In the end, the way the film uses the figure of the child may be its most haunting aspect. The image of a city seized by children harks back to Tokyo’s ubiquitous war orphans. Having lost their parents during air raids, children were left homeless after World War II and subsequently punished by police for occupying public spaces. It’s difficult not to see Terayama’s fascist children policing the streets of Tokyo as the return of the repressed. Likely the full meaning of this repression went unrecognized until youth took over the streets in massive protests throughout the ’60s, which Terayama’s film creatively inverts—the left-wing students becoming even younger and thrust to the other side of the political spectrum. That they engage in simulated sex is another indication of Terayama’s remarkable acuity as a filmmaker. Just as Emperor Tomato Ketchup gives meaning to traumatic past experiences—those of the Asia-Pacific War and the immediate postwar period—the full significance of the experience lived by the children in the film can only be understood through, as Freud would suggest, deferred action, with their memories lying in wait to be triggered by another scene at another time.

Bibliography
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"Children of the Revolution" comes to ARTINFO from the September 2007 issue of Modern Painters.