“Japanese ‘comfort women’ were the first line of invasion prior to World War II,” Imamura notes in his earlier documentary Karayuki-san: The Making of a Prostitute. Zegen, Imamura’s only fiction film set entirely outside of Japan, explores this history through the true story of Iheiji Muraoka, a fervently patriotic pimp. Through Muraoka's perspective, the mordant satire exposes how the exploitation of prostitution served as an economic and military catalyst for Japan’s 20th-century imperial expansion across Asia.