Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2025

99% Cloudy… Always (99％、いつも曇り, Midori Sangoumi, 2023)

February 21, 2025by Hayley Scanlon

Why do some people feel themselves entitled to ask insensitive questions at emotionally delicate moments? Kazuha (Midori Sangoumi) may have a point when she calls her oblivious uncle a bully when a lays into her about having no children at the first memorial of her mother’s passing, but still his words seem to wound her and provoke a moment of crisis in what otherwise seems to be a happy and supportive marriage.

Kazuha is a very upfront person and fond of directly telling people that she thinks she has stopped menstruating so she doesn’t think she could have a child now even if she wanted one. One of the other relatives, however, suggests that her husband, Daichi (Satoshi Nikaido), may feel differently which somewhat alarms her. The questioning had made her angry and offended, not least by the implication that a woman’s life is deemed a success only through motherhood and that those who produce no children are somehow “unproductive”, but it was all the more insensitive of her uncle to bring it up given that Kazuha had suffered a miscarriage some years previously.

The miscarriage itself appears to have resulted in some lingering trauma that’s left Kazuha with ambiguous feelings towards motherhood. Having been bullied and excluded as a child because she is autistic, Kazuha is reluctant to bring a child of her own into the world in case they too are autistic and encounter the same kind of difficulties that she has faced all her life. As the film opens, she’s trying to get in touch with someone about the results of a recent job interview but getting flustered on the phone and asking what may be perceived as too many questions all in one go. She does something similar while trying to enquire at a foster agency about a clarification of their guidelines as to whether she would be eligible to adopt as an autistic woman which she fears she will not be. It just happens that no one is available to talk to her that day as they’re all at an outing leaving only a member of the admin team behind to man the desk while Kazuha repeatedly asks the same question in the hope of a response.

The truth is, Kazuha might have liked to raise a child but not her own while for Daichi it’s the opposite. He may still want to have a biological child but is not particularly interested in raising someone else’s. This question which has reared its head again at a critical moment immediately before it may be too late places a strain on their marriage as they contemplate a potential mismatch in their hopes and desires for the future. Daichi is reminded he has no other remaining family as his younger sister passed away of an illness some years previously and his parents are no longer around either. As he tells a younger woman at work, Kazuha is his only family while others needle them that there’ll be no one there for them in their old age should they remain childless.

Part of the issue is a lack of direct communication as Daichi talks through his relationship issues with a colleague in trying to process Kazuha’s revelation that she felt relieved after the miscarriage given her guilt and anxiety that the baby would also be autistic which is not something that had previously occurred to him nor that he particularly worried about. The film seems to hint that Daichi has the option of moving on, perhaps entering a relationship with his younger colleague, if his desire to have a biological child outweighed that to stay with Kazuha while that is not an option for Kazuha herself who is left only wondering if she should divorce him so he can do exactly that. In flashbacks, we see her reflect on some of her past behaviour and realise that she may have inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings in speaking the truth and been shunned herself because of it. Even so, she has a warm community around her who love her as she is and are in effect an extended family. The accommodation that she finds lies in fulfilling herself through art and building a relationship with her nephew while also helping and supporting those around her. It may be cloudy 99% of the time, but there’s still a glimmer of light and a radiance that surrounds Kazuha as she embraces life as she wants to live it rather than allow herself to be bullied by belligerent uncles and the spectres of social expectation.

99% Cloudy… Always screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hope (望み, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, 2020)

February 20, 2025by Hayley Scanlon

What would you prefer, that your son is alive but a murderer, or that he’s dead but blameless? That’s the dilemma faced by the family at the centre of Yukihiro Tsutsumi’s Hope (望み, Nozomi) who find themselves wondering if they really knew their son at all or had been deluded by an image of familial harmony that was only ever superficial. Meanwhile, they’re also at the centre of a media storm, on the receiving harassment from the press and neighbours, along with the potential financial strain of lost business and fracturing relationships in the local community.

Teenage daughter Miyabi (Kaya Kiyohara) tells her father that she’s read online some families have to move after a relative becomes involved with a crime, that they lose their jobs and place in the community. She’s been studying hard to get into a top high school and is worried that they may not now accept her even if she passed the exam because of something her brother may or may not have done. Some might say that a being a part of the family means that you live or die together, but there is a persistent sense of unfairness felt by all they are being made to suffer because of something over which they had and have no control.

Tadashi (Koshi Mizukami) never explained of this to them and it’s true that he had been behaving differently, was sullen, stayed out all night coming home with bruises, and had in fact recently purchased a knife but it’s difficult for them to believe that he could really have gone on the run after murdering a classmate. At the beginning of the film, architect Kazuto (Shinichi Tsutsumi) had shown off their warm family home to some prospective clients remarking that they wanted to ensure close relationships with the their children and that the design is a good opportunity to plan ahead for the next 10 or 20 years but perhaps there’s something a little hubristic in that statement. Kazuto is trying to sell an image of familial bliss that his house design can bring, but when he knocks on Tadashi’s door the boy is rude and resents the intrusion. Typical teen behaviour, the clients might think, but still it’s a minor crack in the edifice of the image of a perfect family.

But for all that it’s Kazuto who most strongly resists the idea that Tadashi may really have killed his friend and clings fast to the hope that he may be a victim too even though, as mother Kiyomi (Yuriko Ishida) points out, that might mean that he’s already dead and was killed alongside him. For Kiyomi, she just wants Tadashi, whose name means “correctness”, to be alive even if that means he really did do it. If that were the case, the family would also face constant harassment for the rest of their lives, Tadashi would be in prison for the next 15 years, and they would likely have to compensate the other family financially for the boy’s lost future and 50+ years’ worth of lost earning potential. None of that matters to her so long as Tadashi is alive, but to Kazuto it seems more important that Tadashi not be guilty and he reclaim the image he had of his son as a good and honest young man rather than a delinquent killer and bully.

Investigations among the teens turn up contradictory reports, some saying that Tadashi was aloof and arrogant while a group of girls insist on his innocence and even contemplate going to the police to help clear his name. What’s clear is that everyone seems to have taken football far too seriously and a situation among hotheaded young men went way out of control. As a policeman later says, problems often occur at this age because children who are mature enough to think for themselves start wanting to solve their own problems without worrying the adults around them but don’t always know the best way to do it and end up making everything worse. The irony may be that in the end Tadashi may indeed restore a sense of hope for his family that they can turn things around and regain a more genuine sense of familial harmony no matter what the outcome may be.

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

What Happened to Our Nest Egg!? (老後の資金がありません！, Tetsu Maeda, 2021)

February 18, 2025by Hayley Scanlon

A minor controversy erupted in Japan in 2019 when then finance minister Taso Aso issued a statement recommending that couples should have 20 million yen (£104,620 total at the time of writing) saved for their retirement on top of the state pension in order to live a comfortable life in old age. All things considered, 20 million yen actually sounds like quite a low sum for two people who might live another 30 years post-employment. Nevertheless, Atsuko (Yuki Amami) and her husband Akira (Yutaka Matsushige) are now in their mid-50s and don’t have anywhere near that amount in savings. They’re still paying off their mortgage and though their children are grown-up, neither of them seem to be completely independent financially and both still live at home.

Tetsu Maeda’s familial comedy What Happened to Our Nest Egg!? (老後の資金がありません！, Rogo no shikin ga arimasen!) explores the plight of the sandwich generation which finds itself having to support elderly relatives while themselves approaching retirement and still needing to support their children who otherwise can’t move forward with their lives. Seeing an accusatory ad which seems to remind her personally that even 20 million yen isn’t really enough when you take into consideration the potential costs of medical treatment or a place in a retirement home, Atsuko has a sudden moment of panic over their precarious financial situation. The apparently sudden death of Akira’s 90-year-old father acts as a sharp wake up call especially as Akira’s apparently very wealthy but also selfish and materialistic sister Shizuko (Mayumi Wakamura) bamboozles him into paying for the entirety of the funeral while pointing out that they’ve been footing most of the bill for the parents’ upkeep over the last few years.

There was probably a better time to discuss the financial arrangements than with their father on his deathbed in the next room, but in any case Shizuko doesn’t pay attention to Atsuko’s attempt to point out they’ve been chipping in too. Akira’s mother Yoshino (Mitsuko Kusabue) also reminds them that their family was once of some standing and a lot of people will be attending the funeral so they need to make sure everything is done properly. The funeral arranger is very good at her job and quickly guilts Atsuko into spending large sums of money on pointless funeral pomp to avoid causing offence only to go to waste when hardly anyone comes because, as she later realises, all of the couple’s friends have already passed away, are bedridden, or too ill to travel.

Yoshino is however in good health. When Shizuko suddenly demands even more money for her upkeep, Atsuko suggests Yoshino come live with them but it appears that she has very expensive tastes that don’t quite gel with their ordinary, lower-middle class lifestyle. Having lived a fairly privileged life and never needing to manage her finances, Yoshino has no idea of the relative value of money and is given to pointless extravagance that threatens to reduce Atsuko’s dwindling savings even more while in a moment of cosmic irony both she and Akira are let go from their jobs. Now they’re in middle age, finding new ones is almost impossible while their daughter suddenly drops the bombshell that she’s pregnant and is marrying her incredibly polite punk rocker boyfriend whose parents run a successful potsticker restaurant and are set on an elaborate wedding.

The film seems to suggest that Atsuko and Akira can’t really win. They aren’t extravagant people and it just wasn’t possible for them to have saved more than they did nor is it possible for them to save more in the future. Instead it seems to imply that what they should do is change their focus and the image they had of themselves in their old age. One of the new colleagues that Akira meets in a construction job has moved into a commune that’s part of the radical new housing solution invented by his old friend Tenma (Sho Aiwaka). Rather than building up a savings pot, the couple decide to reduce their expenses by moving into a share house and living as part of a community in which people can support each other by providing child care and growing their own veg. Yoshino too comes to an appreciation of the value of community and the new exciting life that she’s experienced since moving in with Atsuko. It may all seem a little too utopian, but there is something refreshing in the suggestion that what’s needed isn’t more money but simply a greater willingness to share, not only one’s physical resources but the emotional ones too in a society in which everyone is ready to help each other rather than competing to fill their own pots as quickly as possible.

What Happened to Our Nest Egg!? screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

To Mom, With Love (お母さんが一緒, Ryosuke Hashiguchi, 2024)

February 11, 2025by Hayley Scanlon

Three sisters embark on an ill-advised family trip to a rundown onsen to celebrate their difficult to please mother’s birthday but eventually discover a kind of serenity in their sisterhood in Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s To Mom, with Love (お母さんが一緒, Okasan ga Issho). Best known for his queer-themed films, this is Hashiguchi’s first feature in a decade and was made to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Shochiku’s family drama channel. As such it explores the perspectives of each of the sisters along with contemplating that of their unseen mother as they each find themselves trapped within oppressively patriarchal social structures.

Which is to say, the main problem is marriage. All the mother wants for her birthday is a grandchild but none of the sisters is married and the older two are ageing out of the prospect of motherhood. 40-ish Yayoi (Noriko Eguchi) has like her mother become somewhat embittered, constantly carping on about the facilities at the old-fashioned inn which she says smells of mould rather than the refreshing scent of tatami mats. She snipes at her sister Manami (Chika Udisa), 35, who has had a string of unsuccessful relationships including one with a married man, while the youngest sister, Kiyomi (Kotone Furukawa), 29, is about to spring the surprise that she is engaged to the son of their local liquor store, Takahiro (Fallgachi Aoyama), as a sort of birthday present for her nagging mother.

This pressure to marry and have children is overwhelming and largely stemming from the mother herself, but it’s clear that she suffered in life because of an arranged marriage to the sisters’ father which was ultimately unhappy. Manami recalls a rare family holiday in which her parents argued in a restaurant and her father violently threw his fork to the floor. He wasn’t an easy person either, but the mother still wants nothing more than to inflict this same misery on her daughters as means of declaring her own life successful. Manami may have a point when she says that they shouldn’t have come on this trip given that it doesn’t seem like something their mother would enjoy and in fact like Yayoi what she apparently enjoys most is complaining about it before going to bed early and ruining everyone’s plans for the evening.

While all this is going on, Kiyomi has Takehiro hiding out in their room waiting for the signal to join them and doing so patiently without complaint. Though he seems fairly clueless, in contrast to the sisters he’s a calm, easy-going presence and eager to keep the peace. He might be a bit of a flirt, not exactly objecting to Manami’s inappropriately flirty behaviour and hanging out with two other women in the inn’s lounge while Kiyomi bickers with her sisters, but otherwise seems like he just might be nice. An only child, he might secretly be a little jealous of Kiyomi for having siblings to bicker with, though that’s something that Kiyomi is too insensitive to notice at least right away. In any case, his family life seems to have been much warmer and down to earth than that of the sisters who though they berate each other for blaming their problems on others struggle to let go of their familial traumas.

In part, that’s why Takahiro’s arrival sparks such a crisis for it means that Kiyomi will be moving on to the conventionally domestic future which has eluded Yayoi and Manami though they each appear to have desired it. Kiyomi says she was left with no choice but to spring this surprise because her mother wouldn’t listen to her otherwise, but it perhaps also hints at her self-doubt that she will really be able to fulfil these roles as wife and mother or that her own marriage will be any happier than her parents’. Tempers rise and grievances are aired, but in the end you can only really have these incredibly raw arguments with family because they’re the only ones who’ll forgive you once the storm has cleared. Though it may have been a bad idea to come on this trip, there is something in the healing powers of the waters or “power spots” at the local shrine which even seems to cause their constantly “negative” mother to say something nice even as the sisters realise that in the end they only have each other but perhaps need little else.

To Mom, With Love screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (Japanese subtitles)

Rude to Love (愛に乱暴, Yukihiro Morigaki, 2024)

February 9, 2025by Hayley Scanlon

Momoko (Noriko Eguchi) can’t find her cat, Pi-chan. It hasn’t been home for days, and now there’s a stray prowling around near its water bowl. Her mother-in-law, Teruko (Jun Fubuki), can’t abide strays. They come into people’s homes and mess up their gardens. She shoos them away, making it clear they aren’t welcome here. It seems like Momoko’s not all that welcome either, and though her relationship with Teruko is civil enough, it’s clear Teruko has no great love for her and no desire to be any more friendly than she has to be to keep the familial peace.

In many ways, it’s Momoko herself that’s a stray cat and in trying to find Pi-chan she’s trying to reclaim her space within the domestic environment in which she fears she is imminently to be replaced, convinced that her husband, Mamoru (Kotaro Koizumi), is having an affair. At the core of Yukihiro Morigaki’s Rude to Love (愛に乱暴, Ai ni Ranbo) is a cry of despair from a middle-aged woman left with nowhere to turn. Someone in their quiet, residential district has been setting fire to the bins and it’s difficult to not think that the culprit is someone much like Momoko pushed to breaking point and desperate for some kind of release. For Momoko’s part, taking out Teruko’s rubbish has become a daily ritual and one of her key tasks as a dutiful daughter-in-law while she also goes out of her way to keep the place tidy, sweeping up the stray cigarette butts and tin cans that fall from other people’s loosely tied bags. But in other ways, we can see she wants things to change. She repeatedly approaches Mamoru with catalogues to talk about their plans for radically renovating their home, including the removal of a non-load-bearing pillar in the living room, but he generally ignores her.

In fact, Mamoru pays little attention to her at all and is frequently away on “business trips”. Momoko has a sideline in teaching other housewives how to make soap, but left her corporate job eight years previously when she married Mamoru. She tries approaching her old boss to expand the soap-making business and he suggests that she return to the office instead but almost certainly doesn’t really mean it and totally ignores her business proposal. Momoko knows that after so long out of the work force and as a middle-aged woman getting another corporate job is unlikely and the soap classes don’t pay enough to live on. If Mamoru leaves her, she’ll be left flat with nothing to fall back on. This is a key element of Mamoru’s betrayal and one of the reasons that Momoko holds fast to this domestic space to the point she would degrade herself by accepting Mamoru’s affair and begging him not to divorce her.

Yet in other ways Momoko feels uneasy within it because she and Mamoru had no children. She looks on at other women with their babies and visits a doctor who tells her that her increasingly painful menstrual cramps are a symptom of ageing that she may have been able to ameliorate by giving birth to a child, but also that she is likely heading into the menopause so this maternal milestone is one that may already have passed her by. She can’t escape the feeling that she’s failed to make a success of her womanhood and channels all of her ambitions and desires into the remodelling project that her husband remains entirely uninterested in because he’s already decided to vacate this space. In the depths of her rage, Momoko finally takes a chainsaw to the foundations of her home in the hope of “freeing Pi-chan,” and ends up lying in a grave-like pit in the middle of her living room much like the deluded patriarch of The Crazy Family.

The only person who seems to appreciate her efforts is the Chinese student, Li (Long Mizuma), who works at the local garden centre where he is treated poorly by some of the other customers. Mamoru never thanked her for anything, but Li expresses gratitude for her always keeping the rubbish drop tidy. Teruko resents her for something that is really a kind of misunderstanding, but has on some level some sympathy for her plight as a housewife. She idly remarks that she wishes she’d been widowed sooner, which sounds like a terrible thing to say, but also reflects the sense of doom a woman feels in her increasing age that a man does not. Men are never too old to start over but for a woman there are certain things for which is just “too late”, just as it was “too late” for Teruko to fulfil herself after her husband died. She tells Momoko that she still young enough to start over, but Momoko knows that in many ways she’s not. Still, at least the domestic space is hers to do with as she pleases no longer under the watchful eyes of her next-door neighbour and mother-in-law, stray cat no more but master of her own domain.

Rude to Love screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Based on the original novel Shuichi Yoshida “Rude to Love” published by Shinchosha