Coup d’etat / Martial Law / Kaigenrei (1973)

The coup of 1936 has been the subject of several significant movies. The most straight-forward presentation can be found in Memoirs of Japanese Assassins, with the same coup reflected in the romance of Utage and the teen-age bullies of Fighting Elegy. Yoshida’s Coup d’etat looks at this failed coup through the life of Ikki Kita, who provided the intellectual foundation for the coup. How much Kita actually participated in the planning is still unclear, but he was ultimately executed with the officers who led the coup attempt. Presumably most educated Japanese at the time of the movie would have known about Kita. This allows Yoshida to depict events that are utterly unknown to viewers outside Japan, but it also helps turn Yoshida’s tendency toward obscurity into a movie that seems even more obscure than it actually is. (The brief biographical note* at the end of the post may help clarify the events depicted.)

The movie covers fifteen years, from 1921 to 1936, and there is no jumping back and forth in time as in so many other Yoshida films. However, there are also no markers to help the audience know time has passed, no transition scenes or titles, and since the clothing is traditional or business suits and uniforms, we have no clue how much time has passed between various events. Much of the time, Kita wears traditional Chinese rather than Japanese dress,

Kita in his Chinese clothing

presumably reflecting the time he had spent in Shanghai but adding yet another layer of confusion to the time line. Though everything is depicted in its proper sequence, we jump forward years at a time, while on the surface the movie seems one continuous story.

The historical Kita was an intellectual whose book written in 1919 was extremely influential on many young officers and businessmen. Essentially, he laid the foundation for a Japanese form of fascism, arguing for a restoration of the Emperor to real power and a much more equal society, not unlike the Tengu-to of the 1860s and some of the other sonno-joi movements. However, he also argued that the only way to achieve this was through a military government which could provide true social stability that civilian elected politicians could not. However, as depicted in the film at least, he had that hesitance found in many intellectuals about actually participating in the necessary action itself. At one point, he extorts money from some industrialists, like any yakuza would do, with the implication of it being protection money, but we never see what that money is actual used for, nor any followers who could follow through on his implied threat. He has no pretense of becoming the fascist leader himself. Conspirators don’t meet at his house. He gives one troubled young officer a grenade to disable a power plant in the 1932 failed coup, but when the boy has gone says “it has nothing to do with me.” Though we see him in phone contact with some of the ’36 coup leaders after the coup has started, we do not see him in any meetings with them beforehand. Even so, he continues to insist the actual actions have nothing to do with him. Even at his execution, after he asks about the fate of “the others,” he is the only one not to shout “Banzai” before being shot.

The result is a film about inaction, about a man who wanders around the streets and his house thinking and talking, often to himself, but doing nothing. (It is rather like making a movie about John C. Calhoun without any scenes of his own Senate speeches or the rush to secession and war in 1860-61 that used his writing as justification.) Even without Yoshida’s camera mannerisms, this would make the movie feel slow, but given Yoshida’s regular practice of hiding the figures in odd parts of the frame while he photographs architecture, the 90 minutes seem like nine hours.

However, within that 90 minutes is a remarkable performance by Rentaro Mikuni as Kita. Yoshida forsakes any of the long takes he had used in his earlier pictures, instead cutting on every line, sometimes even in the middle of a line. Unlike Ozu’s similar cutting back and forth, each cut goes to a new camera set-up. This requires the most difficult kind of film acting, sustaining a meaning, a mood, an emotion through an enormous number of different takes, and Mikuni never fails to rise to the challenge. (This problem has been eliminated in the contemporary film industry where the small and light digital camera with computerized control from a distance allows multiple cameras on every scene; even though Yoshida was shooting in standard format, the 35mm cameras were still relatively large and required at least one and usually two men — operator and focus puller — as well, making it all but impossible to use multiple cameras on a single take.)

The viewer’s feeling of dislocation is encouraged by Sei Ichiyanagi’s very modernist, almost atonal music score. It is not as abstract as his score for Story Written with Water, for example, but it still manages to kill any sense of dramatic tension that might develop. Since this is his third score for Yoshida’s independent productions, we have to assume that it is exactly what Yoshida wanted.

After nine consecutive movies by Yoshida featuring Mariko Okada about the social and emotional lives of women, Coup d’etat is striking in that Okada is missing completely and women hardly figure. Kita has a wife, as apparently does the young soldier, but they are cryptic outsider figures. It is a political movie in which it is impossible, at least for me, to discern the politics, since the politics is mostly kept off screen. The very idea of making the movie must have indicated some admiration of Kita, which would place Yoshida on the fascist right wing of Japanese political thought, not at all where we would expect experimentalist and avant-garde artists to be.**

There is a sense that this is a significant, even important movie, yet I can’t explain why that feeling exists, given the mannerisms of Yoshida’s film-making. It gives us another view of the intellectual and political ferment that continued even after the 1968 demonstrations and thus may actually make sense only within the context of the early seventies. Whatever its impact at the time, it was the last movie Yoshida would make for about 15 years, marking the practical end of arguably the most intensely experimental of the early Japanese New Wave directors.

* Ikki Kita was a writer who had spent about a decade in China, which resulted in a book about the Chinese Revolution and, more significantly, an Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan, which was often censored or banned outright but still managed to circulate widely after his return to Japan in 1920. The book advocated many of the same reforms associated with Soviet Communism, including the death of westernized businessmen and corrupt politicians, but keeping the Emperor as the god/ruler while the country was actually administered by the military who would take power in a coup (sort of a merger of the sonno-joi with a return of a much more powerful Shogunate). In 1921, a young man who had read his work assassinated the aged millionaire head of a major financial group and then committed suicide himself. Shortly afterward, Kita sent a present to the Crown Prince (eventually Emperor Hirohito), who replied with a blank thank you note that Kita read as Imperial approval for his ideas. He tried to organize a series of terrorist acts in 1932 that were to lead to the Prime Minister’s assassination, but these went awry (they shot the wrong man, his brother) and some of the officers involved went to prison. In 1936, another group of young officers, inspired by the same ideas, tried to stage a full coup, assassinating several politicians and occupying the grounds of the Imperial Palace. Along with many officers, Kita was arrested, tried by a military court, and executed by firing squad. (Thanks to David Desser, Eros Plus Massacre (Bloomington, IN, 1988), pp. 72-5, the clearest source have been able to find).

** After living through the New Wave in film and the flamboyant new writing of the sixties and seventies, almost always “liberal” in their political leanings, we tend to forget that many great avant-garde and experimental writers such as Céline and Pound were openly fascist (and anti-Semitic), as were painters de Chirico and Dali, while of course in Japan Mishima is the most well-known artist of the post-war era to advocate measures similar to Kita’s.