Pressure on the networks forces theaters to withdraw a film about the murderer of Shinzo Abe

First modification: 03/10/2022 – 13:02

Reporting from Tokyo, Bruno Duval

It is something unprecedented in Japan. A film just released, came out on September 27, has been removed from the billboard. Is about Revolution + 1, a biopic about the life of Tetsuya Yamagami, the man who assassinated former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in early July. Yamagami accused the politician of being linked to the Moon group, a sect that ruined the man’s family because his mother, a follower of him for thirty years, made exorbitant donations.

Director Masao Adachi chose to walk the path of Tetsuya Yamagami and the double ordeal he suffered, indoctrination and over-indebtedness: “What interested me was to understand what led him to that extreme: how could he feel cornered until he reached that point? And then, also, to pose a question: what kind of society is this that is not capable of preventing such murderous excesses?

Withdrawal from theaters

Politically, Masao Adachi is on the far left. He embodies the ultra-radical and even revolutionary left, which earned him a long stay in prison for being a member of the Japanese Red Army, the terrorist group that, in the 1970s and 1980s, carried out attacks around the world. And his film unleashed a storm on social networks: “A terrorist glorifying another terrorist … Creative freedom has its limits!”, could be read on Twitter.

Millions of outraged comments were posted on social media calling for the film to be banned. The outcry was so great that, after three days, theaters canceled it for fear of incidents after receiving thousands of insulting and even threatening phone calls and emails.

Difficult topics to deal with

In Japan, filmmakers are often criticized for “going too far” in their creative freedom. A few years ago, two documentaries – one Chinese and one American – were the subject of legal complaints, demonstrations and calls for boycotts in Tokyo and throughout the country. They dealt with Japanese war crimes committed in China or Korea in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 2006, the Japanese film confessions of a dog it had some success abroad, but was banned in Japan. For three years, the time it took the director to find a distributor, the entire industry boycotted his film that denounced corruption and violence in the police forces.

Four years later, the American documentary The Bay of Shame (The Bay of Shame) won an Oscar, but it also had major distribution and exhibition problems in the archipelago. It was the hunting of dolphins (in Japan several thousand of these cetaceans are slaughtered every year).