Akio Jissoji Speaks About Himself

By Yukichi Shinada

(in ATG Pamphlet #79)

1.

A promising young filmmaker has emerged.

2.

Akio Jissoji, born March 29, 1937.

He was once a bold and innovative television director, and even after moving into directing TV films, he created strikingly unconventional works within the otherwise formulaic entertainment of serialized television dramas, works that made viewers wonder, “Who directed this?” and take notice of his name. Among certain circles, he had already begun to attract attention.

Someone I know once remarked, “Jissoji’s Ultraman was good because the monsters actually moved like monsters, on all fours.” In other directors’ versions of Ultraman, the monsters moved just like humans, which made them dull.

This may sound like casual conversation, but behind it lies the question of a creator’s imagination. I’ve heard that Jissoji spent much of his middle school years drawing manga; perhaps he was naturally gifted with a visual imagination, an innate creative faculty.

I first met him six or seven years ago. At the time, my impression was of a sharp, up-and-coming television director. As an editor of the magazine Eiga Hyoron, I asked him to write a serialized essay. It turned out to be highly intellectual and abstract, there was not the slightest trace of the boy who had once spent all his time drawing manga.

I only learned recently about his passion for drawing. The one who told me was an NHK news director who had been his classmate from elementary school through high school. When I remarked, “Jissoji’s writing seems rather conceptual to me,” he looked surprised, as if that were unexpected.

The impressions this NHK director and I each held of Jissoji were probably completely opposite. Yet, looking back at his television and TV film work, one can indeed discern Jissoji as a manga-like, visually oriented cultural figure. Until now, I had assumed his work was the result of logical pursuit put into practice, but perhaps, for him, it was actually the unfolding of purely sensory images.

Within Jissoji, there seems to coexist, quite distinctly, two selves: the sensory human and the conceptual human.

Perhaps precisely because he is so deeply a man of sensation (or still is), he seeks concepts intensely as a way to armor that sensibility. His works are always, often provocatively, challenging. This quality was evident not only in his television period but also in the ATG short film When Twilight Draws Near and in his first feature film Mujo.

Might it be that these works are born from an attempt to arm a sharp sensibility with conceptual thought?

3.

He was born in Tokyo. Although he was delivered in a hospital in Yotsuya, his family lived in Takinogawa, Kita Ward at the time. His father worked at the Bank of Japan, he was, in other words, from a respectable family. He was an only child.

Shortly after his birth, his father took a position with an agency in China, and the family moved there. His earliest memories begin in China; he says he remembers nothing from before that. They moved there around 1939, when he was about two years old.

At first they lived in Qingdao. Later, after his father became a secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the family moved frequently throughout Manchuria (now northeastern China). During the Qingdao period, before or just as he entered elementary school, one of his close playmates was Kaoru Kanamori, who is now active in stage design and visual arts. Even back then, Kanamori was extraordinarily talented at drawing - “better than the schoolteachers,” Jissoji recalls - and it was under his influence that Jissoji came to love drawing.

Among his experiences in China, the most vivid memories are from the time he lived in Zhangjiakou in Inner Mongolia. Qingdao, developed by Germans, had a clean Western atmosphere and didn’t feel particularly “Chinese.” But Zhangjiakou, beyond the Great Wall, was stark and desolate. The bodies of Mongolians left to sky burial lay scattered about. The land and climate were harsh. “I’m an optimist,” he says, “but I think growing up on the continent influenced me.”

From the time he first became aware of things until around third or fourth grade—the most crucial period of psychological formation, he lived entirely on the continent. “So my sense of ‘home’ exists only over there.”

He says he feels no sense of hometown within Japan. For him, it lies in the plains of Manchuria, in Zhangjiakou.

And yet, in his first feature film Mujo, he chose Kansai as his setting. Perhaps somewhere within him was a desire to search for a homeland as a Japanese person. He says he is drawn to Kansai, especially Kyoto, explaining it as “a pattern of Japan.” By intertwining traditional Kansai life with Buddhist thought, Mujo surely expresses a desire to seek the spiritual homeland of the Japanese soul.

If his homeland lies abroad, then he must remain a foreigner within Japan. Perhaps within him is a longing to recover the Japanese self inside him.

His father was a graduate of Kyoto Imperial University, so Kansai was not unfamiliar to the family; in fact, they visited often. Jissoji himself says, “I always end up going west.” He even suggests, “People in the west may be of a higher quality.”

Tokyo people, he feels, are dominated entirely by work, whereas Kansai people center their lives around living itself. While those in Tokyo are constantly busy, people in Kansai seem to know how to enjoy themselves.

Toward Kansai, he admits, he has “a certain complex.” He appears to carry a strong sense of inferiority toward things superior or refined. Yet this, perhaps, is a healthy response of the spirit. Starting from that complex, he strives to understand what is better than himself and to make it his own, channeling it into a positive drive for self-improvement.

When he describes himself as “optimistic,” perhaps this is what he means.

4.

To tell the truth, I seem to have been completely mistaken. I had assumed that Akio Jissoji was from Kansai, and that he made Mujo as a form of self-confirmation and self-assertion rooted in that background. But that was not the case. Rather, it was something like the self-confirmation of a Japanese who had grown up overseas.

However, Jissoji does indeed appear to be a Japanese of very old lineage. According to him, the Jissoji family was unmistakably connected to a temple, that is, to the Buddhist clergy, and originally came from Ōita. There is a place called Jissoji-yama in Beppu City, which seems to have been the ancestral home. Temples named Jissoji exist in both the Nichiren and Pure Land sects, but his ancestors’ Jissoji belonged to the Rinzai Zen sect, and up until his great-grandfather, the family members were priests. They only came to Tokyo after the Meiji era.

The family genealogy records even older history: before adopting the name Jissoji, the family bore the surname Kira. Of course, the Kira are associated with Mikawa, but during the Nanboku-chō period they moved from Mikawa to Kyushu, following the Isshiki clan, who had been exiled there after rebelling against Ashikaga Takauji. The genealogy states that in Kyushu they were granted the land called Jissoji-yama and changed their name accordingly. In time, they left the warrior class and entered the Buddhist priesthood.

In fact, before the war, the Jissoji family and their relatives seem to have been unmistakably upper-class. Many family members lived abroad or held important positions. His maternal grandfather was Admiral Kiyoshi Hasegawa, and he even had an uncle who was captured by Soviet forces in Manchuria as a war criminal and executed.

“But after the defeat, the entire family collapsed all at once,” Jissoji says. His own family, having lived abroad for so long, was no exception.

They returned to Japan the year after the war on a repatriation ship, relatively early compared to others. Still, the experience was severe, so much so that one of his classmates died. He was around the end of third grade at the time. Amid the chaos, he hardly attended school, leaving a gap in his education.

“That’s why I’m a bit slow intellectually,” he once joked to himself with a laugh, though needless to say, it was only a joke. In conversation, he is generally serious; he rarely becomes carried away or chatters lightly. Instead, there are moments when he suddenly grows intense and eloquent, as if seized by a thought. But for the most part, he is taciturn, often responding simply, “Yes… well…” to questions, sometimes leaving the conversation without momentum.

After returning to Japan, he entered Gyosei Elementary School, a Catholic mission school. He had originally hoped to attend the affiliated elementary school of Tokyo University of Education, where a relative had studied, but he failed the transfer exam. He continued on through Gyosei for middle and high school, and in 1955 entered the French Literature department at Waseda University. Among his classmates were figures such as Kimieda Kondō (active in the Mingei theater movement) and Osamu Morio, later a news director at NTV.

At university, he specialized in Joseph Kessel. However, due to family circumstances, he had to begin working partway through his studies. He transferred to the evening division (Second Faculty of Literature) and worked during the day at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs through his father’s connections. Since he had always wanted to go into film, he wrote his graduation thesis on French cinema, under Professor Tadashi Iijima.

5.

I mentioned that he switched to the evening program due to family circumstances. His father, it turns out, was a heavy drinker. After the war, he drank methyl alcohol, collapsed, and became partially paralyzed.

“After the defeat, we lost all our assets at once, and Gyosei’s tuition was extremely high, so I think my father must have struggled,” Jissoji says. When he speaks of his father, there is a kind of quiet reverence that does not openly show on the surface.

His father, he says, disliked people, and still does. The reason he was an only child was that his father did not want children in the first place. Several years ago, when they built a house, his father designed it so that the four family members could live without ever encountering one another face to face. From early childhood, there was no sense of family togetherness in the household. No interference from others; no interference with others. Even ties with relatives were cut off. Even now, when a close relative dies, his father informs him, but tells him not to attend the funeral.

Such an eccentric man, his father lost both status and wealth after the war and became even more nihilistic and world-weary, so Jissoji says. And yet, in the way he speaks, one senses a bond between father and son: mutually independent, yet firmly connected.

His father’s way of life must have been rooted in a Western-style individualism. Jissoji describes their relationship as: “We hardly speak directly face to face, but behind the scenes, we might be shedding gentle tears for one another.” He is very fond of the Norwegian writer Agnar Mykle’s novel The Rope Around the Moon (often translated as The Song of the Red Ruby). He feels a deep emotional understanding of how the older brother grieves for his younger brother in that work. “That is what family is like,” he says, sharing a sense of shame that they try not to expose within social relationships.

“My father has an intense sensitivity to shame, and I too have it, perhaps excessively so,” he says. He also adds, “I think my father and I are similar, but I feel he is more capable than I am.”

The presence of this father seems to have had a profound influence on the formation of Akio Jissoji as a person.

6.

At first, Jissoji wanted to become an actor.

However, in high school he saw Film Without a Name directed by Rudolf Jugert, and liked it so much that he adapted it for a school play with his friends. He worked both as an actor and on the set design. Around that time, tape recorders were just becoming available, and a wealthy friend brought one to record the performance.

When Jissoji later heard his own voice played back on the tape recorder, he was deeply disappointed, and abandoned his ambition to become an actor. Had that tape recorder not existed, he says, he might have become one.

After giving up acting, he shifted his goal to becoming a screenwriter. From the beginning, he intended to work in film. Most of his relatives pursued conventional professions, and he says that among them, only he and Takahisa Katsume of Kindai Eiga Kyokai went into film. He himself had little desire to follow a conventional career path. His father, though a banker, had once aspired to be a writer, and perhaps that inclination was passed down to him.

At university, he belonged to the film club, where an upperclassman was Yoshio Shirai, later editor-in-chief of Kinema Junpo. Film club activities at the time were generally stagnant across universities, but Waseda’s group was relatively active, even publishing a magazine called “Third Cinema.” Inter-university gatherings were also dull, debates with students from other universities became the only form of catharsis. “In other words, whoever was the best debater won, and Shirai was a genius at that.”

After graduation, he hoped to become an assistant director through connections from the film club. “It’s strange, isn’t it? I didn’t think I wanted to be a director, I thought I wanted to be an assistant director. I assumed that was the natural step toward becoming a director,” he says.

Seniors from the film club, including directors Shiro Moritani and Michio Yamamoto of Toho, thought he was the type suited to on-set work rather than journalism. For the first time in a while, someone from the film club would become an assistant director, and they wrote letters of recommendation for him. He met with directors Senkichi Taniguchi and Toshio Sugie and applied to Toho.

Although the number of recruits that year was small, he was confident he would be accepted. However, he was told that graduates of the evening division would not be hired. “That really made me furious.”

He also applied to Nikkatsu and Nikkei Film Company, but was rejected by both. At that point, he thought he might try television instead. Though he had been working full-time at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he quit and applied to Fuji TV and Tokyo Broadcasting System (then KRT). He failed at Fuji, but “for some reason, only TBS accepted me.”

Thus, Jissoji had almost no intrinsic desire to go into television.

“Tsutomu Wada consciously chose television, even writing his thesis on it. But for me, it wasn’t like that at all… I wanted to go into film, but the door was closed, so I drifted into television.”

7.

He entered TBS aspiring to become a drama director.

At a television station, one typically begins as an A.D. (assistant director), handling miscellaneous tasks, before eventually becoming a full director. Jissoji reached that stage at the end of his second year. At that point, directors were first assigned to live broadcast programs, and he handled three such broadcasts.

One now-legendary incident dates from this time: during a live broadcast of a stage show from the Nichigeki Theater, he suddenly inserted footage of a shoeshine boy working under a railway overpass.

His broadcasts caused shock in various quarters. They even sparked debates about the fundamental question: What is television? However, from the upper management of the station, he was “furiously scolded.” At the time, he recalls being greatly comforted by an article of support written by critic Sōboku Yamada in a broadcasting industry newspaper.

After that, he directed thirteen studio dramas. When he first undertook a television drama, he went to ask Nagisa Oshima to write the script. It was around the time Oshima was working on The Christian Revolt.

“I don’t know why Oshima agreed to write it. Later he told me it was because of the look in my eyes when I asked.”

The drama A Voice Calling You, written by Oshima, was later criticized by him as having camera work that ran ahead of its substance. Regarding this, Jissoji said:

“Oshima’s generation possesses a shared, socially grounded anger, and that becomes the driving force of their work. But for our intermediate generation, that is missing.”

Indeed, when one watches Jissoji’s When Twilight Draws Near (also scripted by Oshima) or Mujo, one does not find that same density of shared generational anger. Instead, what is strongly felt is not just absence, but a kind of frustration born from that absence.

If we follow Jissoji’s premise, Oshima’s generation clearly identifies a target for their anger. But for Jissoji’s generation, such a target seems lacking. As a result, the anger embedded in Oshima’s scripts may transform into a kind of restless irritation, diffusing without a clear object.

Regarding the theme of Mujo, Jissoji explains:

“This was inspired by the writings of Junzo Karaki. Taking impermanence as a theme, I wanted to make it into a film in the same way one might attempt to film Das Kapital. I aimed to see what would emerge through the process of fitting fiction onto a theme. I also wanted to critically understand Buddhism as a source within us. In the end, what resulted was not impermanence but ignorance (mumyo). But perhaps it is enough to remain in that state of not fully attaining enlightenment. Oshima’s generation creates through self-accusation and self-negation, but we don’t need to become socialized in that way, we want to dig in our heels here. We cannot attain enlightenment, but we want to present that as it is.”

The incestuous storyline, he notes, was proposed by screenwriter Toshiro Ishido, inspired by a novel by Roger Martin du Gard.

8.

At TBS, he transferred to the film division in 1964 and became an external (freelance) director.

At the time, there were four such directors: Jissoji, Harunosuke Nakagawa, Hajime Tsuburaya, and Toshihiro Iijima. These directors worked exclusively on filmed dramas rather than studio productions, often collaborating with outside production companies, and thus existed somewhat independently from TBS itself. For that reason, Jissoji says he always felt, “I could submit my resignation at any time.”

This transfer to the film division was also something he desired. He still wanted to make films and had always believed he would eventually move in that direction. He did not see much potential in studio-based television drama.

“The advantage of using television cameras lies in things mediated by the present, sports broadcasts, music programs, live news coverage, variety shows. But drama is a completed form, so using television cameras for it offers no particular ‘television’ advantage.”

In other words, if studio dramas pursued perfection, they would ultimately become mere imitations of film. That was his view.

In addition, he says, “I preferred television films to television itself.”

While working on location with television film crews, he witnessed them laboring under harsh conditions, and he “emotionally identified with them and developed a sense of solidarity.” He had not been able to form such bonds within the television station. Moreover, he felt that as long as he remained employed by a television network with a stable salary, a genuine connection with those crews would be impossible. So, in February of that year, he submitted his resignation. He had spent ten years at TBS.

And with Mujo, he finally realized his long-held ambition, dating back to high school and university, of making films.

Nearly all the staff on Mujo, came from television film backgrounds. When asked whether the budget of ten million yen had been restrictive, he replied:

“Since we all came from television film, we actually had more time than we were used to. And in things like location shooting and set usage, we may even be more skillful than those raised in feature film production. This was our first attempt, so there was trial and error, but if we do it again, I’m confident we can do it even better. However, for those raised within television stations or traditional film production, it would probably be difficult.”

In the past, films were made exclusively by those trained within the traditional studio system. But over the past decade, the range of people making narrative films has expanded rapidly and diversified. The group of television-film-trained creators who came together for Jissoji’s Mujo can surely be seen as a powerful new force in filmmaking.

There must have been many complex reasons why Jissoji abandoned television, arguably the most modern medium of mass communication, and remained true to his original aspiration toward cinema.

As television stations became increasingly institutionalized, he observed that directors, who should be individual creative figures, inevitably came under the control of the organization and were transformed by it, even if they themselves did not intend to change.

“Within the station, you cannot create something that is truly connected to your inner self. Opportunities to create something that might wound you in the process become increasingly rare, that was the outlook I had.”

Now, through filmmaking, he seems to feel a powerful sense of determination to explore how deeply he can connect with his inner self.

His path is only just beginning.