If the definition of ‘overdosing on something’ is ‘consuming more than is safe’, then perhaps I should find a better title for this post. I don’t think I’m watching more Japanese films than is healthy for me – it just so happens that most of the films I watched so far this month have been Japanese. Perhaps instead of #FrenchFebruary, I should have continued the #JanuaryandFebruaryInJapan challenge.
It started off with a bang thanks to the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2025, an initiative that has been going on for years but of which I seem to have been blissfully unaware. This year’s theme was Justice, Justification and Judgement and most of these films were very recent releases and highly unlikely to ever be shown in mainstream cinemas in the UK or even on streaming services. So I saw three in one day on Saturday, 8th February, and I was by no means the only one to do so. I spoke to a couple of Japanese ladies who were also watching several that day, while one man (who had not even studied Japanese but was simply a film fanatic) had booked himself onto all 26 films that were being shown over the two week period. That’s dedication for you! I wish I could have gone to see more of them myself, but trips into London are a bit expensive.
The three that I saw were all very different, and I’m so happy that the Japan Foundation and Sasakawa Foundation (who both contributed to my undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Japanese, incidentally) are showing the great variety in contemporary Japanese cinema, since it’s all too easy to start typecasting the films of any country when we get such a limited selection over here.
To Mom, With Love directed by Hashiguchi Ryosuke is the director’s first film in eight years, and is quite different from his previous works, which he usually wrote himself and also frequently dealt with LGBTQ issues or outsiders (A Touch of Fever, Like Grains of Sand or Hush!), or struggling marriages (All Around Us, Three Stories of Love). This film is a domestic comedy-drama based upon a play by Maki Peyounne and the original title in Japanese is Okaasanga issho (Together with Mother), which is a nice play on words on the long-running children’s TV programme on NHK Okaasan to issho (same meaning, except that in the film title the mother is more of an active subject – which is significant). If I had to describe it in one sentence I would say ‘Imagine Chekhov’s Three Sisters rewritten as a farce, meeting Italian comic opera’.
Three sisters decide to take their elderly mother to a spa resort for her birthday. We never actually get to see the mother, but everything is centred around her and what she might like or, above all, dislike, since she seems really hard to please (I have to say, it all sounded extremely familiar to me, except I had no sisters to share the burden with). The three sisters in question are Yayoi (nearly 40, acutely feeling her spinster status despite her comfortable lifestyle and high-earning job, nearly as pedantic and critical as her mother), pretty but messy Manami in her mid-30s, without any professional ambitions and in a relationship with a married lover that isn’t going anywhere, and Kiyomi, in her late 20s, who has to bear the brunt of still living at home to look after Mom, but who is planning her escape by getting engaged to a local lad. It was a fascinating look at how societal expectations and family pressures can wreak havoc on independent young women in Japan even today, and exposes all the sibling rivalries and family discontent. Highly enjoyable, with a lot of physical comedy as well.
In the Wake was quite the depressing contrast, but I have to admit that I was eager to see it because of the two main actors, Sato Takeru as someone recently released from prison (who sadly did not look as pretty as he usually does in this one) and the tall, brooding Abe Hiroshi as a policeman (who did do a good job on the brooding front). The director was a bit of a surprise to me, since Zeze Takahisa is known for his ‘pink’ (i.e. soft porn) films, but in recent years he has started making films with a pronounced component of social critique. In this film, which is disguised as a crime drama, he exposes the flaws in Japan’s social welfare system, which became woefully apparent after the earthquake and tsunami of 2011. The scenes of refusing benefits, suspecting vulnerable people of fraud, the long-lasting effects of catastrophes and temporary housing etc. seemed horribly familiar to those of us in the UK in recent years, so I can see why this proved to be a popular film at screenings here. Reminiscent of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach.
Tea Friends is based on real events and directed by the youngest of the three directors Sotoyama Bunji. Despite his youth, he seems preoccupied with the problem of Japan’s ageing population, both of his previous two feature-length films are about the loneliness of old people, either stuck in care homes or trying to find some connection, no matter how late in life. In this film, they become members of an exclusive ‘tea club’ – under the innocent guise of selling tea to elderly people between the ages of 60 and 88, it’s actually a prostitution club with elderly call girls catering to the needs of elderly men. The real-life club operated for over a decade until 2013. In the film, the organiser Mana is presented as not just an efficient businesswoman, but someone who genuinely cares both for her workers, whom she regards as family, and her elderly clients, considering she is providing a vital service for lonely people (even those in nursing homes).
The film challenges our own assumptions about the elderly, sexuality and right or wrong. While I felt that the last few scenes (at the police station, once the club is busted) were a bit too preachy, and the film could have ended with Mana crying all alone, abandoned by her ‘family of choice’, it was certainly a thought-provoking film that dealt well with contradictions and subjects many still find taboo, but which will become increasingly urgent in our ageing societies. This film is (or has been) available on Mubi.
I was also scheduled to watch two Japanese films at the Prince Charles Cinema, which is in danger of being kicked out of its current location thanks to greedy landowners, who are making the whole area around Leicester Square an unappealing wasteland of casinos and tacky souvenir shops – please sign the petition to save it. The two films are part of their Kurosawa season. Kurosawa is one of my favourite film directors, and these two films in particular are good to see on the big screen.
Dersu Uzala is a bit of an outlier in Kurosawa’s film catalogue. It’s his only non-Japanese language film and was commissioned by Mosfilm in the early 1970s, at a low point in Kurosawa’s career after the failure of his film Dodesukaden. It was filmed in the taiga and is based on the memoirs of Russian explorer and topographer Vladimir Arsenyev, who hired and then befriended local nomadic hunter Dersu Uzala, who represents the traditional way of life, in harmony with nature, but a way of life that is clearly under threat. It’s a long, contemplative, beautifully shot film, you feel that you are living every moment together with the explorers, and reminded me in parts of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. This was the first time I watched it, following a friend’s recommendation, and it was quite mesmerising.
Kagemusha is the film that Kurosawa made immediately after Dersu Uzala, a return to his samurai films but on a grand scale, depicting the final stages of the Sengoku (Warring Countries) period in Japanese history. It was apparently quite a problematic production, in terms of securing funding, actors leaving or being replaced, and the director being increasingly irascible and using 5000 extras for the battle scenes to then just cut them out ruthlessly. I think I prefer Ran from the late Kurosawa period; nevertheless, the film remains an epic masterpiece which needs to be seen on the big screen – I’ve only ever seen it on video before. Sadly, it was not meant to be: for the second time this year, the screening of Kagemusha was cancelled (this time because of a leaky pipe). Since I was already in London, I had to make do with shopping, cake and meandering through Foyles’ bookshop, because the queues at the National Gallery and British Museum were just too massive for me to brave them.
Speaking of alternate history, I also watched the animated series Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, (first and only season so far is available on Netflix), which explains the closing of Japan to foreigners as the result of an outbreak of a special kind of smallpox which only affects young men, leading to a parallel version of Japanese history where the Shogun and all the key positions (and labour in the fields etc.) are held by women, while men are just used for procreation. The only 18-rated anime I’ve ever seen, it did show some hardcore scenes of sexual violence, but it’s a fascinating blend of historical fact and speculative fiction.
The last Japanese film I saw was also on Netflix, and one of the few remaining Ghibli Studio productions that I haven’t seen (other than My Neighbors the Yamadas and the universally-panned Tales of Earthsea). Ocean Waves (the original Japanese title translates as I Can Hear the Sea) is one of the animated films directed by the younger talent at Studio Ghibli, at a time when Miyazaki and Takahata were searching for a successor. It feels like any number of Japanese coming of age in high school movies, and, although the animation was pleasant enough, and the teenagers charmingly confused and difficult, it was not the most memorable or delightful of the studio’s offerings. Perhaps that’s why it was only released on TV in Japan and went straight to DVD abroad.
findingtimetowrite 