Tag: Umeno Uno

The Scoop! (新米記者トロッ子 私がやらねば誰がやる！, Keiichi Kobayashi, 2024)

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The print media industry in Japan has often come in for criticism because of its perceived toothlessness in which it is often afraid of speaking truth to power lest it lose its access. Of course, as we’ve seen all too well just recently, that’s not a problem limited to Japan, but it’s something that’s preoccupied the students at the centre of Keiichi Kobayashi’s teen drama The Scoop! (新米記者トロッ子 私がやらねば誰がやる！, Shinmai Kisha Torokko: Watashi ga Yaraneba Dareka ga Yaru) whose unofficial newspaper club is threatened by the school because of its tendency to expose scandal and oppose the elitism which has otherwise taken over the institution.

Yui (Karin Fujiyoshi) only enrolled here because of the famous literature club and the possibility of meeting her idol, Konoha Midorimachi, the winner of a prestigious student writing competition. But as she quickly finds out, the Literature Club is pretty high up in the school hierarchy and only really open to those in the “advanced” class. All of its members wear red scarves to distinguish them from the other students who wear blue. You have to take a test to get in, but Yui’s dreams end before they’ve even started when she’s hit by a rogue drone and knocked out. They won’t let her retake the test because they say it would be unfair to the other students, but the club president, Mari (Rinka Kumada), has another proposition for her. It turns out that Konoha Midorimachi isn’t a member after all but a mysterious person using a pen name. Mari wants to know who it is too so she suggests they team up to find out. Following a lead to the unofficial Newspaper Club, Mari advises Yui to sign up there and win their trust to find out Konoha’s true identity on the promise of being admitted to the Literature Club once she’s solved the mystery.

Yui isn’t really happy with this plan in part because the Newspaper Club has a bad reputation for being a bunch of cranks and nerds. The Newspaper Club isn’t really all that keen on talking about Konoha either but is glad to have Yui on board while she also begins to embrace the opportunity to hone a different side to her writing skills. While there, she’s confused by the tactics employed the editor, Kasane (Akari Takaishi), whom she describes as more like a con-artist than a journalist as she employs some unorthodox methods to get to the truth, but also wakes up to the myriad problems at the school and comes to understand that the newspaper is necessary for exposing them. 

This does not, however, endear them to the headmaster, Numahara (Masahiro Takashima), who is a fascistic elitist intent on ruling the school with an iron fist. Backed into a corner, he agrees to make the Newspaper Club “official” with funding from the school but only as a gambit to control it. If Kasane accepts his offer, they will have to abide by his rules which means puff pieces and propaganda only. “Submit to me,” he snarls, inappropriately pinning the teenage Kasane to a wall while making her an ultimatum to join his side or get the hell out. “Women should be compliant,” he advises shortly before Kasane socks him on the jaw. What happens after that is a neutering of the paper while Numahara strengthens the elitism of the school by deepening the privileges held by the so-called “advanced” class represented by the Literature Club. 

The Japanese title of the film is the more evocative “Rookie Reporter “Trolley”: If I don’t do it, who will?” As Kasane had said to Numahara, silence changes nothing. Kasane later claims that she started the Newspaper Club because she lost faith in the power of fiction, but also wanted to bring about real change and expose Numahara’s corruption. Though their paper is suppressed, they do eventually manage to bring about something like a more egalitarian revolution and expose Numahara for what he really is by using the same tactics he used against them. In some ways, it’s an allegory for the wider society and an advocation for the power of journalism to bring about real change by refusing to shrink from the truth or be cowed by those in power, as much it is a coming-of-age tale in which the heroine learns that things aren’t always what they seem and a club that’s founded on the principle of excluding others isn’t one you want to join.

The Scoop! screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Belonging (とりつくしま, Kahori Higashi, 2024)

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What if you could come back after you died and watch over those close to you while possessing a familiar if inanimate object? Her second film this year, Kahori Higashi’s Belonging (とりつくしま, Toritsukushima) adapts a novel by her mother in which the recently deceased are asked to choose a “belonging” to sink into given that they seemingly still have lingering attachments to this world. Yet simply watching can itself by painful while it might not do to linger too long in a place where everything is moving on except you.

That’s a possibility that comes to mind the second story featuring a little boy who asks to inhabit the blue climbing frame at the park. He wistfully watches other kids he used to play with pass by and later meets a little sister for the first time, but all these other children will grow up while he will not even if other children will their place. The kindly woman (Kyoko Koizumi) sitting in the school room that doubles as Belonging’s office doesn’t mention what happens if the object is destroyed or moved as something like a climbing frame might be though we later discover that depleted objects can no longer hold their charges which are then dragged back to the afterlife. 

Of course, there’s always the possibility that an object that was precious to you was not so precious to others and may end up being sold or given away as one old woman discovers realising the beloved grandson she hoped to spend eternity with has sold the camera she gave him. The heroine of the first sequence, Koharu, installs herself in a coffee cup featuring a design of a triceratops she and her husband bought on a trip to the museum which he continues to fondle and treasure though Koharu watches him being a tentative relationship with another woman who urges him to buy new mugs as a symbolic moving on from his late wife. 

For Wataru, the coffee cup may already in a sense have been possessed by her spirit though he sees her more in a plant he keeps watering unaware that it’s artificial. Objects can have a kind of presence and carry something of their former owners with them even if not literally possessed but being trapped inside an inanimate object is also frustrating and at times painful. They can no longer act or interact but are mere passive observers at the mercy of their loved ones who may be readier to move than they’d assumed or otherwise dispose of or lose the objects the deceased assumed would be precious to them. 

The heroine of the final sequence might have this right when she chooses to possess an item she knows will only give her a limited time, not even minding when she’s denied the full resolutions of her anxieties in seeing her teenage son win a baseball game while he continues to call her number and recite pleasantries like some kind of mantra. She acknowledges that it might not be good for her or her son to stay too long, she just wants to see he’ll be alright before moving on to the afterlife. The woman from Belonging seems to approve of her choice though her own backstory remains unclear, present both in this world and in the other. 

Making brief detours to introduce us to some strange people in the part such as a female banzai double act and a not-quite-couple, the film is at pains capture both everyday life and the poignancy of loss as the various spirits look for new places to belong while the world around them continues to change and evolve in ways they no longer can. In the park, an old man dances comically much to the dismay of his female companion who is trying to read her book, claiming that he’s going to keep living to the very end which at least expresses a vibrant desire for life in some ways free of the lingering attachments that bind the recently deceased to our world but perhaps also trap them here in solitary museums of past love in which their presence may be felt but also unacknowledged. 

Belonging screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Melting Sounds (ほとぼりメルトサウンズ, Kahori Higashi, 2021)

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“They’re all dealing with something. They have nowhere to go back to” an old man sighs watching a cohort of similarly aged men doing callisthenics in a local park knowing that they’re about to lose this place too. A Moosic Lab production, Melting Sounds (ほとぼりメルトサウンズ, Hotobori Melt Sounds) is about what you keep and what you have to let go as the heroes try to preserve a disappearing soundscape while unable to resist the march of progress as even their little backwater finds itself at the mercy of modernising developers. 

Hoping for a solo getaway, Koto (xiangyu) arrives at the rural home of her late grandmother only to discover a strange man, Take (Keiichi Suzuki), camping in the garden. As she will repeatedly, rather than enlist the authorities Koto invites Take into the house where it’s warmer and discovers that he’s in the middle of an important project recording ambient noise from around the village attempting to capture the banal sounds of everyday life such as someone going to the dentist or a young couple having a pointless argument in the street. Meanwhile, the pair receive a visit from a young man, Yamada (Amon Hirai), bearing a tablet featuring the face of a woman, Hiroko (Umeno Uno), trying to explain to them that the house needs to be knocked down so they should hurry up and move out. Unfazed, Koto once again asks Yamada to come and sit under the kotatsu where it’s warm, the young man later taking a break from his job to stay with them under the pretext of convincing them to leave while they’re later joined by Hiroko who also becomes increasingly conflicted and decides to join their small family. 

Just as Take had said they’re all dealing with something, Koto having become estranged from her father whom she no longer talks to, Take as we discover recording the sounds on old-fashioned speaker walkmans for his late sister who was killed in a landslide, and Hiroko and Yamada each conflicted in their work for a greedy amoral developer who reveals that he too was responsible for evicting mostly elderly people from their homes in a town that has since become famous for bubble tea. The four of them are already displaced by the modern society, as are the men doing callisthenics in the park as they watch their town gradually dismantled around them, pushed out even from disappearing and depopulated rural Japan by an encroaching modernity. The developer claims he wants to rejuvenate the town to attract young people to return but is indifferent to what is being lost such as the recording of the nostalgic five o’clock chimes which so moves Hiroko, adding only that they no longer have them where they are only for Hiroko to suggest that you can only hear them if you’re pure of heart. 

Take claims he’s making a “grave of sounds” but he’s also capturing a moment in time and with it the essence of life. As he puts it everything has a sound from a flower blooming to air conditioners and church bells, each of them a part of something bigger immersed in the now. As he points out, everything comes to an end eventually, be it love or friendship or even family. The recordings are a kind of proof of life, but paradoxically also its passing the final implication being that all things have their season and it’s best to enjoy them while there’s time. Small-town Japan may be disappearing or at least changing even if the promised bubble tea might not be quite what you’d expect but that doesn’t necessarily mean it all has to go. 

Thanks to Koto’s warmheartedness, inviting each of them into the house despite having arrived for a “solo” getaway, the trio of youngsters find a new solution to their sense of lonely disconnection discovering a kindred spirit in their shared desire for something simpler and more wholesome as they play boardgames together by candlelight, making curry and gyoza sure to record the sound of them sizzling. A warm and quirky ode to the various ways life can be improved by the simple act of stopping to listen, Kahori Higashi’s laidback debut may be about learning to let things go but also appreciating what you have while you have it and taking what you can with you while being kind and openhearted even in the face of those attempting to run you out of town.

Melting Sounds screened as part of Osaka Asian Film Festival 2022

Original trailer (no subtitles)