Page 50 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 37

lettuce, sausage-like intestines, boiled testicles, and vaginas in blood
sauce, the latter prepared, Kageyama informs us, during menstruation.
Anxieties surrounding representations of abject physicality and corporeal
violability clearly dominate this scene, but what are viewers to make of
the cannibalistic connotations of the ‘tasting party’? Interviewing several
of the guests in attendance, Kageyama discovers that most are curious
about the feast, albeit quite reluctant to sample any of the items on
display. Then the reporter questions some of the event’s more peripheral
attendees. He approaches a cleaning woman who is obviously the ‘Devil
Woman Doctor’ in disguise. Although the blatant conflation of a
traditionally female occupation (‘cleaning woman’) with a conventionally
male practice (a physician) raises several compelling questions regarding
shifting gender roles in contemporary Japan (an issue with which I will
engage more deeply in the pages to follow), it is the cleaning woman’s
reply to Kageyama’s query that the film’s director, Tabe, clearly intends
his audience to ponder. In response to the reporter’s inquiry as to whether
or not she has ever ‘tried human flesh before’, the cleaning woman /
‘Devil Woman Doctor’ shyly states: ‘Maybe my father has eaten some
during the war. But I never have.’ This answer transforms the macabre
‘tasting party’ into a forum for evoking cultural anxieties surrounding
reports of Japanese war-time atrocities, including acts of cannibalism
allegedly committed to fight off starvation. Furthermore, as news and
rumours of these crimes did not reach the general public until the mid-
1980s, the peak of the so-called ‘bubble economy’, they represent an
unassimilated past distanced from later generations both by the passage of
time and by the demands of the post-war ‘economic miracle’.
Tabe’s intentions here seem both instructive and critical. As
Tanaka Yuki notes in Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World
War II, ‘[t]he current generation of Japanese still do not have a clear
concept of the responsibility of their parents and grandparents in relation
to the war’ (1996: 202). ‘This is an entirely different situation,’ Tanaka
continues, ‘from what exists in, for example, Germany, where an acute
awareness of the role of the German people in World War II and
genocide of Jews and Gypsies continues to be a major factor in political
life and memory’ (202). Noting frequently, and correctly, that many