Tag: Yoji Tanaka

Kakashi (案山子, Norio Tsuruta, 2001)

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There’s a village in Japan that’s mostly inhabited by scarecrows. One of the last remaining residents began creating them to replace something that had been lost, fashioning effigies of those who had passed away and immortalising them as if clinging to a distant past long before the shadows of rural depopulation were cast over the village. In a way, it’s an expression of grief or at least a lament for a loss of community and a sense of increasing loneliness and isolation. 

Adapted from Junji Ito’s manga, Norio Tsuruta’s Kakashi is also in its way about grief and the way in which it can consume those left behind so that they too have no more desire to live. Dr Miyamori (Kenzo Kawarasaki) later explains that in the village they co-exist with death and he returned to his home town in the hope that he could save his daughter, Izumi (Ko Shibasaki), through its peculiar magic of resurrecting the deceased as human scarecrows. As he freely admits, he could not accept his daughter’s death and so has chosen to stay here in the village though alive himself rather than attempt to remake his life without her.

The village itself appears to exist slightly outside of the mortal realm as Kaoru (Maho Nonami) discovers on encountering the long tunnel that leads to its entrance. Her car breaks down half-way through signalling her liminal status as one who does not yet belong on either side. It’s not quite grief that’s brought her here but still a nagging sense of foreboding in that she’s come in search of her missing brother, Tsuyoshi, after discovering a letter from an old school friend, Izumi, next to his telephone. Kaoru appears confused as to why the letter should be there and travels to the village hoping for answers, assuming that Tsuyoshi (Shunsuke Matsuoka) may have travelled there in search of Izumi.

As the landlady lets her into his empty flat, Kaoru explains that she is his only family and there’s a suggestion that her attachment to him is unnatural, bordering on the incestuous. A policeman taking a look at the photo Kaoru hands him remarks that they look like a couple, which they do, leading her to stuff the photo back in her pocket as if she were embarrassed. To that extent, she’s come to reclaim Tsuyoshi, not just from death, loneliness, grief, and depression, but from Izumi or at least the spectre of her. In life, she feared that Izumi would take him away from her and at least in Izumi’s mind frustrated their romance out of romantic jealously. Dr Miyamori implies it was this sense of despair that contributed to her death and it’s clear that Izumi’s mother also blames Kaoru while Izumi accuses Kaoru of being forever in her way.

But then again, she did not bring Kaoru to the village and is not targeting her personally out of vengeance. Rather, she has moved beyond that as she finally’s about to become “herself” thanks to the village’s dark magic and the following day’s scarecrow festival, and therefore no longer needs to care about the resentments of her mortal life even if her father says that her evil spirit has empowered the town. There is definitely something quite creepy in this weird village with its shades of the Wicker Man in its strange ritual and humanoid effigies where improbable numbers of children softly blow pinwheels under a large windmill that seems to be moving time itself. Tsuruta even borrows a particularly eerie shot from Don’t Look Now and emphasises the liminal qualities of the village in Dr Miyamori’s advice that Kaoru leave as soon as her car is fixed otherwise she may no longer wish to.

The village is apparently full of those like him who are trapped but wilfully so because they no longer desire to leave. Kaoru attempts to help one of them, a young living woman from Hong Kong unable to let go of the memory of her late father whose scarecrow eventually tells her to go. It’s a place for those who have no other place to go to because they cannot let go of their grief and despair. Thus Kaoru is pulled towards the edge of the tunnel, not so much to free her brother as, in a way, herself by allowing her grief to consume her and consenting to live this empty life alongside death rather than allow herself to accept her loss.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Kaiju Guy! (怪獣ヤロウ！, Junichiro Yagi, 2025)

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“This is my grand revenge against the world,” a frustrated civil servant insists while watching a giant avatar of himself destroying the town. Yamada (Gumpy) always wanted to make Kaiju movies, but now approaching middle age he’s given up most of his dreams and aspirations and lives a dull life working in the tourism division of the local council. An opportunity presents itself when he’s put in charge of a PR video for the town at the behest of its ultra-conservative mayor.

Junichiro Yagi’s Kaiju Guy! (怪獣ヤロウ！Kaiju Yaro!) has a meta quality given that it’s about a film designed to promote the local area, but there are many other parallels in play. The first would be Yamada’s unsatisfying life standing in for that of a corporate drone, while the mayor (Michiko Shimizu) is later cast as the villain precisely because of her reverence for “tradition” and is under the impression that changing anything would be a betrayal of her ancestors in a nod to the rigidity of local government. Yamada’s teacher had told him to smash through the constraints, though that’s something he’s only just beginning to find the strength to do. 

Though Yamada immediately suggests making a kaiju movie, he’s quickly shot down and reminded the mayor wants a conventional puff piece they can use to promote the town. Back in middle school, everyone had laughed at him for his DIY kaiju movie except his teacher who told him not to worry about what other people think and that those who challenge the status quo will always come in for attack or ridicule. Back then, the town of Seki had been the monster, though this time it’s supposed to be the victim that will eventually be saved. The mayor’s script had ironically been for a particular brand of hometown movie that’s become common in Japanese cinema in recent years in which a young person has their dreams crushed in Tokyo and rediscovers the charms of the place where they grew up after returning home in defeat. But there is something quite sad about the juxtaposition of Yamada thinking through the themes of the movie while riding his moped along empty streets which are flanked by rows closed shops.

The economic possibilities of the town becoming a tourist hotspot if the movie does its job might be one reason why many of the local businesses immediately pitch in to help besides a desire to display their hometown pride. Of course, most of them pull out when Yamada reimagines it as a kaiju movie even if he has a few supporters who think a kaiju movie might be fun and interesting way to sell the positives of Seki. In the course of making his movie, with the help of a grumpy, retired kaiju movie master by the name of Honda (Akaji Maro), Yamada discovers a way to use various local assets, such as filming sparks at the factory to create the fire-breathing effect and capturing the strange sound of a local bird for its roar. The heroes of the film become the local businesses supporting it who appear as a mini squad teaming up to fight the monster, while Yamada himself plays the marauding beast and “saviour” of the town going after the mayor and city hall to challenge their conservative insistence on tradition. 

What he eventually discovers is that even the mayor herself is oppressed by “tradition supremacy” and once had to give up her own hopes and dreams to conform to her family’s insistence on the way things should be done. Her abrupt decision to make the film may have been a reflection of her latent desire for change, both for herself and for Seki even as she constantly harps on about cormorant fishing and sword making which are apparently the two biggest draws. Ironically, the film completely fulfils its role as a PR movie for Seki capturing the small-town charms of the area along with its warm community spirit. Smashing through barriers with his kaiju movie, Yamada’s dull and grey existence is suddenly brightened through accessing his creativity and having his artistic desires validated by those around him. Not only are kaiju movies not naff or nerdy, but a source of fun that can bring the community together as well encourage visitors from outside if only to explore the kind of place that could have produced something so wonderfully unconventional.

Kaiju Guy! screens 30th May as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2024 Team KAIJU GUY!

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)

Tokarev (トカレフ, Junji Sakamoto, 1994)

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The discovery of a pistol concealed under a vending machine provokes a prolonged crisis of power and masculinity in Junji Sakamoto’s tense psychological drama, Tokarev (トカレフ). So named for the guns at its centre, the film roots itself in post-Bubble anxiety in the push and pull between two very different men mediated through the kidnapping of an innocent child who in the end pays a very heavy price for the anxieties and resentments that drive his parents’ generation.

That said, the kidnappers are actually very nice to little Takashi who looks strangely happy in the videotaped ransom note as the friendly voice of a youngish man encourages him to look towards the camera. They take him to an amusement park, buy him new shoes and ice cream, and even let him wave the gun around during the money drop but are it seems otherwise callously indifferent to his fate.

The boy’s father, Nishiumi (Takeshi Yamato), has just moved onto a danchi housing estate with his wife Ayako (Yumi Nishiyama). They seem very excited to start their new life, yet the danchi itself speaks of a post-war aspiration which now seems dated and largely absent in the contemporary society. Nishiumi drives the bus to the local kindergarten picking up the surprisingly large number of children from their block each morning. Meanwhile, their neighbour, Matsumura (Koichi Sato) seems irritated by their presence perhaps jealous of their happy family life as he returns home alone and angrily flips the cover over his motorbike before opening the door. 

On the morning in question, Matsumura has trouble kickstarting his bike yet Ayako seems strangely drawn to him perhaps attracted by a different and older kind of masculinity. Unlike her husband, Matsumura wears a suit to work everyday and carries a little salaryman-style purse yet he works a job that could be considered manual in a printing press where they produce newspapers. He later excitedly tells Ayako that he gets to read the news before anyone else, though his hands glide over notices of violent crimes including a shooting which may seem additionally exciting to him given that he is the man who discovered a gun under a vending machine in Christmas-set opening sequence. His cluttered home otherwise at odds with the sense of order he projects is full of old newspapers while he seems to listen to the same weather broadcast every day. 

The gun is later used by another man who fires it at Nishiumi before abducting Takashi from the kindergarten bus. It takes Nishiumi a few seconds to realise it’s Takashi who’s been taken, suddenly taking off at speed after him endangering the lives of the other kids. The sense of guilt and inadequacy slowly consumes him. “Takashi must be so disappointed,” he later laments to Ayako over the phone in his failure to live up to the socially defined codes of masculinity. His son was taken from him in front of his eyes yet he couldn’t do anything to save him. Matsumura meanwhile turns up near the crime scene having been shot in the shoulder claiming the kidnapper stole his bike. 

Perhaps it’s this uncanny proximity along with his odd expression and obvious effect on Ayako that leads Nishiumi to believe that Matsumura was somehow involved in the crime. In another instance of mid-90s technophobia, the clue is once again discovered via videotape as a guiltridden Nishiumi spots Matsumura in the crowd at his son’s sports day which is odd considering he has no children of his own and no reason to be there. The kidnapper also films the random drop on camcorder, black and white images capturing a crowded Shibuya presumably as some kind of insurance plan.

After being attacked and seriously injured, Nishiumi ends up in hospital where he ironically discovers a gun of his own stashed in the restroom by a visiting yakuza. As it had Matsumura, the gun gives him a new sense of power but also drives him into a frenzied obsession, dressing like a yakuza himself in a suit and dark glasses having alienated Ayako who eventually leaves him for Matsumura who has by this point usurped him as a man and patriarch, taking everything he ever had. No longer wishing to live, he embarks on a suicide mission to get his revenge on Matsumura. The pair of them essentially trade places, Matsumura now in check shirt and jeans while Nishiumi approaches in a suit each of them corrupted by the illusionary power of the gun. 

It later transpires that the kidnapper was also facing a crisis of masculinity in that his business was about to go bust, though Nishiumi was not a wealthy man or particularly good candidate for a ransom. The police, who are in fact completely useless, bungling their only opportunity to retrieve Takashi because they were caught off guard by the kidnapper giving him the gun, keep asking him if there’s anyone who might have held a grudge but as he points out there must have been thousands of incidents of petty annoyance that may have pushed someone over the edge dating all the way back to his childhood. The battle he finds himself in is one of vengeance to reclaim his wounded sense of masculinity while Matsumura in turn is determined to defend the new life he’s bought for himself or perhaps stolen from Nishiumi as a happy family man. Sakamoto keeps the tension high through the near wordless closing sequence in which the two men square off against each other with the intention of meeting their endgame each victims of the pervading sense of futility of the post-Bubble era.

The Cold-Blooded Trap (冷血の罠, Takahisa Zeze, 1998)

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“This place is full of people like me” a violent criminal jeers, admitting that he’s killed “plenty” of women but not necessarily the one he’s being questioned about. There is indeed something eerie that seems to have taken over this small corner of Shibuya in Takahisa Zeze’s dark millennial thriller The Cold-Blooded Trap (冷血の罠, Reiketsu no Wana). “Strange things are happening here” another investigator notes, “someone’s malice has infected this whole place.” Yet the sense of haunting may be closer to home than it first seems as two men attempt to come to terms with a traumatic past by solving present mystery. 

Even the police seem to concede that the strange goings on are a “continuation” of something else. As we first meet him private detective Fujiwara (Sho Aikawa) appears to be following a young woman home from the station only as we later discover she hired him herself to watch over her because she had the feeling she was being watched. Fujiwara watches her enter her apartment building and then calls her to say everything looks clear on the ground, but a short time later a body wrapped in sheets is dropped from the roof onto the street below. The weird thing is that it’s the same building Fujiwara’s sister Noriko used to live in, only she took her own life and that of her child by jumping off the roof five years previously. 

Not only does Fujiwara feel as if he failed in his duty to protect his client, but he’s forced into a similar contemplation in his latent guilt surrounding his sister’s death. The most obvious reason for Noriko to have considered suicide was that her salaryman husband Hanazono (Hidetoshi Nishijima) had been having an affair with a work colleague, Yoko (Asuka Kurosawa), yet Hanazono refuses to accept responsibility and is convinced that Noriko was murdered by a mysterious serial killer stalking the streets of Shibuya. 

The irony is that we first think Hanazono is the faceless killer after watching him enter the woman’s apartment building, only to learn that he may have been investigating Noriko’s death. Later these assumptions are overturned again, but even he concedes that he seems suspicious. Wandering around the city at night, he runs into women alone who immediately see him as a threat and assume he may be a dangerous criminal who means them harm. The realisation first shocks him, but then gives way to a physical high in the adrenaline rush of fleeing the scene. He comes to the conclusion that he must get into the killer’s mindset in order to catch him and begins actively stalking people around the city, following them home and checking mailboxes to find out names. 

Fujiwara doesn’t trust Hanazono for obvious and understandable reasons, but even so he begins following him as Hanazono continues to follow the killer. Zeze opens the film with fuzzy 90s camcorder footage trained on the forecourt of a station from a balcony opposite. The camera follows a woman as she leaves, and Fujiwara behind her with eerie intent evoking the mild paranoia of millennial surveillance. Later Hanazono films his own POV walking through the midnight city, once again lending the streets a sense of lurking malevolence and dread-fuelled fatalism even before he arrives at his shocking destination. 

Yet we wonder if Hanazono is just a paranoid obsessive with his giant map of crime insisting that seemingly isolated incidents of violence are somehow linked. Before Fujiwara hears about the woman’s death on the news they were reporting on insolvent banks hinting at a financial anxiety in the contemporary society, and as the suspect Fujiwara later tracks down suggests there are lot of distressed or perhaps disturbed people around. The crimes may really be random, but they are also connected by virtue of being provoked by an anxious society even if as Hanazono admits there are several criminals behind them. Whether or not he gets the answer he seeks, Fujiwara will have to accept that he too bears some responsibility as Hanazono has perhaps already done even if desperate to deny it. “I’ve always been responsible” he admits while taking control over his life, only the elliptical structure of the film may imply otherwise. Dark and eerie, Zeze captures a sense of millennial dread in the streets of the capital filled as they are with “random” crimes and lurking killers in the haunting anxiety of constant threat.

Clip (English subtitles)

Party 7 (Katsuhito Ishii, 2000)

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“This shit’s for real.” according to the front desk guy at Hotel New Mexico, an out of the way spot just perfect for those looking to lay low for a little while. Like a lot of Katsuhito Ishii’s work, Party 7 is essentially a series of self-contained vignettes which eventually collide following a series of bizarre coincidences revolving around some money stolen from the mob, a two-way mirror in a regular hotel room, and the receptionist’s tendency to almost literally shoot the shit. 

Following a brief prologue, Ishii opens with striking animated sequence which introduces each of the main players with an arcade game aesthetic and explains that Miki (Masatoshi Nagase) has stolen money from the mob and is currently on the run which is why he’s turned up at the infinitely weird Hotel New Mexico. The running gag is that Miki thinks he’s holed up somewhere no one will find him, but sure enough a series of “friends” soon turn up in part thanks to a loose-lipped travel agent. The fact that people can find it so easily dampens the impression of the Hotel New Mexico as some kind of interstitial space. It’s not so much existing in a weird parallel world as a bit run down and staffed by a series of eccentrics. It does however have a “peep room” hidden behind a two-way mirror where “Captain Banana” (Yoshio Harada) is attempting to pass his knowledge on to the young Okita (Tadanobu Asano), the son of a recently deceased friend who has been repeatedly arrested for voyeurism. 

Captain Banana’s insistence on his surreal superhero suit is in a way ironic, if perhaps hinting at the super empowerment of accepting one’s authentic self. “It’s your soul,” he tells Okita, “it’s screaming ‘I want to peep’.’” Meanwhile, Miki gets into an argument with his ex-girlfriend Kana (Akemi Kobayashi) who has turned up in the hope of reclaiming money that he owes her. Kana too seems to be less than rigorous with the truth if perhaps emotionally authentic. She’s now now engaged to a nerdy guy having somewhat misrepresented herself as the innocent girl next-door type. Her refusal to let her fiancé into her apartment perhaps hints at a more literal barrier to intimacy or at least that she is intent on preventing him from seeing her true self. What she doesn’t know is that her fiancé hasn’t been completely honest either, in part because he thinks she’s out of his league and is insecure in their romance. 

Miki too maybe somewhat insecure, having run off with the gang’s money after hearing them bad mouth his associate Sonoda (Keisuke Horibe) who has now been charged with killing him and getting the money back. But Sonoda too has reasons to doubt the boss’ affection for him after Miki and the others point out that gifts he thought were so valuable are really just cheap knock offs that suggest the boss thinks very little of him at all. Okita’s psychiatrist tells him that there are “no rules in making friends”, and maybe in a strange way that’s what everyone is trying to do. Kana wanted the money to overcome her anxiety about having no friends or family to invite to the wedding, while all Sonoda wanted was the boss’ approval and though Miki had deliberately gone somewhere he thought no one would find him nevertheless attracts a series of followers. 

Even the receptionists seem to be desperate for human contact with their strange stories of poo falling from the sky and bizarre approach to hospitality. “The point is whether you believe it or not,” one tells the other after spinning what sounds like a yarn but then again might not be. Ishii’s zany world has its own surreal logic culminating in a piece of cosmic irony and defined by coincidence as the otherwise unrelated stories begin to come together and slowly find their way to Hotel New Mexico but seems to suggest the point is in the serendipity of the meeting and its concurrent authenticity even if a literal shot in the arm is a less than ideal way of brokering a friendship.

Party 7 is released in the UK on blu-ray on 17th July as part of Third Window Films’ Katsuhito Ishii Collection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

GO (Isao Yukisada, 2001)

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“We never had a country” a student at a North Korean school in Japan fires back, hinting at his feelings of displacement in being asked to remain loyal to a place he never knew while the culture in which he was born and raised often refuses to accept him. The hero of Isao Yukisada’s Go is not so much searching for an identity as a right to be himself regardless of the labels that are placed on him but is forced to contend with various layers of prejudice and discrimination in a rigidly conformist society.

As he points out, when they call him “Zainichi” it makes it sound as if he is only a “temporary resident” who does not really belong in Japan and will eventually “return” to his “home culture”. In essence, “Zainichi” refers to people of Korean ethnicity who came to Japan during the colonial era and their descendants who are subject to a special immigration status which grants them rights of residency but not citizenship. Sugihara’s (Yosuke Kubozuka) situation is complicated by the fact that his father (Tsutomu Yamazaki) has a North Korean passport, making him a minority even with the Korean-Japanese community. He attends a North Korean school where speaking Japanese is forbidden and is educated in the tenets of revolutionary thought which are of course entirely contrary to the consumerist capitalism of contemporary Japan. 

His father eventually consents to swap his North Korean passport for a South Korean one mostly it seems so he can take a trip to Hawaii with his wife (Shinobu Otake) which seems to Sugihara a trivial reason for making such a big decision especially as it caused the lines of communication to break down with his bother who returned to North. Yet it seems like what each of them is seeking is an expansion of internal borders, the right not to feel bound by questions of national identity in order to live in a place of their own choosing. “I felt like a person for the first time,” Sugihara explains on being given the opportunity to choose his nationality even if it is only the “narrow” choice between North and South Korea. 

But on the other hand he wonders if it would make his life easier if he had green skin so that his “non-Japaneseness” would be obvious. Sugihara reminds us several times that this is a love story, but he delays revealing that he is a Zainichi Korean to his girlfriend because he fears she will reject him once she knows. On visiting Sakurai’s (Ko Shibasaki) home, it becomes obvious that she comes from a relatively wealthy, somewhat conservative family. Her father, who is unaware Sugihara is Korean-Japanese, immediately asks him if he likes “this country” but is irritated when Sugihara asks him if he really knows the meaning behind the various words for “Japan” again hinting at the meaninglessness of such distinctions. When he eventually does tell Sakurai that he is ethnically Korean, her reaction surprises both of them as she recalls her father telling her not to date Korean or Chinese men on account of their “dirty” blood. 

Such outdated views are unfortunately all too common even at the dawn of the new millennium. Even so, Sakurai had not wanted to reveal her full name because she was embarrassed that it is so “very Japanese” while conversely Sugihara takes ownership of the name “Lee Jong-ho”. He embraces the “very Japanese” tradition of rakugo, and hangs out in the Korean restaurant where his mother works dressed in vibrant hanbok. Given a book of Shakespeare by his studious friend, he is struck by the quote which opens the film which states that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and wonders what difference a name makes when its the same person underneath it. 

Perhaps his father’s admission that he always found a way to win wasn’t so off base after all, nor his eventual concession that Sugihara may have it right when he rejects all this talk of “Zainichi” and “Japanese” as “bullshit” and resolves to “wipe out borders”. He insists on being “himself” or perhaps a giant question mark, and discovers that Sakurai may have come to the same conclusion in realising that all that really mattered was what she saw and felt. Yukisada captures the anxieties of the age in the pulsing rhythms of his youthful tale which keeps its heroes always on the run, but is in the end a love story after all and filled with an equally charming romanticism. 

GO is released on blu-ray in the UK on 22nd May courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Thousand and One Nights (千夜、一夜, Nao Kubota, 2022)

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“I can reach the mainland by rowing boat, but why won’t my feelings reach you?” a plaintive song asks in Nao Kubota’s melancholy tale of perpetual longing and continual loss, Thousand and One Nights (千夜、一夜, Senya, Ichiya). A lingering ghost story, Kubota’s contemplative mood piece sees two women, one old and one young, take different paths in the wake of their abandonment but perhaps finding themselves no less unhappy when left with the unanswered questions of a sudden absence. 

On the island of Sado, fishwife Tomiko (Yuko Tanaka) has been waiting for her fisherman husband Satoshi to return home ever since he said he was “just going out for a bit” thirty years previously. Many in the community view her with a mixture of pity of revulsion, seeing her as close to madness in her refusal to accept that her husband will never come back to her. Meanwhile, the former mayor Taisuke now retired to take care of his bedridden wife, puts another young woman, Nami (Machiko Ono), whose husband Yoji (Masanobu Ando) similarly just went out for a bit two years ago and never came back, in touch with Tomiko hoping she can help her investigate what might have happened and if Yoji may be among the small number of presumed abductees taken from the island by the North Koreans. 

Sado does seem to have a large numbers of “missing” people, which in itself is not such an unusual phenomenon given how easy it can be in Japan to simply “evaporate” and start again somewhere else. The island was also the site of a handful of confirmed abductions by North Korea in the late 1970s, dangling another unanswered question in front of the women wondering if their husbands might have been spirited away and prevented from contacting them no matter how much they may have wanted to. Nami is herself third generation Zainichi Korean and wonders if that might have had something to do with Yoji’s disappearance, though in contrast to Tomiko her goal is less reunion than a simple desire to know why. She wants to give herself permission to move on, having drifted into a relationship with a besotted colleague (Takashi Yamanaka) she may not actually quite love but offers her a quiet and conventional life of security she’ll never now know with Yoji. 

Nami does, however, feel a degree of shame in her desire to put the past behind her as if she were betraying a romantic ideal in being unable or unwilling to give up her life in waiting as Tomiko has done. She fears Tomiko may resent her, but she doesn’t, not really only acknowledging that she’s made a different choice. Like Tomiko, Nami is left with unanswerable questions, wondering if Yoji simply walked out on her because he grew tired of the inevitability of their life together, if he was bored, or lonely or depressed. Perhaps he met someone else, had an accident and lost his memory, fell off a cliff or was killed in some other way and someone covered it up. Perhaps he’s dead, perhaps he’s in North Korea. Perhaps it’s all the same. 

While the community pities Tomiko in her martyrdom, they attempt to pressure her to move on by agreeing to marry local fisherman Haruo (Dankan) who has long carried a torch for her even since they were children. Yet in the irrationality of romantic longing, Haruo cannot understand why Tomiko will not give up on Satoshi even as he is unable to give up on her despite her frequent and unambiguous rejections of his overtures. There is a particularly unpleasant quality to his obsessive ardour as his mother (Kayoko Shiraishi) comes round to plead with Tomiko to marry her son and his work colleagues organise a kind of intervention asking her to give in because he’s going out of his mind. He runs her down, says she’s “withering away” and only he can save her while worryingly possessive and controlling even threatening suicide and later going missing at sea just to make her feel guilty and worry about him. 

Even Tomiko’s mother is suffering the pain of lost love, hugging her late husband’s prosthetic leg as she sleeps while excusing the drunken violence that Tomiko says left her with a lasting fear of men by explaining that the war changed him. Tomiko complains that no one ever tells her anything important and that they always leave, but equally refuses to reveal very much important to anyone else keeping her feelings largely to herself remaining something of an enigma, uncertain if her constant waiting is more habit than devotion. In all these tales of frustrated longing from Taisuke and his ailing wife to Satoshi’s parents who rarely talked of their son only for the father to tell the mother on her deathbed that he was still out playing, there is an inescapable loneliness in the essential inability of conveying one’s true feelings that leads some to simply make their exit without saying a word. 

Thousand and One Nights screens at New York’s IFC Center on Feb. 12 & 15 as part of ACA Cinema Project’s New Films From Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

All About Lily Chou-Chou (リリイ・シュシュのすべて, Shunji Iwai, 2001)

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“For us the natural world is a playground. But for the things that live in it, it might be hell on earth.” a middle-aged stranger explains to a confused teenage boy elaborating on a metaphor about a strangler tree that wraps itself around its brethren and suffocates them to death. The contemporary society is indeed a hell on earth to the alienated turn of the century teens in Shunji Iwai’s plaintive youth drama All About Lily Chou-Chou (リリイ・シュシュのすべて, Lily Chou-Chou no Subete) who have found solace in “The Ether”, “a place of eternal peace” as discovered in the music of a zeitgeisty pop singer inspired by the ethereality of Mandopop star Faye Wong. 

Filled with millennial anxiety, The Ether as mediated through message board chat is the only place the teens can be their authentic selves. “For me only the Ether is proof that I’m alive” one messenger types using an otherwise anonymous online handle unconnected with their real life identity. Iwai often cuts to the teens standing alone listening to music on their Discmans while surrounded by verdant green and wide open space with a bluer than blue sky above, but also at times finding that same space barren and discoloured, drained of life in, as Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) puts it, an age of grey much like a field in winter. For Yuichi the world ended on the first day of school in September 1999 when his torment began at the hands of a previously bullied boy who decided to turn the tables after, of all things, getting hit in the head by a flying fish in Okinawa and almost drowning.  

Purchased with money stolen from some other bullies who had just stolen it from a well-off middle-aged man they were harassing in a carpark, the trip to Okinawa captured in grainy ‘90s holiday video style later subverted by the same use of contemporary technology to film a gang rape of a fellow student, is the event that finally reduces Yuichi’s world to ashes. Like the other teens he is also carrying a sense of alienation as his mother prepares to remarry while carrying his soon-to-be stepfather’s child which also dictates that Yuichi will have to change his surname lending a further degree of instability to his already shaky sense of identity. For Hoshino (Shugo Oshinari), his sometime friend, the instability seems to run a little deeper. “Nobody understands me” he tells Yuichi with broody intensity, irritated by the image others have of him as a top swat chosen to give a speech at the school’s opening ceremony and widely believed to have placed first in the exams. In truth he only placed seventh and is most annoyed that whoever really did come top probably thinks he pathetically lied about it for clout. 

We can see that Hoshino’s family appears to be wealthy, at least much more than Yuichi’s, though as we also discover they once owned a factory which has since gone bust amid the economic malaise of the ‘90s leading to the disintegration of his family unit. Like Yuichi he feels himself adrift, evidently bullied in middle school for being studious and introverted while rejected by the girls in his class who again attack him because of his model student image. Hoshino seems to have a crush on a girl who is herself bullied, Kuno (Ayumi Ito), apparently resented by the popular set for being popular with boys. “It’s amazing how women can ostracise someone like that” band leader Sasaki (Takahito Hosoyamada) reflects, one of the few willing to call her treatment what it is but finding no support from their indifferent teacher Miss Osanai (Mayuko Yoshioka), while entirely oblivious to the fact that the boys are just the same in Hoshino’s eventual reign of terror as a nihilistic bully drunk on his own illusionary power. 

Shiori (Yu Aoi), blackmailed into having sex with middle-aged men for money, questions why she and Yuichi essentially allow themselves to be manipulated by Hoshino and are unable to stand up to him even when they know they are being asked to do things that they find morally repugnant such as Yuichi’s complicity when tasked with setting Kuno up for gang rape by Hoshino’s minions with a view to videoing it for blackmail purposes. Whether or not he did in fact have a romantic crush on her, Hoshino’s orchestration of the rape signals his total transformation, forever killing the last vestiges of his humanity and innocence but for Yuichi, who can only stand by and cry, it signals the failure of his resistance that if he went along with this there is no line beyond which he will not go if Hoshino asks it. Yuichi asks Shiori why she didn’t agree to date the kindhearted Sasaki who would have been able to shield her from Hoshino but she knows it’s too late for that while suggesting Yuichi is in a sense protecting her though his inability to do so only further erodes his wounded sense of masculinity. 

Only online can the teens find the elusive Ether they dream of, ironically connected via a message board that Yuichi runs under the name Philia where the only rule is that you have to love Lily yet unknown to each other thanks to the alienating effect of their online handles. Someone has a point when they suggest all this talk of polluting the Ether sounds a bit like a cult, but does at least give the teens their safe space where they can share their pain free of judgement and find solidarity in adolescent angst. In any case all of this shame, repression, and loneliness is later channeled into nihilistic violence and cruelty provoked by millennial despair. The only way Yuichi can free himself is by killing the part of himself that hurts in an effort to quell the “noise” in his head. Broken by title cards accompanied by the reverberating sound of typing in emptiness, Iwai’s characteristic soft focus lends a trace of nostalgic melancholy to this often harrowing tale but also neatly encapsulates turn of the century teenage angst with the infinite sympathies of age. 

All About Lily Chou-Chou screens at Japan Society New York on Dec. 10 as part of Love Letters: Four Films by Shunji Iwai

Original trailer (English subtitles)

What to Do With the Dead Kaiju? (大怪獣のあとしまつ, Satoshi Miki, 2022) [Fantasia 2022]

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The sudden appearance of a deus ex machina is usually where a story ends. After all, that’s the point. Whatever crisis is in play is suddenly ended without explanation. But what happens then? Satoshi Miki’s What to Do With the Dead Kaiju? (大怪獣のあとしまつ, Daikaiju no Atoshimatsu) steps in to wonder what it is that comes next after a giant monster has been defeated. Someone’s going to have to clean all that up, and in a surprising twist a fair few people are keen to take on the burden. Like Hideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Godzilla, which the film is on one level at least attempting to parody, Miki’s kaiju comedy is a government satire this time casting shade on the nation’s pandemic response, though with considerably less nuance. 

As the opening onscreen text, a nod to Shin Godzilla, and accompanying voiceover tell us Japan had been plagued by a kaiju but it suddenly died after being engulfed by a mysterious ball of light. While attempting to comedown from the constant state of anxiety under which they’d been living, the prime minister (Toshiyuki Nishida) is at a loss for what to do next especially as no-one really knows if the kaiju corpse is safe. While trying to ascertain whether or not the fallen kaiju might explode, spread dangerous radiation, or present some other kind of threat, government departments start fighting amongst themselves about whose responsibility the clean up effort must be all of them wanting the glory but not the work or expense. 

Some suggest turning the kaiju’s body into a massive tourist attraction and are therefore less keen on anything that involves destroying it while others think it should be preserved and put in a museum. The government has placed the SJF, a militarised science force set up after a terrorist incident, in charge but isn’t listening to much of what they’re saying. Meanwhile, evil moustachioed staffer Amane (Gaku Hamada) is playing his own game behind the scenes which also involves his wife, Yukino (Tao Tsuchiya), who was previously engaged to the leader of the SJF Taskforce, Arata (Ryosuke Yamada), before he abruptly disappeared after being swallowed by a mysterious ball of light three years previously. 

The political satire largely revolves around the indecisive PM, who at one point says he has no control or responsibility for what the other ministers do, and his anarchic cabinet meetings in which politicians run round in circles and insult each other like children. Not exactly subtle, much of the humour is indeed childish and scatological while one minister’s running gag is making sleazy sexist remarks even at one point accidentally playing a saucy video instead of displaying the latest kaiju data on the communal screen. The government experiences a public backlash in deciding to name the kaiju “Hope” which lends an ironic air to its rampage not to mention the necessity of its destruction, while the decision to declare the body safe for political reasons despite knowing it probably isn’t (“protecting the people’s right not to know”) casts shade on the pandemic response among other crises as do the constant refrains about getting back to normal now the crisis is over. 

Then again, there’s something a little uncomfortable going on with the film’s geopolitical perspectives, throwing up an angry politician on the screen with a mangled name who insists that the kaiju originated on their territory and must be returned to them in what seems to be an awkward allusion to Japan’s ongoing territorial disputes with Korea even while it’s suggested that the Americans wouldn’t mind getting their hands on the corpse either for purposes of experimentation and research. On the other hand it also becomes apparent that the Japanese military have deliberately destroyed civilian homes and cost lives in a reckless attempt to stop the kaiju which obviously failed. 

The closing scenes hint we may have been in a slightly different franchise than the one we thought we were dealing with, another deus ex machina suddenly arriving to save the day after the villains almost cause accidental mass destruction. The film’s problem may be that it’s the wrong kind of silly, relying on lowbrow humour while otherwise trying to conform to a blockbuster formula in which the kaiju corpse becomes the new kaiju but the battleground is bureaucracy. Ultimately the film’s prognosis is bleak. Even when the PM has achieved sufficient growth to realise he should make some kind of decision he makes the wrong call leaving everything up to a lone hero while fundamentally failing to come to any conclusion on what to do with a dead kaiju save trying to ensure it does not blow up in his face. 

What to Do With the Dead Kaiju? screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)