Japanese cinema has a dark, often subversive narrative of violence. In the years since local terrorist group, Aum Shin Rikyo carried out a series of devastating attacks on an unsuspecting urban population, there appears to be an upward trend in violence in Japanese cinema.

At a talk at the Japan foundation in London in 2018, writer and director Yu Irie answered the question of why his films are so violent. The films of Yu Irie are a compelling mixture of horrifying brutality and aching vulnerability, .a acknowledgement of the wounded places within our human soul that we cannot express in words.  Since the 1990s, the level and goriness of violence has risen dramatically in Japanese cinema.  It is violence that is stark, unapologetic in its expression.  

At his talk at the Japan Foundation, Yu Irie shared clips from Memoirs of a Murderer, his remake of the Korean film of the same name. Memoirs of a Murderer tells the story of a serial killer who comes out of hiding to write a book about his crimes. The book becomes a best seller and the author is feted as a national celebrity. There are twists in the story but the film focuses on the amoral nature of celebrity. 

The killer is played by actor Tatsuya Fujiwara. Fujiwara, who is known for his pretty boy looks and brings a sinister elegance to the part but the magic of the story telling is pure Yu Irie. Told from multiple perspectives, the film examines the role of media, social celebrity, fame and our human fascination with killing. 

Yu Irie linked the upward curve in violence in Japanese cinema to the Aum Shin Rikyo on the Tokyo Underground in 1995. Aum Shin Rikyo, whose name means Supreme Truth, came to global attention with that horrifying terrorist attack. Aum members left five canisters of sarin gas on the Tokyo underground, killing thirteen people and injuring over five thousand. Prior to the attack, Aum members had carried out a series of brutal actions, from killing local people to bombing their own headquarters in Fujinomiya.  The group had acquired land, killed their own members and carried out a number of violent crimes, and yet they been largely ignored by Japan’s intelligence services.  

Aum was seen as a religious cult with criminal elements by local authorities not as an emerging terrorist entity. Unlike other countries, Japan had not experienced major terrorism since the 1970s when the Red Army Brigades carried out a number of attacks and kidnappings. The last major incident was the 1985 bombing at Narita International Airport which killed two baggage handlers. 

The Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack had a devastating effect on Japan, but Japanese society has not found a way to understand why it happened and has not found a language that expresses the depth of its pain.  Artists give voice and language to emotions that are often too painful to express, whether that is fear or pain or love.  Film is one such medium of expression and in the hands of Yu Irie, it becomes an expression drenched in subtle signifiers, overt glances and entire lexicons of violence, fear and rage.  

In Vigilante, Yu Irie’s expression becomes a howling, infinitely dark sound that echoes across the country side of Japan.  It begins with three small boys pursued through the twilight by a towering adult figure, the father they had just tried and failed to kill.  One son escapes and does not return until the death of his father, thirty years later. When he does return, he claims to be the sole heir of the father, dispossessing his two brothers.   As the brothers tussle over their father’s legacy, Yu Irie piles on the violence. Corruption, clashes between foreign workers and a local neighbourhood watch group,  the slow painful death of Japan’s once thriving countryside add to the bleak, unrelenting despair of the film.  In one of the most brutal scenes, the three brothers nearly batter each other to death in a local river..  Yu Irie films in one take, focused and direct, and the violence of the brothers is almost unbearable to watch.  If violence is a language for what the brothers cannot express, it speaks of child abuse, loneliness, a definition of manhood that is torn and bloodied at the edges, of loves that are drowned out by the pain of family life. Violence is not an act, it is an entire relationship across decades.  The scene is played out against grey skies and grey rivers.  It is unclear at times if the brothers want to drown each other or save each other.  It is heartbreaking to watch, a spiral of rage and vulnerability that turns inwards and feeds on itself.  

If Vigilante tells the story of the brothers’ painful legacy, it tells it in the context of a Japan that rarely speaks of the Aum Shin Rikyo attacks.  For the last three decades, court cases and appeals by group members have wound their way through the Japanese court system.   Shoko Ashara, the cult like leader of Aum Shin Rikyo has spent decades in jail despite receiving a death sentence for his part in instigating terrorism.  Japanese law forbids the execution of any one who may be connected to any on-going court case.  Finally executed in 2018, Ashara never spoke about the attacks or apologised to the families of victims.  

Aum Shin Rikyo has not disappeared.  It has splintered into three groups, and slipped quietly into Japan’s citizenry and over its borders. In 2016 Russian Special Forces raided Aum Shin Rikyo offices in Moscow.  In the same year, Montenegro expelled scores of Aum followers.  The main  group has since renamed itself Aleph and remains  active, but not illegal, in Japan to this day.  It is believed to have a billion Yen in assets.  Its future plans are unknown.   In the 1960s, political scientist James Denardo described terrorism as a form of communication, a language that bypasses all subtitles and nuances, that has only categories of victim, perpetrator and audience. Cinema has its own language, one that captures the rawness of human emotions and experiences in a way few other mediums do. In the films of Yu Irie, with their mastery of mood and long shot, of bleakness and unexpressed anger and fear, violent cinema offers a glimpse of the bloody wounds that terrorism leaves in place where there is not yet a language to express the pain.