ABSTRACT In 1968, Japan’s own “season of politics” was full of strikes, protests, and university closures. Much of the exigence behind students’ revolutionary fervor revolved around a “self-revolution in everydayness,” as activists sought to criticize capitalist consumerism and imperialism, and aimed to transform their own depoliticized consciousness. The films of the Art Theater Guild (ATG) reflect these desires. This paper argues that the films produced by ATG are a deeply political film cycle united by a “house style” which serves to destabilize and dehabituate our perception, and echoes the student protesters in their desire for a self-revolution of everyday life.

ABSTRACT This introductory essay contextualizes the articles that comprise the special issue by focusing on a historical period known as the ”Japanese long 1968” or the “season of politics” (roughly 1966 to 1972), in order to address the trends in the period’s cinematic production as a social and political expression of its time. The prevailing socio-political unrest – from the massive student occupation of university campuses, to the campaign against Japan-US alliance within the framework of the Vietnam War, to the struggle against the construction of the Narita International Airport – had a considerable impact on the way some Japanese filmmakers conceived cinema. Beginning with a review of those events, the article demonstrates how analyzing the impact of the Japanese long 1968 on cinema, and how filmmakers intervened in that phenomenon, enables us to reach not only a better comprehension of the films in question, but also of the way they reflect and interact with the historical moment in which they were produced.

ABSTRACT In the twentieth century, Japan produced an extraordinary documentary film heritage around the rural world which has not received sufficient attention. This article identifies three different approaches to the rural in Japanese film history: first, the wartime interest in place as providing an “authentic essence” of a national identity. Second, the postwar representation of the rural in public relations films (PR eiga), mainly interested in geography. And third, the release of Ogawa’s Summer in Sanrizuka in 1968 which brought a new dimension to a countryside transformed into both a battlefield and an icon of the political protest of the era.

ABSTRACT In the context of the Japanese Long 68, this essay explores the work of experimental filmmaker Shuji Terayama in relation to the tragicomic possibilities of visual humor and cinematic gags. Juxtaposing Ryan Holmberg’s exploration of Japanese nansensu with other historical, cultural and political theories, the article argues that visual gags and comedic performativity (going back to silent cinema and the avant-garde) allowed Terayama to both embrace and critique the revolutionary ideals of the Japanese New Left in the late 60s and early 70s.

ABSTRACT This essay explores the relationship between cinema and the psychedelic counterculture in the United States and Japan through the life and work of the filmmaker Ōe Masanori. After spending five years producing films within and about the counterculture in the U.S., he returned to Japan in 1969 and quickly became involved in the emerging movements at home. The author argues that Ōe incorporated his understanding of psychedelics into his filmmaking to create forms of cinema that could alter how viewers understood themselves and their relationship to the world in the late 1960s.

In 1968, the Scottish Beat novelist Alexander Trocchi hosted an evening in London entitled “The State of the Revolt.” He was joined by the Glaswegian countercultural psychiatrist R. D. Laing and th...