Japanese anxieties about a rising wave of juvenile violence were projected on to the big screen yesterday with the opening of a controversial film that the nation's education minister had taken the unusual step of trying to block.
Tens of thousands of mostly teenage movie fans queued for up to two days to be among the first to see 'Battle Royale', a gory tale of delinquent secondary school students who are forced to kill one another to survive.
The film, which stars internationally renowned actor and director Takeshi Kitano, depicts the worst fears of a famously crime-free nation that has been horrified this year by a series of brutal murders by teenagers.
Set in the near future, when police are powerless to control an epidemic of youth crime, the movie is a modern-day version of 'Lord of the Flies' with automatic weapons and large servings of gratuitous violence. It depicts the struggle between a class of troubled teenagers who are dispatched to an uninhabited island, armed to the teeth, and then told to fight to the death.
In one scene, a student stuffs a bomb into the mouth of a classmate's severed head and throws it into a room where three of his competitors are hiding. Another blood-splattered episode shows a girl slicing through the neck of a classmate with a sickle even as the victim begs for mercy.
The film is restricted to viewers over 15, but politicians have argued that the graphic violence might prompt copycat incidents and add to the already worrying level of youth crimes.
Earlier this week the education minister Nobutaka Machimura urged cinema operators not to screen the film, and he called on distributors and producers to exer cise more self-restraint with regard to films that might be a bad influence on children.
His appeal was a significant break from the Japanese government's usual stance of non-interference towards violent films, television, manga cartoons and video games.
The shift comes at the end of a year in which the media has been filled with reports of a breakdown of classroom discipline and an outbreak of murderous crimes by 17-year-olds. In May a youth hijacked a bus and killed a passenger, in June aboy battered his mother to death, in August a 17-year-old stabbed three neighbours to death, and this month a boy detonated a home-made bomb in a video store.
Kinji Fukasaku, the director of 'Battle Royale', said his film would highlight the problem of youth crime, without adding to it. 'The more violence, the better,' hesaid. 'Politicians who don't know anything about movies are just making a fuss.'
