Tag: Amon Hirai

Yoyogi Johnny (代々木ジョニーの憂鬱な放課後, Satoshi Kimura, 2025)

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Not much makes a lot of sense in the world of the titular Yoyogi Johnny. Nothing’s quite as it first seems and life is full of contradictions, but that’s alright, for the most part. Johnny just floats on through life going with the flow, but then he meets a series of girls who each for some reason want to practice things with him though for very different reasons while he tries to make sense of it all and gain the courage to push for what he really wants.

Then again, he breaks up with Asako (Mio Matsuda) because he realises he likes her in the same way he likes “history” which is to say, when someone asks him what his favourite subject is he just says that but doesn’t actually know if he even likes history or not. Having never been in love, he doesn’t know what it’s like and therefore wants to end the relationship. Mostly he just spends his time hanging out in the “squash club” where they don’t actually play any squash but just use the clubroom to hideout from the less satisfying aspects of their lives or otherwise avoid other people. In fact, they’re only in the squash club to make up the numbers and were all looking to start clubs of their own but for various reasons were prevented from doing so. But when a mysterious young woman they christen Deko (Shieru Yoshii) for her prominent forehead arrives at the club looking for the founder, Ondera, whom they call “Button”, it wrecks their peaceful lives because of her insistence that they actually play some squash.

Deko wants to practice squash with him, but his childhood friend Kagura (Runa Ichinose) wants him to role play real world interactions while she has otherwise become a virtual recluse who no longer attends school. Meanwhile, he’s also drawn to a colleague at his part-time job at a bookshop/bar, Izumo (Maya Imamori), who is also the boss’ daughter. Somewhat salaciously, she wants him to practice “physical contact,” as that’s one of the areas she has difficulty in having herself also been a recluse who dropped out of school and has come to Tokyo for a fresh start. Johnny immediately picks up on this irony of Izumo salmoning her way to the capital while, in general, most people are travelling away from the city to a less populated area for a quieter life rather than the other way around though like many of these conversations it’s lost on Izumo to whom it is of course just normal. Johnny has several of these conversations in which he attempts to point out that something doesn’t make sense but just finds himself trapped in an infinite loop of back and fore as the other person struggles to understand his logic or he theirs. He is however a kind person who tries to help everyone who asks him though perhaps without really thinking about it. 

Yet most of the young women eventually oscillate out of his life depriving him of these very important friendships and ironically rebounding to the squash club even though they now actually have to play squash. Nevertheless, through his various relationships Johnny begins to gain a new perspective on himself and even finds out what it’s like to fall in love. A strange young woman who seems to be part of what very much looks like a cult, reminds him that “self-sufficiency” is a lie even though it’s supposedly what their cult is founded on. It is after all an organisation that promotes “independent living” while sending its members who all live in the dorm to farm the fields, though this yet another thing that doesn’t really make sense but Johnny just has to accept. Nevertheless, it seems she’s right when she says people can’t live by themselves alone and by and large need each other to survive. She tells Johnny that he should stop visiting Kagura because it’s “meaningless” and wouldn’t help her, but at the same time seems to appreciate his good-naturedness and the gentle positivity he puts out into the world in his ability to just be nice and be there for that want or need him while never expecting anything in return. As he’s fond of saying, if you regard a person as a friend then it doesn’t really matter whether they agree or not they’re still your friend and Johnny has more than many might awesome he would. Warm-hearted and filled zany humour, the retro aesthetic of its opening titles only adds to film’s charm as a little gem of indie comedy.

Yoyogi Johnny screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

On the Edge of Their Seats (アルプススタンドのはしの方, Hideo Jojo, 2020)

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It’s only natural to be a little anxious in the last year of high school but a collection of his school students are in danger of giving up before their lives have even started in Hideo Jojo’s zeitgeisty dramedy On the Edge of their Seats (アルプススタンドのはしの方, alps stand no hashi no kata). Adapted from a stage play written and performed by a high school drama club, the effortlessly witty dialogue has a lived-in quality while pregnant with its own anxieties as the teens each deal with their private disappointments while wondering if there’s any point in trying when all their efforts are doomed to failure. 

Best friends Asuha (Rina Ono) and Hikaru (Marin Nishimoto) for example are still dealing with the fallout from losing their place in a regional drama competition when one of them got sick and couldn’t perform. Fujino (Amon Hirai) quit the baseball team after realising he’d never be as good as the lead pitcher, and the shy Megumi (Shuri Nakamura) struggles with social interaction while unexpectedly having her thunder stolen by popular girl Tomoka (Hikari Kuroki) who not only beat her to first place in the last exams but is also dating her crush, Sonoda who is the star of the baseball team. 

None of them exactly wanted to come and watch their high school baseball team anyway which is why they’re way up in the bleachers. “Is the fabled last summer of high school meant to be so boring?” Asuha sighs, reflecting on the disappointing ordinariness of the end of her youth. It’s just one more thing she claims “can’t be helped” like the cancellation of the play or life’s myriad other disappointments. The ironic thing is that they’ve been bussed all the way into school in the middle of summer to watch their team lose, badly, to one that reached the national finals the year before. Perhaps you can’t blame them for their sense of futility. 

Yet it’s just this kind of defeatism that they end up facing, encouraged by their over-enthusiastic English teacher and the school band to shout their hearts out for their friends on the field. “Life is all about swinging and striking out” their teacher tells them, trying to reassure the teens that it’s worth taking the risk as they continue to meditate on disappointment and inertia. Fujino quit baseball because he thought it was pointless to continue when he’d always lose out to Sonoda, but his teammate Yano, who is objectively bad, stayed on and continued to train intensively despite his low prospects of ever being allowed on the field. He wonders who had the right idea, him or Yano, and whether it’s wiser to switch tracks when something doesn’t work for you or really it was just petulant resentment that led him to give up without putting up much of a fight. 

Though none of them were particularly invested in the game to begin with, when they talk about “baseball” they’re really talking about a lot of other things and gradually begin to rebel against the “can’t be helped” philosophy that led them to give in to disappointment. The shy and secretly lonely Megumi discovers that Tomoka doesn’t have it all that great either, eventually forging a spiritual bond in their shared desire to support Sonoda who after all is not having a great day on the mound. There’s something a little ironic in the choice of Sonoda’s favourite intro song, Train-Train by the Blue Hearts, which neatly reflects the teens’ internal anxiety along with the messages of living in the moment. 

What they learn is in essence that if you’ve done your best and it still doesn’t work out then that’s alright and there’s nothing to be afraid of so you might as well swing for the fences even if you miss. They remain “spectators” in one sense, but in becoming emotionally involved in the baseball game that we never see but only hear about the teens regain the courage and desire to take a more active part while gently bonding in their shared sense of solidarity and renewed hope for the future. Witty and warmhearted, Jojo’s innovatively lensed coming-of-age drama has a poignant quality of youthful nostalgia but also genuine heart in its gentle advocation for the art of perseverance. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Train-Train by the Blue Hearts

Twilight Cinema Blues (銀平町シネマブルース, Hideo Jojo, 2023)

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Japan’s mini theatres have been in a status of crisis since the pandemic. Already struggling under the weight of changing times the immediate restrictions pushed many over the edge unable to entice older regulars back into screens or find a new audience among the young. This is doubly bad news for the industry as a whole as it’s mini theatres that allow indie films the platform they need to succeed and without them there is little avenue for films produced outside of the mainstream. Like Lim Kah-Wai’s Your Lovely Smile, Hideo Jojo’s Twilight Cinema Blues (銀平町シネマブルース, Ginpeicho Cinema Blues) similarly extols the virtues of the mini theatre which is not just somewhere to watch films but a place to belong that has room for anyone and everyone that wants to be there.

That’s more than true for Takeshi (Keisuke Koide), a struggling man approaching middle age who’s become near destitute and is almost sucked into a welfare scam targeting the homeless by a pair of shady yakuza claiming they run an NPO. At the orientation he runs into Kajiwara (Mitsuru Fukikoshi ), the owner of a mini theatre who declines to join the gangsters’ scheme but offers Takeshi the opportunity to bunk in his storeroom while working part-time little knowing that to Takeshi this particular mini cinema is like a return to source allowing him to rediscover his love of film.

But the mini cinema itself is also struggling. They simply don’t get bums on seats and Kajiawa is behind on paying his staff. Though they have a small collection of regulars, they aren’t enough to keep the lights on on their own. Even the projectionist is thinking he’ll probably retire along with the machine. Unable to afford new films, Kajiawara relies on cheap and easily licensable classics such as old favourite Casablanca but is largely unable to see away out of his situation while feeling guilty over ending what was effectively a family business and local landmark. The building’s 60th anniversary, 60 being a symbolic number in Japanese culture as it represents a full turn of the Chinese zodiac and literal new start, presents an opportunity to both Kajiawara and Takeshi to begin to move forward by renewing their faith in cinema.

The faith of Takeshi’s homeless friend Sato (Shohei Uno) needed no renewing. Though he had nothing, the ability to see a film twice a month made him feel human while the community at the cinema is perhaps the only one that still accepts him. He offers a small prayer after every film, and instructs Takeshi that he should the same. But his openhearted faith is also his undoing, allowing him to fall for the yakuza scam little realising they’ll force him to work for them taking half of the social security payments they helped him sign up for in the process. In the outside world, men like Sato find only exploitation and prejudice with cinema their only refuge.

Then again, filmmaking isn’t easy. A young woman who desperately wanted her debut film to play in her hometown cinema has based her first feature on the life of her father, a failed film director who drank himself to death (in a neat allusion to Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth, her film’s title literally translates as “cruel story of a director”). Similarly, the suicide of a much loved assistant director has prevented those around him from moving on, preoccupied with the shock his death caused them in its suddenness and lack of obvious cause. They blame themselves sending their lives into a downward spiral that results in crushing financial debts and the end of a marriage. In some ways, the film is an ode to the ADs who keep everything running, including on occasions the director, and are in a sense the custodians of filmmaking.

Still, it’s clear that not everything can seamlessly repaired. Times have moved on even if some have been left behind and you can’t always simply reclaim what you’ve lost, but you can always start again with another spin of the wheel and make the most of what you’ve got. It won’t be the same, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be good. Jojo’s heartwarming tale of cinema has an undercurrent of darkness and despair running beneath, but also suggests that the silver screen can be a beacon hope when the world is at its bleakest and not least for those whose existence largely lies behind it.

Screened as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0NfatD63Nw

Spring In Between (はざまに生きる、春, Rika Katsu, 2023)

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A struggling editor at a magazine gains a new perspective while falling in love with an autistic artist in Rika Katsu’s romantic drama Spring In Between (はざまに生きる、春, Hazama ni ikiru, haru). Spring is coming in the lives of artist and reporter alike, yet as Haru’s (Sakurako Konishi) professional life begins to come into focus she finds herself romantically confused and ever more obsessed with the mysterious painter while largely unable to ascertain what the extent of his feelings for her may be assuming that he has any at all. 

Haru’s obsession begins when she becomes immersed in one of Tohru’s (Hio Miyazawa) paintings which like much of his work depicts a vast blue sea. Three years on the job, she’s still making rookie mistakes and is constantly berated by her boss who offers little in the way guidance. Nevertheless, she catches a break when he brings her on to assist with an interview of a top artist who is known to be “eccentric”. Never having much exposure to neurodiversity, Haru finds herself captivated but also somehow on the same wavelength while drawn to what she sees as Tohru’s profundity and poeticism. 

The film does at times fall into the trap of fetishising Tohru’s “unique” way of seeing of the world while otherwise keen to lay bare the extent to which neurodiversity continues to be stigmatised. Haru’s partner on the magazine article repeatedly describes Tohru as “odd” in a slightly mocking way, while the journalists assigned to interview him have little patience and do not even bother to hide their exasperation when he flies off on tangents about plastic bottles or tree bark. The magazine is interested in him precisely because of his neurodiversity and learning disability hoping to sell an inspirational story of someone overcoming the odds to find success but in private continue to laugh at him.

Even Haru struggles to comprehend some of the unhelpful information she looks up while researching Asperger’s Syndrome which talks of an inability to empathise leaving her wondering if Tohru has the capacity for romance despite his directly telling her that he has fallen in love before because he is after all human though he never said anything because he did not want to get hurt. A more experienced colleague noticing Haru’s increasingly erratic behaviour tries to give her some advice, but it isn’t to the effect that it might be unethical and irresponsible to fall in love with your subject for a piece but only that she’ll wind up getting hurt because Tohru is autistic and therefore unable to return her feelings, implying that in any case she views a relationship between them as as inappropriate given what she sees as Tohru’s disability. 

In revealing Haru’s own potentially autistic traits, such as her preference to have someone stand on her left and never her right, the film strays into a potentially uncomfortable implication that everyone is a little bit autistic while otherwise trying to eliminate the line has that been placed between Tohru and everyone else. Introducing a romantic rival in the form of an equally eccentric, larger than life photographer who also does not fit into “conventional” society, also implies that neurodiverse people can only date each other while Haru struggles to define her feelings both for Tohru and for uni boyfriend Nao who appears to be both possessive and disinterested telling her that she should get over her left side only thing in the same way some talk about a “cure” for Tohru’s neurodiversity. 

Haru can’t state her feelings any more directly than Tohru can while simultaneously unable to find a way through to him to find out if he likes her at all or is just being friendly and considerate, unlike Nao making a map to figure out the acceptable dimensions of her personal space and promising to always stay at a comfortable angle. Yet in the end it’s curiosity that builds connection, the simple desire to know more about another person and to see the world from another perspective. Promises are kept, and a message delivered if in a roundabout way. As they say, spring will always get there in the end even if summer is right around the corner. A sweet and innocent romance, Spring in Between is as much about self-revelation as it is about mutual understanding and the still currents of a deep blue sea.

Spring in Between screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Melting Sounds (ほとぼりメルトサウンズ, Kahori Higashi, 2021)

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“They’re all dealing with something. They have nowhere to go back to” an old man sighs watching a cohort of similarly aged men doing callisthenics in a local park knowing that they’re about to lose this place too. A Moosic Lab production, Melting Sounds (ほとぼりメルトサウンズ, Hotobori Melt Sounds) is about what you keep and what you have to let go as the heroes try to preserve a disappearing soundscape while unable to resist the march of progress as even their little backwater finds itself at the mercy of modernising developers. 

Hoping for a solo getaway, Koto (xiangyu) arrives at the rural home of her late grandmother only to discover a strange man, Take (Keiichi Suzuki), camping in the garden. As she will repeatedly, rather than enlist the authorities Koto invites Take into the house where it’s warmer and discovers that he’s in the middle of an important project recording ambient noise from around the village attempting to capture the banal sounds of everyday life such as someone going to the dentist or a young couple having a pointless argument in the street. Meanwhile, the pair receive a visit from a young man, Yamada (Amon Hirai), bearing a tablet featuring the face of a woman, Hiroko (Umeno Uno), trying to explain to them that the house needs to be knocked down so they should hurry up and move out. Unfazed, Koto once again asks Yamada to come and sit under the kotatsu where it’s warm, the young man later taking a break from his job to stay with them under the pretext of convincing them to leave while they’re later joined by Hiroko who also becomes increasingly conflicted and decides to join their small family. 

Just as Take had said they’re all dealing with something, Koto having become estranged from her father whom she no longer talks to, Take as we discover recording the sounds on old-fashioned speaker walkmans for his late sister who was killed in a landslide, and Hiroko and Yamada each conflicted in their work for a greedy amoral developer who reveals that he too was responsible for evicting mostly elderly people from their homes in a town that has since become famous for bubble tea. The four of them are already displaced by the modern society, as are the men doing callisthenics in the park as they watch their town gradually dismantled around them, pushed out even from disappearing and depopulated rural Japan by an encroaching modernity. The developer claims he wants to rejuvenate the town to attract young people to return but is indifferent to what is being lost such as the recording of the nostalgic five o’clock chimes which so moves Hiroko, adding only that they no longer have them where they are only for Hiroko to suggest that you can only hear them if you’re pure of heart. 

Take claims he’s making a “grave of sounds” but he’s also capturing a moment in time and with it the essence of life. As he puts it everything has a sound from a flower blooming to air conditioners and church bells, each of them a part of something bigger immersed in the now. As he points out, everything comes to an end eventually, be it love or friendship or even family. The recordings are a kind of proof of life, but paradoxically also its passing the final implication being that all things have their season and it’s best to enjoy them while there’s time. Small-town Japan may be disappearing or at least changing even if the promised bubble tea might not be quite what you’d expect but that doesn’t necessarily mean it all has to go. 

Thanks to Koto’s warmheartedness, inviting each of them into the house despite having arrived for a “solo” getaway, the trio of youngsters find a new solution to their sense of lonely disconnection discovering a kindred spirit in their shared desire for something simpler and more wholesome as they play boardgames together by candlelight, making curry and gyoza sure to record the sound of them sizzling. A warm and quirky ode to the various ways life can be improved by the simple act of stopping to listen, Kahori Higashi’s laidback debut may be about learning to let things go but also appreciating what you have while you have it and taking what you can with you while being kind and openhearted even in the face of those attempting to run you out of town.

Melting Sounds screened as part of Osaka Asian Film Festival 2022

Original trailer (no subtitles)

For Rei (レイのために, Yukari Sakamoto, 2019)

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(C)Yukari Sakamoto

Going to university is a prime opportunity to start figuring yourself out, but if you feel a little hollow inside it can often be an uphill battle. The heroine of Yukari Sakamoto’s For Rei (レイのために, Rei no Tame ni) is intensely anxious, somewhat distanced from herself in the unresolved trauma of her parents’ divorce and subsequent loss of contact with her father. University can also be a prime opportunity to reach towards independence, but that necessarily means learning to “let go of the things you don’t like” to chase the things you do while figuring out what the difference between those two things might be. 

Philosophy student Rei finds herself at odds with her classmates, some of whom actively belittle her off the wall contributions for being off the point while the TA offers only the reassurance that she found her words “poetic”, which given the environment she finds herself in might not exactly be high praise. Meanwhile, she’s in a loose relationship with fellow student Nakamura who has a part-time job as a driver he doesn’t much like. As she reveals to her mother, however what’s really bothering her is that she’d like to reconnect with her estranged birth father whom she hasn’t seen since her parents divorced when she was small. Despite her mother’s warnings that her father may only cause her pain, Rei presses ahead and writes a letter, eventually meeting up with him for dinner in a swanky Western restaurant where he orders wine and she coke. 

That comment that so riled her classmate was to do with the nature of perception and its mutual effect on the perceiver. Rei offers that she thinks being looked at is something inherently uncomfortable, that when someone looks at her she wants to look away while looking at someone else can be a cold, abstracted experience. Later, after meeting her father, she returns to the same topic with additional insight, admitting that she was always afraid of being perceived, feeling as if someone was continually watching and waiting for her to mess something up. As much as she feared the gaze, she also felt its pity and wanted to be embraced by it but as she grew she could no longer fit inside as it seemed to grow smaller and recede from her. The sense of loss and distance made her sad, but she is perhaps coming to the realisation that that feeling of disconnection is also a part of growing up as she outsteps the parental gaze to claim her own independent space. That process may necessarily be painful, but it’s her father’s hand on her shoulder that keeps her from moving fully forward as she struggles to separate herself from a half-felt presence. 

Rei’s father, apparently remarried, tries his best to reconnect with his now grown-up daughter but the encounter is unavoidably awkward, belonging both to the past and future as she realises she’s no longer a woman who needs a paternal presence just as she’s made the decision to find one. They chat awkwardly about the intervening years – her feelings of disconnection from her mother’s second family with a step-father and half-sister, and his remarriage, while eventually returning to the past. He never explains why he didn’t keep in contact (though this is sadly normal for divorced fathers in Japan) but is keen to explain that he didn’t leave because of her, only that he and her mother were very young and eventually discovered that they were incompatible, their views on money and family matters apparently entirely different. He didn’t understand her and the distance between them bothered him. 

Like Rei, he couldn’t feel himself inside the gaze and eventually absented himself from it. The reunion seems to have gone well, her father offering to take her mountain climbing, but we somehow feel that they might not meet again. What Rei learns is the power to perceive herself with pity and perhaps let go of the image of her father, a little disappointed in herself to have taken a throwaway comment to heart and remembered it all these years only to garner no reaction on recalling it. Freed from the overbearing gaze, Rei learns to centre her own perception, forgiving both herself and the past, as she steps boldly into a new adult space and sets off into a future of her own choosing.

 For Rei was screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)