Category: Japan

Morning’s Tree-Lined Street (朝の並木路, Mikio Naruse, 1936)

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A country girl comes to the city in search of a more glamorous life but largely finds only disillusionment and disappointment in Naruse’s 1936 drama Morning’s Tree-lined Street (朝の並木路, Ashita no Namikimichi). Naruse depicts Chiyo’s (Sachiko Chiba) spiritual journey literally as she takes the bus from her rural hometown all wide-eyed wonder and then arrives in the city to be bothered by a homeless man and then walk into a less salubrious area of the city with only her friend’s address to go on. 

In her hometown, everyone thinks Hisako (Ranko Akagi) works in a big office in Marunouchi, but in reality she’s now working in a hostess bar under the name “Shigeko.” Nevertheless, despite a degree of shame in her circumstances, Hisako doesn’t reject Chiyo and isn’t angry that she’s come and found out her secret. She talks her landlady, Okada, into letting her stay but discourages her from working in the bar. The current economic depression is evident in the fact that the bar isn’t doing so well and never has many customers, yet the “help wanted’ sign keeps going up and down outside. There’s even a running gag that the cook makes a permanent version so they won’t waste so much paper, only he spells “hostess” wrong, so they have to take it down anyway. 

The help wanted sign is a harbinger of doom for Chiyo who, it seems, is being drawn towards this kind of life. As Hisako had told her, it’s impossible for a country girl to find a job when there are already so many “desperate” people in Tokyo, and at the grand old age of 22 Chiyo is worried that she’s simply too old to find employment. By the standards of the time, she may be considered on the older side not to be married, and indeed Hisako tells her she’d be better off to go home and find a husband, but Chiyo wants both more and to find a grand romance. She romanticises an idea of poverty believing that she could be happy with a man she truly loved even if they had no money. Hisako doesn’t disillusion her, but may be inwardly rolling her eyes at her naivety. She has a boyfriend already, but he’s no good. He keeps turning up and pestering her for money which might be one reason Hisako can’t escape the life of a bar girl.

It is indeed money that gets in the way everyone’s relationships. Hisako reads in the paper about a salaryman who embezzled money to spend at a hostess bar and then died in a double suicide with one of the women who worked there. The dark fantasy the bar represents echoes the wider despair in the society coloured by economic depression and broken dreams in which the fantasy version of Ogawa admits that his life was without hope or joy. Chiyo gets close to a nice young man who comes into the bar who tries but fails to find her a legit job in an office in attempt to save her from becoming a bar girl. In the end, she gives in and becomes one. Ogawa says he thinks no less of her, but begins coming to the bar more often and appears to be spending beyond his means even while Chiyo warns him not to waste his money. 

What happens next turns out to be a cinematic fantasy informed by Chiyo’s naive desires in which Ogawa agrees to marry her but has already ruined himself by embezzling public funds and later asks her to die with him while she pleads that as long as they have love poverty is nothing to fear. In many ways, the dream shatters her illusions and confronts her with the stark reality of her life in playing out a best/worst scenario in which Ogawa is so deeply in love with her that willingly walks to his destruction, which is at least preferable to the truth, which is as Hisako says that a man may seem honest and sincere but will turn out to be a coward or else he’ll cheat on you.

Unable to find employment nor rely on men, the women have only each other and the solidarity of those like Mrs Okada her running a small bar in this rundown corner of the city where dreams go to die. Chiyo takes to her new life a little more than to her liking. She turns to Hisako and asks if she looks like a bad girl, fearful that it’s already changed her and it’s no longer possible to go back to being the innocent country girl who wanted a bigger life in the city. Her conviction might be brought home to her by the fact that Ogawa is promoted and sent out of Tokyo but doesn’t ask her to come with him, only leave his address in case she ever feels like writing. But at the same time it spurs her into a flurry of false positivity, committing herself to the job search despite knowing that it’s almost certainly futile. Throwing his note into the river and letting it flow away, she both sees through the naivety of her dream of escape through romance and also resigns herself to the life of a bar girl, like Hisako with nowhere else to go and no possibility of return only the vague and far off hope of salvation through employment.

Morning’s Tree-Lined Street screens 21st June at New York’s Metrograph as part of Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us – Part II.

Images: Collection of National Film Archive of Japan.

Love Song from Hiroshima (惑星ラブソング, Hideyuki Tokigawa, 2024)

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Just because we are far apart, it doesn’t mean we aren’t important to each other, according to an interplanetary messenger hoping to avoid the Earth’s apparently imminent destruction in Hideyuki Tokigawa’s gentle ode for world peace, Love Song From Hiroshima (惑星ラブソング, Wakusei Love Song). Twenty-something Mocchi (Ryosuke Sota) says he’s sick of hearing about the legacy of the atomic bomb, but is himself stuck in the past just as the city is frozen in time.

According to his friend Ayaka (Shiori Akita) who is thinking about studying abroad in the US, Mocchi gives up on things too easily and can’t decide on his path in life. Of course, he doesn’t really want her to go to America because he’s in love with her and too shy to say, but agrees to help her with a social media campaign to get over 100,000 likes and impress her boss so he’ll fund her travel. That’s how they end up meeting “John” (Chase Ziegler), a very weird “American” tourist whom they decide to escort around Hiroshima showing him typically touristic things like getting okonomiyaki which they then post on her social media channels. 

Meanwhile, a shady American agency is on a UFO alert in Japan which links back to a little boy’s fascination with aliens even though his friends keep making fun of him because of it despite spreading their own kinds of urban legends. Yuya is obsessed with the idea of extraterrestrial life while also uncomfortable with the scarred city around him. At his school there are a pair of burnt but surviving trees that have become symbols of resilience and survival, though Yuya hates going to the Peace Park and talking about the bomb because it’s scary. According to his mother, his great-grandmother never liked to talk about the war, though it seems she has told the man looking after her at the care home about her carefree childhood of roller skating in the car-free streets. In a brief moment of lucidity, she turns to Yuya and asks him if his aliens can travel in time, why can’t they go back and stop the bomb from falling. 

The irony is that Mocchi’s sick of everyone talking about the bomb all the time, but it’s still a painful subject for many including the taxi driver who drives Yuya and his mother home. As soon as she starts talking about what she does know about her grandmother in the war, she can feel him looking back at her in the rearview mirror and changes the subject, promising to tell Yuya the rest later when they’re on their own. In his dreams, Yuya ends up chasing after his great-grandmother as a school girl as she tells him that there used to be sweet shops, a barber’s, and a cinema where the Peace Park is now. 

The aliens say that the bomb twisted the fabric of time and space, creating a barrier which they cannot move beyond, while there is another fixed point in the future with seemingly nothing beyond it. We cannot change the past, the aliens admit, but we can change the future. The film’s Japanese title is more like “interplanetary love song”, and it turns out that a universe without the Earth in it is like the world without George Bailey. All the planets that the Earth would have helped will also be lost along with countless other possibilities throughout the universe. 

Mocchi still thinks it’s pointless to “pray” for peace, and that as all anyone in Hiroshima ever seems to talk about is the bomb, he doesn’t see how raising awareness could make much difference. Nevertheless, even he can’t help being moved by the aliens’ opening manoeuvre which cures his cynicism by fulfilling the childhood dream he’d more or less forgotten. Mocchi and Ayaka argue about the realities of nuclear deterrents and geopolitical manoeuvring even if they each agree on the horror of war. Ayaka says she loves her city because it represents peace,  and it is indeed a kind of love song from Hiroshima that they send around the world as a plea for a world without war. Telling Mochi to come up with ways to enact world peace on his own might seem a little unfair, but then it’s true enough it’s something we all have to think about to save the future from the mistakes of the past.

Love Song from Hiroshima screens 24th June as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

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)