Tag: 2024

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)

Soul Reaper (Malam Pencabut Nyawa, AKA Respati, Sidharta Tata, 2024)

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A young man finds himself haunted by the spectres of his trauma, but also, as it turns out, by a not so ancient evil in Sidharta Tata’s eerie horror film Soul Reaper (Malam Pencabut Nyawa AKA Respati). Plagued alternately by nightmares and insomnia, he discovers an ability to enter a hidden world of dreams while simultaneously noticing a connection with an ongoing spate of mysterious deaths along with that to a traditional village and its ancient beliefs. 

Suffering with a kind of survivor’s guilt, Respati (Devano Danendra) blames himself for the death of his parents and is haunted by visions of their vengeful ghosts. A new girl at his school, Wulan (Keisya Levronka), is ostracised by the others who hear that the reason she left her last school was that she has a tendency to get possessed by ghosts which upset the other students. Like Respati, she is also haunted by bad dreams and desperately misses an absent parent, in her case her mother. The fact that so many seem to be connected by violent robbery hints at a generalised anxiety within the wider community that is only exacerbated by the series of mysterious deaths hitting the news. 

What Respati eventually realises is that he’s witnessing real deaths in his dreams though taking place in the dream realm. Others who’ve suffered loss and trauma such as a man who recently lost his young daughter are led away towards a bright light where they think they see their loved ones but are actually consumed by a dark force. In the midst of his own grief, Respati is forced to face a secondary trauma that relates to his grandfather’s hometown where the villagers believe in the power of an ancient god. A powerful witch, Sikma, convinced herself that she was the inheritor of the witch’s power and in her zeal to learn more about the dream world began sacrificing her patients. The other villagers shunned her until she too ended up dying a mysterious death after which her body disappeared.

Sikma maybe feeding on grief, but she also had a child who viewed her as a mother and is now bereft in the same way as Respati and Wulan are having lost their parents. Respati refuses to talk about his trauma with the doctor his grandfather takes him to about his insomnia but discovers a new way to face it through the dream realm as if by overcoming his nightmares he could learn to sleep peacefully again while simultaneously ending the series of mysterious deaths by taking care of Sikma. In the dream realm, he is able to manifest his own desires by virtue of his lineage that makes him a descendent of the mountain goddess and imbued with her power which means that he is able to make peace with the past by envisioning a different outcome for a painful event which, though it cannot change what really happened, allows him to let go of his guilt while realising what’s really important. As a young man his grandfather brought from the country advises him, you never really know how much time you have left, so it’s important to cherish your loved ones while there’s still time.

The irony is that everyone wants the same thing and has been hurt in the same way, though they have different ways of dealing with their grief in their inability to let go of the past. The dream world appears as an eerie forest in which it is the grieving who are called towards the light as if like Respati they blame themselves for not going with those they loved, though it also echoes an ancient horror in the natural world. The grieving are pinned in the mortal realm by tree roots which seem to encircle and constrain them until they break free, called towards the light by a comforting lullaby which offers them one way to escape their grief, whereas Respati can only leave by violent means. Ejecting oneself from the dream realm involves physical pain rather than simply the emotional, but allows him to literally “wake up” from the inertia of his grief to find a new purpose in life and overcome his trauma. Bringing traditional folk horror with its witches and ancient gods together with a more overtly modern tale of psychological haunting lends an additional edge to Respati’s quest to solve the mysterious deaths but even if his own trauma has been exorcised it seems this particular strand of evil may not quite be done with him yet.

Soul Reaper is released Digitally in the US 17th June courtesy of Well Go USA

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)

Winter in Sokcho (Hiver à Sokcho, Koya Kamura, 2024)

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A young woman is awakened from a kind of spiritual hibernation by the unlikely arrival of an incredibly brusque French artist in Koya Kamura’s adaptation of the Elisa Shua Dusapin novel, Winter in Sokcho. Like many, Soo-ha (Bella Kim) is waiting for spring, though it’s less this place that has her feeling trapped than an inability to find her place within it, or indeed anywhere, as she struggles with her own identity and the unanswered questions about the father she never knew.

In any case, it seems clear that Soo-ha as begun to resent herself on some level and is unhappy in her long-term relationship with a high school boyfriend, Joon-ho (Gong Do-yu), an aspiring model. It’s not clear why shy returned to Sokcho after studying French and Korean literature in Seoul, but she otherwise lives her life in peaceful monotony working at a small boarding house where the owner, Mr Park (Ryu Tae-ho), has recently lost his wife and is therefore in need to practical and emotional support. One night a week she spends with her mother (Park Mi-hyeon), a fishmonger specialising in fugu, though there’s a frostiness and frustration to their relationship in which neither seems quite satisfied with the other’s life choices. 

Soo-ha repeatedly asks her mother why she never attempted to look for her father, a Frenchman who worked in the fishing industry, though her mother doesn’t really want to talk about, it leaving Soo-ha with unresolved doubts and questions about her past. Her interest in French literature may be a way of trying to explore this side of herself in the absence of a guide, though the attempts at connection a frustratingly one-sided. When a Frenchman suddenly turns up at the boarding house, Mr Park encourages her to use her skills “the one time they’re useful”, though she herself is reluctant, giving Yan (Roschdy Zem) the smallest room in the adjacent annexe like a thought paused for later.

Yan asks her to show him her Sokcho, but as he later says, he’s just a tourist and like the father she never met is just passing through. There may be something a little exploitative in his working visit for though he’s come to draw inspiration from this place, he is willing to give almost nothing to it. He refuses to eat the food that Soo-ha cooks at the boarding house and instead badgers her to take him to restaurants while finding little to like there either. As his incredibly outdated, paper driving licence isn’t valid in Korea, he talks her into taking him to the DMZ which seems to echo the liminal space that exists between them. Soo-ha talks about how sad it is that people still yearn to be reunited with their relatives all these years later, though Yan is indifferent and later mentions a son that it seems he may rarely see. But as he tells her, she may be looking in the wrong place if it’s a deeper connection that she’s seeking or searching for something that will unlock the secrets of herself.

There are reasons for her to feel displaced even in Sokcho given that her unusual height makes her stand out as the nickname “beanpole,” makes plain. Her mother nags her for never eating properly or enjoying her food which may be another expression of her listlessness, but also reminds her not to eat too much and get fat. Joon-ho tells her get plastic surgery, as do a few other people, and though it’s even more insensitive and troubling given that Soo-ha’s father was French. It’s as if they’re telling her to erase these parts of herself, as if she were not “fully” Korean and should become so by adjusting her jawline and the shape of her eyes. Soo-ha’s internal questioning is expressed in brief animated sequences in the style of Yan’s ink paintings as she tries to conjure the image of herself.

There’s a woman at the guest house who’s there recovering from extensive plastic surgery that will give her a whole new face. She sits in the dining area, simultaneously anonymous and instantly identifiable by her bandaged face. Her story is never revealed, so it’s impossible to say whether her decision was motivated by a desire for conformity and conventional beauty or to become more herself and have her outside reflect the person she feels herself to be. Sokcho is also undergoing a process of renewal, as high-rise office blocks spring up everywhere and the traditional quality of the streets disappears as if this urbanisation were creeping up on Soo-ha and taking from her even the anchor of this place which no longer quite exists. 

Joon-ho assumes they will move back to Seoul together when his career takes off because “who doesn’t want to get out of Sokcho?” But Soo-ha may be beginning to feel that perhaps this place might suit her after all. A few cosmetic upgrades could breathe new life into the old-fashioned boarding house and brighten an otherwise gloomy existence. While showing Yan around town she describes a local legend, or perhaps concocts one for the occasion, about a bird who wanted to fly above the clouds but couldn’t. She, meanwhile, may have begun to soar amid the arrival of spring, finally ready to break out of her self-imposed winter in having discovered a way to become more herself rather than what others perceive her be.

Trailer (English 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)

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)

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)

Happy Life (嬉々な生活, Yoshihiko Taniguchi, 2024)

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A teenage girl finds herself responsible for her family after her mother’s sudden death and father’s descent into depression in the ironically named Happy Life (嬉々な生活, Kikina Seikatsu). Filmed with gritty realism, Yoshihiko Taniguchi’s indie drama explores life on the margins but also the judgement and stigmatisation of those who are struggling, along with the echoing effects of parental neglect and a wider lack of compassion and understanding in the community.

Kiki once had a happy life but after her parents moved into a larger apartment on a housing estate, it all seemed to go wrong. Her mother died suddenly, and her father Kensuke has become depressed which has left him unable to work and plunged the family into financial insecurity. As the oldest of three siblings, Kiki has had to pick up the strain with the consequence that she has little time to think about her own future. She tells a friend that she doesn’t have any dreams, but it maybe more that she already feels them to be impossible. She’s more or less stopped going to school and is checking out ways to earn a lost of money fast including a few jobs for a dodgy relative of her friend Miyu who keeps trying to talk her into taking up compensated dating or embark on a blackmail plot of their unpleasant head teacher they say is at any rate at least over friendly with pupils. 

Mr. Maehara is also harassing Kiki’s seemingly similarly depressed teacher who has a habit of putting things in his letter box as revenge. Though he chided her for not addressing Kiki’s truancy problem or investigating whether there might be issues at home, Ms. Kozuma does later take an interest in Kiki and her family which does allow her to begin emerging from her own depression after quitting her teaching job. Lifting some of the burden from Kiki, she helps out by cleaning the apartment and cooking for the family while encouraging Kensuke to apply for benefits and seek psychiatric treatment for his declining mental health.

Those on the danchi are supportive in some ways and in others not. Many of the neighbourhood women feel sorry for the children and often give them leftover food, but at the same time they’re wary of Kensuke and have lost both patience with and sympathy for him. The family is now several months behind on the rent and some of the other residents dissapparove of the family being allowed to go on living there while there is no immediate sign that their living standards will continue to rise. A window herself, Mrs Miyake takes Kensuke to task for failing his children but he doesn’t have much of an answer for her, while Ms Kozuma tells her they should be patient because Kensuke ill and can’t simply snap out it to resume a paternal role over his family.

For his own part, he resents Ms Kozuma’s help because it highlights his own failing but is unable to do anything about his situation while lost in dreams of his late wife. Matters come to a head when he inexplicably takes a little girl’s scooter and throws it on the ground which proves the last straw for a community that’s already come to think of him of “scary”. The irate father of the little girl goes so far to suggest that the family should leave because Kensuke makes people “uncomfortable”, even though his own aggression makes him dangerous and unpredictable. Kiki tries to talk back and defend her father, but the other man simply tells Kensuke that he needs to teach his kids some manners because his daughter’s got problems too, signalling the extent to which anyone who doesn’t fit the norm is not really welcome in this society. 

Even so, thanks to the help of Ms Kozuma and means of connecting with her late mother, Kiki gains the courage to dream, too, deciding she will go to high school after all and would like to become a nurse. Though often bleak in its depiction of the family’s mounting disintegration, the film does allow a ray of possibility to leak through suggesting that Kiki will be able to rediscover a happy life sometime in the future even if right now she doesn’t even have the time to imagine in.

Happy Life screens 30th May as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)