This is a rough draft from Abe Mark Nornes’
book manuscript, Forest of Pressure: Ogawa
Productions and the Postwar Japanese Documentary.
It is not meant for further distribution.
Beyond the Barricades
Every country that experienced massive student
protests in the Vietnam War era has representatives
in the canon of “1968 films.” Japan’s
contributions would certainly include Summer
in Sanrizuka and Ogawa Pro’s next film, Prehistory
of the Partisans (Paruchizan Zenshi, 1968).
As Ogawa Pro set out to shoot their next
issue in the Sanrizuka Series, a small crew
accompanied Tsuchimoto Noriaki to Kyoto to
produce the latter film. Although a seemingly
straightforward record of the protests at
Kyoto University, this is a remarkably dense
film. Tsuchimoto packs the documentary with
allusions to the complex political landscape
that has produced the infiltration and occupation
of Kyoto University’s famous clock tower.
As in previous films, there are visual analogs
for the interior position achieved by the
filmmakers. After scenes of practice on the
athletic field—helmeted students marching
in formation carrying pipes like rifles—Tsuchimoto
reveals recent renovations to Kyoto University’s
stately grounds. A gentle pan moves across
makeshift barricades made of boards, plywood,
and furniture “borrowed” from classrooms
and offices. Broad surfaces are decorated
with huge words like “revolution”.
With a smooth cut, the camera begins to truck
through the barricade to the students holed
up inside, past a group doing calisthenics,
and ends up in a room littered with piles
of helmets emblazoned with the characters
“Zen Kyoto” (____________).
This was the office of the Literature Department’s
chair, recently converted into the occupation’s
central command. Ogawa Pro’s impressive access
to the inside of one of the most important
actions of the student left was spectacular
for audiences at the time. Perhaps Tsuchimoto
was the only filmmaker who could have accomplished
it. Aside from his credentials as a radical
filmmaker sympathetic to the student movement—most
notably the recent Exchange Student Chua
Swee Lin and the Ogawa Pro calling card—Tsuchimoto
was also known as one of the founders of
Zengakuren when he was a Waseda University
student in 1948. Even at that early point,
their efforts to create a movement outside
of the JCP’s sphere of influence were hampered
by factionalism. Tsuchimoto was frustrated
by the way the infighting only got worse.
The first umbrella organization, the Bund,
repeatedly split into at least eight major
sects, such as Chukakuha, Kakumaru, Hansen,
to name just a few (all of which devoted
enormous energies to the Sanrizuka Struggle).
Tsuchimoto was further frustrated by the
paradox that everyone felt the need for an
organization to push for progress and fight
oppressive structures from the past, yet
these very groups would too often replicate
these structures in their own organization,
most notably the top-down exertion of power
in an analog to the Communist party in Yoyogi—or
the emperor system they abhorred.
In 1968, Tsuchimoto found himself attracted
to the 150-odd Kyoto students that called
themselves the Partisans because he thought
they represented something new, thanks in
part to their relationship to Professor Takida
Osamu (Takemoto Osamu). He did not function
as a leader of the Partisans, but rather
as an intellectual source of inspiration.
This group avoided the production of a “leader,”
or even an “organization” as such.
In the film, Takida and his students explain
their experiment at creating a gonin-gumi
(“party of five”). The idea was
that if any five people could come together
to throw themselves into a project, anything
was possible. It could be the occupation
of a national university, but it could also
be something more modest like a newspaper
or a film. This explains the moniker “partisans.”
They resolutely avoided thinking of their
efforts as sect formation. Instead, they
thought of themselves as “buddies.”
Tsuchimoto also found himself attracted to
the Partisans’ commitment to interrogating
the role of violence in social struggle.
The film shows extended discussions of this
issue. How should they meet the increasingly
violent, even deadly, force of the police?
Can we achieve revolution without violence?
Tsuchimoto felt a relevant need to resolve
these kinds of questions, which are as pressing
in today’s so-called War on Terror as they
were in the traumatic year of 1968.
The film does not provide answers. Instead,
it questions the role of violence while accompanying
the students on their actions. One day they
barge in on entrance examinations—one of
the points of contention in many of the campus
struggles—and dismantle the desks of the
testing rooms with their pipes as befuddled
high school students look on. There are startling
sequences of the famous water cannon attacks
on the tower, when the riot police storm
the building with helicopters circling overhead.
The most memorable scenes document the night-time
protests. Otsu’s photography has an unforgettably
eerie quality that is spatially disorienting,
not unlike the adrenaline driven experience
of a real riot’s unpredictable flow. The
light from the scenes comes only from blazing
automobiles and the fiery plumes of Molotov
cocktails. Tsuchimoto went so far as showing
the step-by-step process of making Molotov
cocktails, complete with the recipe (which
I conscientiously record here):
[RECIPE]
I can think of no better example that demonstrates
how these were no simple, objective records.
These films were, by design, meant to incite
action.
However, the film is, likewise, no direct,
unmediated communication of the students’
methods and philosophy. It is, ultimately,
Tsuchimoto’s commentary on the state of the
student movement in Japan, encouraging spectators
to read the film at this meta-level by framing
the Partisans’ story with reportage from
the famous rally at Tokyo’s Hibiya Park which
inaugurated Zenkyoto. On 9 September 1969,
representatives from all the sects from every
part of Japan converged on Hibiya Park in
downtown Tokyo, a short stroll from the Imperial
Palace. The new organization was to network
all the campus struggles into a united front.
Sixty Partisans joined the sea of protestors.
The film shows riot police pulling students
out of the line to get in for body searches,
followed by typical documentary footage of
demonstrations: massive crowds, waving banners,
helmets, and passionate speeches.
Before long, Tsuchimoto focuses on complications
steamrolling out of control. The speaker
he singles out from the Bund shouts over
the sound of helicopters using a bull horn,
and is suddenly interrupted by a commotion
in the back. It was the Red Army. This organization
had recently formed in the Osaka area (and
indeed had connections to the Partisans).
They criticized the spirit of Zenkyoto as
meekly defensive, and called on the students
to—as the slogan went—“incite uprisings
and seek victory in war.” The group
firmly advocated raising the stakes through
the use of arms, and shortly thereafter staged
various robberies to collect guns and money.
They sent 200 members to Tokyo to disrupt
the Zenkyoto rally. Their noisy protest in
the back quickly deteriorated into fighting,
and Tsuchimoto leaves the scene on that note.
Of all the ways he might have chosen to represent
the formation of this new stage in the student
movement, Tsuchimoto chose to emphasize the
fissures in the movement, not its solidarity.
In subsequent scenes he quietly goes further.
Throughout the film, Tsuchimoto crosscuts
between the clashes with police, intense
discussions behind the barricades, and scenes
of daily life for the rest of Kyoto’s population:
two girls strolling through old Kyoto, a
yucca plant in full bloom with a sukarum
passing by in the background, a quiet, narrow
street with the university’s clock tower
jutting above the roofs of the homes. Tsuchimoto
subtly suggests that the students are moving
in their own daydream. The students of raucous
clashes with the police, their attempt to
occupy the school to “dismantle the
imperialistic university,” never leaves
their own hermetically sealed world. With
no serious connection to other social movements,
their rhetoric and violence appeared out
of balance. “Because of this,”
says Tsuchimoto, “I thought this might
be the end of hope for any real revolution.”
In fact, a number of people I’ve met believe
this film hastened the dissolution of Zenkyoto.
One by one, the student activists quit, devoting
their energies to other causes like Sanrizuka
or Minamata, or giving up on politics altogether.
As for Takida Osamu, he became a fugitive
in what came to be known as the Takida incident
shortly after this. In January 1970(?) reporters
for Asahi Journal and Playboy were arrested
for their connections to a man accused of
stabbing a soldier to death. The murder occurred
21 August 1971(?), and police claimed to
have found two red helmets with the word
“Sekieigun” (“Red Guards”)
and a pamphlet entitled, “Red Flag—Declaration
of World War,” a title highly reminiscent
of Adachi Masao and Wakamatsu Koji’s film
on the Red Army. The pamphlet was signed
by the “Red Guard Army,” which
no one to that point had ever heard of. Thus,
everyone assumed this incident was simply
a ploy to crack down on radical activists,
sympathetic journalists, and intellectuals.
The latter became obvious when writers for
Asahi Journal and Playboy were arrested for
supposedly harboring the suspect, and Professor
Takida was put on the wanted list for being
their ringleader. Takida went into hiding
for a number of years, much of it spent in
the closet of Tsuchimoto’s production office.
The filmmaker received unannounced visits
by the police more than once, although they
never caught Takida there. On one occasion
Tsuchimoto’s address book was taken away
as a guide for choosing other people to search.
However, neither he nor Ogawa was ever arrested.
He suspects such a move would have been seen
as further oppression of the people of Minamata
and Sanrizuka, but they kept the the filmmakers
under surveillance well into the 1980s.