Hugo Red Rose

In “Patriotism,” Mishima famously filmed himself going through the motions of hara-kiri four years before he eventually committed suicide in almost exactly the same manner.

In “HitoKiri,” he plays Tanaka Shinbei. When Shinbei’s sword is found at a high official’s assassination scene, he quickly commits seppuku. Given the actor, that’s hardly a spoiler.

As a still, this is one of the most menacing images I’ve ever seen of Mishima.

The film itself seems to be particularly relevant to Mishima’s concerns in 1969, which is when it was filmed. According to IMDB, the film was released February of 1970*, just months before Mishima’s own late November exit.

Hitokiri translates roughly to “manslayer.” The alternate title of the film, Tenchu!, was a battle-cry, meaning “divine punishment.”

Hitokiri is a cinematic retelling of the tale of The Four Hitokiri of the Bakumatsu. These warriors opposed the shogunate and favored the restoration of the Emperor to power. This role was chosen with artful precision. Not only did Mishima’s character commit suicide, but the Four Hitokiri, like Mishima, were supporters of the Emperor. Mishima’s private army, the Tatenokai, were a spiritual army sworn to “shield” the ideal of the Emperor.

Apparently, Mishima also sang the film’s theme song (!!?!?!). I’m working on that…

Review of Hitokiri on Midnight Eye

http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/hitokiri.shtml

Review of Hitokiri on Movie Feast

http://moviefeast.blogspot.com/2008/06/tenchu-hitokiri-1969.html

Review of Hitokiri on Lard Biscuit Enterprises

http://www.lardbiscuit.com/jidaigeki/gosha-tenchu.html

* At least in the USA. I was unable to find a Japanese release date, but it couldn’t have been much sooner if the film was produced in 1969.

h/t  the Werwolf Ensemble guys, who told me about this film.

Here’s the recent Vancouver Sun article on Butoh that tipped me off:

CULTURAL OLYMPIAD: The discrete, ineffable appeal of Butoh
By Kevin Griffin

From Wikipedia:

Butoh appeared first in Japan after the second world war and the student riots there. The roles of authority were being challenged and subverted at this point. It also appeared as a reaction against the contemporary dance scene in Japan, which Hijikata felt was based on imitating the West and Noh and was too superficial.

The first butoh piece was Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours), by Tatsumi Hijikata, which premiered at a dance festival in 1959. Based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima, the piece explored the taboo of homosexuality and paedophilia and ended with a live chicken being held between the legs of Yoshito Ohno (Kazuo Ohno’s son) and Hijikata chasing Yoshito off the stage in darkness. Primarily as a result of the misconception that the chicken had died due to strangulation, this piece outraged the audience, and resulted in the banning of Hijikata from the festival where Kinjiki premiered and established him as an iconoclast.

In the very first “butoh” performances, the style was called “Dance Experience” (in English), but in the early Sixties, Hijikata used the term “Ankoku-Buyo” (dance of darkness) to describe his dance, and later changed the word “buyo,” filled with associations of Japanese classical dance to that of “butoh,” a long discarded word for dance that originally meant European ballroom dancing^[1].

It would be interesting to see a Butoh based on, say, Sun and Steel. Or, perhaps even better, on the events of November 25, 1970.

More Butoh:

“We need to stop this accelleration, stop the speed.”

Technocracy.