Anyone who has wandered in Japanese streets, either as tourist or as citizen, will have glanced at the wanted posters that hang around – a koban always has one. While most passersby do not think twice about these fugitives living among us, they got a stark reminder of such possibility when the national news reported that the terminally-ill Hiroshi Uchida, days before his death,confessed to the Kamakura hospital staff that he was Satoshi Kirishima, one of Japan’s most wanted criminals.

Merely one year after Kirishima’s death, Banmei Takahashi sets out to offer audiences a cinematic glance at his subjectivity of someone who evaded the law for decades. The director, furthermore, takes the opportunity to sketch out the disheartening failure of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front (EAAJAF) to instigate societal chance. The three cells of the EAAJAF (the Wolf-cell led by Masashi Daidoji, the Fangs of The Earth-cell led by Nodoka Saito, and the Scorpion-cell led by Yoshimasa Kurokawa) committed a series of bombings targeting corporations considered to be supporters and perpetrators of imperialist aggression in the first half of the seventies.

Their most infamous bombing – the bombing of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Building which killed six people and wounded more than hundred – forms the starting point of Takahashi’s narrative. In an unspecified tearoom, the three leaders of the EAAJAF discuss the effect of their deadly bombing. Kurokawa, while not against the attack on Mitsubishi corporation, one of the pillars of Japan’s imperialistic reflex and thirst to colonize, laments the unnecessary casualties and demands that the method is chosen in function of the desired political effect. They must target the corporation as symbolic institution with their bombings, not rip the flesh apart from those who breathe life into the corporate dynamic.  

Satoshi Kirishima (Katsuya Maiguma) and Hisaichi Ugajin (Eita Okuno), both members of the Scorpion cell, aid to cause by collecting proof of the exploitative transgressions of Japanese corporations, but are soon asked by their leader to help bombing the Kajima corporation, another institution who refused to take responsibility for their past transgressions under the imperialistic regime. Yet, it does not take long for the police, backed by the governmental forces, to arrest seven of the nine EAAJAF’s members and turn Ugajin and Kirishima into fugitives – plastering their faces on wanted-posters all over Japan. Some time later, Hiroshi Kirishima, who now goes under the name Hiroshi Uchida, applies for a job at Kobayashi corporation.

I Am Kirishima spends little time exploring the movements of EAAJAF – focusing more on sketching out Kirishima’s mundane life as a fugitive, yet Takahashi does invite the spectator to go beyond criminalisation to understand the aim of the EAAJAF. The way Takahashi frames and contextualizes the bombings shows that these attacks were carefully planned-out acting-outs addressed to the political Other, the corporate Other as well as the collective consciousness. These acts of intentional destruction aimed to brutally emphasize the repressed signifier to arouse a sense of guilt in the societal Other and force the political and corporate Other to take responsibility for their imperialistic transgressions.

It is, thus, wrong to assume that these terrorists committed a series of bombings to satisfy their thirst for destruction and pursue their desire to annihilate the Japanese Other. The true aim of these acts of ‘terrorism’ was to loosen the various threads that braid the societal fabric together so that a truth, repressed by the political and corporate Other, can be sewn into it. The left-wing activists aimed to exploit the power of explosions to open the ears of the political Other by force, to demand that the Other takes the signifier emphasized by the corporate debris serious, and to remodel the societal consciousness and, therefore, cause societal change. In other words, what the EAAJAF desires is that the Other assumes and inscribes their imperialistic and capitalistic transgressions into its historical fabric, so that the political system can atone for these sins by instigating societal change. They hope that, after the dust has settled, the government and the sinful corporations take responsibility for their past and present by making amends and by changing the collective consciousness that will shape the future (aufheben).

What the EAAJAF wants to shatter is nothing other than the capitalistic truth that animates the imperialistic dream, i.e. the fact that major corporations support their foreign expansion by exploiting lower-class workers within Japan but also in South East-Asian countries like Korea and Malaysia. Corporations, subscribed to the ideal of economical imperialism, utilize the capital accumulated by exploiting domestic labourers to abuse workers in the “colonies” and, further, maximalize their profit. The exploitation these workers must endure persuades many to flee to Japan in the vain hope for a better life, yet they are welcomed as cheap and disposable labourers in the greedy arms of Japanese corporations.  

    

The EAAJAF addresses the political Other, because they perceive not merely that the government fails to curb capitalistic exploitation, but that the aid the government provided perpetuates the exploitive dynamics of the capitalist. Takahashi takes the opportunity to highlight that little has changed since the seventies. Contemporary Japanese society is revealed as a place animated by capitalistic exploitive tendencies which fuel the rise of xenophobia and the government is shown as the protector of the equilibrium of the system – the cruelty of the Japanese immigration department goes hand in hand with the visa programs (e.g. TITP) that deliver ‘cheap’ East-Asian workers in the hands of employers who are not so strict on abiding by the labour regulations. 

As the EAAJAF falls apart and Kirishima is turned into a wanted man, severely limiting his ability to freely move within society, I am Kirishima transforms into a measured character study. With this sketch, Takahashi succeeds in delivering a refined exploration of the tension between the subject as fugitive and the societal field. More concretely, the film explores the fact that a wanted man can only establish frail and superficial bonds to stabilize himself as ego within the Other and that such integration always entails the risk to be seen by the societal searchlight of the Other of the law. The searching eye of police subtly infests all nooks and crannies of the societal field. Kirishima is not merely cut off from his political voice, but forced to wander in solitude in a societal field that does not (want to) change.

His tragic truth resounds powerfully in the signifiers sang by Keena (Kana Kita) at the local bar: “Be inconspicuous. Don’t get carried away. Know your limits. Don’t try too hard. Never forget caring about others, I want to be man who is behind the times” (General-note 1). Her signifiers deliver an extremely equivocal punch that stirs the unvocalized conflict between his ‘explosive’ past and his persecuted present as well as the effect the subjective elision of his name within the societal field. We will refrain from interpreting these signifiers deeper as to give the spectator the chance to be touched by the emotional impact the concatenation of the sequences related to these signifiers effectuate.   

The composition of I Am Kirishima offers a balanced and straightforward mix between static and dynamic shots. Takahashi rightfully refuses to fall for the temptation to decorate his visual fabric with decorations or artful abstractions to construct a fictional frame that stages the various fragments of Satoshi Kirishima’s subjectivity in a plain and sincere manner.

Takahashi’s use of such straightforward visual frame, of course, puts the weight on the shoulders of the cast to breathe life into the emotional dimension of the film. While the performance of each cast-member helps infusing a sense of honesty in the framing of Kirishima’s life-in-hiding, it is Katsuya Maiguma, who portrays Kirishima, that steals the show. He delivers a layered understated performance that allows the well-structured narrative to catch the spectator emotionally off-guard. The combination of the straightforward composition coup and Maiguma’s understated performance that Takahashi succeeds in elegantly underlining the failure of left-wing activism and the persistence of the societal troubles related to the capitalistic machinery.  

I Am Kirishima is a timely narrative that, by offering a detached but touching portrait of one of Japan’s most wanted, shows how inert a society animated by a marriage between capitalism and right-wing nationalism is. The strength of I Am Kirishima lies in the fact that Banmei Takahashi refrains from idealizing Satoshi Kirishima and stages him as a mundane man who desired societal change, yet got absolutely nothing.

Notes

General-note 1: The song featured in the film is Eigo Kawashima’s時代おくれ河島英五時代おくれ.