High School Student Muyori-Anshin Reflects the Power of Youth and Entertainment without Exit, 1970-1975

High School Student Muyori-Anshin Reflects the Power of Youth and Entertainment without Exit, 1970-1975
Muyori-no-Kakusei" is an iconic action film for young people that emerged in the face of the declining popularity of the Japanese film industry in the early 1970s. Struggling with declining audiences due to the spread of television, film companies shifted their focus to low-budget, high-turnout genres that could reliably draw crowds, and Toho focused on youth action films as its mainstay, along with Toei's "Bancho" series and Nikkatsu roman-porn. This film, produced in this context, is a live-action adaptation of the delinquent manga by Kajiwara Ikki, and is equipped with a mechanism to transform the frustration, impatience, and sense of entrapment of youth into extreme action.
In the background is the failure of the student movement of the 1960s. Political ideals had lost their power, but the anger and anxiety that had built up within the youth had nowhere to go. As society as a whole shifted to an era that emphasized diligent work, with intensifying competition for entrance exams, the control of corporate society, and the conservative family, only a sense of discomfort with reality remained widespread among children and young people alike. The unabashed violence of this film does not deal with it head-on, but transforms it into a form that can be safely consumed as entertainment. Motifs such as fistfights, motorcycles, intramural strife, friendship and betrayal are presented as pure spectacle, devoid of politics, as a stage set for a temporary explosion of depressed youth.
Furthermore, the film captured the emotions of the audience with a speed and violence that television could not match, incorporating the fashion, music, and linguistic sensibilities of the youth of the 1970s. Thus, High School Student Muyori-Kan was not confined to the framework of the original manga, but became a film that overlapped the survival strategies of the film industry with the image of youth of the times. Rebellion without principles, youth with no way out, and invisible dissatisfaction with a controlled society. Packaged together, the film vividly reflects both the shadows and desires of Japanese society in the 1970s.