Rena (Kahori Takeda), a sexually precocious Japanese schoolgirl, loses her virginity to an older lover. But the experience proves unsatisfying. Also with her period overdue Rena worries she might be pregnant. Impressed by Rena's cool attitude to sex, her best friend Yuko (Ako) decides to sleep with her boyfriend. Afterwards Yuko feels so ashamed she runs away from home. A worried Rena travels across the country in search of Yuko. Together the two teenagers embark on a eye-opening journey that challenges their respective attitudes about relationships, morality and sex.
A significant barrier to enjoying Japanese sexploitation fare, or Pink Films, is that so many are fixated with rape or some form of sexual violence. Koyu Ohara was well aware of this problem. Ironically the director was responsible for some of the nastiest, most reprehensible examples of the so-called 'Roman Porno' film for Nikkatsu, a once-proud studio reduced to cranking out glossy sexploitation quickies aimed at a mainstream audience (mainstream in Japan, anyway). Yet Ohara felt such films pandered to the outdated fantasies of a conservative male mindset and fundamentally dishonest, not just about sex but modern Japanese women. In an interview conducted by journalist Maki Hamamoto for the seminal magazine Asian Cult Cinema Ohara admitted Nikkatsu "continued exploiting the misconception – a Japanese macho-centred concept – that a woman wouldn't get hot unless she was forced to have sex."
With Pink Tush Girl screenwriter and political activist Osamu Hashimoto approached Ohara with something radically different from the average Nikkatsu Roman Porno. Something Ohara himself characterized as: "a film that describes sexual awakening of Japanese youth... told with a sense of enjoyment instead of suppressed guilt." The film was a smash hit that spawned two equally popular sequels, Pink Tush Girl: Love Attack (1979) and Pink Tush Girl: Proposal Strategy (1980), though oddly no imitators. Indeed pink films continued along their sadistic, misogynistic course into the next decade and beyond as if these films never happened. By contrast, Pink Tush Girl is a positive, upbeat, progressive account of blossoming feminine sexuality free of guilt and misogyny. For as cute and appealing as leads Kahori Takeda and Rena undoubtedly were to the core male audience, the plot unfolds from their perspective. Grownups play significantly minor roles in the story. Mothers fret on the sidelines as largely ineffectual figures while fathers are entirely absent. Here teenage girls make their own choices which drive the plot.
Hashimoto's script addresses the anxieties of young women in relation to sex: fear of pregnancy, lack of satisfaction, conflicting notions of morality. Both Rena and Yuko remain steadfast in their belief that mental or spiritual purity is not connected to physical purity. Sex can be whatever they chose to make it. For them sex means freedom. Freedom from the social constrictions of their elders and, more controversially, financial freedom. Both heroines experiment with prostitution in a plot twist that anticipates Japan's 'paid dating' phenomenon in the late Nineties where numerous schoolgirls were found to be prostituting themselves to older men in return for designer goods. Admittedly Pink Tush Girl's idea of prostitution as a form of female sexual liberation seems dated and naïve to modern eyes though reflects ideas prevalent among the counterculture at the time and in films by Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel.
Most of the film follows Rena on her cross-country search for Yuko where she encounters and reveals via voice-over her thoughts on various characters with different attitudes to relationships: a chatty girl with a sappy, romanticized view of boys, a smooth-talking lothario who specializes in seducing female tourists yet is left looking foolish, and most significantly a wife hopelessly devoted to her über-macho husband recently released from prison. In interviews Koyu Ohara admitted the characters were a conscious parody of the protagonists in an average Roman Porno film whose abusive, destructive relationship is contrasted with the happier, more progressive young heroines. The male half of the couple was played by Yuya Uchida, one of Japan's most notable rock stars. He went on to star in Oh! Women: A Dirty Song (1981), a Nikkatsu Roman Porno that was supposedly an exposé of his scandalous backstage exploits. This paved the way for more mainstream roles in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1982) and Ridley Scott's Osaka-set thriller Black Rain (1989).
The other significant supporting characters are fellow students Gen'ichi (Atsushi Takahashi) and Takinoue (Yuji Nogami), a supposedly gay couple whom Rena considers really cool for flouting school convention and defying the haters. Yet for all the film's well-intentioned talk of gay rights, its depiction of homosexuality is muddled at best. Gen'ichi and Takinoue abhor physical intimacy and share a steadfastly chaste relationship that seems more like hero worship especially given that both enjoy sexual encounters with Rena. That minor eccentricity aside, Pink Tush Girl handles the various offbeat relationships with great dexterity and charm. Attractive without seeming overly glamorous Kahori Takeda and Ako are thoroughly believable as high school friends. No matter how seedy the action might seem in concept, the tone is upbeat, dare one say even wholesome throughout and Daiko Nagato's disco score is undeniably catchy.
