Reinhabiting the mock-up gallows: the place of Koreans in Oshima Nagisa’s films in the 1960s SHOTA T. OGAWA In August 1964, as Japan waited expectantly for the opening of the Tokyo Olympic Games, Oshima Nagisa boarded a flight to Seoul, South Korea. The ostensible reason for the Japanese director’s first trip abroad was to make a thirty-minute television documentary commissioned by Nippon Television. Although the initial plan was to shoot the Rhee Line territorial water dispute from the point of view of the Korean fishermen, 1 his failure to gain approval from the Korean authorities led to an alternative project entitled Seishun no ishibumi/The Tomb of Youth (1964), which was both a social documentary and a paean to the Korean social workers who looked after street children and sex workers. 2 The two-month trip was well timed if Oshima was hoping to escape the nationalistic fervour that surrounded the Olympic Games, considered by many as a showcase for Japan’s new status as an economic powerhouse. As it turned out, the director saw more than the distant glow of the Olympic flame during his stay in Korea. Amidst a cosmopolitan group of Japanese, Korean and foreign journalists in a hotel in Seoul, he closely followed the quick succession of international political events that stole the limelight from the Games: the USSR’s launching of the first multiperson spacecraft; the ousting of Nikita Khrushchev; China’s first nuclear tests. He still read the Japanese newspapers, but also reached out to see the world from a Korean perspective, picking up local papers despite his inability to read Hangul. If we imagine the young Japanese director, still in his early thirties, excitedly picking out Chinese characters in the Korean papers and discussing the news with foreign journalists, we have an image 1 South Korea’s founding President Syngman Rhee unilaterally declared the boundary position in 1952, ostensibly to protect South Korean maritime resources. The resultant capture of Japanese fishermen who crossed the internationally disputed Rhee line created a diplomatic incident. Imai Tadashi depicted the tension in Are ga minato no hikari da/That Is the Port Light (1961) from the point of view of a Korean fisherman on a Japanese boat, who finds himself caught up in the bitter struggle when his ethnicity is revealed to his colleagues. 2 The connotation of paean is made clear in the Japanese title, which can be read as ‘Monument to Youth’. 303 Screen 56:3 Autumn 2015 © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved doi:10.1093/screen/hjv046 at UNC Charlotte on September 29, 2015 http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from