For many years now, we've been enjoying the annual Japanese Film Festival.



So we were delighted to find that it also travels to Kuching.

The post-movie questionnaire (for the completion of which you get STICKERS and other memorabilia) always asks you whether what you saw helped you understand Japan. And yes, it always does. Maybe not "understand". More "empathize with", or "start to think along the same lines as". Whatever the correct expression, these films are always wonderful little vignettes of Japanese culture and aesthetics.


Stickers from 2018, decorating Nigel's work chair in KL


This year's crop of stickers and other sundries

The common theme of the four we picked (which we saw over two days, so it was quite a binge) was families.

1.
First up, we watched Teruo Noguchi's Brave Father Online, and I can think of no better assessment than this reviewer's: "Finally a video game movie that just makes you wanna hug stuff."

As he points out, the movie is unabashedly an advert for an online game, Final Fantasy XIV. (This is a MMORPG, or massively multiplayer online role-playing game.) So it is relentless in portraying all the good stuff about online gaming while not only omitting all the bad stuff, but also taking the slightly weird world of video-gaming as a given: "[T]he main character is a grown man who plays as a feminine avatar with cat ears, and the movie doesn't dwell on it at all. It's just presented as normal, because in the film's hyper-idealized world, it is."

All that is true. But, as he says, it's lovely. The characters are adorable. The humour is gentle. And the ending is totally warm and fuzzy.

Like many Japanese movies it takes a hard look at the country's work culture. Akira has given everything to work, and when bad health forces him to retire, he has very little to focus on. His son, Akio (the cat man), has never really had the chance to get to know his reticent father, and feels he can both enhance his father's life and get better acquainted by introducing him to video-gaming (without, however, letting on that he also plays a role in the game).

Akio, too, is shy, and finds it easier to manage relationships -- even dates -- online. But his gaming fuels his imagination, and when he's under pressure from his advertising agency employer, he draws on his online community to come up with the goods. Similarly, when he gets posted away from home (and apparently not a lot of consultation happens about this), he keeps in touch with his group via the game.

There's an awful lot that can potentially go wrong with MMORPGs, but they are definitely not an entirely negative phenomenon. So it's refreshing to see a depiction -- even a self-serving one -- that underscores agency, rather than loss of control.



2.
While the family members in Brave Father Online struggle to connect, La La La at Rock Bottom is a reminder of the struggles that come from lack of family moorings.

There are comedic elements, but it's an altogether darker movie. It starts with the release from gaol of Shigeo, who almost immediately falls victim to a mugging so violent that it results in radical memory loss. Still dazed, Shigeo (who is played by Subaru Shibutani, a Japanese pop star) stumbles upon a live performance by a group of musicians (who are played by members of the real-life Osaka band Akainu), and realizes that what he has not forgotten is how to sing.

Kasumi, the band's young manager, decides to take him in. She has lost her parents, and lives with her grandfather, who has dementia. She names her new charge Poochie, after her dead dog -- an action that speaks volumes about her need for connection and the limits to her experience of relationships. As another character comments: "He has no past, and she lives in the past."

Mark Schilling captures her character well: "As Kasumi she is all-business, with a furrowed-brow earnestness that comically contrasts with her laid-back ojisan (middle-aged guy) bandmates. But she also radiates an aching emptiness that echoes Pooch’s own, if manifested in quite different ways."

A quirky, stumbling relationship starts to develop between Kasumi and Poochie. But then Shigeo's past catches up with him, and he begins to remember. The family he used to have he has abandoned. An undercurrent of violence swirls around him. He seems unsure whether he wants his old life back or a new direction.

Schilling again: "Box-office logic calls for the budding of romance between Kasumi and Pooch, but [film-maker Nobuhiro] Yamashita is after something harder: a drama about the fraught process of human connection and redemption following traumas and losses that seem to destroy human trust."

The musical background is a huge plus. Akainu is a 14-member big band. They started out in Osaka in 1993, cover a variety of genres, and often offer a retro and/or comedy touch. (For a sample, see here.)

The Japanese title of the movie was Misono Yunibasu (Misono Universe). The director explains that this is a real place in Osaka. It started as a cabaret club, and then became a live show club. Because of its location and its features, it recalls the atmosphere of the Showa period (1926-89).

The film was shot in Osaka because that's where the lead actor is from: "In the film I tried to show what would have happened if the actual Subaru Shibutani had remained in Osaka and had not become famous."

All of which offers a good excuse for some Osaka memories:









3.
Our third film, Kojiro Hashimoto's Little Love Song, was inspired by the hit songs of MONGOL800, a band formed in Urasoe, Okinawa, in 1998. So it also offers a powerful musical background, with songs ranging from the rousing to the balladic. (Here are some examples.)

The story features the journey of a schoolkids' rock band, from the promise of success, through the tragic loss of a band member, to the brave determination to carry on despite all setbacks. It is undeniably moving.

The families featured in this movie are very different. Some are willing to accept their child's dream, even though it might not have been what they originally envisaged for that child's future. Some find that letting go -- the acceptance of a deviation from standard academic and career goals -- very difficult. (They're joined in that resistance by some very myopic teaching staff.) Occasionally, you find yourself wanting to (metaphorically) slap those people, and say, "It's the kid's life. Not yours. If someone has a talent that brings joy to him/her and to others, that's a rare, rare situation, so for God's sake don't obstruct it."

Added into the plot mix is an interesting cameo of Okinawa's troubled relationship with the United States, whose forces the islands still host.

There are two strands to this. Firstly, although it is never proven, it is possible that the vehicle that killed the young band member in a hit-and-run was a US-registered one (and this is the kind of incident that regularly generates controversy and ill feeling). Secondly, a young American living within the fence makes friends first with the late band member, and then with his sister (who replaces him in the group) and the other two musicians. The song they write for her is a tribute to their shared relationship, and the bonds that unite human beings despite politics.

A recent study finds that younger Okinawans do not tend to hold black-and-white views about US basing, with "one-in-six ... supporting a U.S. base presence, two in six opposing or strongly opposing it, and three in six, or half, responding that they couldn’t decide whether the U.S. bases were a good or bad thing for Okinawa".

Echoing a theme in the movie, they also expressed a desire for more contact with the base communities.

Akemi Johnson, writing this year, records:

"What I found, as I traveled the island, is that most locals don’t have a simple victim relationship with the US military. Instead, since the end of World War II, Okinawan people have been actively engaging with the US military empire, whether helping to enable or disable it. Local men and women—more often women, because of the predominantly male nature of the military—seek out relationships with the bases and their inhabitants, relationships that are often symbiotic, even if they’re problematic. Many locals’ motives center on love or money, but Okinawans also find community and new identities in the base world...

"The bases may have arrived by force, but they have stayed because of the complex relationships formed with people living outside the fences. The truth is that when Okinawans choose not to cooperate, when they decide to challenge the US military presence, their actions have the power to rattle the whole system."

Tricky...











4.
Lying to Mom was inspired by director Katsumi Nojiri's own experience of a sibling's suicide.

It opens with a very stark scene in which the reclusive Koichi puts a few things in order, and ends his life by hanging himself. He is found dead by his mother. Badly injured by her awkward attempts to cut her son down, she in turn is found unconscious by daughter Fumi, and winds up in hospital in a coma.

When she wakes up, she remembers nothing, and the family -- fearing for her still fragile health -- concocts the story that Koichi has reconnected with the outside world, and taken a job in Argentina with his uncle's firm.

But, as the film painstakingly expounds, deception takes its toll on the deceivers, too, and when the lie finally comes to light, the shock is of course much worse.

Despite its moments of comedy, the film very perceptively explores bereavement and the host of conflicting emotions -- such as guilt and anger and helplessness -- that it evokes. Fumi joins a grief counselling group, whose participants deal with their pain in very different ways.

The movie goes on a little too long. And although we can't expect a director to spell everything out, there were some details that really needed to be either left out or explained fully, because they became bothersome. Why, at the end of the day, did Koichi decide life was not worth living? And what role did the sex worker he seems to have named as an insurance beneficiary play in his life? The scenes with the clairvoyant and the bat seemed extraneous.

Nevertheless, it's a moving film. For most of us, family is the bedrock of all our subsequent experience as individuals. Yet we routinely fail to really comprehend and support each other. Films like this one at least help us to understand where things can go wrong.