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 ...