Koji Wakamatsu's Pink Films and the Red Bus Screening Troupe｜Three Routes to the Freedom to Be Screened

Last time I wrote that the wall the independent production companies ran into was not “the freedom to make” but “the freedom to be screened.” Today, with all the cutting-edge technology available, anyone can make a film. There are also countless platforms, from YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Vimeo to TikTok.

At first glance, this looks like the first true democratization in human history. Yet many people have lost sight of something truly important that has surfaced here, namely the person you are making it for.

Creators, and makers of every kind, have always kept in mind “the person they are reaching,” and have made and put forward what the world and its people needed. In the days when making and delivering did not flow into each other, this was a question people thought about seriously. In an age like ours, when anyone can make anything, anytime, with ease, the face of that person has vanished from the maker’s view and has quietly been abstracted into a faceless, unspecified mass.

This is a service structure. In late-20th-century Japan, a hybrid of capitalism and socialism in which the whole nation of a hundred million was said to be middle class, it worked efficiently, and it is still being reproduced as a model of success. But that is now a story from long ago. That is exactly why we should know what was stirring on the eve of this success model.

So how did the filmmakers of the 1960s take on this wall? To give the conclusion first, they changed the way they fought from the ground up. Rather than simply founding “companies that make films,” they turned themselves into groups that carried everything in-house, all the way through to screening. Here lies what is truly fascinating about the independent productions.

The symbol of this shift was an incident in October 1960.

Nagisa Oshima, a young director at Shochiku, released Night and Fog in Japan (1960), which confronted the Anpo struggle against the US-Japan Security Treaty head-on. On October 12, the fourth day of its run, Inejiro Asanuma, chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, was stabbed to death in the middle of a speech. Fearing the reaction to such a political film, Shochiku pulled it from cinemas without telling Oshima.

The film was not suppressed as a work. The company’s top management simply stopped its screening on their own, without a word to the man who had made it. Oshima had been deeply involved in the student movement, serving among other things as chairman of the Kyoto prefectural federation of student self-government associations during his years at Kyoto University. He knew what went on inside the movement, and unless he exposed it, he could not settle his own accounts with it.

That is why Oshima protested so fiercely when his own company halted the screening without permission. Since time remained on his contract, he even paid the penalty for breaking it out of his own pocket, and he left Shochiku the following year, 1961. This was the opening of the film history of the 1960s. Together with his wife, the actress Akiko Koyama, the screenwriters Tsutomu Tamura and Toshiro Ishido, and the actors Hosei Komatsu and Rokko Toura, Oshima and five others founded Sozosha, “the Creation Company.”

He did not leave because he was not allowed to shoot. He left because he was not allowed to show what he had shot to an audience. The independent productions of the 1950s, which we followed up to last time, were begun by people driven from the studios by the Red Purge. The 1960s were of a different color. They grew out of a movement in which people who had broken with their companies over the single issue of screening decided to do everything themselves.

Following his lead, others of the same generation, known as the Shochiku Nouvelle Vague, left their companies one after another. Yoshishige Yoshida founded Gendai Eigasha, and Masahiro Shinoda founded Hyogensha. Shohei Imamura, whose projects were no longer being approved at Nikkatsu, mortgaged his house and set up a production company of his own. The current that would eventually carry them to ATG had begun as a defection from the major studios.

Now I must turn to the one man who embodied the era most vividly.
That man is Koji Wakamatsu.

As an assistant director in television, he grew so angry over changes to a script that he punched the producer and was fired on the spot. Shut out by the industry, with nowhere left to go, he drifted into pink film (the forerunner of the pornographic film). Wakamatsu debuted in 1963 with Sweet Trap (1963). He put up the production budget of 1.5 million yen himself, and the film drew exceptional crowds and made his name almost overnight.

In 1965 he founded Wakamatsu Production. Its first film, Secrets Behind the Wall (1965), was chosen for official screening at the Berlin International Film Festival over a Daiei film recommended by the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, and the industry was shaken to its core.

The film world’s argument went like this. How could a pink film represent the nation at an international film festival? If an insulting film like this appeared there, pushing aside the Japanese themes they wanted to promote as “Japanese cinema,” Japan’s image would be ruined.

It went so far that even the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement of opposition. A managing director of Toho said that Wakamatsu was free to embarrass himself in Berlin, but it would be a problem if the nation of Japan were embarrassed, and critics went as far as to call it hopelessly below third-rate. The following year, 1966, the producers’ association boycotted the Berlin festival itself in protest against the entry. The affair later came to be known as the “national disgrace film” incident.

What was happening behind the uproar, however, was far more important. The biggest barrier for the independent productions was a place to screen their films. There were countless cinemas across the country, yet every one of them belonged to the chain of one of the six major studios, their programs were filled with the studios’ own films, and there was nowhere to show films by outside producers. At this very moment, though, outside the majors’ network, another exhibition network was steadily growing in answer to the demands of the age.

That network was the adult cinemas. Pink film was a genre the proud majors would not touch, the genre they despised above all. Yet demand was enormous, which is exactly why it had its own production companies and its own network of theaters. If you made a film, there was always a place to show it. And the audience did not come after weighing up the content.

Wakamatsu, with his genius for seizing opportunities, put this structure to use. As long as he included the required sex scenes, he could shoot anything he liked. For a man overflowing with creative energy, this freedom made for the finest laboratory, one he could have found nowhere else.

The freedom that Wakamatsu began to build in pink film came to be joined to an important movement. He brought in one radical talent after another, among them Atsushi Yamatoya, Masao Adachi, and Isao Okishima, and drove themes such as the confinement of life in public housing blocks, the decay of left-wing parties, atomic-bomb disease, and the state and violence into the frame of the pink film.

Official histories generally treat their work as taboo, but it was groundbreaking. They did not break through censorship. They took over, exhibition network and all, a place that censorship had never even glanced at.

Masao Adachi, whom I especially love, went to Palestine with Koji Wakamatsu in 1971 and fought alongside PFLP guerrillas, then in 1974 joined Fusako Shigenobu’s Japanese Red Army. Placed on an international wanted list, he was arrested in Lebanon in 1997, served three years in Roumieh Prison, and was deported to Japan in March 2000. Adachi, in other words, lived with Shigenobu and the others at the heart of the first movement to resist the genocide of Palestinians that Greater Israel ideology is carrying out in real time today.

Since his deportation, he has kept working with great energy. In 2022 he released REVOLUTION+1 (2022), a fiction about the man who shot Shinzo Abe and a film that hurled its opposition at the state funeral. True to Adachi the activist, emergency screenings were held on September 26–27, the day before and the day of Abe’s state funeral. This is what a real creator looks like, and it struck me hard.

Others chose an entirely different path. They were the makers of documentary films.

Shinsuke Ogawa ended his contract with Iwanami Productions and in 1966 independently produced Seinen no umi (1966), literally “The Sea of Youth.” The following year, 1967, he founded Ogawa Productions and filmed the campus struggle at Takasaki City University of Economics in Assatsu no mori (1967), literally “The Forest of Suppression,” and the Haneda struggle in Gennin hokokusho (1967), literally “Eyewitness Report.” From 1968 he went to live among the farmers fighting the construction of Narita Airport and went on to make seven films in the Sanrizuka series.

Because their films were seen as anti-establishment, no cinema anywhere would show them. So they organized the screenings themselves. Screening societies sprang up across the country, and supporters carried the film reels on their shoulders from community halls to university classrooms. Self-organized screenings still take place today, and this is where they began. What I personally find disappointing is that since this movement, self-organized screening has not produced a single groundbreaking idea.

Last time I wrote that the self-organized screenings of the 1950s were “high in aspiration, but not a business.” The 1960s were on another scale entirely. Their influence was such that people from the opposition league of the time testified that the Sanrizuka struggle became a nationwide movement precisely because the Ogawa Productions films were screened in places all over the country. The photographer Kazuo Kitai was embedded there as well, and the so-called democratization of equipment helped such people emerge.

Film, in other words, was not recording the movement. The act of screening had itself become the movement. This current reached its extreme in 1971.

Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi, on their way home from the Cannes Film Festival, where they had been invited, went straight on to Palestine. There they filmed the daily life of Arab guerrillas resisting Israeli imperialism and completed Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971). The film cuts straight into the heart of the front line, and I cannot understand why the people now speaking out against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians never mention their names.

After returning to Japan, they bought a bus. They painted it bright red, loaded it with a projector and film, called themselves the “Red Bus Screening Troupe,” and toured the country, starting in Shinjuku. If there was no place that would screen their film, they would drive a place to screen it around the country.

This was the most physical answer imaginable to the question the independent productions had carried for twenty years since the 1950s. They no longer needed the building called a cinema at all. Wherever there was film, a projector, and people who gathered, that place became a theater. Nothing proves more clearly that they were the most radical of all and stood at the very front.

Having come this far, we can at last see the whole picture. Those who sought the freedom to be screened arrived, in the end, at three solutions. The first was to ride on someone else’s network, as Wakamatsu did with the theater network of pink film. The second was to build a network of your own, which is what Ogawa Productions’ self-organized screenings and the Red Bus did. And the third was to team up with the grown-ups who already held a network. That was ATG, which I wrote about before.

Half the money is enough, we will not interfere, and in exchange the film is guaranteed a month in theaters. Why did that third clause have to be written as the third clause? Readers who have followed these twenty years will need no further explanation.

And then the season came to an end. The decisive moment was the incident in 1972 in which the United Red Army collapsed from within. The audience began to drift away, and in 1974, against the backdrop of the film industry’s decline, the majors at last began to pull out of production, with Nikkatsu turning to Roman Porno and Toei to its “true account” yakuza films. The very term “independent production” quietly lost its special ring.

But this was no defeat. From the 1980s on, films came to be made, as a rule, by production committees and independent production companies. Directors employed by a studio, working ten years before being allowed to shoot their first film, belong to a system that no longer exists anywhere. The single vertical line the majors once held has been completely dismantled.

The independent productions did not lose. They became the norm. And now we live in an age in which anyone can shoot and anyone can release. The camera is in our hands, and the outlets for distribution are countless. The “freedom to be screened” that our predecessors pursued for twenty years has, in principle, been fully achieved.

Yet having achieved it, we have learned something.

Being free to put anything out turns out to be almost the same as nobody watching. In that era, people staked their lives on whether they could secure a single week of screenings, because during that week there were sure to be people in the seats. Because there was a wall, breaking through it meant something. Now that the wall is gone, we have lost what we were meant to break through, and instead we stand before a far thicker wall, the wall of indifference.

The makers and the audiences of that time were not separate. They were held together, not separate, inside a single shared something. That is why exhibition could stand on its own. In an age like ours, when people no longer share anything in common, makers and audiences are separate from the start and will never be joined. In light of what we went through in the 2010s, this will be a major problem we face from here on.

The calls heard around the world for a return to story and to religion are attempts to recover this shared sensibility. Yet the separation and isolation of individuals is accelerating without mercy.

Over three installments, we have followed the story from the system of the major studios to the rise and fall of the independent productions.

What they truly sought to protect was not the abstract phrase “freedom of expression.” It was that what they had shot would be set, for a certain span of time, before the eyes of someone they did not know. That was all they sought to protect.

And I think that is not a story about film alone.