By Roland Domenig

When Market of Flesh (Nikutai no ichiba) opened in Japan in March 1962, it caused a sensation. Within days, its distribution was halted by the police on charges of obscenity - the first case of its kind since the war. The screening of the film resumed after cuts were made, and it became a huge box office success.

Market of Flesh is now regarded as the film that started the pink eiga genre, a variation of the sexploitation film unique to Japan. For the past 40 years pink eiga have constituted one of the most vital segments of the Japanese film industry. Even though most pink eiga productions go unnoticed by film critics and film historians, the importance of the genre for Japanese cinema is undeniable.

Pink eiga constitutes a uniquely Japanese film genre that has no equivalent in the West. The films are low-budget movies, typically 60 minutes long, which contain a number of sex scenes. They are often of a pornographic nature, but they never explicitly show genitalia, pubic hair or hardcore sexual intercourse. These X-rated films are produced by small independent production companies and are shown at special cinemas in triple-bills.

Internationally renowned directors like Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Suo Masayuki, as well as experimental filmmakers such as Oki Hiroyuki and Sono Sion, found their start in pink eiga. Other notable directors include Wakamatsu Koji, Mukai Kan, Takita Yojiro, and Mochizuki Rokuro. Market Of Flesh director Kobayashi Satoru continued to direct pink eiga until his death last year. With more than 400 feature films to his credit, he was perhaps the most prolific director in Japanese film history.

In no other country has the sexploitation film played a more important role than in Japan. Even directors not usually associated with sexploitation - Oguri Kohei, Suwa Nobuhiro, Sakamoto Junji and Aoyama Shinji - began as assistant directors or scriptwriters on pink eiga productions. If the directors who emerged from the Nikkatsu variant Roman Porno - Negishi Kichitaro, Kaneko Shusuke, Nakahara Shun, Ishii Takashi, Sai Yoichi, Morita Yoshimitsu, Higashi Yoichi and Somai Shinji - are included, the list of pink eiga filmmakers could stand as a representative digest of Japanese cinema over the past decade.

The history of pink eiga started in the early 1960s, when the Japanese film industry underwent some major changes. In 1960, Japan produced a record 545 films. But cinema attendance was falling, and by 1962, attendance had dropped to half of 1958’s one billion visits. Attendance continued to falter, spurred by the rapid spread of television and the development of the leisure industry. This plunged the dominant major film studios into a crisis.

In 1962, production by the big studios dropped by 30%. But low-budget movies made by newly established independent production companies proliferated. Most of these movies were sexploitation films, shown in small cinemas which could no longer afford the high rental fees of the studio films. Instead, they turned to the independent production companies, which mushroomed during the 1960s. The number of independently produced erotic films rose from 4 in 1962, to 58 in 1964, to 250 in 1969. Since the mid-1960s, pink eiga have been the biggest Japanese film genre.

The term pink eiga was first coined in 1963 by journalist Murai Minoru. But it did not come into general use until the late 1960s. In the early years the films were known as ”eroduction films” (erodakushon eiga) or ”three-million-yen-films” (sanbyakuman eiga). Because of their erotic nature the films were rated as adult films (seijin eiga) by the Motion Picture Code of Ethics Committee (Eirin), the self-censorship organ of the Japanese film industry. The films played to a target audience of young men - the audience for family and women’s films had deserted cinema for television. Action movies and the new yakuza genre fulfilled young male viewers’ desire for on-screen violence, while the desire for sex was satisfied by pink eiga.

The directors of pink eiga came from very different backgrounds. Kobayashi Satoru, Ogawa Kinya and Sawa Kensuke, for instance, began as directors for Shintoho. Shindo Koei worked as a director for Daiei. Seki Koji and Watanabe Mamoru were from television, and Yamamoto Shunya and Mukai Kan started off as assistant directors for educational documentaries and PR films. Motoki Sojiro left a very successful career as Kurosawa Akira’s producer to become a prolific pink eiga director.

But the star of pink eiga in the 1960s was Wakamatsu Koji. His films combined sex and violence with politics, and hit a nerve with a sexually and politically frustrated (male) youth. In 1965 his film Secrets Behind Walls (Kabe no naka no himegoto) created a scandal in Japan when it was screened at the Berlin Film Festival. The press and the general public regarded the film as a disgrace to Japan and the Japanese film commission unsuccessfully tried to have the film withdrawn from the festival. In the same year Takechi Tetsuji’s film Black Snow (Kuroi yuki) was the first pink eiga prosecuted on charges of public indecency.

The controversy surrounding Wakamatsu’s film and Black Snow’s' court case (eventually won by Takechi) brought pink eiga to the attention of the general public, and triggered a boom in production. Takechi soon returned to his origins on the kabuki stage, but Wakamatsu continued to direct pink eiga, creating such genre-classics as The Embryo Hunts In Secret (Taiji ga mitsuryo suru toki) and Violated Women In White (Okasareta byakui). Wakamatsu also became an important producer of pink eiga.

Wakamatsu's films form part of the 1960s Japanese avant-garde, and share many similarities with the films of the so-called Japanese Nouvelle Vague. Like the films of Yoshida Yoshishige, Imamura Shohei, and Oshima Nagisa, whose controversial masterpiece In The Realm Of The Senses (Ai no Coriida) he later produced, the films of Wakamatsu pursued revolutionary politics and questioned the repressive side of Japanese society. After 1968, his films became increasingly political - not least because Wakamatsu Production’s screenwriter Adachi Masao became heavily involved with the politics of the extreme left. Adachi, who directed seven pink eiga, eventually became a member of the Japanese Red Army. In 1973 he left Japan to join the PFLP in Lebanon where he stayed until he was extradited to Japan in March 2000. After a trial and brief prison term, he has returned to the film industry with plans for a new movie.

Not all pink eiga directors were as radical as Adachi and Wakamatsu, though most directors of the 1960s shared the social and political convictions that gave their films such a strong anti-establishment appeal. The main subject of pink eiga was not politics but sexuality. Though the depiction of sexuality became more daring and brazen with time, pink eiga never crossed the border to hardcore pornography. Since the explicit depiction of genitals and sexual intercourse are prohibited by the Japanese Criminal Code and the Eirin regulations, the filmmakers had to resort to indirect depiction. Thus they developed the refined vocabulary of allusions and omissions which characterises the genre.

Incriminating areas are disguised by clever use of camera angles, and hidden by objects. Extreme close-ups are also used, so that it is unclear what is depicted: for instance, the hair of the armpit may be shot to look like pubic hair.

The enormous success of pink eiga didn’t go unnoticed by the major film studios. They started to produce their own sexploitation films. Toei began its so-called ”Pinky Violence” films in 1971 with a series of bad girl movies, and in the same year Nikkatsu launched its production of so-called Roman Porno. With the establishment of the subsidiary company Tokatsu, even the family-oriented Shochiku studios joined the ranks of pink eiga producers. Toho remained the only studio that didn’t venture into the sexploitation market.

The advance of the studios into the pink eiga market led to a reorientation of the independent production companies who entered into a symbiotic relationship with the big studios. By 1970 many of the conventions that characterise the genre today had been established - for instance, the standard length of 60 minutes and the triple-feature-system (sanbontate).

Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno productions soon came to dominate the market of sexploitation films. Though there are many similarities between Roman Porno and pink eiga, there are also several key differences. Pink eiga were predominantly shot on location with a small, and often semi-professional, staff whereas Nikkatsu had a functioning studio system and highly skilled professionals at its disposal. Nikkatsu also owned cinemas nationwide, so had its own distribution network. Moreover, the budget of a Roman Porno was on average much higher than that of a pink eiga, though still lower than the budget of a regular feature film.

Even though many established directors left Nikkatsu when it started Roman Porno production, the studio employed many talented young directors and assistant directors: Kumashiro Tatsumi, Tanaka Noboru, Sone Chusei, Konuma Masaru and Nishimura Shogoro. They became masters of the genre, and led the sexploitation film to new heights. Their films also won the recognition of film critics and gained Roman Porno a certain respectability.

Though pink eiga was overshadowed by Roman Porno, a new generation of directors such as Nakamura Genji, Takahashi Banmei, Yoyogi Tadashi, Izutsu Kazuyuki and Izumi Seiji came to the fore to give the genre a new thrust. They quickly established themselves next to veterans like Yamamoto Shunya, Mukai Kan and Kobayashi Satoru. By the late 1970s the production of pink eiga together with Roman Porno amounted to more than 70% of annual Japanese film production.

Whereas the other film studios continued to suffer from the decline in cinema attendance, Nikkatsu recovered from near bankruptcy in the 1970s. But it didn’t last. Ten years later, the rise of the video-industry and the arival of the adult video market saw Nikkatsu confronted with a powerful new rival. Mismanagement, along with the spinning-off of their production arm, started the beginning of the end for Nikkatsu. In 1988 it stopped Roman Porno production and tried to regain a footing in regular feature film production. The movies did not have the expected success at the box office, however, and Nikkatsu could not recoup its growing losses. In 1993 the oldest Japanese film studio finally went bankrupt.

The rapidly growing porn video market also posed a threat to pink eiga. In Japan, porn videos are subjected to the same restrictions as pink eiga - that is, they cannot explicitly show genitals or sexual intercourse, and must make incriminating details unrecognizable by blurring. Uncensored hardcore videos are illegal and available only on the black market. The fact that hardcore videos cannot be obtained freely is one reason why in Japan, unlike in most Western countries, erotic movie production has not been completely displaced by porn videos.

The rise of the porn video industry entailed several changes for pink eiga. One was the crumbling of the production system. Until then pink eiga had been a low-risk, high-return business, and the production companies and cinema owners - as well as the directors - had profited from the relatively high returns of low-budget films. Many directors had their own production companies, and made good money with their films. In the 1980s, when the production of pink eiga became a less profitable venture, this system started to break down. Several directors changed to the video industry, while others moved on to make regular feature films.

In 1981 Wakamatsu stopped production, and in 1982 Takahashi Banmei - a rising star pink eiga star - joined Directors Company and directed his first regular feature film for ATG. By 1987, Several other directors’ production companies had disbanded. An exception was Mukai Kan’s Shishi Production. This continued to raise new directors like Takita Yojiro, Kataoka Shuji, Sato Hisayasu and Zeze Takahisa. Shishi Production is still in existence, but has not produced any new pink eiga for ten years.

The situation of pink eiga worsened in the 1980s. But they still provided an important place for new directors to experiment. They also acted as a stepping stone to the film industry, especially as the major studios had stopped recruiting assistant directors at the end of the 1970s. The traditional career path of entering the film industry as an assistant director for one of the major studios thus came to an end, and aspiring filmmakers had to look for other ways to get their foot in the door.

One was the independent filmmaking scene which began to develop in the 1980s. The other was to enter the world of pink eiga. In the studio system, an assistant director usually had to wait several years until he got a chance to direct a film himself. With pink eiga an AD could become a director after only two years. Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Suo Masayuki, two of today's most successful and renowned Japanese filmmakers, made their debuts in this way.

Today five companies today control the pink eiga market: Okura, Kokuei, Excess, Shintoho and ENK. Okura was founded in 1961 by Okura Mitsugi, the former president of Shintoho after its bankruptcy. The Osaka sales department of Shintoho took over its name and became an independent producer and distributor of pink eiga. Shintoho also distributes the films of Kokuei, the oldest pink eiga production company. Founded in 1955, Kokuei at first produced educational films for schools financed by the Ministry of Education: the name Kokuei translates as National Film. In 1962 it turned to the production of feature films and, together with the films of Okura, marked the beginnings of the pink eiga genre.

Excess is an offshoot of Nikkatsu, established in 1988 when Nikkatsu ended Roman Porno production. ENK was founded in 1983 to specialise in the production of a subgenre of pink eiga, so-called barazoku eiga, or gay movies. Directors’ companies almost disappeared in the 1990s except for Tantansha, the production company of Hamano Sachi - one of the few female directors of pink eiga. She debuted in 1971, and in the 1990s became the most prolific pink eiga director, making up to 20 films a year.

The films of Excess and Okura are made to please the core audience of pink eiga fans as they grow older. Today this audience is primarily middle-aged men in their forties and fifties. Excess and Okura give them what they want to see - a lot of nudity and sex scenes. Cinematically the films are of little interest.

But the films from Kokuei are highly creative and individualistic. This is particularly true of a group of directors that came to be known as the shitenno, or Four Heavenly Kings, of pink eiga: Sano Kazuhiro, Sato Hisayasu, Sato Toshiki and Zeze Takahisa. Except for Sato Hisayasu, who has directed films since 1985, they all made their debuts in 1989.

The term shitenno was at first used in a negative way by the owners of pink eiga cinemas. They regarded these directors’ films as ”difficult” - they had too little sex, and gloomy, complicated plots. When Zeze Takahisa, Sato Toshiki and Sano Kazuhiro made their first films, the crisis of the pink eiga business had reached its peak. During the bubble years many cinemas that were no longer profitable closed down and production fell to 100 films a year. The margins narrowed and it was generally thought that pink eiga had no future. Since every film might be their last, the shitenno directors went on to make highly individual films without caring much about the audience's tastes. Their films form a refreshing contrast to the formulaic and stereotyped films that make up the larger part of pink eiga production, and are strongly influenced by the notion of the filmmaker as auteur.

Most films of the shitenno directors were produced by Kokuei, who have always been supportive of unconventional ideas. Even when the cinema owners began to refuse the films, Kokeui producer Asakura Daisuke continued to support the directors. He had them adopt pseudonyms, and helped bring their films to a wider audience by showing them outside of pink eiga cinemas.

In 1993 the art-house cinema Athéné Française in Tokyo presented the films of Zeze Takahisa, Sato Toshiki, Sano Kazuhiro and Sato Hisayasu together with the experimental work of Oki Hiroyuki and the film diaries of Kawase Naomi - then still unknown - in a series called Biographies of New Japanese Authors (Shin Nihon sakkashugi retsuden). The series introduced the filmmakers as auteurs, and was an instant success. Other art-house cinemas followed, and the films received the attention of film critics and a cinephile audience. In 1995, films of the shitenno directors were invited abroad to the Rotterdam Film Festival and the Viennale, and the names of the directors spread beyond Japan.

In the 1990s the Japanese film industry underwent major changes. The studio system ended, enabling the rise of independent producers; the direct-to-video market appearaed; cable and satellite television proliferated; the distribution sector was restructured, and a producer system was established. These developments also left their mark on the pink eiga production.

A major change was the increasing importance of producers. Previously, producers only provided the money for a film. Nowadays they are involved in preparation, production, distribution and marketing. Until a decade ago, all the profit was made at the box office. Today, the box office returns are merely one source of income. Most revenues come from selling video and broadcasting rights, especially to satellite stations, and - recently - from the burgeoning DVD market. The marketing of pink eiga is now more complicated than when the films were shown only in specialised cinemas. So the professional skills of a producer are indispensable.

The most important producer of pink eiga, and one of Japan's most outstanding producers, is Asakura Daisuke. All Kokuei ‘s films were produced by Asakura Daisuke - which is in fact a pseudonym. Asakura is not a man at all, as the name suggest, but a woman, Sato Keiko, the president of Kokuei. In the 1960s and 1970s, several producers at Kokuei used the name, but for twenty years Sato Keiko has been the only Asakura Daisuke. She has produced most of the shitenno directors’ work, as well as many films of the so-called shichifukujin or Seven Lucky Gods.

The shichifukujin are Ueno Toshiya, Imaoka Shinji, Kamata Yoshitaka, Enomoto Toshiro, Tajiri Yuji, Meike Mitsuru and Sakamoto Rei, who all began as assistant directors for the shitenno. They are the youngest generation of pink eiga directors, and are characterised by a more introverted and personal style than the films of the shitenno, reflecting the emotional instability and insecurity of today’s Japanese youth.

Though Kokuei is unique in its support of young talent, other companies also began to make use of the talents of younger filmmakers. Araki Taro, Kunizawa Minoru, and the actress-turned-director Yoshiyuki Yumi have made very individual films for Okura, while Niizato Mosaku, Tomomatsu Naoyuki, Suzuki Akihiro and Kajino Ko have directed interesting gay movies for ENK.

The situation of pink eiga has stabilised in recent years, but the conditions are still very severe. The budgets have not changed since the 1960s. Today, as then, filmmakers have to manage with an average of 3.5 million yen (about US$30,000), which must take care of film stock (usually 35mm), post-production costs, all expenses during the shoot, and the salaries of cast and crew. The films are typically shot within three or four days on location. Sound is generally recorded later in the studio and retakes are strictly limited: directors must manage on six or seven rolls of film, or reach into their own pockets. Labour conditions are hard, and assistant directors rarely rise to become directors after two or three years, as before.

Still, pink eiga continues to offer filmmakers a high degree of freedom to make very individual films. It is hoped that it will continue to do so for the next forty years.