This is the translation of an article I origianally wrote in Italian about three years ago, on the occasion of the special online edition of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.
Anticipating many of the aesthetic trends that now abound in the visual and social media landscape, The New God is constructed as a video diary that explores and reveals what lies behind the attraction of some young Japanese for the far-right movements at the end of the last century.
Video activist and filmmaker Tsuchiya Yutaka films his interactions with ultra-nationalist singer Karin Amamiya and other members of the far-right group to which she belongs. Although his political orientation is completely different, Tsuchiya is so fascinated by what the girl has to say that he decides to give her a video camera to record her daily reflections.
The documentary begins with Amamiya in front of the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where soldiers and high-ranking generals who committed Class A war crimes during the Second World War are enshrined. A place that continues to cause controversy and tension between Japan and the international community, especially South Korea and China, due to the annual visits to the place by important Japanese political figures.
As director Tsuchiya, a left-wing activist and fierce opponent of the imperial system, begins to film Amamiya and her band, he discovers that behind the hard veneer of right-wing extremism lies a sense of almost existential confusion not unlike that experienced by other young people in Japan at the time. The New God thus proves to be a fascinating portrait of a group of very confused young people who have made far-right ideology and the celebration of the emperor the centre of their lives.
Structured as a kind of low-fi video confessional and visual dialogue, shot alternately by Amamiya and Tsuchiya, the documentary is an exploration of the response to life malaise by a group of young people in search of something to fill their existential void. In this sense, one of the most striking elements of the work is the sincerity with which the young singer reveals her feelings to the camera. In her own words and by her own admission, the political stance is often just a mask, a personal reaction to a sense of not belonging in contemporary Japanese society. Amamiya often talks about the lack of meaning that reality has for her, especially when compared to the life-and-death decisions made by soldiers during the Second World War. Of course, this is her rather superficial, confused and mythical vision of Japan’s wartime and supposedly heroic past.
In her confessions and conversations with Tsuchiya and Itō, the band’s guitarist, the girl is looking for something to hold on to, something solid and stable that can give meaning to her everyday reality. Very often this meaning and centre of gravity is provided by the pride of belonging to the “Japanese ethnic group”, which she believes to be a real concept.
One of the most fascinating parts of The New God is Amamiya and Itō’s trip to North Korea. There they meet some members of the Yodogō group of the Red Army Faction (Sekigun-ha), who hijacked a JAL flight to Tokyo on 31 March 1970 and eventually took refuge in North Korea, where they were still living when the film was shot. Amamiya, who is very distant from the group in ideology and politics, feels a certain envy both for these 60-year-old ex-terrorists and for the sense of ethnic unity she sees in the Asian country. In one of her videos, she confesses that children aren’t bullied here as they are in Japan, and that she was bullied by her classmates several times as a child and young girl.
As the film progresses, Amamiya’s weaknesses and feelings are slowly revealed, and she is not afraid to confess her fears and indecision directly to the camera. Through the videos that Tsuchiya and Amamiya exchange, the mutual attraction that the two are beginning to feel for each other comes to the surface at a certain point; the two will eventually marry after the filming is finished.
It is this sense of progressive revelation and self-discovery accomplished with the help of the camera that makes this documentary such an interesting experiment. The New God thus sits at the crossroads of video activism – Tsuchiya’s own What Do You Think About the War Responsibility of Emperor Hirohito? (1997) is, in a sense, the starting point for The New God – and the tradition of Japanese personal cinema (self-documentary)1.
Seen today, more than 25 years after it was released, The New God is an interesting example of the problematic process of liberation and democratisation of the filming subject made possible by the technological revolution and brought about by the affordability of small video cameras. At the same time, the video message style with which the work is constructed anticipates today’s ubiquitous visual social media aesthetics. There is a great deal of exhibitionism behind Amamiya’s video letters and video confessions, more in the way she relates to the eye of the camera than in what she actually says to it. It is no coincidence that the film ends with her saying, before turning off the video: “I can’t live my life without a camera!”.
- That is, the personal, diaristic, often amateur documentary, whose pioneers include Hara Kazuo’s Extreme Private Eros: Love Song, 1974 (1974) and Suzuki Shirōyasu’s Impressions of a Sunset (1975). ↩︎
Asian Docs 