Abstract
The paper focuses on Imamura Shōhei’s History of Post-War Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Nippon Sengoshi—Madamu Onboro no Seikatsu), a documentary released for general viewing in 1970. The subject of the documentary was Azaka Emiko, the uninhibited middle-aged owner of the bar Onboro in the port city of Yokosuka, home to a U.S. naval base. Emiko embodied the phantasmagoric (chimimōryō) lowlifes who inhabited the nooks and crannies of Japanese cities and went about their lives without resentment or guilt, unburdened by familial responsibility and social norms that fascinated Imamura. While other intellectuals and film makers were obsessing about the status of Japanese democracy, Imamura chose to focus on people such as Emiko to identify the psychological and moral changes undergone by the Japanese people during three decades of post-war recovery and growth.
Highlights
In the decade from 1960 to 1970, Imamura Shōhei (1926–2006) wrote and directed a body of work dealing with the carnality, squalor, greed and lurking violence that gave context to the lives of pimps, prostitutes, and peddlers of pornography
If the camera had the ability to capture this thing called life, what was the role of cinema: to record or to interpret life? Imamura’s response was to combine the world of the reality—the immediacy and authenticity associated with documentary film-making—with the world of the imaginary: the artifice of storytelling with its emphasis on character development and dramatic arc
The people who were the subjects of his camera were without identity. They were an unassimilable heterogeneity, without representation and “outside” of history; the unchecked off-shoots of life that emerged as an overwhelming number of the rural poor migrated to cities looking for work and wealth. This heterogeneity living outside the pages of history is the subject of Pigs and Battleships (Buta to Gunkan, 1961), The Insect Woman (Nippon Konchūki, 1963), The Pornographers (“Erogotoshitachi” yori Jinruigaku Nyūmon, 1966), A Man Vanishes (Ningen Jōhatsu, 1967), and History of Post-War Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess
Summary
In the decade from 1960 to 1970, Imamura Shōhei (1926–2006) wrote and directed a body of work dealing with the carnality, squalor, greed and lurking violence that gave context to the lives of pimps, prostitutes, and peddlers of pornography His focus fell on life in the streets and back alleys of urban. The people who were the subjects of his camera were without identity They were an unassimilable heterogeneity, without representation and “outside” of history; the unchecked off-shoots of life that emerged as an overwhelming number of the rural poor migrated to cities looking for work and wealth. In the alleys of the black market, Imamura came to realise that food and sex gave value, direction and meaning to life in post-war Japan. Cultural artefacts and social organisation were not signs of progress or the unfolding of the law of history, but a solution to the problem of sustaining the species
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