General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Death by Hanging (絞死刑)

Death by Hanging (絞死刑, Kōshikei) is a 1968 Japanese black-and-white film directed by Nagisa Oshima in which a Korean man sentenced to death in Japan survives his own hanging, leaving the prison officials unable to carry out the law. It is a pitch-black satire that indicts both capital punishment and Japan's treatment of its Korean minority.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Nagisa Oshima, 1968¹
Format	118 minutes, black and white, 1.85:1, Japanese language¹
Production	Sozo-sha, Oshima's independent company; released through the Art Theatre Guild (ATG)¹^•²
Source	The 1958 Komatsugawa high school girl murder case and the convicted Korean Ri Chin'u (Yi Jin-u)³^•²
Lead cast	Do-yun Yu as R, with Kei Satō, Fumio Watanabe, Rokkō Toura, Masao Adachi, and Akiko Koyama; Oshima himself narrates¹
Screenplay	Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Michinori Fukao, and Nagisa Oshima; music by Hikaru Hayashi⁴
Themes	The death penalty, discrimination against zainichi Koreans, guilt, and state power⁵

Spoilers

Premise and plot

The film opens with a documentary-style tour of an execution house, narrated by Oshima in a cool, procedural voice, and with a direct address to the audience: "Are you for or against the death penalty?" It cites a contemporary poll in which 71 percent of respondents opposed abolition, then asks how many of that 71 percent have ever seen a death chamber or an execution.⁴

The condemned man, R, a young Korean convicted of raping and killing two Japanese girls, is hanged, but his body refuses to die. Japanese law forbids the execution of anyone unconscious, so the officials cannot simply hang him again.⁵^•⁶ Revived, R suffers amnesia: he remains alive but no longer recognizes himself as the person who committed the crimes. The warden, the education officer, the prosecutor, the doctor, the chaplain, and the guards conspire to make him accept a guilt he does not feel, reenacting his life and his crimes for his benefit. Carried away in the performance, one of the officials actually commits the murder again.⁶

A Korean woman then appears, visible only to R and the guilty official, and whom R calls his sister, although he has no sister. She defends him, arguing that his crime was caused by Japanese imperialism. In the end R concludes that although he committed the crimes, he is nonetheless innocent, and he allows himself to be executed a second time, assured of that innocence.⁶

Real-life source

The film draws on the 1958 murder of two high school girls in the Komatsugawa case in Tokyo, committed by Ri Chin'u, a zainichi Korean (an ethnic Korean resident of Japan) who was sentenced to death.³^•⁷ Oshima himself later said the film "was suggested by a news story," continuing a career-long engagement with crime and the law despite having left his university law studies.⁸ The scholar Shota T. Ogawa, who has written on Koreans in Oshima's 1960s films, notes that the theatrical space of the film's mock-up gallows was built inside a disused cinema, and that the real-life convict Yi Jin-u haunts the film as an uncanny presence.²

Style and technique

Brechtian structure. The film is built as an alienation-effect piece in the manner of Bertolt Brecht: chapter headings announce the point of each sequence in advance, robbing it of narrative suspense; the prison officers absurdly reenact R's life and crimes, standing between spectator and text; and the black-and-white compositions are deliberately geometrical, letting objects such as the uniforms, the priest's cassock, the noose, and the bare walls carry meaning.⁴ Critics have described the result as a tragicomedy that scrambles political polemic, Kafkaesque parable, and surrealist assault on perception, systematically undermining character continuity and spatial and temporal logic.⁹

The critic Howard Hampton, writing in Criterion's essay on the film, places it among the cinema-of-the-absurd milestones of 1968 and describes how Oshima carves a tightly enclosed theatrical space out of the functionalist death-house setting, making the audience feel present among the obsequious officials, guards, prosecutor, and Catholic chaplain.¹⁰ The film's restricted execution-house setting, in this reading, is a production advantage turned into formal principle.¹¹

Themes

The film attacks Japan's discrimination against Koreans while also examining how officials essentialize the very person they claim to judge.¹¹ For Oshima, the project of law and punishment is rendered counterfeit by its grounding in racist exploitation, particularly Japan's treatment of Koreans during and after the war; the state's violence has no transcendent moral rightness and lives in the subjectivity and complicity of those who serve it.¹² The scholar Ogawa records that the film was the first of the critically acclaimed "New Wave" films to come out of ATG, and that it became a popular reference in the political modernist discourse of film theory; Stephen Heath's article "Narrative space" read it not merely as a film about Koreans in Japan but as an exploration of the limits of representability.²

Production context

Oshima had begun as a studio filmmaker at Shochiku, with a hit in Cruel Story of Youth (1960), but left when the studio pulled his politically incendiary Night and Fog in Japan (1960) from circulation. He then became an independent director and founded the production company Sozo-sha, through which he made Pleasures of the Flesh (1965), Violence at Noon (1966), Sing a Song of Sex (1967), and Death by Hanging.¹ The film was made with a new generation of collaborators, including the teenage scriptwriter Mamoru Sasaki (originally Masayuki Harada) and lead actor Do-yun Yu (also credited as Yung-do Yun), who plays R, within an independent film group.¹³^•¹

Release and afterlife

The film was classified for British cinema release on 29 January 1970, distributed by the Academy Cinema, with a running time of 117 minutes 30 seconds; the British Board of Film Classification reclassified a 2025 home-video and streaming version, distributed by Radiance Films, at 118 minutes 8 seconds, with content advice covering sexual violence references and references to discrimination against Korean people in Japan.¹⁴ The Criterion Collection issued the film as Spine #798 with a new 4K restoration, an interview with the critic Tony Rayns, Oshima's 1968 director's statement, and a high-definition transfer of Oshima's 1965 short documentary Diary of Yunbogi, which also concerns Korean experience in Japan.¹ The film is available on the Criterion Channel and on digital rental and purchase platforms.¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Black comedy and satire films › Released 1939 to 1997

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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