Review: David Byrne’s American Utopia

Posted on May 29, 2021 by philipbrasor

Japanese fans of David Byrne may count themselves lucky, or they may not. The preternaturally optimistic rock star’s Broadway show, adapted to the screen by Spike Lee, will initially be shown here in theaters rather than on TV, to which, in the U.S., at least, it was relegated thanks to the pandemic. As with the Aretha Franklin film, Amazing Grace, which I reviewed yesterday, American Utopia should be seen in a theatrical setting if for no other reason than that’s where you can appreciate the full effect of the music, but more than the Aretha doc, Byrne’s and Lee’s production is visually rich, probably even more so than the stage production it’s directly taken from (it was filmed during a regular performance in front of a full house shortly before lockdown).

In fact, the care that went into not only the stage production but the filming can be distracting in terms of a viewer giving themself completely over to the musical exuberance on display. Most of Byrne’s aesthetic choices are, as they were when he led Talking Heads, so simple as to be almost meaningless in terms of subtext, but they dominate, nonetheless, especially his sartorial decisions: matching grey suits on all the people on stage and no shoes or socks. Similarly, while the music is characteristically loose in the rock style, the choreography is schematic. The musicians are arrayed as a marching band would be, with their instruments deployed mainly for portability so that everyone on the bare stage can move. Byrne is one of the few artists in the world who can afford to entertain his expansive idiosyncratic notions and he has assembled a first-class contingent of musicians, singers, and dancers from all over the world (a point he emphasizes during the requisite closing introductions). Moreover, Lee’s celebrated penchant for forcing camera angles and tricks in places where they wouldn’t normally seem to belong works well here, highlighting the physical intricacies of a production that is based almost solely on human bodies and the sounds they make. 

The result is a full manifestation of the promise of the title: this is an ecstatic work, and even more indicative of Byrne’s peculiar professional mission than Stop Making Sense, which many consider the apex of concert films solely for its ability to spark joy. Nevertheless, the obsessive attention to detail makes you wonder if you’re really getting the message when, probably, there isn’t any. Until the end, when the ensemble performs Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout,” the only song Byrne didn’t have a hand in writing, the movie never sets foot in the shadows. Monae’s song is about Black people being killed by police, and the screen shows faces and names of victims. Byrne encourages greater voting participation, but not in a nagging or pleading way. A few reviewers have compared Byrne’s approach to rock music, as well as to activist participation in changing things you don’t like, to Mr. Rogers’ approach to his own specific professional mission, which is why it’s difficult to find a theme in the production outside of “life is great so let’s have a good time.” Throughout the show, Byrne occasionally explains a song or a reason for doing what he’s doing, and the most characteristic line, as well as the most anodyne, is “Everybody is a miracle.” When the stage show is over, Lee even films the cast and staff going home by bicycle.

American Utopia is as good as Stop Making Sense, but the theme of lifting spirits was better served by Jonathan Demme, who was simply celebrating the uniqueness of America’s most unusual rock group. Byrne may or may not have something concrete to say about the state of American happiness in the 21st century, but his production is so attuned to his sensibility that you often wonder how much you’re missing. Best to just sit back and let the music take you away; or, if you are watching it at home, just get up and boogie.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi, (050-6868-5060),Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).

David Byrne’s American Utopia home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 PM AU Film, LLC and River Road Entertainment, LLC

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Review: Amazing Grace

Posted on May 28, 2021 by philipbrasor

The story goes that Aretha Franklin didn’t want this movie released. It was filmed in the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church (formerly a movie theater) in Southern California in 1972 in front of a congregation and quite a few industry people (Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts can be seen boogeying in the back). The soundtrack was released as a double album under the same name and went on to become the biggest selling gospel album of all time. It’s not entirely clear what about the film Franklin objected to. The opening credits said something about technical difficulties and several reviews have mentioned syncing problems, but Aretha was always a bit contrarian when it came to her gifts, and likely there were elements here where she revealed things that only she understood but probably thought every viewer would pick up on. 

In any case, after she died in 2018, an independent producer acquired the rights to the footage and put it together. Ostensibly, it was directed by Sydney Pollack, who can be seen darting around with a handheld camera, but the overall film’s makeshift structure and lack of planned-through narrative shows that, in the end, the producer just wanted to get this stuff out there, and you should be very glad he did, because it will make you a believer, if not in God and the redeemer than definitely in the truth that Aretha Franklin was the greatest singer of our lifetime. 

What needs to be said up front is that Aretha decided to go back to her roots and make a full-on gospel record at the height of her fame as a pop singer, and while the camera and the audience on hand treat her as the diva she was, there’s an anxiety underlying her performance that gives it a tension that’s difficult to describe. Accompanying herself on piano she opens with Marvin Gaye’s pointedly secular, and relatively new, “Wholy Holy,” and, pulling the exceptionally prescient Southern California Community Choir behind her, shows exactly how gospel informs her pop sense. From then on she almost never engages with the congregation, and lets her mentor, Rev. James Cleveland, act as both master of ceremonies and pastor of the hour (two nights were filmed). And though the movie doesn’t follow the dramatic development of the album, it creates its own fireworks through the juxtaposition of fiercely inspired witness, technically accomplished musicianship, and the spontaneity that is the hallmark of a stirring Sunday morning assembly. At one point, the great Clara Ward, sitting in the front seat next to Aretha’s father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, is so moved by Aretha’s reading—just her and piano—of “Never Grow Old,” that she gets into a kind of tussle with her elderly mother, who has stumbled to the front to express her approval. During the performance of the title song, Cleveland himself, accompanying Aretha on piano, is so overcome, he has to be spelled by choirmaster Alexander Hamilton. Meanwhile, the choir in back, seated through most of the movie, falls all over themselves trying to urge Aretha on to greater heights of spiritual reckoning. 

At times, the business around Aretha almost threatens to make her presence incidental. The crowd and the other participants are agitated while she remains the eye of the storm, so to speak. If the album is more of a continuous immersion than the movie is, it’s because all the vocal drama is calculated in post-production. But as you watch her break through on one impossible note after another and the accompanying visceral reaction in the venue, the movie transcends its pokey production values. It’s not a great film; it’s not even a great concert film in the way, say, Stop Making Sense is, but it captures the essence of musical performance like no concert movie ever has. It is a genuinely transporting experience; pure emotion on screen. If you can see it in a theater with good sound (the mixing is superb) then by all means don’t miss it. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya (03-3477-9264)

Amazing Grace home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2018 Amazing Grace Movie LLC

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Media Mix, May 22, 2021

Posted on May 23, 2021 by philipbrasor

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. 

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Milva in Tokyo, 1998

Posted on May 19, 2021 by philipbrasor

The great Italian singer Milva died on April 23. For a while in the 90s and 00s she was an annual visitor to Japan, kind of like the Ventures of canzone, and I caught several of her concerts because Masako at the time did a lot of work for the promoter who brought her to Japan. The following is a review of her joint concert with the bandoneonist Daniel Binelli that I wrote for the Japan Times.

It’s not unusual for an artist’s reputation to soar after his death, but in the case of Astor Piazzolla, the Argentine bandoneonist and tango music composer who died in 1992, the legacy has taken on a separate life of its own. Though successful while he was alive, Piazzolla has in the past several years entered the classical canon as one of the late 20th century’s most significant composers, thanks not only to the current “tango boom,” but also to superstars like cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Gidon Kremer, both of whom recently released best-selling albums of Piazzolla compositions.

As Kremer said in an interview on TBS’s “News 23” last year while he was in Japan for a concert tour, Piazzolla’s newfound popularity as a composer among the classical elite can be attributed to a sudden fin de siecle realization: For better or worse, most of the “serious” music composed in this century has been aimed at other composers. Piazzolla, on the other hand, wrote music for people — music that was not only challenging to play but enjoyable to listen to.

The Italian singer Milva, never one to pass up a chance to exploit a cultural trend, has dedicated her latest “Dramatic Recital” to the music of Piazzolla. Former Dramatic Recitals included programs dedicated to Brecht and Weill, songs that were popular in Europe between the wars, and the music of Edith Piaf. But while some people may raise their eyebrows at the canzone diva’s blatant opportunism, she has more of a right to take advantage of Piazzolla than, say, Ma or Kremer does since she actually toured with the great man back in the 80s.

What’s more, on her current Japan tour, entitled “El Tango de Astor Piazzolla,” she is being accompanied by bandoneonist Daniel Binelli, a musician who, since he spent three years playing alongside and studying with Piazzolla, can lay justifiable claim to the master’s musical legacy, not only as a musician but as a composer.

Though Milva’s name was at the top of the bill, Binelli and his excellent quintet were equal creative partners when they performed at the Tokyo International Forum on June 11. Alternating between Piazzolla compositions (including two written expressly for Milva) and Binelli compositions (including one written expressly for Milva), the recital was as much a tutorial on the musical life of Buenos Aires as it was a showcase for the oversized theatrical expressionism of the saucy, red-haired chanteuse.

In fact, Binelli and his group held forth by themselves on half the numbers. The peculiar genius of Piazzolla’s work is the way it extrapolates the rhythmic fundamentals of the tango into a new kind of formalism that is as compelling to listeners as it is to dancers. Binelli has taken this idea further. His compositions are more angular, more self-consciously “modern” than his teacher’s were. If in concert these works do not sound particularly danceable, that may only be because there were no dancers around to prove otherwise, but my guess is that tangoers would have had a tough time with the time signature changes in a work like Binelli’s “Fugue & Resurrection.”

Milva dances, in a fashion, but what she really does is sing, very loudly and very broadly, in a rich contralto complemented by a thick, juicy slice of Mediterranean ham. There’s some debate as to whether Piazzolla’s music, as melodic as it is, really lends itself to lyrics (his second wife was a singer and he wrote a number of songs for her), but don’t tell that to Milva, who threw herself into the material with the abandon of a Holy Roller.

Dressed in a series of daringly strapless gowns that clashed rather obviously with director Filippo Crivelli’s purposely impoverished-looking set (an unpainted wooden fence meant to represent…what? Some Buenos Aires back alley?) as well as with the musicians’ customary black shirts and slacks, Milva is such a gone showwoman that you can’t help but admire her total disregard for theatrical congruity, even when she kicks off her high heels (as she does at every performance) in a fit of planned impetuousness.

She can even be forgiven for putting lyrics (English, no less) to Piazzolla’s brief gem-perfect instrumental “Libertango” for an encore. After all, this was not a classical concert; it was essentially a cabaret show. And despite his clear acknowledgment of Piazzolla’s highbrow legacy, Binelli was more than happy to match Milva’s campy excesses with some wonderfully ostentatious accompaniment. As the saying goes, it takes two.

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Media Mix, May 15, 2021

Posted on May 16, 2021 by philipbrasor
Yuki Kitazumi

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the Japanese government’s “channels” to the Myanmar military that staged a coup earlier this year. The point of the column is to ask whether the government has the wherewithal to confront the Myanmar military and persuade it to negotiate in good faith with the civilian government it removed from power under the charge that the civilians’ overwhelming victory in last November’s general election was fraudulent, though third party observers said it was free and fair. The fact that the military has freed Japanese freelance journalist Yuki Kitazumi after arresting and indicting him for allegedly spreading “fake news” about the protest movement against the military proves that the Japanese government does have some sway over the generals because of all the aid it gives the country—much of which likely goes directly into the generals’ pockets—but so far there has been no indication that the Japanese government will use this influence to help the people of Myanmar and its shaky democracy, which has now collapsed. Though the Japanese mass media hasn’t said so overtly, the mood on social media leans toward an acknowledgement that there seems to be little will in the government to try and broker some kind of agreement between the military and the civilian government. The President Online article cited in the column goes into detail about the financial stakes involved, and though these stakes definitely come into play (many Japanese companies are heavily invested in Myanmar), as time stretches on and the military seems determined to just wait things out in a bid to wear down the protesters, the relative inaction on the part of the Japanese government seems to show that it doesn’t have the stomach to take on the generals in this regard. In other words, maybe money has less to do with it than we think it does. It may simply be a matter of the government telling itself that this is an issue that only the people of Myanmar can solve, and you can make of that what you will. 

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Review: The Father

Posted on May 14, 2021 by philipbrasor

I had no problem with Anthony Hopkins winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Florian Zeller’s screen adaptation of his own play. I saw all the other nominated performances, and only Hopkins’ stood out. Everyone else, including odds-on favorite Chadwick Boseman, did exactly what they were supposed to do in their respective movies. Hopkins, however, not only transcended Zeller’s occasionally gimmicky dramatization of a man confronting dementia, but he brought out his character’s true personality, something the script didn’t necessarily support. If the point of Zeller’s realization was to place the viewer in the main character’s mind, there was always going to be the danger of feeling doubly estranged from the character, but Hopkins’ careful focus on the kernel of the role’s humanity gave the viewer something to grasp, and once you were in his grip, it was difficult to avoid the horror of the situation.

Hopkins plays Anthony, so named because Zeller wrote the screenplay with Hopkins in mind. Unfamiliar with the original French play or the subsequent French movie version that, according to various reviews, seems very, very different from this English version (co-adapted by Christopher Hampton, himself an acclaimed playwright), I have no idea what kind of adjustments Zeller made in order to accommodate Sir Anthony, but the character is firmly within the actor’s wheelhouse: a retired engineer-cum-civil-servant who lives in a lovely London flat surrounded by objects of good taste and doted upon by a daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), who clearly adores him and only wants him to be happy. In the opening scenes, she tries to set him up with a new home helper (Imogen Poots) in the hopes that he will be easier with her than he was with past helpers. Though this premise is fairly standard for stories that address the indignities of growing old, the various tensions at play—the hushed anxiety beneath Anne’s polite veneer, Anthony’s overbearing flirtatiousness, and the new recruit’s difficulty in navigating between them—is handled so adroitly that you leave the sequence in a state of acute unease that Zeller and Hopkins then exploit to the fullest.

Borrowing from the horror-suspense playbook, Zeller’s direction forces the viewer to question what’s reality and what isn’t, though even that fairly trite approximation doesn’t quite get a handle on the emotional complexities at play. At almost every step, we have to wonder not only whether the people Anthony encounters are really who they say they are, but if this place that seemed so comfortably his really is his. It’s not so much that Zeller masters the art of meaningful contradictions, but that he understands how the human mind naturally reacts to them. He and Hopkins evoke terror and sadness by denying us the comfort of continuity. What’s really horrifying is how inevitable it all seems.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya (03-3477-9264).

The Father home page in Japanese

photo (c) New Zealand Trust Corporation as Trustee for Elarof Channel Four Television Corporation Trademark Father Limited F Comme Film Cine-@ Orange Studio 2020

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Media Mix, May 9, 2021

Posted on May 9, 2021 by philipbrasor
Ban’ei race

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about a viral video showing a jockey kicking a horse. The point of the piece is that the media tends to be passive about anything that might be perceived as animal abuse, and that pertains to livestock as much as it does to race horses and other animals bred and raised for entertainment purposes. As mentioned in the column, after the video drew criticism, some people involved in the racing business defended the jockey and the sport by saying that it isn’t as bad as it looks, and that line of argument has continued, with the media picking it up but never getting to the other aspect of horse racing that I brought up later in the column—that as soon as a horse becomes unproductive it is killed, because they aren’t bred for anything other than racing or creating other race horses. Granted, ban’ei race horses are draft horses, so they could presumably be put to work, but I really wonder how many farmers, even in Hokkaido, still use horses to pull plows and transport crops. The same thing goes for cockfighting. In one old article I read about Kyoko Honda, the woman who rescues maimed and discarded roosters, one man was interviewed who stages “safe” cockfights in that the birds’ claws are trimmed and the fights do not end in injury or death. Needless, to say, however, this man’s example is the rare exception and it didn’t sway Honda away from her mission to get the sport banned in Okinawa.

Though the Japanese media seems to go out of its way to avoid the obvious about animals raised for sport or food, generally speaking media all over the world do the same thing, even if it’s only a matter of degree. That, in fact, is the moral of the story, so to speak, of two similar documentaries now available on Netflix, Cowspiracy and Seaspiracy, which happen to be from the same production house. Ostensibly, both films address mass food production from the standpoint of the environment and sustainability—the former about livestock farming and the latter about industrial fishing. Both are incredibly destructive to the environment. However, both also end up in the same place where the narrator-directors conclude that eating flesh, whether it be that of mammals, birds, or fish, is morally indefensible for all the suffering it causes. This is, of course, a highly personal determination, but it is a truth that anyone who lives in the world today has to confront on their own terms, and while the media does talk about inhumane conditions for livestock, it usually comes down to the idea that we leave the dirty work to people at the bottom of the economic pyramid or those lingering at the margins of society. One could make the argument that catching and killing your own meat is defensible from a primal standpoint, but like the humane cockfighting presenter mentioned above, it’s the exception that essentially proves the rule, which is that we make other species suffer needlessly for our own sustenance. In that light, making them suffer for our own entertainment seems beyond the pale. 

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Media Mix, May 2, 2021

Posted on May 2, 2021 by philipbrasor
Yoshiaki Yoshida

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about bigoted comments made by Yoshiaki Yoshida, the chairman and founder of the cosmetics/health supplement company DHC, and the media reaction. Some marginal matters that didn’t make it into the column but are nevertheless relevant: Originally, I had written the anti-Korean slur in the article because it has appeared in other English-language coverage of the matter but was told by an editor that the word is considered extremely derogatory, on par with the N-word. This would seem to indicate that recognition of anti-Korean hate speech has yet to permeate the culture at large, since even the BBC used the word. Also, last year the magazine Shukan Bunshun reported that Yoshida, reacting badly to the news that his company was no longer the sales leader in the industry, urged employees to blanket fake-post on consumer bulletin boards using pseudonyms to boost the image of DHC’s products while at the same time blasting his own advertising department’s work, saying the ads were “childish.” As pointed out in the column, his beef with Suntory was prompted by his losing market share to the liquor giant, which also sells health supplements, and this brought out his bigoted side more prominently. Bunshun, which seems to have a grudge against the company, also interviewed an employee in January who was fired for having openly criticized Yoshida for his anti-Korean rants and gave Bunshun a recording of a human resources person asking him to quit, which he refused to do, thus forcing the company to dismiss him. In the recording, the human resources person said that hate speech “is not a problem” in the company. The fired employee is suing DHC, seemingly to get his job back. 

One more side note: DHC started out as a translation company that also offered lessons in translating. When Masako and I were first starting out as translators we entered a contest that DHC was running as a means of drumming up students. The winner would receive ¥50,000 and a chance to work for the company as a freelancer. The winning translations (there were two — one for Japanese to English, another for English to Japanese) would also be published. As it happens we won the J to E prize, and while we did receive the money they never asked us to do any work after that. Also they never published our translation, which was of an interview in Japanese with scholar Douglas Lummis, an American who is famous for defending the rights of native Okinawans, which seems ironic now given Yoshida’s reactionary proclivities, including his bigoted feelings toward Okinawans. Less pertinent but still interesting and slightly ironic, Masako’s late father was a Korean immigrant, though there was no way that DHC would have known this because Masako doesn’t bear his name. In any case, a company that deals in translation as a business should be expected to be more tolerant of other cultures, I would think. So maybe Yoshida’s bigotry was something that developed over time; or just became more apparent as he got older and richer.

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Review: Along the Sea

Posted on May 1, 2021 by philipbrasor

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

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Media Mix, April 24, 2021

Posted on April 25, 2021 by philipbrasor
Nagoya torch relay (Chunichi Shimbun)

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about coverage related to the Olympics that doesn’t sit right with the organizers, whether they be local officials or the IOC. I should say more about the Tokyo Shimbun article and video that covered the start of the torch relay in Fukushima. Though I use it in the column as an illustration of how IOC rules vis-a-vis the media sidestep local laws and practices in order to privilege those outlets that have entered into exclusive deals with the Olympics, to the newspaper’s reporters the restrictions in place could have real negative consequences. When locals in Fukushima complained about the “festival atmosphere” during the torch relay event, they weren’t just talking about the “bad taste” aspect, but also the health risks, which has been the main focus of Tokyo Shimbun’s coverage. On April 7, the paper ran another feature about the torch relay as it passed through Nagoya and Aichi Prefecture, reporting on how crowds of spectators were dangerously dense. In this case, a video would have made a particularly strong impact in line with the reporting, but since Tokyo Shimbun couldn’t keep any visuals on its home page for more than 72 hours per IOC rules they had to make do with verbal descriptions about crowds standing “shoulder-to-shoulder” along public roads “3-persons deep,” and how local security teams were having trouble maintaining social distancing guidelines. Needless to say, no TV stations covered the torch relay in this way since most of the networks have some kind of stake in the Olympics, and even if a station doesn’t have a sponsorship deal they still are hesitant to get on the wrong side of the organizers lest they get shut out of future coverage. 

But even if that weren’t the case, would TV stations cover the torch relay and other Olympics promotional events with a critical eye? When NHK broadcast a livestream of the torch relay as it passed through Nagano city on April 1, some viewers noticed that the sound was cut out for about 30 seconds after it was apparent that protesters in the background were chanting anti-Olympics slogans. A wave of indignation swept through social media, accusing NHK of shutting out dissident voices and distorting its news coverage. One explanation is that security stopped the demonstration due to the loud chanting, which goes against COVID-prevention protocols, but it’s obvious from the resulting footage that somebody muted the sound itself. Organizers responded by saying that the presentation of the video was NHK’s concern and the organizers had nothing to do with it. When Mainichi Shimbun, which, as pointed out in the column, has been the most conscientious of the sponsoring daily newspapers in its coverage of the Olympics in general (Asahi has, too, but mostly in its editorials), asked NHK why it cut out the sound, the publicity person referred to “various circumstances” without elaborating, though they didn’t deny that the sound had been altered. NHK, of course, will be one of the main broadcasters of the Games, but, given their history of avoiding certain controversies for the sake of decorum, it seems just as likely that NHK’s decision to cut the mic mid-protest was more reflexive than cautionary. 

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