Mickey Schulkes

Excerpt 1

‘Nothing that is expressed is obscene. What is obscene is what is hidden.’ - Oshima Nagisa

The first time I ever saw an erotic Japanese art house film was the night I moved to Tokyo. Having screwed up my arrival date with my landlord - ergo, having no access to my humble new ‘danchi’ abode - I ended up crashing at a Polynesian themed Love Hotel in Shinjuku for the night; one of those neon-sign-baring sex dens with the gaudy wallpaper, futuristic robo-toilets and battery-powered beds that cater to Japan’s sexually frustrated youth. Or at least that is the type of clientele these joints aimed to accommodate during their inception in the 70s - a time when youngsters still living with their folks were unable to consummate their sexual desires behind the wafer-thin walls of their parents’ stifling post-war block apartments. These short-stay suites - whose mirror-plastered ceilings, water mattresses and gussied up decor became synonymous with the sleazy bubble era nightlife of the 80s - provided Japan’s youth with some much-needed privacy. As for me, they simply provided a cheap, no-res-needed crash pad for a night or two.

I got to the reception at a little past one and was immediately greeted by a delicate pair of alabaster hands that had emerged from a slit in the wall. After ever so discreetly handing me my keycard, both of our anonymities still intact, I made my way up to my Kabukicho ‘no-tell motel room’ - rotating circle bed, artificial silk sheets and all. Having used up all my Ambien and not disciplined enough to try and fight off the jetlag without, I reclined and felt around for a remote in hopes of finding something decent on TV; a subtitled Satoshi Kon picture or a Yakuza flick or something like that. I eventually located a Toshiba clicker alongside some litre containers of lubricant not so subtly disguised as bottles of shampoo (for modesty, of course) and once I got my bed to stop spinning, I began flicking through the channels for some late-night siesta-inducing entertainment.

The genitals of an old homeless guy fill the screen as they are hit by small fistfuls of snow. Naughty children have found the man sprawled out, laying comatose outside a Tokyo hotel - surely anaesthetized from a few too many Asahi’s the night before. They seize the opportunity to lift open his scraggy kimono with the stick end of a Japanese flag and get up to some devilry. 

The film I had landed on was Oshima Nagisa’s 1976 release, In the Realm of the Senses - a film based on the true story of Sada Abe, a geisha/prostitute who killed her lover via erotic asphyxiation before hacking off his genitals and carrying them around Tokyo in a kimono. While not quite a porno, (despite its wealth of unsimulated sex acts including a blow job that makes Brown Bunny look like it's rated PG and a geisha gang bang that left me never looking at wooden bird sculptures quite the same way) the film wasn’t really a regular Oshima New Wave picture either - something i’ll get into later. It was more of an arthouse meets grindhouse type of film - a blurring of art and pornography, kind of like the films of Gaspar Noé or Lars Von Trier - but without the kind of titillation you’d expect from the sexually injected television screens of Japan’s love hotels.

It was in the late 60s that the first tape players hit Japanese markets and by the time love hotels had started becoming hot commodities in the early 70s, personal televisions became something of a love hotel staple. Naturally, with the kinds of activities that such establishments aim to accommodate it made sense that the channels would showcase something a little kinkier than Mobile Suit Gundam-style anime and indeed, production companies like Shintoho and Ôkura Eiga seem to have supplied love hotels with videos of a steamier kind.

Oshima’s biopic nudie shouldn’t have seemed that unusual in a place like this and yet it most certainly was. Sure, there was lots of nudity and a ton of sex, but it seemed to me that this was a porno with no real intention of arousing its audience at all. In fact, for any couple seeking to enhance their sexual escapades with a bit of erotic stimulus playing in the background, Oshima’s lurid film would have been one hell of a turn off. 

Oshima and Unerotic Pornos 

Oshima had been somewhat of a shot in the arm when it came to my enamorment with Japan and its cinema. I had been mildly obsessed, if there is such a thing, with the New Wave cinema of Hong Kong and in particular its second wave, of which Wong Kar Wai acted as head honcho in terms of the movement’s defining auteurs. Inevitably this got me sniffing around some of Asia’s other New Wave movements and once I dove into the rabbit hole of Japanese cinema, I found I couldn’t get back out. Interestingly, the term honcho is derived from the Japanese ‘hanchō’ or ‘group leader’ - it’s not Mexican in origin as many people have come to believe. The term gained popularity in the States in the early 60s but was initially absorbed into the American lingo in the 40s by US servicemen stationed in Japan who brought the term back with them when the occupation ended, and troops returned home. These occupation and early post-occupation years represent an era that marked and bred a generation of avant-garde filmmakers in Japan - those of the Nūberu bāgu, the Japanese New Wave - and Oshima Nagisa, as it turned out, filled the position of head honcho. 

It is surprising then that this film of Oshima’s that I watched that first night in Tokyo is probably his best-known work despite the fact that it wasn’t anything like the New Wave films that made him a household name on the international film festival circuit. In fact, his tour de force wasn’t actually released until 1976 so it didn’t really belong to the New Wave genre anyway with the movement having already faded away by the early 70s. And it can’t even really be considered Japanese, as while it was shot in Kyoto, L'empire Des Sens (its original title) was technically a French production - one that wouldn’t have come into fruition were it not for Oshima’s Cannes-born friendship with Anatole Dauman (the guy who produced films like Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour, Christ Marker’s La Jetée and Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin-Feminin). 

Like I said, the film really didn’t give off even remotely the same feel as Oshima’s usual New Wave stuff, or anything else he had made up until then for that matter. It could be that he was influenced by his New Wave counterpart, Imamura Shohei, who aroused controversy with films like The Insect Woman (1963) for his intense interest in sexual themes - in the relationship between the lower part of the human body and the lower depths of Japanese society. Or perhaps it was the fact that Pier Paolo Pasolini’s equally fabled Salò came out just the previous year - a film adapted from the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. While it would be far too simplistic to whittle the film down to an ‘orgy of violence and degradation,’ the nausea-inducing feces force-feeding scene combined with the mass rapes, pedophilia and executions makes Pasolini’s magnum opus something like ‘the mother of repulsive and controversial films’ - at least in the cinema of the West. And while Oshima’s picture isn’t nearly as depraved, when it comes to pushing the boundaries with politics and sex, Salò could have certainly been an inspiration. It is also notable that Oshima wasn’t the first to adapt the story of the sadomasochistic castrating geisha into film, as A Woman Called Sada Abe came out just a year earlier - a film directed by Noboru Tanaka, known for his work in the theatrical pornographic film world of the ‘Roman Porno’. If you look up the film’s credits, however, another even more direct influence will hove into view with Koji Wakamatsu listed as the film’s co-screenwriter and assistant director - a guy known in Japanese cinema as the Godfather of the independently produced, low-budget, softcore porno movies known as pink films. 

The pink film 

The pink film (or pinku eiga) has lurked in the murky underbelly of Japanese cinema since the early 60s. It's the type of film you may have found flicking through the channels of a love hotel television set before the hardcore porn tapes of the adult video industry took over. Yet it wasn’t on the small screens of these hedonistic short stays that most pink films were originally enjoyed but rather the remodelled ‘adult only’ cinemas whose softcore screenings would help keep Japan’s movie-going industry afloat. Satoru Kobayashi’s 1962 erotic crime drama, Flesh Market, is generally accepted as the first ever pink film and it was born out of an era marked by the rise of television, the resultant crash of box office returns, the bankruptcy of the major studios and a nation of emptying theatre seats. With theatres unable to fill their double or triple bills, a new kind of film was needed to lure audience members back to the cinema in ways that the majors had not. This is where the kinky softcore indies of the pink film ‘genre’ came into play and by the 1970s this sub-industry was already booming with audiences flocking to their local Pink theatres to catch the triple-bill screenings of a genre that now made up almost half of all the films produced in Japan. 

I put genre in quotation marks here because despite a couple of unwritten rules that pretty much congealed into place by the early 70s, (shooting 1 film of around 1 hour in around 1 week on 35mm film, guerilla-style and with a rather pathetic budget) these ‘three-million-yen films’ or ‘eroductions,’ as they have also been called, don’t actually fit into any particular genre in the traditional sense. According to Jasper Sharp’s 2008 work, Behind the Pink Curtain - a Pink bible of sorts that summons its readers into the hinterlands of Japan’s underground erotic cinema scene - what really defines the pink film genre is not its content or even its eroticism but rather its means of distribution and production.When it came to subject matter, as long as pink filmmakers met their quota on sex scenes and nudity, they could pretty much make anything from a surrealist cyberpunk slasher to a cowboy space operetta. 

For pink filmmakers, most of whom were university graduates, (a prerequisite for those wanting to get hired in the Japanese film industry) working on a skin flick provided just as good of a starting point as any. And while titillation may have been the main target, things like mise-en-scene, camera angles, script and soundtrack were given much more attention in the production of a pink film than that of your average dirty movie. The subgenre provided young filmmakers with a directorial gateway drug of sorts and a space of seemingly infinite artistic freedom. But while the pink film industry has produced some genuine cinematic knockouts - turning out some of the most mind-bending, wildly experimental and hallucinatory pictures of the Japanese indie scene - the reality is that the bulk of these types of pictures delivered little more than the cheap titillation and paper-thin narratives that they promised. 

It’s true, most pink films were trash - smutty stag films that were dispassionately watched and then taped over to be consumed again. Pink Theatre patrons were no cinephiles either, but most likely horny salarymen on their lunch breaks chasing after an airconditioned room. You could find them lounging around the theatre like a bunch of sweltering legumes, their chain-smoking fumes flirting with the dust particles by the projector as the no smoking signs remained diligently ignored. Other Pink Theatre frequenters were the seedy individuals of Japan’s bubble era 80s who used the sheltering darkness of the cinema’s dimmed lights to solicit blowjobs and double masturbations. But pink films and their theatres weren’t always this tragic, if you consider the exception and not the rule. And Wakamatsu Koji was certainly an exception. 

Wakamatsu films weren’t at all like the other cinematic junk food that was out there. For one, several of the films he produced in the late 60s and early 70s were screened at European film festivals - something unheard of in the eroduction orbit at the time. While most pink films were made to be scarfed down and forgotten, Wakamatsu’s pictures - often drenched with maddeningly elusive political allegory - crossed over into the realm of subversive art. Art still venerated by Japanese cult film enthusiasts to this day. His socially conscious pornos, as I like to call them, were not consumed in the usual dispassioned salaryman fashion. Rather, ‘people would watch them quietly and intensely, even reverently’when Wakamatsu was in his prime. The political porno brainchildren that branded Wakamatsu a radical filmmaker blurred the lines between art and pornography, serving as visual testimonies of an age of sexual expression, student rebellion, burgeoning left-wing radicalism and sweeping post-1960 disillusionment. For Wakamatsu, who died in 2012 after being hit by a Shinjuku taxi, these films are the legacy of a director that was forever raging against the machine. 

As an ex-con and ex-Yakuza member whose connections got him into the biz, Wakamatsu’s entry into the pink film arena was almost as unconventional as the movies that made him famous. Back in his directorial salad days however, Wakamatsu drank the Pink industry Kool-Aid just like the rest of his eroduction compatriots did. The workaholic director produced something like 100 films and most of his output - titles like The Love Robots, Dark Story of a Japanese Rapist and Orgy - simply catered to the flavour of the month. It was through these run-of-the-mill features however, that Wakamatsu and his collaborators could fund his more experimental works - films like his 1966 psychosexual bondage masterpiece, The embryo Hunts in Secret, for instance - and exploit the distribution system that the eroduction industry hereby provided. 

The Dawn of Political Pornos 

Wakamatsu’s first real stand-out picture was released a year following the 1964 Tokyo Olympics when, by the sweat of Japan’s brow, the games had restored the country’s global status ‘from post-war pariah to high-tech go-getter,’ leaving the land of the rising sun to bask in a state of modest pride (á la Japonaise). Broadcast for the first time in glorious technicolor, the 64’ Games provided Nippon with a tentative sense of security. Their global popularity was at an all-time high as somewhat of a selective amnesia took over, shrouding the atrocities of war under a new kind of patriotism - one that involved some good-old fatality-free combat between nations. It was but a year later that an overseas screening of a different sort would once more garner international attention; one that threatened to corrode Japan’s recently achieved lily-white image by drenching it in pink-tinged controversy. We are of course talking about Wakamatsu’s iconic tenement block flick - his 1965 “succés de scandale”, as David Desser calls it - ‘Secret Acts Behind Walls’. 

Secret Acts Behind Walls was the first of Wakamatsu’s eighteen prior works and the first picture from within the pink film ether to catch the glimpse of overseas eyes after a succession of strange fortuities led it all the way to the 1965 Berlin Film Festival. The picture wouldn’t have even made it to domestic screens if Wakamatsu hadn’t presented a different script to its financiers, potentially risking any future funding if things backfired and they didn’t rake in a profit. The commissioning company, Kanto Movie, approved the project and it wasn’t until the whole thing was wrapped and edited that they realised Wakamatsu had taken them all for a ride. Needless to say, upon seeing the final product, with its Little Boy aftermath overlays, incestuous rape scenes and Vietnam War references (all of which I will delve into in a later chapter), the people at Kanto were foaming at the mouth. As it turns out however, the film would have its investors lining their pockets - in large part because of some German guy from Hansa-Film (As Wakamatsu referred to him) who, after catching the film during a visit to Tokyo, ended up submitting it to the Berlin Film Festival. It wasn’t the prestige of the festival that led to the film’s domestic success, however. Quite the opposite in fact. 

Any of the film’s artistic merit was hastily dimmed by scandal as domestic newshounds ventilated the dirty linens of Japan’s film industry for the second time that year. The first director to land in the gutter press was Takechi Tetsuji whose 1964 and 1965 cult-classics, Daydream and Black Snow led to a high-profile obscenity trial. It wasn’t the full-frontal nudity or rape scenes that got the censors on Takechi’s track, however - far more salacious and pornographic films had gone unscathed in the past. Rather, it was his treatment of the nude body as a political allegory for the US military presence on Japanese soil that got him into trouble….

The Great Wave off Kurosawa - Fleshing out the New Wave

I had rented out a shitty little apartment in Shinjuku - one of those khrushchyovka looking buildings that cropped up all over the city in the 50s and 60s and 70s - and I would often hang around the Big Box movie theatre at Takadanobaba Station where a lot of the students from nearby campuses loitered and smoked Seven Stars cigarettes and got wasted off half-litre cans of Chu-hi. From there you could almost see the concrete soviet bloc-esque buildings of which one small cubicle became my home, and one stop on the train from Takadanobaba took you straight to my university’s Campus.

I moved to Tokyo in the summer of 2019 to study Japanese film and anime at Waseda University. It was there that I met Professor Sasaki and where my deep dive into the Japanese New Wave would streamline from late-night Asian film blog perusals, in which superficial comparisons were perpetually drawn between Godard and Oshima, to actual class time. Professor Sasaki was quick to denounce the oft repeated and reductive notion that the Japanese New Wave emerged as some kind of second-rate wannabe Nouvelle Vague. And Oshima himself also disapproved of such fatuous classifications, firing back in frustration at international critics who equated him to the big daddy of the Nouvelle Vague with a verbal ejaculation. “GODARD IS THE FRENCH OSHIMA!”

The year 1959 marked the baptism of two distinct New Wave movements. “Après tout, je suis con” is the line that kicked off the French New Wave with the release of Jean Luc Godard’s first feature, À Bout de souffle (Breathless</em>); a film that pays tribute to the classic chase sequence movies of Godard’s youth; the kind of American gangster flicks or film noir popcorn movies made during the Hollywood Golden age by the B Movie studios of Poverty Row - studios like Monogram Pictures for instance, to which Godard dedicates his film. À Bout de souffle was the first of a slew of French films in the late 50s to early 70s to reject the so-called ‘Cinema de Papa’: the kind of hackneyed, studio-bound and script-heavy cinema that François Truffaut talks about in his1954 essay, “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema.40”It was an old-timey cinema reliant on literary adaptation - a cinema about as innovative as a stagnant ditch - that directors like Godard of the Nouvelle Vague strove to turf out.

The other New Wave movement to hatch during that cinematically auspicious year in 1959 was the Japanese Nūberu bāgu - a movement inaugurated by Oshima Nagisa when his debut feature Ai to Kibo no Machi (A Town of Love and Hope) hit the scene across Japan’s picture houses. While the Nūberu bāgu is a term that may have been pinched off the French, the katakana-ized label is about the only thing that can be said to have emerged out of the nouvelle vague as, while both filmic movements do share a number of things in common, they pitched up their tents within quite distinct circumstances and so, their contexts have got to be set asunder if you’re gonna fully appreciate the art.

Admittedly, the fact that so many New Wave movements crashed into the established cinemas of this particular period and the fact that all New Wave cinemas are yoked together at a most basic level by a desire to buck the conventions of filmic tradition, and by an engagement of directors with the social and political ills of their time, does point to a kind of inaugurating cinema. And presumably it is the nouvelle vague cinema of France whose moniker got slapped onto so many avant-garde film movements of this era. Movements like Brazil’s Cinema Novo, the Czech New all cropped up at around the same time - or at least not too long after - and despite their similar raison d’être and their poached name, you really can’t consider any of them dime store knock offs of the Nouvelle Vague. In order to ‘get’ the films of each movement - to extract the wax from the carapace and get to the gold, “á la Sembène” - you’ve got to appreciate the backdrop in which they were produced.

Desser makes a good point of this in Eros Plus Massacre when he brings up the British New Wave and a cultural development of the same blood known as the Angry Young Men movement; that is, the fact that few would make the claim that the British New Wave was but an imitation of the French Nouvelle Vague or even a response to it - not merely because of its chronological impossibility but because of the obvious British context from which the films of the former emerged. In fact, what influenced the directors of the British New Wave had little to do with the nouvelle vague films being produced in neighbouring Panane and much more to do with the notoriously archaic class structure within which they grew up. With their pictures, the directors of the British New Wave (the likes of Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, John Schlesinger and Lindsay Anderson) wrung out the sweat of their nation’s scornful brow over kitchen-sink dramas and stories of gritty realism written by a generation of ‘angry young men’ - men like John Osborne, John Braine and Kingsley Amis whose sardonic problem plays, Look Back in Anger (1956, filmed in 1959), Room at the Top (1957, filmed in 1958), and Lucky Jim (1953, filmed in 1957), wound up on the big screen in the late 50s and early 60s.

The bottom line here is that people don’t look at the British New Wave as some sort of Xeroxed nouvelle vague as it was a distinctly British reservoir of historic and cinematic events from which the movements’ cineastes of social change leaked out. After defining the Japanese New Wave then, with the movement having its own distinctly Japanese ancestry of filmic and socio- political events, it should be shocking to find that anyone would still view this development in Japanese film as some sort of counterfeit to the ‘real deal’ in France or as some kind of reprint of an avant garde movement that was never much of an inspiring force to the Japanese to begin with. Besides, it’s not as though anyone thinks of the esteemed French Nouvelle Vague as a back issue anyway. Similarly, when looking at the sociopolitical context of Wakamatsu’s more experimental films, his works resonate much more with the Japanese New Wave than the Pink film.

So, let’s get into defining the Japanese New Wave, for which I will again look to Desser and his late 80s work, Eros Plus Massacre - a book in which he churns out the sine qua nons of the movement in a way that trashes any useless cannon-fodder but still makes sure to touch on the essentials of what makes the Nūberu bāgu so distinctly Japanese. First of all, we’ve got to make a note of the fact that the Japanese Nūberu bāgu, with its commercial and mainstream origins, is immediately set apart from other New Wave movements that burst out of the independent scene; as unlike Hollywood whose studio system got killed off by the Supreme Court in the late 40s, Japan’s studio system was still very much alive.

Of course, as I’ve already mentioned, the Japanese New Wave figures in any films produced or released on the back of A Town of Love and Hope - that feature that Oshima directed in 1959. On top of that, the directors of this movement deliberately deep-sixed many of the previous filmic norms of Japanese cinema, making their film form consciously disjunctive. I’ve got to say though that this second point is one that is too often harped on as while the Japanese New Wave could be thought of as a reaction against the older gen of filmmakers - guys like Ozu or Mizoguchi or Kurosawa - there’s much more to it than that. Which brings me to the third facet of Desser’s definition - that is, the glaringly political position taken on by films of the Nūberu bāgu, whether that be in a broad sense or toward a specific issue. Naturally, this definition on its own really does separate the wheat from the chaff and yearns for some further explanation. But one of the things I've cottoned onto during my cinematic trek through this decidedly elliptical film movement is that there’s a master key of sorts when it comes to decrypting the films of the Nūberu bāgu and that master key has got the term ‘Anpo’ written all over it. Before we get into Anpo, however, I’d like to start off with one of the ways that political stances were taken in the New Wave films of the 60s in a more general sense and this was often through a socio-political commentary on the era itself.

Swinging Shinjuku

When I was living there, Shinjuku had in recent years unveiled a 12-foot Godzilla statue on the rooftop of one of its many Kabukicho high-rises, the Shinjuku Toho building. The massive monster head had been erected following a Hollywood remake of Ishiro Honda’s original 1954 Kaiju picture and a domestic version was already under way. Godzilla’s release preceded the sea change that took place across the silver screens of Japan’s meigaza picture houses, from the Golden Age of Japanese cinema, the rise of the indie sector, the introduction of technicolor, and the proliferation of the eroduction and samurai flick, to the lost decade of the 80s with its (mostly) shitty live action blockbusters. It was within this sphere of time between the denouement of Allied occupation - when Japan was still prophesying whether it’d be facing an aquarian age or the Armageddon - and the death of the Showa emperor in 89’ that the Japanese New Wave would arrive on the scene, ferment and fizzle out. And in its development the ward of Shinjuku played a title role. Godzilla’s initial 54’ release (by none other than Toho) took place just three years before the Anti-Prostitution Act was passed, leading a bunch of brothel owners to close up shop in the ‘akasen’ red light districts of Tokyo only to relocate to Shinjuku (and more specifically to the district of Kabukicho - that place I stayed in that tacky love hotel for the night). Failing to obliterate the profession, the Anti Prostitution laws merely decamped sex workers to a different part of town; and with the Kabuki district having several gaps to fill, the passing of the 1956 Act could be seen as the equivalent of a maître d showing guests to a new table.

The 60s were fast approaching and Shinjuku was rapidly emerging as the marrow not only of Tokyo’s red-light district but of the Japanese counterculture itself. Past Kabukicho, and past the Godzilla statue, the pachinko lots teemed with stale cigarette smoke and the Chinese street walkers strutting outside hostess bars, you will find the Ginkgo-tree-lined streets of Waseda’s campus - trees that sour the air with the smell of shit and vomit when their fruit falls in the autumn - and another 10 minutes down the line is where I rented my cabin fever- inducing studio in that complex of concrete coops by Takadanobaba station. I spent most of my days and nights in the ward of Shinjuku and spent a good deal of time wool-gathering about the kinds of folks that would often appear in the 60s and 70s flicks I'd been watching since I got to Japan - the bedroom community drifters, the American Vietnam War deserters looking to make it to Sweden, the coffeehouse Marxists and above all else, those twenty-something year-old Japanese college kids who had also walked to class along the shit-scented paths of Shinjuku’s university campuses some 60 years before I did. And so, a slight sense of anemoia set in - being a young student living in Shinjuku and all. That is, a feeling of nostalgia for a time or place I'd never known. But the youth that figured into the kinds of pictures I was watching digested a scene of Shinjuku history that was altogether different from mine. Different in that they experienced Shinjuku during the era that it became and then ceased to be the countercultural metropolis of Japan’s youth - an era in which Japan entered into an age of student-led rebellion, sexual freedom, and post-Anpo disillusionment.

By the 60s Shinjuku had become the pith of artistic ferment as well as the nerve centre of sexual liberation and of a youthful vanguard. Watanabe Katsumi’s photographs from his The Gangs of Kabukicho collection provide a pretty good sense of the types of figures that roamed the streets of Shinjuku during this time and confirm that when it comes to 60s stereotypes, the disseminated image of ‘Swinging Shinjuku’ holds a fair amount of truth. Prostitutes carried out business in makeshift brothels while young go-go boot clad women and mala-bead wearing men wandered the alleys of Golden Gai, delighting in the vices of the post- war mecca of self-expression that Shinjuku had become. Home to the Yakuza, to Japan’s hippie: the glue-sniffing futen, to chanting Hare Krishnas and guitar-stroking folk guerrillas. To the pomp of Kabukicho whores and Ni-chome drag queens of the neighbouring ‘blue light district’, the influx of avant-garde artists, playwrights, and poets. To photographers, jazz musicians and any other beat-generation devotee or member of the anagura/underground scene, and to the masses of university students leading the New Left into insurgency - Shinjuku was the emblematic site of post-war Japanese countercultural activity, and when it came to making movies much of this activity revolved around sex and revolution.