22 posts tagged “japan”
She's been sending these to me for years and they keep on coming: every month 5-10 of them. Nice...these are all from a recent trip she took to Hokkaido in northern Japan...
In Japan. Two friends (Quebecois) are visiting there now. And my sister just told me that she and her husband are off to Japan for a year or so this summer.
Some pics from my friend in Japan...
...on the back of this novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar caught my eye:
Greg: Yes, they are lucky they get to be outside in this nice weather!
Jan: I bet you wish you hadn't given up smoking.
Greg: I don't smoke. I never did.
Jan: Yes, you did. You told me you used to smoke.
Greg: No, I didn't. I've never smoked in my life. Ever.
Greg: Maybe I forgot that I used to smoke? I think it's more likely that you're just mistaken.
Jan: IT IS A BIG DEAL BECAUSE YOU'RE CALLING ME A LIAR WHEN YOU'RE THE BIG FAT LIAR! AND DON'T TELL ME TO CALM DOWN, YOU CALM DOWN, YOU MOTHER FUCKER!!!
The new street views of Japan on Google Maps are AMAZING! I can follow the path I took to school every day when I taught at a university in suburban Tokyo.
I can follow the route I'd take every Sunday from Nakano to the Starbucks at Nakano station when I'd ride my bike there to get Masa a scone and myself a latte. COOOOL!
Apparently there is this car that drives around snapping photos in all four directions as it goes. They started with several US cities, then added a few spots in France and Italy. Then in the last two weeks added Japan and Australia. From what I read on Wiki, the hard part isn't the photos or matching them to the map, etc.: it's having to go in and blur images of faces and license plates, etc., so that Google doesn't get sued for privacy violations!
The images are really entertaining and sure makes me miss Japan. Unfortunately, I can't get the embed code to work so you're just gonna have to take my word for it. I was trying to embed an image of my apartment building at Tamagawa, but I'll have to just upload a picture the old fashioned way. Humph.
Masa loves reading odd stories about Japanese happenings: there are lots of things that are never translated and certainly never make news outlets outside of Japan.
Several times during the day, he'll pop into where I'm working, and without any preface:
"Forty years old man. Three years ago...he tries to steal a dog. Corgi dog..."
So the guy is arrested and sent to jail for 18 months (?!! seems kind of harsh, but I've long ago given up trying to line up Japan with logical conclusions); finally, after doing his time in the choky, he is released and almost immediately returns to the same apartment and attempts to steal the same dog!
The dog is now "missing." When asked, the guy reported that he was lonely and thought the dog was really really cute. I imagine him pining away for all those 18 months, planning his attack. Obviously, he didn't think it through very carefully...
So now he's back in prison.
A sad, desperate, and wicked world we live in.
Great film! Very early Kurosawa (1949), so he's not quite moved into the style that he would later make his mark with, but the themes are very much his: consumer culture, the àpres-guerre identity, new vs. old generation (a well-established Ozu theme as well), but more than this: Stray Dog is an exploration of existential identity in a world that has nearly collapsed socially. About the choices we are all forced to make in order to survive, particularly in a hostile environment. It's like a film-noir from the Hollywood 40s with all the existential dread of Camus and Sartre, the realism of early Russian cinema.
The movie centers around a missing gun, that of Murakami (played by Kurosawa favorite, Toshiro Mifune), whose weapon is lifted by a pickpocket on a crowded bus. He is a rookie cop and losing his gun means a demotion. More than this, though, Murakami blames himself when his gun is used for a string of crimes where people are injured or killed, by a criminal whose past is eerily similar to Murakami's own (both former soldiers, both poor, both having suffered after their return to Japan): the film ultimately explores the criminal in a humane way, showing that living a life of crime has less to do with simply being a "bad person" than simply making wrong choices. Murakami's obssession leads to a quest: to recover his gun before more people are hurt by its reckless use.
What I love personally about this era of Japanese filmmaking is all that is not said: about the war, about the social conditions, about the backstory that each character is trapped by and trying to overcome. How does a society carry on after their entire city has been firebombed and hundreds of thousands of neighbors, friends, relatives killed? How does a society absorb soldiers that have returned from war when society knows that these soldiers have committed terrible atrocities against innocents?
Interesting tidbit: the title of the movie is Stray Dog and it starts with a title sequence that has a dog panting fiercely, a real close up that lasts quite a long time. Apparently some woman in the US, a member of the SPCA attempted to sue Kurosawa since she argued that Japanese were barbarians and the only way they could have gotten a dog to pant like that was to inject it with rabies. Kurosawa had to send a signed deposition, stating that they had gotten the dog to pant by riding a bike around for a while with the dog tied to it, then let it rest and filmed it panting. Kurosawa reportedly said that the only time he ever wished that Japan had won the war was having to suffer this indignity.
chipotle and jalapeno in the village friday night for cat's birthday dinner. great place! excellent tortilla soup; nice laid back atmosphere. and cheap cheap: big meal for two, drinks, soup, dessert & coffee for $50 including tip (for two!). unheard of!
friday night: "the savages". laura linney. philip seymour hoffman. AMC atwater with cat & ian. great film! i was thinking it was fixing to move towards a sappy melodramatic "everything-get's-worked-out-dysfunctional-family" ending, but it kept surprising me. and ends on a happy, hopeful note, though you wouldn't think so by watching the trailers. great flick.
saturday afternoon: joyce carol oates is a great writer, but i find most of her characters annoying and people that i just don't have any interest in reading about. is it that they live a kind of life that i can't relate to? or that i just don't like them? i read this over the weekend and enjoyed it, actually, though once it was over, i was happy that it was over...no wonder i read so much stuff from the japanese lately!
this evening: big love: ugh. bored me. some good actors in it and i love the idea of this show: a supposed "objective" view (whatever that means) of a fundamentalist religious utah family that practices polygamy. unfortunately, i just couldn't get the tone of it...
tonight: blood: the last vampire. great animation, really amazing, actually. the story? idiotic and cliche. and who did they get to do the english dialogue, half-wit soldiers that can barely read? we ALWAYS watch japanese anime in japanese but this one actually takes place on a US military base IN japan, so it's about half in english. unfortunately. it's almost painful, it's so bad. i never realized VOICEOVERS could be so awful and contain such bad acting!
last night: potluck on nun's island with d&s and their neighbor. fun! we ate ourselves silly, played family feud which wasn't much fun (two francophones, a japanese guy, a chinese-canadian from manitoba and me, the only american playing a game testing US pop culture), admired the view, played with the cats, played the piano, and then played monopoly (the star wars version) until 1am!!
today: another great yukio mishima novel that i laid around and read most of the day. full of all the delicious mishima insight into human behavior and that obsession of his: power, how people use it, and how people are used by it. i think i'm going to start into his sea of fertility tetralogy next. or soon...
