Rituals Within Walls: Thinking Post-War Japan’s History through Cinematic Allegories of Everyday Life

Between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, the quotidian dimension took political centrality in Japan thanks to the leading role of the New Left movement and its ideology. This went hand in hand with an appreciation of the philosophical approaches of Marxist intellectuals such as Jun Tosaka and Gorō Hani, who saw the quotidian as a fundamental space for historical transformation. We know how Tosaka and Hani developed an everyday-centred philosophy of history through their writings, but we know little about how formats other than the written word – such as cinema – contributed to thinking historical reality from the same ideological approach. To address this gap in our understanding, this article analyses the intersection of two highly representative films with Tosaka and Hani’s historical thought: Secrets Within Walls (Kabe no naka no himegoto, Kōji Wakamatsu, 1965) and Ceremonies (Gishiki, Nagisa Ōshima, 1971). These films’ cinematic allegorisation of post-war Japan’s everyday relationships was a way to reflect on the political character of that period.