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Takashi Miike, Japan’s maestro of the extreme, now takes on a relatively sedate and mainstream genre: the courtroom drama. But he can’t help bringing to it his signature shocks and unsubtle tropes. Sham is based on a real-life case from 2003 that convulsed Japanese media and public opinion. In the city of Fukuoka in south-west Japan, primary school teacher Seiichi Yabushita was accused of racially abusing and beating a pupil and driving him close to suicide on the grounds of the child supposedly having an American grandfather, his pure Japanese blood tainted by foreigners. But was the child lying on the instructions of his mother, the real abuser? The film is based on Fabrication: The Truth About the “Murder Teacher” in Fukuoka, investigative journalist Masumi Fukuda’s 2007 book about the case.
Mirroring the prosecution and defence cases in court, Miike gives us both sides of the story in quasi-Rashomon style: first, that of the boy’s mother Mrs Himuro (Kô Shibasaki) and in this version, the behaviour of the teacher (Gô Ayano) is truly sinister. Afterwards – the “prosecution” version having taken up very little of the film – we get the teacher’s own account, and it soon dawns on us that this is in fact the objective reality. He is a gentle, reasonable man, loved by his pupils; he wouldn’t hurt a fly and his remarks on the boy’s family background are entirely innocent. The trouble stemmed from having been persuaded by the school’s terrified headteacher to apologise to the parents in a doomed attempt to make the case go away and to confess to corporal punishment on the grounds of one misjudged chastisement after a bullying incident, intended to show him how awful violence is.
In the end, this film does not sit on the fence; there is no Rashomon-style mystery about where the truth lies. Yet Miike’s own creative energies are galvanised, I think, by showing the teacher in his “evil” guise and also, perhaps, by showing Mrs Himuro as a virtual J-horror villain with long straight black hair and a pale impassive face – not far, in some ways, from the avenger Asami in his classic chiller Audition. And the bullying scenes, the teacher beset by slanderous rumour, the school’s insincere apologies, and the air of ambiguity and mystery … it may be a clue that the original 2003 case also indirectly inspired Hirokazu Kore-eda’s mystery drama Monster from 2023.
