becoming
korean
by Douglas Messerli
Masao Adachi, Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu
Tamua and Nagisa Ōshima (screenplay), Nagisa Ōshima (director) 帰って来たヨッパライ(Kaette kita yopparai) (Three Resurrected Drunkards) / 1968
In Three Resurrected Drunkards Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima uses a
1960s comic genre to discuss far more serious issues. Like a mix of The
Beatles’ and Monkees’ movies and Jean-Luc Godard, Ōshima takes his three
musicians of the Japanese band The Folk Crusaders through a series of
semi-comic, self-conscious adventures.
On a beach, this group of mismatched drunkards, Kazuhiko Kato (described
throughout as a “beanpole”), Osamu Kitayama (shorter), and Norihiko Hashida
(very short) somewhat darkly point their fingers at each other’s heads in a
goofy mock re-enactment of the famed Eddie Adams photo of a Vietcong guerilla
being executed, The Folk Crusaders hit song, “I Only Live Twice” playing in the
background. If the game they are playing has more dark undertones than comic
ones, so too does their somewhat blasphemous song about heaven being a place
where “the booze is good and the girls are pretty,” run by a god who is an “old
meany.”
That soon is played out
within the plot, as the three go swimming, their Japanese soldier uniforms
being stolen from beneath the beach by a hand that replaces their uniforms with
those of Korean soldiers, along with some money. Returning from the water, two
of them are forced to dress in the Korean costumes, while beanpole retains his
own dress.
From that outward transformation, along
with their insistence to a local tobacconist that a popular brand of cigarettes
costs only 40 yen (the real price is higher), things go quickly from bad to
worse, as the police begin following them and other beach dwellers are on the
attack. Only a mysterious woman is evidently willing to help them, suggesting
they steal other’s clothing. At a local spa they try just that, but are
suddenly attacked by the Koreans who have stolen their clothes and are forced
to return to their Korean costumes, as they are captured and sent to Korea’s
Pusan Bay, before being sent away to Viet Nam to the war in which they die.
Waking up once more to see
the mysterious girl hovering over them, the three change, this time into her
dress and blouse, attempting to get away once more, only to meet up again with
two AWOL Koreans, who restore them to their Korean identities.
Ōshima’s theme, clearly, is the
Japanese xenophobia, in particular their hatred and dismissal of Koreans. On
the streets of Tokyo, the three, film camera in hand, ask citizens a simple
question: “Are you Japanese?” which each time gets answered with the words “No,
I’m Korean,” clearly satirizing the real situation of racial purity. And when
the film suddenly begins all over again, including the ocean swim, the robbery,
the event at the tobacconists, and the attempt to steal clothes at the spa, the
trio answer their questions slightly differently, this time admitting and even
embracing their enforced Korean identities.
Nonetheless, the three find themselves in a further series of
misadventures, particularly because one of their group has fallen in love with
the mysterious and helpful woman, whom, they have discovered, is also Korean.
It hardly matters what happens in the
end, for everything in this film happens over and over as in a surreal dream,
the story forever repeating itself due to the Japanese society’s clear
inability to learn from history. The last scenes of the film take us to a mural
that portrays the very scene which trio was imitating in the very first scene,
a horrible image of Asians murdering Asians, just as the boys had pretended to
shoot one another at the beach, the director revealing that the comedy is, in
fact, a tragedy the society must face.
Los Angeles, June 7, 2013
Reprinted from Nth Position (England] (July
2013).
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