Mass Games

Loft Plus One in Shinjuku Kabuki-cho: A public space for sub-cultural discussion and performance for ten years and running.

I’ve seen women tied up and hung from the rafters here, under the supervision of S&M author Dan Oniroku. I’ve sat on stage here before, calling Machiyama on the house phone long distance, then showing clips from the live-action Taiwanese Fist of the North Star movie.

Kinji Fukasaku came once to talk Battle Royale.

Roman Porche. Jun Mirai, Kiichiro Yanashita, Godzilla movie actors. Artists. Writers. Lovers. Muggers. And theives.  They’ve all been to Loft at one time or another.

Matt knows someone who went to a scat show here.

And while I wouldn't want to eat anything from the kitchen (although the curry is supposed to be good...bad associations though), I feel the same about the place as I felt about Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco when I was in my teens. Meaning, I want to live there, or at least go for a bit every night, just to be nestled for a bit in the bosom of the ankogugai.

Saturday. Toru Honda, the author of Akihabara’s best-seller Dempa Otoko, whom you are going to read about in this very good Asahi.com article, is the main event at what’s he’s calling a Dempa Shimai Matsuri; an all night celebration of the very worst of otaku trends: little sister complex, sick jokes about Galge addicted salarymen, and those shades that were only cool for a year or so after The Matrix came out. Everyone is on stage wearing them, including Honda’s homeboy, Yanashita-san.

Honda reveals the Otaku Super Archetypal Meta-Narrative in Three E-Z pieces. Sounds boring, I know, but it’s not. Everyone is laughing, cracking jokes, and having a drink.

He begins with a 20 min reel of highlights from Taxi Driver.

Travis, God’s Lonely Man, is a textbook otaku. He’s terrible with women. He takes Cybill Shepherd to a porno movie (but who among us hasn’t wanted to from time to time?). She recoils in disgust, but her rejection only serves to turn Travis into a gun nut, collecting all the weapons he can like Virtual On gashapon toys. He becomes a masturbatory adolescent, devoting the solitary hours to regimes of push-ups, and tests of his own strength.

The next stop is a no-brainer: the infatuation with Jodie Foster is Loli-Con, pure and simple.

From here, Travis plays his own personal simulation game. The “you talkin’ to me” patter with the mirror is every bit as menacing as a post-Columbine game of Doom.

By the time Travis storms the fleabag hotel where the forces of evil are keeping innocent little Iris hostage, he has become a kaizo ningen: a cyborg who can transform his hands into guns with a flip of wrist.

A pile of dead bodies later and Game Over.

Act Two is 1983’s Ushimitsu no mura, the film version of the Tsuyama Shotgun Massacre, directed by famed Roman Porno director Noboru Tanaka, who also helmed Woman Called Sada Abe and Noburo Ando’s Chronicle of Fugitive Days & Sex.

World War II.

Everyone is sleeping with each other in a dirty little inbred village in the Tohoku region. Mutsuo Toi, a walking case of the Young Man Blues, calls it home. As if to underline this point, Mutsuo gets a handjob from the town slut number twenty-two while her man is miles away, but somehow, the whole thing leaves him feeling very very sick.

Mutsuo wants to join the army, to fight and kill for the glory of Japan. But at the induction center, where young men parade around the Imperial flag in their underwear, the doc tells him to beat it. He’s too weak and ill.

Rejected by the army, Mutsuo becomes a total social outcast. He is wearing an invisible dunce cap. Women usher their children away from him whenever he passes by. Other men simply make fun of him. He was engaged to a beautiful young bride, but his failure to be a “real man” means, like a wooden leg, she has to break it off.

Bad times. He begins to cough up blood. Tuberculosis, which also put the squeeze on Ando’s gang, is such a bring-down.

Just like Travis before him, Mutsuo becomes a gun freak and plays sim-games in the woods; practicing his aim on a straw dummy shaped like a human being.

He makes a map of his village and pours gunpowder over it. He equips himself with a sword, a pistol, and a very wicked pump-action shotgun. Then, he straps two flashlights to his head and puts a miner’s light on his chest. It’s dark out there at night. But the low-tech also serves to make him a henshin hero of sorts, like Flashman, even if only in reverse.

Mutsuo yells “Banzai!” and goes on a killing spree. Victim one is his grandmother, his only living family relation. He reaches for a shovel, literally, then grannies on her way to meet the devil. 

He catches town slut twenty-two with a man in her bed. He blows his head up zombie-style. She gets it with a sword in the tits. Mutsuo has gone beyond sex and violence, and director Tanaka can’t resist the temptation to follow him either.

The shotgun goes between her legs. There is silence on the soundtrack as a big splash of blood erupts in slow-mo.

The next morning we find Mutsuo high on a hill overlooking the peaceful village as the sun comes up.

“Minna-san, gomen nasai,” he says, in a deranged voice that’s neither apologetic nor actually very sorry. Just cool and crazy.

Then he puts the shotgun in his mouth. Fingers fumble trying to find the trigger. The barrel tastes funny. He takes it out and stares at it, as if to ask, is this thing on?

Then the camera pans away politely for a freeze frame of God’s green Earth. The end.

Great flick. True story. Dude killed thirty people in all in less than half an hour. It’s not so boring in the sticks after all. But I guess you got to make your own fun.

Having knocked us out already, Honda decides to go for three direct hits. The next one is being advertised to children and families: Revenge of the Sith. Perhaps you've heard about it.

Anakin. Into hot rods and robots. Bad with women.  He only scored Amidala because she thought they were going to die. And the last time he saw her, he choked the bitch. He thinks he’s The Greatest, but when it really counts, his peers on the council turn their backs on him. So it's up to the devil on his shoulder to tell him what to do next: become a man-machine spree killer named Darth Vader.

The Tsuyama Shotgun Massacre was a true story. Taxi Driver became real when John Hinckley pulled a trigger. And Star Wars, prequel that it is, already happened, a long time ago, far, far away. So what's next?

I look around at the crowd at Loft Tonight. The grid pattern button up shirts, the glasses, and hasty haircuts of lonely men in their late twenties and early thirties stare back at me in silence.

Are they planning the next stop on the Otaku highway to hell? I’ve no fucking idea. But I bet Toru Honda is going to be behind the wheel somehow.

Comments

[Carl Horn]

Then he puts the shotgun in his mouth. The barrel tastes funny. He takes it out and stares at it, as if to ask, is this thing on?

I just wanted to let you know: that phrase alone was one of your top ten, maybe top five. Thirty extra points for quoting "Mind of a Lunatic;" but it was already A-plus.

[Josh]

wow, great fackin post.

[Steve Harrison]

Holy fuck.

Patrick, if you're not our generation's Hunter S. or Mailer..or maybe our Mishima..I don't know what.

I can't read your stuff without firing up the CD player with a load of Isao Sasaki and sink into a different world...thank you for sharing!

[Gilles Poitras]

Yes! Thanks for your postings.

This is the street eye view of Japan that I find so interesting. Even if, or especially if, it is filtered through your brain.

[Patrick3]

Gilles,

Sorry about my brain.

Steve,

Matt said something about seeing a video of Sasaki dressed like a cowboy singing an Elvis medley. I thought he was the court minstrel as well, until I found out that the official soundtrack of Japan Railways is early '90s gangster rap.

[Steve Harrison]

So, then...I'm not 'in' if I get my groove on via Sasaki's processed echo pipes?

Well, guess I'm not 'in' then, brutha...and add Ichiro Mizuki to the mix too.. ;)

One of my silly 'otaku dreams' would be to bring JAM Project, the full on show, to the US for some con. I've been told this is stupid, because the 'kon kulture kiddies' wouldn't dig it. screw 'em, in the words of someone, "those that get it, will get it"

Or some crap...

And in your previous post, it should have been Janperson with Robot Detective K...that's Law and Order: Metal Hero Unit right there, baby... :)

[Patrick3]

No Steve, you are definately in. Look for your G.O.D. (Gaijin of Darkness) membership kit in a few days.

[Gilles Poitras]

Patrick: Your mind is a great filter, catchin' great stuff most of us would have missed.

[Carl Horn]

"Did anyone prophesize these people?/Only Travis/Come in, Travis!"

—The Clash, "Red Angel Dragnet"
(off the first album I ever bought)

It need hardly be added that Iris is also the lorilori teddy-clutching poster child of SAKURA TAISEN, the very imperialism in progress Mutsuo was unable to join owing to having spilled his Super-Soldier Serum on the ground.

I haven't seen any STAR WARS movies since Reagan was president, so I can't address the whole Sith thing.

[Patrick3]

Carl,

I hadn't listened to any new Public Enemy records since Clinton Went To Harlem, but their new CD is pretty fierce.

[The Die is Cast]

Interesting insight into Revenge of the Sith I had never really thought of the movie in that light. Anyways please write a sequel to cruising the anime city it’s a very enjoyable book.