Film: Gaea Girls / Shinjuku Boys
Release date: 25th January 2010
Certificate: E
Running time: 159 mins
Director: Kim Longinotto/Jano Williams
Starring: Gaish, Tatsu, Kazuki, Chigusa Nagayo, Meiko Satomura
Genre: Documentary
Studio: Second Run
Format: DVD
Country: UK
This double-bill of documentaries directed by the respected team of Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams offers an intriguing glimpse into the lives of Japanese women who defy conventions of female identity. While Gaea Girls (2000) takes us inside the world of professional female wrestlers, Shinjuku Boys (1995) introduces us to three women who live and work as men.
Opening just before a wrestling bout between head Gaea Girl Chigusa Nagayo and Lioness Asuka, it’s immediately apparent that Gaea Girls is no Memoirs Of A Geisha. There may be a common link in the form of entertainment, but the female wrestlers in Gaea Girls are anything but demure and dainty. A voice proclaims: “We are violent, we are freak out,” and the wrestlers enter the arena to the sound of Republica’s ‘Ready To Go’.
After Nagayo wins the contest, thanks in no small part to her spitting fire into the face of her opponent, things quieten down a little as we are introduced to trainee Gaea Girls at a nondescript training centre. The quiet doesn’t last for long, however, and Nagayo is soon bullying and humiliating her trainees with an ever-increasing intensity that reduces some to tears and causes others to run away. One of the trainees, Takeuchi, eventually makes the grade and is given her first professional bout, but not before a fair bit of blood is spilled.
The atmosphere in Shinjuku Boys could not be more different, but the subject of gender is equally, if not more important in this earlier documentary. Gaish, Kazuki and Tatsu are three female-to-male transsexuals who work as ‘onnabes’ at the swish New Marilyn club in Tokyo, where they meet and entertain female clients.
Individually and together as a group, Gaish, Kazuki and Tatsu speak frankly about their personal histories, and what led them to take on the identity of men who aim to be the perfect companions to the women who seek them out. The issue of sex is discussed with a disarming honesty that is both touching and humorous, and the complications of being an onnabe and maintaining relationships with family members and loved ones are addressed in an equally forthright and engaging manner…
Both documentaries adopt a similarly straightforward approach, but of the two, Shinjuku Boys relies more heavily on interviews with its subjects. We do see the onnabes at work and interacting with their clients in Shinjuku Boys, but, for the most part, it explores why they do what they do, not what they do. In Gaea Girls, on the other hand, brief snatches of interviews are interspersed among extended scenes of training sessions and actual bouts. The fixed nature of the wrestling contests themselves is not directly addressed, but the sometimes brutal footage of the training sequences highlights the fact that being a Gaea Girl is a remarkably tough life that requires incredible determination and resilience.
It could be argued that Gaea Girls could have been benefited from more in-depth interviews with trainees such as Takeuchi or Sato, a young, more conventionally feminine trainee who very quickly realises that she is not cut out for the hardships of being a Gaea Girl, instead of giving most of the interview time to the dominant Nagayo.
In the case of Shinjuku Boys, it would have been interesting to hear more from the women who utilise the services of the onnabes, particularly the women who seem to have fallen in love with them, or would that have been better explored in a separate documentary? It’s difficult to say, and it may actually be a strength of both documentaries that they leave you wanting to know more.
Jano Williams appears to have fallen of the radar after Gaea Girls, but Longinotto has continued to explore the lives of women on the margins of society in acclaimed documentaries such as Pink Saris (2010) and Rough Aunties (2008). She is clearly a dedicated documentary maker who allows her subjects to speak for themselves, and doesn’t feel the need to impose her own personality on her work, unlike so many younger directors who do very much the opposite.
The notion of objectivity in documentaries is undeniably problematic, but Longinotto and Williams’s determination to maintain a distance between themselves and their subjects arguably allows viewers more scope to contemplate their own responses to what is seen on screen. If only for this reason, Gaea Girls / Shinjuku Boys deserves a fresh audience. JG
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