Living as an Onna in Japanese Cinema: Pink Filmmaker Hamano Sachi's Reproductive Labor

This essay situates the impossible volume of Japanese pink filmmaker Hamano Sachi's more than three hundred films as a reproductive labor, arguing that through its iterative enactments her filmmaking practice performs renewals that invigorate her life as an onna (woman) in cinema and make it possible in the first place. The argument advances that we might understand Hamano's pink cinema as a woman's cinema that rewrites sex in non-phallic terms, borrowing from the artist and social theorist Bini Adamczak's theory of circlusive sex. Reading the visual and aural techniques of Hamano's pink cinema alongside her autobiography, the conflicts and desires Hamano faces as a woman in film, which recruit her reproductive labor to nourish her very existence, are brought into conversation. Because the autobiography implicates structures of value located in legible, visible forms, the essay ultimately advocates for investing in the material articulations of Hamano's pink forms.