My Adolescence Began with Defeat

Nagisa Oshima, Cruel Story of Youth (still), 1960.

Originally written in 1969, Nagisa Ōshima’s essay offers a personal reflection on the political and social upheavals that shaped the Japanese filmmaker’s early life and artistic development. Through its candid account of adolescence marked by frustration, the text provides insight into Ōshima’s filmic exploration of contradictions of dissent in the postwar Japan and historical consciousness.1

When does adolescence begin and when does it end? I wonder if one can know when one's own adolescence began. That seems almost impossible—at least so far as I am concerned.

I think that I am still in adolescence. I wonder if this is because I am involved with films.

Those who watch films are mostly young people. Surveys indicate that the peak age of Japanese film audiences is from seventeen to twenty-two. Young people see films fanatically. I wonder if they see life itself in them. They talk about them feverishly. Nearly everyone has one or two films he has seen and felt passionate about dur­ing adolescence. And he probably has a memory of a coffee shop where he sat around talking about a film for hours.

At some point, however, people stop seeing films. Once they have jobs and fam­ilies they practically stop seeing films altogether. They say things like, "Oh yes, films. I want to see them, but I don't have the time." I had a televised confrontation with a large group of housewives who talked like that. "What do you do about this kind of person?" the moderator asked. I said that I don't make films for people who say they don't see films. It's fine if they don't. What bothers me is the air of intellectual superiority with which they say it. As if to say, "We don't see that sort of thing." I said, "You're lying. You don't see films. In fact, films don't interest you. I'm sure you don't read books, either. Other than passively taking in the images projected from the nearest television set, you don't absorb a single thing. You've fallen into a state of total intellectual idleness."

I don't know about other countries, but in Japan this happens to everyone after adolescence. In the midst of that Japan, I am independent. My films are independent. Fifteen years ago I had a career as well. Ten years ago I started a family. For better or worse, however, because it was the career I chose, I didn't have the leeway to fall into intellectual idleness. It may have been inevitable, but during that time, along with some friends, I had to continue reading and thinking. As a result, I am independent.

The only people who see my films are young people. The friends who went through adolescence with me fifteen years ago say, "The old films were good, weren't they? . . . By the way, what are you making now? Lately I haven't even had time to see your films. Sorry about that. I'll see the next one. Let me know when it comes out, okay?" Thank you, thank you. There's nothing to say. People say the old films were good. However, a person is able to see a film and be moved by it only because he or she has a certain degree of sensitivity. People saw films and were moved by them during adolescence, that time of acute sensitivity. Even if they were to see a film now, their sensitivity has dulled, and they wouldn't be moved. They have lost even the sen­sitivity that causes them to want to see a film.

When I am among those people talking to them, I feel that I myself am still in the midst of adolescence. I am independent, and for that reason I am positively full of rebellion. Rebellion is a sure sign of adolescence. You could even say that it is the surest sign. I couldn't possibly stop rebelling yet. When I talk with young people, I think to myself, "They too will soon have an occupation and a family and become like the average intellectually idle Japanese. And I will remain, remain, remain. I have to remain. I must remain in an adolescence that takes the form of independent rebellion."

I wonder when my adolescence began. I can't discern it for myself. However, I probably have to mention the things that happened that day—although I am reluc­tant to do so because too many people, all kinds of people, especially the intelligentsia of my generation, have said too much about that day.

By that day, I mean that hot summer day when a strange silence gripped Japan. I was thirteen years old, an eighth grader. I was playing Japanese chess with a friend in a dusky house in the traditional commercial section of Kyoto. At noon, leaving the chess pieces as they were, my friend returned home, about ten houses away, to eat. In those days, it was unthinkable to eat a meal at someone else's house or to be treated to food by them. After eating, my friend came back. Then we continued our chess game. The afternoon was no different from the morning. The hot sun continued to beat down, but the old Kyoto house was dark. We continued staring silently at the chessboard, which was the bottom of a wooden box onto which drawing paper had been pasted, lines drawn in ink, and varnish carefully applied.

During that one game, however, the whole world changed. "It" happened. What we had been taught could never happen, what we had believed would never happen, had happened. I don't know whether I won that chess game or lost it, but it wouldn't have mattered if I had won. My stouthearted mother was already getting dressed to go meet my younger sister at the evacuation camp. And then she was prob­ably hanging out of a railway car into which people had been packed like sardines. If that is true, I spent the night alone. I wonder if I prepared my own supper. No, there was nothing to eat, so I probably spent the whole night cowering.

Looking back, I think that that day—August 15, 1945, the day on which the Emperor conceded, on the radio, Japan's defeat—was probably the beginning of my adolescence. If so, I would have to say that it was a strange adolescence, in the true sense of the word. The reason my adolescence began on the day is that I learned that there was nothing of which one could say that it could never happen. I had been thinking that adolescence would be more full of hope because my father, who died when I was six, had left me so many books, and by that time I had already read most of the classics. I had even scanned a few pages of a very old edition of Das Kapital. According to the knowledge I had gleaned from those books, adolescence was some­thing that began with innocence and hope and ended with heartbreak and frustra­tion. My adolescence, though, began with frustration. There was nothing resembling hope.

The next day, remembering, I dug up the garden. The garden, although small, was the traditional Japanese type with a pond and stone lanterns, but it had been con­verted into a sweet potato field, and I had buried some books there in a large pot. We had sent things like encyclopedias and old books to my younger sister's evac­uation site, but I had put the familiar books that were particularly important to me in the pot. But that was a careless idea. The pot had absorbed water, and the books were half rotted. A strange odor emanated from the book remains when they were exposed to the daylight. Among them, I felt that I, who had loved the books, was ugly. For the next five or six years I read nothing but textbooks and Baseball Magazine. Nor did I have the money to buy books. When I went to bookstores, it was to shoplift. A best-selling dictionary of the time was the easiest book to steal and resell.

I wonder when the word "frustration" became as popular as it is now. Certainly the word was heard frequently after the anti-Security Treaty riots of 1960. It was said that the youths and students who fought then suffered from intense feelings of frustration. All three of the films I made before and after those riots—Cruel Story of Youth, The Tomb of the Sun, and Night and Fog in Japan—were tales of the frustration of adolescence.

At that time, when you made a film with a company, you were made to write something called a production plan. It was printed at the beginning of the script. It didn't always indicate the artist's plan; instead, at times it contained words couched in euphemisms to single out points of compromise with the company. Let's say, how­ever, that production plans can be trusted to some extent. In the production plans for Cruel Story of Youth, I wrote, "This is the story of young people who were only able to show their youthful anger in a perverted way. This distortion drives their adolescence—which could have been beautiful into cruel defeat. Through that trag­edy, I expressed my intense anger at the conditions that dominate modern-day adolescence."

In the production plan for Night and Fog in Japan, I wrote, "All people have responsibility. Those who created the current situation must change it. Those who should become the nucleus of reform but remain embedded in their lives; those who once stepped forward as the nucleus of reform but became frustrated and now impatiently wait for reform to come from outside themselves; and those who pre­serve the stagnant conditions in spite of their unceasing belief that they are the nucleus of reform—I strongly denounce the corruption, depravity, and mistakes of such nuclei."

In one plan I write of defeat and in the other I write of frustration. Viewing the matter in this way, I am sure that when I treat adolescence in my films, I maintain strong images of frustration, defeat, which continues to haunt me. This is even clearer when you see the films, and several outstanding critics have pointed it out immediately. The funny thing is that just after I made these films, when I first met Masumura Yasuzo, who is a bit older than I, he said, "What is this? You, with such a serene face, what do you have to be frustrated about?" Certainly, there is truth in that. I have almost never shown a sad expression in front of anyone, and even when I'm not with people, my countenance isn't that sad. And I've never had the experience of being unable to eat because of some disappointment. Moreover, I have never con­sidered suicide. It may seem strange to people that my stories of adolescence are based on images of frustration, but the opposite is true. It isn't strange at all.

Frustration is natural. Once you understand that there is nothing that abso­lutely cannot happen in the human world, everything is ultimately wasted effort. Even if one decides on some goal and tries to accomplish it, events completely unre­lated to one can determine whether or not the goal is accomplished. When you look at it this way, there are a lot of opportunities for disappointment during adolescence, when the human heart burns passionately. I made up my mind about this long ago. So I go on grinning. I am not surprised by a bit of frustration.

When did I make up my mind about this? I wonder if it was on that day. I stopped reading books after that day. I sweated it out as the worst player on a sandlot baseball team. I dabbled in student theater and, although my acting was poor, I flat­tered myself that I was second best. When I went to college, I chose law rather than literature. I vainly avoided thought and reflection. I thought that I wanted to be just a lump of flesh.

However, the moment I entered college, I was attacked by a strange feeling of disappointment. I suddenly felt that I was at the end of my adolescence. This was strange because I sensed that adolescence was ending at the time when it usually begins. The lectures were dull; I had no money. Having entered the law department, I had no idea of what I wanted to become in the future. I didn't have a beautiful girl­friend, and, although I had been hoping I was a genius, it somehow became clear to me that I wasn't. The fact that I had lived apathetically for the five years since that August day exploded all at once. Finding no place for myself on the large campus, I had nowhere to turn. And I was intensely worried about the fact that my adoles­cence was over.

In that frame of mind, I became involved in student theater once again and also participated in the student movement. The student movement became a struggle to be won or lost. Many of the struggles ended in defeat. At those times, the leaders still said we had won. They searched for reasons to justify their saying so. I wasn't able to believe it, however. Defeat is defeat. What's wrong with that? When I thought that, I felt my destiny and the movement overlap. To put it grandly, I felt myself overlap with history. By that time, my feeling of disappointment had already disappeared. I decided to yield to the selfish desires of the moment and let my destiny take care of itself. I was no longer afraid of defeat or frustration or independence. I became involved in the student movement merely because I wanted to; I didn't join the fac­tion to which the leaders belonged. In that respect, I thought, I was yielding to the flow of history.

At that time, I encountered a book and a phrase. The book was Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, and the words were those of Akashi Kaijin, a poet stricken by lep­rosy: "If you don't glow like the fishes in the depths of the ocean, there will be no light anywhere." These words and the image of Sisyphus continuing to push the boulder up the mountain, no matter how many times it rolled back down, described my feelings exactly.

The student movement accumulated its defeats, and I made repeated mistakes in the student theater; before I knew it, four years had passed. While listening to the school president's inane address, I thought to myself, "Like being pursued by a boulder. . ." Perhaps the only thing I had gained during four years of college was an image of what frustration was.

I entered the studio with only that. There my second adolescence began. What happened after that is a very long story. I have been defeated time and again; those who know me, however, know that I am fine all the same.

1969