Tag: Nippon Connection

Black River Intro

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Black River is a good place to start this retrospective as, though it’s not his first film, it is the first time Nakadai played a prominent role on screen. His cinema career, however, began a little ignominiously with a small gig as an extra on Seven Samurai having been sent there by the acting school he was training at at the time. He had obviously never been involved with a period film before and Akira Kurosawa actually yelled at him that he “walked funny” and didn’t know how to move like a samurai. He was only in one scene all he needed to do was walk across the set, but Kurosawa kept making him redo it from 9am to 3pm before finally giving up. 

Nakadai seems to have taken this quite badly and made a vow that he was going to become a great actor so he could turn down all of Kurosawa’s films, so he was quite reluctant to work with him again. He rebuffed all of Kurosawa’s attempts to do so and only accepted the role in Yojimbo when Kurosawa reached out to him personally, having apparently remembered him from Seven Samurai. Presumably, he’d either learned to walk like a samurai by that point, though he’d mainly done films set in the present day, or Kurosawa didn’t mind because his character in Yojimbo after all represents a kind of modernity. 

In any case, Nakadai got his start in films proper after he was spotted playing Oswald in Ibsen’s Ghosts by actress Umeji Tsukioka who recommended him to her husband, the director Umetsugu Inoue, and he made his film debut in Pheonix in 1956 in which Tsukioka starred. He then played several small parts in other films before playing what’s really his first prominent role Masaki Kobayashi’s Black River, which is the film you’re about to see, after being recommended to the director by a friend of his who was an executive at Haiyuza theatre company where Nakadai had trained and continued to work.

Throughout his career, Nakadai was primarily a theatre actor. Though he was highly sought by each of the big five studios during Japan’s golden age, Shochiku, Toho, Nikkatsu, Toei, and Daei, he never signed an exclusive contract and preferred to remain freelance meaning that he was in the enviable position of having a lot of control over which projects he participated in. While the studio system was in place, the Big Five’s business model was largely based around a roster of exclusive stars that they slotted into whichever project they thought would suit them. If a director wanted to use an actor from another studio, they’d have to come to some sort of agreement which could be quite difficult to work out. But as Nakadai was freelance, he could work with any of the studios he wanted and was able to play a wide variety of roles rather than by literally type cast as a leading man or character actor or limited one particular genre. 

That’s why you’ll see the Shochiku logo before Black River which was the home studio of director Masaki Kobayashi, while The Age of Assassins was made for Toho which was the home studio of Kihachi Okamoto. During the days of studio system, the Big Five would also train their own directors in house and there was no real other way to become a mainstream film director without joining a studio and working your way up from assistant director. That said, the interesting thing about Masaki Kobayashi is that he was a relative of the great star Kinuyo Tanaka who had also spent most of her career at Shochiku before breaking her exclusive contract following the backlash on her return from an American tour in 1949. She also went freelance in order to work with a wider variety of directors and later pursue a career as one herself. 

The working relationship between Nakadai and Kobayashi was the most important in terms of their cinema work to the point that Nakadai really became a stand-in for Kobayashi on many of his films and especially his magnum opus The Human Condition. They were, however, from quite different generations. Kobayashi joined Shochiku as an assistant director after graduating from Waseda University in 1941 but was drafted not long after and left for the war though he regarded himself as a pacifist and resisted by refusing all promotions above the rank of private despite being considered a capable soldier. He spent about a year in a prisoner of war camp after the war ended and only returned to Japan 1946 to discover his father and older brother had died, while he was professionally disadvantaged as other directors who were exempt from the draft and had continued working throughout the war had leapfrogged ahead of him. He ended up serving as an assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita who was only a couple of years older than he was, though they got on really well and Kobayashi had a lot of admiration fro Kinoshita’s work who had, after all, been quite a close collaborator with Kinuyo Tanaka. 

That might explain why his first couple of films were more regular Shochiku fare. The studio specialised in “shomingeki” or films that revolved around the lives of ordinary, lower-middle-class urbanites. It wasn’t until his third film, Thick-Walled Room that he began to address the themes that were more personal to him such as Japan’s wartime legacy and the struggle of the individual against a corrupt system. But The Thick-Walled Room which dealt with the still sensitive topic of wartime atrocities proved too controversial for Shochiku, which is not a studio that generally tolerates controversy. Consequently The Thick-Walled Room was shelved for a few years for fear of offending the Americans though the Occupation was already over and Kobayashi had to go back to making films that were much more typical of the studio’s style.

After testing the waters with cynical baseball drama I Will Buy You, Black River may be Kobayashi’s second attempt to work on material that directly interested him. Scripted by Zenzo Matsuyama, the film explores on the radiating corruption of US military bases in the post-Occupation society through the lives of those drawn into its nexus of violence and immortality. It opens with an American plane noisily zooming overhead above sleazy clubs with Western names catering American servicemen. Sex workers line the streets and it’s clear that the entire area is economically dependent on the base for its survival. Caught between those living in a rundown slum area and red-light district are recently arrived student Nishida and pure-hearted waitress Shizuko neither of whom feel they belong in this environment. Nishida is a student who’s chosen to live out here to save a few pennies, but at heart thinks he’s much better than the other residents at the tenement. Shizuko is attracted to him because he seems different and represents a link back to a more middle-class, respectable vision of Japan, but ends up being raped by local gangster Killer Joe who represents post-war moral decline in his wilful collaboration with the Americans. She’ll spend the rest of the film trying to retrieve the parasol that Joe took from her that represents innocence, while struggling with herself, unable to understand her attraction to the man who raped her despite her fear of him and his violence towards her.

Ineko Arima who plays Shizuko is another interesting case in that she actively fought for more control over the kind of roles she played even within the studio system. She started out playing male roles at Takarazuka Review and made her film debut in a Takarazuka Review film for Toho. Before moving to Shochiku she co-founded the independent production company Ninjin Club with fellow actresses Keiko Kishi and Yoshiko Kuga that aimed to circumvent the studio system and provide more creative freedom for actresses in particular. Ninjin Club is also one of the production companies listed for this film alongside Shochiku. 

You actually might not recognise her to begin with because she’s wearing this amazing set of false teeth that give her a rather grotesque appearance, but the slum landlady is played by Isuzu Yamada, a star of the 1930s who mainly worked at Toho and often worked with Mizoguchi and Naruse. She had also gone freelance at this point having left Toho during the labour dispute that erupted in the mid-40s, so you could say that these are all very appropriate stars for a Masaki Kobayashi film in each having in some way rebelled against the corrupt studio system, even if Kobayashi himself was more or less complicit with it. 

The landlady’s grotesquery provides an interesting counter to the amorality of Joe and his backer who are in cahoots with the Americans and want to knock the tenement down to build a love hotel. She is merely someone whose worst instincts have been indulged by the post-war moral decline as she gleefully teams up with Joe in the hope of many a bit more money from selling her apartment block, little caring that most of the residents have nowhere else to go and are only living here because they can’t afford anything better. The resistance, led by Korean communist Mr Kim, in the end proves ineffective and it seems there really is no solution other than violence to deal with a man like Joe, though in taking him out one would only damn oneself. Nevertheless, the film does not particularly blame the Americans so much as the Japanese for allowing themselves to be corrupted in this way and permitting this state of lawlessness to exist in which a man like Joe is free to behave as he does with no real consequences. I do hope you’ll enjoy it.

Text of an intro given at the 2026 Nippon Connection film festival.

Tiger (Anshul Chauhan, 2025)

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At 35 years old, Taiga (Takashi Kawaguchi) is beginning to tire of city life and thinking of settling down, but as a gay man in contemporary Japan, there are limits to how much that is possible for him. Inspired by real life stories from the LGBTQ+ community, Anshul Chauhan’s Tiger is more character study than issue drama, but explores the ways in which Taiga’s horizons are constrained by the way society receives his sexuality to the point that he finds himself considering entering a platonic marriage as the only real way to ensure a full domestic life with the possibility of raising children.

As someone from the “Friendship Marriage” organisation points out, even the recently introduced partnership system available in some areas of Japan is a long way from a legal marriage and is geared more towards housing provision and hospital visits. It doesn’t confer inheritance rights for those who own property, or even the right to attend a funeral if the other relatives object. Child adoption is relatively rare in Japan in any case and not generally available to same sex couples while even costly options such as IVF and surrogacy could be bureaucratically difficult given the way the family register system works. 

Though the woman giving the presentation seems incredibly angry about the weakness of the partnership system legislation, labelling it “a disgrace”, it can’t be denied that Friendship Marriage is essentially complicit with the heteronormative views of mainstream society in which it is still socially and in some cases practically difficult not to be married. After signing up for the service, Taiga meets a woman who is half-Iranian and grew up in Tehran. It doesn’t occur to him that her decision to come to Japan was not made entirely freely and that she cannot safely return there without the threat of violence. Taiga may feel himself constrained, but he won’t be arrested or tortured solely for existing as a gay man. Nevertheless, he faces reduced options when it comes to employment and has never revealed his sexuality to his father fearing that he will reject or disown him.

Tensions come to a head, as they so often do, when the matter of inheritance is raised. Taiga’s sister Minami (Maho Nonami) is aware of his sexuality though does not seem altogether accepting and is resentful of his life in Tokyo which she assumes to be aimless and free of responsibility while she has had to shoulder the burden of caring for their ageing father alone. It’s obvious that she has been banking on inheriting the family home and is resentful on hearing their father has suggested leaving it to Taiga on the condition that he marries and has children, knowing that this is something that is not possible in contemporary Japan. The implication is that Taiga had no choice but to leave his home town in order to lead a more authentic life and essentially develops two opposing personas, that of “Tiger” the aspiring porn star and “Taiga” the would-be-family man. 

Minami later wields this duality against him, asking him to baby-sit her daughter Kaede to whom he is especially close, while threatening to out him to their father if he doesn’t agree to give up his right to the domestic space represented by their family home. His former lover, Koji (Yuya Endo), has entered a conventional heterosexual marriage without disclosing his sexuality to his wife and is riddled with regrets over not leaving with Taiga and trying to start a domestic life in the city as a gay couple. The Friendship Marriage system removes the element of betrayal, but also elides authenticity in providing a mechanism for each partner to fulfil social and parental expectation while avoiding disclosing their sexuality, and equally prevents them from enjoying a full and loving domestic relationship with a same-sex partner.

The film never particularly suggests that there is anything wrong with the way Taiga is living in Tokyo nor with his desire to get into gay porn, but merely highlights the sense of emptiness he feels as someone denied the possibility a full domestic life. There is after all a kind of age cap involved in his life as a sex worker working at a men-only massage parlour which he may fast be approaching even aside from the clients who like to exorcise their own sense of powerless by paying money to abuse and humiliate him. In the end, all he’s left with is an uncertain liminal space living as a literal stand-in marooned on the sidelines with no place to call his own.

Tiger screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Tiger Production Partners

New Group (Yuta Shimotsu, 2025)

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If all your friends went and formed a giant human pyramid, would you go and form a giant human pyramid too? Parents used to caution against such dangerous group think, but it has to be said that perhaps they only complained when the group activity didn’t suit them or required some additional expense they didn’t really want to pay. If the group activity was studying hard at school to get into a good university and become a successful member of society rather than buying the later must have fashion item to fit in at school, then they’d hardly complain about that.

Yuta Shimotsu’s absurdist satire New Group is in many ways about the deeply ingrained patterns of thought that exist within a society to the extent that they are rarely ever questioned. Ai (Anna Yamada) is coming to an age in which she is beginning to feel hemmed in by a conformist society but at the same time does not have the courage or confidence to challenge it. When she sees another girl being bullied, she wants to step in to defend her but all she manages to do is give the bullies a hard stare. Her friend Haru asks her what university she’s thinking of applying to to, but Ai only says she’ll apply to the same one as her and study the same thing. She can’t even answer when she’s put on the spot about what she wants to do for the school festival for fear of picking the wrong one and being ostracised from a particular faction, so she just goes along with the first person who asked for her vote.

As her teacher says, though there is a strong groupthink in play, everything comes to a binary. It’s always “uchi-soto”, us and them. But what does it mean to be a member of the main group? Ai isn’t convinced she wants to give up her autonomy just to fit in and increasingly feels herself to be an outsider. Her name is of course reminiscent of the English pronoun “I”, though it’s true meaning is “love”. She’s pulled out of inertia by a boy named “Yu” who nevertheless is later pulled into the pyramid and tells her that “ai” is here, meaning both that the group is love and Ai, the individual, belongs with in it. She replies that he’s wrong, that isn’t love, and it isn’t her. There is no room for the individual within the pyramidic structure of the group.

Yu has recently returned from abroad and is living alone free of parental authority which is why he doesn’t fit into the carefully controlled harmony of the school. He is out of step at marching practice and less afraid to voice his true opinions. He intervenes to save the other girl from the bullies and chastises Ai that just watching makes you complicit. Yu might as well be one of the space aliens they keep talking about on TV, a subversive force out to destabilise the harmonious society. Yet Ai’s doubts seem to have arisen because of a personal trauma. As a child, she chose the group over her younger sister who was then killed in an accident. She feared being excluded and essentially sacrificed her sister for approval while also denying her affiliation to the group that is her family.

The quest of Ai and Yu is then to maintain their selfhoods while operating in a society that demands conformity. Controlled by the maniacal headmaster, their schoolmates all immediately start marching to the beat of the PE teacher’s whistle and dutifully take their place in the pyramid in which all they do is uphold the structure of the group. As the pair are chased by the zombie-like figures, Ai has to confront the fact that it might just be easier to go with the flow, even if that too comes at a price. Even so, in her efforts to resist, is Ai not just creating another group of her own that can only exist because of its opposition to the first? If there is “I” there must also be “you” and never the twain shall meet. A TV commentator played by the director Takashi Shimizu tries to speak out about the nonsense groupthink being conveyed through the innocuous medium of daytime television but is dragged off air while shouting at everyone to wake up and think for themselves. It seems that few are brave enough to switch off and think for themselves while the only path to freedom lies in loneliness and exile even if in the end it is “love” that saves us after all.

New Group screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2025 “NEW GROUP” Film Partners

A Century in Sound (百年の音色, Nick Dwyer & Tu Neill, 2024)

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Listening cafes are a phenomenon particular to Japan in which the music is the draw rather than the quality of whatever refreshments are available. Indeed, as Nick Dwyer and Tu Neill’s documentary A Century in Sound (百年の音色, Hyakunen no neiro) makes plain, they are spaces of community and identity in which people with similar tastes come together even if, as at classical music cafe Lion, they sit in silence to better absorb the music. Exploring three such cafes which are themselves a dying breed, the film also examines Japan’s complicated 20th century history and the shifting tastes that accompanied it.

This is evident in the first cafe visited, Cafe Lion, which opened in 1926 and catered to a then new interest in European classical music which in Japan was viewed as something new and exciting. The nation was still emerging from Meiji-era transition and at that time, before the war, entering a moment of fierce internationalism and creativity. The current manager is in her 80s and relates her own memories of another Tokyo before the fire bombing along with the ways the city changed afterwards. Cafe Lion was among the first buildings to be rebuilt and they pride themselves on the quality of their sound system, even deciding to stop serving food because it was considered too noisy and got in the way of the customers’ ability to hear the music. Her son will be taking over the business, so she’s hopeful that this tradition will survive and they’ll be able to continue spreading the love of classical music in the wider community.

The reason these spaces originated was that in the beginning records and sound equipment were expensive so people couldn’t afford to buy their own and would request music they wanted to hear at a cafe instead. Jazz Kissa Eigakan didn’t open until 1978, but though it may have arrived earlier, the owner, Yoshida, attributes the popularity of jazz to a desire for freedom in the post-war society as exemplified by the protests against the security treaty with the Americans and subsequent anti-Vietnam War movement. A former film director, he found the same energy in the Japanese New Wave and opened the cafe to share his love of jazz and film even going so far as making it his life’s work to construct his own sound system to get the best possible sound for his customers that won’t leave them feeling tired or overwhelmed. He also hosts film screenings demonstrating the various ways these spaces have become community hubs that provide a refuge for people with similar interests along with a place to relax and be welcomed in an otherwise hectic city. 

That seems to be the draw for Atsuko, a regular at rock music cafe Bird Song which mainly plays Japanese music from the 70s and 80s. In her teenage years, she’d been a frequent visitor to famed rock cafe Blackhawk before going travelling and then settling down to have a family. Now regretting that she gave up her love of music, she’s returned to Bird Song to rediscover it along with another community of like-minded regulars. While Yoshida discusses the era of the student protests, the owner of Bird Song cites Happy End’s 1971 album as a turning point in not only in Japanese music but culturally in moving towards the post-Asama-Sanso society and the consumerist victory that led to the Bubble Era. He posits City Pop as the sound of consumerism and while looking back on his time as an ad exec in the era of high prosperity does not appear to think they were particularly good times or at least that they lacked a kind of spirituality that his customers are looking to rediscover in music. 

Dwyer and Neill make good use stock footage and films as well as artful composition to compensate for the talking heads while fully conveying the richness and warmth of these spaces along with their welcoming qualities. Though it’s obviously much easier now to access music wherever and whenever one wants, the cafes provide an optimal listening environment that no home system can replicate while simultaneously providing a place where people can come together and shut out the outside world. Though they may be dying out in a society driven by convenience, the owner of Bird Song has to work a second job as a security guard just to keep the lights on, the cafes represent the best of what a city can be in recreating, as one customer describes it, a village mentality of care and community built on the back of a love of music.

A Century in Sound Escape screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

BAUS: The Ship’s Voyage Continues (BAUS 映画から船出した映画館, Hokimoto Sora, 2025)

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According to the hero of Sora Hokimoto’s BAUS: The Ship’s Voyage Continues (BAUS 映画から船出した映画館, Eiga kara Funadeshita Eigakan), films are born of man’s battle against time and the desire to extend one moment into eternity. Yet his father was always looking for a new “tomorrow” and a path towards the future that ironically kept him from being fully in the  present. Inspired by the memoirs of Takuo Honda, the film is effectively a people’s history of cinema culminating in 2014 with the closure of the Baus Town cinema amid a climate in which film itself seems to have entered a terminal decline.

Indeed, Takuo’s father Shigeo (Shota Sometani) becomes almost a ghost himself. Having come to Tokyo insisting that movies were his “tomorrow,” the war leaves him a shadow of his former self and a spectral presence in the auditorium. Though Takuo’s mother (Kaho) and others at the cinema have discovered a new community eating together every night after the final screening, Shigeo is often out drinking with the chamber of commerce and rarely returns home. Still looking for “tomorrow,” he appears lost for direction despite opening a new, more modern cinema fit for the post-war era. 

As the mother of Shigeo’s wife Hama says, men are focused on past and future while it’s women who are forced to face the present leaving most of the more practical problems for Hama to deal with. Shigeo’s brother Hajime (Kazunobu Mineta) had perhaps been overly obsessed with the past and ultimately unable to move forward. After coming to Tokyo with Shigeo, he became an unsuccessful benshi only to be rendered obsolete by the arrival of talkies. Despite being drawn to the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the migrant workers, he later falls hard for militarism and becomes a casualty of the war both literally and spiritually. Shigeo laments the increasing censorship of the late 1930s complaining that it has become impossible to make or show films, but it’s little better afterwards as the Occupation forces push Hollywood movies at the expense of the European or Japanese.

Hajime had snapped back that entertainment wouldn’t change anything and that war purified the world, but Shigeo insists that films are a window from which the local population can learn about other lives and other places, a means of “building the heart” that might a save a soul. The older Takuo envisages a world in which watching a film normally or loving someone normally might become political acts in themselves. He weaves his personal history of film, which is also that of his family, with the political realities of the mid-20th century in which beautiful forests are cut down to make coffins for the endless dead and unexploded incendiaries lurk like ticking time bombs both literally and psychologically as, as one old man puts it, the nation’s struggles to reckon with its role in the war or its traumatic consequences. 

Nevertheless, even if Takuo is closing Baus Town for reasons stemming from his own traumatic loss, he continues to look for tomorrow despite his old age. Asked what his dream was, he replies only that he wanted his children to have better lives than he did, though he worries he may have failed. In any case, he remains lost within the labyrinths of cinema. The building itself, originally surrounded by fields in a much smaller Kichijoji, becomes a haunted space in his memory, half dream and longed-for place of warmth and salvation in which he remains a small child searching for his father in the empty auditorium.

The name for Baus Town is taken from the bow and stern of a ship, echoing Takuo’s own search for other horizons and a constant process of moving through the world. He too is trying battle time and make a moment last an eternity while admitting that there’s nothing so beautiful as smoke in the projector beam. He asks his daughter if smoke, like movies, isn’t connected to the afterlife and there are ways in which Takuo has also become a ghost, both haunted and haunting while films are themselves a kind of other world of the living past and a way of communing with those no longer here. Taking over production after Shinji Aoyama passed away, Sora gives the film an elegiac, poetic quality while asking if cinemas too might be resurrected in the same way as film even as Takuo ponders new directions while continuing to sail ahead in search of tomorrow.

BAUS: The Ship’s Voyage Continues screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Images: ©Honda Promotion BAUS/boid　

Diamonds in the Sand (砂の中のダイヤモンド, Janus Victoria, 2024)

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A middle-aged salaryman is awakened to the depths of his loneliness when his upstairs neighbour dies in an apparent lonely death in during the pandemic in Janus Victoria’s Filipino co-production, Diamonds in the Sand (砂の中のダイヤモンド, Suna no Naka no Diamond). Contrasting an epidemic of loneliness with the more literal spread of Covid-19, the film finds its hero trying to redefine his life and discover what gives it meaning in making connections with others. 

Yoji (Lily Franky) is indeed an isolated man whose world is shrinking around him. The DVD department of a large manufacturer where he works has been wound up and he’s been transferred to one that seems to deal in pornography is basically four men in a room with nothing to do. It’s no surprise that he tells his bosses he doesn’t need his computer when they go remote during the pandemic. A large clock seems to tick out his remaining time as if reminding him that his life is running out. Things aren’t much better at home, either. Divorced, he lives in a tiny, colourless flat and seems to have few friends. He’s aloof from even those he does know and always stands slightly outside of the group. One of his former colleagues has been given a big promotion, but it involves moving to Thailand which Yoji seems to regard as a kind of exile or age-based banishment even as he reminds them how much Japan has invested in the nation.

Yoji first becomes aware of the death of his upstairs neighbour when his discomposing body begins leaking through his ceiling. Staring at the stain left behind, he begins to contemplate the reality of his own lonely death and the meaninglessness of his life. He begins going to visit his mother in a care home and trying to rebuild a meaningful relationship with her, but she also asks him if he’s ever really been happy in his life. Though her body is failing and her days are sometimes dull or lonely, the memories of past happiness sustain her. If Yoji doesn’t even that, then his old age would be even more miserable and his life not worth living. The only spark of joy is a colourful pinwheel he bought for his mother on a whim but enlivens each of their worlds with a sense of fun and vibrancy.

This sense of encroaching isolation and emptiness is directly contrasted with the bustling streets of Manila which are alive with colour and life and where, Yoji is told, there is no loneliness. Minerva (Maria Isabel Lopez), the middle-aged woman who looked after his mother in the care home, is one of many working abroad to support a family in the Philippines and experiencing different kinds of loneliness and isolation in Japan. She has an almost grown-up daughter, Angel (Stefanie Arianne), whose father was Japanese, but she was not really accepted by his family and struggles to find a place for herself in either society. After abruptly travelling to Manila in search of a life less lonely, Yoji becomes to her almost a surrogate father offering the reassurance and connection that her own father obviously did not.

But Minerva has a point when she says Yoji lacks compassion and even after being warmly accepted by the community in the Philippines and witnessing their interconnected way of life refuses to become fully a part of it or to help others when they are in need. He sees coverage of extrajudicial killings on the television and is confronted by the fact that life is cheap here too, but is also judgemental and unwilling to fully embrace the community around him. Still, he ironically comes across a kind of graveyard of “surplus” Japanese goods like Mr Suzuki’s bowls that the house clearance staff patiently boxed up and threw away as if erasing his existence. One of the ashtrays still has ash in it. It’s this that perhaps enlightens him to what’s really important in life and convinces him of the necessity of accepting his responsibility to others rather wanting love connection from them without really thinking about giving anything in return. Like looking for diamonds in the sand, it’s the little things that matter and just asking someone if they’ve eaten yet can in its way save a life.

Diamonds in the Sand (砂の中のダイヤモンド, Janus Victoria, 2024) screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Missing Child Videotape (ミッシング・チャイルド・ビデオテープ, Ryota Kondo, 2024)

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“Now you’re it,” a little boy says, but in a game of hide and seek it can be difficult to tell the seeker from the sought. Inspired by classic J-horror, Ryota Kondo’s eerie debut feature Missing Child Videotape (ミッシング・チャイルド・ビデオテープ) takes the innate fear we have of things that are so old they surpass our understanding and couples it with a more psychological dread in which the heroes are quite literally haunted by their personal traumas.

The irony is that we first meet Keita saving a little boy lost in the forest, though he’s haunted by his failure to do the same for his younger brother Hinata who disappeared 13 years previously when they were both children. Keita’s mother regularly sends him VHS tapes of the day Hinata went missing he shot while playing with his father’s camera. Keita had been rude to his mother and seemingly resented his little brother tagging along behind him. He tells Hinata to go away, which he of course then does, never to be seen again. The boys somehow wander into a disused building where Keita suggests they play hide and seek, mostly so Hinata will go hide and stop bothering him. Catching sight of Hinata in a corridor, Keita tells him that he’s now “it” so it’s time to come look for him instead, but now he can’t find his brother anywhere. His rising panic is palpable from the terror in his voice to the increasing shakiness of the camera, even as it transitions into the mental state of the adult Keita as if the tape itself were on a constant loop in his mind. 

There is a suggestion that the boys are still playing hide and seek and that Hinata has also been trying to find his way back to his brother all this time. As for the now grown-up Keita, he’s fairly detached and on a surface level a little indifferent, still resenting his brother for seizing an eternal spotlight. He’s sick of everyone talking about it all the time and equally of the ambivalence of being the brother of the boy who disappeared, alternately pitied and suspected. He thinks his parents actually thought he probably killed Hinata but did nothing about it, while he always resented them anyway. Even as a child, it seemed apparent to him that they were only playing the roles of a family and none of it was “real”. In any case, he did not want to be forced into the role of big brother with all the responsibility that entails. 

To that extent, Keita is also a “missing child” and a man who is still a boy lost in a disused building that apparently never existed. His search for his brother is also a way of reclaiming himself and opening up to more complete human connections. The film is curiously ambiguous in its depiction of the relationship between Keita and Tsukasa, the man with whom he lives who has psychic abilities and is able to see ghosts and supernatural entities. Tsukasa tells the equally haunted reporter Mikoto that he’s “the person who lives with him,” but the pair otherwise behave more like a couple if one that seems content to let their secrets breathe.  

Nevertheless, Tsukasa comes to the conclusion that Keita is “under the influence of the mountain,” which as it turns out, has taken several more victims before and since Hinata’s disappearance. Another strange young man tries to warn Keita not to go back there, telling him a weird story about how his grandmother cannot really be his grandmother because of the ironic results of her sacrifice to the mountain gods. Indeed, this curse may reflect the lack of respect we’ve shown to the natural world as the mountain has become a dumping ground for unwanted things from bits of temples to a collection of funerary urns. Perhaps “unwanted” people are being thrown away there too, spirited away by the mountain and placed in some other realm. 

Kondo includes two kinds of tape each of which is imprinted with the psychic echoes of a traumatic event as Mikoto comes across a cassette recorded by students who also found the building that doesn’t exist, reflecting both the technological anxiety of classic J-horror along with the way that trauma replays and imprints itself on the present. Keita still appears to be haunted, and not least by himself as well as whatever did or didn’t happen the day his brother disappeared and the latent guilt he feels because of it. Playing hide and seek with himself, it seems that Hinata, and those he’s lost, may indeed have been with him all along, though both seeker and sought are apparently trapped within this infinite loop of fear and loneliness. 

Missing Child Videotape screens 28th May as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2024 “Missing Child Videotape” Film Partners

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)

Fly Me To The Saitama -FROM BIWA LAKE WITH LOVE- (翔んで埼玉 ～琵琶湖より愛をこめて～, Hideki Takeuchi, 2023)

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The Saitamafication of Japan continues in the long-awaited sequel to the hit 2019 comedy Fly Me to the Saitama. Though the visa system has been abolished and the citizens of Saitama are new free to enter the capital, that does not mean to say everyone is on the same page and the prefecture still faces internal divisions and increasing factionalism. Revolutionary Rei (Gackt) proposes a solution which involves connecting the series of train lines to make it easier to get around and building a beach resort to lesson their sense of inferiority over having no access to the sea.

Once again it has to be said that humour is very local and largely built around regional stereotypes, though it is perhaps curious that the ordinary citizens are often seen in clothing reminiscent of the 1930s something which is also echoed in scenes of trains arriving at stations greeted by crowds of well-wishers seeing soldiers off to war. This may in a sense echo the film’s central theme in the encroachment of Osaka imperialism in which Japan’s second city has launched a not so secret campaign to Osakify the rest of the nation, if not the world, using white powder manifesting as sand from Koshien Baseball Stadium which is a holy place to many as it is where the high school baseball championship takes place. 

They have a visa system in Osaka too, or more strictly the Kansai area, with Kyoto and Kobe apparently in on the plot and intent on looking down on suburban areas such as Wakayama and Shiga which is where Rei was planning on getting his sand. Shiga is set up as a the Saitama of the south west, a pleasant if dull sort of place with a lake its only claim to fame. Like Saitama it has a liberation front, led by Kikyo (Anne Watanabe) who known as the Oscar of Shiga because she went to France to study revolutions and is is dressed like Oscar from the Rose of Versailles. 

The citizens of Kyoto come in for a bit of a kicking for their stereotypically snobbish attitude, the natural politeness of the local dialect undone by a social gadget that reveals what they’re “really” thinking which is that their definition of Kyoite is very narrow. The stereotypical view of Osaka, as voiced towards the end of the film, is that the people are cheerful and warmhearted. The city is associated with comedy and particularly manzai double acts like the one which appears during the opening credits, which perhaps adds to the sense of despair and confusion that the normally nice Osakans could suddenly be hellbent on world domination aided by the already strong love for takoyaki throughout the nation.

As before, we also have a “real world” subplot in which members of a family listen to the radio broadcast outing the urban legend of Rei and his BL love story with Momomi, the Tokyo-raised governor of Saitama. These regional rivalries are tearing up the real world too with a tug of war match that threats to go incredibly wrong if the two areas with an existing beef are allowed to face each other in the final. In contrast, the fantasy world is a riot of zany 18th-century influenced design that sees Rei set off on a pirate ship to get his sand for the fake beach though the mayor of Kobe turns up dressed like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Kyoto-ite has Taisho-esque straw hat. When the gang are caught by the fascisitic Osakans they’re relegated to a dungeon under Koshien Stadium and enslaved because of Saitama’s low ranking amid the other prefectures of Japan.

It’s all very silly, and somewhat impenetrable to non-Japanese speakers who can’t pick up on the dialect switching or zany wordplay while a certain degree of familiarity with regional stereotypes is certainly helpful. In any case, while the Osakafication of Japan undoubtedly sounded quite bad, the same cannot be said for its Saitamaification and Rei’s desire to create a land without discrimination free of the oppression and inequality born of pointless regional snobbery where everyone is free to go wherever they please without let or hinderance. 

Fly Me To The Saitama -FROM BIWA LAKE WITH LOVE- screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Hijacked Youth – Dare to Stop Us 2 (青春ジャック 止められるか、俺たちを2,  Junichi Inoue, 2024)

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A loose sequel to 2018’s Dare to Stop Us, Hijacked Youth (青春ジャック 止められるか、俺たちを2, Seishun Hijack Tomerareruka, Oretachi wo 2) picks up a decade later with an autobiographically inspired tale from writer director Junichi Inouchi but in its way also becomes the latest in a series of indie films to offer a celebration of Japan’s mini theatres still struggling with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic while exploring the origins of the contemporary independent film scene. 

The allusion seems clear even from the film’s opening in which cinephile and former programmer Kimita (Masahiro Higashide) fears for the future of cinema amid the arrival of the VCR. Having quit his job to support a young family, he is puzzled but eventually won over when unexpectedly contacted by notorious film director Koji Wakamastu (Arata Iura) who has apparently decided to open a cinema in provinciail Nagoya after the screening of Ecstasy of the Angels was restricted because someone bombed a police box for real. Kimita wants to run it as a rep cinema, but Wakamatsu sees it partly as a vanity project and a side business so has his eye on the bottom line. Making the mistake of programming films he thinks are good rather than ones people want to see quickly puts them in the red with Wakamatsu pressuring Kimita to give in and agree to screen pink films even though he himself had admitted that pink cinema had had its day. 

Wakamatsu is forever taking Kimita to task for having a prejudice against these kinds of films which are after all the kind that Wakamatsu makes though he does concede that there are talented directors working in pink film who may someday become the leading lights of the Japanese cinema industry. Some of that is hindsight, but what the film is working towards is a link between pink film, which was independently produced in contrast to something like Roman Porno which was made by a studio with much higher budgets and production values, and the rise of independent cinema which is largely dependent on the mini cinema ecosystem to it keep going. 

But then the film is also a nostalgic memoir revolving around the director’s teenage dreams and his eventual meeting of Wakamatsu thanks to the cinema in Nagoya. The irony is that the first film had been titled “Dare to Stop Us,” focussing on Wakamatsu Pro during the turbulent days before Asama-sanso as an anarchic force in a sometimes staid film industry. But the through line here is that everyone gives up far too easily. Kimita abandoned his dreams to sell video recorders, while the young woman who works for him believes she has three strikes against her, the first being her gender, the second a lack of talent, and the third which she does not disclose that she’s a member of the Zainichi community of ethnic Koreans often discriminated against even the Japan of the 1980s and in fact today. 

Junichi gives up a bit easily too after making a twit of himself on Wakamatsu’s film set, though the picture he paints of him is larger than life. Fatherly and compassionate, he gives him solid advice to go to a proper uni and learn filmmaking with him while otherwise taking him under his wing, but also pretty much takes over after giving him his first opportunity to make a film and has a tendency to take no prisoners when it comes to his crew members. At least as far as the film would have it, he’s become a rather lonely figure now that his more politically minded friends have scattered following he decline of the student movement in Japan. As much as anything else, the film is a sort of hagiography as evidenced by the surreal coda which seems to reference the director’s early death in traffic accident in 2012, jumping forward 30 years to find the cinema still open and celebrating his legacy more literally yet also in its existence in supporting the indie scene Wakamatsu helped to birth. According to Wakamatsu, the most important thing is finding your own angle and sticking to it, something his rebellious spirit at least may have fostered in the many directors who started their careers at Wakamatsu Pro and not least Inoue himself.

Hijacked Youth – Dare to Stop Us 2  screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)