Takashi Miike, Japan's maestro of the extreme, takes on a relatively sedate genre with his latest film, Sham: the courtroom drama. However, he brings his signature shocks and unsubtle tropes to this two-sided retelling of a real-life case from 2003 that convulsed Japanese media and public opinion.
The film is based on the case of Seiichi Yabushita, a primary school teacher in Fukuoka who was accused of racially abusing and beating a pupil, driving him close to suicide. The child was said to have an American grandfather, tainting his pure Japanese blood. But was the child lying on the instructions of his mother, the real abuser? The film draws from Masumi Fukuda's 2007 book Fabrication: The Truth About the 'Murder Teacher' in Fukuoka.
In quasi-Rashomon style, Miike presents both sides of the story. First, the mother's version, where the teacher's behaviour is truly sinister. Then, the teacher's account, which emerges as the objective reality: he is a gentle, reasonable man, loved by his pupils, whose remarks on the boy's family background were entirely innocent. The trouble stemmed from the school's headteacher persuading him to apologise and confess to corporal punishment in a doomed attempt to make the case go away.
Ultimately, the film does not sit on the fence; there is no mystery about where the truth lies. Miike's creative energies are galvanised by showing the teacher in his 'evil' guise and the mother as a virtual J-horror villain, reminiscent of the avenger Asami in his classic chiller Audition. The bullying scenes, slanderous rumours, and air of ambiguity may also evoke Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2023 mystery drama Monster, which was indirectly inspired by the same case.
