Review: The Asadas

Posted on October 3, 2020 by philipbrasor

The true story of photographer Masashi Asada and his Mie Prefecture family, who were and presumably still are the main subject of his award-winning pictures, provides such a smooth dramatic arc for a movie that early on you begin to wonder how much was elided. As played by Kazunari Ninomiya, Asada is an amiable iconoclast, someone who is passionate about his art but not particularly intent on the work involved. His success is more or less accidental since he doesn’t actively apply himself to getting his photographs out there, and the viewer develops the feeling that he relies on his family for subject matter simply because it’s easier. Director Ryota Nakano depicts Masashi’s progress as a creative soul with the kind of comic aloofness you’d expect from someone like Robert Zemeckis, if we were to use a Hollywood cognate. If that seems like a cheap reductionist rhetorical gambit, it’s important to note that the aforementioned dramatic arc was something that Hollywood perfected in its heyday, if not outright invented. 

So Masashi’s mildly antisocial bona fides are conveyed by his tattoos and, reactively, by his brother Yukihiro’s (Satoshi Tsumabuki) relentlessly disapproving comments. Yukihiro is the killjoy, the scold who walks the straight and narrow and had little confidence in Masashi’s ability to make a living from his art. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t love him. His parents (Jun Fubuki, Mitsuru Hirata), on the other hand, couldn’t care less about his putaro attitude, and love getting dressed up as gangsters and firefighters and sick people for his staged tableaux. Predictably, publishers of photo books — a rarefied but seemingly active subsection of the Tokyo publishing business — aren’t interested in “family photos” and it falls to an equally iconoclastic small press to finally bring out his book, which is simply called “Asadake” (The Asada Family). It sells next to nothing, but it does win a prestigious award, so you could say that Masashi is on his way, even if he relies on his girlfriend, Wakana (Haru Kuroki), for financial support.

But if his book isn’t exactly flying off shelves, it does give him a certain rep, and he starts a niche business taking photographs of other families at their request. This activity takes him all over Japan and eventually to Fukushima, where he makes friends. When the quake and tsunami strike, he rushes back to see how he can help, and eventually gets caught up in a project to reunite families with the photos and albums they lost in the flood.

The completion of Masashi’s journey not only as a photographer but also as a character worthy of cinematic recognition is so airtight that the movie as a whole is stifling. While there are a few well-staged scenes in Fukushima involving victims and loss that are emotionally affecting, overall the story feels as safe as milk. It’s an extremely comforting two hours in that you never once sense that, as a viewer, you will be confronted with anything that could be described as disturbing. Families are wonderful things, of course, but they make better movie subjects when there’s a bit of friction. 

In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

The Asadas home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 “Asadake”Seisaku Iinkai

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Media Mix, Sept. 27, 2020

Posted on September 27, 2020 by philipbrasor

Isoko Mochizuki

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is mainly about the lack of women’s voices in the Japanese mass media, especially with regard to the press. I understand that some people, aside from the issue of fairness in employment, may be uncomfortable with the idea of a female point-of-view when covering news stories, since journalism should be totally objective, but that professional ideal is unrealistic. In fact, one of the biggest problems with journalism in Japan is that many reporters who work for the major media companies approach their jobs too objectively. If they consider anyone’s feelings in their approach to the story it’s either that of their editors, that of their subjects, or that of the target audience. They rarely bring their own sensibility and experience to bear on their coverage, probably because these aspects weren’t cultivated when they were in school. The most famous mass media reporter right now is probably Isoko Mochizuki because she is seen to be challenging to people in power. However, all she is doing is asking the questions that need to be asked in order to get at the truth in the story she is pursuing. Does the fact that she’s a woman have anything to do with her seeming iconoclasm? Maybe. She doesn’t cover nominally “women’s” issues, and her writing doesn’t necessarily betray a woman’s point of view, but few men who are employed as reporters for major publications and TV stations are as aggressive in their approach to getting a story. By that token, it should also be mentioned that Mochizuki is a wife and a mother, and such responsibilities seem to have no particular effect on her journalistic capabilities. And, of course, they shouldn’t.

One of the reasons male reporters in general may not be as aggressive as Mochizuki is that they are thinking about advancement. If they piss off someone in power and that person complains to their editor or someone even higher up in the media company where they work, it might make it difficult for them to be promoted down the line. As mentioned in the column, there are few women editors at the dailies and TV networks, and I have to wonder what Mochizuki’s chances are of climbing the ladder within even a left-leaning organization like Tokyo Shimbun. From what I’ve read and heard, she gets by with what she does at the company mainly through force of will and the unexpected celebrity that has attended her unusual approach (in Japan, at least) to her job. She is supposedly resented by some of her colleagues and editors, but she’s a star so they aren’t going to do anything about it. Still, I doubt if she is going to be promoted, and, again, that doesn’t necessarily mean she is being held back because she is a woman, but the fact remains that she is a woman and an exceptionally effective reporter. And I don’t think those two attributes are unrelated in a media milieu like Japan’s. In the Asahi Shimbun article I mention in the column, Tomohiko Nezu cites two reporters who hit glass ceilings in their companies because they were women. The late Reiko Masuda was the first woman to be named an editor at the Mainichi Shimbun, but her dream was to head the political affairs department, the most important editorial post at the paper. Men who entered the company after she did ascended to that desk instead. The late Yayori Matsui was a force to be reckoned with at the Asahi Shimbun, but because she wanted to cover the comfort women issue in depth she made her male colleagues uncomfortable and so had to quit the newspaper in order to work on the issues that meant the most to her, in particular gender inequality and sexual violence against women. The question thus becomes: If Isoko Mochizuki became a powerful editor at a major newspaper, would she carry out her responsibilities in a way that was different from other, presumably male, editors? Probably, but then you’d have to wonder whether such actions were due to her experience as a journalist or due to her experience as a woman, and when you think about it carefully, you know you can’t separate the two.

addendum (Sept. 27, 11 p.m.): This afternoon I learned that Mainichi Shimbun employs more women reporters than any of the other national dailies. I discovered this because I am now writing a column about Shiori Ito’s defamation lawsuits and Mainichi’s coverage of Ito’s situation has been thorough since she first came forward with her rape accusation. It turns out that women reporters at the paper have made a point of covering the topic, which essentially proves my point about having more women in editorial and reporting positions. However, I should also mention that Mainichi pays less than any of the other national dailies. The average annual salary, in fact, is about ¥2 million less than that at the Asahi Shimbun, which pays the most. Make of that what you will.

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Review: The Wild Goose Lake

Posted on September 25, 2020 by philipbrasor

Mainland Chinese cinema was relatively late to film noir, especially in relation to Hong Kong and other Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, all of which have reshaped the genre in distinctive ways. But once a younger set of directors applied film noir tropes to their local circumstances, it became almost a national obsession. Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake has pretty much become the standard to which all Chinese noir will be compared until something better or more original comes along, but that seems unlikely owing to how thoroughly Diao has applied these tropes. It’s a pretty stunning achievement, even if it can sometimes feel like a trial.

The movie opens appropriately with rain pouring from a night sky over a neon-illuminated slice of urban decay. (Coincidentally, it happens to take place in pre-COVID Wuhan) Two people, partially hidden by shadows, meet and exchange what is obviously some kind of code. The man, Zhou (Hu Ge), is there waiting for his estranged wife, but the woman, Liu (Gwei Lun-mei), isn’t her. She’s a sex worker who nevertheless demands Zhou prove his identity. Zhou, it turns out, is an ex-con on the lam for killing a policeman by accident. Though he’s the leader of a gang of motorcycle thieves, he’s portrayed as a small cog in a larger crime machine, and his disastrous luck has made him the target not only of the authorities, but other gangsters. He now has a price on his head. Hints are circulated that Zhou’s ex-wife, hard up for cash, may be in on the bounty, and though Liu’s motives remain cryptic for quite a while, she and Zhou try to come up with a way of collecting the money for themselves.

But, of course, this is a noir, and one of the cliches of the genre is a moral reckoning for the antihero, so the pair’s scheme only makes their situation worse, at least for a while. Unlike Diao’s last noir, Black Coal, Thin Ice, The Wild Goose Lake wears its social criticism lightly, but it also incorporates its socioeconomic observations more deeply into the plot. The impressive chase scenes and wildly violent fight tableaux never feel gratuitous, but instead seem to grow organically out of a milieu where everyone looks restless and ready to explode. And while this aspect makes the film relentlessly watchable it also adds to the general confusion, what with Diao’s endless affection (also evident in Black Coal) for flashbacks and a certain weakness for hinging every plot twist on a double cross. It can be a bit of a slog, but for anyone who’s a true noir fan it’s absolutely mandatory viewing.

In Mandarin. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5488-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

The Wild Goose Lake home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2019 He Le Chen Guang International Culture Media Co., Ltd., Green Ray Films (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.

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Review: Martin Eden

Posted on September 20, 2020 by philipbrasor

I haven’t read Jack London’s novel, which is supposedly an autobiographical affair outlining his genesis as a writer, but based on his other writings that I have read and the general tenor of autobiographical novels by writers, I can probably guess what the main theme is: the triumph of the individual sensibility over that of the crowd, and the suffering that comes with it. Pietro Marcello relocates the book’s setting from Oakland to Naples in a time that feels as if it’s early to mid-20th century (but since there are no references to any world wars, it may simply be a time out of mind). Martin (Luca Marinelli) is a sailor, a proletarian by birth who is uneducated but hungry for knowledge. He meets the socialite Elena (Jessica Cressy) after saving her brother from a beating, and develops a crush both on her and her bourgeois living situation. After a conversation with Elena about the poet Baudelaire, he decides to become a writer in a language, Italian, he’s not fluent in. Martin’s mission is simple and almost sad in its trite dramatic essence. He wants the respect of the better classes, initially so that he can marry Elena, since her parents can barely remain in the same room with him, but inevitably so he can get revenge on his own lowly past.

Naturally, Martin’s quest clashes with the actual realities of a life lived for art, not to mention the kind of self-awareness that attends the accumulation of knowledge. At first, Martin’s dedication to work rather than craft—he even buys a typewriter—is pathetic, and the film piles one visual cliche onto another, showing him typing, reading intently, looking out his window at the sky, brooding to beat the band. As he improves in both intellect and sensitivity, he comes to hate the rich while at the same time growing farther from his working class background. He becomes a socialist, a pretty articulate one, in fact, but loses sight of socialism’s egalitarian purpose.

London supposedly wanted to explore the distinctions between his own hatred of capitalist striving and the success with which the system had rewarded him as a writer. Martin Eden takes this idea to its natural conclusion, by showing the protagonist using his celebrity to damn those who would presume to “make” him great, and in that regard, it makes a kind of perverted sense that it takes place in Italy during a time that looks as if it produced the great neorealist films of the mid-20th century. (London’s book took place at the very beginning of the 20th century) Marcello even includes actual film clips from such movies, not to mention historical footage, throughout the movie as a kind of leitmotif to remind us how we’re supposed to be taking it all in. In the end, this sort of gambit just adds to the confusion of what such a gorgeously shot and structured movie is supposed to tell us about the life of the mind in a world where only some people are allowed such a thing. London’s story is not the best vehicle for exploring political truths, especially when you can’t really locate the setting in history. Martin not only abandons his values, but turns into something of a monster. That’s happened in Italy before, but I’m sure it didn’t happen this way.

In Italian. Now playing in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

Martin Eden home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2019 Avventurosa-IBC Movie-Shellac Sud-BR-Arte

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Review: Vitalina Varela

Posted on September 19, 2020 by philipbrasor

There’s a subset of narrative film directors who work almost exclusively with non-professional actors, which may sound like an oxymoron since these performers are in all likelihood paid for their efforts, but in most cases they only appear in one movie and otherwise live lives that have nothing more to do with film. The Portuguese filmmaker, Pedro Costa, belongs to this group, but his methodology is even more refined. For 20 years he has focused on immigrants to Lisbon from the former Portuguese colony of Cabo Verde, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. More to the point, he centers his stories in a small, warren-like Lisbon slum where these people live their lives of quiet desperation, and while that sounds like a cliche, Costa’s use of space and narrative is highly unusual, not so much because it follows documentary procedures, but rather because it plucks its protagonists’ stories out of a strip of their lives as a means of illuminating what it’s like to pass most of one’s existence in the shadow of an alien culture.

His latest work is even more circumscribed. The titular character, who plays herself, is a woman in her 50s who has come to Lisbon to seek out the husband she hasn’t seen in several decades. She has heard that he is dying, and after emerging, confused and barefoot, from a commercial jet, seemingly the only passenger to disembark, she is met by strangers who understand her predicament, if only by association. They inform her, rather abruptly, that she is too late. Her husband is already dead, and she should return to Cabo Verde because “there is nothing for you here.”

That is an understatement. She stubbornly insists on seeing his tiny house, which contains next to nothing, and tries to arrange for some kind of wake or funeral to make sure his soul is conveyed to heaven. Most of the movie is taken up by these protracted and seemingly useless gestures toward convention, and Costa’s insistent use of natural lighting when there often, in fact, is no natural lighting at all in these tightly packed spaces sometimes makes it difficult for the viewer to make any sense of what the shapes and sounds add up to. Add the fact that all the people in the movie are dark-skinned and you basically spend most of your time distinguishing between various moving shadows.

Though Vitalina also played herself in Costa’s previous movie, Horse Money, there isn’t much continuity between the two films; or, at least, not as much to make any real difference in meaning. Near the end, he includes a flashback scene of Vitalina and her husband as newlyweds back in Cabo Verde, and it comes across as a concession to the viewer’s presumed exhaustion with what one critic calls Costa’s “funerary” aesthetic, but the real puzzle is why Costa, who is obviously fascinated with this group of immigrants and their lot, doesn’t explore their lives. There are obviously political forces at work keeping these people down, and while we don’t expect the director to be didactic about it, he’s obviously shrewd and intuitive enough to understand how to project their lives without a whole lot of exculpatory effort. I get it. The guy knows how to make film art out of the most meager resources. Much of this is stunning. But if it has some deeper meaning, it seems to be trapped in his head somewhere.

In Portuguese. Now playing in Tokyo at Euro Space, Shibuya (03-3461-0211).

Vitalina Varela home page in Japanese

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Review: Bring Me Home

Posted on September 18, 2020 by philipbrasor

Bring Me Home is, I think, the third missing child movie I’ve seen this year, which, given the attenuated nature of my moviegoing pastime in the COVID era (I tend to watch TV series at home), practically makes it a subgenre. Compared to something more cerebral like the Spanish movie, Madre (opening here next month), this Korean thriller is pretty straightforward, and because it’s Korea it’s also more viscerally stimulating. First of all, there’s the social elements to contend with, which are always more potent in Korean movies, whether mainstream or indie. Then there’s the violence and emotional extremism, which is also a given in any Korean movie that even touches on criminal behavior. In other words, it’s quite a ride to begin with, and that isn’t even taking into account its questionably exploitative handling of children.

Jeong-yeon (Lee Young-ae) and her husband have been searching desperately for their son who went missing six years earlier. Though both have to a certain extent fallen back into routines of domesticity and work in order to avoid thinking too much of their lost boy, in their calmer moments they separately check the internet and bulletin boards for anything that might indicate he’s still alive. Inevitably, the accumulation of inquiries, regardless of how fruitless they seem, results in the husband receiving an anonymous message from someone who may have seen their son. While racing to confirm the intelligence in the message, he crashes his car and dies.

Insult is added to fatal injury when Jeong-yeon determines that the original messages were a hoax. But the accident makes the news, and the story of the missing boy is resuscitated by the media, leading to two developments that the first-time writer/director, Kim Seung-woo, handles with rare finesse, considering how difficult it could be to pull off without revealing too much. He introduces the employees of a police station in a remote fishing village who notice a resemblance between the missing boy pictured on the news and a local kid, but say nothing to anybody about it. At the same time, Jeong-yeon is hit up by a cruel opportunist who tries to exploit her pain for money. Not only does the resourceful but at this point extremely desperate woman foil the opportunist’s scheme, but learns that his information is reliable, since he is in the business of tracking down stolen children and exacting recompense for assistance in their return.

Suffice to say, that Jeong-yeon would rather tackle the problem alone, and she travels by herself to the fishing village. By this point, the viewer has come to understand that stealing children is not an isolated problem, that many traditional vocations, such as fishing and agricultural, are suffering a lack of manpower owing to South Korea’s falling birthrate, the lowest in the world right now. With this premise in mind, Jeong-yeon’s rapid descent into violent vengefulness becomes both understandable but no less repugnant. In essence, all the inhabitants of this particular village become complicit in the crimes described, and thus are disqualified for any sympathy we may have built up for their sorry lot in life.

This dramatic element is exaggerated by scenes in which children are made to do unspeakable things, thus letting Jeong-yeon off the hook for the unspeakable things she does as well. As always, the technical aspects are flawless and, since this is a Warner Bros. co-production, often breathtaking. And yet, the movie holds you at arm’s length. I think I would have preferred watching a documentary about the issue of child-stealing, if, in fact, it is a social problem as widespread as it’s depicted here.

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

Bring Me Home home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2019 Warner Bros. Ent.

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Review: Hitsville: The Making of Motown

Posted on September 17, 2020 by philipbrasor

Right away, I should mention that this documentary about the pioneering Black-owned independent record label was authorized and to a certain extent supervised by Motown’s founder Berry Gordy. It’s essentially a PR gambit and looks like it. The narrative emphasis is on the label’s enormous success and historical importance, neither of which can be denied. Whatever frictions it covers are good-naturedly glossed over with a smile and/or a shrug, and some of the biggest surviving beneficiaries of Motown’s success, most conspicuously Diana Ross, don’t participate.

In other words, as a history, Hitsville is partial at best, but for those of us who grew up changed by the songs themselves it is, of course, indispensable, if only for the musical clips, some of which haven’t been shown publicly before. The focus is on the 1960s, when everything was still located in that funky little house in Detroit, and the filmmakers do take pains to show how the label fit into the social history of the times, taking in the civil rights movement and the racial strife that has always been America’s original sin. Gordy himself, looking unbelievably fit for a man in his 90s, is on hand for most of the interviews and steers them in the direction he wants, concentrating on the admirably efficient and effective assembly line system of record-making. In several scenes he mixes it up with an equally spry Smokey Robinson, who comes off as the single most characteristic and valuable musical cog in the Motown machine, mainly by default since Marvin Gaye is not around to put in his own claim for that distinction. Both men explain much of the previously unseen footage about specific sessions, and if, say, they probably spend a little too much time on a song like “My Girl,” singling it out as probably the most revolutionary thing produced at the label, they do manage to drop as many important names as possible to make their point. Generally, the operative word during this legendary time was “competition,” since songwriters and producers were pitted against one another on purpose in order to come up with the most indelible hits, and it obviously worked. Motown not only outperformed the Beatles, but became one of the Beatles’ most important influences while they were working at their own peak.

Too much time is wasted going over well-trod ground — the riches of jazz musicianship in the label’s house band, the Funk Brothers, the sales agent who everyone thought was a mafia connection, the earthquake in shades known as Stevie Wonder who became his own industry within the label before he was old enough to drink — thus making the lesser known tidbits that much more enticing. I definitely wanted to hear more about Gaye’s problems trying to sell “What’s Going On” to Gordy, Diana Ross’s diva eruptions, and what prompted the great writing/production team of Holland-Dozier-Holland to split the label to form their own company, which, by what I could ascertain, was not very successful. The history pretty much ends when Motown makes the inevitable move to Los Angeles, though much was still in store for the main players in the late 70s and even part of the 80s. Frankly, I’m not sure a movie like this, devised to sell Gordy’s legacy, is really necessary, and someday someone will do the subject justice, but I thoroughly enjoyed every second of it, and unless you’re totally averse to nostalgia (or under the age of 40) you probably will, too.

Opens Sept. 18 in Tokyo at Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6268-0015), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Hitsville: The Making of Motown home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2019 Motown Film Limited

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BIFF2020: Press Conference

Posted on September 14, 2020 by philipbrasor

Last week, the organizers of the 25th annual Busan International Film Festival announced somewhat abruptly that the festival, originally scheduled to take place Oct. 7-16, would be postponed for two weeks and would instead begin on Oct. 21. It has already been decided and announced that, due to the COVID crisis, the size of Asia’s biggest film event would be scaled back considerably. For one thing, there would be no foreign guests in attendance due to government rules stipulating a 14-day quarantine for anyone entering South Korea. That includes, of course, the usual invited press, of which I have been a member since 2001. It also means that most if not all the non-Korean filmmakers whose works will be shown at the festival will not be able to attend in person. However, the organizers were, and still are, intent on having a live event, with real people attending screenings in real theaters, because that is what a film festival is about and BIFF considers itself a real film festival, i.e., one for the local fans. The two-week postponement was implemented because of uncertainty over the Chuseok holiday period in the first week of October, when many Koreans visit family and friends. The fear is that such activities could result in another spike in infections. If that happens, the two-week lag time might be enough to flatten the curve.

But even that is not certain, and the main message of the first press conference that took place Sept. 14 via the Zoom conferencing app is that the festival could very well still be cancelled, depending on the situation following the holiday period. Festival Director Jay Jeon, Chairman Lee Yang-kwan, and Program Director Nam Dong-chul answered reporters’ questions online after announcing the lineup of films and providing a general overview of the festival. As expected, the roster of films has been cut considerably, from the usual 300 or so to 192. However, the usual sections are all still in tact, with one rather striking addition: a large selection of films invited to the cancelled Cannes Film Festival will be screened, including Francis Lee’s Ammonite, Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, and a revival of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. The opening film will be the omnibus Septet: The Story of Hong Kong, with contributions from Hark Tsui, Sammo Hung, Johnnie To, Ringo Lam, and others. The closing film will be the Japanese animated feature, Josee, the Tiger and the Fish, directed by Kotaro Tamura. In fact, Japan, as usual, is perhaps the best represented non-Korean country at this year’s festival, with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Venice winner Wife of a Spy and Naomi Kawase’s True Mothers in the Gala Presentation section; Kazuo Hara’s Minamata Mandala in the Icons section; Yuya Ishii’s All the Things We Never Said, Shinji Aoyama’s Living in the Sky, Shuichi Okita’s Ora, Ora Be Goin’ Alone, and Bunji Sotoyama’s Soiree in the Window on Asian Cinema section; Yujiro Harumoto’s A Balance in the New Currents section; Keisuke Toyoshima’s Mishima: The Last Debate in the Documentary Competition section; and Ryota Nakano’s The Asadas in the Open Cinema section. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, Sept. 13, 2020

Posted on September 13, 2020 by philipbrasor

Honda e

Here’s this week’s Media Mix column, which is about Japan’s response to the Green Recovery movement. As pointed out near the end, the Japanese media will cover environmental issues but rarely links that coverage to Japanese business practices since anything that’s perceived as being bad for business is also seen as being bad for media companies. The automobile industry is one of the biggest advertisers in Japan in terms of money spent, which explains why the Honda e’s rollout was covered so breathlessly in the press despite the fact that the car maker doesn’t expect to sell many in Japan. Essentially, this coverage has two purposes: it gives Honda free brand publicity, and it sends a message to the world that the company is working, however grudgingly, on cars that are less polluting. This latter point is important, especially right now. A recent climate study found that SUVs are the second biggest contributor of emissions in the world, after power plants. Sales of SUVs are driven by cheaper gasoline prices, and despite their obvious unsuitability to driving conditions in Japan, where roads are narrower and traffic more congested, they are very popular here as well. However, so are mini-cars (kei jidosha), whose appeal is that they are smaller and use less fuel. Obviously, there is no real coherent logic to car purchases in Japan, and car makers sell whatever they think they can get away with. SUVs have higher profit margins than do mini-cars, and as long as gasoline is not too expensive, there’s no reason to try to steer people toward electric vehicles. And while the press does report that Japanese people aren’t fond of EVs, they never really try to figure out why, thus making it seem to be merely a matter of taste.

In a sense, this is strange, since Japanese car makers are intent on overseas markets where governments are implementing regulations (not just incentives) that discourage the use of fossil fuels. As pointed out in the column, the Honda e is really being made for Europe, as was the world’s first mass produced EV, the Nissan Leaf. Mazda will soon start selling an electric vehicle in the EU (in Japan it will only be available as a lease), and even Toyota, which has so far eschewed electric cars in favor of developing hydrogen cars as its environmentally friendly option, will market an EV, but only for two people. None of these cars will target Japanese consumers in any significant way, which could be construed as just common business sense. But then you look at South Korea, where Hyundai and Kia are aggressively developing EVs for both overseas and their own market with the express idea of appealing to the public’s desire to be more proactive about environmental concerns. Yonhap News reports that Hyundai is planning to invest a huge amount of money in EV development over the next 5 years, while Toyota, which still doesn’t have a solid state battery of its own, looks upon EVs as a kind of nuisance, the same way a white-shoe law firm would look upon its requirement to provide a minimum of pro bono representation.

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Media Mix, Sept. 6, 2020

Posted on September 6, 2020 by philipbrasor

Koichi Nakano

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about TV Asahi’s recent departure from the Japan Federation of Commercial Broadcast Workers Unions. In the column, I distinguish the federation, known as Minpororen, from MIC Union, an umbrella union that represents workers in the media, information, and culture industries. At the moment, the general secretary of MIC is Akira Minami, the leader of the newspaper workers union. Minami is also an employee of the Asahi Shimbun, and though he seems to be taking a sabbatical from reporting, he is one of Japan’s most famous investigative journalists, which is probably why he became personally involved in the plight of the laid-off contract staff of Hodo Station, TV Asahi’s flagship news program and a ground-breaking news shows in the history of Japanese broadcasting. Minami is one of the few Japanese journalists who has reported extensively on the cordial relationship between the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and major media outlets and how that relationship has undermined the press’s watchdog responsibilities. Hodo Station also looked at this relationship, perhaps less intensely, and for years, apparently, the management of TV Asahi has been uncomfortable with the reporting since their own executives were said to be complicit in the cordial realtionship, which is centered on wining-and-dining.

This is a particularly fraught issue right now because, according to various freelance journalists making the rounds of the internet discussion shows, talking about the probable ascension of Yoshihide Suga to the premiership in the wake of Shinzo Abe’s resignation, Suga was the architect of the LDP’s scheme to buddy up to the media and, in turn, weaken their confrontational approach to power. It wasn’t just Suga’s post as chief cabinet secretary, with its main task of briefing the press on the matters of the day. He himself actively wined-and-dined journalists and, more importantly, their bosses in a concerted effort to get the press to go easy on the government in terms of both policy and any bumps on the road to their fulfilling Abe’s mission. And by all indications he has been successful. Shigeaki Koga, the former METI bureaucrat and frequent media foil for the Abe bunch, has said that Suga was instrumental in getting him fired as a regular pundit on Hodo Station, so it’s natural to assume that Suga also had something to do, albeit indirectly, with the letting go of the veteran Hodo Station staff, which has annoyed the LDP for years. Getting rid of a pundit here or a producer there wasn’t going to do much to blunt the program’s aggressive thrust, which had been built into its brand since it debuted as News Station in 1985, so the only way for TV Asahi management to turn the show around was to get rid of everyone at the core of the production. It remains to be seen what the results will be.

But in a sense, Hodo Station and Akira Minami are so exceptional to the Japanese press world that it probably doesn’t make much difference what happens to them in the grand scheme of things. After Abe resigned, the press, both domestic and foreign, was generally filled with positive reviews of his long tenure. Two stark departures from this tendency was an op-ed in the New York Times by Sophia Univ. Professor Koichi Nakano and a Daily Beast piece by Jake Adelstein. Both took Abe to task for failing to accomplish much of anything that was beneficial to Japan rather than to the LDP, but, more importantly, the two writers suggested that Abe had probably broken the law. Adelstein’s prickly reporting style was easy for the Japanese media to ignore, but Nakano, a bilingual Japanese national with a long history of anti-establishment writing, can usually get his colleagues’ attention. However, according to a recent installment of the web program Videonews, the only mainstream media outlet that ran a Japanese translation of his New York Times piece was the Japanese language edition of Chosun Ilbo, the South Korean daily.

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