Recently, interest in Japan seems to be coming back in an extraordinary way, not in Japanese cars and electronic gadgets, but in culture, the way the Japanese live, work and play in their own world. Thunderbird student and Japanese citizen Hiroki Iwai describes how Japanese culture is and has been depicted through film.
Two American films that opened last year showed some aspects of Japanese culture to the rest of the world. The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise and Ken Watanabe portrayed what it was like to be in samurai era; the film Lost in Translation depicted contemporary Japan. While these films capture major aspects of the Japanese, we cannot deny the fact that they are through western, or gaijin, eyes. For example, in The Last Samurai there are extensive explanations of the samurai spirit through voiceovers or Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe’s character), whereas a samurai in a Japanese sense would teach spirit through silence. Pupils could observe and absorb through the tense atmosphere that was created.
Since I believe that a motion picture is a portrait of a country's view of culture, I offer this simple guide on how Japanese movies capture our own feelings on film.
There are two major segments of Japanese films: jidaigeki, films that take a closer look at the samurai era, and contemporary dramas. Until recently, the jidaigeki films seem to have lost the interest of Japanese viewers, although they were popular as one-hour dramas on TV, showing a good leader wiping out the bad. But the spirit of the samurai, always being loyal to his master through being quiet, humble and hardworking, was gone. These characters were magnificently portrayed in the films of Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi in the 1950's and 1960's when their popularity reached an all-time high. Since our nation's downfall through the long recession in the 90's, which in fact is continuing, the spirit is again being viewed as the lost soul we must regain to recover as a nation. Twilight Samurai (Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Picture in 2004) brought out the old-timers and young middle-class people who are struggling in their workplace, feeling sympathetic with the character in the film. This film, along with Last Samurai, could bring the jidaigeki genre back to a new level.
The Japanese contemporary drama, portraying present life, has not been noticed by the rest of the world until recently. During the 1950's and 1960's as a rival of Kurosawa, Yasujirou Ozu shot many family dramas like Tokyo Story and Sanma no Aji, showing an ideal family with a modest father figure and an obedient daughter and mother growing up after the war. At the same time there were action films of youngsters with the great late Youjirou Ishihara (the younger brother of the present governor of Tokyo) and Youzou Kayama. The films they starred in became a hip hit series stealing the hearts of many baby-boomers of the time.
In the 70's, with the influence of new cinema from the U.S. and France, a lot of experimental, hard-to-understand films came out, becoming a cornerstone of new techniques of expressing sex and violence. Violence was shown in the Yakuza films mainly shot by Kinji Fukasaku and introduced to the western world by Quentin Tarantino. The blunt aggressiveness and the loneliness every character portrays is what the Japanese saw in themselves at that time, knowing they have caught up with the world economy, but not knowing what their next step as a nation will be.
Recently, Japanese films have lost original movie stars, since financing has been done by the big TV stations and publishing companies. But this is not always a negative situation. Each TV drama is original, so the blowing up of these dramas to the movie screen may seem refreshing to foreign eyes. For example, the recent film Bayside Shakedown was originally a hit TV drama series, and shows how our age group deals with bureaucracy within a company in a casual way.
Although there is now a rise in attention to Asian films as a whole—thanks to Korea and China—I welcome the attention to Japanese filmmaking, and hope that our films continue to express the unique characteristics of our culture.
Hiroki Iwai ’05 is a current Thunderbird student, with five years experience in the banking field, although his passion for film entertainment has not died. He has an undergraduate degree from Kobe University in Japan. He can be reached at Hiroiwai@global.t-bird.edu or Hiroiwai@aol.com.
