As far as inflammatory films go, the kind of films where, for example, a senior high school boy’s severed head is thrown through a window with a grenade in his mouth, few have managed to top Kinji Fukusaka’s kid-killing tour de force, Battle Royale (2000).

Often discussed in tandem with William Golding’s seminal novel The Lord of The Flies, the movie is more than a simple technological update — despite the premise of school kids killing and surviving (or not) on a remote island. It’s a far more severe crisis, since only one is permitted to survive (and then re-enter society) after the three day time-limit, which gives the film a full license to take school cliques, playground politics, squabbling over boyfriends, etc., to a darkly comic hyper-real plain where Zentsuji Class B’s students painfully shoot, poison, stab and mow each other down with a variety of weapons.

Predicated on a Japanese victory in World War II and so set in an alternative present, the extreme social tensions showing adults punishing naughty, naughty children through the genocidal Battle Royale Educational Reform act also gives the film it’s allegorical edge. Besides, perhaps any teacher having a bad week could maybe relate to the gleefully psychotic teacher, played by comic legend Beat Takeshi, who silences a talkative girl by throwing a pocket knife at her head (”I said, ‘No talking!’”), without of course giving into the urge to do likewise. The remaining horrified classmates continue to watch the hilariously genki video explanation and, sent out onto the island, react in different ways to the situation. Some opt to commit suicide, others hack into the adults’ mainframe computer surveillance and sweet little Mitsuko goes on a bloody serial rampage to ‘get back’ at whoever bullied her in school (”Why does everyone gang up on me!?”) Another boy admits he has a crush on a panic-stricken girl — but after she’s pumped four or five handgun rounds into him. To balance out the black comedy, the mordant on-screen graphics telling us the name and number of the dead boy/girl and the number “left to go” is oddly reminiscent of Kambei’s scroll in Seven Samurai, used to cross off the dead bandits.

Banned in the U.S. and deplored at home (though voraciously enjoyed by Japanese stundents – kowai?), this movie is arguably in tune with the mood of it’s day. Ijime (bullying), school drop outs and the problems of finding and securing an identity are very much real problems affecting students nationwide. In 1997, the Asahi Shinbun conducted a survey, asking the public to choose one word that describes society: a 37 percent majority said “confusion.” So when the survivors whom we follow throughout round off the narrative by becoming wanted criminals, we have to see Battle Royale as not only a brilliantly conceived and executed (mm, bad joke?) movie or as ultra-violent entertainment that’s too stylized to deeply shock, but as a brave commentary on the state of the nation which is not doomed to destruction but has to be aware of and to face problems that are, in essence, everyone’s problems.

And I don’t mean 17-year-olds running around with a pair of shears and a shotgun either…

Stories of change and transformation, or setsuwa (apparently), are an old tradition in Japan: the crossing of boundaries between the human and the non-human; tales linking the animal and human worlds that overlap, on occasion, with Western mythology. It’s tempting to cite salary men morphing into slobbering, giggling, schoolgirl-hungry creatures from a netherworld twenty minutes after kampai as the most obvious example, but narratives often found in Japanese anime (animated movies) presenting fluid subjects (transforming robots, humans turning into demons, that sort of thing), whose very identities are unstable, paint a (slightly) more sinister vision.

It was exactly a diet of anime and far too much coffee that informs independent director Shinya Tsukamoto’s dysptopian (and now very cult) movie: Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989, b/w). Though Japanese directors are, on the whole, pretty damn adverse to realism, Tsukamoto goes to extremes to show a dizzyingly kinetic, convulsive and disturbing explosion (for want of a better word) of techo-pop visuals. It shows the fragile equilibrium of young people living on the edge of disaster where soulless machinery is taking over.

Prosperity abounds, as it did before the recession, yet Japanese businessmen are jaded with their lifestyle, and food etc.; it simply isn’t as oishii as it used to be. The unnamed salary man of the movie is subjected to a hysterical mental assault afer he collides with a metal fetishist in a car crash and reimagines himself literally as part metal, part man. Needless to say, the scene in which he brutally impales his (quite) surprised looking girlfriend on the end of his spinning “drill” doesn’t exactly constitute the stuff of Disney movies. The twinned protagonists set out to mark the beginning of a huge metal matrix that’s waiting to supplant the natural world as we know it, eventually melding into a tank-like two-headed beast that zooms insanely through Tokyo proclaiming the whole world will be mutated into metal.

Feeling like an extended acid trip at times, movies like Tetsuo — or its colour sequel — are not the most obvious entry points into Japanese cinema but do, at least, support my belief that Japanese movies are among the most imaginative, engrossing and wildly different in the world. If only the TV shows could catch up even a little bit.