Tag: Camera Japan

Alien’s Daydream (地球星人（エイリアン）は空想する, Yoshiki Matsumoto, 2023)

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Who can really say what’s real and what’s not, who gets to decide what’s right and what’s wrong? The journalistic hero of Yoshiki Matsumoto’s Alien’s Daydream (地球星人（エイリアン）は空想する, Chikyu Seijin (Alien) wa Kusosuru) is asked each of these questions when railing against the absurdities of his latest assignment, a possible UFO hotspot in an otherwise remote area of Japan. In addition to the question of whether there is life on other planets, Ito is confronted by questions of press ethics as he begins to wonder if telling the truth is really the right thing to do.

In many ways, Uto’s (Yukichi Tanaka) problem is his rigidity. He doesn’t like injustice, so he stands up to some people bullying a homeless man but then also threatens to report him to the police pointing at the no loitering sign behind him. He something similar while visiting the space museum in the UFO town, abruptly breaking off his interview to confront a young woman and ask her if she has a ticket even though it’s not his responsibility seeing as he doesn’t work there and in fact it’s none of his business. Uto likes to think of himself as a serious journalist and and wants to do real investigations into the things he thinks matter, but is employed by a sleazy tabloid mainly interested in celebrity sex scandals and bits of weird news like the UFO town. 

That’s one reason Uto had little interest in going, but in the end doesn’t have much choice and is surprised to find there actually might be a story in it after all even if not quite the one his boss might be looking for. A local man is claiming to have been abducted by aliens and dumped in a random place some distance from where he was taken, while the girl he interrogated about her ticket, Noa, keeps making cryptic statements about “earthlings”, refers to aliens as her “people” and is fascinated by crop circles.

What he eventually discovers is that Noa may really have been kidnapped a few years ago if by a more terrestrial presence and subsequently brainwashed by a UFO worshipping cult. He realises that to some, including the girl’s mother, the stuff about aliens is a harmless delusion and blessing in disguise that prevents her from remembering what “really” happened. Uto want to write an article stating what how thinks it was, but if he does so there’a chance Noa may find out the “truth” and have her illusions shattered. He goes ahead and publishes anyway, but then realises his central hypothesis may have been incorrect and he’s fingered the wrong man. He then has another dilemma of whether or not to correct his article with Noa’s mother and friends each saying it’s better if he just lets it stand as the truth so that at least Noa won’t be branded a crazy cultist.

It turns out the local UFO lore has a surprisingly long history dating back to the Edo era which has given rise to a series of folk legends. The space museum itself is designed to resemble the pre-modern UFO and is a decidedly strange place where the manager is constantly shadowed by a man in a green alien mask.Yet what Uto is later learns is that we are all perhaps lonely aliens, each from different planets which is why we’re so different from each other. Uto himself often seems somehow alien in his rigidity and black of white way of thinking, a quality perfectly brought out by Yukichi Tanaka’s stiffness and often vacant stare. Noa asks him if he isn’t tire of living his life like that, so needlessly uptight and unimaginative and perhaps in a way he is though he soon turns the equation around on her. Dividing the film into 10 chapters each with a strange and childlike illustration, Matsumoto adds a touch of whimsical absurdity to what could otherwise be quite a dark tale. Uto may have to learn that he isn’t the arbiter of the truth, selling believable lies to a readership looking for something to make life more interesting, but is free to find the truth for himself because it is of course out there for those want to believe. 

Alien’s Daydream screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Camera Japan Announces Complete Programme for 2024

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Camera Japan returns for its 19th edition in Rotterdam 26th to 29th September and in Amsterdam 3rd to 6th October bringing with it another fantastic selection of the best in recent and not so recent Japanese cinema.

Feature Films

  • Afterschool Anglers Club – a bullied teen makes new friends through fishing in Hideo Jojo’s laidback drama.
  • Alien’s Daydream – surreal drama in which a jaded reporter investigates reports of alien activity.
  • All the Long Nights – mismatched colleagues struggling amid contemporary corporate culture find unexpected solidarity in Sho Miyake’s gentle human drama. Review.
  • All the Songs We Never Sang – a young woman finds herself diving into the past after receiving a less than enthusiastic welcome on visiting her mother’s island home in Chris Rudz’s gentle indie drama. Review.
  • Baby Assassins: Nice Days – the Baby Assassins try to have a nice holiday but instead find themslves facing off against a rogue hitman. Review.
  • The Box Man – those who obsess over the Box Man, become the Box Man, in Gakuryu Ishii’s adaptation of the Kobo Abe novel. Review.
  • Bushido – a stoical ronin’s peaceful life is disrupted by a face from the past in Kazuya Shiraishi’s elegantly lensed period drama. Review.
  • Confession – latest from Nobuhiro Yamashita starring Toma Ikuta and Yang Ik-june as two men hiking in memory of a late friend.
  • Desert of Namibia – a young woman struggles with the conditions of modern living.
  • Fly Me to the Saitama – From Biwa Lake with Love – Osaka is on the March in the sequel to the popular comedy. Review.
  • Great Absence – a forced reconnection with his estranged father forces a young man to contemplate the great absences of life in Kei Chikaura’s poetic drama.
  • Hoyaman – the tranquil island life of a pair of brothers is interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious woman in Teruaki Shoji’s quirky comedy. Review.
  • Ichiko – when a young woman disappears, it transpires that she never existed in the first place in Akihiro Toda’s twisty psychological mystery. Review.
  • Kyrie – musical drama from Shunji Iwai told over 10 years and starring AiNA THE END as a street musician who can only communicate through song.
  • Let’s Go Karaoke! – an old school yakuza and high school boy find themselves fighting similar battles through the medium of Karaoke in Nobuhiro Yamashita’s zany comedy. Review.
  • The Moon – a formerly successful author struggling with personal tragedy takes a job at a care home and is shocked by what she finds in Yuya Ishii’s hard-hitting drama.
  • One Second Ahead, One Second Behind – misaligned romantics eventually rediscover a long forgotten connection in Nobuhiro Yamashita’s take on Taiwanese rom-com My Missing Valentine. Review.
  • Penalty Loop – a man trapped in a timeloop of vengeance begins to realise the fallacy of revenge in Shinji Araki’s absurdist drama. Review.
  • Promised Land – a young man takes drastic action when traditional bear hunting is called off.
  • Qualia – a timid poultry farmer’s wife begins to feel her coop’s a little cramped after unwittingly inviting her husband’s mistress to live with them in Ryo Ushimaru’s quirky family dramedy. Review.
  • Retake – a diffident teenage boy finds himself editing in real time in Kota Nakano’s movie-making summer holiday movie. Review.
  • Shin Masked Rider – Hideaki Anno’s take on the classic tokusatsu series.
  • Sin and Evil – when their friend is murdered, three teenage boys end up killing a man they assume to be responsible and then carry on with their lives only for the case to echo 20 years later.
  • Six Singing Women – a man finds himself trapped in a strange place after travelling to the mountains in the wake of his estranged father’s death in Yoshimasa Ishibashi’s surreal drama. Review.
  • Stay Mum – on returning to care for estranged father, a woman finds herself taking care of a neglected little boy in Kosai Sekine’s maternal melodrama. Review.
  • Swimming in a Sand Pool – a group of high school girls ponder the role of gender in their lives while shovelling the sand in Nobuhiro Yamashita’s charming teen comedy. Review.
  • Tatsumi – a fisherman/cleaner for a drug gang teams up with his ex-girlfriend’s sister to avenge her death.
  • Till the Day I Can Laugh about My Blues – lonely young woman bonds with a mysterious girl after being given a magic kaleidoscope.
  • Worlds Apart – a young woman goes to live with her eccentric aunt after her parents are killed in an accident in a gentle drama from Natsuki Seta.
  • Yoko – an isolated woman begins to rediscover herself while hitchhiking to her estranged father’s funeral in Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s quietly moving road movie. Review.

Animation

Documentary

Special Screenings

  • All Mixed Up – new restoration of Yasuzo Masumura’s adaptation of the Tanizaki novel Quicksand.
  • Hoodlum Soldier – first in the series of films featuring Shintaro Katsu.
  • Kisses – Masumura’s debut feature subverts the Sun Tribe narrative for sweet and charming youth romance.
  • Nakano Spy School – drama starring Raizo Ichikawa as a recruit at Japan’s famous espionage academy.
  • The Wife’s Confession – searing drama starring Ayako Wakao as a wife accused of killing her husband. Review.

Camera Japan 2024 takes place in Rotterdam 26th to 29th September and Amsterdam 3rd to 6th October. Full information on all the films as well as ticketing links can be found on the official website and you can also keep up to date with all the latest news via Camera Japan’s official Facebook page, X (formerly known as Twitter) account, and Instagram channel.

The Rest of Our Lives (ラストターン　福山健二71歳、二度目の青春, Shinji Kuma, 2023)

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A pair of elderly men struggle to find meaning in their lives in the face of well-meaning infantilism and health anxiety in Shinji Kuma’s warmhearted ageing drama, The Rest of Our Lives (ラストターン　福山健二71歳、二度目の青春,, Last Turn: Fukuyama Kenji 71-sai, Nidome no Seishun). They are not, however, the only ones as even younger people find themselves consumed by existential confusion when reaching a natural turning point and accepting that their lives will have to change. Yet through their various relationships each begins to come to a new accommodation with the present and accept that though their lives may be different than before there are still many things for them to do. 

Kenji lost his wife two years previously having cared for her as she succumbed to Alzheimer’s. These days he likes to take a walk around the neighbourhood and then get on with his usual business though even he begins to realise that he’s become forgetful and is prone to doing strange things like leaving the remote control for the TV in the freezer. His son lives far away but is worried enough about him to install an iPad on the wall so they can call each other any time and he can also check in on him to make sure Kenji hasn’t had a fall or anything like that. But to Kenji it obviously seems like an imposition, his son’s basically spying on him and taking away his privacy along with a little of his independence. Satoru has also been checking out homes and recommends an organisation for elderly people where he can get health advice, stay active, and avoid social isolation. 

Only at the centre he starts to feel insulted, irritated that the staff members talk to them as if there were small children while getting them to do weird exercise regimes that make him feel silly. One elderly gentleman, Hashimoto, eventually storms out exclaiming that they aren’t in kindergarten anymore instantly earning Kenji’s admiration. Even so, as it turns out they are very different men. While Kenji is somewhat reserved and polite, Hashimoto is a chatterbox who makes constant inappropriate comments about women he probably only (just) gets away with because of his age and otherwise loudmouth personality. The friendship between them is slow to develop for this reason, but also because Kenji seems to have forgotten what it’s like to have a friend and accidentally upsets him leading Hashimoto to think that perhaps he is just annoying Kenji and should leave him alone. 

At the swimming pool they’re encouraged to go to, the pair run into Kaori, a former competitive swimmer like them struggling to accept the physical decline of her body along the end of her sporting career. Now working as an instructor she finds teaching an uphill battle partly in her buried resentment but also through a lack of empathy for her students unable to remember what it was like to not be able to swim and impatient with those lagging behind. They are all looking for ways to reorient themselves, not so much because of their age because of the immense changes in their lives along with a sense of loneliness. Kenji lives alone, but even Hashimoto who has moved in with his son confesses that the often feels in the way and once again infantilised seeing as they’ve given him a traditional Japanese room which lacks a locking door. 

Yet the realisation Kenji comes to is that their fear of becoming a burden is misplaced. It’s alright to ask for help when you need it and even better to offer it where you can such as in his thoughtful decision to walk a neighbourhood dog that barks all the time because the elderly lady who owned him passed away and her son’s out all day at work. Shining a light on the lives of the elderly in an increasingly ageing Japan, the film is makes a gentle plea for intergenerational solidarity and a more compassionate society that is responsive to the needs of others and cares for everyone equally. Kenji and Hashimoto marvel that even in their old age they still take pleasure in learning new things while allowing themselves to accept help as a gesture of love while making sure to return the favour wherever they can. 

The Rest of Our Lives screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Sabakan (サバカン SABAKAN, Tomoki Kanazawa, 2022)

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A melancholy middle-aged writer looks back to a climactic summer of his youth and the ghost of fractured friendship in Tomoki Kanazawa’s heartwarming nostalgia fest, Sabakan (サバカン SABAKAN). A classic summer adventure movie, the film finds a sense of warmth in childhood memory but also reflects on all that at the time it was impossible to understand along with a sadness in the inevitable end of summer as two boys chase the spectre of dolphins in an otherwise tranquil seaside town.

In the present day, Takaaki (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) is a struggling author and divorced father already behind on his child support. When he mentions working on another novel, his agent laughs at him that books like that don’t sell while trying to convince him to take a job ghostwriting for an Instagram influencer going viral for her dieting tips. Perhaps because the agent had described his writing as “quick and easy to read”, essentially anonymous and empty, he begins meditating on his childhood self repeatedly praised for his writing by a teacher who is perhaps a little easily moved. 

The summer of 1986 was the beginning of the Bubble era and Takaaki’s memories are indeed filled with a series of cultural touchstones such as the idol Yuki Saito whose poster the young Takaaki sometimes kisses after dancing around singing her hits. All of which is one reason why the poverty of his classmate Kenji (Konosuke Harada) has made him even more of an outcast bullied by the other kids who follow him home and make fun of the rundown house with tarp covering the roof that he lives in with his mother (Shihori Kanjiya) and several siblings. His fisherman father died some years ago and his mother works in the local supermarket doing her best to support five kinds on a part-timer’s salary. Kenji takes a liking to Takaaki because he’s the only kid who didn’t join with the others when they laughed at him, more or less blackmailing him into a summer adventure looking for dolphins in a cove over the mountain. 

Even the younger Takaaki reflects there probably weren’t any dolphins in the first place, Kenji just wanted to go on adventure with him and didn’t otherwise know how to ask. A careless word from his otherwise warm and supportive mother provokes a minor rift in the boys’ relationship that despite himself the younger Takaaki didn’t quite understand causing him to pull away from Kenji in an unwarranted sense of rejection unable to recognise that he is simply awkward and has low self-esteem which caused him to question the reality of their friendship. In any case though they are later separated by unexpected tragedy, their connection becomes a touchstone for each of them reminding them that they are not alone even if no longer together. 

Kanazawa captures an impish sense of fun the boys’ adventure as they find themselves in a tricky situation with a trio of thuggish delinquents and meet an equally melancholy teenage girl at the shore who stares mournfully at a washed up can of Korean soda and explains sadly as she looks out over the sea that she herself has not been there yet. The Yuki Saito poster comes down, signalling the arrival of a coming of age and the putting away of childish things as Takaaki moves into a more concrete adulthood while still floundering in adolescent confusion and the inability to fully understand his new friendship or its growing importance in his life. 

The adult him understands only too well, meditating on his memories and triggered by nostalgia on seeing a can of mackerel and remembering the carefree summer of his youth. The rediscovery of a childhood bond begins to open him up both artistically and in his relationship with the wife and daughter from whom he is separated. Told with humour and warmth, the film is filled with a sense of childhood wonder and the comfort of the everyday largely undimmed by the entrance of tragedy and the essential sadness of summer’s end. Even so it allows its melancholy hero to find a kind of salvation not only in childhood memories of dolphins and canned mackerel but in the enduring quality of a friendship that itself may have become distant.

Sabakan screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Love Will Tear Us Apart (ラヴ・ウィル・テア・アス・アパート, Kenichi Ugana, 2023)

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“This film depicts a pure and genuine love between an awkward boy and a girl with a pure heart,” according to a pop idol starring in a film called “garbage love”, but it’s a true enough description of Kenichi Ugana’s genre-crossing slasher romance, Love Will Tear Us Apart (ラヴ・ウィル・テア・アス・アパート). Co-scripted by Hirobumi Watanabe, the film has a deadpan, surreal sensibility but has a lot to say about entrenched patriarchy and a bullying culture. 

As the film begins, Wakaba is a cheerful little girl who has an all encompassing obsession with a handsome pop idol, but is secretly enduring an oppressive atmosphere of domestic violence in her family home at the hands of her cruel and violent father. In this she might have found a kindred spirit in classmate Koki who is enduring physical abuse at the hands of his mother who openly tells him how much happier she’d be if only he’d never been born. Koki is also being bullied by a pair of mean kids at school and meekly takes it, unable to stand up for himself. When Wakaba steps up and tries to help him, the bullies turn on her too and their teacher (Atsuko Maeda) seemingly does nothing. After the pair bond through a screaming session at a local river, the bullies mysteriously fall out of a window which Koki is then seen ominously staring out of. 

The film jumps on seven years to a teenage Wakaba (Sayu Kubota) who discovers the world is not a safe place for women, repeatedly encountering a series of skeevy guys beginning with her favourite pop band who lure her to a cabin in the woods where they openly talk about getting her drunk to take advantage of her or spiking her drinks. One of the chief victimisers is another woman, Moeka, whose apparent “job” it is to recruit girls for the guys to have fun with. Wakaba’s friend Kanna (Riko) wants to leave, sensing that there’s something not quite right but Wakaba is naive and unable to see the danger. A similar thing happens when she visits Tokyo alone and has a meet cute with a guy who spills coffee on her shirt and offers to buy her a new one, then to show her around, takes her for sushi, declares his love and makes a proposal of marriage. 

As might be expected, many of these men end up dead at the hands of a vicious, chainsaw-wielding serial killer in a white hazmat suit, gas mask, and goggles. You can’t quite blame him for his crimes because everyone he kills is so irrediambly awful while it really does seem that he might be trying to protect Wakaba in some way from the hidden dangers she remains unable to see because of her pure heartedness. While her own father had been cruel and violent, she discovers that Moeka’s, police detective Kamiyama (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), is the opposite but worse in his unsettling obsession with his daughter, whom he believed to “pure and earnest” little knowing that she had been procuring young girls to serve up to the sleazy band members.

In a strange way, the serial killer turns out to be Wakaba’s healthiest relationship even if he’s basically stalking her not to mention murdering people with chainsaws because they threatened her happiness. The film runs through a series of genres from the cute childhood romance that soon turns ominous and the cabin in the woods slasher movie complete with creepy monkey and trainset, to martial arts epic as Wakaba abandons her life to train with a YouTube serial killer catching guru in a tropical resort town but retains its sense of anarchic innocence and internal integrity. As the pop star had implied, it really is a tale of genuine love between an awkward boy and a pure hearted girl in which they gradually realise that they each have a right to be happy and can be so together despite all violence and mayhem around them which includes killing a guy by shoving a grapefruit blender on his head. Strange and absurd the film nevertheless has a heartwarming romantic sensibility along with a desire for a less destructive world defined more by kindness and compassion than bullying and violence. 

Love Will Tear Us Apart screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

A Mother’s Touch (桜色の風が咲く, Junpei Matsumoto, 2022)

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A young man begins to ponder the meaning of his life while losing both his sight and hearing in Junpei Matsumoto’s heartwarming biopic, A Mother’s Touch (桜色の風が咲く,Sakurairo no Kaze ga Saku). The English title aptly hints at the maternal devotion that kept Satoshi (Taketo Tanaka) part of the world even as he feared becoming isolated from it, though the Japanese “when the pink wind blooms” leans towards the poetic in echoing the ways in which he is able to open himself to a different kind of sensory experience. 

Satoshi Fujisawa would later go on to become the first deaf blind university professor in Japan though the films opens with a toddler Satoshi discovering that he has a rare condition that causes the pressure in his eyeball to increase endangering his vision. Though he undergoes various treatments, he eventually loses the sight in one eye and then the other several years later. While in high school he then discovers that he is also beginning to lose his hearing which, along with braille, had been his primary way of experiencing the world around him. 

Matsumoto’s film does not really go into the various ways in which Satoshi is inconvenienced by a largely ableist society aside from his having to leave home and go to Tokyo to attend a school for the blind. Satoshi does, however, experience bullying as a child particularly from an obnoxious gang of boys who egg him on to remove his glass eye in front of them while otherwise isolated by the constant need to rest his eyes with only rakugo to listen to on the radio. Introduced to braille, he is immediately fascinated remarking that the person who came up with it must have been a genius and explaining that he has not given up on his sight but it doesn’t hurt to learn. 

It’s braille that eventually becomes his lifeline as his mother figures out a way to communicate with him by pressing his fingers as she were typing on a braille keyboard while he replies vocally. Her adhoc solution has apparently gone on to provide an important means communication for other deaf blind people across the world and reminds Satoshi that though he may feel as if he as been marooned in deep space he is not alone and is able to interact with the world around him. While still trying to save his hearing, he had decided to try an alternative treatment method which emphasised heavy exercise and bland food designed to boost the immune system though he discovered that it only robbed him of an additional sensory input and a resultant longing to eat something sweet. Though he is unable to see or hear, he can still taste and smell the world around him welcoming the spring in unexpected ways while embracing his potential and independence.

That said, his major philosophy is that life is full of voids designed for other people to fill in the ways that we can all help each other. The film doesn’t shy away from exploring the strain placed on Satoshi’s family as they try to cope with his medical needs which leave his mother feeling guilty that she is often away from her other two children caring for him at the hospital, and his father lonely and overburdened while trying to balance the demands of his working life with that of taking over the domestic space. In any case, they resolve to get through it as a family doing what they can to support Satoshi without robbing him of the opportunity to lead as independent a life as possible. Satoshi comes to believe that his disabilities may be the price for his purpose, that there must be something he is uniquely supposed to do with his life along with places only he could discover. The film eventually finds him in a space of possibility, recalling happy times with his family as a child but also looking forward towards a new potential for pushing the boundaries and moving beyond the limitations others might have placed on him. 

A Mother’s Touch screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Tsugaru Lacquer Girl (バカ塗りの娘, Keiko Tsuruoka, 2023)

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Which traditions should we keep and which should we lose? A young woman finds herself frustrated by outdated gender norms in her desire to take over the family lacquerware business in Keiko Tsuruoka’s gentle rural drama, Tsugaru Lacquer Girl (バカ塗りの娘, Bakanuri no Musume). While her family, save older brother Yu (Ryota Bando) who has already rejected lacquerware, do nothing but run her down and claim she’ll never be a success at anything all she wants to do is devote her life to a traditional craft her father no longer believes has any kind of future. 

Even so, Seishiro (Kaoru Kobayashi) is dead set on Yu taking over the business to the point that they have become semi-estranged. He calls Miyako (Mayu Hotta) “clumsy” and complains that she has no aptitude for anything unlike Yu who was always good at anything he tried. Miyako too later suggests that she was her brother’s opposite, while he was cheerful and outgoing she is shy and melancholy but then perhaps it’s hard to be cheerful when everyone’s always telling you you’re useless and doing everything wrong. In an interesting parallel, Yu is also trapped by outdated social codes in that he is gay and he and his partner have decided to move to London where they can legally get married and live their life out and proud in a way they feel they cannot do in contemporary Japan. 

Lacking other direction in her life, Miyako has been working a part-time job in a local supermarket which she hates while her father occasionally allows her to help him finish big orders though it’s clear her salary is now their main source of financial support. A local inn keeper who is a good customer of theirs explains to some of his guests that craftsmen rarely construct large pieces such as tables because they are no longer cost effective while fewer young people are willing to take up apprenticeships leaving the traditional art in danger of dying out despite the frequent remarks that everything tastes better out of a lacquerware bowl which is after all in the modern parlance “sustainable” in that it will last for many decades and can easily be repaired if damaged. 

Seishiro doesn’t seem to have a reason for rejecting the idea that Miyako might take over aside from basic sexism in preferring to hand the business over to his first born son. It might be tempting to think that he dissuades her because he thinks there isn’t a future in lacquerware, but if that were the case he could simply retire. Her mother (Reiko Kataoka), who left the family some years ago in part it seems because of her own animosity towards lacquerware and its lack of financial promise, seems to feel much the same comparing Miyako to a more successful cousin who has kids and a high powered job at an international trading firm, telling her that she should be settling down and getting married suggesting that she is simply incapable of becoming a successful lacquerware artist and should at best keep it as a hobby. 

Her mother had also shut down her desire to learn piano as a child by telling her there was no point because she’d never be good at it. Miyako’s decision to prove herself by re-laquering an abandoned piano in her disused school is then an act of rebellion against both parents showing them what she can and will achieve along with the direction she has chosen for her life. Not everyone respects it even if her father begins to come around but really it doesn’t matter because the decision is hers alone whatever anyone else might have said. Far from being insular, the embrace of traditional culture gives Miyako new opportunities and allows her to grow in confidence until she’s finally ready to set off along her own path. Even so, it seems there are some traditions she thinks it would be better to lose, such as her father’s sexism and the homophobia that has forced her brother to emigrate in order to live a happy life just as he is. They call it “fools lacquer” because no one but a fool would go to all this trouble to make a bowl but in many ways that’s the point. Miyako pours all of herself in to the lacquer, piling layer on layer dotted by handfuls of thrown rice that give it its pattern much as she herself is slowly tempered by the world around her.

Tsugaru Lacquer Girl screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tea Friends (茶飲友達, Bunji Sotoyama, 2023)

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Japan’s rapidly ageing society has provoked an epidemic of loneliness but also perhaps new business opportunities in Bunji Sotoyama’s empathetic social drama Tea Friends (茶飲友達, Chanomi Tomodachi). The phrase may sound innocuous enough, but given some potentially outdated cultural connotations the men who spot the advert cunningly placed in a newspaper to catch the eyes of older readers may have reason to assume that it’s more than just tea and chat on offer. Though as it turns out, it’s not just the old who are lonely as a younger generation in turn often in conflict with their parents also attempt to seek security and comfort in found family.

That said, there’s something a little cult-like about the way that Mana (Rei Okamoto), a former sex worker, talks about her organisation which aims to cure late life loneliness through what others might describe as an elderly sex ring. Employing a collection of older women, she accompanies them to meet new clients where they silently slide viagra over the table. The gentleman caller subscribes to a plan to purchase “tea” and anything that happens inside the hotel room they subsequently go to is just “free love” rather than “prostitution”. Mana sees herself as running a “community safety net” and helping elderly people who might otherwise have become isolated and depressed keep active as part of one big happy family along with the other members of staff who have, like her, become estranged from their parents and relatives. 

For Yoshiki, one of the men who escorts the ladies around, it’s that he views his father as a failure for leaving a well-paid corporate job to open a bakery which subsequently went bankrupt and has led to him living in his car. He thinks that in the end it’s better not to try at all than be left with the humiliation of things not working out. But then for Mana herself it’s more a sense of parental rejection. After a difficult childhood, her now terminally ill mother continues to reject her on the grounds of her history of sex work while she continues to crave the unconditional love of a family. Like a mother hen, she nestles those around her into the Tea Friends organisation which operates out of her own home and strives to create a place where everyone can feel they belong. 

Which is all to say she’s the loneliest one of all, but as someone else later cautions her you can’t cure your own loneliness with the loneliness of others. What she sees as a social enterprise others may see as a deliberate attempt to take advantage of vulnerable people who have admittedly been let down by an indifferent society and are in need of the money even more so than comfort or validation. At the other end of the spectrum, a young woman working at Tea Friends discovers that she is pregnant but her boyfriend immediately rejects her, insisting that he refuses to take responsibility and revealing that he is already married. Chika wants to have her baby, but everyone seems to be telling her that she shouldn’t. The doctors seem to look down on her after realising she isn’t married and the father most likely not in the picture, while an attempt to inquire about benefits at the town hall leads only to judgement as the clerk pithily tells her that they’re there for when you need them but she shouldn’t “depend” on them too much virtually calling her a scrounger and implying she’s been irresponsible in becoming a single mother. 

As another of the older women admits, being used was better than being ignored and at least being part of Tea Friends gave her a sense of purpose and acceptance if only for a time. In any case, Mana’s attempt to find unconditional love from her new “family” largely flounders as even those she’d come to believe herself close to desert her when the threat of legal proceedings enters the picture leaving her to face the music alone while she continues to protect them insisting that they’ve done nothing wrong even if it it was technically against the law. An old man’s devastation on picking up the phone and getting no answer suggests that Mana might have had a point when she said it was a social service seeing as no one else seems keen to tackle the problem of late life loneliness even if she did go about it in a problematic way. As Mana often says, righteousness does not equal happiness and it is often outdated social brainwashing that keeps people unhappy and not least herself as she struggles to find the unconditional love lacking in her life that would enable her to cure her own loneliness even in the prime of her youth.

Tea Friends screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Firing The Lighter Gun (ピストルライター の撃ち方, Kohei Sanada, 2022)

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“Whatever got you here, it can’t be any good” a resident of a flophouse reflects on their moribund circumstances suckered to into debt bondage by exploitative yakuza who force them to risk their lives doing clean up in a nuclear exclusion zone. Kohei Sanada’s bleak indie drama Firing the Lighter Gun (ピストルライター の撃ち方, Pistol Lighter no Uchikata) takes place after second nuclear disaster has left even more of the land unsurvivable. The heroes have been quite literally displaced, left without a place to return to or call a home, but are also emotionally alienated unable to envisage an escape for themselves from this otherwise hopeless existence.

Having recently been released from prison, Ryo (Yu Nakamura) remarks that the area has changed since he’s been away but his friend Tatsuya (Yuya Okutsu) counters that he doesn’t really think so. In any case, Tatsuya lives with a huge inferiority complex most evident on his attendance at a school reunion he didn’t want to go to where he sits sullen and dejected among those who’ve moved up in the world not least his ex, Shoko (Emi Okamura), who left him for a guy with a steady government job but still drops by to care for his ageing mother who suffers from dementia and the legacy of domestic abuse. Tatsuya is not a yakuza but his work is yakuza adjacent in that he drives a van full of equally hopeless men recruited for a dodgy operation offering cleanup services in the nuclear exclusion zone. 

Though the jobs are supposed to pay well with a bonus for the hazardous nature of the work, most of it is being skimmed by the yakuza bosses who deduct vast amounts from the men’s pay-packets for “expenses” such as the right to sleep in a communal flophouse where they charge them exorbitant amounts for snacks and drinks which they have to buy because they aren’t allowed to go out. Nor are they allowed to quit the job, trying to run incurs a 50,000 yen fine on top of any debts they’re supposed to be working off. An unexpected addition to Tatsuya’s van one day is Mari (Anju Kurosu), a sex worker, who’s been forced to work for the gang to pay off a debt incurred by an ex who’s since run off. 

As she later says, it’s a waste of time dreaming about a home, life is easier when you no longer expect one. But despite themselves a gentle bond soon arises among the trio of dispossessed youngsters who each feel trapped by their circumstances but are uncertain if they still have the strength to contemplate escape. Tatsuya’s sense of impotence is embodied by the cigarette lighter he carries around which is shaped like a pistol and realistic enough to cause a yakuza bodyguard a moment of concern but of course of no real use to him. As Ryo puts it, Tatsuya’s problem is that he still cares about those around him and is not heartless enough to treat the flophouse men like the “disposable tools” others regard them to be. He is constantly belittled by grinning boss Takiguchi (Ryoji Sugimoto) who blames him for everything that goes wrong and calls him useless and ineffectual, while the flophouse boss also regards him as soft for refusing to beat one of the men who had tried to escape. 

Ryo meanwhile swings in the opposite direction, giving in to a sense of hopelessness that sees him shift towards yakuza violence but perhaps eventually allows him to bounce back and take a chance on escape even if it maybe short-lived or spent in constant hiding. Tatsuya may feel trapped by responsibility to his mother, but is otherwise psychologically unable to move forward staking all his hopes on the rumour of a new power plant hoping it will ignite the town in the way the construction of the last one did despite knowing its attendant risks. Unlike Ryo, he says there’s no point in running, despite himself still yearning for a home. The flophouse men are no different, the few who escape are soon drawn back to other similar kinds of work because there is no other hope for them. Still, once the final shots have been fired there is a kind of clearing of the air and the light of a new dawn even if few seem to be able to see it. 

Firing The Lighter Gun screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Natchan’s Little Secret (ひみつのなっちゃん。, Yasujiro Tanaka, 2023)

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On learning that their friend and mentor has died, a trio of drag queens vows to do whatever it takes to fulfil her wishes and ensure her family never know about her sexuality in Yasujiro Tanaka’s road trip comedy Natchan’s Little Secret (ひみつのなっちゃん。, Himitsu no Natchan). In some ways it may seem old-fashioned, that rather than ensuring her family knew who she really was they decide to honour Natchan’s desire for secrecy but nevertheless meditate on the nature family while finally landing on a poignant sense of loss for all that secrecy entails.

Virgin (Kenichi Takito), an accountant by day and former drag queen who’s lost the taste for dancing, and Morilyn (Shu Watanabe) who works at the bar Natchan owned, are forced to confront the fact that in many ways they didn’t even know Natchan at all. They don’t know her address or hometown and have only the vague idea that she was estranged from her family. Virgin reflects that she was “secretive”, but in the end none of them really know what to do now that she’s gone. Another drag queen turned TV celebratory, Zubuko (Tomoya Maeno), laments that some take their secret to their grave realising that’s exactly what Natchan has done. That’s one reason why the trio become obsessed with the idea of cleaning out Natchan’s flat to make sure that her family don’t find anything they weren’t expecting. 

But then again, the trio frequently refer to the gay community as their family while claiming Natchan as their own. Without really thinking about it, Morilyn allowed hospital staff to assume he was family in a more legal sense and started making funeral arrangements. He also packs up some of Natchan’s property without realising he could be accused of theft while trying to tidy up her life. They may feel that the birth family are in a sense intruding, reasserting ownership over someone they never accepted in life and preventing those who truly loved them to honour their wishes. Yet Natchan’s mother (Chieko Matsubara) turns out to be sweet old lady who is in her way hurt that she and her son became estranged wishing that they could have been closer while he was alive.

It’s she who eventually invites them to Natchan’s rural hometown which is famous for a particular kind of festival dance. None of them are sure they want to go, partly because they fear accidentally blowing Natchan’s cover but also the social attitudes of what they imagine to be a more conservative, traditional area. Only it appears quite the reverse is true. Residents at the inn where they stay actually have a fierce curiosity about drag and enthusiastically enjoy a risqué routine performed by Morilyn and Zubuko while even a manly man later shrugs his shoulders and claims it’s not so different from Gujo Odori which also makes people sparkle. 

Maybe Natchan’s little secret is that she was a person who had learned to see the beautiful things in life and wanted others to see that they were beautiful too even if some told them that weren’t or they didn’t feel that they were. Virgin describes Morilyn’s straightforward living as a beautiful thing, especially as he recounts being made to do karate by conservative parents afraid of what the neighbours would think of their effeminate son, an experience he describes as emotionally destabilising and has led to a degree of repression as an adult. Virgin is out at work and well liked by a collection of female colleagues but now only dances alone at home and keeps it as her own kind of secret. Yet through their various adventures on the road the trio begin to come to new acceptances of themselves as they prepare to say goodbye to Natchan while comically affecting the tropes of conventional masculinity in an attempt not to give the game away. They wander through queer spaces in search of her and rediscover their own sense of family realising that they did know Natchan after all or at least all that was important to know as did others even if they pretended not to because that seemed to be how she wanted it. Finding liberation amid the Gujo Odori, the trio finally say goodbye but also discover a new sense of solidarity and self-acceptance joining the dance at which all truly are welcome. 

Natchan’s Little Secret screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)