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Death by Hanging
Movie

Death by Hanging

1968 • Unknown

Woke Score
6
out of 10

Plot

A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but somehow survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next.

Overall Series Review

Death by Hanging is a 1968 Japanese New Wave film presented as a dark, Brechtian, and absurd political farce. The movie follows a group of bumbling government officials and a priest who must try to make a surviving Korean convict, R, regain his memory and his sense of guilt so he can be legally executed again. This premise allows the director to launch a scathing, relentless, and intellectually dense critique of the Japanese state, its justice system, and its historical persecution of the Korean minority. The film directly questions the moral legitimacy of state-sanctioned violence and the nature of guilt in a system steeped in historical ethnic bigotry. The narrative is heavily focused on identity politics and civilizational self-hatred, using theatrical reenactments of R’s life and crimes to expose the underlying racism and moral hypocrisy of the state apparatus. It is a highly political work where almost every element exists to make a philosophical and political lecture on systemic oppression.

Categorical Breakdown

Identity Politics9/10

The plot's entire engine relies on the ethnic identity of the protagonist, R, a Korean man, and the systemic oppression and racism directed at ethnic Koreans (Zainichi) by the Japanese state. The officials attempt to force R to accept his 'Korean-ness' through crude racial stereotypes and reenactments, explicitly linking his ethnicity to his alleged criminality. The narrative exists to lecture on systemic oppression.

Oikophobia9/10

The film functions as a sweeping and relentless indictment of Japanese institutions, including its legal system, bureaucracy, and 'imperialist psychology.' The officials representing the state are depicted as a collection of bumbling, absurd, and violent hypocrites who lack moral authority. The home culture and its immediate past are framed as fundamentally corrupt and defined by unrepented war crimes, contrasting the state's violence with the individual's crime.

Feminism4/10

The male officials are portrayed as incompetent agents of a corrupt system, and their attempts to reenact the original crime include simulated rape and an accidental murder of a girl. While the men are thoroughly emasculated by their own moral and procedural ineptitude, the female characters (the victims and the 'sister' figure) primarily serve as symbols of political persecution or objects of violence. This focuses on the failings of masculinity but does not introduce the modern 'Girl Boss' or anti-natalism tropes.

LGBTQ+1/10

The core themes of the film are state violence, race, and the death penalty. The narrative contains no focus on alternative sexualities, deconstructing the nuclear family, or gender ideology, and maintains a normative structure by avoiding these subjects entirely.

Anti-Theism7/10

The film questions the entire notion of objective morality and guilt, suggesting that morality is subjective and a function of state power dynamics, not a transcendent truth. The priest character is included among the bumbling officials who use 'bizarre metaphysical sophistry' about R's soul to justify the bureaucratic continuation of the execution, portraying institutional religion as a tool for cynical procedural manipulation rather than a source of moral strength.