Japanese Culture: Recommendations
Matt Kimmich, a creative maverick, theatre director, teacher and PhD student at the Unversity of Bern, Switzerland, sent me an e-mail yesterday, which reads in part:
Seeing that you've been living in Japan for a while, I guess you might know some of the Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki anime. Do you know any of their films? I recently saw Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi), which I thought was an amazing piece of work. Can you recommend any Japanese culture (pop or not) that a gaijin like me could get into? (Would make a nice change from most of the solidly Anglosaxon stuff I'm surrounded with here...)
Miyazaki is a genius, which took me a while understand, though. A long time ago, Hayase-sensei lent me a copy of My Neighbor Totoro. I watched the first few bits of the video and was rather underwhelmed: the backdrops were lovingly made but the kids were just too cloyingly cute, the mum was too cloyingly cute, and the dad was too good to be true. I switched it off before any of the Totoros ever appeared. As time went on, the video was beginning to give me a guilt trip because I wanted to return it. I figured I first had to sit through the whole piece before doing that, however, so eventually I got around to popping it in the video again.
And it pulled my socks off. Once Totoro appears, the video really gets magic, and I even got to like the plucky little brat.
I don't usually care much for the Academy Awards: movie stars, yeah, so what? But I was really glad when Miyazaki got the Oscar for Spirited Away: that's one great piece of anime. Last term I was reading Lewis Carroll's Alice books with a group of students, and I asked them to compare and contrast the novels with that particular work of Myazaki's. Yukiko-san wrote that she liked Spirited Away better than Alice in Wonderland because it had a strong environmental message in contrast with which Alice looked like a gratuitous romp. Fair enough, maybe...
The environmental concern is more pronounced Princess Mononoke, a darker work by far. It had a rather mixed reception in the U.S., I understand, because many parents were expecting a kiddie's movie like Totoro only to find that there were beheadings and dismemberments in it. But the violence fits with the theme and it's a very powerful movie.
Castle in the Sky (Tenku no shiro Laputa) is a classical instance of misprision. In Gulliver's Travels, the story of the floating island Laputa is a reactionary curmudgeon's (and whacking great writer's) scathing satire on science. In Miyazaki's take on the island, it appears as an ecological utopia tended by ultra-powerful robots with hearts of gold: that sort of makes you picture Swift tearing off his periwig in a fit of choleric rage. Maybe Miyazaki was taking revenge for Swift's unflattering portait of Japan in Gulliver's Travel's. Myazaki's father, by the way, was an aviation engineer, and the love of flying results in a few great scenes in that work.
But on to the more general point: Japanese culture that deserves a world audience. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Yeah, I enjoyed Dreams too, except for the one story where people are running around in van Gogh paintings -- that just looked too much like a video clip on MTV.
Kurosawa, of course, is the godfather of Japanese cinema; everyone and their grandmother already knows him, also in the West.
I like Miyazaki's anime too. Especially I love Kiki's Delivery Service, because I like the atmosphere of this anime, whose model is Tasmania in Australia. Whenever I watch it, I feel like going to Tasmania again.
However, the film which impressed me as a little girl is Grave of the Fireflies written by Isao Takahata. This story is about the hard life lead by a little girl, Setuko, and her elder brother during war. But the scene where they play with fireflies even in the war makes our hearts warm and mild. They die at the end of the story, which makes us consider what war is and that it killed many people, including little children.
i saw princess mononoke recently and i really enjoyed it.
it's kind of difficult to get good anime here in the states (i prefer english subtitles to dub), but it's worth it.
I hear that the pop painter/manga artist Yumiko Kayukawa is making it big in America.
The tavelogue on her first trip to the U.S. sticks closely to the script of every overseas documentary on Japanese TV: the young hero/traveller/presenter always winds up in a big tearful farewell scene. Every time I see another enactment of that scene, I think it should tell me something about Japanese mentality. I never find out what it is.
I enjoyed this post and the comments it has received. I just wanted to let you know that the American-English idiom for being awestruck is 'knocked my socks off,' not 'pulled my socks off.'
Just a couple of things - Alice in Wonderland was written in a drug-induced reverie -- Spirited Away was probably not.
This isn't a quality call, but just an explanation as to why they are so different. I'm often surprised that Alice is considered a children's book. It was never intended as one.
I too thought Mononoke was an amazing film, both for its story and its animation, and its environmental message was driven through like a silk knife. It's especially sad to look around (especially here in Tokyo) and see the sheer devastation wrought on the environment here in Japan. Remember, we do not leave our environment to our children, we borrow it from them.
Ayumi Sawa :: May 7, 2003 09:38 PM
I like Miyazaki's anime, especially Spirited Away. I like YUBA-BA's sister, but of course she is not a main character.
Then, what I want to recommend is Dreams, made by Akira Kurosawa, a famous director. This is a movie which does not include much dialog. It is very moving because of its very, very beautiful images. Dreams consists of several stories which reflect Japanese culture, nature and so on. I like the scene where many peach trees are blooming.