Five Days in Tokyo

A subjective round-up of some brief experiences with film-making,
Cinema and DVD in Tokyo, April 2004

by Slarek
(23 April 2004)

Two-and-a-half weeks in Japan, but only five days in Tokyo, and a good part of two of them were spent traveling from Osaka on the Shinkansen (bullet train) and then getting to or from my hotel in Nakano. Tokyo is a huge city, comparable to London but more densely populated. Nakano is a particularly lively quarter in which I am sure you could spend three months eating out every night and still not visit every bar, cafe and restaurant there. If you did, it's just one stop to Shinjuku, which is even livelier. And unlike London, wherever you chose to eat the atmosphere will be great, the food delicious and the booze superb. I know - I spent a lot of time testing this statement out. I was pleased to find that shochu, a drink I actually like even more than sake but whose strength used to prompt Japanese friends to raise their eyebrows when I ordered it, has found a new popularity in the past two years and is now very widely available, including in a can ready mixed with fruit juices and soda as Chu-Hi.

As with any great city, the best way to explore it is by knowing someone who lives there, as is the case with my good friend Hiroyuki, who works at the Japan Film Academy, an establishment whose previous graduates include the impossibly prolific Takasi Miike, of Audition, Ichi the Killer and Happiness of the Katakuris fame. This is an excellent film school with first-rate facilities, and the standard of the work there is very high. In particular I had screened for me a graduate film of two years ago, whose English title is Live Forever and that has now secured a cinema release. This is an extraordinarily touching, insightful and well made documentary portrait or three elderly leprosy victims, all of whom were based at the same clinic and have found expression through painting, campaigning for equal rights for leprosy suffers and, in one particularly moving case, a friendship with a young sight-impaired boy. This is exactly the sort of film that the BBC screen regularly in their Storyville documentary season and is well up to the standard of other works that have fallen under that creative umbrella. A subtitled print is already available, and if anyone even remotely connected with the Storyville season is by chance reading this, then please, please get in touch with us and I will pass on contact details for Hiroyuki and the Japan Film Academy. This is a remarkable tale that absolutely should be seen.

The lecturers I met are all film professionals and both welcoming and friendly, some of them demonstrating a better command of English than I have of Japanese. I missed meeting the head of the school and Japan's foremost film critic, Tadao Sato, who was abroad at a film festival, but was touched that he sent me his greetings anyway, and left for me the translated copy of his book Currents in Japanese Cinema. Very special thanks to two of the school's very patient new graduates, Nori and Tetsu, for showing me round, introducing me to such great food and getting me so drunk. Nori also very kindly presented me with a DVD of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and a memento of my visit, which I will be reviewing soon.

With such a limited time in Tokyo I only had the chance to catch two films. I missed out on the hoped-for screening of Imamura's 1964 Akai Satsui due to conflicting appointments and it being the first day of the new school year there, but did catch the latest animated feature from Mamoru Oshii, the visually and intellectually arresting Innocence (to read a separate preview of this, click here) and, particularly interesting in the light of the recent region 1 release of two of his similarly themed films from this period, Kenji Fukasaku's 1966 Hokkai no Abare-Ryu, which as near as dammit translates as 'Violent Dragon of North Japan. This was the first of his Yakuza thrillers and contained some splendid action sequences, the best of which is a running battle on a beach in which the camera tracks with the characters and a fight that looks completely unrehearsed, but must have been choreographed to the letter as it moves from person to person but never loses the action for a second. The print was is exceptional shape for a film of this period - I can't remember one we have screened in the cinema recently that looked this clean - and was part of a superb retrospective of 60s and 70s Yakuza thrillers being screened by the excellent independent cinema, The Musashino Hall, which due to not being able to make ends meet is tragically closing down next month. The closure of such venues in any town or city should be seen as a negative thing, as independent cinema and enthusiasm for real film is dealt another blow by the multiplexes and their Hollywood dominated fodder.

There seemed good support for Japanese cinema, especially amongst the graduates, and trailers screening before Innocence boasted a range of new and upcoming anime features, including and impressive-looking double from Shinji Aramaki, Appleseed and Steamboy, the second of which which is set in Victorian London and includes almost gleeful footage of Crystal Palace and Tower bridge being completely annihilated. For the record, we were also subjected to the trailer for the big budget American movie version of Thunderbirds. You can't really judge a film properly by its trailer, but this looked utterly terrible. Here we go, Lost in Space all over again.

Few people I spoke to had even seen Lost In Translation, and the only ones who did were less than happy with what they saw as a condescending attitude to the Japanese. As an experiment I asked almost everyone I talked to in Tokyo to say "Rat Pack," and not a single one pronounced it "Lat Pack," as the film had its Japanese background characters do. The Japanese do not use "La" instead of "Ra" for the simple reason that "La" is not in their alphabet, whereas "Ra" is. Some Koreans do make this substitution, as I found when I got talking to a very friendly guy on the plane, but just lumping all Orientals in together and giving them the same pronunciation mix-up seems to me to make matters even worse.

Despite its popularity with young girls there who dote on Tom Cruise, all I met who had seen The Last Samurai thought it complete and utter bollocks. Trying to be polite, one Japanese friend described it as "really poo." Poo indeed. Reaction to Battle Royale 2 was also one of extreme disappointment, though it seems to be scoring with the English students I know who have seen it. But then so did The Fast and the Furious.

DVD brought a few surprises and as many frustrations. No-one I met - and I mean no-one, owed either a widescreen TV or a DVD player, though a couple have DVD drives in their computers. Despite that, DVDs are in plentiful supply, if limited to specialist music and DVD shops - you won't find any at the local supermarket as you do in the UK, and I found no trace of any form of DVD rental outlet. Pleasingly, despite the inevitable Hollywood dominance, there are a good number of modern and classic Japanese titles available, and I could have spent a small fortune but for one thing: almost none of them have English subtitles. Not that surprising, really - how many UK DVD releases have Japanese subtitles? This is, however, particularly frustrating when you encounter the Takeshi Kitano collection, decent anamorphic transfers of almost all of his films, but yet again, no subtitles. However, one of the first disks I laid eyes on (and not part of the collection) was his latest, Zatoichi, which I immediately bought without even checking for English subtitles. Joyously, it had them. A review will follow very soon.

One thing I always find time to check out is the latest electronic gadgetry, but the real surprise this visit was how much the gap between what is available in the UK and what was on display in Japan has closed in the six years since my last visit. I saw almost nothing that is not freely available in the UK, and despite the lower shop prices, some prudent searching on the internet can offer similar savings at home. Many of the most interesting computer developments I saw on my last trip - wafer-thin laptops, small computers the size of a thick paperback book - simply did not catch on, in the main because of the smaller batteries and resultant reduced battery life. Besides, very few people I met used their computers as much as I do - they do all their e-mailing and web browsing on their mobile phones, a popular activity that you can see large numbers of young people involved in on every train you travel on. But guess what, mobile phone ring tones and actually talking on mobile phones in train carriages is effectively banned. You want to yap stupidly into your phone, then you go and stand outside by the toilet and do it, where you won't bother the rest of us.

One essential visit must rank as the Mecca for all Hayao Miyazaki fans: The Ghibli Museum. If you love animation and you happen to be in Tokyo, then take time out to visit this wonderful place. Quite apart from being able to have yourself photographed next to a life-sized robot from Laputa: Castle in the Sky, watch kids go nuts on and in the giant furry Cat-Bus playhouse, and buy Ghibli memorabilia in the insanely crowded gift shop, you can examine and - I found this quite astonishing - in some cases actually handle original drawings, cells and storyboard books from the studio's own collection. There is even a recreation of Miyazaki's work area, complete with all of the books and personal items he keeps handy for reference and to inspire his work.

Some of the exhibitions themselves are tremendous, and one astonishing creation uses a combination of strobe lighting and a series of models representing animation frames of key Miyazaki characters to create a genuinely breathtaking 3D animation of said characters. This knocked everyone who approached it for six - every few seconds you could hear someone new say "Sugoi!" which is Japanese for "amazing!"

All of this was at the opposite end of the scale to something I was dragged to against my will when I returned to Osaka a few days later. Universal City is a gigantic toilet of tacky Americana into which all of the worst aspects of American popular culture have been diarrhoetically shat. This is a horrible place, full of American-style shops and eating places and completely lacking any sense of taste or style. Absolutely the worst of the lot has to be the Hard Rock Cafe shop, a truly insipid place in which every item on sale is emblazoned with the company's ghastly logo, and you are invited to hand over money in order to advertise their product for them in a horrid variety of ways. I so appalled by this shopping mall that I refused to go inside and take the Terminator ride, no matter how good it might be. Fortunately there are enough great restaurants and bars in Osaka proper to wash the taste of this experience from your mouth. Eating and drinking, as well as traveling and watching films, is a joy in Japan, and I already miss it.