Tag: Michihito Fujii

The Village (ヴィレッジ, Michihito Fujii, 2023)

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The toxicity of life in small-town Japan is manifested in a giant recycling plant in Michihito Fujii’s poetic drama, The Village (ヴィレッジ). Closely aligned with the noh play quoted in the opening title card, the film charts a young man’s simultaneous blossoming and corruption as he finds himself at the service of a demonic mayor and fighting for his place in a village that doesn’t need him but requires a sacrifice. 

In the opening scenes, mist rises over the mountain accompanied by noh recitation before we eventually arrive at a noh recital. These two images would seem to signal a kind of innate Japaneseness which has been corrupted by the presence of the recycling plant despite the economic benefits it’s brought to the area. The mayor, and boss of the plant, Ohashi (Arata Furuta), wants to extend it out across the other mountains in the region and boasts that though there may have been resistance at first now everyone is grateful to them for everything they’ve done for the village. 

Yu’s (Ryusei Yokohama) father was the last holdout against the plant and apparently ended up killing a man in an altercation thereafter taking his own life and burning down their family home. Because of the stigma surrounding his father’s actions, Yu has been ostracised by his community and is used as a perpetual kicking bag not least by Ohashi’s thuggish son Toru (Wataru Ichinose) at his job at the plant. His mother has also turned to drink and developed a pachinko problem which has resulted in massive debts to yakuza loanshark Maruoka (Tetta Sugimoto) who’s press-ganged Yu into working at the illegal dumpsite which is how the plant really makes its money.

But his life begins to change when childhood friend Misaki (Haru Kuroki) returns to the village having apparently suffered a breakdown in Tokyo. Misaki’s resurfacing reinforces the purgatorial atmosphere as if everyone here were already dead. Having been away so long, only she immediately embraces Yu and simultaneously bonds with him in their outsider status. Encouraging him at work and at home, Yu gradually becomes more confident but equally dependent on the plant for his newfound status. When he’s suggested as the host of a TV documentary some of the locals object given his family background, but in contrast to his father’s opposition Yu is slowly seduced by the plant and the new life it offers him which seems almost too good to be true like a dream he is sure to be awoken from. In this, he mimics the man in the noh play who falls asleep in an inn and is transported to a world in which he is an emperor. He lives there happily for 50 years only to wake up again back in the inn and realise that really life is just a dream. 

Misaki hands him back his noh mask as means of separating himself from the world around him. She says that it forces you to confront yourself, and also perhaps implies a deeper connection with an idealised vision of pre-modern Japan uncorrupted by the greed and cynicism of a man like Ohashi who claims that “position is all that matters.” Toru had told Yu that the village didn’t need him, Misaki and Ohashi say it does though for different reasons. Yet Ohashi darkly suggests that it also needs a sacrfice, and in an odd way just as his father before him it may be Yu who sacrifices himself even at the cost of his idealised life. His encroaching cynicism is directly contrasted with the idealism of Misaki’s younger brother Keiichi (Ryuto Sakuma) who like he once was is meek and diffident yet certain in his idealism and unwilling to along with the lies and wrongdoing that increasingly define village life. Eventually, he leaves the village altogether.

Yu meanwhile achieves his destiny in bringing things full circle, conducting a kind of purification ritual that aims to rid the village of Ohashi’s corruption as symbolised by the giant rubbish tip which is slowly consuming the landscape. Yu’s problem was that he tried to make his life on top of all this filth and toxicity only to realise what the price of that new life might be. Conjuring the strange and oppressive atmosphere of small-town life where past is always present and petty prejudices die hard, Fujii spins a poetic tale of fatalism and redemption amid the misty mountains and ancient chants of a slowly dying village.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Parades (パレード, Michihito Fujii, 2024)

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Living a life without regrets is easier said than done. The protagonists of Michihito Fujii’s The Parades (パレード, Parade) each have unfinished business that prevents them moving on from this world, but what they discover is an unexpected sense of solidarity among similarly lost souls as they try to lay themselves to rest. After all, all they can do now is observe and reflect while helping others like them with their own lingering doubts and regrets.

Drawing inspiration from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Fujii first introduces us to Minako (Masami Nagasawa). A 35-year-old single mother, she wakes up on a beach and frantically looks for her seven-year-old son Ryo (Haru Iwakawa) little realising that the reason no one seems to be able to hear or react to her is because she’s already dead. Picked up by fellow ghost Akira (Kentaro Sakaguchi), she’s taken to a disused fairground that doubles as a hub for wandering souls. Though it takes her a while to accept her new situation, she gradually bonds with others at the camp each of whom have their own unfinished business which isn’t all that different from her own in that they mostly want to be sure the people they left behind will be alright.

The film takes its name from the monthly processions in which wandering souls meet by lantern light to look for their missing people together. This sense of solidarity and empathy seems to echo the best of humanity along with a melancholy longing. There appears to be little rancour in this afterlife, a yakuza who was killed in a gang war simply feels sorry for his father and so guilty about the girlfriend he left behind that he’s been afraid to face her for the last seven years, and a high school girl who took her own life because of bullying first thinks her unfinished business is vengeance on the bullies but later accepts is actually a desire to apologise to her best friend who then had to take the brunt of the bullies’ cruelty on her own.

What the film seems to say is that we should have more of this fellow feeling in life. Former film producer Michael (Lily Franky) constantly references his days as a student protestor remarking that they might not have amounted to very much but at least they had unity. His regret is less his failed revolution than a moment of emotional cowardice that saw the woman he loved marry someone else instead. Constant references to the end of Casablanca echo their plight as if Maiko (Yuina Kuroshima / Hana Kino) married Sasaki (Ayumu Nakajima / Hiroshi Tachi) for the good of the revolution though she really loved Michael who unlike Rick just walked out on it because in the end he wasn’t brave enough to risk the consequences of its success or failure. 

The world building may not always be consistent and the rules of this universe appear unclear. It seems that in general the ghosts don’t linger long. Even the heavenly liaison Tanaka (Tetsushi Tanaka) appears to have been dead not longer than 40 years with Michael seemingly the only other long-stayer with the others’ deaths fairly recent. In general they are only really waiting for themselves or others, wanting to make sure that their loved ones will be alright in their absence even though there’s nothing more they can do for them now other than observe. Though they can walk through this world and interact with physical objects, their presence is otherwise invisible unless the person they wish to contact happens to be in an altered state. To this extent, the resolution may seem like a bit of a cop-out but does lend an additional poignancy and imply that these lessons learned in limbo can still be taken into the mortal realm creating additional empathy and solidarity among the living so that they may be able to live their lives freely and fully perhaps not entirely without regrets but at least with fewer of those that would prevent them from moving on when their time comes. But even if they find themselves trapped in limbo, they’ll hopefully find others like themselves and a gentle sense of hopefulness about what’s to come even as they prepare to leave this world.

Trailer (English subtitles)

18×2 Beyond Youthful Days (青春18×2 君へと続く道, Michihito Fujii, 2024)

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Apparently inspired by a real life viral blog, the latest from the prolific Michihito Fujii, 18×2 Beyond Youthful Days (青春18×2 君へと続く道, Seishun 18×2 Kimi e to Tsudzuku Michi) is in many ways in dialogue with Shunji Iwai’s Lover Letter which itself makes an appearance in the film in a allusion to a love that as the hero says never quite even began. Even so, the he, as the heroine had, undertakes a journey not so much to find himself as to recover the young man he once was before romantic heartbreak and professional strife left him emotionally numb and filled with despair.

Jimmy (Greg Hsu Kuang-han) says he’s on a journey with no destination, and perhaps, he is though it’s clear there is an end point in sight only one he’s reluctant to go to. It’s never quite clear to what extent the film intends its big reveal to be quite so obvious, though it seems clear enough that this is a tale of lost love and a circular journey towards a new beginning. After being kicked off the board at the games company he started, Jimmy catches sight of an old postcard soaked in the perfume of a girl he once new perhaps ironically called the flow of time. It does indeed call him back to the past, sending him on a trip to Japan where he too encounters various people who help him to reaffirm himself during a solo trip towards the nexus of his emotional pain.

Back in Tainan 18 years previously, he developed a crush on a young Japanese woman, Ami (Kaya Kiyohara), who rocked up at the karaoke bar he was working at the summer before uni and asked for a job having lost her wallet. Ami is four years older than him and perhaps sees his clumsy attempts at courtship as childish even as he earnestly brushes up his Japanese to be able to converse with her but otherwise treats him warmly if keeping him at arms length. In his own recollections, Jimmy was a clueless teenager who never really picked up on the pregnant hints Ami was leaving him in her sometimes cryptic comments and confusing behaviour but nevertheless went into a massive sulk on hearing she planned to return to Japan wasting precious time with her and almost ruining the memories of their tentative relationship by allowing it to end on a sour note.

The 36-year-old Jimmy is only a little wiser, a lonely, melancholy man who appeared to have little aside from the work that been taken away from him. This apparent mid-point of his life, a double 18 split in the middle, affords him the opportunity for self-reflection as many of those he meets along his way remind him. What he’s doing in a way is travelling on the flow of time, heading back into the past in order to travel through it and out the other side as he later says leaving this moment of youth behind to move into a more settled adulthood and an end to his frustrated inertia. 

As in Love Letter, he ends up deep in frosty snow country reflecting the emotional coolness of his adult self in contrast with the tropical temperatures of Tainan and sunniness of his memories of the summer with Ami. What he discovers is also a kind of love letter as yet undelivered but waiting for him at the destination he was afraid to approach as a kind of closure that will allow him to begin moving forward while carrying his memories with him rather than remaining trapped inside them. Reflecting that the people we meet along the way each leave something of themselves behind in our hearts, Jimmy is finally able to recognise himself and discover a way forward in reaccepting the memories of his summer that never quite blossomed into love as warm and comforting rather than the chilly sadness of the pure white vistas of snow country on Ami’s postcard. Travel doesn’t as much broaden his horizons as remove them, leaving him with an endless, meandering journey open to the possibilities of life and a spirit of adventure born of a lost but not forgotten love.

18×2 Beyond Youthful Days screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Trailer (English subtitles)

Day and Night (デイアンドナイト, Michihito Fujii, 2019) [Fantasia 2019]

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day and night poster 1Can two wrongs ever really make a right? Michihito Fujii’s Day and Night (デイアンドナイト) wants to ask if the difference between good and evil is really as stark as that between dawn and dusk, or if life is really more like twilight in which morality is a relative concept and acts cannot by judged individually but only as a part of the whole. What the hero discovers, however, is that the world is an inherently unfair place and it may not be possible to “win” against the forces of self-interest solely through being pure of heart.

The drama begins with a stunned Koji (Shinnosuke Abe) returning to his small-town home to graffiti scrawled across his fences and his father lying in repose inside after having apparently taken his own life. No one will quite explain to Koji what exactly has happened, but it seems there has been some unpleasantness surrounding his father’s auto business. Though most of the other townspeople including his old friends are civil, they are also frosty and obviously unwilling to address the subject of Mr. Akashi save to press Koji for money they might still be owed as employees.

Meanwhile, poking around the garage in search of answers, he runs into the mysterious figure of Kitamura (Masanobu Ando) who claims to have known his father well though Koji’s mother claims never to have heard of him. Seeing as Kitamura is the only person willing to speak to him, Koji ends up taking a job at the orphanage where he works which turns out to be a little different than he thought seeing as Kitamura is actually the head of a local crime ring which exists with the sole purpose of keeping the orphanage running.

Though Koij, like his father, is an upstanding, law-abiding young man, he is quickly pulled into Kitamura’s world of moral justifications when presented with his personal philosophy in which the greater good remains paramount. Kitamura steals cars by night, stripping the unsellable ones for parts, which is where Mr. Akashi came in having succumbed to a life of “crime” in order to support himself while his business was suffering. He also does some possibly less justifiable work in the red light district while making a point of beating up drug dealers because 80% of the kids in his care have a parent in jail for crimes related to substance abuse. In Kitamura’s view at least, these are all “justifiable”, morally defensible “crimes” given that they are necessary to ensure the protection of the orphans. Though the money is good and Koji does need it, they are not in this for personal gain but to protect something they feel is important.

As Kitamura puts it, Mr. Akashi put his faith in laws that are meant to protect people but in the end it killed him. Having discovered a serious flaw in the auto parts he received from a local company he did the “right thing” and blew the whistle but Nakamichi Autos is the major player in the local economy and many people did not take kindly to having their reputation called into question. Nakamichi rallied its supporters and had Akashi hounded into submission. As one of the former employees tells Koji, the truth “hardly matters anymore”. Nakamichi doesn’t care there is a minor flaw in their products because they feel the chance of a fatal accident is slim enough not to need to worry about and happy to let the risk continue as long as they maximise their profits.

Miyake (Tetsushi Tanaka), Nakamichi’s CEO, also has his justifications, insisting that there’s no such thing as right and wrong only the cold logic of numbers and that the death of one man will not change anything. Increasingly pulled into Kitamura’s world of crime, Koji opts for underhanded methods to expose the truth about Nakamichi and clear his father’s name but finds in the end that no one is interested in facts. Listening in to some of his father’s old employees enjoying their belated severance pay he is dismayed to hear them too justifying their actions as they each insist that they did what they thought was “best” for everyone, for a peaceful life, for their families.

In truth, Koji claims he hated his father. That he resented him for always working all the time. Now however he begins to see that Akashi was only trying to protect his family by providing for it. His father was a “good” man, and he did the “right” thing, but he also became involved with Kitamura’s morally questionable crime syndicate. Kitamura wants to protect the orphans and takes care of them well, but can he really justify his actions solely on the grounds that there is no honest way to care for children who are often victims of an unfair society the pressures of which have pushed their parents from the “moral” path? What Koji’s left with, broadly, is that “good” people do “bad” things for “good” reasons, but bad people do bad things because they’re selfish and so they hardly care about the consequences of their actions. He starts to believe that the only way to resist is to fight fire with fire, but discovers that the little guy is always at a disadvantage when there is too much vested interest in not “making trouble”. It turns out everyone is OK with the status quo, so long as it’s not their car that might suddenly lose its wheels. As Miyake says, “that’s just how society works”.

A bleak meditation on the wider nature of justice and moral greyness of the world, Fujii’s noirish drama suggests good and bad are less like day and night than a shady evening in which the only shining light is the greater good. The world, however, continues on in self interest and the “good” will always lose to the “bad” as long it compromises itself trying to play by the other guy’s rules. Koji finds himself torn between a desire to avenge his father and a new sense of fatherhood fostered by bonding with a teenage girl at the orphanage as he contemplates the existence of a line between good and evil and his own place along it, but his old fashioned “nobility” finds no answer in the infinitely corrupt moral dubiousness of the modern society.

Day and Night was screened as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Journalist (新聞記者, Michihito Fujii, 2019)

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The Journalist poster 2In these days of “fake news” and misinformation, a robust press is more important than ever. In Japan, however, the news media institution has long been decried as toothless, if not actually in league with the ruling regime. A timely and appropriately exasperated conspiracy thriller, Michihito Fujii’s The Journalist (新聞記者, Shinbun kisha) is inspired by the non-fiction book by newspaper reporter Isoko Mochizuki who makes a brief appearance at the beginning of the film and has herself been singled out as “problematic” by politicians unused to being held to account and objecting to her intensive interview technique.

Mochizuki’s fictionalised stand in, Erika Yoshioka (Shim Eun-kyung), is a rookie reporter who grew up in America with her Japanese journalist father and Korean mother. Following her father’s “suicide” she returned to Japan and is currently working for Toto News where she receives a mysterious fax containing information about a suspicious government plan to found a new medical university.

Meanwhile, idealistic former international diplomat Sugihara is on temporary secondment to CIRO (Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office) – a secretive organisation set up under the occupation to mirror the US’ CIA but often criticised for acting like a secret police force and expending too much effort on spying on ordinary Japanese citizens on Japanese soil rather than gathering useful international intelligence. Sugihara (Tori Matsuzaka) finds himself conflicted in his new work, the first assignment of which is handling a smear campaign against a young woman (clearly inspired by the Shiori Ito case) who has accused a high ranking journalist close to the government of rape. A married man with a baby on the way, he fears rocking the boat but resents his complicity with such obvious government finagling and failure to counter the misogynistic narrative that passes for office banter.

When his former mentor, Kanzaki (Kazuya Takahashi), commits suicide, no longer able to live with his compromises, Sugihara begins to reconsider his decision not to go against his superiors but finds it difficult to countenance “betraying” his organisation even in the knowledge that they are no longer working in the best interests of the people. Yoshioka, with whom he eventually bonds after witnessing her sympathetic treatment of Kanzaki’s bereaved daughter, may in some senses be better placed to resist given her overseas upbringing. Where Sugihara and the news media at large struggle with the idea of standing up to authority, Yoshioka is keen to sell the ideals of journalistic integrity, insisting that a robust press is essential in holding power to account.

Meanwhile, she finds herself a lone voice adrift in the largely patriarchal world of Japanese news media. Leaving the press conference called by the woman accusing the government crony of rape, she stops to tell off a pair of journalists making sexist comments but receives only a brief eye roll before they walk away laughing. She also finds herself resented by her colleagues for pointing out that their hounding of Kanzaki’s bereaved wife and daughter at his funeral is insensitive and inappropriate, but refuses to back down in fierce determination to do what is right even if it is not popular.

Meanwhile, Sugihara’s odious boss Tada (Tetsushi Tanaka) is desperately trying to keep a grip on power from the shadows. He uses Sugihara’s conflicted loyalties against him, subtlety reminding him that he has a wife and newborn daughter to whom he has a greater responsibility, and insisting that there is no “shame” in complicity when it comes to maintaining “the illusion of democracy”. CIRO, it has to be said, does not come out of this well as it wilfully does the government’s dirty work – covering up the indiscretions of “valuable” politicians and their relatives in order to avoid the unpleasant chaos of unwelcome political scandals. Kanzaki’s compromises left him a broken and defeated man, Sugihara wonders what kind of man his daughter would think him to be if he too just went along with the government line and enabled their subversion of democracy solely for personal and economic security.

The press may be waking up, but The Journalist’s chief takeaway is that change comes when enough people find the courage to keep saying no. As the ending implies, the battle is far from over but it has perhaps begun thanks to the efforts of those like Mochizuki and her filmic counterpart Yoshioka as well as the courage of whistleblowers like Sugihara who risk personal ruin merely for speaking out. A timely, urgent defence of press freedom in the face of tightening authoritarianism, The Journalist is an all too plausible conspiracy thriller in which the last guardians of liberal democracy are the nails which refuse to be hammered down.

The Journalist screens in New York on July 27 as part of Japan Cuts 2019.

Original trailer (English subtitles)