Lost In Translation

Okochi Sanso

Okochi Sanso villa is located at the end of the bamboo grove pathway and it was one of highlights of my visit to Arashiyama. It is the former home of Denjiro Okochi (1898-1962) a silent film star of Japanese cinema.

Mount Hiei.

Here are some pictures of the villa's former owner Denjiro Okochi.

The entrance fee is ¥1000, which is more than most attractions, but it includes a cup of maccha (green tea) and kashi (Japanese sweet), with which to contemplate the bamboo forest.

Arashiyama Bamboo Grove

Amazing.

Tenryuji

Tenryuji is a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site and has one of the oldest gradens in Japan.

Kyoto: Arashiyama

My trip to Arashiyama started by boarding a bus at the controversial, ultra modern Kyoto station.

I was told by some Kyoto citizens that the fall colors would be much better in two weeks-looks good to me. These pictures are of Katsuragawa river in Arashiyama.

Here are some fresh Matsutake mushrooms on sale. Mushrooms are considered a fall season treat in Japan.

Here's a random shot of a gate and some fall foliage.

A traditional statue in an open courtyard.

Spectacular colored leaves in front of a torii gate.

Monkey fern trees.

A fierce looking wooden demon mask.

A small roadside shrine.

Eclipse Sereis 17: Nikkatsu Noir

Criterion released a new collection of action films in 2009 produced by the Nikkatsu film studio in the 50s and 60s, Eclipse Sereis 17: Nikkatsu Noir. The set includes the following films: I Am Waiting (1957) directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara, Rusty Knife  (1958) directed by Toshio Masuda, Take Aim At The Police Van (1960) directed by Seijun Suzuki, Cruel Gun Story (1964) directed by Takuma Furakawa, and A Colt Is My Passport (1967). Each film has some comments by noted Asian film critic Chuck Stephens. These films were considered to be "Borderless" action films (mukokuseki). One aspect of the films I like is that they show what Japan looked like in the 50s and 60s with all the location shots. The series gets progressively better from the first film to the last film.

I Am Waiting is the debut of director Kurahara and stars Yujiro Ishihara as a restaurant manager and former boxer who helps club hostess (Mie Kitahara another familiar face in mukokuseki films) try to escape the clutches of her gangster employer. Yokohoma is the noir stand in for NY in this film that presents a darker brooding Ishihara, who was a film superstar at this point. The protagonist is waitng for his brother to send for him after buying a farm in Brazil, perhaps a stand in for Mexico as the place of escape for Japanese noir.

Rusty Knife directed by Masuda also stars Yujiro Ishihara and fellow top Nikkatsu star Akira Kobayashi, and they play former hoodlums trying to leave behind a life of crime working at a bar. However, they are sought out as witness to a murder and are drawn back into the world of crime. Joe Shishido has a small role as a blackmailer and will become a star under Suzuki.

 Take Aim At The Police Van is a film by the most well-known mukokuseki director Seijun Suzuki. This film is more of a detective mystery when a prison truck is attacked and convict murdered. The penitentiary guard on duty (the middle aged Michitaro Mizushima) is accused of negligence and suspended which allows him to get to the bottom of the crime. Stephens point out some of the outre visual shenanigans by Suzuki: the gunman who strokes the  rifle's stock lovingly before putting his gum on the scope for safekeeping and the onsen hooker who lurches out of the private show lie St. Sebastian with an arrow stuck in her chest.

Cruel Gun Story by Furukawa stars Shishido as a freshly released ex-con sprung to do a job for a mob boss. So this is essentially a heist story about robbing a an armoreed car carrying racetrack receipts.It seems to owe something to Kubrick's The Killing with its meticulously planned heist. It takes place in the abandoned US Army party town Yamato (my old friend Arie's former place of residence). The double and triple crosses also birng to mind The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre.

The best film in the series is Nomura's A Colt Is My Passport also starring Joe Shishio. It is the story of a hardboiled hitman caught between two warring yakuza families. It has  great spaghetti western tinged soundtrack and takes place on the seaside near Yokohoma as the hitman and his protege try to escape Japan by boat. It finishes with a great and inventive climax.

The Face Of Another

The Face Of Another (1966) is the third film collaboration between director Hiroshi Teshigahara, screen play writer Kobo Abe, and composer Toru Takemitsu. Several of the themes that were first introduced in Pitfall and elaborated upon in The Woman In The Dunes. In particular is the obsession with identity that is the main theme in The Face Of Another. It seems this film was considered a critical failure after his sublime The Woman In The Dunes. Critic James Quant, who has video essay supplements for all three films in the Criterion series, is trying to champion and restore the reputation of Pitfall and The Face Of Another.  There are some great surrealistic effects and art direction in the film, as well as interestingly framed shots from Teshigahara.

One final note on the extras in this series besides the excellent Quant video essays: a new documentary about the working relationship between Teshigahara and Abe, including interviews with Japanese film scholars Donald Richie and Tadao Sato, four short films by Teshigahara: Hokusai (1953), Ikebana (1956), Tokyo 1958 (1958), and Ako (1965), a booklet featuring wssasy by Peter Grilli, Howard Hampton, Audiei Bock, and James Quandt, as well as a Max Tessier interview with Teshigahara, and theatrical trailers.

Kenji Mizoguchi And The Art Of Japanese Cinema

Japanese art critic Tadao Sato's study of Kenji Mizoguci, Kenji Mizoguchi And The Art Of Japanese Cinema (1982), was my next foray into understanding the films and legacy of Mizoguchi after reading Mark Le Fanu's study, Mizoguchi And Japan. Sato's book is a good companion, because he brings an understanding of traditional Japanese culture  (i.e. Noh, shimpa dramas, bunraku puppet shows,etc.) and values that inform much of Mizoguchi's work. Furthermore, since he is working in his own native tongue he is able to draw from a variety of primary sources to give insights about Mizoguchi and his film making techniques. There was an interesting revelation he made in the chapter entitled "Encountering the New School of Theater," in which he discusses how in the past crimes against women (rape, incest, etc.) were heard in court the judgements were quite severe and the victims were also punished for bringing the men to trial. Sato also makes clear his judgements about Mizoguchi's works; identifying those that he feels are classics (he adds A Story From Chikamatsu (1954) as one his best films along with those that are universally praised-The Life Of Ohara, Ugetsu, and Sansho The Baliff) and those that he feels are flawed or minor works in Mizoguchi's oeuvre. His chapters that analyze the camera techniques used by Mizoguchi are also illuminating: ("The Dialectic of Camera and Performance" and  "Looking Up, Looking Down"). This is a useful and informative book for anyone interested in Mizoguchi or Japanese cinema. I was somewhat apprehensive about the English translation that was completed in India before reading it, but had no qualms about it while reading, however, two stills were mislabeled, however I encountered few other errors.

Blue Papaya

My quest for the default Thai restaurant in Ebisu brought me to Blue Papaya. Not spicy enough for me and not a native Thai to be seen, but there's a mini buffet on weekends with salad, soup, drinks and dessert that's not bad. The search is still on.

Fairness

Kate Elwood always has some interesting observations about cultural differences between Japanese and Americans and the latest from The Daily Yomiuri focuses on the concept of fairness:

Fairness, of course, is a concern for both Japanese and Americans, but there are differences in the way the two cultures engage with the concept. Social psychologist Michele Gelfand and other researchers conducted a variety of studies related to fairness among Japanese and U.S. students. In the first study, they asked the students to write down all the fair behaviors that came to mind in five minutes, and in another five minutes to write down all the unfair behaviors that occurred to them. If the behavior recorded was something they did more frequently than other people, they were told to begin the statement with "I" and if it was something others did more than the participant, to begin it with "They."

The U.S. students wrote more than twice as many statements related to fair behavior beginning with "I" than they wrote "I" unfair statements. Similarly, the Americans' "they" unfair statements were almost twice as frequent as their "they" fair statements. On the other hand, the Japanese "I" fair statements were only slightly greater than their "I" unfair statements, and the same was true of the difference in frequency between their "they" unfair and "they" fair statements.

In another study, the researchers asked different groups of U.S. and Japanese students to write down a conflict that they had personally been involved in. They were then asked to imagine how a neutral third party might view the actions of both the participant and other person involved in the conflict. The Americans were much more likely to believe that the impartial evaluator would consider their behavior fair and their counterpart's unfair, than the Japanese respondents were.

In yet another study, participants were asked to engage in a negotiation activity. Afterward, they were randomly assigned positive, negative or neutral feedback regarding their negotiating effectiveness compared to the performance of all the other participants in the study. Then the participants were asked to evaluate whether they felt personally responsible for the feedback they had received. The Americans were more likely to accept personal responsibility when the feedback was positive than when it was neutral or negative, but the Japanese were less likely to accept responsibility when the feedback was positive compared to the two other evaluations. Similar results were obtained when the participants were asked how confident they were that the feedback reflected their abilities.

Gelfand and her colleagues suggest one reason for the cultural differences in the results of their tests is the Japanese emphasis on hansei, a term used to describe the practice of thinking over one's actions, both good and bad, with an eye to future improvement. Such training in a more self-critical approach, the researchers argue, is likely to result in a divergent outlook on "fair" assessments.

The introspection focus begins early: Early childhood education specialist Satomi Izumi Taylor and her colleagues made a survey of the attitudes of 143 people--teachers, parents and grandparents--to hansei among kindergartners. In response to whether it was important for the children to engage in hansei, 132 answered "very important" and only two answered "not important at this age."

Japanese people certainly care about fairness. I'd even venture to say that in some situations I've witnessed they have been "obsessed"--in a very good way--with it. Perhaps what the Japanese student from way back was remarking on was a significant difference in assurance in making fairness allocations regarding one's own actions.

Cultural Conundrums: Cultural Uncerainity

Here's another interesting column on cultural differences by Kate Elwood for The Daily Yomiuri:

A couple of months ago, a former colleague, whom I'll call Prof. Kawata, invited me out to dinner as a way of thanking me for a favor I had done for him. We had a bit of back-and-forth with e-mails to figure out an evening that was good for both of our schedules, the type of cuisine we might enjoy, and to relay that his wife, whom I was also acquainted with, would join us. Then the day before we were to meet, Prof. Kawata sent me the final confirmation. In a list in Japanese he wrote the following items with the relevant details added: participants, date and time, venue, address, telephone number.

It was convenient to have all the pertinent information summed up succinctly, but to me the format also seemed a bit strange for a social occasion, particularly the participants' field, when there were only three of us and we all knew each other pretty well. On the other hand, it could be argued that this was the most vital point of all to confirm. Undoubtedly many people have had the experience of showing up for an event and being startled to find fewer, or more--or simply different--faces than anticipated. Prof. Kawata's minimal yet thorough notification left no risk of such an unsettling surprise.

With due discretion I investigated other people's reactions to this style of invitation. Most of the Japanese acquaintances I asked found the way of writing a bit formal or businesslike for the small social gathering, but they tended to shrug and point out that it was practical. Many of the Americans I asked judged it a tad uncouth and somewhat off-putting, feeling it would be friendlier and more natural to abandon the point-by-point communicative form in favor of some connected sentences, like, "The dinner will be the three of us--you, me, and my wife. We'll meet at...." For them, generally speaking, amiability trumped expediency.

It was one of those little, quirky things, certainly not a big deal in any way. But what I found most interesting was my own contemplation of the tersely formulated dinner confirmation, when I became aware that in my mind I was reflexively linking it to "uncertainty avoidance." And then wondering whether that was precisely what I ought to be doing or not.

Uncertainty avoidance, or UA, is one of five cultural values and behaviors identified by the well-known organizational anthropologist Geert Hofstede, based primarily on data obtained through more than 116,000 questionnaires completed by IBM employees from 72 countries in 20 languages. Hofstede suggests "Ways of coping with uncertainty belong to the cultural heritage of societies, and they are transferred and reinforced through basic institutions such as the family, the school, and the state." Among 50 countries and three regions, Hoftstede's uncertainty avoidance index ranks Japan seventh, with an actual score of 92, and the United States ranks 43rd, with a score of 46. Citizens of countries with high UA rankings are characterized as relying heavily on rules and rituals, following well-defined and strictly upheld ways of doing things. People of cultures with low UA rankings, on the other hand, are flexible, content with unstructured and ad hoc approaches and procedures.

In subsequent studies by various researchers, the uncertainty avoidance rankings have been linked to tourist behavior, product development, accounting systems, and many similar customs and practices. Other researchers have replicated Hofstede's study in organizations other than IBM. On the other hand, 25 years after Hofstede collected his data, intercultural management researcher Denise Rotondo Fernandez and her colleagues set out to see whether the rankings still held true, and found that Japan had shifted substantially to weak uncertainty avoidance, while the United States had become a strong UA country. The researchers suggest that political, economic and social change may contribute to such attitudinal modification.

Once exposed to the concept of uncertainty avoidance, and to the notion that Japan has a high ranking in this cultural dimension, it can be easy to unconsciously view various types of divergent behavior through this filter. Perhaps Prof. Kawata likes to avoid uncertainty, and for this reason he favors an explicit invitation confirmation format, or perhaps at the end of a long day he was in his business communication mode and dashed off the e-mail without much concern for uncertainty avoidance, simply attempting to get the task accomplished swiftly and efficiently.