If You Were Young: Rage

Fukasaku’s first independently produced film. The rapid economic growth in the first half of the sixties in Japan was partly possible thanks to the involvement of many secondary- school children, who were also known as ‘golden eggs’. Recruited in groups from the countryside, these kids were forced to work in factories in Tokyo and other major cities. The film tells the story of five of these ‘golden eggs’, youths who all came from different parts of the country to end up in a factory in Tokyo. When the factory goes bankrupt, the five decide to buy a truck to work on their own. In order to collect starting capital they first have to work elsewhere. Soon one of them leaves to live with a girl, a second allows himself to be hired as a strikebreaker and dies, while a third is arrested for theft. So only two are left. They manage to buy the truck and start afresh. But then the kid comes back from jail and joins them. From that moment on, their friendship goes downhill and eventually disintegrates completely. The film is exceptional in Fukasaku’s oeuvre because the story is not set in the Yakuza environment and is only about young people. But the theme is related and Fukasaku uses the same energetic visual language with which he openly displays his sympathy with people on the underside of society, expresses his anger at a society that eventually destroys their solidarity and criticises postwar developments in Japanese society. It is one of Fukasaku’s least-known films that has only rarely been screened.