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.