Horror, Sympathy and Empathy

Abstract

This chapter analyses the first two films to deal with the URA incident: Kumakiri Kazuyoshi’s Banquet of the Beasts (1997) and Takahashi Banmei’s Rain of Light (2001). It is argued that both films deal with the question of how subsequent generations can understand the incident. Kumakiri’s Banquet does this implicitly: the film is a graduating film student’s reimagining of the incident through the genre of horror. Takahashi’s film does so explicitly: using a complex film-withina -film structure to ask whether it is possible for the current generation to understand the incident at all. Furthermore, both films address the URA incident as trauma. Banquet dwells on trauma to bodies, both the bodies of the members of the radical left-wing group it represents and the figurative body of the nation itself. Rain’s approach to the trauma of the incident focuses on the capacity of those involved in the radical student politics of the 1960s and early 1970s to speak of the incident, and makes a case for the necessity of subsequent generations to write their own URA narratives. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the films within Landsberg’s framework of sympathy and empathy so as to understand better the nature of the interface with the past furnished by these cultural memory practices.