These two hour-long documentaries by Michael Blackwood, filmed in a verite style, follow the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk during several concert and recording stints in the U.S. and then Europe in 1967. There is no narration, and much of the footage has been cannibalized for other documentaries about jazz, so for the most part the films do little to give you any idea about Monk’s history and opinions. The original docs were broadcast on German TV and then never shown again until 1999. These current prints were taken from stock that was remastered in 2017, and what you get is mostly Monk playing, and that’s what you should want. Probably the most idiosyncratic pianist in a genre where idiosyncrasy is the norm rather than the exception, Monk is given plenty of room in these films to show his stuff. The production notes tell us he was at the height of his “fame” as a performer, and the awe with which he is met by fellow jazz musicians and fans alike is palpable, but the man himself is mostly incoherent and inadvertently comic, what with his extensive collection of headgear and a cigarette smoking style that kept his hands free to play. Monk comes across as an artist who is instinctual in that he has no need to explain much of what he is doing or even what he wants. Though one of the greatest jazz composers ever, he has people who transcribe what he does (including his solos) and translate his often incomprehensible ideas to the people he’s playing with. Monk, of course, could read and write music, but by this point he didn’t seem to have to—or he just couldn’t be bothered. During one studio session, some players ask about keys and tempos and he only responds viscerally. Of course, that’s how jazz musicians communicate, but Monk seems particularly dependent on the intuition of his interlocutors.
During the concerts that were filmed, especially in the Europe doc, which chronicles a tour by the Newport Jazz Festival, Monk often seems disconnected, sitting slightly offstage while others solo, smoking and thinking. He will then casually get up, sit down at the piano and just get into it without fuss, but the exactitude of his intentions are obvious. There truly does not seem to be any conduit between thought and fingers. He’s more like an athlete than a musician, except that the beauty of what he produces is directly affecting. Though Monk would live another 15 years, he reportedly didn’t perform much after this period, and the overall mood of the two docs is of a man who not only has nothing to prove any more, but seems somewhat put out by any demand that he should. (It also suggests a man who wasn’t in the best of health.) In any case, Blackwood got the goods. These are films for hardcore jazz freaks. You come for the playing. Everything else is distraction.
Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
South Korean cinema has perfected the police procedural owing mainly to Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (still his best, I think), which set the bar very high at a crucial time when Korean directors were coming into their own internationally. Though there’s nothing particularly distinctive in terms of narrative about Korean cop movies, the industry’s fairly relaxed attitude toward excessive violence, sentimentality, and social criticism often combine to make them much more than just the sum of their foot pursuits and dogged interrogations. Moreover, the mysteries tend to be informed by something that transcends the mere solution of a crime.
Even by those standards, Park Ji-wan’s debut feature, which she wrote and directed, is extraordinary, and it’s not just because the featured detective is a woman, but rather how her identity as a woman affects her sleuthing. Kim Hyeon-soo (Kim Hye-soo) is a veteran cop who hasn’t been a detective that long, and her career as the latter has been interrupted by a traffic accident that led to what sounds like a recovery period combined with a temporary suspension. When she finally returns to regular duty, her colleagues welcome her back but something is obviously different, and not just because she still needs to go through an internal investigation. Her first assignment is to look into a cold case on a remote island that involves a teenage girl who went missing on the night of a big typhoon. Her shoes were found on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea, and she left a note in the house where she was staying. The local police have determined it to be a suicide, but they need confirmation from Seoul headquarters since they have yet to find a body. Kim’s job is to close the case once and for all.
From the beginning, it’s clear that it’s a job no one wants to do, and Kim goes about the investigation at first in a desultory manner, checking with the local cops and persons who knew the girl. She soon discovers that the case is more complicated than what she was told. The girl was essentially in a witness protection program since she was ready to testify against her own father, whom she fingered as the ringleader of an elaborate smuggling operation. The prosecutors set her up on the island in an empty house to keep her as far away from her father and his associates as possible, but the longer the girl, Se-jin (Roh Jeong-eui), stayed in isolation, the more uneasy she became. Kim finds this out from the only person who was close friends with her, Sun-young (Lee Jung-eun), a deaf, middle-aged woman who bonded with Se-jin over the former’s comatose niece, whom Se-jin cared for on a part-time basis. Through Sun-young, Kim starts doubting the local investigators’ stories, and realizes that Se-jin’s connection to her father is more fraught than anyone originally imagined.
But as Se-jin’s story slowly reveals itself, so does Kim’s. She is in the middle of a contentious divorce whose contours align with those of her accident and casts a pall on everything she does. It’s not so much that her situation causes her to identify with Se-jin, but rather that Se-jin’s desperation seems to have sprung from the same sort of reaction that Kim is now feeling toward all the men in her life trying to tell her what she has to do. As such, she understands that she has been sent here to close the case as a condition for getting her own career back on track. And she resents it.
Steady command of atmosphere is one of the hallmarks of South Korean cinema, and Park proves herself to be more than up to the task. There’s not a whole lot of action, and some viewers expecting a thriller may be disappointed, but the emotional tension never lets up. Even if the mystery offers no big surprises, it provides something richer: A character arc that is both realistic and dramatically affecting.
In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).
The Day I Died: Unclosed Case home page in Japanese
Given that the elaborate set piece which sets the extravagant mood for this highly stylized retelling of the fall of the Gucci fashion brand is a wedding where everyone sports comically distinctive Italian accents, it’s tempting to approach Ridley Scott’s latest blockbuster as his inevitable tribute to The Godfather, but while the similarities don’t end there (intrafamily intrigue! organizational criminal intent! professional hit men!), the juxtaposition of thriller elements with comical characterizations that may or may not be inadvertent keeps the viewer off-balance. Does it deserve that coveted imprimatur of a “movie that’s so bad it’s good”?
Probably not, because it isn’t that bad, just confused. The aforementioned caricatures of the various members of the Gucci clan are compromised somewhat by Lady Gaga’s turn as the outsider/spoiler of this epic, Patrizia Reggiani, a social climber from a family that, at the end of the 1960s, just recently clawed its way out of the working class. Patrizia’s skillful if somewhat trite seduction of the heir-apparent to the House of Gucci, Maurizio (Adam Driver), is the lip-smacking hors d’oeuvre that sets the irresistible tone, and Gaga acts her ass off, thus also setting an impossible bar for the rest of the all-star cast—almost all Oscar-winning thesps-with-a-capital-T—that none, understanding the thrust of the script, endeavors to reach. At the dynastic head of this troupe, both as characters and actors, we have Al Pacino as Rodolfo, Maurizio’s father, Gucci’s CEO, and an actual actor by profession, and Jeremy Irons as Aldo, the creative brains of this particular generation who actually talks Maurizio into joining the family business. Initially, Maurizio wants nothing to do with shoes and bags and dresses, preferring to make his way in the world of business on his own. But then Patrizia enters and convinces him that shoes and bags and dresses are the way to go.
The problem is that Maurizio isn’t satisfied to sit at the top of the empire and rake in cash. He wants to make a difference, even if it’s not a difference the rest of family appreciates, and with his wife’s help and encouragement, he turns away from the cheap knock-offs that have allowed the extended family to cruise on their name only. This decision alienates Aldo, who feels betrayed, and sets in motion a game of legal hopscotch that eventually snares the family in an international investigation into racketeering and tax dodging. None of this is served particularly well by Becky Johnston’s and Robert Bentivegna’s script, which is more concerned with Patrizia’s desperation as the family fortune is put in peril, as well as her suspicions, which turn out to be well-founded, that Maurizio is cheating on her. Enter Salma Hayek as a fortune-teller who helps Patrizia secure some Goon-level “mechanics” to take out Maurizio, and you get what should have been a proper payoff to the kind of social comedy that Adam McKay specializes in. Scott obviously thinks he’s getting what he paid for, but the actors work at cross-purposes, none more than Driver, whose typical interiority makes him look like the only person onscreen who’s not in on the joke. His opposite is Jared Leto, confined to interminable layers of makeup, as the black sheep, Paolo, who owns every scene he enters by sheer force of wicked will. Either someone told him he was in a different movie, or he decided he’d just have as much fun as possible because no way will he ever win another Oscar. Ironically, he may actually end up with one here. That’s how wacky a production it is.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Walf 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).
Though Clint Eastwood has never officially stated when he plans to retire as a director, it seems to be that he once said something about leaving acting behind, but I may have imagined that. In any event, having entered his 90s, Eastwood still insists on starring in his movies, and it’s getting more difficult to justify these appearances, even when he’s playing a character that is sufficiently old. His latest takes place in 1979, so the viewer is spared the trouble of having to make concessions with the kind of post-millennial sensibilities that Eastwood isn’t very keen on representing. His character, Mike Milo, is a cowboy, more specifically a one-time rodeo rider who works in some capacity for a horse breeder named Howard (Dwight Yoakam), who fires Mike in the first scene because he’s a “has-been,” a line that I first took as a joke since Eastwood looks so frail to begin with. Apparently, Milo hurt himself badly some years ago and has since become dependent on pain pills, but it’s not clear if that’s the reason Howard is firing him. It’s a pretty incoherent scene, and becomes even more puzzling when the movie quickly jumps a year into the future and Howard is attempting to rehire Milo for a one-off job: Go down to Mexico and bring back his teenage son, who lives with his floozy of a mother in a perpetual state of delinquency.
Though Nick Schenk’s script is based on a novel by Richard Nash (who’s credited as co-screenwriter), it doesn’t really give us much to work with, and the questions raised by Milo’s mission—Why Milo? Why does Howard suddenly want the boy to live with him?—are simply tossed to the side because the movie isn’t really interested in the job Milo is carrying out. It’s all about the journey. Milo eventually finds the kid, named Rafo (Eduardo Minett), and discovers the mother, Leta (Fernanda Urrejola), living is luxury due to some connections she has with underworld figures. At first, she seems happy to get rid of Rafo, but she changes her mind, again for reasons that make little sense, and after Milo and the boy leave, along with his fighting rooster, which give the film its title, she sicks a bunch of bruisers on the pair to bring them back, but they manage to elude their pursuers by hiding out in a nice old Mexican town where Milo finds work breaking horses and Rafo learns how to be responsible. That’s pretty much as far as the “story” goes. The film, however, seems to be more or less a kind of refutation of Eastwood’s reputational style. Milo is, of course, anything but macho at his age, and while his romance of a middle aged Mexican restaurant owner needs to be taken with a sack of salt, it’s nice to see one of Eastwood’s stock cowboy personalities, with all his rough edges in tact, relax and look at the sunny side of what’s left of his life. But in the end, Cry Macho feels muddled, its clear sentimental intentions clouded by a lazy attitude toward narrative. Though I don’t begrudge Eastwood his desire to keep making movies, this one really does look like it was made by a nonagenerian with cognitive problems.
Opens Jan 14 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
On December 26, Japan’s public broadcaster NHK aired a special program on its BS1 satellite channel about the making of the official documentary for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, which is being directed by Nara-based filmmaker Naomi Kawase. One scene depicts a man whom NHK described in the explanatory subtitles as someone who had participated in an anti-Olympics demonstration and received money for his participation. Then, on January 9, NHK Osaka, which had produced the special, issued an apology, saying that some of the information conveyed in the explanatory titles had not been properly vetted. That night, there was a two-minute message aired on BS1 explaining the problem and apologizing to viewers and those associated with the Olympic documentary.
According to Asahi Shimbun, the scene in question was part of a program segment in which NHK was following another director, whom Kawase had asked to cooperate on the documentary, as he interviewed anti-Olympic protesters. The subject of the interview was not identified, but the chyron (explanatory titles) described him as a demonstrator who had been paid for protesting against the Olympics. According to NHK the chyron had been written by the NHK director based on “supplemental materials,” but apparently he hadn’t double checked whether the man actually participated in any anti-Olympic demonstrations. After the special was aired viewers wrote to NHK to complain about the segment. Then, in early January, NHK somehow located the man and learned that even when he was originally interviewed for the documentary—in June, before the Games began—he actually said that in the past he had appeared at demonstrations, though none had been protests against the Olympics, and he was sometimes paid for his participation. The only thing he said about the Olympics during the interview was that he was “thinking” of participating in an anti-Olympics demonstration “in the future.”
NHK said it had no intention of “fabricating” information. The problem was simply the result of a misunderstanding and lack of rigorous checking on the part of NHK staff. However, Asahi Shimbun said that before the special was aired, it had been shown to people “related” to the production, and none requested revisions. Asahi does not say whether any of these related persons were working on the Olympic documentary itself, but in its apology NHK insisted that the special was completely the responsibility of NHK, and Kawase had nothing to do with it. It should be noted, however, that while the interview with the anonymous “demonstrator” was aired by NHK, the interview itself was carried out for the purposes of Kawase’s documentary.
Nevertheless, Kawase, who has cultivated an enviable reputation with documentaries and feature art films that have won prizes at prestigious international film festivals, has received a certain measure of criticism on social media from people who think her documentary is essentially pro-Olympics propaganda. According to a January 6 posting on the media watchdog website Litera, these critics mainly cite a statement Kawase made during the NHK program where she insisted, “It was we [meaning Japan] who invited the Olympics [to Tokyo] 7 years ago,” adding that the nation as a whole was pleased to win the bid and happy to host the Games. Actually, a fair number of people had advocated that it should have been cancelled outright after it was postponed in 2020, so Kawase’s recent social media critics begged to differ, saying that there had never been a strong national—or for that matter regional—consensus regarding the Tokyo Olympics.
The Olympics ended without any serious problems regarding the COVID epidemic, which was one of the main reasons that protesters demanded the Games be cancelled. So in that regard, the pro-Olympic camp was vindicated. However, there were other reasons for people to object to the Games—the snowballing costs being shouldered by the Japanese public, the displacement of long-term residents by the construction of venues, the diversion of funds from 2011 disaster victims in the Tohoku region—and the feeling among Kawase’s critics was that if she doesn’t address these objections in her documentary, then the film will end up being nothing more than a propaganda device. More to the point, it was wrong for Kawase to generalize that everyone in Japan was happy about the Olympics. (It remains to be seen how Kawase addresses the anti-Olympic movement in the finished documentary, or is she does at all.)
Litera is also suspicious of Kawase’s intentions, since her media appearances in relation to the documentary tend to contain glowing descriptions of the Olympic spirit and the International Olympic Committee charter. When confronted with the COVID issue, she said that any such anxiety in relation to the Olympics had no meaning, and while there was no appreciable increase in infections among people involved with the Games, Litera thought that her assurances regarding people’s fears came off as sounding tone deaf at the very least. After all, if the public really had been unanimously excited about hosting the Olympics, the fact that they were eventually barred from attending the Games due to COVID countermeasures should have been a crushing disappointment.
ADDENDUM, Jan. 11: Asahi Shimbun today published a statement by Kawase about the NHK faux pas, saying that she was not shown the footage of that interview in question by the director in charge of the interviews, and stressed that she was merely one of the subjects of the NHK special. Also, journalist Ryu Honma, speaking on the web talk show “Hitotsuki Mansatsu,” commented that the people NHK should apologize to are those who organized the anti-Olympics protests, not Kawase and the staff of her documentary project.
ADDENDUM, Jan. 14: On this week’s edition of the web program “No Hate TV,” activist/editor Yasumichi Noma talked about the video segment that NHK apologized for, and provided a bit more background. The director Kawase recruited to carry out the interviews is Kakuei Shimada, who attended film school with Kawase. According to Asahi Shimbun, Shimada was tasked with interviewing “anti-Olympics demonstrators,” though other media made it sound as if Shimada was just supposed to do man-on-the-street interviews in general. The Litera article said that in the controversial scene, NHK set up its camera at a distance and recorded Shimada talking to the man in question, so it’s not as if the interview was destined to be in the final documentary. In any case, as both Litera and Noma point out, the audio quality is poor. But Noma was also struck by the setting. If Shimada was trying to get comments from anti-Olympics protesters, then it made sense that he would go to a demonstration to seek them out, but the scene of the interview is not the new National Stadium, where most of the demonstrations took place in the month of June 2021. He says it looks like Sanya, the district in the shitamachi area of Tokyo where day workers traditionally gather for jobs. What’s notable about Sanya is that it is the preferred place to go to recruit anyone for purposes of mobilization, and that right wing groups have been known to go there and pay people to show up at their demonstrations in order to make it look as if whatever cause they are protesting/advocating has a lot of support. So Noma thinks that Shimada purposely went to Sanya to try and find people who had been paid to protest the Olympics, but this guy is the only one he found, and, from what was eventually discovered in a follow-up interview by NHK, he never attended an anti-Olympic rally. This, of course, brings up the question of NHK’s rationale for following Shimada to Sanya: Didn’t they think it strange he was going to Sanya, rather than to the National Stadium, to do interviews? Also, Noma brings up Shimada’s background. As a director, he is probably most famous for his music videos of Japanese punk groups with a nationalist bent, a related theme that is also touched upon in the Litera article, which mentions Kawase’s close association with Akie Abe, former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s wife and a fellow believer in “Japanese spirituality.”
Japan tends to go through intense phases with regard to popular breeds of pet dogs. About 50-60 years ago it was the spitz, and 20-30 years ago you couldn’t pass a dog run without stumbling over a dozen or so chihuahua. Right now the dominant breed is overwhelmingly the toy poodle.
The ubiquity of certain breeds points to the widespread and often lucrative enterprise of pet breeding, which was unregulated in Japan only until recently, and even the new laws may not be entirely effective in protecting animals. An article that appeared last month in the economic magazine Toyo Keizai by pet journalist Mika Sakane took one example of a breeder in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, as representative of the business in general. The breeder, a man named Koji Momose, was arrested, along with some employees, in mid-December on suspicion of violating the animal welfare law. One of his facilities in the Nakayama district of the city contained 360 dogs confined to enclosures of differing sizes stacked four to six cages high. These cages, some of which held more than one dog, were invariably filthy, and almost all the animals were ill or injured in some way. A few were blind and many had trouble breathing. It turns out that Momose had other facilities and police estimated the total number of dogs in his care was around 940. Due to “lack of workers,” according to a statement made by the breeder, these other facilities were in no better shape than the one in Nakayama, and Sakane reports that Momose had talked to other media several days before his arrest admitting that he himself regularly performed C-sections on dogs to deliver puppies, even though he is not a licensed veterinarian. Moreover, he did not anesthetize the dogs when he operated, though he says he did administer “sedatives.” When asked where he learned how to perform C-sections, he said he had watched real veterinarians do it. A representative of the local sanitation department, which is in charge of animal welfare, told the press that “sedatives” are not the same as anesthesia in veterinary surgery.
The mind-boggling box office success of the latest Spider-Man installment during another surge in the pandemic only goes to prove that there’s no such thing as too much Spider-Man, and while some will point to the MCU imprimatur as being its own reason to print money, essentially such cynicism shortchanges the peculiar appeal of the web-spinning superhero, an appeal that Sony, as the only studio outside the Disney universe to still have control over a Marvel character, is too lucky to possess and not ambitious enough to appreciate properly. During my own brief elementary school comic book phase Spider-Man was the most interesting superhero simply because he was a kid who couldn’t quite square his powers with his immaturity, and he genuinely suffered for it. He was the most human superhero because the stories were as much about his doubts and fears as they were about fighting bad guys. There was something of that poignancy in the Tobey Maguire-Sam Raimi trilogy that made so much money, and slightly less in the angtsy, attenuated Andrew Garfield “Amazing” movies. Since Tom Holland’s gig is twofold—he not only plays Spider-Man in his own series, but also plays him as perhaps the future central character in the continuing Avengers franchise—his personality as Peter Parker is more utilitarian, and while the filmmakers have tried to get back to the adolescent self-awareness that is the core of the Spidey story, there’s too much going on in the surrounding films to make it work.
No Way Home is obviously meant to resolve all those problems as a means of getting the character back to basics, and it does an impressive job, logistically at least, in bringing all the conflicting dramatic impulses to bear on that mission. At the end of the last installment, Mysterioso (Jake Gyllenhaal) exposed Spider-Man’s identity as Peter Parker to the world, which threw not only Peter’s life into total chaos, but those of his girlfriend, MJ (Zendaya), and best friend, Ned (Jacob Batalon)—specifically, their chances of getting into MIT. He can no longer effectively fight bad guys, but even worse he can’t even safely attend to his scholarly ambitions. So he does something that only makes sense in the context of fantasy blockbusters like these: he uses magic by calling on his new Avenger compatriot Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to use his special powers to make the world forget Mysterioso ever happened. As with the whole X-Men series, this sort of supreme deus ex machina plot device is so open-ended as to be practically meaningless. It’s why an in-context motivational purist like Quentin Tarantino would never be caught within ten feet of an MCU production.
Dr. Strange’s spell causes more than just mass amnesia. It opens up portals to different dimensions, all of which contain those other Spider-Men that were so effectively presented in that animated peculiarity Into the Spider-Verse. By now if you have a connection to the internet, you know what happens, but I promised Sony I wouldn’t tell, so suffice to say that all the previous incarnations of Spider-Man, as well as their most prominent adversaries, get to share the same space for the kind of blowout that guarantees anyone with a Marvel jones will line up twice to see it. As I said, it’s well done in a totally cynical, future-profit-speculating way, and settles Holland’s status as a Peter Parker manque we can believe in, but just as I was exhausted after sitting through this two-and-a-half-hour fan service epic, I can seriously say that there is such a thing as too much Spider-Man.
Now playing 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).
In late 2020, the Japanese government passed a law that recognizes married couples who have children via donated sperm and eggs as being the legal parents of those children. The law would go into effect in one year’s time, meaning, presumably, it became effective last month. Prior to this revision to the civil code, parents who had children using such methods had to go through a convoluted bureaucratic process to have the resulting children registered as being theirs, but even in such cases there were always documentary clues that indicated the child’s biological provenance, a matter that concerned many prospective parents. Since the government is determined to increase the birth rate, it was important to change the law so that parents who wanted to access such treatments due to issues that prevented them from having children otherwise would be encouraged to procreate. In essence, the revision allows the man married to the woman who gives birth to declare himself the legal father of the child even if he did not provide the sperm; and allows the woman who gave birth to the child to be the legal mother even if the egg was donated by a third party. What the law does not do is allow the resulting child to seek disclosure of the identities of any of the donors, a point of contention to some interested groups.
The law indirectly points up the relative lack of regulation covering donated sperms and eggs in Japan, as well as the general practice of in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination. While the revision helps the government maintain its control over who can declare themselves the parent of a Japanese child, which is one of the purposes of the family register (koseki), it has no effect on the process of how these parents acquire the eggs or sperm needed to carry out the desired function of producing a child. Though the government has said it intends to discuss the purchase and sale of sperm and eggs, in which the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology does not allow its members to partake, it has yet to proceed any further than a declaration of purpose. In addition, many hospitals have suspended artificial insemination treatments, which means more and more couples who wish to carry out such treatments are on their own.
For the second year in a row I have decided to forego a ten best list, since I didn’t see nearly enough of the movies released in Japan in 2021 to make any sort of authoritative judgment on which were the best. Though most of the local distributors have gotten back up to speed with press screenings despite the stubornness of the pandemic, I have apparently been dropped from several lists and though I tried to see as many films as I could after they opened in theaters, I don’t live in Tokyo and the number and type of movies available to me where I live is limited. I have become more used to watching movies online, including quite a few screeners from distributors and publicists who have caught on to the idea that they can get more media attention that way, and while I don’t think my opinions about the movies I see online are any different for having watched them online, the net impact of watching them on a smaller screen and in an environment where distractions are inevitable is certainly different. I might, for example, have concluded that Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog was the best movie of the year had I seen it on a big screen, but like most people I watched it on Netflix while my partner and the cats continually passed through my fields of vision and (more significantly) hearing.
Minamata
I also missed both of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s movies, which won lots of awards overseas. One of them, Drive My Car, may very well pick up an Oscar. As I’ve said here before, except for those by a handful of directors, I haven’t had much interest in Japanese movies made after 1990, and I wasn’t greatly impressed by the only Hamaguchi movie I’ve seen so far, Asako I & II, so I didn’t seek the two new ones out. I’m sorry I didn’t, though I’m sure they’ll be available for streaming relatively soon. That said, probably the best movie I saw that was released this year was Japanese, but it was a documentary: Kazuo Hara’s Minamata Mandala, another deep dive into a controversial public health issue that the authorities have tried their best to ignore. At more than six hours, it was even longer than Hara’s last movie, which was about citizens’ lawsuits against the government for asbestos-related illnesses, and I think it’s better since Hara was able to pull together all the disparate arguments that surround Minamata disease into a cohesive statement about the real social effects of industrial pollution and the attendant negligence. Coincidentally or not, it was released in Japan only two months after Minamata, the American feature film with Johnny Depp playing W. Eugene Smith, the photographer who brought the Japanese environmental crisis to the world in the 1970s, and while it was far from a perfect movie, it did a fair job of highlighting the conflict between the affected public and a large corporate entity that relies on the government to protect its interests, even when those interests lead to illness and death. In that regard I would recommend anyone interested in public health issues to see both, though I know that’s asking a lot considering the length and complexity of the former film and the fact that you will have to put up with Johnny Depp playing a drunk in the latter.
September 1, 2023, will mark the 100th year anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake, which struck Tokyo and surrounding areas, killing more than 140,000 people. In the days that followed, an additional number of Korean residents of the affected areas were murdered by vigilante mobs, soldiers, and police after rumors spread that Koreans had poisoned wells, set fires, and looted businesses and homes in the confusion caused by the quake. At the time, of course, Korea was a colony of Japan and the Japanese authorities were fearful of the Korean independence movement, and there is a great deal of testimony on record saying that the police and other public entities spread these rumors and furtively encouraged the killings.
On January 1, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that citizens groups from South Korea and Japan have jointly created a petition to demand that the post-quake massacre, which they call an act of “genocide,” be investigated thoroughly by the government of South Korea. According to one of the citizens groups, there is clear evidence that Japan’s interior ministry at the time conveyed the anti-Korean rumors to local governments throughout Japan. The Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, which was in essence the government of the Korean peninsula in exile at the time and thus supportive of the resistance movement, reported that 6,621 Korean residents of Japan had been killed by military police and vigilante groups, though some reports have estimated the number killed was as high as 10,000. The Japanese government has always maintained that the number killed was only 231.
One of the Japanese citizens groups, Hosenka, has been trying to excavate the remains of Koreans killed during the massacre since 1982. The group also began holding annual memorial services for the victims. Now, however, a representative says that many Japanese public officials, including prominent politicians, have increasingly made “revisionist statements” that suggest there was never a concerted effort to kill Koreans after the quake. The purpose of the petition is to get to the bottom of the matter in an official manner once and for all before the 100th anniversary takes place. The groups are essentially looking for the Japanese government to make a formal apology, which they think would go far to heal the frayed relations between Japan and South Korea brought about by disputes over shared history. Such a reckoning, they say, is vital for the good of eastern Asia as well as a means of avoiding hate crimes in the future, which are on the rise.
The citizens groups are now setting up videos on YouTube for publicity purposes. So far, no mainstream Japanese media outlets have picked up the story.
philipbrasor.com 