Honey and honour
Dec. 26th, 2007 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusMy Christmas was a double bill: I watched two Japanese films made over fifty years apart. I began with Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), a tale of rape, murder and honour-bargaining out in the medieval Japanese forest. In fact it's four tales, four mismatching accounts of the same violent events, told by the participants (a bandit, a samurai, his wife, and a woodcutter).
[Error: unknown template video]
Now, I enjoyed Rashomon very much, especially this court-style narrative device of running through the same events from four completely different perspectives (one of them from beyond the grave, from a ghost). But in general I have my problems with Kurosawa. I think of him as a stiff, macho director too much given to crowd scenes, battle scenes, violence and pessimism. He makes great art, but if you were to plot the world of Rashomon -- a world where nobody trusts anyone else, where swords are constantly necessary, where alliances shift, where betrayal and dishonour, rape and murder power the narrative, and where none of the characters are remotely sympathetic -- onto the Inglehart Values Map, the Japan it represents would be close to modern Zimbabwe. This is a world dominated by traditional values and survival values. As such, great art or not, it says little to me about my life.
The second film (click the picture to watch it) couldn't have been more of a contrast. If Rashomon is a hard film, a tragedy, a 1950s art film made for export, a film for men (Hisae refused to join me on the sofa), Honey and Clover (2006) is a light, fluffy mass market film, a "women's picture", a comedy (in the Aristotelian sense). Despite a vague resemblance to Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream" (multiple lovers at cross-purposes), it doesn't really qualify as art. And yet it moves me more than Rashomon and says a great deal more about my life. For instance, Honey and Clover opens with a bunch of Japanese art students preparing gyoza. And it so happens that that's exactly how I spent Christmas Eve -- preparing and eating gyoza with six Japanese art students, one of whom had even attended Tokyo's Musashino Art University, the model for the college in this film.
If Rashomon showed, in terms of the Inglehart Values Map, predominantly lower-left quadrant values (survival, tradition), Honey and Clover shows upper-right ones: this is a film set in the secular-rational world of higher education, a world dominated by the quest for self-expression through art and personal happiness through love. What it lacks in artistic value (the music is awful and the cinematography slick rather than visionary) it makes up for by establishing the radiant Yu Aoi as the earthly summation of all possible human goodness. In Inglehart terms, the Japan depicted in Honey and Clover sits exactly where today's Japan sits on his map; in the civilized upper right quadrant. It's an advanced, soft place with advanced, soft values.
[Error: unknown template video]
If you follow Yu Aoi through Japanese popular culture, you find that, over and over again, she's cast as an advanced, soft being, a quirky, childlike, expressive, kind-hearted fairy, modestly unaware of her own beauty and unwilling to use it in power games. In her many TV commercials -- for Canon, for the Aeon bank card, for Shuiesha -- Yu is self-expressive yet socially harmonious. She's a water nymph, sharing a bath with Aoi Miyazaki. If she's not a painter, she's holding a light meter, part of the
creative team on a photo shoot, dressing up in a kimono, heading out to the seaside in a cute yellow Fiat 500, or weeping as she reads sentimental books in refreshing candy-striped wrappers.
Now, it's unlikely that so perfectly lovely a person could ever be a good artist. And, indeed, the paintings Yu's character creates in Honey and Clover are truly dreadful daubings, underscored on the soundtrack with appalling emo songs. But it would be a harsh film director indeed who forced Yu Aoi back to the Bronze Age -- and a series of survival- and honour-oriented struggles -- in the name of art. And perhaps we could see the society that vests some of its core values in Yu Aoi -- an advanced consumer society where people are finally able to concentrate on self-expression and personal happiness without sacrificing communal, unselfish values -- as a work of art in its own right, an incarnation of a new, less brutal code of honour.
[Error: unknown template video]
Now, I enjoyed Rashomon very much, especially this court-style narrative device of running through the same events from four completely different perspectives (one of them from beyond the grave, from a ghost). But in general I have my problems with Kurosawa. I think of him as a stiff, macho director too much given to crowd scenes, battle scenes, violence and pessimism. He makes great art, but if you were to plot the world of Rashomon -- a world where nobody trusts anyone else, where swords are constantly necessary, where alliances shift, where betrayal and dishonour, rape and murder power the narrative, and where none of the characters are remotely sympathetic -- onto the Inglehart Values Map, the Japan it represents would be close to modern Zimbabwe. This is a world dominated by traditional values and survival values. As such, great art or not, it says little to me about my life.
The second film (click the picture to watch it) couldn't have been more of a contrast. If Rashomon is a hard film, a tragedy, a 1950s art film made for export, a film for men (Hisae refused to join me on the sofa), Honey and Clover (2006) is a light, fluffy mass market film, a "women's picture", a comedy (in the Aristotelian sense). Despite a vague resemblance to Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream" (multiple lovers at cross-purposes), it doesn't really qualify as art. And yet it moves me more than Rashomon and says a great deal more about my life. For instance, Honey and Clover opens with a bunch of Japanese art students preparing gyoza. And it so happens that that's exactly how I spent Christmas Eve -- preparing and eating gyoza with six Japanese art students, one of whom had even attended Tokyo's Musashino Art University, the model for the college in this film.
If Rashomon showed, in terms of the Inglehart Values Map, predominantly lower-left quadrant values (survival, tradition), Honey and Clover shows upper-right ones: this is a film set in the secular-rational world of higher education, a world dominated by the quest for self-expression through art and personal happiness through love. What it lacks in artistic value (the music is awful and the cinematography slick rather than visionary) it makes up for by establishing the radiant Yu Aoi as the earthly summation of all possible human goodness. In Inglehart terms, the Japan depicted in Honey and Clover sits exactly where today's Japan sits on his map; in the civilized upper right quadrant. It's an advanced, soft place with advanced, soft values.
[Error: unknown template video]
If you follow Yu Aoi through Japanese popular culture, you find that, over and over again, she's cast as an advanced, soft being, a quirky, childlike, expressive, kind-hearted fairy, modestly unaware of her own beauty and unwilling to use it in power games. In her many TV commercials -- for Canon, for the Aeon bank card, for Shuiesha -- Yu is self-expressive yet socially harmonious. She's a water nymph, sharing a bath with Aoi Miyazaki. If she's not a painter, she's holding a light meter, part of the
creative team on a photo shoot, dressing up in a kimono, heading out to the seaside in a cute yellow Fiat 500, or weeping as she reads sentimental books in refreshing candy-striped wrappers.Now, it's unlikely that so perfectly lovely a person could ever be a good artist. And, indeed, the paintings Yu's character creates in Honey and Clover are truly dreadful daubings, underscored on the soundtrack with appalling emo songs. But it would be a harsh film director indeed who forced Yu Aoi back to the Bronze Age -- and a series of survival- and honour-oriented struggles -- in the name of art. And perhaps we could see the society that vests some of its core values in Yu Aoi -- an advanced consumer society where people are finally able to concentrate on self-expression and personal happiness without sacrificing communal, unselfish values -- as a work of art in its own right, an incarnation of a new, less brutal code of honour.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 11:54 am (UTC)Where do these fit on the Inglehart map?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 12:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 12:32 pm (UTC)The thing is, it's difficult to say that this is unconnected to the advanced softness which characterizes a lot of Japanese life and Japanese aspiration. You know, one of the reasons that Pim Fortuyn became, at one point, almost an unstoppable force in Dutch politics is that he very cleverly elided an anti-immigration position with liberalism, and thus appealed to both left and right, hard and soft. He said that Muslim immigrants couldn't understand the Dutch tradition of tolerance (for instance, towards homosexuals like himself) and therefore shouldn't be allowed to bring their "tradition-survival" values into a country which was on the other side of the Inglehart scale. "They can't tolerate our tolerance, so let's not tolerate their intolerance" was his basic -- and basically self-contradictory -- message.
Now, I disagree. I think opening the EU up to Eastern Europe and even Turkey creates a "rising economic tide which floats all boats", not just economically but attitudinally. In other words, affluence softens all comers. I'm in favour of opening and expanding the EU because we need what the people at the margins have (their high birth rates, their ambition, their dynamism, their hard work and skills) and they need what we have (our wealth, our security, even our liberalism and ease). It's a real exchange.
But there is a transitional price to pay, in terms of increased tension, alienation, crime and cultural misunderstanding. I live in Neukolln happily, but I know that its multi-ethnic character and its poverty does put its crime levels higher. Neukolln, on Inglehart's quadrant, would be tugged towards the middle by value clashes between its communities of expressives and survivalists.
If you were aiming to make a rarefied, super-advanced society that avoided being tugged towards the middle, it would be more like Japan: it would skip the inclusiveness thing altogether. Naturally it would be stocking up problems for itself if its birthrate started declining. It would eventually have to reach out to immigrants to replenish its economic base. And at that point its internal softness would harden somewhat.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 12:35 pm (UTC)It's worth pointing out that the opposite message is also somewhat self-contradictory: "We're tolerant, so let's tolerate their intolerance."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 12:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 01:50 pm (UTC)Is the music of Honey and Clover really that bad? This movie is (not really shocking news, huh?) based on a manga, and an anime series was made first, about two years ago or so. The music for that series was actually more than decent. Not the highest form of art maybe, but fit the story like nothing else would, and it actually almost made me a fan of the band that provided 90% of it (said band being Spitz).
Too bad if the movie doesn't follow good traditions of animated series on that.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 01:54 pm (UTC)Last month, a new immigration system was implemented where ALL foreigners have to be fingerprinted and have their mugshots taken like common criminals EVERY single time they enter the country. This includes permanent residents. and not even the paranoid US is quite as bad as that. The tatemae is the usual terrorist nonsense security scam, even though all terrorist actions in Japan have been performed by Japanese nationals. The real reasons seem to be 1) to sell enormously overpriced, badly functioning scanning equipment to airports with major kickbacks to politicians and bureaucrats, and 2) in time-honored fashion, blame all ills and crimes on foreigners, not so differently from the way Hitler used to blame the Jews for everything.
Whenever there's a robbery, the TV news are quick to point out that the criminal appears to have been a generic "foreigner" (white, black or Chinese - no distinctions are made), until the actual Japanese thug is apprehended.
Just last week, there was a guy who entered a sports club and started shooting people at random, American-style (sorry). NHK et al promptly reported that it was a "foreigner", until the guy - a local misfit - shot himself as well. Naturally, no apologies have been made to the foreign community.
Things are getting really BAD here, Momus!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 02:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 02:10 pm (UTC)If anything the tragic development of the past decade for foreigners has been their increasing ubiquity. No one cares that you're foreign any more. The airport thing is lame indeed, but things are no worse this year than any of the last several hundred.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 02:10 pm (UTC)It might seem weird to some but ever since Swedish cinema announced that they would get less of a budget there have been more interesting films coming from it ever before. A good example of how little money can speak.
Umi ha mite ita
Date: 2007-12-26 02:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 02:22 pm (UTC)IMHO, the vast majority of Anime is shit, but when it's good it's excellent. As for Honey & Clover, it's mediocre to say the least. The manga is slightly more tolerable... infact, thats something Ive noticed about Japan in general: Anime tends to have a lot of the negative stereotypes it does here in the west, but manga is generally read by everyone of all ages.
I quite enjoy Josei (comics for girls), they tend to be gentle, slow-paced "slice of life" stories which I enjoy reading. The last josei comic I read was "shippo ga tomodachi", it's about the daily life of a university student in her early 20s.
that said, I also enjoy Kurosawa's films and I'm a fan of Toshiro Mifune.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 02:46 pm (UTC)I'm not so sure about your appraisal of Kurosawa as a stiff, macho director, the samurai films are after all set in feudal Japan and even the most Westernised (excuse the pun) of these - The Seven Samurai - has enough wit, intelligence and human observation to carry it across.
If these films were pure macho, hierarchy-of-honour survivalism we would not be watching or discussing.
I also don't think his characters are entirely unsympathetic; I cannot in any absolute sense relate to Toshiro Mifune meat-carving his opponents but there aspects of the characters that are sympathetic.
In film and in literature it is those 'aspects of' characters that perhaps appeal to us more than those we find mirror our personalities or value systems more closely.
As an aside do you like the films of Mikio Naruse?
I discovered him a few years ago and he has to a degree supplanted Kurosawa in a pantheon of Japanese directors of that era.
Thomas S.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 03:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 06:18 pm (UTC)The only difference is the precise concept of outsider. Is the infamous arms dealer with a Japanese passport ever fingerprinted? Probably not. It's just nearly impossible to get a Japanese passport if you're not.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 07:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 07:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 07:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 07:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 08:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 09:04 pm (UTC)Re: Umi ha mite ita
Date: 2007-12-26 10:06 pm (UTC)Re: Umi ha mite ita
Date: 2007-12-26 10:22 pm (UTC)I haven't seen After the Rain. Apparently the script for The Sea Was Watching (for some reason translated as 'The Sea Is Watching was written by Kurosawa, and the director - Kumai Kei - was "handpicked" by Kurosawa's son. It's a tale mainly of the love between a geisha/courtesan and a very down-at-heel customer who makes good in the end. It's quite simple in a grand way (in the grand way, for instance, that something like The Life of O'Hara is. But I think it's warmer and softer than something like The Life of O'Hara, which has a very strong dose of Buddhist transience to it, which, particularly in Japanese film and lit, I find can be very chilly (in a fascinating way). So, I suppose I thought it was interesting because it was to me more feminine than other Kurosawa films I had seen, and wondered if that had been his intention or the influence of the director Kumai Kei (perhaps a bit of both).
Re: Umi ha mite ita
Date: 2007-12-26 10:29 pm (UTC)Perhaps death makes us all a bit girly!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-26 11:37 pm (UTC)Momes, this is a troubling (and I sense intentionally provocative) sentence! Do you really believe that one has to be fucked-up or ugly in some way to be a great artist?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-27 12:16 am (UTC)You fixed yourself, you said "Well, never mind, we are ugly but we have the music"
Leonard Cohen quoting Janis Joplin (http://youtube.com/watch?v=Dx11oNHPDrA)
Re: Umi ha mite ita
Date: 2007-12-27 10:16 am (UTC)This made me chuckle. Cheers, Nick.
I think, in a strange way, you're very right, too. How about "Perhaps death makes us all a bit girly!" as the title for your next album?
Yoi otoshi wo omukae kudasai.
Listening to 20 Vodka Jellies, watching Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box,
Q.
macho director,
Date: 2007-12-27 02:03 pm (UTC)>meat-carving
that great scene in yojimbo of a dog running into the frame holding a chopped arm in its teeth that david lynch quotes in, i think, wild at heart
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-27 08:32 pm (UTC)yet still Rashomon, with all its tense politics, might be the more apt metaphor for the milieus where all those things Aoi helps promote are conceived and made.
slice-of-life
Date: 2007-12-27 10:35 pm (UTC)http://www.veoh.com/videos/v7980707BE3hzR2
--LS
Re: macho director,
Date: 2007-12-28 05:06 am (UTC)"'The Last Samurai' centres on the relationship between Sibylla, a single mother of precocious and rigorous intelligence, and her son Ludo, who, through his mother's singular attitude to education, develops into a prodigy of learning. He reads Homer in the original Greek at the age of four before moving onto Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse and Inuit; studying advanced mathematical techniques (Fourier analysis and Laplace transformations), and, as the title hints, endlessly watching and analysing Akira Kurosawa's cinematic masterpiece 'The Seven Samurai'. But the one question that eludes an answer is that of the name of his father: Sibylla believes the Japanese film obliquely provides the male role models that Ludo's genetic father cannot supply, and refuses to be drawn on the question of paternal identity."
Re: slice-of-life
Date: 2008-01-01 04:06 pm (UTC)Re: slice-of-life
Date: 2008-01-02 04:58 am (UTC)Seriously, though, I was watching the Honey & Clover anime and it runs circles around the movie. As cute as Yu Aoi is she is no little person. In fact, she's much too beautiful and graceful for the role. The character of Hagu in the manga and anime is a sort of dwarf, 19 years old yet appearing to be 10, suffering for being a freak of nature a la Claudia from Interview with the Vampire. She also creats giant Rodin-like sculptures. Morita takes pictures of her and posts them up on a website where she is enshrined as a fetish elf. Rika is crippled and her body is disfigured. The pace is much more energetic and pays a lot more attention to character development. I think a lot of what was interesting has been sucked out with the movie. Although I'd agree with kumakouji this is not the smartest anime out there, I think for what it does it does well. Similar, in a sense, to another hugely popular melodrama manga/anime adaptation, Nana, although the "slice-of-life" nature of H&C certainly grew on me where Nana's pseudo-punkisms conversely grated. I wish there were more Ozu-ish stuff in anime. That would be an interesting dynamic... although how successful it would be is anyone's guess. I've been putting off that Azumanga Daioh for a while now... I should check it out soon. Peace out.
Re: slice-of-life
Date: 2008-01-02 05:54 am (UTC)