Blackness in Proof of the Man

A few minutes into Proof of the Man (1977, dir. Junya Satō), a biracial man jumps joyously into the air and freezes. The camera punches in, and a title card in Japanese appears. At this point, we don’t know who this man is, and we don’t know why he is important, but the film has unmistakably marked him as “人間の証明”. Though I don’t speak Japanese, I can read kanji, and the title seems to translate not necessarily to “proof of the man,” but just “proof of human.” To place such momentous importance on anyone in a film is intriguing enough, but to place it on a half-black man in an African-American neighborhood screams thematically significant. Another few minutes later, he is unceremoniously killed. We still don’t know who he is, but his status hovers over our heads. He is the proof of human.

“Look at me!”, he tells the audience.

We later find out that this proof of human is Johnny Hayward, whose parents are a Japanese woman and an African-American man previously stationed in Japan post-WWII. He finds his mom in Japan and is brutally rejected by her. We don’t exactly know why she rejects him; it might be his illegitimacy, her social status, etc. But the answer is clearest in a flashback of him fighting with her. As he pleads for her love and acceptance, he asks her to look at him. Shirtless, he asks her, “who created this body?” It’s impossible to remove blackness from this image. The rhetorical question implicitly becomes “who created this half-black body?”, and as she ducks from his half-black body, blackness becomes a major factor in her rejection of him. This is an accurate depiction of race relations in a highly homogenous East Asian country like Japan. Even though I’m not an expert in Japanese society, a quick Google search has told me that racism against black people remains rampant and widespread in Japan. Because of this root in reality, I found this scene quite poignant and mature. In the film, black people are rejected in both the US and Japan; they are at a perpetual displacement. But rather than reinforcing Johnny’s suffering and pain, Satō instead shows a man actively fighting and searching for answers, not giving up until his last breath. With Johnny, Satō avoided the pitfalls of exoticization, fetishization, caricaturization, etc. There is something powerful about the film’s rather simplistic portrayal of Johnny – blackness is surely intrinsic to him, but he is also merely a man trying to find his place in the world.

Where exactly is this place? All this time, the answer’s been in the title card. No matter how much his mother wants to deny his blackness (and America his Asian-ness), they can’t deny the filmmaker, who, with his godlike powers, has given a half-black person the title and place of the “proof of human.” The “proof of human,” as explained by Kyoko in the film, is a “burden of guilt,” something a person should choose not to eradicate, but to embrace. On the most literal level, the proof of human is a symbol of humanity’s existence. Satō has chosen a half-black man as that symbol. His acknowledgement of African Americans’ plight makes this certification even more powerful and politically acute. Obviously, it’s not like African Americans were worthless before this random Asian dude gave them this certification. They don’t need anyone’s validation. But there’s still something so notable about Satō’s huge political gesture here. Back in the 1970s and honestly even now, calling a black person the “proof of human” would be politically daring, even coming from an American director, not to mention a Japanese one.

The film’s presentation of blackness, however, gets much spottier once removed from Johnny. Firstly, we have the endless scenes of conspicuously black models performing at fashion shows. Their Afrofuturistically exoticized clothes are later revealed to be designed by Kyoko, a Japanese woman. It’s unclear to me what statement Satō is making here. Is he criticizing a Japanese woman using black bodies as literal mannequins for her monetary gain? Is it showing Kyoko’s hypocrisy of accepting black runway models but not her half-black son? Is it trying to normalize black presence in modern Japan? It can be any of the above, but it remains unclear, and I don’t think the film can remain unclear with a topic as contentious as this. It gets worse when the film moves to the US. Stereotypical caricaturization of African Americans is sadly almost expected in 20th century international films set in NYC, and to my grave disappointment, African Americans are lazily shown as uncooperative criminal drug addicts. (Quick observation: the only shopkeeper who helps the detectives with the plum wine is white. The ones who don’t are black.)

Beyond tropes, however, what intrigues me is how the movie ends. Out of nowhere, our main white police detective is fatally stabbed by an African American he assaulted in a previous scene. Why, suddenly, has this Japanese director chosen to end his film on a note of American black-white racial violence? And what exactly is he trying to say with it? When Detective Shuftan dies, we are conditioned to immediately question why he has deserved it. Satō must’ve chosen to kill him for a reason. Shuftan is previously implied to be the man who killed our lead Japanese detective Munesue’s father. Munesue, however, chose not to (or failed to) take revenge against Shuftan. A disturbing implication immediately arises: Satō has used “random black thug #3” as the vessel to enact Munesue’s revenge. Our hero is too noble to kill anyone in this film, so why not have an unnamed black extra do it? It’s a haphazard statement on racism in America that completely misses the mark on why an African American would want to kill a white man, and perpetuates the stereotype of the criminal African American. Regardless of the stabber’s motives for killing Shuftan within the plot, Satō has added an extra intention of revenge to him, and used his black body as merely a tool of violence and crime.

That’s why the film’s presentation of blackness is at least somewhat problematic. But the main axis of the film is the straw hat murder, and we can’t deny the positive characterization of Johnny there, despite his lack of screen time. And we definitely can’t deny the unmissable political statement of the title card. He might’ve died, but he lives on.

Work Cited
Proof of the Man. Directed by Junya Satō, Kadokawa Films, 1977.