Nihon shunka-ko / Sing a Song of Sex

Nagisa Oshima: 日本春歌考 / Nihon shunka-ko / Sing a Song of Sex (JP 1967).

日本春歌考

    JP 1967. PC: Sozosha. P: Takuji Yamaguchi. 

    D: Nagisa Oshima. SC: Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Toshio Tajima, Nagisa Oshima. DP: Akira Takada – Shochiku Grandscope 2,35:1 – colour. AD: Jusho Toda. M: Hikaru Hayashi. ED: Keiichi Uraoka. 

    GRADUATE BOYS: Ichiro Araki (Toyoaki Nakamura), Koji Iwabuchi (Hideo Ueda), Kazumi Kushida (Katsumi Hiro), Hiroshi Sato (Koji Maruyama). 

    GRADUATE GIRLS: Nobuko Miyamoto (Sanae Satomi), Hiroko Masuda (Tomoko Ikeda), Hideko Yoshida (Sachido Kaneda, Korean).

    Ichimo Itami (Professor Otake), Akiko Koyama (Takako Tanigawa), Kazuko Tajima (Mayuko Fujiwara, 69). 

    103 min

    Print: Japan Foundation, with English subtitles. 

    Viewed at Finnish Film Archive, Orion, Helsinki, 29 Aug 2009.

The colour print looks great to begin with, but the definition of light is uneven.

One of Oshima's most disturbing films.

It is winter in Tokyo. Graduates from the countryside want to enter Tokyo University. Their mentor, Professor Otake, invites them to a pub and they sing together old Japanese bawdy songs. The professor is killed at night in an inn in a gas oven accident.

Akiko Koyama plays the late professor's long-term lady friend.

The story takes place on the resurrection of the Emperor's Day, the celebration of which had been banned during the U.S. occupation. There is a demonstration against it, where workers' songs, the "Warshawjanka", "This Land Is Our Land", "We Shall Overcome", etc. are sung along. The film is almost a musical. The protagonists interrupt the rebellious singing with bawdy songs, male and female. But the bawdy songs have also a strong dimension of social protest.

Also here there is a Korean theme: the origin of the Japanese is in Korea.

The film is deeply nihilistic and pessimistic. The boy students' sexual fantasies are violent, about raping and humiliation. The young generation does not seem better than the old one. The girls' fantasies seem to be about being dominated, humiliated and raped, willingly.

Despite the title, there is hardly any sex and only fleeting nudity. It is more about extreme awkwardness and shyness in sexual matters.