Does director Miike Takashi love idols?
Miike Takashi is best known in “world cinema” film circles for his films featuring violence and horror. I suspect this is because the other side of his work is far too deeply tied to domestic Japanese pop culture to be of interest to most “world cinema” fans. I’ve started listening to a great podcast called Agitator (go subscribe!) where the two hosts (and sometimes a guest) talk about Miike and his work and the reason I’m writing this post is because one of the recent episodes was on The Mole Song (2013) and they go the entire episode without mentioning that the star of the film is a Johnny’s & Associates idol: Ikuta Toma.
This is something I find fascinating--without any other context, an idol is just an actor.
But since it was on my mind, I thought I’d run through some of Miike’s work with idols.
In 2001, Miike directed the fantastic Happiness of the Katakuris (which I’ve had on my docket to write about for a while) starring one Sawada Kenji aka “Julie” from the Tigers. The film is a musical and explicitly plays with Sawada Kenji’s idol image. Sawada would also appear in Miike’s 2002 historical film Sabu.
Then in 2009, we see Arashi’s Sakurai Sho star in the adaptation of the classic 1970s anime Yatterman, for which Arashi also did the theme song.
SMAP’s Inagaki Goro played a sadistic lord in 2010’s 13 Assassins, a film I use all the time as an example of how pervasive idols are in Japanese entertainment. (And the film also featured Sawada’s old bandmate Kishibe Ittoku aka “Sally”.)
2012’s remake of Ai to Makoto (nonsensical English title: For Love’s Sake) plays heavily with the idol image of the star of the original Ai to Makoto manga adaptation: the eternal Saijo Hideki. (Read my write up of that 1974 film here.) Miike turns the story into a musical which heavily relies on adaptations of well-known-in-Japan kayoukyoku such as “Hageshii Koi” by Saijo Hideki.
As mentioned at the top, Ikuta Toma has starred in all three of the adaptation of the manga Mogura no Uta or The Mole Song, with the theme songs for the films done by those kings of the Good Time Karaoke Song: Johnny’s & Associates kansai idols Kanjani8.
2016’s manga adaptation Terra Formers stars (now former) Johnny’s idol Yamashita Tomohisa, who you may have seen in his scene stealing performance as a host on HBO’s Tokyo Vice. The theme song was done by J Soul Brothers, members of whom were in the non-Miike directed sequel to the Miike-directed Crows Zero and Crows Zero 2, both of which starred the Johnny’s adjacent actor Oguri Shun.
The legendary Kimura Takuya from SMAP stars in Miike’s 2017 samurai film Blade of the Immortal.
And Arashi’s Sakurai Sho returned for 2018’s Laplace’s Witch.
Miike was also involved in the creation of the sugary sweet kids series involving a girl group called Idol x Warrior Miracle Tunes! which, again, not something you would expect if you only knew Miike from his exported work like Audition or Ichi the Killer but which I think fits in with his appreciation for schlocky domestic popular culture and is extremely charming.