Category: Festivals

90 Years Old – So What? (九十歳。何がめでたい, Tetsu Maeda, 2024)

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Everyone keeps congratulating Aiko Sato (Mitsuko Kusabue) on reaching 90, but she can’t see what’s so special about it. Having retired from writing after publishing her last novel at 88, she’s really feeling her age and has little desire to anything but sit around waiting to die. That is, until she’s badgered into picking up her pen by a down on his luck, “dinosaur” editor certain that her words of wisdom will strike a chord with the young people of today.

Marking the 90th birthday of its leading lady Mitsuko Kusabue and directed by comedy master Tetsu Maeda, the film takes its name from a collection of essays published under the title “90 Years Old, So What?” which largely deal with what it’s like to be old in the contemporary society along with the way things have changed or not in Japan over the last 90 years. It does not, however, shy away from the physical toll of ageing despite Kusabue’s sprightliness or the undimmed acuity of Aiko whose only barrier to writing is that she fears she’s run out of things to say and the energy to write them. During her retirement, she remarks on the fact that her legs and back hurt while she also has a heart condition and everything just feels like too much bother. Her daughter Kyoko (Miki Maya), who lives with her along with her twenty-something daughter Momoko (Sawako Fujima), asks her why she doesn’t go out to meet a friend, but as Aiko says, most of her friends have already passed on or like her don’t really have the energy to leave the house. 

In many ways, her age isolates her as she finds herself slightly at odds with the contemporary society. She turns the television up louder because she finds it difficult to understand what younger people are saying and doesn’t get why they stare at their phones all the time. Though she manages most things for herself, she has to call repair people, which costs money, if something breaks down while her daughter’s not around to fix it, even if it’s something as simple as a paper jam in a fax machine or pushing the off button on the TV too hard so it won’t turn back on again. Nevertheless, so intent is she on “enjoying” her retirement that she repeatedly turns down the entreaties of a young man from her publisher’s who wants her to write a column and always turns up with fancy sweets which are, as she says, well-considered gifts, but also a little soulless and superficial being driven by fashionable trends of which Aiko knows nothing and by which she is not really impressed.

There is something quite interesting about the contrast between herself and fifty-something Yoshikawa (Toshiaki Karasawa) who is also a man behind the times and a relic of the patriarchal culture she railed against in her writing and rejected in her personal life, divorcing two husbands and going on to raise her daughter alone. In the opening scenes, she reads an entry from an advice column about a woman who’s sick of her husband of 20 years because he’s a chauvinist who dumps all of the domestic responsibilities onto her while looking down on her because of it. Aiko tuts and contradicts the advice of the columnist, remarking that the answer is simple. She should just tell him to his face that she hates him and then leave. Nevertheless, the fact remains that not all that much has changed since she was young. The husband’s behaviour is considered “normal”, while the woman’s desire to be treated with respect or leave her marriage is not. Yoshikawa is effectively demoted because he has no idea that his treatment of a female employee amounts to workplace bullying and sexual harassment even if he didn’t intend that way because he’s trapped within this old-fashioned patriarchal ideal and is unable to see that his behaviour is not acceptable nor that he’s been taking his family for granted while considering only his own needs and positioning himself as the provider. 

Yet it’s 90-year-old Aiko rather than his humiliating demotion or the failure of his marriage who begins to show him the error of his ways by accepting him into her own family like a lonely stray. Aiko’s essays don’t really say that everything was better in the past, even if she’s confused by modern people who are annoyed by the cheerful sounds of children playing and a city alive with life because she remembers how everything went quiet during the war and how depressing that could be. But she does sometimes think that progress has gone far enough and things were better when people had more time for patience with each other. That said, patience is one of the things Aiko has no time for, advising Yoshikawa to charge forward like a wild boar because one of the benefits of age is that you just don’t care anymore what anyone thinks so get ready to annoy people or exasperate them but carry on living life to the full. Ironically, that might be a gift that he gave her by convincing her to write again which returned purpose to her life and gave her a reason to engage again with the world around her lifting her depression and making her feel as if she still mattered. The real Aiko turned 100 in 2023 and carried on writing, while 90-year-old Kusakabe is herself undergoing something of a career resurgence in recent years proving that even if you’re 90 years old, so what? There’s still a lot of life left to be lived and you might as well carry on living it doing what you love for as long as you can.

90 Years Old – So What? screens 21st June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ravens (レイブンズ, Mark Gill, 2024)

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“All I see are self portraits”, the hero’s by then former wife cuttingly remarks on visiting his comeback exhibition in the company of her new husband, seemingly a much more conventional businessman. Japanese films about photographers are similar to those other countries make about writers in that their protagonists are often very flawed people, tortured artists consumed by their own trauma and often turning to drink at the expense of their personal relationships. Tadanobo Asano has in fact played similar roles a few times before. In Yoichi Higashi’s Wandering Home, he played real life war correspondent Yasuyuki Tsukahara who passed away from kidney cancer at the age of 42 after years of alcohol dependency, while in 1999’s One Step on a Mine, It’s All Over he played Taizo Ichinose whose obsession with getting a photograph of Angkor Wat eventually results in his death.

Masahisa Fukase was one of the key photographers of the post-war era and also an incredibly troubled soul. The conceit of Mark Gill’s Ravens (レイブンズ) is that Fukase is accompanied by a giant, anthropomorphised, English-speaking raven (José Luis Ferrer) who gives voice to his darkest thoughts and impulses. A magazine profile describes Fuksase’s work as having dark and occult influences, which the film attributes to the fact that his incredibly conservative father (Kanji Furutachi) used to lock him inside a more literal dark room as a punishment when he was a child. 

Like many of his contemporaries, Fukase’s photographs often express the widening gap between the traditional and the modern in the changing post-war society and the film also uses many of his motifs such as his family photographs to express the changing dynamics between them. Fukase himself is caught in the nexus of this continuing battle in inheriting the legacy of his father’s war trauma. A heavy drinking, violent man, Sukezo insists that as the oldest son Fukase must take over their family photography studio and that taking photogaps is a commercial activity not an artististic one. Fukase’s wife and muse Yoko (Kumi Takiuchi) often says the same thing, undercutting Fukase’s sense of purpose in his work even while he also denies Yoko’s role as a collaborator rather than simply as a subject. “Any woman will do,” the Raven tells him though that turns out not quite to be the case. 

Yoko complains that that Fukase never really looks at her but sees the world abstractedly through the lens of his camera which is really just another way of avoiding reality. She thinks she begins to understand him after belatedly meeting Fukase’s family years after their marriage and witnessing one of his father’s drunken rages first-hand, but it only seems to push them further apart. Despite his claims of artistry, Fukase quickly becomes jealous of the attention Yoko attracts as the star of his photographs as if she has eclipsed him, the artist, and can no longer be controlled by his camera. He clearly wanted the fame and acclaim through his success only seems to deepen his self-loathing and desire for death. His father had told that a man who failed to achieve success by 40 should kill himself, though when Fukase does eventually attempt to take his own life he does so by hanging, hoping that his assistant will photograph it, rather than by using the sword his father shoved at him.

Though Fukase describes Yoko as a very modern woman she too is caught by this cycle in that her mother tells her it’s a wife’s duty to forgive her husband even after he wounds with a knife during a drug-fuelled psychotic episode. Despite separating from him, Yoko continues to visit Fukase in the hospital where he remains after suffering a traumatic brain injury until his eventual death in 2012. In its way, it’s a frustrated love story in which the relationship between them is disrupted by the intrusion of outdated social codes, generational trauma, and Fukase’s own demons which appear to have been with him since childhood. The conviction that Yoko comes to is that all his pictures are actually reflections of himself and that he is incapable of seeing the world through any other lens even as he tells her that the sky is just the sky and ravens are just ravens, nothing means anything. He tells his assistant that he thought he was in search of death the whole time, but maybe it was death that was looking for him. Dreamlike and ethereal, Gill weaves back and fore throughout Fukase’s life from his conservative upbringing to the heady 1970s and gradual comedown of his later years before finally discovering a melancholy sense of serenity as Fukase, finally, dares to gaze back into the lens.

Ravens screens 20th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

International trailer (dialogue free)

Last Mile (ラストマイル, Ayuko Tsukahara, 2024)

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“Customer-centric”, what does that actually mean? The Amazon-like US-based conglomerate at the centre of Ayako Tsukahara’s Last Mile (ラストマイル) prides itself on its customer-centric philosophy, but at the end of the day, what that really means is that they give us what we tell them we want through our purchasing patterns and browsing history. That would be that we want everything as cheap and fast as it’s possible to be and don’t really think about the wider implications or what a world of infinite convenience might be doing to the society around us.

At least from the perspective of corporate lackey Elena (Hikari Mitsushima), recently returned from the US, the reason Daily Fast pressures its delivery staff to lower costs isn’t to maximise their profits, it’s so they can go on providing lower prices to customers which to her is all part of their customer-centric approach. This doesn’t really gel with her off-the-cuff remark about the warehouse not having a safety net to protect the workers from accidental falls or, she ominously adds, prevent people from jumping. That she brought it up at all might signal that she knows something’s not quite with the way this company treats its employees, though as it turns out she may have something else on her mind. In any case, when she arrives on her very first day the entrance to the complex is little better than a cattle market with a man on loud speaker barking instructions about were to go to the 800 members of staff some of whom have only been brought in to bulk up for the upcoming Black Friday sale. 

Which is all to say, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if the fact that some of their parcels have been exploding on delivery were a concerted attack against their ultra-capitalist philosophy, though actively delivering bombs to people who didn’t order them is not very “customer-centric” in any case. Obviously, Elena isn’t keen on this either but is also convinced that it can’t really be their fault because they have strict and dehumanising security measures in place preventing the workers from bringing in anything inessential. Even after she works out that the bomber has actually warned them that there are 12 bombs out there, she wilfully withholds the evidence from law enforcement to avoid damaging their share prices while trying to minimise business interruption rather than do anything sensible like stop delivering people parcels until they’ve figured out what’s going on with the bombs, though the real mystery is why the police don’t really seem to have the power to do that and, in fact, end up working with the warehouse to check each parcel individually to keep the conveyor belts going.

From the aerial view, the city itself resembles the warehouse with the roads taking the place of the belts as delivery vans shuttle along them. Seventy-something delivery driver subcontractor Sano (Shohei Hino) once had a friend who used to say that they were the ones who kept the country running. Yacchan became the number one driver largely because he took 10 minutes to eat his lunch and worked every hour god sent for dwindling pay with the implication that his gruelling schedule contributed to his early death. Sano’s son Wataru (Shôhei Uno) has just started working with him on the van after being laid off from an electronics job. They made quality washing machines that were designed to be efficient and to last, but of course they couldn’t compete with cheaper brands so they went bust.

Elena berates herself for being “too Japanese” for the American company which is to say that she takes pride in her work. That’s not to say that everything about the American business culture is bad as she encourages her assistant, Ko (Hikari Mitsushima), to call her Elena and to feel free to speak his mind rather than equivocate to avoid causing offence. But despite their “customer-centric” approach, it’s clear that the company puts profits above all else and treats its workers, who are not actually employees, poorly, without concern for their wellbeing. Yagi (Sadao Abe), the boss of logistics first Sheep Express which is the prime courier for Daily Fast, laments that he’d love to hire more drivers to help them through this crisis but he can’t because they’re always squeezing his budget and no one will work for their terrible rates except for those who, like Sheep Express itself, have no other options and will have put up with it because they’re dependent on Daily Fast. And because they’re dependent on Daily Fast, it means we all have to keep buying stuff we don’t really want or need just keep the belts going because we’re terrified about what will happen if they stop.

There is a direct comparison between Wataru’s well-made washing machines and the cheap and fast consumerist model that’s gradually taken over that suggests things like craftsmanship and integrity have gone out the window in a world where no one really bothers to go the last mile anymore, though it’s his steadfast engineering that eventually saves the day while even Elena comes to rethink her career trajectory and advises the drivers to strike and end this culture of exploitation because it turns out Daily Fast needs them more than they need Daily Fast. But maybe we don’t really need Daily Fast either, and we’re as much to blame for letting them give us what we think we want without really considering what that actually means. Perhaps a “customer-centric” society’s not all it’s cracked up to be, especially when workers and consumers are often the same people stuck on conveyor belts knowing there’s only one way to stop them.

Last Mile screens 19th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Hakkenden (八犬伝, Fumihiko Sori, 2024)

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Kyokutei Bakin thinks he’s a hack who writes inconsequential pulp that will be forgotten faster than yesterday’s headlines. He’d never believe that people hundreds of years later would still be talking about his work. Yet he may have a point in his conviction that people crave simple stories where good triumphs over evil specifically because the real world is not really like that and a lot of the time the bad guys end up winning. But does that mean then that all his stories are “lies” and he’s irresponsible for depicting the world not the way that it is but the way he wants it to be? 

Fumihiko Sori’s Hakkenden (八犬伝) is on one level an adaptation of the famous tale probably most familiar to international audiences as The Legend of the Eight Samurai, and also a story of its writing and the private doubts and fears of its author. In dramatising the tale, Sori plays fantasy to the max and revels in Bakin’s outlandishness. An unusually picky Hokusai (Seiyo Uchino), Bakin’s best and he claims only friend and unwilling collaborator, points out that his use of guns is anachronistic because they didn’t come to Japan until 60 or 70 years after the story takes place but Bakin doesn’t care. He says people don’t notice things like that and all they really care about is that good triumphs in the end, so he’ll throw in whatever he feels like to make a better story. In any case, the tale revolves around magical orbs, evil witches, dog gods and good fairies, so if you’re worrying about there being guns before there should be, this isn’t the story for you. 

Hokusai is also shocked that Bakin has never been to the place where the story is set, but as he tells him it all happened long ago and far away so going there now would be pointless. Even so, Hokusai needs to see what he draws which is why he spends half his life on the road costing him relationships with his family. Whatever else anyone might say about him, and he admits himself to being a “difficult” person, Bakin is very close to his family even if his wife yells at him all the time for being rude to influential people and not making any money when he could have just taken over her family’s clog-making business rather than carry on with this writing malarkey. His biggest ambition is that his son become a doctor to a feudal lord and thereby restore their samurai status which on one level points to a kind of conservatism that doesn’t matter to Hokusai and singles Bakin out as a tragic figure because the age of the samurai is nearing its end anyway. 

In his fantasy, however, he hints at and undoes, up to a point, injustices inflicted on women in the romance between Shino (Keisuke Watanabe) and Hamaji (Yuumi Kawai) who is almost forced into a marriage with a wealthy man because of her adoptive parents’ greed but is finally revealed to be a displaced princess and returned to her father who is thereby redeemed for having accidentally killing his other daughter in a mistaken attempt to control her after accidentally promising her in marriage to a dog god without really thinking about what he was saying. A neat parallel is drawn in a brief mention of Hokusai’s artist daughter Oi and Bakin’s daughter-in-law Omichi (Haru Kuroki) who did not receive an education and is almost illiterate but finally helps him to complete the story by transcribing it in Chinese characters he teaches her as they go after he loses his sight.

As his literary success increases, Bakin’s own fortunes both improve and decline. He becomes wealthier and moves to nicer houses in samurai neighbourhoods, but his son Shizugoro’s (Hayato Isomura) health declines and he never opens his own clinic like he planned while remaining committed to the idea that his father is actually a great, unappreciated artist. In a way, completing the story gives Bakin a way to say the world could be kind and just even if it has not always been so to him. He needs to maintain the belief in a better world in order to go living even if he feels it to be inauthentic while his life itself is a kind of fiction. On a trip to the theatre, he ends up seeing Yotsuya Kaidan and is at once hugely impressed and incredibly angry. The world that Nanboku sees is the opposite of his own. People are selfish and greedy. The bad are rewarded and the innocent are punished. Yet perhaps this is the “reality” of the way the world really is, where as his work is a wishful fantasy. All he’s doing is running away from the truth. But then, as his son’s friend tells him, if a man devotes himself to the ideal of justice and believes in it all his life, then it becomes a reality and ceases to be fiction. There is something quite poignant about the dog soldiers coming to take Bakin to the better world he dreamed of where bad things happen but good always triumphs in the end, which has now indeed become a reality if only for him.

Hakkenden screens 13th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

A Century in Sound (百年の音色, Nick Dwyer & Tu Neill, 2024)

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Listening cafes are a phenomenon particular to Japan in which the music is the draw rather than the quality of whatever refreshments are available. Indeed, as Nick Dwyer and Tu Neill’s documentary A Century in Sound (百年の音色, Hyakunen no neiro) makes plain, they are spaces of community and identity in which people with similar tastes come together even if, as at classical music cafe Lion, they sit in silence to better absorb the music. Exploring three such cafes which are themselves a dying breed, the film also examines Japan’s complicated 20th century history and the shifting tastes that accompanied it.

This is evident in the first cafe visited, Cafe Lion, which opened in 1926 and catered to a then new interest in European classical music which in Japan was viewed as something new and exciting. The nation was still emerging from Meiji-era transition and at that time, before the war, entering a moment of fierce internationalism and creativity. The current manager is in her 80s and relates her own memories of another Tokyo before the fire bombing along with the ways the city changed afterwards. Cafe Lion was among the first buildings to be rebuilt and they pride themselves on the quality of their sound system, even deciding to stop serving food because it was considered too noisy and got in the way of the customers’ ability to hear the music. Her son will be taking over the business, so she’s hopeful that this tradition will survive and they’ll be able to continue spreading the love of classical music in the wider community.

The reason these spaces originated was that in the beginning records and sound equipment were expensive so people couldn’t afford to buy their own and would request music they wanted to hear at a cafe instead. Jazz Kissa Eigakan didn’t open until 1978, but though it may have arrived earlier, the owner, Yoshida, attributes the popularity of jazz to a desire for freedom in the post-war society as exemplified by the protests against the security treaty with the Americans and subsequent anti-Vietnam War movement. A former film director, he found the same energy in the Japanese New Wave and opened the cafe to share his love of jazz and film even going so far as making it his life’s work to construct his own sound system to get the best possible sound for his customers that won’t leave them feeling tired or overwhelmed. He also hosts film screenings demonstrating the various ways these spaces have become community hubs that provide a refuge for people with similar interests along with a place to relax and be welcomed in an otherwise hectic city. 

That seems to be the draw for Atsuko, a regular at rock music cafe Bird Song which mainly plays Japanese music from the 70s and 80s. In her teenage years, she’d been a frequent visitor to famed rock cafe Blackhawk before going travelling and then settling down to have a family. Now regretting that she gave up her love of music, she’s returned to Bird Song to rediscover it along with another community of like-minded regulars. While Yoshida discusses the era of the student protests, the owner of Bird Song cites Happy End’s 1971 album as a turning point in not only in Japanese music but culturally in moving towards the post-Asama-Sanso society and the consumerist victory that led to the Bubble Era. He posits City Pop as the sound of consumerism and while looking back on his time as an ad exec in the era of high prosperity does not appear to think they were particularly good times or at least that they lacked a kind of spirituality that his customers are looking to rediscover in music. 

Dwyer and Neill make good use stock footage and films as well as artful composition to compensate for the talking heads while fully conveying the richness and warmth of these spaces along with their welcoming qualities. Though it’s obviously much easier now to access music wherever and whenever one wants, the cafes provide an optimal listening environment that no home system can replicate while simultaneously providing a place where people can come together and shut out the outside world. Though they may be dying out in a society driven by convenience, the owner of Bird Song has to work a second job as a security guard just to keep the lights on, the cafes represent the best of what a city can be in recreating, as one customer describes it, a village mentality of care and community built on the back of a love of music.

A Century in Sound Escape screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Escape (逃走, Masao Adachi, 2025)

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Satoshi Kirishima’s incongruously smiling face was a familiar presence across on the nation for over 40 years until he finally made a deathbed confession revealing his true identity as a man wanted in connection with a series of bombings in the 1970s and that he’d successfully evaded the authorities until the very end of his life. What apparently appealed to director Masao Adachi, a former Japanese Red Army member, was the question of why he chose to come clean rather than enjoy his secret victory by taking the truth to his grave.

That might be a minor irony at the centre of the Escape (逃走, Toso) in that Satoshi (Kanji Furutachi) is essentially in flight from himself only to finally escape from his torment by accepting his original identity. As a young man, Satoshi had been a member of a left-wing cell that wanted to awaken the population at large to the ways Japanese society had not changed in continuing to discriminate against the Ainu, those from the Ryukyu Islands, Koreans and other minorities while modern corporations enact another kind of capitalistic imperialism built on exploitation. It was for this reason that they embarked on a bombing campaign targeting large companies, but due to a miscalculation with the explosives, the bombing of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Building in 1974 proved more destructive than intended resulting in loss of life. 

Satoshi was not directly involved in that bombing which was carried out by another cell but was wanted for allegedly setting up a bomb in the Economic Research Institute of Korea which did not result in any casualties. Details of the real Satoshi’s life during his 40 years on the run are thin on the ground, but Adachi paints him as a man torn apart by internalised conflict and unable to make peace with the sense of guilt he feels for those who killed even if he was not directly responsible. The film’s Japanese title is a kind pun in that it’s a homonym which can mean both “escape” and “struggle” which for Satoshi become one and the same. He’s in flight from his younger self while simultaneously preoccupied with how he can continue the revolution in the name of his friends who were not so lucky. Adachi structures the later part of the film as a kind of self-criticism session as Satoshi engages in various dialogues with himself notably as a Buddhist priest interrogating him about his worldly attachments. 

These worldly attachments also obviously separate him from his true calling to revolution including a non-relationship with a woman he meets at a concert venue and is later told has two previous convictions for marriage fraud. Most of the people around him are also leading double lives or harbouring secrets of their own including a man that Satoshi once worked with whom he finds out years later was also another former member of the far left movement living life on the run. The implication is that this sense of isolation and aloneness in wilfully having to suppress his identity became a kind of prison, but that it also liberates Satoshi to a more intensive examination of the self. 

To that extent, his escape is also from contemporary Japan and an act of resistance towards an increasingly capitalistic and indifferent society. Hoping to stay below the radar, Satoshi works a series of casual construction jobs chiefly because of their anonymity. There was plenty to be built in this era and jobs like these were plentiful, usually offering basic accommodation in a company dorm. He experiences the hardships of the working man first-hand and lives a life of asceticism in which live music and drinking are his only outlets. “We’re all dying to survive,” he reflects, “trying to go home,” though he no longer has a home to go to and has become estranged from his previous identity. He meditates on fallen comrades who either took their own lives or spent them in prison while convincing himself that he’s continuing the struggle on their behalf even in the act of running away in perfecting his “escape”. Though Adachi’s approach is less sentimental than Banmei Takahashi’s in I am Kirishima, he is not immune to sentiment as in his depiction of Satoshi’s final escape from life as the ultimate form of liberation even as his ghost proclaims he will continue to fight, but nevertheless introduces a meta commentary of self-examination in Satoshi’s constant questioning if his long years of struggle have really been worth it.

Escape screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

BAUS: The Ship’s Voyage Continues (BAUS 映画から船出した映画館, Hokimoto Sora, 2025)

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According to the hero of Sora Hokimoto’s BAUS: The Ship’s Voyage Continues (BAUS 映画から船出した映画館, Eiga kara Funadeshita Eigakan), films are born of man’s battle against time and the desire to extend one moment into eternity. Yet his father was always looking for a new “tomorrow” and a path towards the future that ironically kept him from being fully in the  present. Inspired by the memoirs of Takuo Honda, the film is effectively a people’s history of cinema culminating in 2014 with the closure of the Baus Town cinema amid a climate in which film itself seems to have entered a terminal decline.

Indeed, Takuo’s father Shigeo (Shota Sometani) becomes almost a ghost himself. Having come to Tokyo insisting that movies were his “tomorrow,” the war leaves him a shadow of his former self and a spectral presence in the auditorium. Though Takuo’s mother (Kaho) and others at the cinema have discovered a new community eating together every night after the final screening, Shigeo is often out drinking with the chamber of commerce and rarely returns home. Still looking for “tomorrow,” he appears lost for direction despite opening a new, more modern cinema fit for the post-war era. 

As the mother of Shigeo’s wife Hama says, men are focused on past and future while it’s women who are forced to face the present leaving most of the more practical problems for Hama to deal with. Shigeo’s brother Hajime (Kazunobu Mineta) had perhaps been overly obsessed with the past and ultimately unable to move forward. After coming to Tokyo with Shigeo, he became an unsuccessful benshi only to be rendered obsolete by the arrival of talkies. Despite being drawn to the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the migrant workers, he later falls hard for militarism and becomes a casualty of the war both literally and spiritually. Shigeo laments the increasing censorship of the late 1930s complaining that it has become impossible to make or show films, but it’s little better afterwards as the Occupation forces push Hollywood movies at the expense of the European or Japanese.

Hajime had snapped back that entertainment wouldn’t change anything and that war purified the world, but Shigeo insists that films are a window from which the local population can learn about other lives and other places, a means of “building the heart” that might a save a soul. The older Takuo envisages a world in which watching a film normally or loving someone normally might become political acts in themselves. He weaves his personal history of film, which is also that of his family, with the political realities of the mid-20th century in which beautiful forests are cut down to make coffins for the endless dead and unexploded incendiaries lurk like ticking time bombs both literally and psychologically as, as one old man puts it, the nation’s struggles to reckon with its role in the war or its traumatic consequences. 

Nevertheless, even if Takuo is closing Baus Town for reasons stemming from his own traumatic loss, he continues to look for tomorrow despite his old age. Asked what his dream was, he replies only that he wanted his children to have better lives than he did, though he worries he may have failed. In any case, he remains lost within the labyrinths of cinema. The building itself, originally surrounded by fields in a much smaller Kichijoji, becomes a haunted space in his memory, half dream and longed-for place of warmth and salvation in which he remains a small child searching for his father in the empty auditorium.

The name for Baus Town is taken from the bow and stern of a ship, echoing Takuo’s own search for other horizons and a constant process of moving through the world. He too is trying battle time and make a moment last an eternity while admitting that there’s nothing so beautiful as smoke in the projector beam. He asks his daughter if smoke, like movies, isn’t connected to the afterlife and there are ways in which Takuo has also become a ghost, both haunted and haunting while films are themselves a kind of other world of the living past and a way of communing with those no longer here. Taking over production after Shinji Aoyama passed away, Sora gives the film an elegiac, poetic quality while asking if cinemas too might be resurrected in the same way as film even as Takuo ponders new directions while continuing to sail ahead in search of tomorrow.

BAUS: The Ship’s Voyage Continues screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Images: ©Honda Promotion BAUS/boid　

Diamonds in the Sand (砂の中のダイヤモンド, Janus Victoria, 2024)

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A middle-aged salaryman is awakened to the depths of his loneliness when his upstairs neighbour dies in an apparent lonely death in during the pandemic in Janus Victoria’s Filipino co-production, Diamonds in the Sand (砂の中のダイヤモンド, Suna no Naka no Diamond). Contrasting an epidemic of loneliness with the more literal spread of Covid-19, the film finds its hero trying to redefine his life and discover what gives it meaning in making connections with others. 

Yoji (Lily Franky) is indeed an isolated man whose world is shrinking around him. The DVD department of a large manufacturer where he works has been wound up and he’s been transferred to one that seems to deal in pornography is basically four men in a room with nothing to do. It’s no surprise that he tells his bosses he doesn’t need his computer when they go remote during the pandemic. A large clock seems to tick out his remaining time as if reminding him that his life is running out. Things aren’t much better at home, either. Divorced, he lives in a tiny, colourless flat and seems to have few friends. He’s aloof from even those he does know and always stands slightly outside of the group. One of his former colleagues has been given a big promotion, but it involves moving to Thailand which Yoji seems to regard as a kind of exile or age-based banishment even as he reminds them how much Japan has invested in the nation.

Yoji first becomes aware of the death of his upstairs neighbour when his discomposing body begins leaking through his ceiling. Staring at the stain left behind, he begins to contemplate the reality of his own lonely death and the meaninglessness of his life. He begins going to visit his mother in a care home and trying to rebuild a meaningful relationship with her, but she also asks him if he’s ever really been happy in his life. Though her body is failing and her days are sometimes dull or lonely, the memories of past happiness sustain her. If Yoji doesn’t even that, then his old age would be even more miserable and his life not worth living. The only spark of joy is a colourful pinwheel he bought for his mother on a whim but enlivens each of their worlds with a sense of fun and vibrancy.

This sense of encroaching isolation and emptiness is directly contrasted with the bustling streets of Manila which are alive with colour and life and where, Yoji is told, there is no loneliness. Minerva (Maria Isabel Lopez), the middle-aged woman who looked after his mother in the care home, is one of many working abroad to support a family in the Philippines and experiencing different kinds of loneliness and isolation in Japan. She has an almost grown-up daughter, Angel (Stefanie Arianne), whose father was Japanese, but she was not really accepted by his family and struggles to find a place for herself in either society. After abruptly travelling to Manila in search of a life less lonely, Yoji becomes to her almost a surrogate father offering the reassurance and connection that her own father obviously did not.

But Minerva has a point when she says Yoji lacks compassion and even after being warmly accepted by the community in the Philippines and witnessing their interconnected way of life refuses to become fully a part of it or to help others when they are in need. He sees coverage of extrajudicial killings on the television and is confronted by the fact that life is cheap here too, but is also judgemental and unwilling to fully embrace the community around him. Still, he ironically comes across a kind of graveyard of “surplus” Japanese goods like Mr Suzuki’s bowls that the house clearance staff patiently boxed up and threw away as if erasing his existence. One of the ashtrays still has ash in it. It’s this that perhaps enlightens him to what’s really important in life and convinces him of the necessity of accepting his responsibility to others rather wanting love connection from them without really thinking about giving anything in return. Like looking for diamonds in the sand, it’s the little things that matter and just asking someone if they’ve eaten yet can in its way save a life.

Diamonds in the Sand (砂の中のダイヤモンド, Janus Victoria, 2024) screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

PRINCIPAL EXAMINATION (中山教頭の人生テスト, Dai Sako, 2025)

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What is the place of the teacher in the contemporary society? Are they extensions of authority whose only role is to insist on order and produce children who will be obedient and know how to follow rules, or is it to educate and care for them so they can become the best versions of themselves free from the pressures of a conformist society? After taking some time away from active teaching, an absent-minded deputy headmaster finds himself confronted by just these contradictions as he’s suddenly tasked with taking over a class of primary school children while studying for the exams to qualify as a head teacher.

A mild-mannered man, it’s clear that Nakayama (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) is already overloaded and that the headmistress, Ms. Takamori (Eri Ishida), delegates most of her work to him. Though he was a frontline teacher for most of his career, he took an admin job after his wife’s death and seemingly lost his enthusiasm for the profession but quickly finds himself in the middle of a wider dispute about the scope of a teacher’s responsibilities to their students. He’s asked to take over after the current teacher, Kurokawa (Shu Watanabe), takes a leave of absence having come in for criticism from the children and their parents over his overly harsh teaching style. We see him force the children to repeat their morning greeting several times because they were not “in unison,” while he otherwise singles children out in front of the class for various rule infractions or poor performance. He appears to be more or less bullying some of the students, including Reona (Michiru Kushida), who comes from a single-parent family and is not able to get her mother to check her homework over for her because she just doesn’t have time.

There is a degree of push and pull between the teachers and parents over the shared responsibility for educating the child with some feeling that asking parents to do this kind of task is unreasonable while also reinforcing traditional gender roles in expecting there to be someone at home who is always available and dedicated only to raising children. This mistaken assumption disadvantages children like Reona while also stigmatising her in front of the rest of the class. Meanwhile, teachers are overly cautious of upsetting parents if they tell a child off in school. One irate father makes a point of coming in to see them when his son was merely questioned about something that happened after class and appears to be something of a bully himself. His son was one of the boys who criticised Kurokawa, and seems to have a lot of pent-up anger that could become a problem in the future but there isn’t much they can do about it at school. 

Kurokawa had only been appointed because Ms. Takamori insisted on temporarily suspending the original teacher, Ms. Shiina (Shiho Takano), because of complaints about something that happened outside of school. She had accepted an invitation to a barbecue with the children’s families where a child fell over and was injured. Ms. Shiina was then criticised for not properly supervising the children though she had only been at the barbecue as a guest and wasn’t responsible for watching them. Nevertheless, she was criticised because her role as a teacher leads people to think that she should be somehow responsible for any children present even when attending in a personal capacity as a private citizen, further emphasising a blurring of the lines when assessing the boundaries around the roles of teacher and parent. 

Ms. Shiina, who also appears to be queer coded, is presented as a more progressive teacher who doesn’t care about playing the game but only about the children’s welfare and wants them to grow up to be morally responsible people who can think for themselves. The irony is that Ms. Takamori may have been similar, later saying that Ms. Shiina reminded her of herself when she was younger, but because of the discrimination and prejudice she faced as a woman she decided her life would be best served by following all the rules so no one could complain. A former champion weightlifter, she had been criticised for a lack of femininity all her life and is also subject to the sexist and misogynistic judgements of the former headmaster, Kishimoto, who has made Nakayama his prodigy, but only if he plays the game which means becoming the kind of teacher who puts appearances first and enforces discipline rather than attempting to find out what’s going on in the children’s lives or fully understand the realities of class dynamics.

Indeed, it turns out to be the kids who are following the rules who are the worst and actively encouraging the semblance of order maintained through hierarchical bullying. Nakayama tries to investigate, but only arrives at half the truth and is torn between his desire to become a head teacher, which means submitting himself to the rigidity of the school system, and the idealism he once had for teaching. He finds himself effectively bullied, pressured into going along with things he doesn’t think are right which is the opposite of what he wanted for the children. As he eventually tells one of them, everything the teachers say is wrong, and what they really wanted to do was right, which is as close to admitting the irony of his position as it’s possible to get. 

The film’s English title has its ironies too as this is also an examination of Nakayama’s principles and how far he’s willing to compromise on them to be validated by the system in becoming a headmaster. He betrays his principles when he takes the test, but gets away with it and is in fact uncomfortably praised for his hardline stance after lying to protect Ms. Takamori by saying it was his decision to suspend a pupil who was caught shoplifting and drinking though some criticise it for its unfairness on the child. After all, suspending them will just result in them having nothing to do and getting into more trouble. But on the other hand, some parents now see this child as problematic and don’t want them back at the school where they worry they may prove disruptive to their own children’s education and development. 

The film offers no solutions though lands on the side of the children rather than the authority, sympathising with Ms. Shiina and encouraging Nakayama to regain his former idealism rather than become just another tool of an already oppressive social system. The fact that Nakayama loses his notebook implies a disregard for the kind of rules that are written in the headmaster’s manual and a return to his own judgement while leaving his final decision ambiguous as to which side of the line he will finally be on or whether he can really change this system from within. Though pretty bleak about the education system and its implications for the wider society, there is still a note of optimism in those like Ms. Shiina who don’t care about the rules so much as the children’s wellbeing that there is still a place for a more idealised form of teaching even within a fairly oppressive society.

PRINCIPAL EXAMINATION screens 31st May as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Hotspring SharkAttack (温泉シャーク, Morihito Inoue, 2024)

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the onsen, prehistoric sharks decide it’s time to strike back against unsuspecting bathers. Is it really so wrong to want to relax in some nice, warm water or are we actually invading the sharks’ territory? In any case, Morihito Inoue’s creature feature Hotspring SharkAttack (温泉シャーク, Onsen Shark) is as much about the ravages of capitalism as it is about aquatic terror as the social media-obsessed mayor fixes his sights on saving the town through a massive onsen complex.

Tellingly, many of the local people are against the plan, which will have profound effects on their livelihood, while many of the local politicians are reluctant to close the onsen despite knowing about the shark issue in much the same way the mayor in Jaws refuses to lose the beach because they don’t want to risk damaging the tourist industry. When they do eventually close them, little children cry to their mothers about not being allowed into the baths, which just shows how important hot springs culture is to this area. 

But then it is quite weird, sharks suddenly snatching people from the baths and somehow dragging them back to sea. Modern science has an answer, thanks to top sharkologist Mayumi (Yu Nakanishi), but it’ll take a bit longer to find a way to stop them getting in while Mayumi agonises about her role in the proceedings as a lover of sharks yet essentially responsible for their destruction. A part of her still wants to find a way to coexist peacefully even as the sharks wreak havoc on the town and continue to pose a serious risk to life. Even so, the area ironically becomes a tourist hotspot after all as a swarm of live streamers arrive to try to experience the shark-infested waters for themselves despite the danger. 

Meanwhile, the sharks’ gills light up like the onsen symbol on maps while the mayor is haunted by the spirits of his ancestors and also wears a tie with little onsens on it. He later thinks better of his sleazy capitalist ways and comes to the realisation that it’s his responsibility to save the town even if that means torpedoing his landmark new resort and acknowledging the harm it would do to the local area. It seems that these prehistoric, super squishy sharks only got woken up because of global warming which is why they’re drawn to warmer waters and able to terrorise innocent onsen-goers. 

The same might be said of Maccho, a very buff guardian of onsen culture who can’t remember who he is or why he was born but is committed to defending protecting hot springs everywhere. Everyone in the town is keen to protect them too, and not just because they drive the local economy. The police chief’s about to retire with a vague idea about becoming a novelist but is still determined to clear up the shark problem, while his assistant later fights off a bunch of sharks single-handed to give the others time to do their thing. 

Unable to use guns because these sharks are also full of methane, this particular issue requires a less conventional solution, though the irony is that it lies at the heart of the problem. The weird disease the sharks starts spreading can only be cured by an antidote found within their own fins. The government might be content to simply destroy the town first, hinting at the indifference of the Tokyo elite to small-town disaster, but the local community won’t let that happen and nor will the hot springs guardian. Inoue adds in a fair degree of absurdity in order to make his central conceit work including a series of weird gags about eating a sub on a sub while harnessing the reality of his low budget to add a note of surreality to the town. The sharks themselves have a pleasingly retro design while the practical effects add to the sense of absurdity right down to the cute little submarine the team eventually constructs using the 3D printer that was designed to build the soulless onsen complex with its rooftop pool and ill-advised bungee jumping facilities. If there’s one thing that Hotspring SharkAttack has, it’s genuine heart along with small-town pride and a sense of fun that actively revels in the ridiculousness of its premise.

Hotspring SharkAttack screens 31st May as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (no subtitles)