Our culture is highly organised and systematised, and we do not grant citizenship to pigs. Therefore, disruption and criticism would ensue if even a lone pig were to jump into the Imperial Household…¹

Tolstoy attributes wars and revolutions to the whims of unknown historical forces, and declares the decisions of emperors and the manoeuvres of generals to be irrelevant to either their outbreaks or outcomes. ² In the long, violent and agonising battle between two boy-generals who play a never-ending game of Jan-ken-pon (the Japanese version of 'rockpaper- scissors') in Shuji Terayama's dystopian film Tomato Kecchappu Kôtei (Emperor Tomato Ketchup, 1970), cataclysmic war comes to Japan, a nation whose martial history ended abruptly in 1945 with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.³ Terayama once described dramaturgy as the 'organisation of violence'⁴ and in his film's brutal satire of political activism and ideologues, his boy-generals, dressed in cobbled-together uniforms, resemble less generals than actors in a martial theatre in which dramatic action simply spreads like pandemonium.

Japan emerged from the catastrophe of World War II as one of the most pragmatic and materialist societies in the world, and amidst this consensus Emperor Tomato Ketchup erupted deliriously, along with a string of acts of violent political contestation by leftist and nationalist factions - hijackings, bank robberies and an attempted coup d'état-cumpublic suicide - that were upending Japan's post-War ideology of parliamentary democracy, domestic peace and economic expansion. The film depicts the anarchic scenario of children taking over, told through a series of burlesque theatrical tableaux and a collage of voiceover and found audio documents. The sheer sensationalism of the