Makoto
Kido is the sort of teacher who is popular with his students. He is lax about
discipline and often late to his own classes. The only drawback is he often
lectures on subjects that will not be on their university entrance exams, like
the procedure for making nuclear bombs. Unfortunately, it is a subject he knows
cold. When he launches his campaign of nuclear blackmail, it will be up to
hardnosed Inspector Yamashita to stop him in Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s classic The Man Who Stole the Sun (trailer here), which screens as
part of the 2015 New York Asian Film Festival’s tribute to Ken Takakura and Bunta Sugawara, two late, great, manly icons of Japanese Cinema.
Kido
is kind of a hippy, but he is not very political. Frankly, he will have a hard
time coming up with demands for the government to meet. Instead, he is more of
your basic bored sociopath. Ironically, when Yamashita first meets Kido, he
assumes the science teacher is decent enough for a long-hair, even though we
know he has already started laying the groundwork for his evil scheme.
As
fate will dictate, Kido’s class is hijacked while on a field trip, by a
deranged man seeking redress from the emperor. Yamashita draws the case,
impressing Kido with his gruff dedication to duty. After boosting some
plutonium from the Tōkai nuclear plant, proceeds to make two bombs—one to prove
his skills with the authorities and one for him to dangle over the prime
minister’s head. As part of the ground rules he establishes, Kido (employing a
home-made voice modulator) will only speak with the confused Yamashita.
In
many ways, Sun is a blast-from-the-past
time-capsule of a film. Among other things, it reminds us of the time when most
television stations signed off around midnight by playing the national anthem.
Evidently, during the late 1970s in Japan, TV stations also used to stop
baseball games promptly at ten o’clock to accommodate the evening news. It
seems Kido put a stop to that practice. Running out of ideas, Kido reaches out
to Zero Sawai, a DJ catering to the youth culture. She is cute as a button, but
she also serves as a scathing critique of a myopic media that cannot see the
dirty bomb for the trees.
Bunta
Sugawara is stone cold awesome as Yamashita, an old school throwback, who would
be perfectly at home in the films of Don Siegel and Sam Fuller. Yet, Takayuki
Inoue’s massively groovy music might just be even cooler. It is strange the
soundtrack album has not been more eagerly sought after by crate-diggers. Real
life rock star Kenji Sawada is also frighteningly convincing as the coldly
detached psychopath. Watching him play Kimiko Ikegami’s naïve Sawai is especially
chilling.
