Falling Down the Rabbit Hole with Cinema Nippon

 

Recently I watched a presentation on Anarchism in Japan recorded before the COVID-19 lockdown. During the presentation the speaker referred to a small group of Anarchists from the famous Japanese student protest movements that paralysed much of the country through extreme rioting and campus occupations. Collectively they're known as the Zengakuren and there coloured helmets, banners and pole weapons are quite infamous.

They used coloured helmets as a way of distinguishing between themselves, different groups used different colours. Because aside from agreeing on what they were against, capitalism, militarism, American military presence, the Imperial system, the fascist generation etc, they were deeply divided along ideological lines. Zengakuren students who identified with Anarchism wore Black Helmets. So I started trying to look up Zengakuren Black Helmets, this didn't turn up much, except for a strange video called アナキズム

Strange is an understatement, I found this video uploaded to several sites and all from an account with the same Nietszchean name Azsacra Zarathustra (AZ). The comment sections are disabled and there is no contact information besides a facebook so contacting him to answer some questions looks like it won't happen. Anyway the video itself is bizarre, there's an opening "Production credit" for NihillihiN (yes that extra capital N is deliberate) and then cuts to an interview of a group of Japanese young people. Sadly it is unsubtitled and my spoken Japanese skills are almost non existent so I have no idea who they are or what they are saying. We then get a slow zoom in on a wounded Japanese young man smiling, and then the title card flashes up アナキズム, then we get a collage of clips of clashes between the police and Zengakuren factions while a Japanese song plays in the background. Halfway through the collage of petrol bombs and baton charges the song ends and another Japanese song starts, this one is sung by a woman and it seemed eerily familiar to me at the time. Then when that song ends there is a cut to credits in Japanese and English, I couldn't read the Japanese but the English bits thanked among other people Edwin O. Reischauer who was a United States diplomat to Japan and was injured when a Japanese rightist stabbed him. He died in 1990, so I think the credit is something of a joke, oh and the song playing over the credits is I Put a Spell on You by Creedence Clearwater Revival. And just before it ends it credits a A Z and one other initial for editing and closes out on a stylised A with the year 2017 written underneath. 2017 is the date the video was uploaded onto the various channels. 

So very strange indeed, I had more questions then answers. I was able to find out that アナキズムis a way to write Anarchism or Anarchy in Japanese, and that AZ is into esoteric nihilistic philosophy with an orientalist fixation. I needed help, and fortunately I knew where to turn, I've been a follower of Cinema Nippon  a review channel for Japanese cinema for some time and have assisted them with research on two of their videos. I hoped they could help and they did. Unfortunately it still wasn't enough to get to the root of the video, and left us with even more questions than before.

Here's what was found 

• AZ probably was the creator of the video (the two production cards at the start and end threw me at first) and edited together disparate clips 
• The Japanese credits were just listing archive sites where we think he found the clips, like "Manichi News Archives" and "record of incident at Yasuda Hall No 1" which weren't very helpful.
• The Japanese above Edwin O. Reischauer says something like "Heart of Japan" which neither of us understand, unless its a reference to his stabbing or as his role as diplomat and cultural commentator.
• One of the credits is just  無 which is a character associated with Buddhism and other spirituality philosophies and usually represents "Nothing" or "Oblivion" 
• The first song is a 1970s pop song by a group called Garo, and the song is Gakuseigai no Kissaten, Student Street Cafe or alternatively Coffee House of University Quarter.
• After the second song is an alternate version of the same song, only this time its credited to Hatsune Miku, which explains why it sounded so familiar and on hearing it again it definitely has a Vocaloid sound to it. 

Sadly there was no listing for the interview segment at the beginning of the video, which is unfortunate since I feel that was the key to understanding just what the point of the whole thing is. Having to guess based on the video and what I've seen of AZs other interests it looks like he's a fan of esoteric nihilism with a strong fixation on the "orient" he's really into Hindu and Buddhist culture and I'm guessing the appeal of the Zengakuren for him lies in a fixation with rebellion and death. Looking through his work he isn't a fan of national anarchism and likes regular anarchism and believes the two are incompatible which honestly surprised me, but I don't really understand what his objections national anarchism are. English isn't his first language, he appears to be Russian, but beyond language barriers there's very little coherency to any of his blog posts. One thing that became clear was that he often takes concepts and then changes them slightly to give the veneer of authenticity, he uses a lot of Nietzsche terms in ways Nietzsche wouldn't or couldn't, he ripped of the surrealist Theatre of Cruelty concept with his own Theatre of Cruelty NOH, and what NOH means is not explained. The NihillihiN from earlier, if you put that term into a search engine the only results are AZ blog sites that talk about a very strange and confused nihilist theory AZ is the author of. 

I'm grateful to Cinema Nippon for their help here, while I'm still lacking on information on the Black Helmets and I don't think アナキズム has much for me I appreciate the strange ride we went down together and I kind of like Gakuseigai no Kissaten.