I had meant to start this blog by writing about Yoshimoto Banana's 2010 book Another World which is volume four in the Okoku series but that will have to wait for a little bit longer. In the meantime I have been inspired to write about a couple of Japanese films after watching Matsumoto Hitoshi's 2007 film Big Man Japan last night. But I'll come to that in a little while. I first want to say a little bit about Twilight of the Cockroaches.
Twilight of the Cockroaches was a part live action and part animation film made in 1987 by Yoshida Hiroaki. The film is about a live action man whose live action lover walks out on him. As a result, the apartment becomes a breeding ground for animated cockroaches. Unusually for a Japanese man, the spurned lover shares his apartment willingly with the cockroaches. I say unusually because of the Japanese obsession with cleanliness. You will know what I mean if you have watched any of the Miyazaki Hayao films. These can be quite a purging experience. You need only watch the floor scrubbing scene in Tonari no Tottaro (1988) as the makuro kurosuke are banished from the house; the scene in Spirited Away (2001)when the bath is scrubbed from top to bottom; or the scene in the 1992 film Porco Rosso when the young female protagonist cleans the pirate's dishes and washes their clothes. Miyazaki shows the same deep concern for the environment in his films. In the 2008 film Ponyo, there are graphic images of pollution in the sea. I guess it is the search for innocence and purity that drives these films which is why childhood is central. I have digressed somewhat from The Twilight of the Cockroaches, but it is interesting perhaps to see it as a film that challenges the notion that the Japanese are obsessed with cleanliness. It is also an antidote to those adult viewers of anime who have seen enough panty shots in Miyazaki's otherwise innocent representations of childhood.
Another must-see film is the 1990 film Dreams, by Kurosawa Akira. This is another film that tackles environmental themes in a big way. Interestingly his film making career spans the post war period from the 1940s until the 1990s and in that time he moved from being concerned about nuclear annihilation to a growing sense of ecocrisis that he shares with Miyazaki Hayao. In Dreams, various segments deal with exploding nuclear power plants, an earth populated by ogres that has been turned into a tip for deadly chemicals and a vision of Eden in which a one-hundred-and-three year old man tells the narrator that people, especially scholars, have forgotten that they are part of nature.
Another film worthy of your attention is the fantastic satirical 1996 film My Secret Place, by Yaguchi Shinobu, which challenges gender stereotypes. The film looks at a young female bank employee who is obsessed with money (perhaps a symbol of the bubble economy). She is shown in one scene dressed in her pink office uniform lugging heavy geological equipment through the forest. At the end of the film, her obsession with money is overcome and she trhows away a suitcase full of cash. The image of the young woman in her bank uniform, hauling heavy equipment through the forest, challenges the perception that young Japanese women are merely wallflowers in big institutions with no real power.
Finally the film that triggered these reminiscences is the 2007 Matusmoto Hitoshi (of Downtown manzai combi fame) film, Big Man Japan. This remarkable film, part spoof, part homage to the Godzilla (and other monster) films, manages in mockumentary fashion to poke fun at many aspects of contemporary Japanese culture. There is the Shinto priest blessing the electrical system that produces the charge needed to transform our hero to superhero size. There are the monsters themselves that are hard to take seriously. There is the 'public' who for the most part remain unimpressed by the efforts of our hero and indeed question the use to which all this electricity is being put towards. There is the graffiti scrawled along the walls of his house that point to his fall from grace. His manager seems to be the main beneficiary to the deals she negotiates with his sponsors. (She is a young woman who drives her dogs around in a nice big car for which she has paid cash). This film is reminiscent of the crazy game shows and zany comedies of Itami Juzo's nemesis Beat Takeshi.
These may not be the films-of-choice of film buffs but they make me laugh. They challenge stereotypes with great satire. The Miyazaki films and the Kurosawa film, whilst they are not hard edged satires, tackle problems such as the growing sense of ecocrisis in the world at a time when concerns have been fuelled by the leaking of radiaton from the Fukushima power plant.
