Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Oshima is known primarily in the West for two landmark productions. His Palme d’Or-nominated, queer-coded 1983 POW drama Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence is widely celebrated for David Bowie’s haunting lead performance and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s BAFTA-winning score. His 1976 erotic drama In the Realm of the Senses, meanwhile, caused a scandal for its unsimulated sex scenes, leading to charges of obscenity in his home country and drawing arthouse crowds throughout Europe. 

But the man that New York’s Lincoln Center calls “one of Japanese cinema’s all-time great iconoclasts” had far more to offer than these two works alone. And when a bumper new box set from Radiance Films, Radical Japan: Cinema and State’, arrives on Nov 17, UK audiences can finally engage with the wider canon of one of Japan’s most provocative and subversive filmmaking voices.

The nine-film box set paints a vivid picture of a formally daring artist, and a driving force behind the Japanese New Wave of the 60s. This was a movement that rebelled against the humanist cinema of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story) and Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu) in favour of stylistic experimentation inspired by French and Italian arthouse, and direct confrontation with the structures of modern Japan.

Refusing to be pigeonholed, Oshima would experiment relentlessly with structure, form and style across a 40-year career, resulting in an unpredictable filmmaking canon that dealt with everything from disaffected youths, class divides and political conflicts to racism, sexual violence and homosexuality. Many of the independent works for which he is best-known – and perhaps even infamous for – in Japan have been obscure in the West until now. The primer below, then, offers a timely entry point to one of the major forces behind one of 60s Japan’s most radical creative minds.

DIARY OF YUNBOGI (1965)

Diary of Yunbogi is a harrowing experimental short. It’s derived from hundreds of photos of street children taken on a research trip to South Korea, at a time when the country was one of the poorest in the world. Narratively inspired by the real writings of a young boy struggling to survive in the slums of Daegu, Diary of Yunbogi tells the story of a 10-year-old chewing gum vendor – one of some 50,000 orphans left behind following the Korean War – who struggles amidst poverty and skyrocketing food prices to fend for his starving siblings. The film paints a stark picture of a country much different to the global powerhouse of South Korea today. Juxtaposed with images of laughter and play, these stills also reveal a story of humanity struggling on in bleak circumstances. 

DEATH BY HANGING (1968)

Death by Hanging is another Oshima work that confronts Japanese-Korean relations at a time when such discussions were highly controversial. “Koreans weren’t even treated as human [at the time],” says Japanese-born Korean filmmaker Yang Yonghi in a video interview included in Radiance Films’ release. “Even in the 70s and 80s, if [Koreans living in Japan] were caught for minor offences like jaywalking or parking violations, police treated you like it was a heinous crime.”

Her reflections allude to the long and complex history between the former colony and coloniser. The film would take close inspiration from the real-life murders of two Japanese high-school girls by an ethnic Korean man named Ri Chin’u in 1958. The crime, Ri’s subsequent death penalty sentence, and his extensive writings while in prison, shocked the nation via widespread press coverage, but the movie challenges the viewer by wrangling instead with a fascinating ethical dilemma. In Death By Hanging, a Korean man guilty of rape and murder inexplicably survives his own execution, but loses all memory of himself and his crimes in the process. Should his Japanese executioners therefore kill him all over again? Or has justice already been served? 

DIARY OF A SHINJUKU THIEF (1968)

Oshima was highly active in student politics during his studies at Kyoto University, becoming a student union leader and participating in leftwing protest actions. Some 15 years after his graduation, he completed one of his most charged tales of youthful transgression: a Godardian schism of jerky cameras punctuated with colour and black-and-white inserts taking narrative inspiration from the works of Jean Genet. 

Filmed at a time when mass urbanisation and broad prosperity were transforming the country’s make-up, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief captures Tokyo’s 60s sexual liberation and counter-culture movements with striking effect. Following a bookshop shoplifting incident, a pair of delinquents (one of whom is played by Tadanori Yokoo, the legendary Japanese graphic designer known for his psychedelic collage art) engage in a series of liberating sexual encounters in the vast urban jungle of the Shinjuku district/ Tokyo’s Shinjuku district.

BOY (1969)

In 1966, Iwao Nakamoto and Hatsue Deguchi were arrested in Osaka after being accused of defrauding motorists of over two million yen (roughly five times the average annual salary in Japan) in a string of at least 60 staged traffic accidents. While injury fraud was not an unusual scam, the couple’s methods – which involved forcing two young boys, often sporting real or faked injuries, to pretend they’d been hit by vehicles on the roadside – caused nationwide outrage. Oshima would take direct inspiration from the scandal when he made Boy in 1969.

The film centres on 10-year-old Toshio Omura as he effectively becomes the breadwinner for his own disturbed family of grifters by blackmailing motorists through similar means. Shot on location in a production that reportedly spanned some 7,400 miles and countless cities, the film offers a sobering but convincing look at the lives of those left in the margins amidst Japan’s rapid post-war economic recovery.

It is anchored by a powerful and naturalistic performance from one-time child actor Tetsuo Abe, a nine-year-old boy recruited from a Meguro child welfare facility. Finding Abe was “the biggest piece of good fortune in the entire film production,” Oshima commented in 1969, recalling that “his upturned eyes impressed me more than anything.” Sadly, it would transpire that Abe’s life was almost as tragic as the character he would portray: “His father was dead and he had lived briefly with a mother who was not his natural mother. His life history was almost identical to that of the boy in the film.”

THE MAN WHO LEFT HIS WILL ON FILM (1970)

The Man Who Left His Will on Film opens with jerky handheld footage depicting the robbery of a film camera from the point of view of the cameraman. A footrace ensues, set to the eerie sounds of creaking metal. Minutes later, the thief is dead, having ostensibly jumped from a rooftop. As a left-wing student group bickers over the circumstances, Matoki (Kazuo Goto) and Yasuko (Emiko Iwasaki) scrutinise and re-enact the footage depicting his final moments, and soon begin questioning whether the events witnessed had actually taken place at all. 

This ambiguous and postmodern work exudes style thanks to its dynamic cinematography and kinetic, French New Wave-inspired editing (which energise the film’s copious, guerilla-style running sequences). Underpinning it is Oshima’s incorporation of visceral documentary footage of student demonstrations at Meiji Park, which almost feel like horror sequences thanks to the unnerving sound design and jarring handheld photography. The director had been devastated by the renewal of the ANPO Treaty in 1970 (he’d captured earlier protests against the agreement, which allowed the US to maintain military bases on Japanese soil,  in his 1960 film Night and Fog in Japan) – not only because it reaffirmed Japan’s dependence on the US but because the associated protest crackdowns had left activist groups fractured and despondent. With this in mind, the film’s enigmatic symbols and themes of death, disappearance and protest become all the more profound.

Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence is screening at London’s Prince Charles Cinema on December 4