The production company Kokuei was founded in August 1957 by three people with no prior experience in filmmaking: Yamoto Teruo, a former postal employee who was making money through the lumber trade and money lending, his younger brother Yamoto Mitsuo, who was also in the lumber trade, and a tax officer working for the Ministry of Finance. All three came from Hokkaido and had some savings, which they invested in the educational film business that was booming in the 1950s during the years of economic growth.
Two years before the establishment of Kokuei, Yamoto Teruo had founded another film company, Daiwa Eiga, to produce the film We Are in the Skies above Pearl Harbor - Blitz Tactic Nr.11 (Ware shinjuwan jôkû ni ari - Dengeki sakusen 11-gô). This compilation of existing documentary footage about WWII in a way resembled the revisionist war movies that the studio Shintôhô produced at the time, which also concentrated on the victories of the Japanese military in WWII rather than on its defeats. The film catered to the sentiment of the war generation and enjoyed a considerable success at the time of its release in 1957. The film was compiled by Hara Chiaki, who before the war had worked for Shinkô Kinema. After the war he joined the independent production company Rajio Eiga, founded by Seki Kôji, who had also started his career with Shinkô Kinema. Yamoto hired Seki Kôji to direct educational films for Kokuei, such as The Rascal Goes to Parliament (Wanpaku kozô kokkai e yuku, 1958). However, Kokuei’s educational films, which were made primarily for the use in schools, were less profitable than Yamoto had thought and when by chance a client who had mortgaged some burlesque films from Europe as safety for a loan didn’t pay back the loan, he sold the films to a cinema owner he knew. It turned out that the films brought handsome profits and Yamoto decided to produce burlesque films on his own. The films had titles such as The Blonde and the Beauty (Kinpatsu to Bijo, 1960), Keyhole Sexy (Kiihôru sekushii, 1960), Pink Fantasy (Pinku fantashii, 1961) and Waist Hip Show (Uesutohippushô, 1961) and marked Kokuei’s shift towards sexploitation.
Yamoto not only sensed that the erotic market was potentially more lucrative than the market for educational films, he also had an unerring instinct in another field as well and that was TV animation. In Japan TV broadcast had started in 1953, but it was not until 1959, triggered by the wedding of crown prince Akihito, that television gained wider dissemination. With the increase of TV-stations and after the instant success of Tezuka Osamu’s animation series Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu) in 1963 TV animation series were in great demand. With money from Kokei, Yamoto in 1965 established the animation production company Nihon Hôsô Eiga, which produced for the broadcaster NTV series such as Fight! Osper (Tatakae! Osupâ, 1965-67), Jump Out! Batchiri (Tobidase! Batchiri, 1966- 67) and Super Boy Shadow (Bôken shônen Shadâ, 1967- 68). In Italy the latter two were broadcast under the titles Il piccolo detective and La spada di luce. In 1968 Yamoto withdrew from animation, and Nihon Hôsô Eiga was renamed first into Tôkyô Terebi Dôga, then into Nippon Terebi Dôga, which among others produced the popular TV animation series Doraemon.
Even more profitable than the TV animation market, however, was the market for sexploitation films that opened up in the early 1960s. The emergence and rapid spread of television and the diversification of the leisure sector in the course of the economic growth led to a drastic decline in movie attendances and resulted in a decline in film production of the major studios. Low budget films by newly established independent production companies filled in the gap created by the studio’s cut-backs in production. These films were full-heartedly welcomed by the cinemas at the lower end of the exhibition market, which were hit hardest by the crisis. In the cheap independent productions they found a profitable alternative to the costly studio films. Together with Ôkura Eiga, a production company established in 1962 by former Shintôhô president Ôkura Mitsugi after the studio’s bankruptcy, Kokuei was a pioneer of these films that eventually became known as “pink films” (pinku eiga). The term “pink film” was created in September 1963 by the journalist Murai Minoru in a report for the newspaper Naigai Times about the shooting of the Kokuei production Cave of Lust (Jôyoku no dôkutsu), a kind of female Tarzan variation. The term “eroduction”, another popular denominator for this new kind of films, was also first introduced in a report about Cave of Lust. The film was directed by Seki Kôji, who already had made several educational films for Kokuei such as the above mentioned The Rascal Goes to Parliament and Counterattack of the Sea Devil (Kaima no gyakushû, 1958), an animal documentary about an adventurous octopus. Seki had several TV documentaries about animals to his credits and put his experience of filming with animals to good use in his pink films as well starting with the predecessor of Cave of Lust, Valley of Lust (Jôyoku no tanima, 1963), which was Kokuei’s first foray into feature film.
Today Kobayashi Satoru’s film Market of Flesh (Nikutai no ichiba, 1962) is generally regarded as the first pink film. Beside the fact that the film was produced by an independent company Market of Flesh’s ascription as “first” pink film has much to do with the fact that the film was exposed by the Police two weeks after its release in March 1962 on charges of obscenity. The charges were soon dropped when the producers followed the “suggestions” of the police and cut several scenes from the film, but the struggle with the authorities — with the Police as well as the film industry’s self-censorship board Eirin (Commission of Motion Picture Code of Ethics) — about sexual representation should remain a disputed topic for pink films for some time to come. Kokuei too ran into troubles with the authorities from quite early on. In May 1963 Kokuei’s second pink production, Sexy Route ‘63 (Sekushii rûto ‘63), was confiscated by the police on grounds of violation of §175 of the criminal code (obscenity charge). The director of the film Saijô Kenji, Yamoto Teruo and other Kokuei employees were held in custody for a few days, because some unauthorized scenes had been inserted after the film passed the censorship board. However, this incident did not stop Kokuei from continuing to break new ground. Sexy Route ’63 was actually only distributed by Kokuei (the film was produced by Makino Production). Besides its own productions Kokuei distributed a number of films produced by other production companies. These films were usually commissioned by Kokuei, that is to say Kokuei provided the budget, but was not itself involved in the actual making of the film. This practice is still fairly common in the pink film industry today.
In some cases Kokuei was approached by directors, who couldn’t land any other production or distribution deal. One such example is Hadakamushi (1964), a film credited to a “Group Creation” (Gurûpu Sôzô). The film was in fact made by Konno Tsutomu, one of the pioneers of Japanese TV and later co-founder of TV-Man Union, the first independent TV production company in Japan. At the time Konno was employed by TBS and would probably have run into trouble with his employer if he had disclosed his name. Hadakamushi also illustrates the prejudices with which the independent pink films were confronted in the formative years. Kokuei submitted Hadakamushi to the annual Art Festival (geijutsusai) organized by the Ministry of Education, but the film was flatly rejected by the selection committee. It was the first time in the 19-year history of the Art Festival that a film was rejected. Inoue Umetsugu’s The Night of the Honeymoon (Modae, 1964), on the other hand, which was perhaps even more permissive than Hadakamushi and which had also been classified by Eirin, was accepted by the selection committee, because it was produced by the Daiei studio. The uneasy relationship between pink productions and the major studios, who increasingly felt threatened by the exploding number of pink films (and, by the way, were the main sponsors of Eirin), aggravated the following year when Wakamatsu Kôji’s Secret Behind Walls (Kabe no naka no himegoto, 1965) was selected by the Berlin Film Festival as official Japanese entry to the festival’s competition. The studios unsuccessfully tried to intervene and have the film removed from the festival and as a consequence boycotted the Berlin Festival for the consecutive two years.
The media interest caused by the controversy about Secret Behind Walls and the prosecution of Takechi Tetsuji’s Black Snow (Kuroi yuki, 1965), the first pink film put on trial on grounds of violation of §175 of the criminal code (the trial ended in 1969 with an acquittal), brought pink films, which so far had led a shadowy existence, to the attention of the general public. This in turn resulted in a further rise in production. The number of pink films, which in 1964 had grown to 67 films jumped to an impressive 225 films in 1965 and resulted in a cutthroat competition. The biggest problem was distribution. Ôkura Eiga, the biggest player in the field, in April 1965 launched the so-called OP-Chain, a network of theatres in Tokyo, for the distribution of its own films as well as the films of six other pink production companies, including Kokuei and Nihon Cinema. The latter was founded by Washio Hidemaro and Chiba Minoru, two former Kokuei board members who had quit in 1963 in order to establish their own production company. Dissatisfied with its position within the Ôkura-led OP-Chain Kokuei withdrew from the network and in September 1965 founded the socalled “Independent Chain” (dokuritsu-chên) together with Shintôhô and three other production companies. The “Independent Chain” too split up after only a few months, but the close relationship between Kokuei and Shintôhô (not to be confused with the former Shintôhô studio which went bankrupt in 1961), which began at that time, intensified in the coming decades and lasts until today.
Despite the cut-throat competition, the mid- and late- 1960s were a lucrative period for pink films, especially for the major players in the field such as Kokuei. Films such as Seki Kôji’s Cave of Lust, Ogawa Kinya’s Mistress (Mekake, 1964) or Wakamatsu Kôji’s Cronicle of an Affair (Jôji no rirekisho, 1965) turned out to be cash cows and reinforced Kokuei’s central position within the sexploitation film market. The directors who worked for Kokuei came from different backgrounds, and for this reason it is difficult to speak of a homogeneous production in the formative years of the pink film genre. Some directors such as Kobayashi Satoru came out of the studio system (the Shintôhô studio), others such as Seki Kôji, Shindô Takae and Sawa Kensuke had been raised in one of the studios, but had left their studio and worked in the documentary and educational film sector. Yamoto Teruo preferred to work with these directors who had experiences with film directing. The younger producers at Kokuei, on the other hand, most notably Yamoto Teruo’s son Yamoto Kazuyuki, Nao Shinichi and Satô Keiko, who all had entered Kokuei in 1963 just when the company began with its feature film production, favored young directors such as Wakamatsu Kôji, Mukai Kan, Umezawa Kaoru and Watanabe Mamoru, who had not worked as directors before, but made their debuts with pink films (in the cases of Mukai and Umezawa with Kokuei). All three producers shared the fictitious name Asakura Daisuke, which became Kokuei’s trademark for its more innovative and experimental films. These films were also championed by Kawashima Nobuko, wife of pink film name-giver Murai Minoru and editor of the magazine Seijin Eiga, the first Japanese magazine devoted exclusively to pink films published between 1965 and 1973. The editorial office of Seijin Eiga was, by the way, located at Kokuei’s headquarter in Western Ginza.
The uncontrolled growth of the pink film sector in the first years gave in the 1970s way to a more streamlined production. The production companies that survived the shakeout churned out films on a regular basis and provided the cinemas, many of which have specialized on pink films, with a constant flow of new films. The continuous crisis of the studios, from which the independent pink productions had profited so far, led the studios to also turn to the profitable sexploitation market. The Tôei studio entered the sexploitation market in the late 1960s with what later came to be called its “pinky violence films,” the Nikkatsu studio followed in 1971 with the launching of its Roman Porno line, which saved the studio from bankruptcy.
Roman Porno and pink films, which should be distinguished, because their production, distribution, exhibition and reception context differ considerably, although their content share many common features, were not so much competitors than more accomplices associated in symbiosis. Many pink films were produced as third films for Nikkatsu’s common triple bills and profited from Nikkatsu’s distribution network. For Kokuei and other pink production companies who did not collaborate with Nikkatsu this implicated an easing of the severe competition in the pink film exhibition market.
The realignment of the distribution and exhibition market was accompanied by a narrowing down on the level of production. Whereas in the 1960s Kokuei has worked with a variety of directors from different backgrounds and has actively raised new talents, in the 1970s the number of directors with whom Kokuei worked declined drastically. Between 1974 and 1979 Kokuei practically relied only on two directors, Umazawa Kaoru (at that time using the name Tômoto Kaoru) and Inao Minoru, who alternatively provided a film each month. Inao Minoru, who had debuted in 1971, to this day has remained one of the most prolific pink directors (he also worked under the names Fukamachi Akira and Ogisai Tarô) with more than 400 films to his credit.
The 1980s saw not only the rise of the adult video industry, which put pink film productions under intense pressure, but also the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers who added new spice to the pink film genre. Kokuei opened up again to new directors, who often came from the stable of Wakamatsu Production, like for instance Takahashi Banmei, Komizu Kazuo (Gaira), Isomura Itsumichi and Fukuoka Yoshiho, or from Mukai Kan’s Shishi Production, most notably Takita Yôjirô and Kataoka Shûji. But while most veteran directors had a prolific output, young directors had only slim chances of shooting films on a constant basis. Faced with an increasingly insecure market young directors began to organize themselves into new groups that promised more efficiency. One of the critically most successful formations of the 1980s was the socalled Unit 5, formed by Isomura Itsumichi, Fukuoka Yoshiho, Yoneta Akira, Mizutani Toshiyuki and Suo Masayuki. Kokuei worked together with all five, and in particular produced the directorial debuts of Mizutani and Suo, who like their fellow Unit 5 directors in the 1990s had successful careers in the V-Cinema market and in mainstream cinema. In fact Suo Masayuki became the celebrated comedy hit-maker of the decade.
Within Kokuei a major change took place in 1982 when Yamoto Kazuyuki, the managing director of Kokuei, died at the young age of 42. Nao Shinichi had left Kokuei in the 1970s, and Yamoto Teruo, the president of Kokuei, had largely withdrawn from production, so that Satô Keiko became the sole producer of Kokuei. Production became more or less separated from Kokuei’s other fields of activities such as the management of the preview-screening venue TCC. In 1991 the production unit split from the rest of Kokuei. It retained the name Kokuei, but is run by Satô Keiko, who since Yamoto Kazuyuki’s premature death is also the sole carrier of the name Asakura Daisuke. She has played a pivotal role for the so-called shitennô directors, who in the 1990s were hailed as “Pink Nouvelle Vague”. Zeze Takahisa, Satô Toshiki, Sano Kazuhiro and Satô Hisayasu, who with the exception of the last had made their debuts in 1989, did not bother too much with genre conventions and were more oriented towards an auteur cinema. Their films didn’t go down well with the pink cinema owners, but they found enthusiastic adherents in young cinephiles. The originally pejorative labeling “shitennô” (“Four Heavenly Kings”) in the early 1990s became a positively connoted brand for innovative and highly individual films. The films of the shitennô directors, most of which were produced by Kokuei, successful transcended the confinement of the traditional pink film market and also found their way to the foreign market. Beginning with retrospectives at the film festivals of Rotterdam and Vienna in 1995, the films were presented in special programs in Europe and put the names of the shitennô directors on the map of international cinema. In Europe they were assessed in the same reception context as other independent Japanese productions of the early 1990s such as the films of Tsukamoto Shinya, Kitano Takeshi and Sakamoto Junji, who coincidentally also debuted in 1989. It is also noteworthy, that the shitennô directors shared a common concern and the support of Asakura Daisuke, but that thematically and stylistically their films were quite different.
The shitennô quartet had a strong impact on the subsequent generation of pink film directors, however, and paved the way for their former assistant directors who entered the scene in the 1990s. The label shichifukujin (“Seven Lucky Gods”) was given to Ueno Toshiya, Imaoka Shinji, Kamata Yoshitaka, Enomoto Toshirô, Tajiri Yûji, Meike Mitsuru and Sakamoto Rei, although as a group they probably have even less in common than the shitennô directors. Whereas the pink films of the shitennô often had strong political and socio-critical connotations, the films of the shichifukujin concentrate more on interpersonal relations. By the mid-1990s it has become normal practice for the films of Kokuei to be released simultaneously in the pink film cinemas (under generic titles) as well as in selected art-house cinemas (under a different title). Many of these films have also found their way to the foreign festival market.
However, since the films of Kokuei are effectively the only pink films that travel to Europe and North America, they have caused a bias in the perception of pink films outside of Japan. It is noteworthy that these films are not necessarily representative for the pink film genre as a whole. They rather demonstrate how a small and independent production company like Kokuei successfully deals with the challenges of a constantly changing market.
The traditional pink film market has lost much of its former importance due to a decline in audiences and the number of pink cinemas. Today the revenues from the theatrical release are often secondary to the revenues from DVD-release, TV-sales and Internet-streaming. For a production company like Kokuei it is essential to adapt to these changes and to adequately adjust its production. With the new pink musical Underwater Love (Onna no kappa, 2011), a co-production with Rapid Eye Movies from Germany, and Kokuei’s participation in the production of Zeze Takahisa’s epical Heaven’s Story, which won two awards at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Kokuei and its producer Asakura Daisuke have demonstrated that they are set to remain a driving force in Japanese cinema.
Roland Domenig