exhausting and at times quite painful to watch, conceptually this is  
one of the most interesting parts of the film.

The last segment of the film shows how the police gradually close in  
on the group, and their final standoff in the Asama lodge. Again,  
this is entirely from the point of view of the group itself and we  
don't even see the police until the moment when the storm the lodge  
at the very end. There's one sort of perverse and funny scene in here  
concerning an "anti-revolutionary cookie" but otherwise it's played  
straight. During the Q & A, Wakamatsu was asked how he went about  
dramatizing the inn sequence, and he revealed that he'd spoken for  
many hours with Bando Kunio, one of the surviving members, who  
(seemingly for the first time) described some of the things that  
happened at the inn. Bando and the others had apparently made a vow  
of silence about this, which he broke to speak with Wakamatsu. Based  
upon this description, Wakamatsu sought to give a greater air of  
reality to the inn sequence.

At over three hours long, "United Red Army" is a sprawling, detailed  
treatment of the Japanese Red Army. It provides a lot of interesting  
historical context and sheds much light on the backdrop to the Asama  
lodge incident. It doesn't flinch from showing the extraordinary  
violence of the Red Army against its own members. I found myself  
wishing the film tried to explore the whole question of motivation a  
bit deeper, though. Wakamatsu begins to get to this in his treatment  
of the practices of "self-critique" but then sort of refuses to  
personalize or psychologize it. The practice is left somewhat  
ambiguous to emphasize part of the group dynamic. Of course, if his  
goal is to force us to think about this, then the gesture of refusal  
could be described as effective.

During the Q & A, Wakamatsu expressed a sense that the anti- 
government movement and student movement in Japan was deeply affected  
by Asama-Sanso incident, in effect blunted by the media treatment and  
consequences in the national consciousness, and especially by the  
revelation of the violent purges within the movement. At the same  
time, he suggested that the internal violence was poorly understood,  
and that indeed the present era seems to shy away from such  
exploration. In one of his final remarks, he rather provocatively  
stated that the Japanese had greater freedom during the later Showa  
period, that people could say what they really felt without fear of  
judgment or exclusion.

"United Red Army" is scheduled to screen at a few different theaters  
in Japan next year. In Tokyo, it will show at Cinemabox in Shinjuku.

M