Tokyo

[imomus]

I'm in Tokyo for the rest of this week, staying in Ogikubo with Florian Perret, a friend from Paris who designed the sleeves for Folktronic, Oskar Tennis Champion and the Super Madrigal Brothers album.



Florian now has a very high-powered job with a Tokyo animation company... and a new baby! It took a while to find his company's HQ last night though: we had to go into the lobby of the Hyatt Century to ask directions, which felt like walking onto the set of one of my least favourite films, set in one of my least favourite parts of this city. Right after leaving the Hyatt lobby with its fuck-off chandeliers, arrogant gaijin and Saudi marble we walked through Chuo Koen, a park inhabited by homeless Japanese living under blue tarpaulin. Big city, big Gini spread.

Over dinner at my favourite Nishi-Ogi restaurant last night (a tiny place with room for just ten people, hidden in a backstreet... God, the crispy tatsutaage mackerel was delicious!) Florian told us that rents in Tokyo are now cheaper per square metre than those in New York, London or Paris. He pays around €800 a month for 50 square metres, which, while not quite Berlin-cheap, is pretty reasonable. And the area's nice.

Comments

[akabe.livejournal.com]

i'm in sapporo at the moment ane it reminds me of berlin. (i guess the absence of an edo infrasctructure has spawned an alltogether different beast)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I can sort of see the Berlin thing in Sapporo... certainly the red brick building containing Cafe Soso / Shift (http://www.shift.jp.org/) is an older, post-industrial space of the kind you don't often see in Japan (the Tokyo equivalent would have been the Shokuryo Building (http://metropolis.japantoday.com/tokyo/451/art.asp) which used to house Koyama and other notable Tokyo galleries, but got demolished).

[nomorepolitics.livejournal.com]

That's funny; Osaka reminded me of a downscaled German city the first time I went there.

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

christ yes, lost in T is a terribly overrated film, isn't it? I have this thing for re-titling films in a literal manner. Lost in Translation is something like: Two Wingeing People Go to Tokyo; Fail to See Tokyo

[blastoisemaster.livejournal.com]

Yes, god forbid a movie is anything but a cultural documentary. I hate it when characterization and the central plot get in the way of long explanations about societal values and traditions.

Yum!

[(Anonymous)]

Nice choice of cereal.

Re: Yum!

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

reading the guardian is good too!

[nato-dakke.livejournal.com]

weird, your review of LIT.
I generally thought that bill murray was more self-effacing than insulting to anyone in the film. Your take on the film hits on what I thought was one of the thrusts of the film: That their medieval values and the artifice of the western bubble through which they see tokyo is severely limiting. The world is teeming, and neither of the principles are free to take part, or even have the means to understand anymore thanks to their self-imposed lifestyles/alienations.
And yeah, tokyo's a red herring. It's just a safer backdrop than the closest analogues for that sort of incomprehensible frenzy... developing nations.

cheap

[(Anonymous)]

800 $ for 50 square meters?! where does your friend live???

Re: cheap

[(Anonymous)]

pounds, not dollars

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

Loved the review of Lost in Translation. I completely agree with your assessment, but unlike you, I loved the film. I was rather shocked when my friends talked about how much they liked the main characters after the film was over. "They were assholes," I said, "and we saw the world from their perspective: everyone else was stupid and cheesy, and utterly false and insincere."

You hit the nail on the head, but I think that Coppolla knew what she was doing, and showed us the ultimate "horrible American tourist" who never leaves their Western hotel, and who stays above the culture they're in, and betray everyone and everything around them (while falling in love). They were horrible people: distrustful of the people they should trust, dismissive, superficial, selfish, but I still couldn't take my eyes off of them. I thought Coppolla walked that line between repulsion and identification perfectly, but maybe I was wrong - maybe she did think the main characters were awesome (which, like I said, I don't want to believe).

BTW, I wish I could read the article on Kill Bill.

Selfish

[ebekenezer.livejournal.com]

I agree. It portrayed how selfish and stupid Americans can be when faced with any culture but their own. What is culture? Hmm. I love the service in this hotel. Real Japanese food? I like the sushi in America better. ETC ETC....

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

It's amazing to me that you write so much about the delight of unresolved ambiguities but can still insist on being so literal-minded about what different things represent in the world and in the arts. I sort of took Lost In Translation the same way as the last couple of commenters above, who suggest that perhaps the main characters of the film weren't meant to be entirely sympathetic. I swear sometimes it's like you're incapable of appreciating a piece of art (or a piece of architecture) that doesn't have a strong, positive protagonist as its main focus.

But you call everyone else old fashioned...

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

To be fair, you're undoubtedly much more acquainted with the actual personalities behind this film, so perhaps your reaction is at least partially based on firsthand knowledge of what the creators' attitudes really are. Still, it's probably not fair to hold this against the vast majority of the film's admirers who couldn't have possilby shared that perspective, and instead 'got it wrong in an interesting way.'

[markii187.livejournal.com]

Cheaper per metre than London and NYC?!

*starts packing*

[tassellrealm.livejournal.com]

London. You'd have to be rich to live here.

And if you were that rich - you'd live somewhere else.

£1.50 for a short-hop bus ride.

£3.00 on the tube.

£5.50 for a packet of cigarettes.

£1.80 for a sit-down piss-weak coffee.

Rents, polltax and mortgages completely unaffordable.

In a place where proper brains, beauty, glamour, newness and excitement were made Virtual Illegal a long time ago.

Soujourn

[ebekenezer.livejournal.com]

Take me with you. I'll quit school, I promise.

Kind of off subject

[(Anonymous)]

Fuck-off chandeliers!!! Thanks for making me laugh. I am in fuck-off New England and I have to get in my fuck-off car to do fuck-off errands on this fuck-off morning and deal with fuck-off entities. I really do long for Japan. Do you like Mishima at all? I love Japanese literature. There's more to it than Mishima, but I was just wondering. I loved your blog "Japanize Your Ass". I hate public restrooms in America. They are so fuck-off beastly. I am obsessed with Samurai. I read Ruth Benedicts' "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" years ago. I want to go to the least westernized part of Japan. I know I have to do more research, but Japan has always struck me as beautiful and intriquing. My cousin went to Osaka and made me long to go even more.

Re: Kind of off subject

[ebekenezer.livejournal.com]

That was from Ebekenezer. If it matters.

[nomorepolitics.livejournal.com]

I loved your essay on Lost in Translation.

I had a similar reaction; I couldn't see the point of watching two completely bored people and their stuck up attitude towards everyone else. The film was torture. Perhaps such characters are better ignored on-screen and off~. But maybe some of the commenters above have a point that the film is making an important point about Americans. And yet, I can't help thinking that Coppola and her actors made this point unconsciously, since there fails to be a contrasting theme in this movie.

Frankly, I think Bill Murray should stop acting. I just saw Broken Flowers, and his presence in the movie simply annoyed me. The man does not know how to character act, all he does is the same stock character over and over. If you watch Where the Buffalo Roam, where he actually tries to act like Hunter S. Thompson, you can see that he fails miserably. In Broken Flowers he simply repeats the same gestures and movements that he used in Lost in Translation.

Lost in loneliness

[ebekenezer.livejournal.com]

I do think the film was more about loneliness. The displacement of the two characters in a culture that they were unaccustomed to emphasized this portrayal of loneliness. Of course, many aspects and interpretations can be derived from any film or work of art. This is just my observation about the aspect of loneliness and the use of two Americans in Japan (already lonely): displacement/loneliness. The film wasn't about Japan. It was set in Japan.

Lost In Translation

[(Anonymous)]

you've missed the point of the film entirely

Re: Lost In Translation

[(Anonymous)]

What is the point of the film then?

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

on a clear day you can see the construction site


in tsuzuki's photo book "tokyo a certain style" which was compiled in 1997, he writes abt 2room apartments with kitchen, bathroom, toilet for 40.000 yen a month, adding "cheap, you may think, for tokyo. but in reality, you can find places like this without much difficulty."

is that still the case?

[elleohelle.livejournal.com]

You really felt that the characters had a negative attitude towards Japan? I thought that Scarlett's character explored Japan quite a bit and was intrigued by the culture.

[elleohelle.livejournal.com]

They were far from the ideal tourist. But is the tourist ever ideal?