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Above, an alternate poster for the Japanese melodrama Manji, aka All Mixed Up, which premiered today in 1964. And before any readers get all mixed up, it has nothing to do with Nazis. We already talked about the movie, and you can read what we wrote here.
You’d be surprised how many Japanese movie posters feature swastikas. Or backwards ones, anyway. This particular promo was made for the melodrama Manji, a movie known in English by the name Swastika, or sometimes All Mixed Up. Some of you out there might be saying right now that the crooked cross Westerners know as a Nazi symbol is also a Native American symbol, though turned backward. And you’d be right. Others of you may say it’s an ancient Sanskrit symbol, whether turned backward or forward. And you’d also be right. Still others of you, the more widely traveled perhaps, know that in Japan the backward swastika is a symbol used to mark the location of Buddhist temples on maps. And what the hell, we should also mention that younger Japanese sometimes say “manji” instead of “cheese” when posing for a photo.
Why did we go into all that? Because when you put a swastika on your website it’s prudent to explain why. There is no discussion of the symbol in Manji. The film is about bored housewife Kyôko Kishida embarking on an affair with a younger woman played by Ayako Wakao. It’s all fun and games at first, but Kishida, in the grip of middle age and an unfulfilling marriage, grows increasingly obsessed with her young girltoy. The movie’s makers seem to be using the cross ironically—in Sanskrit it symbolizes good luck, but the affair in Manji is anything but. You can find out yourself, though, because the entire thing is on YouTube for the moment—with English subtitles!—at this link. Say goodbye to ninety minutes of your life, cinephiles. Manji premiered in Japan today in 1964.
2021 update: the link has finally died. You’ll have to find the movie elsewhere.
Exacerbated by a long drought combined with poor conservation techniques that caused excessive soil erosion on farmlands, a huge dust storm known as Black Sunday rages across Texas, Oklahoma, and several other states, literally turning day to night and redistributing an estimated 300,000 tons of topsoil.
In the U.S., CIA director Allen Dulles launches a program codenamed MK-ULTRA, which involves the surreptitious use of drugs such as LSD to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function. The specific goals of the program are multifold, but focus on drugging world leaders in order to discredit them, developing a truth serum, and making people highly susceptible to suggestion. All of this is top secret, and files relating to MK-ULTRA’s existence are destroyed in 1973, but the truth about the program still emerges in the mid-seventies after a congressional investigation.
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies of a cerebral hemorrhage while sitting for a portrait in the White House. After a White House funeral on April 14, Roosevelt’s body is transported by train to his hometown of Hyde Park, New York, and on April 15 he is buried in the rose garden of the Roosevelt family home.
American journalist, playwright, and author Richard Harding Davis dies of a heart attack at home in Philadelphia. Not widely known now, Davis was one of the most important and influential war correspondents ever, establishing his reputation by reporting on the Spanish-American War, the Second Boer War, and World War I, as well as his general travels to exotic lands.
