The United Red Army on Screen: Cinema, Aesthetics and The Politics of Memory

Cinema, Aesthetics and The Politics of Memory

Christopher Perkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137480347
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137480354
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: History

This book investigates how films made about the URA since the 1990s have engaged with, reproduced and contested cultural memories of the organisation, discussing how directors have addressed questions of narrativization, trauma, intergenerational connection, and political subjectivity as they engage in the politics of cultural memory on screen.

1

The URA, Politics and the Aesthetics of Memory

Abstract: This chapter introduces the United Red Army incident and lays out a rationale for investigating its mediation through film. It argues that a particular way of sensing the incident – an aesthetic of madness – was established by the event’s mediation, which has had an impact on political action in Japan ever since. Film, as an aesthetic technology of cultural memory has the potential for reframing and producing new ways of sensing the incident, and thus for producing new political subjectivities. The chapter then sets out the theoretical framework and method that will be used to investigate the different ways in which films about the URA incident have remediated and challenged the dominant memory aesthetic of madness.

Perkins, Christopher. The United Red Army on Screen: Cinema, Aesthetics and The Politics of Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137480354.0005.

In 2013, the Nippon Television Network broadcast a 30-minute documentary entitled The True Face of Madness (Kyōki no shōtai) (NNN 2013). The documentary opens with a point-of-view shot of a stairway in a cramped multistorey building. After climbing the stairs, we see a door with a sign displaying the name of a ‘strange bar’ (fushigi na sakaba) called Snack Baron. The camera enters the bar and takes in the scene. The proprietor, Uegaki, welcomes us, one customer is lying face down on the counter. A jump cut. Uegaki serves beer to a female patron wearing a beret. She speaks of finding the bar and asking Uegaki if he had killed people. She tells us that he replied ‘yes I’ve killed people’. An older man debates with Uegaki, who is slightly overweight, in his 60s, a bald amiable looking man wearing glasses.

Don’t you regret what you did, killing them? They were comrades weren’t they? Comrades.

If they weren’t comrades it would be okay to kill them?

No, no not that! Because they were comrades it should have been even more –

[Uegaki interrupts]

Putting it a different way, you could also argue that we killed them because they were comrades. We wouldn’t kill normal people.

Another jump cut. Uegaki laughs and says: ‘I didn’t think people would come to a bar run by a murderer.’ At this point the narration begins and what has been thus far intimated is revealed. This ‘normal looking old man’ is in fact Uegaki Yasuhiro, a former member of the United Red Army (Rengō sekigun, henceforth URA), a radical New Left organisation that became notorious in February 1972 for two interrelated incidents. The first (although chronologically second) was the Asama Lodge Incident (Asama-sansō jiken). Running from the police, five members of the URA occupied a lodge in the holiday town of Karuizawa and took the lodge manager’s wife hostage. This resulted in a protracted police siege that garnered unprecedented, around-the-clock television news coverage, lasted ten days and ended when the police, armed with water cannons and a wrecking ball, stormed the lodge. All five members of the URA inside were arrested and the lodge manager’s wife was rescued. The second event constituting the URA incident was chronologically prior but made public subsequent to the Asama Lodge siege when, in the aftermath, it emerged that during the group’s training in the mountains 12 young men and women had been killed. The bodies, which had been buried in the woods, were dug up in front of Japan’s assembled media, and the incident went on to shock the nation.

It is these killings that Uegaki refers to in the above quote from The True Face of Madness. The documentary makes the connection for us as a still shot of old, bald, amiable Uegaki dissolves into a black-and-white photograph of Uegaki as a young man, flanked by two officials and scowling directly out the screen at us. The tacit question asked by the documentary is how to reconcile the contradictions: killing comrades because they were comrades; the popularity of a bar run by a self-confessed murderer; the friendly barkeep and the scowling radical. The soundtrack, which until this point had relied on diegetic sound only, now changes: discordant strings slowly reach a crescendo. And as the title of the documentary appears, the answer is revealed. There is no reconciliation, no understanding. It was all a case of madness.

The True Face of Madness is a useful starting point for an investigation into cultural memories of the URA and speaks directly to the issues at the heart of this book. This book is about memory, cinema and politics; about how particular aesthetics of memory become attached to historical events, and how cinema, as an aesthetic technology of memory, engages in memory politics. As I will argue, The True Face of Madness is a recent example of what I call the dominant aesthetic of memory that became attached to the URA incident. And as Ranciere (2006) has argued of aesthetics, this texture of representation has had important political effects. According to Ranciere, underpinning our practice of politics are aesthetic regimes that mark out what is sensible and define how the sensible is to be apprehended. On this account aesthetics can be thought of as

a delimination of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of space and possibilities of time. (2006, p. 13)

For Ranciere this understanding of aesthetics constitutes the foundation for interrogation of ‘aesthetic practices ... “ways of doing and making” that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility’ (ibid).

Building on this conceptualisation of aesthetics, this book argues that a particular aesthetic of memory regarding the URA incident was produced by contemporaneous and subsequent media coverage that cast the incident, both itself and as synecdoche for the politics of Japan’s ‘long 1960s’ (1958−1972), in terms of madness (kyōki). In Ranciere’s terms, this aesthetic of madness then delimited what was ‘sensible’ about the incident and the politics that it came to represent. As a result, the possibilities of space were restricted: political mass movements, student radicalism on campus and the politics of urban space were now set within a teleological decent into madness. The possibilities of time were also delimited in that the incident acted as a temporal roadblock set between the student activists of the 1960s and subsequent generations.

The second central argument of this book is that films about historical events, such as the URA incident, engage with, contest or reaffirm dominant forms of cultural memory both at the level of narrative (the story, the actors and causality) and at the level of aesthetics, by intervening in the order of what can be seen and how the seen can be apprehended and acted upon. The goal of this book is to first understand how the mediation of the URA incident produced ways of sensing and apprehending the URA incident, and second to explore the ways in which films about the URA have interacted with the aesthetics of memory established by the original mediation.

These opening statements will be unpacked over the course of this chapter. The next section makes the case for the importance of looking at memories of the URA incident, and sketches out the social context in which the films analysed in this book were produced and consumed. Following this, I lay out the theoretical framework underpinning the approach taken in this book to cinema, aesthetics and the politics of memory. In it, I argue for an approach to films about historical events that sees them not in terms of doing history (and either doing it well or badly) but as taking part in the process of producing and contesting cultural memories. I also outline the methodological implications of this framework before concluding with a summary of the rest of the book.

The URA, politics and the problem of connection

On the 40th anniversary of the URA incident, a group called the Association for Leaving Behind the Full Picture of the United Red Army Incident (Rengō Sekigun Jiken no Zentaizō o Nokosukai, hereafter the Association), made up of ex-members and affiliates of the URA, held a symposium to commemorate and debate the incident’s legacy. The Association itself developed in the late 1980s out of discussions over drinks into a group with the remit to record first-person accounts of the turbulent New Left politics of the 1960s and 1970s. The group has since published ten volumes of interviews and debates, edited by Yukino Kensaku, a ex-member of the URA who himself spent ten years in prison after attempting to rob a gun shop in 1971. Panels at the symposium included members of the URA, film directors, commentators, lawyers and journalists, and the topics discussed included the nature and origins of the incident, its legacy, and the meaning it holds for contemporary Japanese society. However, the preamble to the published transcription of the symposium displays surprise that such an event could even be possible. As it states: ‘40 years ago this incident left a deep wound in people’s hearts, and since then many have avoided engaging with it’ (RZNK 2012, p. 2). What changed in Japan that would enable such a public reengagement?

As will be argued over the coming chapters, part of the answer to this question lies with the films analysed in this book. However, it is also important to take into account the social, economic and political conditions of contemporary Japan as they provide the context in which justifications for cinematic engagement with the URA story have been made. Although in the 1960s, and even more so in 1970s and 1980s, Japan’s economy was the envy of the world, with the busting of the speculative bubble in 1989 an economic malaise permeated Japan that has produced what Leheny (2006) has termed a ‘vague sense of anxiety’ about the direction of the nation. As the work of Brinton (2011) has shown, social, political and economic changes in post-1989 Japan have had far reaching effects on the social institutions that managed the production of identity for most of the postwar period. After 1995, the state implemented a number of market deregulation reforms and offloaded the resultant risk onto individuals and families under the moniker of ‘personal responsibility’ (jiko sekinin) and the championing of ‘individual freedom of choice’ (Hook & Hiroko 2007). Against this background, the generation that came of age in the 1990s, known as the lost generation (rosu gene), experienced a slow breakdown of the nation’s economically driven metanarrative. These economic and social changes have seen the emergence in Japan of a class dubbed the ‘precariat’, made up of young workers that face the very real possibility of long-term unstable underemployment. The postwar model of Japan as a ‘general middle class society’ (sōchūryū shakai) has in the past 20 years been replaced by notions of Japan as a ‘divided society’ (kakusashakai) of winners and losers (Chiavacci 2008).

This environment of nagging job insecurity (Genda 2007) has also had an impact on identity and belonging in contemporary Japan, in particular, through the erosion of a sense of place. Japanese social structure has traditionally placed much emphasis on place, or ba, as a fundamental constituent element of identity (Hendry 1995). In Japan’s postwar economic system, an individual’s movement from successive ba was carefully managed by interlocking institutions, the most important of which being the family, schools and the workplace (Brinton 2011). However, as the economy has been deregulated, not only has it become harder for young people to achieve economic stability through long-term employment, it has also become increasingly difficult to achieve the sense of belonging that would be afforded by a stable institutional attachment. As Anne Allison (2013) states in a recent book on Japan’s precarious present, young people very often say that they no longer have a place to belong to.

This social and economic malaise has provided fertile ground for memory politics, both on political right and on the left. On the right, the most conspicuous public example takes place at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which commemorates Japan’s war dead, including a number of Class A war criminals tried and executed during the US Occupation period (1945–1952). The Yūshūkan military museum, which is adjacent to the Shrine, is a prominent component of the Shrine complex’s memory strategy of rendering noble the deaths of Japanese soldiers who fought in the war (for a detailed discussion, see Breen 2007). Through its exhibition, the Yūshūkan constructs a positive narrative of the Second World War that casts Japan as liberators of Asia and Japanese soldiers as embodying values of community and self-sacrifice, all justified in terms of the supposed action models and sense of pride it provides for the present generation. This process of articulation of the Yūshūkan’s mode of remembrance with current day Japan takes place most explicitly through a film shown at the museum, which through its narrative argues that young Japanese can escape the existential crisis associated with post-bubble Japan by coming into contact with and understanding the motivations, ethics and sense of duty of Japanese soldiers, and in particular kamikaze pilots (Perkins 2011).

The Yūshūkan has been roundly criticised for its one-dimensional representation of the Pacific war from which, in Breen’s words (2007, p. 155), the facts of Japanese war crimes, colonialism, aggression and defeat have been ‘obliterated’. Nevertheless, as Rumi Sakamoto (2014) has argued, the museum does still have the capacity to provoke strong emotional responses from visitors. Drawing on the work of Sarah Ahmed (2004) and William Connolly (2002), Sakamoto argues that in order to understand this emotional resonance, analysis must be sensitive to the museum’s affective strategies. In particular, she draws attention to the way in which the Yūshūkan aestheticises the figure of the kamikaze pilot by placing it within a web of emotionally charged cultural symbols while simultaneously removing factors that might interfere with kamikaze’s affective power. Framing the kamikaze pilot in terms of tragic heroism, divinity and ordinariness, and eliciting gratitude for their ‘sacrifice’, enables the museum to circumvent historical accuracy and become an ‘affective space’, where an ‘authentic’ bodily encounter with the exhibition can take place (Sakamoto 2014, p. 19). Sakamoto’s work is important in this regard as it demonstrates how the purchase of particular memory strategies is not due solely to rational argument, but also to the ways in which particular aesthetic renderings of the past produce embodied emotional affect.

On the left, an unlikely memory phenomenon, namely the 2008 boom in sales of prewar Marxist writer Kobayashi Takiji’s (1903–1933) proletarian novella The Crab Cannery Ship (Kani Kōsen, Kobayashi [1933] 2013), is particularly instructive. As well as being linked to memories of the URA, the rediscovery of Kobayashi’s text is illustrative of how people negotiating this new social and economic environment in Japan are looking for narratives that capture their current experience and the ways in which memory work in Japan has taken place across different media.

By the time the social and economic conditions discussed above had set in, Kobayashi’s novella, which tells the story of fishermen uniting against the harsh working conditions and arbitrary exercise of power on a crabbing ship, had largely become a relic of Japan’s prewar past. This changed, however, when a discussion between former punk rock singer and precariat activist Amamiya Karin and the novelist Takahashi Genichiro was published in the Mainichi Shimbun (2008). In the discussion, Amamiya and Takahashi both noted how struck they were by the parallels between the conditions on the crab cannery ship and the precarious working environment young Japanese find themselves in today. These observations circulated widely, eventually reappearing in an article published in Japan’s leading left-of-centre newspaper the Asahi Shimbun, which prompted a book seller, who was also struck by the similarity of the narrative to her own experience as a part-time worker, to order in and subsequently sell a number of copies of the book. Japan’s other major newspaper, the right-of-centre Yomiuri Shimbun, then took up the nascent boom, which led to competition between media outlets over its coverage. By December 2008, roughly 600,000 copies of the original edition of the book had been sold, new editions had been published, and in 2009 (70 years af...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The URA, Politics and the Aesthetics of Memory
• 2  The Japanese New Left and the URA
• 3  A Spectacle of Sex, Violence and Madness
• 4  Horror, Sympathy and Empathy
• 5  The Image, Seeing and the Siege
• 6  Conclusion
• References
• Index