'MANBIKI KAZOKU' AT THE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, 2018

The Japanese film 'Shoplifting' by director Hirokazu Kore-Eda, a Melbourne Film Festival, quickly sold out this year. The queue to see the film stretched from the front of the Kino cinema to the steps and then up to the level on Collins Street above. The film had already won a number of important awards and was a 'must see' for fans of Japanese cinema. The poverty that the film explored was perhaps a novelty for many young cinema goers who see Japan as a first world economy. Those who have seen the films of the post-war period know that, for an older generation of film goers in Japan, it would bring back memories from not a not so distant past when the country was devastated by war.

In 'Shoplifting a young boy is shown teaching his young 'sister', a new addition to the household rescued from an abusive household, how to steal food from the local shop. Towards the end of the film the shopkeeper, who is forced to close, gives the boy some snacks and tells him not to teach her to steal. He has known all along how the young boy and his 'father' come to his shop in order to steal food but he has turned a blind eye. When the family is discovered by the authorities, they are living in an apartment that belonged to an old woman who died. To avoid discovery they bury her in the house. The body is subsequently discovered as is the body of the husband of the young woman who plays the role of the 'mother'. There is a media storm and the 'mother' takes responsibility and goes to prison. The film looks at how these people living below the poverty line in a big city like Tokyo survive. It looks at how they have to break the law in order to survive. The way these individuals form a 'family' unit in order to survive is reminiscent of the anime 'Tokyo Godfathers' by Satoshi Kon. This is another grim look at the Japanese under-class who largely remain invisible in everyday Japanese discourse despite their obvious visibility. This film puts them front and centre in a  film designed to prick the social conscience of a nation in which failure isn't an option and hasn't been since the twelfth century.

Another island nation built on a fault line that explores similar social dilemmas in film is New Zealand. In the film 'Boy by director Taika Waititi there is a similar family group experiencing poverty. While the grandmother is attending a funeral her son comes home from prison having formed a gang with a couple of mates. He proceeds to dig up a paddock where he has buried treasure. As more and more holes are dug his son dreams of joining the gang. He begins to steal marijuana from a crop next door for his father. This leads to a visit from a rival gang and a few heads are busted. When the grandmother finally comes home the children busily cover the holes in the walls of the house with their art work. The father finally visits his dead  wife in the cemetery is rescued living under a nearby bridge after he falls into the water. 

Both families in these two island nations are fringe dwellers but they all have their dreams and in their own way look out for each other. Whether state intervention or institutionalisation is the answer is doubtful. The young people and the adults who care for them form relationships that are caring despite the blatant disregard for the law. In both cases there is an absence of 'adult' figures apart from the grandmothers. The problem is that their 'children' have failed to become independent and self supporting. As a result the next generation experiences a debilitating poverty from which it is hard to imagine that they can escape.

RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: CODA: MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

There was a queue at the cinema which quickly made its way back up the stair case to the street outside. Sakamoto may not be a household name in Australia but he is not unknown. After the tickets were scanned, a process ticket holders were allowed inside for the sold out screening. There was the usual as people found each other and then their seats and then the rustling of chip packets. Why cinemas advertise popcorn is beyond me - its not just the working of multiple surreptitious jaws that is offensive it is also the smell. Horrible. 

The documentary started with footage after  the tsunami in Fukushima and Sakamoto's discovery of the now famous piano the 'tsunami piano'. The tsunami was now way back in 2011 and precedes Sakamoto's discovery of a stage three throat cancer that stopped him playing and composing music while he underwent treatment. A call from Director Alesandro J. Inarritu soon had him back at work composing the soundtrack for The Revenant  as he admired his films so much.

The documentary ,looks at a career that started in the 1970s with electronic band Yellow Magic Orchestra. There is great footage from a live performance in America and an interview where he explains why he likes computers and synthesisers. Essentially he argues they can play the music a lot faster than the human hand and rather than sending decades learning to play that fast you can program a machine and focus on ideas instead. Very pragmatic! 

A lot of time is spent looking at footage from the Russian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky and listening to sounds and music from his film Solaris. Sakamoto even had a copy of his collection of polaroids Instant Light. Sakamoto credits Tarkovsky with being a musician given the way he uses the sound of footsteps and water in his films. He is a composer. And post The Revenant soundtrack Sakamoto turned to Tarkovsky for inspiration especially in his use of Bach Chorales. Sakamoto finds a lot of melancholy in these which is not surprising given the wars and political instability not to mention the plague that racked Europe at the time.

Sakamoto's concerns about his own world emerged in the early 1990s when evidence of climate change first appeared. Sakamoto has subsequently appeared at demonstrations against nuclear power in Tokyo after the Fukushima earthquake and the subsequent tsunami. Recordings on the 'tsunami piano' have been used in the compositions for his latest CD.  He talks about the piano being a product of the Industrial Revolution in the way tat the case and the strings are made. When a piano is in tune it sounds natural to us he say but all of the components and the materials from which they are made have been forced into a particular shape to make those sounds. It is only natural that they will attempt to return to their natural shape. And the tsunami in Fukushima only helped speed up that return in the case of the 'tsunami piano'.

Along the way the documentary looks at the success Sakamoto achieved writing the scores for Merry Christmas Mt Lawrence, The Sheltering Sky and The Last Emperor. Unsure of his future post cancer, Sakamoto wants to leave work behind that has significance. He has traveled to Kenya to the site of the oldest human remains ever found in a search for the origins of the rhythms and sounds that have shaped music. he has also traveled to the North Pole to see the effects of climate change and taken sound recordings of pre-Industrial Revolution snow melting. The purest sounds you can imagine he says... 

In the documentary there is a scene where Sakamoto with his plays for tsunami survivors. His music has a global appeal but the history of the atom bomb in Japan, his politic activism and his concern for the environment give his work a strong local focus.  

THE REAL JAPAN: CLIVE JAMES VERSUS PETER CAREY

Over a lifetime the Australians Peter Carey and Clive James have made a name for themselves with their writing, one in London and the other in New York. Both, however, have had time along the way to contemplate Japan and the Japanese. Clive James made his television program Clive James in Japan in 1987 and in 1991 published his novel, Brmm Brmm. Peter Carey published a memoir about his trip to Japan with his son Charley in 2004, Wrong About Japan. Recently Peter Carey was in Australia to promote his new novel A Long Way from Home and I asked him if he was still wrong about Japan? 

"Always" was his reply.

In Brmm Brmm Clive James refers to a "a facetious commentary by an Australian in lamentable physical condition." This not so thinly disguised self-portrait is a good description of the Clive James that appears in his TV special on Japan as he takes viewers into the world of the capsule hotel, sumo wrestling and the giesha. James struggles but perseveres with the language as he is lost in admiration on his way to an appearance on Beat Takeshi's game show, Takeshi's Castle. James is a good sport and does his amiable best despite being lost in a culture without a suitable guide book. 

We see reverse culture shock in James' novel Brmm Brmm as a young Japanese man comes to terms with life in London. There is the tiresome humour of the British such as the endless jokes about his name, Suzuki, which lead to his nickname and the title of the novel. Elsewhere there are jokes about personal hygeine. He describes his trip to the English massage girls who "wore nothing under their nurses' uniforms." He observes that, "Their lack of cleanliness sometimes made him gag and even the pretty ones were no pleasure to the eye when one looked closely." He is then propositioned by a male journalist who he finds "physically repellent". He imagines his seducer in the tub and says, "The thought of a would-be seducer getting unwashed into the bath, and sitting there in his own scum, made Suzuki's face freeze." Clearly in James' mind cleanliness equals Japaneseness. And when you think about it. every great Japanese fim has a good cleaning scene with endlessly scrubbing. The best of these, perhaps, is the bath cleaning scene in the Miyazaki Hayao anime, Spirited Away. 

Ultimately for James, there is a fiundamental disconnect between East and West. When Suzuki reflects on Jane, his English girlfriend and Japanese women, there are similarities but these are quickly destroyed. "He tried to imagine her in Japanese traditional dress, slowely and meticulously laying out the utensils for the tea ceremony. The thought was instantly dispelled when she tore a lettuce to pieces without looking at it. He could hear the lettuce scream for mercy." Not all is lost, however, as Jane's body passes inspection despite the disorderliness of her life. "Suzuki was pleasantly surprised to find that in resepct of her person she was, by Western standards, scrupulously clean." Phew, that was a close call!

No such qualms about cleanliness for Peter Carey. His view of Japan is framed by his son, Charley's love of anime and manga. And Charley's one stipulation when the decision is made to visit Japan, is that they not visit the 'Real Japan'. In other words. "No temples. No museums." Upon arrival there is the inevitable humour that comes with discovery and disappointment. The traditional toilets that Tanizaki lauded are nowhere to be seen. Instead there are contraptions, "designed for a science-fiction comedy." Think Woody Allen when it was okay to laugh at a Woody Allen movie. Visiting a traditional Japanese sword maker Carey senior is disappointed that they were not shown a sword. "We were gaijin, capable only of hurting the sword or ourselves." Finally, after being bored to death at the kabuki and learning all about the war, Charley gets to visit Kodansha, the holy shrine where the world of Gundam is created. Here, Yuka, a transexual otaku, explains manga and anime to Carey senior. He learns that manga is not a postwar phenomoenon. It is in fact based on traditions like the kamishibai (paper theatre). And the real purpose of Gundam, is to sell robots. Having worked all that out, there is the, after all, inevitable bath scene. Naturally, there is no way that Charley is going to get into the bath naked with Carey senior. Carey blames the puritan aesthetic of their New York lifetsyle for this. He himself doesn't get into the communal bath either due to all the Toblerones and cognacs he has consumed over the years since his previous visit. This leads to the suffereing of a "private guilt over my incomplete experience of the Real Japan." The climax of the trip, however, comes after a viewing of the anime classic Tottoro. Despite advice to the contrary, Carey senior and Charley do get to meet Miyazaki Hayo on a visit to the Ghibli museum. Here the great man did a show-and-tell for them... Carey senior writes that as Miyazaki showed Charley the notebooks in his drawers, "He was the kamishibai man dashing his wooden blocks together and working the magic of paper film." And so everything comes together in a sublime magical moment that is Japan. 

THE HOKUSAI EXHIBITION IN MELBOURNE

As my fifteen year old son sets off to the picture frame shop on Smith Street to buy an A2 asized frame for his newly purchased Hokusai print of 'A woman ghost appeared from a well' I reflected on the boom of all things Japanese at the moment. Despite Rocket Man and his suicidal tendencies in North Korea, there has been no halt to the steady stream of visitors from around the world to Japan. On top of that, Japanese born, British novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro just won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.

But let's get back to the Hokusai exhibition at the National gallery in St Kilda Road, Melbourne. My wife set off first and then I got a phone call asking where I was? I explained that I was waiting for our son who had decided that he would join us. This surprised her. His interests seemed to be mostly designer clothes and basketball. 

Anyway, we got to the gallery and my heart sank when I saw the queue. Luckily, that was the queue for the Dior exhibition. The line waiting to buy tickets for Hokusai was much shorter but there were quite a few people inside. The exhibition made a big deal of the Prussian blue paint that he used, especially in the series Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji. There were two copies of the 'Great Wave' on display, one from the Ukiyo-e museum in Matsumoto and one from the local gallery. Both had a crease down the middle which fascinated us but about which there was no commentary whatsoever. After days of speculation Steve came up with the idea that that was where the paper met during the printing of the wood blocks. No wiser, we could only observe that one seemed a lot more faded than the other.

It was evident that Hokusai was prolific and while there were no examples of his shunga (erotica) there were illustrations of famous poems as well as comic sketches collected in manga and  stories inspired by ghost stories. One was of an event featuring one hundred candles where after each story a candle was blown out until the last one which was blown out after the last story. Very creepy. When my son bought a copy of the 'A woman ghost appeared from a well' the brochure explained that this was the inspiration for the popular Japanese horror movie called The Ring. That explained the obsession with the well if not the TV screens. 

There was a series based on the Ryukyu isalnds but it turned out these were copied from books as Hokusai had never visited these islands. He had also illustrated a number of famous poems but he removed the important personages from the past and instead celebrated the lives of ordinary folk like farmers instead. This democratic instinct resonated well with a modern-day audience hungry to learn more about all things Japanese. My favourite picture was of the 'Snow Traveller'. The two pines in the background reflecting the two figures rugged up against the snow in the foreground on the narrow moutain pass create a sense of harmony and at oneness-with-nature that is elusive in rea life but here appears to be so simple. The way Hokusai used recurring shapes was also repeated in the 'Great Wave' where unobserved by many untutored eyes it waas pointed out that the shape of the mountain is repeated in a much smaller wave in the foreground. One of the joys of knowing what you are looking at was thus made apparent to me. 

My son walked home with his prize copy of 'A woman ghiost appeared from a well'. Now he is on his way to have it framed. Hopefully he will have it for a long time, long after the fading and peeling posters have disappeared from the multitude of building sites around the city.  

NORTH KOREAN MISSILE CRISIS

"Well" said Hiro, leaning back in his chair, " I don't think there will be a war."

Sally looked at him sceptically. She pured him some more red wine and asked if he had had enough to eat.

"You see" said Hiro, "North Korea is all about face. Japan and China used to be like that too. Now they're kind of 50 - 50. North Korea is 120% face. And remember that guy Mr  Jong Un is just a dictator. He enjoys his lifestyle. If he goes to war he will be destroyed. He knows that. He doesn't want to lose what he's got. But he can't lose face. So when South Korea and America do their war exercises he has to fire a missile or two. That's his only way of saving face. But he can't go to war or he will lose everything."

Hiro stopped to have a drink of red win. "Umai" he said, smacking his lips. There were no more cigarettes these days, they had all given up.

"It's a dictatorship like the Tokugawa shgunate in sixteenth century Japan where one guy owns everything. Its crazy but he owns everything and he will lose the lot if he goes to war. I have a friend who goes to North Korea every year. He says that the people know that they will lose a war. They also know that in the West normal people live like kings. In North Korea they have nothing. It is a dictatorship but the people know what is going on. Maybe, one day, it will all be over."

After the meal, Hiro looked at his watch. He had to catch a flight back to Japan in the morning. Grimshaw gave him a lift back to his hotel. There was a lot of traffic. With football finals there were people wearing footy scarves everywhere. Hiro's hotel was down near Crown casino. He was enjoying his work more than ever, he said, now that he was a manager. Even though he had to fly economy he could travel and see family in Europe as well as come to Australia every six months. This were also in-between visits to Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. He didn't spend time in China much anymore. While he was in Japan he often went on trips to Nigata to take photos. There were a lot of cheap houses up there apparently. Even though he didn't own his apartment in Tokyo he was considering buying a house in Nigata when he retired. That is if a missile didn't fall apart on its trajectory over Japan and start a war. That was the only way America would go to war with North Korea, he figured, and then it was all over for Mr Jong Un.

WOMEN WITHOUT FACES: THE TALE OF GENJI

In the Heian period society shielded women in the nobility from the male gaze. The 'Tale of Genji' describes, how, in the case of the Shining Prince and his contemporaries this only added to the allure of the mysterious women cloistered away beyond their reach. Glimpses of clothing led to surmises about the type of woman who might be wearing such fine clothes. Then there was her performance on the koto which might lead to all sorts of conjectures about the performer based on the feelings she expressed. Then there were the perfumes she chose to wear. This spoke volumes about refinement and a sense of culture.

These women without faces excited the desires of the Shining Prince in a tale that is over a thousand years ago. Penned by a woman and written in hiragana, a woman's script, it continues to fascinate readers in an era where women are prisoners of their faces, endlessly judged by their appearance. This story about women without faces therefore has a new relevance. Especially in regard to the on going debate about the hijab and the niqab and whether these represent the suppression of women in Islamic culture.

After reading 'Genji Monogatari' there is a sense of the irrepressibility of human nature. Whilst there will always be rules there will also always be individuals who refuse to be bound by those rules. And, through the strength of their imaginations, they find a way to express not only their own desires but also the desires of others. With or without faces these women loom larger than society might otherwise have allowed, undiminished and reclaimed by either reductive obscurity or oppressive scrutiny.

TSURUBEI NO KAZOKU NI KANPAI: LIVE AT THE SOFITEL HOTEL, MELBOURNE

The call went out and they turned up in their hudnreds. The Melbourne Japanese expatriate community turned up on mass to see one of their own stand-up comedians sit down on the cushion in front of the microphone, Tsurubei Kanbei was a household name in his native country for his rakugo skills specialising in the Osaka dialect.

Officials ran up and down the length of the queue reassuring everybody that the doors would be opening soon. When the queue started to move we made it to the corner and then saw that the queue reached around a stairwell before it got back to the doors. We made it to the last stretch and then it was announced that there would not be enough seats for everybody. Luckily we had made it close enough to the door not to be turned away.

Inside the hall the cameraman was in the centre and at the very last moment the seat next to him was given a young man, a latecomer. Amidst the excitement at recognising other people in the crowd the show finally started. The NHK rep congratulated everybody for coming along and said they couldn't believe the turn up and how many people they had had to turn away.

The crowd cheered.

"We didn't know there were so many Japanese people in Melbourne."

The crowd cheered.

To start the show Tsurube explained how he had spent the day, During the day he had complained about the dry wintry conditions so he had been given some paw paw cream for his lips. He had also tried a meat pie, fed some birds in the park and been for a ride on Puffing Billy. In the morning he had taken a walk around the MCG. This had been rather arduous and then he met a young Japanese man who seemed to recogise him. When Tsurubei asked him, "Do you know who I am?" the young man had paused and then replied "Ebisu san?" This amused Tsurube no end so he kept asking the young man who he was and laughing out aloud each time when the young man gave up and said "Ebisu san?" With that he called the latecomer who was sitting beside the cameraman down to the front of the stage. It turned out that this young man was named Takumi. When he got there they shook hands, exchanged another laugh and then the show was ready to start.

The first of the performers sat at the microphone and compalined about Osaka grandmothers. He talked about wanting to eat eat udon and how when he asked for some money for dinner all he was given was some furikake. Some meal that would buy he exclaimed. He then said that he wouldn't tell anyone he was going for tea because all he was likely to receive was a tea bag. The second speaker lamented that he had recently performed rakugo in a much smaller theatre in Saitama where there had only been four people in the audience sitting in single file, one behind the other, facing the stage. He had sat and faced the audience and been the fifth in line. At the microphone he spoke about his trip to a tiny zoo where he was convinced to dress up as a tiger. He practiced moving his feet in imitation of a tiger. He was terrified when a lion was led to the cage only to discover that it was the zoo owner in the lion's suit. Finally Tsurubei came to the microphone to give his rendition of an ageing junior high school teacher with false teeth. He nearly choked on these in his rage at the lazy students in his class especially Akiyoshi kun who refiused to take down the notes for the dictation. To the teachers chagrin, despite giving them hints about what was on the test, they were the worst performing of all his classes. They were in fact so bad they were the worst class that he had ever taught but, despite that, he liked them the best. The audience erupted in enthusiastic applause as he choked oin his false teeth.

After a short interval Tsurubei came back for a more traditional rendtion of rakugo. The kind that the Australian Henry Black had performed in the Meiji Period when he lived in Tokyo and became a well-known rakugo performer. The show was over and it was off home trhough the city. The performance was to be broadcast on NHK so with a bit or luck they could relive the performance, especially that of the junior high school teacher with the false teeth. It was a sobering reminder in a world of excess just how much we enjoy those people and those events that get under our skin.