Xenophobic Manifesto Dust without a single tree, the wasteland adjacent to the American air base is built up hastily with erected buildings in which an overseas soldier in need of rest will find everything he needs. At its service, American whiskey, American cigarettes, American Coca-Cola and trouble-free Japanese girls with whom you can do anything for American dollars - even cut into pieces: Japanese women are still spawning.
In Tetsui Takechi's "Black Snow," every shot oozes hatred for America. There is nothing but this blind, all-encompassing anger at the strangers who came to the sacred land of Nihon to destroy its ancient culture, bringing in exchange the cult of money and mass entertainment. This is a real anthem of traditional Japanese xenophobia, which for centuries allowed to keep the country away from the rot of Western civilization and pious Abrahamic morality. But this anthem in the image of the director becomes funeral, because there is no longer the former Japan, and no longer bearers of the Japanese spirit. And a symbolic shot of three desperate signature-gatherers against an American base against the backdrop of the Sun Walking Beyond the Runway becomes the apotheosis of a bitter and hopeless film. The residents of the village, feeding on handouts from the Geijin, drove them away with kicks and threats, because they are much more worried about the possibility of filling the rotting syphilis gut with American food.
The main character of the film, a young man named Giro, also knows no other feelings than hatred, which for him merges with constantly experienced lust. After all, Giro lives in the very brothel where all the syphilis patients who are ready to fulfill any whim of an American soldier. The main entertainment for him is peeping at a rough fuck through loosely adjacent to the ceiling partitions, and the main dream is to rape his native aunt holding a bar with contrabad booze. In fact, the brothel also belongs to her, but it is run by Giro's mother, whom he also hates. That’s just an early aging parent does not cause the son such unrestrained lust as her sister, and therefore can for a long time not suspect anything, still considering his boy unintelligent child.
Meanwhile, the child has long grown up and dreams of releasing his rage. After all, he does not know other feelings, and when love meets on his way, he also takes it for hatred, which inevitably leads to tragedy. Because instead of the last bearer of the old samurai spirit, he sees a beggar taxi driver, and in the old professor brought up in the tradition of respect for elders, his daughter is a banal whore that you can give to the person whose attention you are looking for. As a result, traditions are trampled, honor with a naked body is trampled into the mud at the fence of the American base, because of which the Darkness that enveloped Japan oozes with black spots of fuel oil.
The rigidity of Takechi’s ideas inevitably grows into the rigidity of cinematic language. Even in the sado-masochistic thriller Hakujitsumu, shot a year earlier, he did not allow himself such naturalism in depicting violence. The world of Black Snow is a world of sex and violence. In these two words, the quintessence of life for Giro, for his older gang mates, for the syphilitic prostitutes in his mother's brothel, even for an aunt who sees nothing unusual in being raped by her nephew. Well, maybe a little surprised. Such candid scenes, on the verge of pornography even in modern times, Takechi uses to enhance the effect of a complete denial of the modern reality in which the Japanese spirit is dead, and the body is capable only of the most primitive desires.
Is there any hope left? After all, Giro seems to wake up in the finale from his nightmare. But he does it too late, when nothing can be fixed. You cannot restore the virginity of an old professor’s unhappy daughter, you cannot restore the life of an aunt, you cannot even save yourself. And the base will remain a nasty octopus in Japan. And it is not even the base itself that is scary - it is scary that people watch American films (the others in the village of Giro are not shown), it is scary that they drink American whiskey (sake in the village of Giro does not happen), it is scary that the price is measured in dollars (other money in the village of Giro is not accepted). It is not even terrible that an alien culture has come to Japan - that only the worst has been taken from this culture, and it has been caricatured.
Black Snow directly and categorically affirms the impossibility of interpenetration of cultures on a grassroots, unconscious level. You can try as much as you like to understand someone else’s philosophy, study ethics with aesthetics. But that is the lot of the elect. At the level of the crowd, everything is reduced to basic primitive instincts, splashing out into sex and violence, the singer of which Takechi became in his later film career. But the nationalist manifestos were no longer taken down. The point of throwing pearls before ... the dead Japanese nation, he no longer saw.
