The Seppuku Pistols 
切腹ピストルズ 「Seppuku Pisutoruzu」
Release Date: 2022
Duration: 115 mins.
Director: Yo Umezaki
Writer: N/A
Starring: Seppuku Pistols
When I say punk music, you might think of a band led by a Sid Vicious-like figure snarling on stage while guitars are jabbed and drums are thrashed. If I said that punk could also be people playing flutes and shamisen, you might balk at the idea but Seppuku Pistols will win you over.
Seppuku Pistols are a 20-member punk band that eschews electrical instruments for the thunderous rumble of taiko drums, sinuous trilling of flutes, and the staccato plucking of shamisen strings, all of which is kept in time by a bell. They play punk clubs, music festivals, and often do guerrilla street performances while wearing clothes that come from something like Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) rather than Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984) but their counterculture cred is real and growing as they begin to tour the world.
The best way to find out is to see them live. The second best is through film.
For his music documentary, The Seppuku Pistols, Yo Umezaki spent many months travelling thousands of miles around the world with the titular band. With talking-head interviews and lots of concert footage, his film gives their definitive story.
The first part of the film, which won the Chicago Japan Film Collective’s Audience Award, introduces the band and their philosophy of looking to the past to confront our corporatised contemporary times with seminal moments in Japanese history guiding their fate.
Leader and founding member Hiroyuki Iida details how they originally started out as a Sex Pistols-inspired punk rock group formed in 1999. Primary evidence like their name, which is a pun on the British group, still photographs of them in leather and denim, and video of them playing Dead Kennedys Too Drunk to Fuck show how they took the typical punk rocker route. However, in the shadow of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, when Japan was in a crisis of identity and resources, they dropped electric guitars for acoustic and wind instruments and a visual look that harkened back to the Edo period (1600s to the late 1800s) and championed tradition over modernity to become their current incarnation as counter-culture icons.
The crux of the rest of the documentary is in exploring how their incongruous approach to punk music is very punk all the way to the core.
Visually, Umezaki often captures the unique incongruity in tableaux where bandmembers donning bamboo hats and click-clacking around concrete cities with geta are truly like figures who have time slipped from the past. It could be a cynical marketing ploy but through interviews, Umezaki keeps the theme of identity foremost in the minds of viewers.
Lots of screentime is dedicated to showing how their aesthetic developed. Iida talks about deeper philosophical appreciation of the Edo era, a time when people treasured objects and looked after things. Reinforcing this theme, Umezaki’s film has fascinating passages of Iida’s hunts for noragi – Edo-era farmer’s jackets – and other members darning, mending, recycling, upcycling, reusing, and recreating other old fashioned clothes and even farming. This stands as an act of rebellion against fast fashion and the Malcolm McClaren manufactured marketing ready Sex Pistols look that epitomises the cultural commodification of capitalism and seeing it so fully in the film provides the band with the bona fide’s that make them a genuine artists.
This vein of exploration is also part of a theme wherein community is constantly evoked, one that sees sequences of the group learning about local culture, teaching others their skills, and even recreating village experiences that draw in old and young in workshops as group members cannily use modern means to maintain craft passed down through the generations, thus preserving them. It seems to run counter to the punk image but, taken as a whole, this is perfect act of rebellion for our modern age of alienation due to technology and the easy disposability of objects and history.
With this philosophical depth, we get the breadth of their work as Umezaki’s film dedicates much screen time to dynamic concerts in places ranging from Tokyo to New York with Fukuoka and Okinawa in between.
The variety of locations helps the film’s structure and pacing as there is a constant forward momentum that carries the interviews and band background. Acting as backdrops are wonderfully lensed shots of the environments that the band plays in with a particularly cold snowy Niigata show having a particular visual appeal. It culminates in a centrepiece moment of a Times Square performance, while off-the-cuff moments of band members interacting with concert-goers punctuate performances.
Meanwhile, the music is powerful. Even if the thought of taiko drums sounds unappealing, experiencing that raw power, even via speakers, has an effect as the percussiveness really compels the body to move. This sensation is probably encouraged by Umezaki’s camerawork which conveys really infectious energy through being handheld, deep in the crowds and amidst Seppuku Pistols, and rapidly cutting between performers, dancers, and some bewildered onlookers. It is exhilarating as the percussion has a physiological effect of making one want to move with the beat and making one feel like hearing it in the flesh would be much, much, much more fun.
Showing how much fun can be had are onlookers who are smiling and wilding out. Amidst these people is the ever-present sense of community that the film keeps as a thematic thread running through it. It shows how universal and accessible their music is, something highlighted in New York where a Senegalese woman comments on how the music is similar to what she hears in her motherland and how American fans feel compelled to follow the band around the city, with one person even making a trip to Japan. Meanwhile, the connections to punk music reverberate again when seeing people wild out in mosh pits and band members join in. Meanwhile, their taiko rendition of Dead Kennedys “Too Drunk” acting as their encore work, reinforces their punk bona fides but that aspect matters less than the joy their music engenders and seeing how their intellectual rigorousness in delivering Edo-era festivities and treasuring culture has broad appeal that speaks to everyone.
Even if the raucous music shown here isn’t really your thing, it is moving to see the transformative power of their music. Beneath the thrashing and thunder of the drums is a shared vision for the group and their followers that gives them the ideas on how to live life in a different manner. Their cultural conservations sound contradictory to what is sold as punk but, again, it works in that punk way of breaking free from society’s call for conformity and that fixed image of punk music, which is as punk as it gets.
Ultimately, this is a great introduction to the band and full of fantastic musical performances that viewers should be sold on Seppuku Pistols.
Starting tonight, Seppuku Pistols are touring venues in London and Bristol and will pop up at various places along the way, just like in the documentary. You can find out more on details and dates in this post but here’s the short version:
Fri 02nd, 19:30: cafe OTO
Sat 03rd, at night: Brixton’s Baddest
Sun 04th, 12:00: William Morris Gallery
Tue 06th, 19:30: Paper Dress Vintage
Thu 08th, at night: secret gig in Bristol
Okay, this will be my last use of the word punk just to recommend GREEN ROOM, a film where punks fight Neo-Nazis. I saw this at a cinema with my mother and sister and we still regard it as a great film!