Images of kamikaze pilots drinking sake, saluting the Emperor, and flying to their deaths interposed with an image of the hinomaru, (the Japanese national flag), initiate the eye into Ginji the Slasher. A simple sequence of images that carries a myriad of meanings. Although the kamikaze attacks during the Pacific Campaign of World War II are most readily associated with the traditional Japanese warrior spirit, in reality they were a last desperate attempt to gain the upper hand in a war that was quickly being lost. They were also a gesture which belonged to a different era, an era that was already fading from Japan’s history. This film follows three men – Ginji, a militaristic pilot saved from a kamikaze mission by the ending of the war; Kuroda, his superior officer; and ‘Ground-Spider’, an amphetamines dealer – all of them men whose steel-like kamikaze-mentality was forged in the white-heat of battle and shaped by their shame over Japan’s surrender.

Ginji the Slasher interweaves narrative segments taking place in 1945, 1953 and the present-day to create a landscape of memory, pain, shame, violence and loss. The script manages to engage the viewer’s attention in each of these time-periods without revealing the full-scope and significance of the events they are watching until the film’s end. After the opening credits we move to 1953, and the mysterious events which earned Ginji the moniker of ‘Slasher’. We watch him cutting down scores of advancing men with a samurai sword. He reaches the man he has been searching for, reaches him but is shot four times before the man is within striking range of his sword. Though the film now proceeds to switch between showing us the events which caused this violent outburst and the events which were a direct result of it, it also manages to nudge the story into the background so that it rarely overwhelms the interest in Ginji’s psychology and the development of his friendship with a homeless Korean that unfolds in the present-day segments.

The shifts to Ginji’s past are often constructed as dreams rather than as unmotivated flashbacks. In an early dream we watch as he goes off to war with his brother, his sister is calling out his name, the whole town is yelling “banzai” over and over. Ginji turns and waves to his sister, and wakes up still waving. That was the last time Ginji ever saw her, and his ‘goodbye’ wave in 1945 segues into a wave in the present-day which expresses his sadness at loosing her without ever having the chance for a proper farewell. Ginji often wakes from his dreams doing or saying the same things that he was in 1945. It is a technique that links an unfinished past to a restless present and helps to explain Ginji’s psychological motivations in many of the present-day scenes. Another example of the way this dream-flashback technique works is Ginji’s failed attempt to commit seppuku when he first hears of his country’s surrender. After watching this scene we are moved forward to the present-day where an aged Ginji is repeatedly punching his reflection in a bathroom mirror. The reflection he sees, however, is that of his younger self. And as he punches, we see that Ginji’s youthful anger and shame and loss are still alive within him. Why did Japan surrender? It is incomprehensible to him. In the end, Ginji’s outburst shatters the mirror – he is left, as it were, without a reflection, and we are left with the hint that having destroyed this image of himself, he is now free to discover a new one.

The Japanese flag which is superimposed over all of the film’s opening images displays a red circle on a white ground. There is a haiku by Shiro which evokes the hinomaru’s meaning in almost cosmogenic terms: “In snow-white mist where sea and sky are one,/ A single disc of red: the rising sun.” (This surprisingly well-rhymed English translation is by Harold Stewart – most haiku drop dead from English rhyming.) Even in the West, Japan is still often known by its Chinese name, “The Land of the Rising Sun”, and the Japanese call their own country Nihon  or Nippon , which signifies “sun origin”. In Ginji the Slasher, the hinomaru comes to symbolize both origins and new beginnings, both the past with its weight of meaning and influence, and a future open to unknown possibilities. And the fact that the hinomaru has not only deeply nationalistic, but also deeply militaristic associations, gives this link between past and future a definite political inflection – an inflection that hangs over this film like a discord yearning to move towards resolution. This politicized atmosphere that plays around the film’s interest in the weight of the past and the weightless pull of an open future is perceptible in the relationship between Ginji and the Korean man who has come to Japan to escape military conscription. Their relationship shifts from one in which the dispossessed Korean is at first wholly dependant, at least from an emotional viewpoint, on Ginji’s friendship, to a realization that each needs the other. For a contemporary Japanese audience, the political relevance of this relationship would be hard to miss. Japan and Korea are still dealing with a difficult history, which in 20 th century has included Japan’s controversial annexation and occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. It is a mark of the two countries’ desire to wrestle with this history that in 1998 they signed a treaty for “ A New Japan-Republic of Korea Partnership towards the Twenty-first Century”.

Ginji the Slasher offers an interesting variant on the more usual Japanese fare which approach the samurai either through nostalgic yearning, or through a romanticized idealism that believes only the purity of samurai values can redeem Japan from the more corrupt influences of modern life. Though Ginji the Slasher certainly seems to evince respect for traditional samurai values, it also shows the tide breaking and rolling out on old Japan and on people such as Ginji. There is simply no longer any honour to be found in killing, not even in committing seppuku. At one point, a detective trailing Ginji refers to the kamikaze attacks of World War II as “lunacy”. She does not understand them. Though the filmmakers might feel it is necessary to move beyond the old values, they also seem to feel that they deserve to be understood before being forgotten. Perhaps that’s what this film is: a signpost, a remembrance, a fading salute to Ginji’s Japan.

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