Punishment Room / Shokei no heya (1956)

By the end of the fifties, Kon Ichikawa was probably second only to Akira Kurosawa in his international reputation, based on Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain, but it was Punishment Room, made just after Burmese Harp, that cemented his reputation in Japan.

Though critics like to place Punishment Room within the context of the “Sun Tribe,” its hero Katsumi is much closer to Masahira in The Rose on his Arm than to any of the real “Sun Tribe” rich kids. Katsumi, like Masahira, is mad at the world, but he does not have the excuse of poverty, a dead father, and a future of dead-end laboring jobs. Neither is he rich, like the Sun Tribe characters who manipulate Masahira or the brothers with no real cares in Crazed Fruit. His father is just a salaryman with a bad case of ulcers, a mid-level man in a bank. Nevertheless, Katsumi hates his father and generally ignores his mother. He is a university student more than capable of holding his own in intellectual duels, but he has no politics. He is the sulky teenager writ large, with no real explanation for his anger at himself or society and without any hint of some saving grace. When he at last is taken to his punishment room, you can’t help but feel it took a long time for him to get what’s coming to him.

He hangs out with other students, themselves coming from similar families, who play at rebellion of various kinds but who, in one way or another, know they are only playing while within the safe confines of the university. Katsumi is first seen scamming his father out of half his life savings and is actually shocked when his buddy repays the money. He picks fights with students from other colleges. He humiliates a “friend” because he is in University on a scholarship. After a Big Game, in the celebrations he and two buddies pick up two college girls. He mixes sleeping pills into their drinks and carries off Ayako Wakao, whom he rapes while she is asleep. He sets up his own buddies to be robbed. After messing with the boys from the first fight, he is captured, tied up in a room behind a bar, beaten badly, and then ultimately stabbed by Wakao.

Perhaps the most disturbing sequence is his rape of Wakao while she is fully drugged and his buddy does the same with another girl in the next room.

The other girl is utterly traumatized, but Wakao tries desperately to salvage some part of her self-esteem, meeting him again to ask why he chose her, hoping there was something that made her special. He rejects any attempt to suggest he is actually interested in her. When his parents find out from an anonymous letter, he falls back on the “she must have really wanted it, since she didn’t call the police immediately” defense.

As portrayed by Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Katsumi is a roiling mass of anger and ego. He is not as far off the rails as Akira in The Warped Ones, but he is close. As a character, he is distasteful, as a symbol he is disturbing. Rich kids, like the real Sun Tribe, have always gotten away with things all over the world, protected by their parents’ money and class, while the rebellious poor can eventually be beaten down by work, family, and if absolutely necessary the police. But middle-class boys who reject the new middle-class world without even espousing the threat of politics were incomprehensible in Japan of the fifties. The movie set off a firestorm of political criticism that led studios to quietly drop any rebellious teenager movies from their plans until another outburst appeared during the political crises of 1960. Even today, the movie is brutal and disturbing — much more so than any of the pinku torture films of later years – because Katsumi seems so appalling and yet so absolutely real and because there is really no attempt to explain him away with any easy psychological or sociological diagnoses. There is no Brando-ish romanticisation of rebellion for the sake of rebellion, none of the poor, tortured sensitive teen whose parents just don’t understand him of James Dean. Nor is there any sexual titillation, as in Crazed Fruit. (This may explain why the movie found no interest among American distributors and was first seen here in a film festival in 2001). I can’t think of any movie like it from any country until perhaps Blier’s Going Places (1974), and even there we see an implicit rejection of bourgeois social and political values in favor of more relaxed if dubious freedom and rather a lot of casual female nudity to soften the blow through titillation.

Along the way, we see a glimpse of university life that looks very familiar to Americans of the era (except for the uniforms) – lots of classes missed, lots of disdain for the scholarship students and for smart girls who are getting above their place, lots of hanging out trying to think of something to do.

There is even a Big Game, with the stands packed with thousands of people as for college football games and the drunken carousing afterward, though Ichikawa never shows us the field so we don’t know what the actual game is. The boys organize several dances to make money, and they’re held in what looks like a gym with hundreds of couples jammed together, jitterbugging to combos playing a mixture of dance-band jazz and Bill Haley-style rock.

We can’t quite call the movie New Wave before its time, as we can Kinoshita’s Rose on His Arm, for the basic filming techniques are straightforward and traditional. Yet the lighting is harsh, the cutting between scenes rough, the contrast intense, and Katsumi’s beating remarkably realistic for its day, giving it an over-all brutal look. It is not a movie that is easy to like, but it is one that is hard to forget. It is also inexplicable that it got so little attention outside of Japan.