Media watch: Government does itself no favors with new incentives to promote My Number cards

Posted on September 11, 2022 by philipbrasor

For several years the Japanese government and, more specifically, the new digital agency has been trying to sell the public on the My Number system, which assigns a 12-digit ID number to everyone who lives in Japan. Assigning the numbers was the easy part: bureaucrats generated the numbers and sent them out on small paper cards. The idea was that these would be used, as are social security numbers in the U.S., for various government functions to streamline procedures, such as filing tax returns, using national health insurance, and applying for public services. The problem has always been that a certain cross-section of the public doesn’t feel comfortable with the number, since it smacks of government overreach and control, and, despite the ruling party’s continuing success at the polls, the public for the most part doesn’t trust the authorities, which is understandable. Twenty years ago, for instance, the welfare ministry discovered it had lost millions of pension records, thus necessitating a years-long retrenchment of the whole system that inconvenienced thousands of retired people. How would such officials handle numbers that in principle were supposed to connect to the most personal data the government keeps under virtual lock and key?

Consequently, the relevant authorities have had their hands full trying to proceed to the next step of the My Number system, which is to get dedicated My Number cards in the hands of everyone in the country. The card is more elaborate than the little paper thingy, which simply has the holder’s name, address, and number printed on it. The real cards, which are plastic, look like a genuine piece of ID, with a photo of the holder and a chip that makes it usable on digital devices to connect to a central database. This, apparently, is a bridge too far for many people, and the penetration rate for card application has been much lower than the government had expected. According to various media reports, as of May, only 44 percent of people who should have the cards have applied for and/or received them, which is pretty sad because the expressed goal is to have cards in everybody’s hands by the end of fiscal 2022.

I received mine about a year ago. Call me an easy touch, but I think the basic concept is good. As an American, the My Number card just sounds like a supercharged social security card, which many Americans find scary, too, but as someone who actually pays their taxes in full and on time, I figure I have nothing to fear from Washington (unless they read this blog, which I doubt), so, naively perhaps, I don’t really think the Japanese government is going to come after me. (By no means do I speak for all foreign residents.) Having an all-in-one card that I can use to pay my taxes, handle my health insurance payments, and access government documents sounds like a fine idea. And it was a painless, easy process. After receiving an application in the post from my local government I sent it in with a photo and a few months later went to my local city office to pick up the card. There I registered a password and received a short lecture on how to use the card. That was it. In the past year, I’ve used the actual card only once (the number itself I’ve used several times), when I applied for my vaccination certificate for overseas travel.

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Review: Hostage: Missing Celebrity

Posted on September 9, 2022 by philipbrasor

Basically meta-cinema for dummies, Pil Gam-sung’s debut feature takes full advantage of its star’s screen image to keep you guessing as to how much he is acting. Hwang Jung-min has cultivated an enviable, respectable career playing a wide variety of types but essentially the same character, whose down-to-earth, self-deprecating attitude lends ironic gravitas even to roles that are comic in nature, like the principled rogue cop in Veteran or the wildly obnoxious mafia scion in New World. In Hostage he plays himself, literally, one of Korea’s biggest movie stars, who is kidnapped by a bunch of psychos and held for ransom. That Hwang’s version of Hwang feels indistinguishable from many of his other parts is probably a function of his star power rather than any representational skills he may possess, but that seems to be Pil’s aim because often the inside jokes are double edged: Is he or isn’t he? An asshole, that is. 

As with all Korean crime thrillers the violence is sadistic and relentless, but more importantly celebrity culture is pretty intense in Korea, and the contrast of these two tendencies has a bracing effect on the plot. Driving himself home after a big movie event, Hwang parks his car at a convenience store and walks the rest of the way to his house, presumably because he’s had a few drinks and is afraid of being seen by paparazzi. It just so happens that a bunch of criminals who’ve been carrying out kidnappings in the neighborhood pass by and spot Hwang. “Jackpot,” says the buzz-cut crew leader Dong-hun (Ryu Kyung-soo), who taunts Hwang as a fan and then beats him before trundling him into their van and spiriting him to their woodland lair. In classic hostage-movie style, Hwang awakes tied to chair in the company of two other kidnap victims, one of whom is quickly dispatched by the sleepy-eyed ringleader, Choi (Kim Jae-bum), ostensibly because he hasn’t come up with his own ransom yet but mainly to impress on Hwang that Choi means business. 

The subtext of what entails is that Hwang, thanks to his extensive experience playing everything from prosecutors to cops to hardened criminals to victims, knows what he needs to do to escape, though he’s confounded by the fact that his co-hostage, a young woman, also has to be saved, as well as by the unpredictability of the kidnapping crew, one of whom is a fan and annoyingly keeps demanding Hwang recite lines from his most famous movies. However, as the story develops and the police start following leads that expose the kidnapping ring and the press finds out that Hwang is a prisoner, Pil gets caught up in the action movie prerogatives. In the end Hostage becomes just another efficient, bloody, twisty Korean thriller; which is not a bad thing at all, but we never find out what kind of person Hwang really is. He certainly can’t be this guy, who turns out to be a real ass-kicker. But that was probably intentional all along.

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Hostage: Missing Celebrity home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Next Entertainment World & Filmmakers R&K & SEM Company

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Opening press conference for the 27th Busan International Film Festival

Posted on September 8, 2022 by philipbrasor
Official poster

It was obvious from all the prefatory statements made by the various officials of the Busan International Film Festival on Sept. 7 to announce what would take place this year that the opening press conference was supposed to be a bigger deal that what it turned out to be. The organizers wanted it to be a live event in front of flesh-and-blood journalists in both Seoul and Busan, with the mayor of the latter city showing up to lend his unqualified support, but, unfortunately, that pesky typhoon showed up and they ended up limiting the event to one venue with reporters participating online. Consequently, it wasn’t much different from the last two opening press conferences, which were online and relatively brief. Why it was doubly disappointing this year is that the four men who talked to us online were bursting with the wonderful news that BIFF was back to full strength from two years of limited exposure due to the pandemic, meaning more sections and screenings than ever in real theaters with full attendance and, more importantly, big guests from Asia and the rest of the world in attendance because without that celebrity cachet, BIFF isn’t BIFF. Though it’s got the best market and the biggest, most eclectic selection of any film festival in Asia, it’s mostly a party for Korean film fans, and they do love their stars and VIPs.

Still, it’s the selection itself that means the most, and while BIFF tends to play down the spectacle when it comes to programming, as programmer Nam Dong-chul said at the press conference, this year he and his colleagues focused on “large-scale films” that were designed to be seen in theaters with an audience. However, the organizers chose Iranian director Hadi Mohaghegh’s Scent of Wind as the Opening Film, a seemingly modest production set in a rural environment among people who must deal with isolation and disability. In 2015, Mohaghegh won the New Currents Award, the only prize given to films themselves by the festival, for his second feature, Immortal, so the honor of opening the event can be seen as a kind of family affair. The Closing Film sounds like more a big deal: Japanese director Kei Ishikawa’s hotly anticipated A Man, which is based on a best-selling mystery about a woman who learns after her husband’s death that he wasn’t who he said he was. While A Man should be a crowd-pleaser—its release had been delayed more than a year due to the pandemic—it won’t be a world premiere, since it was already screened at Venice.

Even the Gala Presentation, which usually includes the festival’s highest-profile films, this year contains only two, both European: Alain Guiraudie’s Nobody’s Hero and Pietro Marcello’s Scarlet. Where the festival hits its stride with regard to the goals articulated by Nam is in the Icons section, which offers a whopping 24 selections by the world’s most famous and/or important directors, and while only one of them, Philippine director Brillante Mendoza’s Feast, is a world premiere, the section fulfills the real mission of BIFF, which is to assemble those movies that other, bigger, flashier (i.e., Western) festivals showed off over the past six months all in one convenient place, including James Gray’s Armageddon Time, Claire Denis’ Both Sides of the Blade, Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Dario Argento’s Dark Glasses, Francoise Ozon’s Peter Von Kant, and Noah Baumbach’s White Noise. Asia is represented by Kore-eda’s Korean co-production Broker, which already opened in Japan, and two-count-’em-two Hong Sang-soo features, Walk Up and The Novelist’s Film.

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Media watch: Media take a more clinical look at sex crimes

Posted on September 6, 2022 by philipbrasor
Tokyo District Court

Last month, a man named Akinori Hashimoto was sentenced by the Tokyo District Court to 20 years in prison for sexually abusing and photographing 20 boys between the ages of 5 and 11 from 2015 to 2020. Hashimoto, an accredited pre-school teacher, had committed these crimes in homes to which he was dispateched as a babysitter, at a campsite in Yamanashi Prefecture where he was a volunteer, and at a children’s welfare facility where he was a staff employee. The charges included 22 cases of rape, 14 cases of sexual assault, and 20 cases of producing child pornography. 

Generally, media stories about the sexual abuse of children, especially when both the perpetrator and the victim are male, tend to be treated in a cursory manner by the mainstream media. Most reports about the trial did not go into detail about testimony given, but only relayed the results and the judge’s reasons for the verdict and sentence. Asahi Shimbun, however, went fairly deep in its Aug. 31 article on the trial, especially with regard to Hashimoto’s motivations and psychology. 

In court starting in June, Hashimoto testified about his childhood, saying that his mother was a violent alcoholic who constantly told him she wished he’d never been born. When Hashimoto was 8, she ran away with the owner of a bar where she worked and when he was 12 she died of a stroke. His father beat him on occasion and he was a constant target of bullying throughout elementary and junior high school. Eventually, he dropped out. 

Hashimoto’s own explanation for his abuse of young boys was his sense of inadequacy. He yearned for his parents’ approval and love but only received resentment. Eventually, he started looking to the affections of children as he assumed that they had no capacity to discriminate against him. Whenever he was around young boys, he said he felt “safe.” 

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Review: Incredible But True

Posted on September 2, 2022 by philipbrasor

Like fellow French filmmaker Michel Gondry, Quentin Dupieux favors plots governed by fantastical, absurd elements, but while Gondry has very definite narrative goals in mind Dupieux seems so hung up on the elements themselves that he can’t quite get them to add up to a story. In his latest economic (74 minutes!) feature, a couple, Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie (Lea Drucker), purchase their dream house in a leafy, luxurious suburb, in spite of, or perhaps because of, two strange holes in the living room—one on the ceiling and one on the floor. The real estate agent explains the holes openly and at length: When a person enters the hole on the floor he or she exits via the hole in the ceiling, and in doing so time for that person jumps 12 hours into the future while they also become three days younger.

The comic possibilities of this setup seem endless, but Dupieux limits himself to one that, despite the short running time, exhausts its mojo right away. Alain finds the hole a bit intimidating, but Marie can’t get enough of it, and, sure enough, as the movie progresses she becomes visibly younger and, in the process, puts a notable strain on their marriage that no counseling could alleviate. Adding injury to an already farfetched concept, there is a parallel storyline involving Alain’s unpleasant boss, Gerard (Benoit Magimel), who decides to replace his penis with a new electric model that should last longer and work more efficiently as he gets older. 

What Marie and Gerard have in common is a wish to allay the indignities of aging, and for a while Dupieux exploits the humor inherent in such vain pursuits with success. It’s when he tries to offload the plot development onto a more disturbing track that the movie loses its bearings, not to mention the viewer’s faith in the whole enterprise. One thing about Gondry’s ridiculous fantasies is that they revolve around people with real problems and recognizable lives, but no one here, even the relatively grounded Alain, feels genuine. Incredible But True is just an exercise in clever ideas that have nowhere to go.

In French and Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Incredible But True home page in Japanese

photo (c) Atelier de production-Arte France Cinema-Versus Production-2022

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Media watch: Doc maker’s first narrative feature to tackle 1923 quake massacre

Posted on September 1, 2022 by philipbrasor
Tatsuya Mori

September 1 marks the 99th anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake, in which more than 100,000 people perished. Local governments use the occasion to carry out preparedness drills for major quakes. A few localities also hold memorials for victims, including Japan-resident Koreans murdered en masse by vigilante groups, whose rage was stoked by baseless rumors that Koreans were poisoning wells and carrying out other acts of terrorism. At the time, the Korean peninsula was under Japanese Imperial rule, and there was an underground resistance movement that attempted to throw off this rule, though the vast majority of Koreans killed after the quake had nothing to do with it. Nevertheless, it’s been well documented that the police and military not only did little to stop the random massacre of Korean residents, but that they also participated in some of the killings.

The memorials to the Korean dead don’t get a lot of media attention. In fact, most Japanese probably don’t know much about the massacre itself since it isn’t something that’s taught in school or covered in textbooks. As with similar matters related to pre-1945 Japan-Korea relations, there are disagreements about the number killed. Officially, it’s only a few hundred, but some scholars claim the real number is as high as 6,000. Consequently, there’s almost no mention of the massacre in Japanese popular culture, but that will change soon. An article that appeared in the Aug. 29 Asahi Shimbun reported on the first narrative feature by the noted documentary filmmaker Tatsuya Mori, which will tackle one isolated incident that occurred during the killings.

Mori’s most famous work comprises two long documentaries about the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult, which carried out the deadly sarin attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995. As he told Asahi, the Aum movies embody a theme that has obsessed him his whole career, and which his new film will continue to explore. What fascinated him about Aum followers is that they appeared so rational and even-tempered. They did not outwardly manifest qualities that many people would characterize as being evil, and yet they allowed themselves to be party—in many instances through direct action—to evil deeds. That’s why in his new movie, whose working title is “Fukuda Mura Jiken” (Fukuda Village Incident), he will endeavor to take the point-of-view of the perpetrators of the killings, which took place in a village that is now in an area of Noda, Chiba Prefecture. The killings he chronicles took place on Sept. 6, 1923, or five days after the earthquake itself. 

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Review: Bullet Train

Posted on August 31, 2022 by philipbrasor

David Leitch is one of those handful of directors to be continually blessed with big Hollywood budgets to realize his ambitious action-movie dreams. A former stunt man who knows how to stage a fight so that it’s more interesting than exciting, he personifies the kind of cinematic mindset that feels all the technical tools at his disposal must be exploited effectively in order to realize a sustained entertainment vision, which goes without saying. In his case, this vision is the depiction of brutality that no one could ever take seriously, but at least in Deadpool2 he was working with a parody of the overblown superhero franchise that has dominated Hollywood for two decades. Bullet Train, loosely based on a novel by Japanese writer Kotaro Isaka, seems to have no subtext whatsoever. It is what it is—a garish, ultra-violent, impossibly convoluted exercise in snarky attitude and criminal preposterousness.

If the movie succeeds, at least half the credit should go to Brad Pitt, who seems fully invested in the stupid story mainly because it fits into his wheelhouse so perfectly. Pitt plays Ladybug, a hired assassin who, following a long layoff due to a traumatic injury and months of therapy, decides to become a different kind of hit man, one with a zest for life and a more forgiving philosophy. Obviously, his handler, Maria (Sandra Bullock, in a performance that is literally phoned in), doesn’t see this as being helpful, but she gives him a fairly easy assignment on his first day back: Retrieve a briefcase that is being transported on the titular high-speed express from Tokyo to Kyoto. “I don’t need the gun,” Ladybug says when he picks up his assignment package. “Take the gun,” says Maria.

And, of course, he needs the gun. The briefcase is apparently filled with lots of money that two other assassins (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry) were supposed to deliver in a ransom deal but are keeping for themselves. There are a number of other shady but colorful types on the train eager to not only secure the briefcase, but dispose of Ladybug, since each one seems to have something against him. These various agenda do a deal on Ladybug’s head that Pitt conveys with his patented confused dude sensibility, constantly asking his opponents as they attempt to shoot, stab, or beat him, “What’s your problem?” 

If the eventual multiple reveals fail to engage the viewer’s imagination it’s because real life in any recognizable form never enters the story, and even the fantasy elements involving old yakuza families, Mexican cartels, and Michael Shannon as the epitome of Asian inappropriation (for laughs, of course) end up cancelling one another out through sheer overkill. Occasionally, the script, adapted by Zak Olkewicz, attempts to humanize the characters by presenting their respective back stories, but it only adds to the confusion. I have no idea if any of this was in the original novel, and it’s pointless to point out the disconnects between what you get on screen and how things really are in Japan, because Japan is simply a convenient construct to exoticize what is at base a pedestrian crime comedy. The only localized aspect I appreciated was the running joke in which Ladybug’s repeated attempts to get off the train were thwarted by the Shinkansen’s strict rule of keeping the doors open for only 30 seconds at each stop. Hey, I’ve been there. 

In English, Japanese and Spanish. Opens Sept. 1 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Bullet Train home page in Japanese

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Media watch: Asahi focuses on the reality of Okinawan women’s lives

Posted on August 29, 2022 by philipbrasor
Protest against US soldiers’ violence toward Okinawan women

Asahi Shimbun’s regular Koron feature typically asks three experts to contribute short essays on a designated theme. On Aug. 24, the column’s topic was the status of Okinawan women on the 50th anniversary of the prefecture’s reversion to Japanese control after being under U.S. occupation since the end of World War II. Okinawa, which was once a self-contained kingdom, has always been an outlier among Japanese prefectures for various reasons, some of them related to its culture. Consequently, the rest of Japan tends to view Okinawans as being distinct; and, in fact, even Okinawans think this as evidenced by their use of the word “Yamato” when they refer to the rest of Japan. However, the image that most Japanese have of Okinawa is that of a carefree place ideal for sightseeing, what with its tropical climate, and conducive to families with children, since Okinawa’s birthrate is always the highest of all the prefectures. 

One of the contributors, Prof. Yoko Uema of the University of the Ryukyus, attempts to dispel this image in her essay, first by pointing out that Okinawa is also perennially the poorest prefecture in Japan and thus would naturally be the most difficult place to raise children. However, prejudices on the main islands prevail and so the reality of children’s and, by extension, women’s lives is not generally known. 

As she points out, the reason the birthrate is so high on Okinawa is because birth control, whether utilized before (preventive) or after (abortion) possible conception, is not a facet of everyday life the way it is in the rest of Japan. Another statistic that distinguishes Okinawa is that the average age of women when they give birth for the first time is lower than anywhere else in Japan. And because income levels are also the lowest, not to mention the fact that after-school daycare and child welfare are very difficult to secure, many young mothers cannot afford to raise their children and usually leave such matters to their own mothers or female relatives. In addition, Okinawa has both the highest marriage rate and the highest divorce rate in Japan, as well as the highest portion of residents who remain single their entire lives. 

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Media watch: Opinions about state funeral show the limitations of public surveys

Posted on August 28, 2022 by philipbrasor
NTV asks why a state funeral

Polling and public surveys suck up a lot of media oxygen, especially with regards to political issues. Earlier this year, the justice ministry questioned the public on the separate married names matter. Over the years the portion of respondents in such surveys who said they think married couples should have the right to choose whether they want to maintain separate names had been increasing, but for this most recent survey that portion went down. Then some commentators noticed that the methodology used in the questioning had changed and wondered if that had anything to do with it.

It’s a topic we plan to go into in more detail in the near future, but it has prompted us to look at surveys more carefully. At the moment, the press wants to know whether people feel they should pay for the upcoming state funeral for former prime minister Shinzo Abe, a decision that was not made by all representatives of the public, meaning the Diet, but rather by the Cabinet, whose members all belong to the ruling coalition that Abe headed for many years. Consequently, surveys of people’s opinions would seem to be called for, but the results weren’t entirely instructive.

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Review: DC League of Super-Pets

Posted on August 27, 2022 by philipbrasor

Having pretty much fallen out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe out of sheer exhaustion, not to mention general apathy, I likely would find any future MCU installment totally incomprehensible, since much of its appeal (not to mention economic justification) seems to be in keeping up with all the various narrative threads. The DC Cinematic Universe appears to be more forgiving in that the only through story is that of the Justice League, which nobody is that interested in anyway. So I could enjoy this animated sideshow about Superman’s pet dog, Krypto (Dwayne Johnson) and some newfound super-critters actually saving the asses of the whole Justice League because I had absolutely no investment in the ongoing saga, if, in fact, there is a saga.

And since the Superman back story is even known by people who grew up in caves in the Himalayas, Krypto’s status as Superman’s best friend doesn’t need a lot of exposition, so the jokes about how you take a super-dog for a walk (actually, you fly) and just how keen a super-dog’s sense of smell is (super keen) can pour out freely. And everyone also knows that green Kryptonite takes away Superman’s powers, so we don’t have to go into that when the big guy’s nemesis, Lex Luthor (Marc Maron), wields it to capture Superman and then the rest of the Justice League. It’s thus up to Krypto to save his master, but he can’t do it alone. The cleverest, and some might say wokest, element of the plot is that Krypto essentially deputizes a motley group of animals rescued from a shelter who have already been accidentally infected with super powers from orange Kryptonite, though at first this crew—a pig, a turtle, another dog, and a squirrel—don’t really know how to control their newfound abilities, so Krypto has to train them, and the resulting montage is quite humorous in that it makes fun of any other training montage you’ve ever seen in a Hollywood movie.

Of course, with superhero pets you have to have a supervillian pet as well, so there’s the guinea pig Lulu (Kate McKinnon), who is mainly doing evil in order to win Luthor’s love, just as the super-pets are doing good so as to endear themselves to the various members of the Justice League they are saving. The script makes a bit too much of this quid pro quo loyalty thing, especially the squirrel, a species I never equated with affection for humans, but they make a joke out of that, too. Much has been written in the American press about the expensive array of voice actors on board—John Krasinski, Kevin Hart, Natasha Lyonne, Keanu Reeves, Olivia Wilde—but except for Reeves none made much of an impression on me aurally, so I wonder if the money was worth it. Still, I’d sooner see a sequel to this than any future adventures of the Avengers. 

Now playing in J-subtitled versions in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024). (Also Japanese dubbed versions in other theaters)

DC League of Super-Pets home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

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