On 8 February this year I was in the audience for the ICA's screening of Flora on the Sand (Kô Nakahira, 1964), part of the annual Japan Foundation touring programme. The film is wonderfully stylish - striking, formally composed, high contrast black-and-white cinematography with enigmatic colour inserts featuring the paintings of Paul Klee. It also struck me that night as being, for its date, one of the most singularly sex-saturated films I have ever seen.
It begins with a man in his mid-30s confiding to his barber how tormented he is by the idea that his wife may have slept with his late father, an artist, back when she sat for him as a model. This is the motivation, apparently, for his launching into an affair with a schoolgirl (a virgin), and another with her elder sister (an escort). The sex is kinky, possibly coercive; there is even one scene involving both women, though the avant-garde style of the film makes it difficult to know if the schoolgirl is participating or only observing. In between, our hero hangs out in a pub with his glum middle-aged chums, where talk turns to groping women on public transport; one of the circle is also shown acting on this urge.
I was intrigued. Our programme notes that night indicated that the film anticipated the later Roman Porno genre, but that its frank sexual content was 'startling' for the time. With the little I knew about the Japanese softcore 'pink' movies – could this be true?
In Japan, as in the West, the 1950s saw the slow insinuation of depictions of sex and nudity into the nation's cinema. The tendency towards greater sexual frankness was given a boost in 1954, when the Japanese censorship board Eirin introduced a new seijin adult category. Suddenly film companies had increased liberty to explore avenues other than the family market – and they were quick to capitalise.
Sex, or at least he promise of it, because an increasing component of a new breed of movies which, like The Wild One (1954) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), took hedonistic, rebellious youth as their subject. This new focus was partly due to the rise of young new scriptwriters and directors from the post-war generation, and partly a reaction to broader demographic shifts which made young people, rather than families, the key cinema-going public.
Nakahira (1926–78) began work as a contract director at Nikkatsu, one of Japan's six major studios, just as it resumed production after a long hiatus. His film Crazed Fruit (1956) is a celebrated example of the new genre of seishun eiga ('youth movies'), being in fact the most famous contribution to the taiyozoku ('sun tribe') sub-genre of films about delinquent youth running riot at the beach.
Although the taiyozoku craze was short-lived, the films proved hugely influential and their box office success defined a new target demographic for Nikkatsu. Thereafter, the studio pursued a determinedly populist route, developing a series of commercial, genre-based light entertainment films, Nikkatsu Action, featuring its new young stars.
Other companies also got in on the taiyozoku boom. Daiei produced Punishment Room (1956) and Kisses (1956). Meanwhile Shochiku, known for their family-friendly dramas, tragedies and romantic weepies, looked to three young directors – Masahiro Shinoda, Kijū Yoshida and Nagisa Ôshima – to give them purchase in the youth market. The films made by these three included Dry Lake (1960), Bitter End of a Sweet Night (1961) and Cruel Story of Youth (1960), all set in the world of student revolutionaries, young thrill-seekers, and gangsters.
By the late 1950s, output at one of the newer studios, Shintoho, came to focus almost exclusively on exploitation films. These ero-guru (short for 'erotic grotesque') were churned out on a monthly basis and circulated on double or triple bills; they relied heavily on the B-movie fundamentals of ghosts, gangsters, guns and girls – as suggested by titles such as Lady Vampire (1959), Violence Girl (1959) and Female Slave Ship (1960).
And so by the early 1960s sex was increasingly a feature of mainstream film production. Given that the major studios of the time operated under a vertically integrated model of production and distribution, each with their own chain of cinemas, we can also say that these sexy new films were given significant screen space. It was at this point that the landscape widened, and suddenly sex was on more screens than ever before.
In 1961 the Art Theatre Guild was established; by 1962 it had a small chain of ten cinemas across the country, including the flagship venue Shinjuku Bunka in Tokyo. The ATG released arthouse and experimental foreign films as well as ambitious Japanese independent productions, and also produced or co-produced new titles of their own. Many of these films featured nudity and adult subject matter.
That same year saw the release of the very first pink film, Flesh Market. Eroduction films, or pinku eiga as they were later known, were released into mainstream cinemas to fill up shortfalls in theatre schedules due to the waning output of the major studios. There were just four films in that first year, but very quickly output rocketed to 65 in 1964, and 213 in 1965. It was in this year that the first specialist adult cinema chains sprang up, and by the start of the 1970s the pink industry had developed its own self-contained system of distribution.
Before this, Shochiku and Nikkatsu had also begun taking an active role in buying these cheap productions to distribute in their own cinemas. These companies also reacted by making sexual subject matter more central to their own films. Interestingly, the influence ran in both directions: in terms of thematics and levels of nudity, Insect Woman (1963) and Gate of Flesh (1964), both produced by Nikkatsu, are cited as important influences on the development of the pink genre.
It is in this context that we should see Flora on the Sand. Nakahira had remained under contract at Nikkatsu, making commercial genre films aimed at the youth market. Some, like the romantic melodrama That Guy and I (1961) seem to have been relatively tame; others, especially those made the same year as Flora, more daring. Only on Mondays (1964), follows a good-time girl on a tour of the nightclubs of Yokohama and through the arms of her many men; Whirlpool of Flesh (1964) concerns the fractures and infidelities in an arranged marriage; The Hunter's Diary (1964) takes as protagonist a womanising businessman who seduces young women for sport. Flora itself is based on a bestselling novel by Junnosuke Yoshiyuki, whose work was noted for the frankness of its depiction of sexual themes.
All this to say that in this phase of his career Nakahira was very much surfing the new wave of sexual license in Japanese cinema which his own early film Crazed Fruit had done so much to usher in. In context, it would not I think have been particularly startling; by this point, most of the major studios had spotted the commercial potential of films that exploited female nudity and dealt with adult themes. Sex had come to the fore in both mainstream and independent Japanese cinema. Nor can we see Flora on its own as anticipating the turn Nikkatsu's productions would take in the next decade.
By the end of the 1960s Nikkatsu was in dire financial straits. Overproduction, loss of audiences to television and the explosion of low-budget independent pink films saw the whole industry thrown into crisis. It was with more violent, edgier and sexier films such as Flora, yes, but also Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970) and Retaliation (1968) that Nikkatsu saw its future lying. In 1971, the company threw in its lot with the adult market, and the new Roman Porno was born.
Further reading:
Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, by Jasper Sharp (FAB Press, 2008)
More by Kô Nakahira:
