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Paper short abstract

A hermeneutic analysis of Togawa Naoki’s 1966 essay on pinku eiga, published in the Polish film journal Film, as a case of the transfer of Japanese film theory into socialist Poland. The paper situates the analysis within the crisis of 1960s cinema and kasutori bunka.

Paper long abstract

In 1966, an essay by Togawa Naoki entitled “Pink Films,” or the Erotic Offensive was published in issue 37 of the Polish film magazine Film, one of the few texts by Japanese film critics to appear in the Polish film press during the socialist period. This short essayistic piece, devoted to the phenomenon of pinku eiga, was addressed to readers largely unfamiliar with both the phenomenon and its author.

Togawa Naoki (Naosuke, 1917–2010) was a key figure in twentieth-century Japanese film culture: a critic and theorist, a long-term contributor to Eiga hyōron, a lecturer at Nihon University, and an active participant in the international circulation of film-theoretical discourse. His essay published in Poland thus represents a compelling case of the transnational transfer of knowledge about Japanese cinema into a media context peripheral to its original cultural milieu.

The paper offers a hermeneutic analysis of Togawa’s text, based on close reading, and situates it within the context of Japanese film culture in the 1960s. The analysis discusses pinku eiga (Sharp 2011; Nornes 2014) and its aesthetic and historical connections to the ero guro current (Silverberg 2006), as well as the broader transformations of Japanese cinema: the crisis of the studio system, often described as the “end of Japanese cinema” (Yomota 2019; Zahlten 2021), and the emergence of alternative models represented by the Art Theatre Guild (Domenig 2005).

The interpretation further considers the wider socio-cultural context of postwar Japan: a normative crisis, the absence of a new moral code, and the liminal condition of a rapidly transforming society—conditions that facilitated the commercialization of corporeality and sexuality within kasutori bunka (Olson 1992; Kapur 2018). Japan’s relationship with the West is treated as ambivalent, functioning as both a driver of modernization and a source of cultural frustration.

Finally, the analysis maintains methodological reflexivity from the perspective of a contemporary Polish researcher, while reconstructing Togawa’s critical position through a comparative reading of the essay alongside other works in which his thought is articulated or referenced (Leslie 1972; Gerow 2012; Kitsnik 2016; Fujiki 2022).

Keywords: Togawa Naoki; Pinku Eiga; Japan; Film; Criticism