Posts Tagged “Japan”
John Seven • 9th Apr 2010 • Film • horror movies, Japan, Japanese film, Nobuhiko Obayashi
James Cameron may think that $500 million and the latest in bells and whistles buys you a great night out, but I’m here to dispute that, and the 1977 Japanese horror film, “Hausu (House),” is the most persuasive weapon in my arsenal.
Like something you would blunder upon at 3 a.m. on TV in 1986, “Hausu” — directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi — might be a haunted house film in conception, but its stylistic ancestor seems to be The Monkees film “Head,” with a little bit of Alejandro Jodorowsky thrown in the mix. More precisely, it’s in direct lineage to the opening sequence of Sid and Marty Krofft’s “Lidsville” television show — it’s both twisted and goofy at the same time.
The quick set-up is that Gorgeous and six other Japanese schoolgirls visit a weird house of horrors in which much giggling and terror ensues. Each girl has a descriptive name — my favorite is Karate, because she gets to demonstrate the reason for her moniker in slow motion and with a cool synth action theme. Left in the house unchaperoned — there was an accident involving a bucket and their teacher’s rear end — the girls are faced with some of the most original horror film surprises you will ever encounter, as the frenzied onslaught of feathered mattresses and Mad subplots and unusual little details abound — for instance, Gorgeous’ father apparently has a job writing film scores for Ennio Morricone — but they never get in the way of the main action, which mostly involves the girls tittering at little jokes they make and being faced with glowing-eyed cat that always heralds some mishap, like a particularly hellish piano or a butt-biting head.
It’s all realized through an unhinged utilization of old technology that must have seemed dazzling at the time. Obayashi uses video bleeds to create floating body parts and animation is rendered into live action scenes — these are just some of most prominent manifestations of this potpourri of low-tech filmmaking, not to mention plenty of psychedelic video washes for that otherworldly effect. The frenetic finale — which features the house breaking apart in a fury — beats anything I’ve seen done with CGI, and, by contrast, you can see the effort that went into creating these effects.
It’s not so much the fact that these techniques are employed, but the breakneck pace with which they come and go. The film is a frenzy of stylistic choices — one moment might be built around a wacky musical interlude, while the next is devoted to choppy, creepy slow motion, and then it moves onto something else. “Hausu” never rests. The fact that Obayashi went onto, among other things, a successful career in making commercials isn’t much of a surprise after watching “Hausu” — it’s like watching a master of multiple genre parody’s audition reel, and it’s impossible to settle in on whether the film is smart or stupid because of it.
“Hausu” won’t scare you — well, not in the normal way — but it’ll provide you with one of the best times you’ve had at the movies in ages. It’s literally like nothing you have ever seen before, and in this day and age, that’s a hard claim to be able to make.
John Seven • 31st Dec 2009 • Art Articles, Book Articles, Comics • Astro Boy, Japan, Japanese comics, Japanese paper theater, manga, Osamu Tezuka
Two recent art book releases from Abrams wrap beautiful fantasy images within the history of post-war Japan and the popular culture that mended the wounds of World War II.
Eric P. Nash’s “Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater” is a fascinating archeology of a lost form of entertainment that dominated Japan from the 1930s to the early 1960s — well-remembered in its country of origin but entirely unknown anywhere else.
Kamishibai was a form of public storytelling that utilized printed artwork in the action. Imagine someone pulling out the illustrations of a children’s book and acting out the narrative before a live audience, and that’s essentially what kamishibai was. The form was so influential that at times of war — and occupation — it was steered by official bodies for propaganda purposes, since it was a reliable way of reaching a massive audience of citizens as well as children.
The storytelling is gone with the decades, but what we have left is the astonishing artwork that embellished the words, and Nash’s book does an absolutely beautiful job at presenting this material.
Complete stories are contained in the book, ranging from the over-the-top adventures of the Golden Bat to the jarring Hiroshima examination “Pledge of Peace from Children of the Bomb,” and just about any genre or tone between the two. Much of the art is breathtaking and filled with the sort of pluck that such lively theater must have demanded in order to compete with the storytellers. (more…)
John Seven • 25th Jul 2009 • Book Articles, Comics • autobiography, Drawn and Quarterly, Japan, manga, memoir, Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Manga — that is, the Japanese style of comics — has taken America by storm in the last decade or so, moving beyond a niche audience and deep into mainstream youth culture. Yoshihiro Tatsumi is one of the most respected practitioners of that form, renowned for his serious work that investigates the dark side of the post World War 2 Japanese psyche in artful stories not meant for kids.
It’s a part of Manga that is hidden to many Americans, who only encounter the form on the packed shelves of places like Barnes and Noble, where most the titles involve teen-age girls in very short skirts. Tatsumi offers gray depths for interested adults to plummet into.
In his new work, the decade-in-the-making autobiographical novel “A Drifting Life,” Tatsumi lightens it up a bit to offer a fictionalized chronicle of his own early career. In episodic format, Tatsumi traces his early days as a fan artist entering post card contests in Mangas to his first large successes in the late 1950s, when he began mining new territory in the format working through different genres and challenging himself to do better with each subsequent work. Tatsumi’s biggest influence was the American art film and he set about revolutionizing Manga by applying film techniques to the storytelling, thus creating an entirely new language of visual storytelling for print.
“A Drifting Life” goes into the minute details of the way that industry worked in the 1950s, the types of artists who sought to create within it and the sorts of businesses that put out the books.
It’s a coming of age tale that involves fly-by-night businesses and farms of young artists churning out product day and night. It is also an amazing history of Japanese pop culture — Tatsumi scatters each section with Japanese pop history, giving the reader a crash course in the subject and also providing a context for the leaps and strides being made by the characters portrayed.
As an introduction to another form — as well as another culture — “A Drifting Life” is a charming and informative work. But more importantly, it serves as a gateway to the creative lives of those in other cultures as well. It’s a painstaking effort to document the studio habits of commercial artists in Japan half a century ago, with the hindsight of miracles they forged in their work.
John Seven • 27th Apr 2009 • Film • Fusake Urabe, Iraq, Japan, Masahiro Kobayashi
Japanese society is a continual mystery to Westerners, with any possible aspect that is brought to light only adding to the curiosity. The film “Bashing” continues this tradition with its alternately affecting and alien premise.
Yuko (Fusako Urabe) has returned to Japan following a stint as a volunteer worker in Iraq, where she was taken hostage and subsequently freed. Her homeland is far less inviting than the war-torn country of her calling, though — somehow Yuko’s course in life has offended other Japanese, and the insults that run rampant tear apart her life and her family’s.
It’s a strange notion that offering your service to a county other than your own would create the urge to make foul-mouthed threats to a stranger, but this is Japan as presented in “Bashing.” A country built on polite decorum with an underbelly of rage, Japan as an entity resents Yuko for opening up to foreigners and eschewing her own, as well as for returning alive. One crank caller points out that, if she had died, she would have been proclaimed a heroine, but instead, she lived to rub her country’s face in her betrayal.
The underside of this premise is the extreme nationalism of Japan, as well as a protectionism, and perhaps even a subtle racism. In fact, the shunning of hostages in Iraq who returned to Japan was a part of a national uproar in 2004 — citizens were angry that volunteer workers had defied government advisories not to travel in Iraq. The overtures that the government had to make in order to get the hostages freed spoke against some cultural idea of personal responsibility and decades of convoluted Japanese views toward their foreign ministry.
Director Masahiro Kobayashi captures the psychology of that moment in time with a slow and somber style. With very little dialogue, the depression of Yuko’s plight hangs in the film like a mist that wraps itself around her family and defines the audience mood as well. It’s a revealing portrait of not just Japanese society but also the individuals within it who are not acknowledged as conformity goes into a rage.
As Kobayashi shows, remaining an individual in the face of that fury is the only real way to escape it, and “Bashing” stands as a silent, stern paean to societies moving forward in the world despite their historical urges to stand back.
John Seven • 23rd Nov 2008 • Book Articles, Comics • Japan, NBM, rk Schwieger, Travel
With packaging designed to look like the popular and prevalent Moleskine sketch books — and a title derived from the Japanese mispronounciation of the brand name — Dirk Schwieger’s “Moresukine: Uploaded Weekly from Tokyo” is a casual, amusing travelogue that hints at a far bigger project for the talented cartoonist.
Schwieger spent seven months in Tokyo and as a creative time-passer, he started a blog that would allow readers to give him assignments. Each week, he would do what was requested and create a four-page comic story about his investigations. This book collects the work on that blog and adds in some guest assignments that Schwieger gives to other web comic creators, including James Kochalka. (more…)
John Seven • 31st Oct 2008 • Film • Japan
Japanese director Sion Sono takes the idea of a horror movie to a new level in “Noriko’s Dinner Table” by dispensing with the trappings of the genre and focusing on actual horror — personal, internal, overwhelming, emotional traps that we all find ourselves in. Sono then takes it a step further by using the unfolding story as surreal examination of aging and perspective, taking the viewpoints of four different characters to illustrate the ways in which people connect through roles played and how the inability to see each other clearly has as much to do with cues we fail to project as the internal decisions not to recognize those that we do.
“Are you connected with yourself?” is a question posed to every character at one point or another and it’s a confusing question. Is it good to be connected with yourself? And who are you, anyhow? Are other people part of you or are you a private, unknowable existence? Can you really connect with yourself anyhow? Can the conscious you really recognize the part that lives without self-surveillance? Sono asks all these questions and comes up with multiple answers — self is defined by your own self, as well as your family, your society, your peers, your fantasies, you daily actions and what you decide to use in your definition. It’s a complicated brew that a normal human might well be ill-equipped to grapple with. (more…)
John Seven • 26th Aug 2008 • Book Articles, Comics • Drawn and Quarterly, Japan, manga, Seiichi Hayashi
Seiichi Hayashi’s “Red Colored Elegy” evokes French New Wave film as it follows the relationship between Ichiro and Sachiko, investigating the personal tortures that have an effect on their status as a couple.
Structurally, Hayashi unfolds his tale through disjointed scenes that either hint at more than they reveal, or sometimes just make the reader feel left out from a secret. It’s that arm’s length mode of storytelling that grew out of films like “Breathless,” where it’s hard to engage with the characters since it’s impossible to get inside them beyond their whining to each other.
Hayashi matches the oblique attitude with simple artwork — sometimes so simple that characters can become interchangeable in appearance. That’s a shame because at points, Hayashi lets his skill slip through, mostly with some lovely renderings of landscapes, street scenes, and architecture. The complication of these renditions make it seem as if he is holding back too much with his characters — especially since there are points where the author is really on the verge of drawing a reader into his characters’ dramas.
At the same time, Hayashi does have the detached, disjointed storytelling technique down. It’s not hard to see that in 1970/71, when this first appeared, it certainly was groundbreaking — it’s just that decades later, it has little emotional resonance and stands best as a technical example of experimentation in the graphic arts.
It points to what could be and shows an astonishing level of creative maturity — it is, unfortunately, a promise of what could be rather than a realization of it.
John Seven • 4th Jul 2008 • Book Articles, Comics • Drawn and Quarterly, Japan, manga, Yoshihiro Tatsumi
If Ingmar Bergman were a Japanese Manga creator, he would no doubt have been Yoshihiro Tatsumi. In “Good-Bye,” a new collection of Tatsumi’s short works from 1971 and 1972, the underbelly of the Japanese psyche is examined in from an intimate and often grim vantage point with masterful results.
Japanese Manga has been the hottest comics trend in the United States, with shelves of the books finding their way into mainstream bookstores and the hands of American teenagers everywhere. Tatsumi, though, is a pioneer of the form and if the current onslaught is mystifying to adults on a number of levels — from the youthful subject matter to enormity of the titles available — Tatsumi provides a reference point for the lost, both in chronology and maturity.
In Tatsumi’s world, Japan is land of not merely of repression, but of the illusion of repression. Nastiness still abounds and people still act out their coarsest desires, but society turns a blind eye to it, creating the mass delusion that there is nothing wrong. The way Tatsumi tells it, this results in a world of colliding, mournful loners who want and take and hurt.
In “Hell,” Tatsumi uses the bombing of Hiroshima as the ultimate indicator of the fraud of Japanese society, with the desire for upright decency being revealed as a compulsion enabled by the country’s nostalgia for its own need for honor.
Japanese women are portrayed as being expected to submit to being objects of lust, while being shamed into doing what their society demands of them. In “Life Is So Sad” Akemi is forced to work as a hostess after her abusive boyfriend lands in jail — but his assumptions about her job push her into fulfilling his worst expectations. In “Good-Bye” Mariko — branded a slut by her neighbors — finds herself torn between her American lover and her sleazy father, a conflict that results in a horrible dehumanization of the woman.
Meanwhile, men are desperate and lonely, filled with self loathing due to the expectations of society. In “Just a Man” and “Rash,” older men grope for their fantasies and end up with further dark holes in their souls. In “Woman in the Mirror” and “Night Falls Again” the inability of Japanese men to express themselves in a sexual manner is turned inside out on them by the world at large.
Tatsumi’s bitter slices of life unwind with a silent grace — his artwork renders the tragedies with a compassion that never hides the starkness of the emotions portrayed. Tatsumi is spare with dialog, but it packs a punch when his characters speak, bring the reader to intimate corners as we intrude on the most private — and sometimes horrible — moments in their lives.
John Seven • 4th Jul 2008 • Book Articles • Abe Kobo, anime, Godzilla, Hiroshima, Japan, Pacific Ocean, science fiction, Williams College
A new book co-edited by a Williams College professor offers insight to the world of Japanese science fiction — not only in the popular anime form, but also lesser-known fictional works. Christopher Bolton, an assistant professor of Japanese, teamed with DePauw University professor Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. and Takyuki Tatsumi, an English professor at Keio University in Tokyo, to compile a scholarly study of the genre, which has seen a boom among American teens in anime films and manga comics. The aim of Bolton and his colleagues was not only to study the texts themselves, but draw a line between the current popular Japanese science fiction and its more obscure prose ancestors. Japanese animation is of such an interest to students in the United States that it gets taught in colleges among the Japanese literature classes.
“We thought at the same time that it would be interesting to look at the history of prose science fiction, because that is much less well known in the States, very little has been translated and not many people have written about that side of things,” said Bolton.
Rediscovering early sci-fi
The book traces early works by authors such as Yumeno Kyusaku, an avant garde detective fiction writer whose work often explored the darkness of technology, Yano Ryukei, who was heavily influenced by Jules Verne and Abe Kobo, whose “Inter Ice Age 4″ is one of the seminal Japanese texts that has actually made it into English translation. These early works map out themes that continue through the string of Japanese science fiction — an examination of technology’s relationship with humanity, how the lines blur, the national identity of the Japanese in regard to militarism and the island’s relationship with the Pacific Ocean, all aspects of that most famous of Japanese science fiction figures, Godzilla.
Bolton finds that as he and his colleagues study these works, they are sometimes expected to over-simplify what they reveal about Japan and its culture, particularly its fabled relationship with technology, which many Americans believe is closer and more open than any other country’s, what Bolton describes as the “Robot Kingdom of Japan” viewpoint.
“That’s not an idea I really subscribe to myself,” said Bolton. “I think that’s an idea that we like to have of Japan because it makes them into an appealing alien civilization. In other words, whenever you talk about this stuff, there’s always a tendency to science fictionalize Japan as Western authors and to see them as exotic, as in the 19th Century, when that exoticism was centered around traditional culture like geisha and the warrior culture and so forth. Today it’s centered around this consumer product culture and technology. That’s a kind of Orientalism or exoticism that I am trying to avoid.” (more…)
John Seven • 4th Jul 2008 • Book Articles • Akiko Ikeda, cats, children's books, Dark Horse, Japan
Hidden away in children’s popular culture in Japan is a big-eyed cat named Dayan who inhabits a magical world not far down the street from the works of Beatrix Potter, thanks to its darkness and absurdity. The books are being translated into English for the first time, giving American kids the chance to encounter the cat’s low key adventures.
Akiko Ikeda’s tales walk a path that welcomes mysticism and a subtle folkloric quality, as well as an existentialism that replaces any sort of humdrum exposition. The first book, “Dayan’s Birth-day,” opens with the simple idea that Dayan does not know when his birthday is, but wants to so he can throw himself a party. Like something out of an old folk tale, Dayan makes a deal with witches to uncover the mysterious date, but thoughtlessness creates a conflict with the witches that can only be solved through fast-thinking trickery.
There is something positively pagan about the comings and goings of the animal characters — “Thursday Rainy Party” involves a celebration of showers and the creation of a calendar; “White Eurocka” brings animals together for a Winter Solstice style celebration that involves a mystical birth; and “Chibikuro Party” unveils a party of freed shadows who plan never to return to their masters, under the leadership of the nefarious shadow of “The Satan of Death Forest.”
Despite the dark, supernatural tones, these are not scary stories in the slightest — and they all unfold around cute forest animals. The darkness functions as a spice that mixes well with the adorable simplicity of the other half of the tales — there will be, perhaps, a cultural difference in what is considered the norm for children’s books. For a little kid who might be ready for something with unexpected texture — or a parent who might want to expose the child to other cultures in a subtle, less dictatorial manner, that involves exciting strangeness traveling through the ether — the Dayan books are just the thing.
