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Akio Fujimoto’s Along the Sea does a good job of describing Japan’s arcane technical intern training program without actually explicating its rules and procedures. As such, it also goes a considerable distance in providing an idea of Japan’s attitude toward immigration in general, though for those of us non-Japanese who live here it may feel insufficient given the rank hypocrisy at the heart of the country’s immigration policies. By now, everyone who has ever read about the technical trainee program knows that it is basically a cover for the provision of cheap overseas labor to Japanese businesses without any reciprocal protections for the laborers themselves. Cloaked by the meaningless and anodyne concept of development assistance, the program can’t help but create a kind of parallel universe of brokers and criminal agents who exploit the system for themselves, thus making its supposed beneficiares double victims.

Along the Sea focuses on three trainees, all young Vietnamese women (Vietnam provides approximately half the trainees) who came to Japan with the express aim of making money rather than “learning a skill,” which is the ostensible purpose of the program. When we first meet the women, Phuong (Hoang Phuong), Nhu (Quynh Nhu), and An (Huynh Tuyet Anh), they are already escaping from their assigned positions, where they work 15-hour days in a factory under horrible living conditions, including unpaid overtime. The underground nature of their escape, however, means they leave behind their documentation, which their “employers” withhold in order to keep them hostage, and are thus not only illegally resident in Japan, but unable to return properly to Vietnam.

Their escape is assisted by a broker who has already secured  employment for the women at a fish-packing factory in Aomori Prefecture. For a while the women are happy with their decision, mainly because the pay is better and more secure, which means they can easily send money back to their families in Vietnam; and they have more freedom of movement and actually seem less conspicuous in this sleepy seaside town. However, Phuong eventually falls ill and believes she may be pregnant, a development that puts all three women at risk. Because they have no documentation they cannot access public health care and Phuong turns to a Vietnamese fixer who exploits her situation more brutally than the Japanese authority, which can mostly hide behind bureaucratic layers of cyncism. Eventually, the general paranoia festers, destroying the women’s relationship. 

Fujimoto treats the story with  documentary precision, and thus the viewer may want more information, such as the availability of abortions in Japan (Phuong thinks the father is her boyfriend back home, and pregnant trainees are forbidden from entering Japan) and the distinction between brokers and fixers in terms of what kinds of underground networks they belong to. Such unanswered questions do not detract from the dramatic impetus of the movie, and while the overall production is purposely drab and as contrast-free at the overcast pallor of Aomori, the movie is thought-provoking in an immediate way, which is unusual for a recent Japanese narrative film.

In Vietnamese and Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Polepole Higashi Nakano (03-3371-0088).

Along the Sea home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 E.x.N K.K./ever rolling films

The clever, almost flippant title of this Czech documentary betrays its slightly self-congratulatory tone. Though the topic is a very serious one—pederasts stalking children online—the focus on superior production values and the game-like execution counteracts the seriousness to a certain extent. For all the disgust certain scenes will surely provoke in viewers, the movie seems almost beside the point, and I can’t help but feel that a more effective documentary about the sexual victimization of children could have been made without the reality show trappings.

Granted, the enterprise concocted and recorded by filmmakers Vit Klusak and Barbora Chalupova is presented as an “experiment” that mostly investigates the permeability of social media and how those without proper defenses due to lack of maturity can be taken advantage of. Right at the start of the film we are shown statistics stating that 41 percent of Czech children have received unsolicited pornographic images online from other people. The parameters of the experiment are explained clinically and also in a slightly conspiratorial fashion. The directors put out a casting call for young female actors over the age of 18 to arrive wearing children’s clothing. Twenty-three show up and each is told her task if selected: she will impersonate a 12-year-old girl who joins a number of social networks with the purpose of attracting men who stalk pre-teen girls for sexual gratification. Those auditioning for the part explain, often in lurid detail, some of their own experiences with sexual abuse. Three are selected, and then an elaborate set is constructed on a soundstage consisting of three bedrooms that simulate the individual actors’ respective spaces when they themselves were 12 years old, complete with actual artifacts from their childhoods. Computers are set up and connected to video recording equipment that will be monitored by a large staff, including psychologists, lawyers, social workers, and sexologists, who are on hand to make sure things don’t get too intense for the actors, which, of course, they do.

The experiment lasts for ten days, during which the three women are contacted by a total of 2,548 men, who mostly interact with the women through Skype. Their faces are creepily masked, and they often freely admit that they are masturbating as they talk to the women, who are clearly distressed by the fact though they’ve been warned this will happen. In almost all the cases recorded, the men not only show the women their penises, but request that they remove articles of clothing themselves or demand they send nude photos of themselves. In fact, in order to extend the experiment, the producers hire outside models to act as body doubles for the women so that they can send the nude photos requested. In at least one case, an interlocutor uses the photo for blackmail purposes. (As a kind of antidote to the queasy mood, they include one young man who goes online just to talk and then commiserates so honestly with one of the women about the horridness of most men that the interaction brings tears to the eyes of everyone listening.) The whole endeavor is capped by in-person meetings in a cafe with 21 of the men and then a contentious encounter with one outside his home where the filmmakers reveal their project and accuse him of illegal acts. 

The film does explicate how shockingly widespread child stalking is on the internet, and many of the encounters reveal the mindset behind such actions, which often come down to simple misogyny (in his defense, the man confronted at the end of the movie blames the girls for coming on to him); and a final title card mentions that the data collected during the experiment was eventually handed over to the police, who are now “investigating” the men depicted. But the overall impression is of a very sophisticated stunt that produced interesting results that probably could have been produced in a way that was less sensational. 

In Czech. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670). 

Caught in the Net home page in Japanese

photo (c) Milan Jaros, 2020 Hypermarket Film, Czech Television, Peter Kerekes, Radio and Television of Slovakia, Helium Film

D.W. Young’s engrossing documentary attempts to make a case for the physically printed word as the most viable means of extending culture into the future, but  because it focuses on rare booksellers it invariably makes that case as a construct of capitalism, and I don’t think that was Young’s intention. At one point near the end of the movie an expert comes out and says that young people, or, at least, young New Yorkers, are rejecting digital reading platforms for paper and theorizes that technology like Kindle was developed and used mainly by boomers whose eyesight was starting to go. It’s a quaint but rather difficult idea to defend empirically (he seems to base this theory on observations he made on the subway), and, in any event, contrasted with the narrative that Young presented prior to this assertion, simply sounds like the conclusion of someone with a vested interest in trade paperbacks.

The main subject of the movie is books as artifacts–as works of art distinct but not separate from the art of the writing they contain. Revived New York essayist/iconoclast Fran Lebowitz puts it best when she says saltily that she would kill anyone who dared place their drink on a book, any book. Books are living things, she says, which is why she can’t countenance anyone “throwing them away,” no matter what kind of literature they deliver. In that regard, Young might have gained a lot of traction by reporting on regular book stores that are going out of business (or coming back, as some media have reported) due to or despite digital pressure, but instead he hangs out with the fringe of the business, those who collect books obsessively and then trade the rarest of them for ever-increasing amounts of money. As such, the movie has the kind of musty, low-lit atmosphere that antique book stores give off. The sellers themselves are, for the most part, quiet and serious, though Young makes a point of interviewing members who don’t fit the stereotyped majority, meaning middle aged men in tweedy outfits with bad haircuts. There are women and people of color, who point out how hard a time they have doing business with the leaders in the field. There’s also a brief shout-out to rare magazine fans, which at least brings the business into the 20th century.

Unfortunately, Young seems to assume that the viewer cares more about the state of books than the state of literature, and consequently it feels like it’s aimed at a niche audience that already has its mind made up. For one thing, he often neglects to identify the person on screen or the place where the interview is taking place, which is odd for a documentary about documentation. In a sense, he’s more interested in conveying the excitement of the physical world of books than he is in the act of reading, and, in my mind, at least, the two are inseparable. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645). 

The Booksellers home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2019 Blackletter Films LLC