It’s rare that an experimental filmmaker’s grave is regularly visited by weeping fans. But Shuji Terayama, who died in 1983, is an unusual case. The protean and prolific artist was most acclaimed in his native Japan as an avant-garde dramatist and poet, although he was also celebrated for the lyrics he wrote for pop songs (including Carmen Maki’s 1969 debut single, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”) and his boxing and horse-racing criticism. He was both a public figure and avant-garde artist, two roles that—Warhol aside—seem irreconcilable in the US. One of Japan’s most popular comedians, Kazuyoshi Morita, still performs a famous impersonation of Terayama, which is akin to Jay Leno being known for his Jack Smith impression—if only Leno had four regular programs on TV and Smith had penned lyrics to Loretta Lynn’s songs.

Yet outside a small circle of cinephiles, Terayama remains obscure in the West. Only two of his narrative films, including Fruits of Passion: The Story of “O” Continued (1981), starring Klaus Kinski, are available on DVD in the US, and none of his experimental films have been released there. Last year Tokyo’s Daguerreo released the DVD boxed set The Experimental Image World of Shuji Terayama, whose trickling out beyond Japan may help Terayama reach wider acclaim. The dominant themes of his oeuvre—critiques of origins and traditional family structure—remain relevant to Japanese cultural production today, as so much of the latter capitalizes on associations between Japan, cuteness, and images of infantility.

Befitting a man who questioned the primacy of origins, Terayama frequently revised his biography. Nevertheless, he was born in rural Aomori Prefecture in 1935 and escaped at the age of 10 with his mother from their hometown after it was bombed in an air raid. That year Terayama’s father was killed while stationed in Manchuria, which, as Terayama put it, absolved him of the Freudian impulse to kill his father or sleep with his mother. By the age of 15 Terayama was publishing poems; by 20 he had scripted his first play at Waseda University, where he studied literature. His first screenplay, A 19-Year-Old’s Blues, based on Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning (1942), was written in 1959, and the following year he directed a now-lost 16 mm film that allegedly documented cats being pushed off the roof of a high-rise building. In 1967 Terayama established the theatrical troupe Tenjo Sajiki (the name was taken from the Japanese release title of Marcel Carné’s 1945 Les Enfants du paradis but roughly translates to “peanut gallery”). He claimed the group was partly composed of runaways who had arrived at his doorstep—a product, one assumes, of a series of essays and lectures in which Terayama encouraged young adults to leave home. Although he would direct five feature-length films before his death at age 48, it is chiefly Terayama’s experimental films—informed by other avant-gardes like Surrealism and British expanded cinema—that continue to reverberate today.

The 1970 Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Terayama’s best-known experimental film and a high point of his interrogation of origins and teleology, issues from some key historical contexts. Its roots lie in his 1960 radio play The Parent Hunt, in which a child stabs his father after being beaten for not doing his homework, triggering a child rebellion. In Emperor Tomato Ketchup, a violent regime of rule by children is unleashed by a similar episode. The film’s opening scene shows a group of armed kids looking on as a girl is spanked by her mother, while her father, in makeup, holds her still. The year 1970, like 1960, was one in which the US–Japan Security Treaty was ratified, guaranteeing the continued existence of US military bases in Japan. Many there felt the treaty compromised the country’s independence and involved it in US neocolonialist agendas and the cold war. In 1960 Michiko Kanba, a Tokyo University student, became the first casualty of demonstrations protesting the treaty’s renewal; her death became a cause célèbre of the Left for the decade that followed.

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.

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
Asada, Akira. “Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale.” In Postmodernism and Japan, edited by Masao Miyoshi  and H. D. Harootunian. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989.

Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: Norton, 1999.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

Igarashi, Yoshikuni. “The Bomb, Hirohito, and History: The Foundational Narrative of Postwar Relations Between Japan and the United States.” In Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Lummis, Douglas. “Genshiteki na nikko no nakdeno hinatabokko.” Shiso no kagaku, June 1981, 18.  

Sakai, Naoki. “Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism.” In Postmodernism and Japan, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989.

Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” In Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Picador, 2002.

Terayama, Shuji. “Shuji Terayama Experimental Film Filmography.” In Illusionary Visions of Shuji Terayama. Tokyo: Daguerreo Press, 1993; and “Chi wa tatta mama neteita” (The Blood Was Sleeping While Standing). In Kanashiki Kuchibue (A Melancholic Whistling). Tokyo: Rippu Shobo, 1993.

Yamamoto, Traise. Making Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

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