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Given that this weekend marks the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and that the Chinese government has prohibited any memorial of the incident in Hong Kong for the first time, the opening of Sue Williams’ documentary about pop star/democracy activist Denise Ho in Japan seems opportune for a variety of reasons, not least of all that it may help Japanese viewers focus on what’s at stake in the territory. Even before she threw her lot in with the city’s young pro-democracy contingent, Ho was a controversial figure, mainly because she came out as a lesbian at the height of her popularity as a singer—a revelation that did nothing to dent that popularity—but mainly because she’s forged a path as both an entertainer and a public person that has remained true to her ideals and veers away from those ideals for no one, including the show biz powers-that-be in China. 

As it happens, Ho’s upbringing was seriously affected by Tiananmen. Her parents were teachers and always suspicious of the Chinese Communist Party, and Tiananmen made them rethink their priorities for their children. When Denise was in junior high school, her parents moved the family to Montreal, where the school system, not to mention the Canadian mindset in general, instilled in her a fierce sense of individuality. However, the pull of her home town was always there, and in 1996, encouraged by her older brother (who would eventually become her music director), she entered a Cantopop singing contest and won, which set her up with various music production endeavors in Hong Kong. Her dream was to follow in the footsteps of her idol, Anita Mui, who became her mentor, but she bridled at the trappings of conventional stardom: the focus on glamor, the artistic prerogatives of (mostly) male managers and fans, and a resistance to her desire to tell her own story in song. In fact, it was her implacable will to tell that story that led to her coming out after a decade of playing mainly by the rules and being rewarded handsomely for it. In Williams’ telling of this story, it’s difficult not to imagine that Ho just happened to be the right person at the right time, and in that regard her gravitation to the pro-democracy movement was inevitable, since her own insistence on freely expressing herself as an artist sprang from a native fear following the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China that such freedoms were no longer guaranteed. 

Once the movement shifted to active participation, Ho had no choice but to shift with it, even though she knew it was destroy her career. This is the meaning of the title, “becoming the song.” She had to make real the idealism she sang about. In 2014 she was arrested on camera for taking part in an Umbrella Movement demonstration, and could no longer perform in China, where she had millions of fans. Consequently, many international brands, most notably L’Oreal, which stood by her after she came out, dropped their endorsement deals with her in order to placate the Chinese authorities. 

As powerful as the documentary is, it’s already dated since it ends with the riots over the extradition bill that was eventually overturned. All that seems so long ago, now that the government is cracking down even more ruthlessly than before. Though the movie expresses some hope for Ho by showing how she’s managed to stay solvent by playing concerts for overseas Chinese fans, there’s a bittersweet flavor to these performance vignettes that points to some kind of ending. Denise Ho may not be defeated, but it remains to be seen if her tirelessly potent example as a beacon of personal freedom will survive the current political situation. 

In English (mostly) and Cantonese. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Denise Ho: Becoming the Song home page in Japanese

photo (c) Aquarian Works LLC

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about coverage of local governments’ handling of the vaccine rollout. The main theme would seem to be that, while each municipality is running things their own way, they all have to deal with the same issues as determined by the central government. As pointed out in the column, some localities have had trouble addressing glitches in the overall program, but for the most part it seems they’ve managed to keep their eyes on the prize, so to speak, and have a done a capable job considering the difficulties forced upon them by the various government ministries administering the rollout. 

Thus it might be useful to explain my own experience. Having turned 65 last December, I was in the third designated group in the city of Inzai, Chiba Prefecture, where I live, population about 100,000. The first group was, of course, medical workers, and the second was people over 75. I received my packet in the middle of April informing me that I could start making reservations for shots on May 6, either at a designated clinic or at the city’s mass vaccination center, which would be located in an empty storefront in one of the malls that line route 464 (Inzai has quite a few malls with empty storefronts). The packet contained the “coupons” with my name printed on them in katakana. These coupons, based on my resident card data, are mandated by the central government so that only those who belong to the designated cohort can get vaccinated first. The problem with this system, as pointed out in the column, is that it doesn’t account for exceptional circumstances, such as people not showing up for reservations or not even making reservations in the first place. From what I understand, municipalities are given a set amount of doses depending on their population (though, right at the beginning, apparently, every municipality got the exact same number of doses regardless of population—about 1,500) and have to make do on their own, so they need to be creative with regard to cancellations and no-shows. 

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about how the national newspapers are talking about the scheduled discharge of irradiated ground water from the stricken Fukushima No. 1 reactor into the surrounding sea. One of the purposes of editorials is to put the news into some kind perspective that will have meaning to readers, and in the case of the discharge many people don’t know if it’s a good idea or a bad idea. For the most part, the media has taken the government line, which is that the discharge will not harm the environment, but it’s not really certain that the public is convinced, which is why the general tenor of the editorial content of all five national newspapers is that the government has to explain more, though, realistically speaking, it’s difficult to imagine what exactly the government could do to bring everyone over to their way of thinking. Obviously, someone like Hiroaki Koide, the physicist mentioned at the end of the column, is going to be against the discharge because he is fundamentally opposed to commercial nuclear energy, but his main beef is with Tepco rather than the government, since he believes the utility approaches the whole matter from an economic standpoint, which means safety and other concerns are secondary. 

With climate change an ever-increasing threat to everyone on the planet, nuclear energy has become a focus of attention because it doesn’t produce CO2, so Japan, which has spent decades building up its nuclear capacity, has an obligation to see how viable nuclear power is as a means of mitigating its contributions to global warming, but it can’t ignore the public’s anxieties about nuclear power, not after what happened in Fukushima ten years ago. Tepco and the government have had a decade to put into place credible safety guidelines that take into account the proximity of power stations to residential areas and Japan’s geological situation, and they haven’t done enough. Various courts have blocked power station restarts because evacuation plans have been found to be insufficient, and in the past several months violations of security arrangements at two of Tepco’s power plants were discovered. It’s as if Tepco and the government don’t really care, so they can’t complain about “damaging rumors” if they themselves are party to creating them.