Tag: Sho Kasamatsu

Eternally Younger Than Those Idiots (君は永遠にそいつらより若い, Ryuhei Yoshino, 2021)

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An insecure young woman struggles to assume her place in the world while preparing to leave the aimless security of college life for an uncertain adulthood in Ryuhei Yoshino’s empathetic social drama, Eternally Younger Than Those Idiots (君は永遠にそいつらより若い, Kimi wa Eien ni Soitsura yori Wakai). Adapted from the novel by Kikuko Tsumura, Yoshino’s film has its share of quirky humour but seems to be overshadowed by a lingering darkness in which there is only constant suffering tempered by a longing for recognition which often goes unanswered.

Horigai (Yui Sakuma) is one of the lucky ones in that she’s already locked in a job for after graduation as a children’s social worker back in her hometown. After making a speech at a uni party, however, she’s challenged by a rude fellow student who calls her out for her arrogance in thinking she has the right to interfere in people’s lives. He has perhaps touched a nerve. Though it’s a job she’s always wanted, Horigai is worried that she isn’t up to it and won’t be able to help anyone in part because she feels herself to be somehow different from those around her and lacking the skills to see what everybody else just naturally sees. 

Her sense of inadequacy is thrown into relief by a chance meeting at a party with a soulful fellow student who has just been released after getting arrested for suspected kidnapping having allowed a little boy neglected by his parents to stay in his apartment. Though she bonds with him, he soon leaves her life in unexpected fashion leaving her with an unspoken story hanging in the air. At her part-time job doing quality control at a factory she befriends another young man, Yasuda (Yo Aoi), who eventually confides in her about a very personal problem which she had originally not taken very seriously only to feel bad that she didn’t notice how much pain it was causing and had in a sense even made it a little worse by unwittingly teasing him. She didn’t see it because, in this case understandably, she did not want to look but without fully realising did perhaps make a difference a life just by listening. 

Most of all, she berates herself for picking up on her new friend Inogi’s (Nao) buried trauma as manifested in a physical wound to her body. Horigai’s uni thesis is on the link between childhood environment and visions of success, exploring whether or not there’s a difference in the way people dream based on the way they were raised. Some of the answers are, if taken at face value, a little surprising, Inogi wishing for a beautiful daughter-in-law to take care of her in her old age perhaps hinting at her desire for the security of a conventional family, but also somewhat poignant in their seeming simplicity. When Horigai relates a traumatic childhood memory Inogai is brought nearly to tears, despite having just met her, in guilt and sorrow that she wasn’t there to help, a sentiment which is later returned when Horigai learns of her trauma while also reflecting on the fact that she survived it if only by force of will and the gentle kindness of someone who was simply there. 

Simply being there is as Horigai learns a big part of it, finally stepping into herself by daring to look at the things she didn’t want see and making a difference in someone’s life who might not have survived if she had simply gone about her business. Having believed herself a “defect”, unfit for human society and unable to make lasting connections with others she gains strength through mutual acceptance that gives her the confidence to be there for those who need her still uncertain if she is really up to the job but doing her best anyway. Death seems to overshadow her, haunted as she is by missing children and the spectres of those whose suffering she could not see, but she is finally able to rise above it in overcoming some of her own childhood trauma. Almost everyone is burdened with something be it guilt, loss, or the legacy of pain and abuse but it helps to have someone to help carry the load. “The world is full of scary shit. Want to try Mario Kart?” Inogai asks, and it might be as good a suggestion as any. 

Eternally Younger Than Those Idiots screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Ring Wandering (リング・ワンダリング, Masakazu Kaneko, 2021)

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“Don’t forget me” pleads a mysterious young woman guiding the hero of Masakazu Kaneko’s Ring Wandering (リング・ワンダリング) towards the buried legacy he is unwittingly seeking. In this metaphorical drama, the aspiring manga artist hero is on a quest to discover the true appearance of the long extinct Japanese wolf, but is confronted by a more immediate source of unresolved history while working on a construction site for the upcoming Tokyo Olympic Games. 

The manga Sosuke (Show Kasamatsu) is working on is about a wolf and a hunter, Ginzo (Hatsunori Hasegawa), whose daughter Kozue was killed by one of his own traps. Though praising the general concept, his workplace friend points out that his manga lacks human feeling but Sosuke claims it’s unnecessary in a story that’s about a duel to the death between man and nature while matter of factly admitting that Kozue is merely a plot device designed to demonstrate Ginzo’s manly solitude. Yet Soskue complains that he can’t make progress because the Japanese wolf is extinct and he can’t figure out how to draw it. 

His quest is in one sense for the soul of Japan taking the wolf as a symbol of a prehistoric age of innocence though as it turns out he knows precious little about more recent history. The workers at the construction site have heard rumours about a stoppage at another build and joke amongst themselves that if they should find any kind of cultural artefact they’ll just ignore it rather than risk the project being shut down or any one losing their job. The site itself symbolises a tendency to simply build over the buried past erasing traces of anything unpleasant or inconvenient. When Sosuke comes across an animal’s skull buried in a pit he has recently dug, he is convinced it’s that of a Japanese wolf only later realising it is more likely to be that of a dog killed in the fire bombing of Tokyo during the war along with thousands of others on whose bodies the modern city is said to lie. 

Then again, impassive in expression Sosuke is particularly clueless when it comes to recent history. While searching for more wolf cues he comes across a young woman (Junko Abe) looking for her missing dog but completely fails to spot her unusual dress aside from assuming the old-fashioned sandals she is wearing are for the fireworks show set to take place that day incongruously in the winter. Similarly in accompanying her to her home he is confused by all her references to things like the metal contribution and her brother having been sent to the country. He wonders if she might be a ghost, and she wonders the same of him, but still doesn’t seem to grasp that he’s slipped into another era fraught with danger and anxiety only realising the truth on exiting the dream and doing some present day research. 

The fallacy of violence works its way into his manga in the fact that Ginzo’s traps eventually lead to the death of his daughter while he becomes on fixated on besting the wild wolf as a point of male pride though others in the village are mindful to let it live. A pedlar meanwhile explains that the wolf has been forced down towards the village because of the declining economic situation as more people hunt in the mountains for food and fur depriving him of his dinner. He tells Ginzo that the country has been “brainwashed in militarism” and the gunpowder that killed Kozue and will one day be repurposed to create joy and awe is now his most wanted commodity. In the end Ginzo too is saved by a kind of visitation, a ghost from the past offering a hand of both salvation and forgiveness along with an admonishment forcing him to take responsibility for his role in his daughter’s death.

In forging a familial relationship with a lost generation Sosuke comes to a new understanding of more recent history and in a sense discovers the connection he was seeking with his culture, weaving the anxieties of 1940s into an otherwise pre-modern fable about the battle between man and nature in which wolf becomes not aggressor but casualty in a great national folly. Like Kaneko’s previous film Albino’s Trees deeply spiritual in its forest imagery and oneiric atmosphere, Ring Wandering finds its hero transported into the past while unwittingly discovering what it is he’s looking for without ever realising that it has always been right beneath his feet. 

Ring Wandering streamed as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©RWProductionCommittee

Masked Ward (仮面病棟, Hisashi Kimura, 2020)

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“This hospital is…abnormal” according to locum doctor Hayami (Kentaro Sakaguchi) as he begins to discover dark goings on while trapped in a former psychiatric home after being taken hostage by a man in a clown mask. Based on the medical mystery novel by Mikito Chinen, Masked Ward (仮面病棟, Kamen Byoto) is partly a meditation on guilt and grief and partly an attack on backroom eugenics in an often judgemental and potentially corrupt society, if wrapped up in a wilfully silly B-movie crime thriller. 

Still on a temporary sabbatical following a bereavement, Dr. Hayami is recruited by an old friend, Kosakai (Ryohei Ohtani), to cover a night shift at a long term care hospital mostly catering to patients living with dementia. It has to be said the hospital itself has an instantly creepy aura, the police who later arrive describing it as looking like a prison which is apt because no one ever thought to remove the bars from the interior intended to keep “dangerous” patients from escaping. Even so, Hayami is repeatedly assured that nothing ever happens here and most likely he won’t need to come out of his room. Unfortunately that proves to be bad advice because not long after he settles in, a man in a clown mask turns up with a young woman he apparently himself shot but now wants patched up thereafter taking everyone present hostage while hiding out from police who have instituted a manhunt after he robbed a convenience store at gunpoint. 

You’d have to admit it looks a bit suspicious that all of this happened the very night that Hayami is in charge, especially as it’s suggested he may bear a grudge towards head doctor Tadokoro (Masanobu Takashima) as he was the one who refused to admit Hayami’s late girlfriend Yoko (Izumi Fujimoto) who was killed in a car accident in which Hayami was driving. Then again, as Hayami says, what would be the point in that? Suffering frequent flashbacks he subconsciously links the young woman, Hitomi (Mei Nagano), with Yoko determined in a sense to save her instead while trying to figure out what exactly is going on in this very weird medical institution and what the clown is trying to achieve with his random siege. 

The creepiness of the hospital is already well established with its former psychiatric institution vibes, something only enhanced on the discovery of an apparently disused operating theatre which is no grimy basement filled with rusty equipment but appears to have been refurbished recently and is sparklingly clean. It doesn’t really take a genius to figure out what’s been going on in there or why evil head doctor Tadokoro doesn’t want to call the police, but it does call into question not just his own ethics but those of the wider medical profession as he advances a series of eugenicist justifications for his decisions insisting that some lives are not worth saving while those of the elite who “can’t bear to wait” obviously are. Many of those in their beds have no names, taking those only of the area in which they were found supposedly with no identification, and are receiving only basic care otherwise forgotten by an indifferent society while hypocritical politicians offer platitudes about equality, superficially insisting that every citizen should have the right to live, to be protected, and to have a future.  

Even so Kimura can’t quite decide how seriously he wants to treat the darkness at the film’s centre, embracing the outlandishness of the material through a series of B-movie cliches from eerie handheld photography in the creepiness of the of the empty hospital corridors to literal lightning effects and foreshadowing so heavy it almost feels ironic. Yet the tone is at the same time earnest and slightly naive, the police apparently minded to cover the whole thing up due to pressure from above while Hayami is otherwise free to blow the whistle by getting the media involved with a press conference beamed directly onto a big inner-city screen in the middle of a presidential campaign speech all of which seems faintly unlikely given how far they were prepared to go keep the conspiracy secret while one wonders if he’d really be able to get so much attention so quickly even having recovered the secret documents proving his claims are true. In any case, his speech is only really intended for an audience of one as he says pretty much the same thing as the duplicitous politician only he really means it while urging those who’ve been irreparably harmed to give up their hate and try to move on sharing feelings and hopes rather than anger and resentment which is a nice message but perhaps also not especially helpful in holding those who’ve misused their power to account. 

Masked Ward streams until 27th February in several territories as part of Japanese Film Festival Online 2022.

Original trailer (English sutbtitles)

Flowers and Rain (花と雨, Takafumi Tsuchiya, 2019)

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A troubled young man seeks fulfilment in hip hop glory but his self-involved insecurities frustrate his dreams in Takafumi Tsuchiya’s stylish coming of age drama Flowers and Rain (花と雨, Hana to Ame). Inspired by the album of the same name by real life rapper SEEDA, Tsuchiya’s film finds its conflicted hero consumed by a sense of internalised rage and cultural displacement as he struggles to find his place in conformist Japan after a childhood spent abroad realising only too late that he was not the only one struggling and that his self-absorbed inferiority complex has cost him dearly. 

Hakuhiro (Sho Kasamatsu) spent his early childhood in London where his father was working at the time. Whilst there, he was sadly subject to common racist microaggressions from other children who tried to put him down by showing off to their friends with ugly playground chants. Nevertheless, Hakuhiro and his older sister Saki (Ayaka Onishi) profess that they prefer living in the comparatively less stressful UK than in conformist Japan and it is indeed Saki who seems to have the most difficulty when they are forced to move back after the financial crisis. She is determined to return to the UK for university, but as we later see ultimately remained in Japan. Hakuhiro meanwhile has become a sullen and distant teen, bullied by the high school delinquents for being a returnee student. He gives them the same treatment as he gave the playground bullies, ignoring them until he is able to ignore them no more. Mostly he just keeps to himself, listening to hip hop on cassette via his retro walkman and vintage headphones. 

Hakuhiro dreams of becoming a top rapper by rapping in English, but a small circle of likeminded friends including a fellow high school student, Aida, are unconvinced. Though he actually comes from quite a wealthy family and still lives at home supported mainly by his parents, Hakuhiro wants to rap about the same things as his heroes such as street life and social oppression, none of which rings true to those around him who are painfully aware that he is somewhat uncomfortably appropriating the struggles of others and pretending to be something he’s not. He blames his friend Aida for his lack of success in not writing good enough beats for his words and Japan as a country for failing to “get” true hip hop. His sense of insecurity eventually tips over into belligerent arrogance that sees him taken in by an unscrupulous promoter who allows him to humiliate himself during a live rap battle with his high school bullies resulting in the probable end to a credible career as an underground rapper. 

To get more experience of what he sees as “the life”, Hakuhiro has also gotten himself involved with drugs firstly by growing cannabis and then by trafficking cocaine on behalf of a shady street gang. His relationship with his family has obviously suffered and though he’s nominally gone back to uni he doesn’t seem very invested in his studies. Saki, herself troubled in repeatedly failing to pass the final exams for her MBA, tries to talk some sense into him but Hakuhiro repeatedly fails to notice that she is also in distress and trying to tell him something important. A brush with the law pushes him back towards the straight and narrow, but does not exactly humble him and he is still blind to the various ways in which his self-absorbed and arrogant behaviour ruins his relationships and with them his chance of ever making it in the music business. 

Only tragedy finally awakens him to his failings. As Aida had tried to tell him, his problem was a refusal to face reality as reflected in the inauthenticity of his lyrics. If he wants to make it as an artist he’ll have to face himself from a position vulnerability and give up the macho posturing of his adolescence for something a little more “real”. Drawing inspiration from SEEDA’s life and music, Tsuchiya is unafraid to allow his hero to appear unsympathetic even while emphasising the lingering traumatic echoes of a sense of displacement and rejection that prevents him from stepping into adulthood with a fully formed identity, but eventually allows him to find a sense of peace in art even if too late to repair fractured relationships with those he loves.

Flowers and Rain streamed as part of this year’s online Nippon Connection Film Festival.

Original trailer (no 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)

Orange (orange-オレンジ, Kojiro Hashimoto, 2015)

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Orange posterPerhaps it isn’t possible (or even desirable) to live a life without regrets, but given the opportunity who wouldn’t want a second chance to tackle some of those thorny adolescent moments where you said something you shouldn’t have or didn’t say something that perhaps should have been said. The heroine of Kojiro Hashimoto’s Orange (orange-オレンジ) gets exactly this opportunity when she receives a letter from her future self asking for her help in “erasing” some of her teenage regrets by using the information in the letter to save a friend she hasn’t yet met. Though the letter contains little information about the life she is leading ten years from now, it is clear that something happened all those years ago which has profoundly affected the lives of a tight group of high school friends.

16-year-old Naho (Tao Tsuchiya) receives the letter at the beginning of her second year of high school, reading it under the vibrant pink cherry blossoms. A little creeped out, she doesn’t read it fully but is surprised when, just as the letter said, a new student, Kakeru (Kento Yamazaki), transfers into her class and occupies the previously empty desk next to hers. A shy and quiet girl Naho is nevertheless part of a group of five friends which includes sportsman Suwa (Ryo Ryusei), geek Hagita (Dori Sakurada), and two other girls Takako (Hirona Yamazaki) and Azusa (Kurumi Shimizu). For reasons unexplained, the group quickly takes Kakeru into their fold only for him to suddenly disappear for a couple of weeks. On closer inspection of the letter, Naho is disturbed by the news that Kakeru is “no longer around” at the time of her future self’s writing.

Orange fits neatly into the popular tragic high school romance genre in which an older version of the protagonist looks back on a traumatic event and tries to come to terms with their own action or inaction in order to move forward with their adult lives. 26-year-old Naho, as we quickly find out, has moved on – she is married to Suwa and has a young son she has named Kakeru but she and the others are still finding it difficult to come to terms with what happened to their friend and the possibility that they could have done something more to help him if they’d only known then what they know now.

So far so “junai”, but Orange tries to have things both ways by introducing a slightly clumsy time travel/parallel universe theory in which the protagonists realise that they won’t be able to change the past but are hoping that their friend is happy in an alternate timeline created by their efforts to influence their younger selves with more mature thinking coupled with the benefit of hindsight. Unlike other examples of the genre, Orange undercuts the usual need to deal with the past and find closure through a mild fantasy of denial in which the older protagonists can believe in an alternate future in which they were able to do things differently and save their friend from his unhappy destiny.

Saving their friend is, however, only a secondary goal – the first being to ease their own sense of guilt in not having seen that Kakeru was in trouble and needed their help. All this emphasis on personal “regret” cannot help but seem somewhat solipsistic – everyone is very sorry about what happened in the past and wishes that they could have acted differently but is also somewhat preoccupied with their own role in events rather than a true desire to have in someway eased their friend’s suffering. Though there is the true selflessness of real, grown up love such as that displayed by Suwa who has always loved Naho but supports her love of Kakeru despite his own feelings, the actions of the group remain childishly goal orientated as Kakeru’s survival becomes an end mission flag rather than an expression of love and care for a friend in trouble.

The teenagers are, despite advice from their older selves, still teenagers and so it is only to be expected that they respond to a very grown up problem with a degree of immaturity, but it is also true that Kakeru’s ongoing, mostly well hidden, depression plays second fiddle to the various romantic subplots currently in action. Though the friends rally round with fairly trite phrases about helping to carry Kakeru’s burden and always being there him, Orange almost tries to argue that kind words are enough to pull a strained mind back from the brink – not that kind words ever hurt, but some problems are bigger than superficial pledges of friendship can handle especially when you’ve half a mind on who loves who and who is trying to get in the way of someone else’s romantic destiny. In spending so much time worrying about their friend, they have, in a sense, left him to deal with all his problems on his own while revelling in their own “concern”.

Superficial and melodramatic, Orange’s insistence on the power of teenage friendship can’t help but ring a little false and the parallel universe solution an overly convenient narrative device which allows for two differing resolutions both of which essentially frustrate the attempts of the older protagonists to accept their own sense of guilt and responsibility for their friend’s death in order to move on with their lives. Kakeru, in a sense, gets forgotten in his friends’ need to absolve themselves of his fate – a particularly ironic development in a cautionary tale about the enduring legacy of regret and the necessity of communicating one’s true feelings fully in the knowledge that there may not always be another opportunity to do so.

Original trailer (no subtitles)