Zegen, Imamura’s only fiction film set entirely outside Japan, is a macabre, acerbic anticolonial critique of Japan’s 20th-century imperial expansion across Southeast Asia, exposing how the nation systematically trafficked and subjugated women to anchor its colonial networks. The film is told through the true story of one of Japan’s most powerful – and most fervently patriotic – pimps: Iheiji Muraoka, a zegen (literally, a “procurer of women”) who trafficked Japanese women into sex work across the region, framing his enterprise as a form of national service that extended the Emperor’s imperial project.

The film is directly informed by Imamura’s 1975 documentary Karayuki-San, The Making of a Prostitute, which traced the lives of Japanese women trafficked abroad as prostitutes, many of whom remained overseas rather than return to Japan.

Based on Muraoka’s autobiography, Zegen follows the destitute exile as he washes up in Hong Kong, is coercively recruited by the Japanese consulate to spy on Russia in Manchuria during the early Meiji era, and eventually amasses wealth as a pimp. Imamura depicts Muraoka’s delusions of grandeur as he pursues national glory and personal fortune with increasingly grotesque and treacherous consequences.