Currency and the Blonde / Tuka to kinpatsu (1999)

A middle-aged man walks through a subway under the train tracks and pauses to pray to an advertising poster that features an American blonde woman, asking her to save him and his country. Thus begins Tuka to kinpatsu, one of the oddest looks at economics and the Japanese cultural psyche ever put on film. Like many of his generation, writer/director Rokuro Mochizuki had begun his career in straight to video pinku, and the kinky subject matter along with the 4×3 format, small cast, and obviously low budget suggest another video pinku film. However, by this stage of his career Mochizuki had attained considerable mainstream success with his Gokudo kisha trilogy and his revivals of the serious yakuza movie, so this has the look of a very personal project for him.

The praying man is Kosaka, an economics professor at a Tokyo university. He is ignored or ridiculed by his students because he used to be a major figure on TV whose investment advice is no longer sought since Japan has entered the recession that followed the bursting of its real estate bubble in the mid nineties. Kosaka has become a pathetic man, living alone after his own bankruptcy, masturbating regularly to a video of crotch shots of a blonde woman in her underwear or spending evenings getting lap dances from an American woman in a strip club.

An “exchange student” called Anna with short, short skirts, long legs, and very blonde hair appears and his obsessions let her humiliate him in ever greater ways. She humiliates him in front of his students, locks him naked in a suitcase that she drags across Tokyo, abandons him on the train or the streets, pushes him down a steep hill,  ties him up to watch her have sex with her American boyfriend, or drags him across town on a luggage carrier in his underwear. Even after she lets him go, he keeps coming back for more of the same. Such an exercise in personal humiliation has not been seen since Topazu. (If nothing else, it illustrates the humiliations actors of both genders will go through to have work.)

His relation with the stripper is different, perhaps because she has never dyed her hair blonde. After several club sessions she begins to visit his apartment for private dancing but always keeps her pants on. Even when she offers sex, he declines but begins to do some strange bondage, once drawing lines on her using a beef-cutter’s chart.

As he waits for his train each morning, a friendly man begins to chat, and over time they talk about what has happened to the country. Their generation had been taught that money was what counted, and that idea had driven Japan out of its post-war poverty as everyone sought to make more money. But as Kosawa tells his students in his farewell lecture, Japan had money but didn’t know what to do with it, so it went into land and stock market speculation, then evaporated when those bubbles burst. The friendly man appears one morning without his suit and without any warning steps off the platform in front of the express train.

As far as my generalized readings in modern economics go, this is a fairly accurate if overly concise summary of what happened to Japan’s economy in the nineties. The country did enter a significant recession and the unthinkable happened as many salarymen who thought they had permanent jobs with permanent companies were laid off. *

Kosawa comes to believe not only that the nation must be saved but that a Blonde will be the savior, if he (and they) accept another humiliation like the war and start over as they did in the Occupation years, which gets a good laugh from his students. His humiliations at the hands of Anna thus become not just the story of a man with pathetically kinky sex habits but rather his own acting out of the position in which he thinks Japan itself has fallen. So much loathing of Japanese society itself hasn’t been seen on film since the sixties movies of Oshima.

After the stranger’s suicide, Kosawa arranges for a Japanese call-girl. When she comes into his room she finds the American stripper is bound to the chair watching. No matter how hard the call girl tries, Kosawa can not get an erection until the American woman starts to laugh at him, after which he can complete the sex only while still being laughed at. The call-girl will do anything for the right amount of money, since that is her job, but no matter how much money he throws at her, she can not sing the national anthem, because she does not even know it. This sends Kosawa over whatever edge is left, as he sees it as the final proof that Japan is finished.

There is a dream-like sense to much of the movie, in part because Anna is played by Eri Kimura in her only known appearance. Quite different in appearance from the Blonde on the poster to which Kosawa prays, she is clearly a Japanese actress who can’t actually speak English well enough to even pronounce her character’s name, hardly plausible for an American who only spent a few years of her childhood in Japan. The blonde whom Kosawa watches on the video tape is also a Japanese performer with obviously dyed hair, though the American stripper is a brunette.** Events seem to occur in sequence but without transition. The stranger at the station seems to have been re-enacting his own earlier suicide, which he had described in his first meeting with Kosawa.

Kosawa oscillates between begging for humiliation by the Americans and telling himself that Japan is better than they are but has been failed by the Japanese themselves, a conflicted position we have seen depicted in many other movies. Mochizuki himself never quite takes a firm stand on all this, so the movie is neither a parable or a lecture, simultaneously depicting both a superiority and an inferiority complex. Nor, despite its bare breasts and a couple of sex scenes, is it quite a sex film either. But in its perverse manner it captures a sense of malaise and uncertainty that apparently swept across Japan in the economic troubles of the late nineties as it approached the millennium.

* Since then the economy has stabilized but has remained an enigma to most economists because its growth rate remains small, though its GDP per capita and living standards remain on a par with any of the Anglo/European nations of the G7 to which it belongs. We also regularly see news stories of politicians bewailing the falling birth rate that portends further economic problems, but also resisting the most obvious solution of easing immigration restrictions.

** Identified in the credits only as “Sophia,” she does speak a serviceable Japanese that is far better than “Anna’s” English. By the nineties, there was a small market for American strippers, with their generally longer legs and larger breasts than Japanese performers. The bare breasts suggest she is probably a real strip club performer rather than an American visitor who has been hired simply for looks, and the use of the local language suggests she had been in country for some time.