Nagisa Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief is an avant-garde film which defies categorisation. The film confuses the viewer with switches between fiction and reality, utilising both scripted narratives, documentary footage and Japanese kabuki play. While the main “problem” in the film is the protagonist Torio Okanoue’s sexual impotence, Diary is clearly much more than that. Oshima depicts gender dysphoria, sexual assault, national identity, sexual identity and more in a barely coherent manner.
Despite the film’s abstract and fragmented nature, most scholarship about the film focuses on its political and historical nature, particularly with regard to the Japanese student riots of 1968. Taro Nettleton examines the film’s site, Shinjuku, as a liminal space for the marginalised, where all kinds of discourse could take place (Nettleton 8). It is in that very same stage for discourse that the Japanese student protests took place, which we see in documentary form at the end of Diary. More pertinent to this essay is Uchino Tadashi’s description of the student protests as a “possible postcolonial moment” (Tadashi 10). Tadashi’s choice of words imply that the post-World War Two American Occupation was an act of colonialism, and that the unrest in 1968 was a Japanese attempt to reclaim its pre-colonial past instead of following Western thought. Whether post-war Japan can be considered a post-colonial state is debatable, but Diary’s allusions to Japanese nationalism in the final kabuki scene certainly point to the film’s nationalistic themes. By using a feminist and postcolonial reading of Diary, I will argue that Oshima mixes documentary and fiction to draw attention to the struggle of a postwar Japanese youth to find their identity. Torio’s overly feminine nature and struggle to find an identity outside of stolen Western ideas forms an internal realisation of this problem, while the real documentary footage represents an external one.
Diary’s main narrative thread follows the protagonist, Torio, who struggles to fix his sexual problems. We see this in the first sexual encounter he has with Umeko, the shop employee who catches him in the act of stealing. The first love scene is framed intimately, with a close-up of Torio’s back tracking to Umeko. Oshima immediately contrasts the scene with a wide shot of Torio lying prone on the bed while Umeko looks away from him, hands wrapped around her knees in a forlorn manner. Clearly, their sexual act had put more distance between them rather than bring them closer as was suggested in the previous scene: after their sexual act, Torio asks Umeko if she enjoyed it, to which she responds that she felt neither pain nor pleasure. The film points to Torio’s femininity as a reason for his sexual inefficacy, causing him to be unable to satisfy Umeko. Diary alludes to this point as Torio stretches out and kicks his legs on the bed, asking Umeko to clean his ears. In doing so, he becomes a passive subject and takes on a feminine role in the framing.
Torio’s sexual problems are symptomatic of a greater problem of being unable to find one’s identity. Yet the problem is not exclusive to him: the psychologist Takahashi Tetsu also accuses Umeko of being narcissistic to the point of lesbianism and acting overly masculine, reasons for her inability to enjoy sex. Later in the film, we see Umeko peruse literature ranging from Henry Miller, Jack Olsen to Stalin and other Japanese poets in an apparent attempt to find meaning. As she reads more and more books, she slowly forms a mountain of discourses on the book shop’s floor. However, her consumption of ideas all around the world do no good to her as she begs the book store owner to “buy” her. Torio and Umeko are emblematic of a post-war Japanese youth population struggling to find their identity. Torio is a man who gains sexual pleasure from “stealing” Western books and ideas, while Umeko only views herself as a sexual object throughout the film, or as Tadashi describes, “that Suzuki as a Westernized Japanese is a prostitute and Okanoue as an onlooking Japanese male is a pimp” (Tadashi 8).
Apart from being shot in a handheld, documentary style with natural lighting, Diary also contains numerous documentary scenes, particularly those in which the couple try to find solutions to their sexual problems. In the scenes where the couple consults the sexologist Tetsu Takahashi and ask men in the bar for advice, the scene appears to take on an unscripted quality. Takahashi does not appear to be acting or reciting scripted lines, stating that Torio is a baby who is “still breastfeeding”. Simultaneously, he claims that Umeko has lesbian tendencies because she was aroused by a Japanese pornographic picture of two women with one man. He then applies Freudian psychology, claiming that she has an attraction to her mother. The camera swings between the characters without any jump cuts, suggesting continuity as in real life. The bar scene which immediately follows Takahashi’s session also follows the same pattern. While it does not apparently take place in real time, the old men in the bar answer questions about sexuality in an unfiltered manner similar to an interview in an attempt to help the couple. As Mika Ko writes:
For Matsumoto, ‘neo-documentarism’ was neither a genre nor a subgenre of documentary. Rather it referred to a ‘method’, or a new kind of realism that would be made possible by merging the styles of the documentary and the avant garde. Matsumoto noted that conventional documentary films tended to focus on the observation of external realities without fully addressing internal or psychic realities.
(Ko 389)
While a documentary film purports to depict factual information about the real world, a fictional film is usually mimetic in nature. Yet as Ko suggests, films from the Japanese New Wave like Diary and Funeral were unique in combining fictional mimesis with actual documentary realism. In doing so, they had surpassed the directors of the French New Wave in depicting realism. While Truffaut and Godard only suggested realism through on-location shooting and natural lighting, Oshima and Matsumoto went further by adding in documentary footage to strengthen the link between fiction and reality.
The scholarship on Diary mostly agrees that it is a political film, but it only describes the “external reality” of the student riots with one final scene. The rest of the scenes concern the “internal or psychic realities” of the disillusioned post-war youth who started the riots. The men in the bar and Takahashi both completely failed to help the couple. Their advice was misguided, irrelevant, and in Takahashi’s case, comically ludicrous to the point of satire. By depicting them in this way, Oshima highlights the inefficacy of the last generation to help the post-war youth. The documentary style interview also emphasises that this problem was not just pictures on a screen, but something happening in reality which would eventually lead to the student riots.
Oshima depicts this “internal reality” through the private worlds of Torio and Umeko. Their private sexual issues and the failure of the past generation paralleled the post-war youth’s disillusionment with the Japanese administration. Oshima also implies that the correct way forward for the Japanese youth is to return to pre-occupation thinking. Takahashi and the old men at the bar were unhelpful at best and predatory at worst. By the end of the film, the only thing that solves their sexual problems is kabuki theatre. Torio plays the role of Yui Shosetsu, an Edo era revolutionary. He is finally able to give Umeko sexual satisfaction over Mahler’s triumphant score. Yui Shosetsu’s role in the play is significant as well. In real life, he was a revolutionary who plotted a coup against the Tokugawa shogunate because of their strict laws.
Clearly, the play is drawing a parallel between the current Japanese administration after US rule and the Tokugawa shogunate. Both governments experienced political unrest as a result of strict mandates. Within the same play, Kara Juro proclaims that Japan is like “a female who has shrunken her genitals, fearing someone or something outside may reach out and toy with them.” Juro’s personification of Japan as a scared woman alludes to its diminished status after the American Occupation. The current government still had policies put in place during the American Occupation such as censorship, democratic reform and a dissolution of Japan’s military. Only by playing the role of a revolutionary who seeks to collapse a corrupt institution may Torio regain his sexual vitality. Tadashi also notes that Japanese Noh theatre and kabuki “supposedly guarantees Japan’s imagined uninterrupted continuity locating the traditional/aesthetic space as the site of the endless present” (10). In this case, Oshima seems to assert that the right path for Torio is to embrace the traditional and aesthetic of Japan. Prior to doing so, Torio’s attempted stealing of Western literature and ideas only result in a weak, twisted sexuality and unwanted femininity. It is only through the power of traditional Japanese theatre that he recovers his vitality.
Following Torio and Umeko’s successful lovemaking, Oshima once again uses documentary footage to shift from mimesis to reality. However, while the previous scenes were ambiguous in if they were scripted, the final scene of the film is clearly real. Hundreds of people flood the streets of Shinjuku. In one scene, a man throws an object into a police box, shattering the glass.
he shot frames the two tightly to divorce them from the setting in which they make love. In strong contrast, the scene of the police station that begins the riot footage is shot wide, from a distance. This final scene is the only one in which we see ‘the public’ in any detail. The film thus underscores the separation between the political and private, which remain inextricably tied in Funeral.
(Nettleton 22)
Like Nettleton notes, the setting shifts from private to public, mimesis to reality and “internal reality” to external. Oshima does this to emphasise the reality that Diary is grounded in. Like how the mimetic problem of Torio’s sexual inefficacy is solved, Oshima implies that the student riots and recovering Japan’s pre-war identity is the way forward as well.
In conclusion, we observe that Diary of a Shinjuku thief mixes mimesis and reality in order to portray both internal and external realities of the 1968 Japanese student riots. Oshima employs neo-documentarism, using documentary footage and documentary-style scripted scenes to depict the private lives behind disillusioned Japanese youth trying to find their identity. The mimetic problems in the film revolve around the main characters’ struggle to find an identity. They repeatedly try to steal Western ideas and fail, evidenced by their stealing of Western books. Instead, their problems are solved by returning to a pre-war tradition of Japan.
Works Cited
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, Directed by Nagisa Oshima, performances by Tadanori Yokoo and Rie Yokoyama, Sōzōsha, 1969.
Uchino, Tadashi. “Misperforming and the Everyday: Shinjuku Dorobo Nikki (Shinjuku Thief’s Diary).”, pp1-13,
2009.
Taro Nettleton, Shinjuku as site: Funeral Parade of Roses and Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, Screen, Volume 55, Issue 1, Spring 2014, Pages 5–28, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hju001
McLelland, Mark. “Takahashi Tetsu and Popular Sexology in Early Postwar Japan, 1945–1970.” A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960, edited by Veronika Fuechtner et al., 1st ed., University of California Press, 2018, pp. 211–31. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1vjqqxw.14. Accessed 23 Oct. 2023.