An oblique representation of Japan’s fascist, colonialist behavior during the Asia-Pacific War, Emperor Tomato Ketchup casts 70 nameless children as fascists who have imprisoned all adults under the rule of the titular emperor dressed in European military attire, complete with a bicorne hat à la the Meiji emperor. Barring Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), there may not be a campier film that evokes the aesthetics of fascism. Shot in black-and-white 16 mm, primarily with a handheld camera, the film comprises a series of short shots, surrealistically juxtaposed, without synced sound. The film’s sex scenes between male children and adult women have kept it from being frequently screened outside Japan, but they are hardly gratuitous in the way they play off the relationship between fascism and sexuality (see, for example, Susan Sontag’s famous 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism”). While the film’s most shocking scenes show the prepubescent emperor frolicking in a mock orgy with adult women, their spirit closely suggests the flaccid playfulness and polymorphous sexuality of the orgy scenes in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963).

And yet to focus exclusively on these bodily spectacles is to miss the film’s point. Through such scenes the film critiques US–Japan power relations and, moreover, Japan’s symbolic infantilization. In Western discourse the perceived diminutiveness of the Japanese has long been used to naturalize their infantilization. This obsession can be seen in works as recent as Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) and traced all the way back to noted Japanologist Lafcadio Hearn, who wrote of Japan in 1891, “Elfish everything seems; for everything as well as everybody is small, and queer, and mysterious.” As if in response, Emperor Tomato Ketchup seems to take at face value Wilhelm Reich’s words “Fascist mentality is the mentality of the ‘little man’” to deconstruct this Western impulse, a subtext of the occupying forces’ interpretation of Japan’s fascist acts as a childish aberration that American reeducation would cure. General Douglas MacArthur, who led the US occupation of Japan, famously described the country as a “nation of 12-year-olds,” a characterization that both exculpated and diminished its people.

Curiously, Emperor Tomato Ketchup treats postwar US–Japan relations not only thematically but structurally. The film had its debut as part of a double bill with a Godard film in Tokyo. “I felt quite confident about the film at the time, but it was very unpopular,” Terayama explained in 1980. “I cut a little and a little more, and finally a film that was over two hours long was now only about 40 minutes long.” This shortening parallels the way Emperor Tomato Ketchup shrinks Japanese adults to children, as well as the symbolic diminution of the pattern’s archetype, Emperor Hirohito, who after the war shrank from a god to a man, and then to a child, towered over by General MacArthur in their infamous “wedding photo.” This shrinking critiques the narrative that would have Japan “mature” into capitalist democracy—a narrative imposed on the country from without, much like the family structure that Terayama despised for being forced on the child.

Aware, however, that stereotypes cannot be undone through oppositional means, Terayama refused to construct the film as a positive statement of identity. Instead, the film suggests that self-representation is relational, underscoring how Japan’s identity had been constructed by the US. The last scene employs an audio track from Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad (1965) laid over a shot of three children dressed up as national leaders, including Emperor Tomato Ketchup, at the opening ceremony of the 1964 Tokyo Games. As they watch, they trade their respective glue-on mustaches, suggesting that the Tokyo Olympics were stagecraft performatively inscribing Japan into adulthood. Asserting that the difference between Emperor Tomato Ketchup the kiddie fascist and the mature capitalist is a mere fake moustache, Terayama points to the emptiness of the idea that capitalist democracy is progress.