15. Tokyo

Finding ourselves in the cinematic city

Nov 29, 2022

group of people standing — “Shopping in Shibuya,” Tokyo, Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash

Japan is one of those dreamy elsewheres that feels both a part of me and my experiences and something so beautifully foreign, so completely out of reach that we are drawn forever toward it, like Lacan’s objet petit a.

I can’t claim to know much about Japan, to really know it in a deep knowing sort of way. I’ve traveled to Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and the mountains. I’ve read a bunch of its literature (in translation), studied its art, enveloped myself in some of its cinema, and visited countless Japanese restaurants. But I don’t speak Japanese. I’ve never lived there. I’m still pretty far away from it, really, both figuratively and literally.

I dream of living there one day, if just for a couple years, to try to discover the inside of this culture just a little bit more and have more time to explore its amazing natural landscapes. To read the perspective of an outsider living in this immersive state, check out Gianni Simone’s Tokyo Calling. He is writing a guest post for this week’s Saturday Brunch.

Because I’m so enamored with Japan, I thought we’d spend a little longer. Today, we start with Tokyo as an extension of our City as Text discussion. This will be followed by Gianni’s writing this weekend. In January, we’ll come back to Japan (as a whole) and Art of Zen, with a focus on art history and Zen Buddhism.

Tokyo (the city as text)

How can we define Tokyo (as outsiders)? An Asian City? A global city? An Alpha++ city? How globalized is it really? And how do the spaces, people, and artistry interact with one another? What does the myth have to do with its reality?

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

                                           What is your experience with Tokyo?

Cinematic city

This idea of being lost in Tokyo is nothing new. Foreign filmmakers have found exciting otherness in the confusing urbanity — consider Babel and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

And of course, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). The iconic film of existential global travel starring two of the best actors of this century: Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. Their characters spend the film figuring out their lives through dissonance and jet lag. Their strange encounter in a hotel — which could be anyplace, but is important in its foreignness as well as elements of its Japaneseness, including the quiet within a busy city — opens up questions about life: family, work, artistry, mortality…

Don’t we travel in part to get lost? To lose ourselves in otherness? Imagine other possibilities in our lives and give us distance from the map we have set out for ourselves?

Relatedly, here’s a great interview with Soffia Coppola talking about her artist instinct. In fact, the film is about instinct. It’s about the way we often drift into experiences and make choices without rational thought.

Films from Japan have a different perspective of Tokyo that one might expect. Viewing these films allows us to partly move to an insider perspective, especially as move into private interiors or private thoughts inside a denizen.

Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurasawa’s Tokyo Sonata (2008) is a horror film without his typical supernatural. The horror is in the psyches of the characters themselves. Themes of alienation and existential questions are similar to those of Coppola’s work.

A New York Times review of the film investigates these ideas in relation to the cinematography:

Mr. Kurosawa’s manner in both of these extremely frightening movies (and most of his others) is calm, detached, inquisitive. He uses close-ups sparingly and, especially for a horror director, very few spectacular special effects; the action tends to unfold in impeccably composed long shots and, in the interiors, lengthy tracking shots from a discreet middle distance.
His camera moves as cautiously as his characters do and with the same willed attentiveness. He favors a quiet, naturalistic acting style, light on histrionics, a style of which [actor Koji] Yakusho is a master. And there’s a distinctive kind of setting in a Kurosawa picture: he often shoots in decaying, forgotten-looking neighborhoods of Tokyo, in areas that feel somehow provisional, temporary, misconceived as places of human habitation or activity.

The film is horrific in the way that an individual is able to convince others to do terrible things, which makes us question our own resolve to be good. Is it the city, whether her anonymity or some kind of toxicity, that allows this to happen? Or is it simply human nature? Kurasawa often explores the dark side of humanity and this film is no exception.

Café Lumiere (2008) from Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien is instead about music and artistry in small spaces of Tokyo. There is no horror here, which give me hope that my romanticized Tokyo can also exist! Although from a Taiwanese director, this was a Japanese produced film to seek homage to director Ozu — whom we will hear more about from Gianni on Saturday.

It is further interesting that Hou was raised in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule. His affinity with the culture shows he believes in a common human connection that is demonstrated by different cultural means (i.e. filmmaking and music).

DAI Jinhua (Translated by ZHANG Jingyuan) in “Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films: pursuing and escaping history” (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, 2008) takes a look at this work within an international frame. It is still an othered view of Japan even though it was produced there with Japanese actors:

Starting from the mid-1980s, there have been many new waves of Chinese films. As a film auteur, however, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s only equal in representational style is the Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami. In terms of treating historical themes, the closest Asian film director to Hou Hsiao-Hsien is the famous Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu. When Hou Hsiao-Hsien was invited to make a Japanese film Coffee Jikou to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Yasujiro Ozu, he was widely regarded as the obvious choice for the job.

Chris Fujiwara’s Film Quarterly article “Places and Other Fictions: Film Culture in Tokyo, by Chris Fujiwara“ (2008) claims film in Tokyo is dying, much like elsewhere, due in part to the high cost of going to see a movie. Film criticism is also dying — it’s a matrix. But of course, in the last decade, and especially the last couple of years, much of the film industry has gone online, including releases. On the one hand, more people are able to access these films at a lower cost. On the other, we lose some of the collective experience as well as the immersive experience that can make the film more impactful and memorable.

Japan still values independent films and retrospectives are vibrant, but more recent articles suggest the film industry there is also “cliquey,” leaving out women and minority groups or people without the right connections.

Fujiwara links the cinematic to a deeper understanding of the city: “Tokyo is a city where the cinema lives, though its life is discontinuous and paradoxical.” He further uses Hou’s work to contextualize these ideas, especially in its homage to Ozu:

Café Lumière is not explicitly about film culture, but it offers a profound message about culture in general. It accepts the inevitable loss of parts of the past because it knows how to retain the parts that can be saved. It provides a model for both filmmaking and film viewing as immersions within the fleetingness of experience. It deals with the conquest of social isolation through the acknowledgment of shared aesthetic projects and the formation of communities of outsiders. It tells us that we all must, and do, make culture, including the culture of the past, and advises us to go about this task with patience and without dread.

This idea of ‘making culture’ and forming ‘communities of outsiders’ is central to understanding the world through Hou’s cinema. He has immersed himself in other places as well: Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai…these investigations of culture through film often include immigrant or visitor characters seeking understanding through and between languages and art forms.

Akira & anime

I know very little about about Japanese anime. You can read Gianni Simone’s take here:

Tokyo Calling

Anime between fantasy and reality

Anime (and manga, of course) can be so heavily stylized that a lot of fans end up forming a fantasy version of Japan in their heads that doesn’t square with reality. They get some really odd ideas sometimes, and that results in a weird form of culture shock when they visit…

3 years ago · Gianni Simone

Akira (1988) is a film about annihilation, about rebirth. As The Guardian writes: “Thirty years on from a devastating explosion that razed the city, a new capital – Neo-Tokyo – has been born: sprawling, chaotic, like the LA of Blade Runner.”

In an article from The Washington Post in 2018, there is a claim of its relevance 30 years later:

Long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe gave the clearance for niche pop culture properties to enter the mainstream, Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira” served as an entry point for Westerners into the world of Japanese animation. The frenetic cyberpunk anime, released in Japan on July 15, 1988, showed that cartoons across cultures could address larger social issues. Its intricate, futuristic cityscapes and its evocative tale of telepathic power inspired a generation of works to come, including a Kanye West music video and “Stranger Things.”

The article goes onto discuss the international production team (in Europe and America), that in part made the film into more than a Japanese depiction. Interestingly, this article about the relevance of a destroyed and strange world that will host the Olympics in then-future 2020 was written before the pandemic and before the actual hosting of a pandemic Olympics in Tokyo.

Literary Tokyo

I’ll go more into literature with a larger focus on Japan. Culture Trip has curated a list of their ten favorite Tokyo-set novels here. Here are a few quick takes.

Natsume Sōseki’s oeuvre, including Kokoro (1914), can be a way of looking historically at Tokyo through literature. His work was distinctly modern and had many allusions and connections to Western literature and art at the time. He writes: “You see, loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egoistical selves.”

Jumping well ahead, Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen (1988, translated by Megan Backus) is a beautiful novella about grief, friendship, and alternative families. The story takes place mostly in Tokyo but could really be most places in Japan. Tokyo perhaps allows for some of the plot, such as the representation of a transgender mother in the city and the accessibility to certain jobs and schools for the younger characters. However, the movement between Tokyo and elsewhere is also an important one. There is a sense that one must get away from the busy metropolis in order to see clearly — in relationships and emotions and identity.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold (2019, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot) likewise takes place in small spaces of Tokyo, namely a coffee shop. This isn’t just any coffee shop: one particular seat allows one to time travel within the cafe (only). Therefore the space is quite limited despite the access to moments in time. It is a beautiful weave of interconnected stories all taking place in this setting.

Again, however, the distinction between Tokyo and elsewhere, or the countryside, is utilized. At the start of “Mother and Child” (p. 165), Kawaguchi writes of haiku that show the beauty of the higurashi cicada and its metaphorical representation of the start of autumn. However, “[i]n the city, the shrill of the higurashi is seldom heard.” A single cicada lives near the cafe and can be heard at the start of autumn. It seems to bridge a connection between this urban cafe and the natural world as well as the artistic world of Japanese poetry.

Tokyo-based Japanese writer Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite authors and one I have mentioned before. Some of his novels take place in Tokyo. He also wrote a nonfiction book called Underground (1997, translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel) about the Tokyo sarin gas attacks in 1995. Murakami interviewed many victims who were on the metro during the attacks. Through the anecdotes of travelers and the maps of their journeys, Murakami paints a picture of Tokyo’s resilience and diversity, humanizing the horror and thereby in some way combatting its destructive forces. But Murakami also criticizes his nation’s inability to learn from the attacks. In “Blind Nightmare: Where are we Japanese going?” (pp.. 195-209) he criticizes the us vs. them media, loneliness perpetuated by his culture, cultures of violence, and his own lack of understanding Japaneseness and his own society, as much as he may try as a novelist and citizen.

Meaning through poetry

Perhaps poetry best captures the elusiveness of the city and its culture by allowing ambiguities to continue to exist. “Two Tokyos” by Shuntarō Tanikawa (2001, translated by Harold Wright) from The Selected Poems of Shuntarō Tanikawa contains the following depiction:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

TOKYO was noisy.
TOKYO was huge.
TOKYO was fancy.
He wanted to send a picture postcard somewhere,
but there was nowhere to send one.
So he wrote to himself,
addressing it to his rooming house
saying, “Tokyo has everything.”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

A postcard attempts to reduce a place and experience to a single image and a few words. The persona seems to want to capture this for himself rather than anybody else, perhaps unsure that others would understand his experience of “everything” the city has to offer.

Hong Kong poet Leung Ping Kwan (known as Ye Si in the mainland) has a beautiful poem about postcards — “Postcards from Prague.” But he also has an interesting one about Ozu’s “Tokyo Story,” of the same name (pp. 178-181 of city at the end of time 1980).

The persona in the poem attends a screening of Ozu’s film in Onomichi, in southwest Japan. There are technical difficulties in the theater and the persona waits in silence, listening to the “rain on the roof” and the “scattered” audience “stare[s] ahead at the empty space in front of them / from their separate places.”

It is not unlike the dissolution / strangeness of Lost in Translation; this an excerpt toward the end of the poem from a bilingual edition with translations by the poet:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

We agree, this is a good movie.
                   The daughter watches from a window;
a train passes outside.
                   The father sits in his room; 
the train passes.
                    Noriko sits in the train.
(Everybody just sits there staring ahead.) 
Suddenly I feel saying something.
                    (from their separate places,)
but stop.
                     (silent and alone.)
Noriko listens to her watch
                                            ticking;
this is a good movie, we agree,
                                                       (ticking)
for all the thunder rolling and the rains on the roof of the theatre,
for all the breaks in our lives.
                                                   (ticking)

And I will leave you there for today, because Gianni will pick up Saturday with the films of Ozu. In case you missed the initial post on the city, here it is below. Feel free to leave your thoughts on the poetry in the comments.