Schoolgirl Rebel With a Razor Blade: New TokyoScope Talk Kicks Off SF J-Pop Summit Week

While the Land of the Rising Sun pushes its "Cool Japan" image of a nation always looking towards the horizon and promotes its many popular, cutting-edge intellectual properties up the wazoo, its American vanguards--in this case the country's Japantowns--oftentimes seem trapped in a dull 1980s time warp of pricey yakiniku joints and old ladies fashion stores. While these things may have raked in the dough when the world trembled at Japan's unstoppable economy, these days, in the post-bubble era, all eyes are on that nation's young generation and what's hot in their world. Lots of shops have taken the next step and put up their token Totoro and Naruto wall scrolls, but few have made the kind of quantum leap VIZ Media has in San Francisco's Japantown with the New People building.
 
Since its opening in late 2009 New People has not only masterfully inserted itself into the local Japanese pop culture scene as a must-go destination for aficionados of that media underworld, but also into the general landscape of City by the Bay hipness. This week the building's facilities are at the center of the 2010 J-Pop Summit and Festival, an event consisting of five nights of movies, music and fashion programming followed by two days of (hopefully) fun in the sun. The party kicked off Monday night with the sixth TokyoScope talk hosted by Otaku USA editor Patrick Macias and yours truly was in the audience taking notes like a freshman in a lecture hall. 
 
 
Monday's talk focused on the bad girls and wild women of cinema, manga and anime that assaulted the senses and sensibilities of Japanese audiences starting in the 1960s. Though the talk still consisted of that frothy mix of history and hilarity, was not your average oration. Firstly, the event was a double-feature of sorts: one hour of lecture followed by another hour-and-a-half screening of seminal Japanese exploitation film Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion. This was also the first TokyoScope with an age minimum which, considering the subject matter, may have been a smart move by the organizers. Needless to say, in movies about throngs of rough and tumble women and the men who exploit them, nobody's clothes stay pristine for long, if you know what I mean. 
 
Now, bad girl media isn't a unique product of Japan, but it's a much rarer commodity in America to be sure. The levels of abject violence, graphic sex and outright misogyny found in these films seem designed to disgust as much as titillate and might be scarcely palatable to Western audiences. The "sexploitation" films of Russ Meyers (like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) and some of the late-night "Skinemax" fare are the closest this country has come, really, but even they don't live up to these monumental heapings of shock cinema. 
 
It didn't start out this way, of course. The craze of women behaving badly began with the decline of ninkyoeiga ("chivalry film") yakuza gangland movies in the mid- to late '60s, when even the charms of iconic actors like Ken Takakura couldn't draw audiences in anymore. The solution? Replace the male antihero with a female one, and thus the Red Peony Gambler series was born. Starring the remarkably elegant Sumiko Fuji, this series revolves around the disenfranchised daughter of a murdered yakuza boss not afraid to shoot, stab and cheat anybody if it means revenge against her father's killers. The series was a huge success and signaled studios that, hey, audiences really dig these tough-as-nails ladies. 
 
But it was going to take more than girl gangsters to pull audiences back to theaters for good. Thanks to the rise of TV, movie houses were becoming ghost towns and many Japanese studios were on the ropes desperate for the Next Big Thing. While that was going on, one sector of Japanese cinema remained profitable: the so-called "pink films," a sort of low-budget softcore pornographic movie that were churned out by the dozens. Toei had the idea to combine pink films with the action genre and add in a Red Peony-esque empowered female protagonist to launch the first in a wave of "pinky violence" movies. Other big studios like Nikkatsu soon joined in and the wave quickly became a tsunami. 
 
Thematically, these films run the gamut from the frankly difficult to watch aforementioned torture and nudity-filled Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion to the kind of wacky schoolgirl delinquent sukeban movies of the Terrifying Girls' High School series to more yakuza movies with blood, sex and motorcycles replacing chivalry and elegance. The boom era for these movies lasted for over a decade, until the rise of home video in the '80s and a soon-to-be "normalized" porn industry signaled an end to the female exploitation film's day in the sun and it slid from mainstream to niche. The spirit lives on, though, leaving in its wake a whole generation of lady rebels from political activists to hundreds of schoolgirl biker gangs nationwide. Even girl music groups like the idol blob that is AKB48 have gotten in on the action with their appearance in the TV series Majisuka Gakuen about an all-girls high school for delinquents (kind of like Cromartie High with cute girls instead of Freddie Mercury, Mechazawa and gorillas). 
 
All in all, Macias delivered a solid, informative presentation that was a fitting kick-off for the J-Pop Summit Week and a stark reminder that Japanese culture isn't all cartoon mascots, tea ceremonies and an impeccable work ethic: sometimes is downright blue, bloody and bracing. Variety is, after all, the spice of life and I say pass that shaker this way.