Lost In Translation

Oyakodon

Here's another of my simple lunch favorites "oyakodon" (parent and child rice bowl). It is usually made of chicken, eggs, green chives, and a sauce simmered together then poured over rice.

 

Pigs And Battleships

Pigs and Battleships was  Shohei Imamura’s breakout film. Imamura was an assistant director under Ozu before striking out on his own and the two directors couldn’t be more different in style and content. In this film Imamura has a moving camera and one that retracts to give an anthropological view of the proceedings taking place within the screen. Ozu focuses on the middle class and such conflicts as leaving family for marriage, but in this film Imamura looks at the poor inhabitants of Yokosuka that live near an American Navy base and depend on them for their livelihood. The main character, Kinta, is a low-level yakuza member who is helping the yakuza raise pigs with scraps from the American Navy base. His girlfriend, Haruka, is what would become the typical plucky Imamura heroine, wants him to quit the gang and get a straight job at a factory in nearby Kawasaki. Conversely, she is being pressured by her mother and sister to become a kept woman for one of the sailors on base, but is reluctant to do so. In this film and subsequent films (I’ve previously seen The Insect Woman's [1963] original title translates as Entomological Chronicles of Japan, and the subtitle of The Pornographers [1966] is Introduction to Anthropology) Imamura focuses on the lower orders with an anthropological view from a distance. It is also a black comedy, one of the yakuza bosses thinks he is dying and provides comic relief. Imamura see the Japanese as the pigs and has little regard for these people who are ruled by their pursuit of material wealth and an easy life. The Americans fare no better, the half-Japanese American middleman from Hawaii swindles the yakuza and deserts his mistress. The rest of the Americans are seen as simple brutes only looking for a good time.  Imamura takes on some big themes with good results, and my only criticism would be some sloppy action scenes where violence takes place and some over acting in places. Otherwise a very satisfying look at postwar Japan-warts and all. This Criterion edition (part of the Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes box set) contains an interview-like special from French television, an interesting essay by film critic Audie Bock, as well as a discussion segment from critic Tony Raynds.

Downtown Owl

I decided to have a look at Chuck Klosterman’s first foray into fiction, Downtown Owl, recently. It is a story of a small town in North Dakota that has each chapter narrated by a different person from a 16 year old third string quarterback to a 60 something widower. It ends up being much bleaker than I would have expected from Klosterman, but it also captures his essence in the quirky interactions between people and their eccentric small town views on life. It was an entertaining look at small town life through the eyes of a variety of characters and their respective points of view. I’d read his next effort. I think I liked this more than his last book of essays, Eating The Dinosaur.

Architecture In Tokyo

There's an interesting article on contemporary architecture in the latest edition of Metropolis. The picture above from the article is the new Nezu Museum which I will try to visit this winter break.

 

Just as Tange’s attention-grabbing style set the tone for the late Showa period and influenced countless lesser architects to design their offbeat office buildings, puerile pachinko parlors, and ludicrous love hotels, the present generation has found its guiding light in Kengo Kuma, a kinder, gentler architect whose ideas and growing international renown are exerting an influence far beyond the handful of buildings that he has designed in Tokyo. While Tange and his cohorts expressed the madness of a frenetically growing Japan, so the 55-year-old Kuma and his followers reflect the saner, more somber mood of a post-Bubble—and now post-credit crunch—Japan.

The key points of this new, unselfconsciously Japanese style can be seen at Kuma’s latest building, the redesigned Nezu Museum, located at the front of a large traditional Japanese garden at the far end of Omotesando. The first impression is rather dull—all you can see from the outside is a large tiled roof, surmounting a thick hedge of bamboo. But this effect is entirely intentional, as the architect explained in a recent sit-down with Metropolis.

 

Meiji University Illumination

Here's a tree lit up on the Izumi Campus at Medaimae. Incidentally, there was a mention of my department, the School of Global Japanese Studies, it an article in the English version of the Daily Yomiuri.

 

Top Music of the 00s and 2009

Here's the AV Club's Top 50 of the decade. I have enjoyed reassessing the decades best entertainment and I will list 10 of my favorite recordings of the decade:

1) Yankee Foxtrot Hotel-Wilco (2001)

2) Cold Roses-Ryan Adams and the Cardinals (2005)

3) Feast of Wire-Calexico (2003)

4) Chutes Too Narrow-The Shins (2003)

5) Blacklisted-Neko Case (2002)

6) Back Numbers-Dean and Britta (2007)

7) Neon Bible-The Arcade Fire (2007)

8) Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots-The Flaming Lips (2002)

9) Dear Catastrophe Waitress-Belle And Sebastian (2003)

10) Transaltanticism-Death Cab For Cutie (2003)

Here's the AV Club's Top 25 of this year. I haven't been listening to that much new music this year, so here's the ones I have been listening to:

1) Middle Cyclone-Neko Case

2) Popular Songs-Yo La Tengo

3) The Hazards of Love-The Decemberists

4) Wilco (The Album)-Wilco

5) Damon & Naomi-The Sub Pop Years

6) Noble Beast-Andrew Bird

7) 3-Nouvelle Vague

8) Embryonic-The Flaming Lips

Other great music new to me this year: Prisoner of Love-Yo La Tengo, There's Nothing Wrong With Love-Built To Spill, Armchair Apocyrpha-Andrew Bird.

DVD Extras: Gomorrah

I'd call Gomorrah a revisionist mafia film and it is out in a special 2 disc set. This is from a review in Slate:

The thinking goes like this: No matter how bleakly mob movies end, they are invariably intoxicating. (What is Goodfellas' famous Copacabana tracking shot if not a virtuoso dance of seduction, tugging us tipsily through the warm belly of underworld privilege?) Gomorrah, by contrast, is great precisely because it's repulsive. The film, about the Neapolitan organized-crime syndicate the Camorra, starts with the gruesome slaughter of some half-naked thugs in the sickly blue light of a tanning salon; it reaches a quietly nauseating crescendo with a shot of rotting peaches grown from mob-polluted soil; and it ends with the image of a bulldozer indifferently scooping up the corpses of two freshly murdered youths and hoisting them to the sky like a sacrifice. A two-hour-plus stranglehold, the movie sends us back into the world gasping.

Gomorrah is a deeply moralizing film, brooking no ethical ambiguity or mitigating factors in its hellish vision of organized crime. But Garrone is smart about his moralizing. He curates the film's ample stock of outrages with a cool head, dry eyes, and a steady hand. The source material, a best-selling book by the investigative journalist Roberto Saviano, is so potent that Garrone needs only stage, frame, and edit it for maximum impact, then step out of its way.

It's impossible to avoid comparing Gomorrah to the iconic gangster movies that have preceded it, and the film itself makes one explicit comparison early on, when two of its younger characters playact a shootout from Brian DePalma's Scarface with real handguns. "The world is ours!" they shout. "I'm Tony Montana!" But how does the film really relate to genre staples like Scarface, Goodfellas, and The Godfather? Is it more honest? Less sentimental? More authentic? And if we agree on what these shaky terms mean and decide that Gomorrahdeserves them, is that the same as saying it's better?

Group Thinking

Kate Elwood discusses the implications of group dynamics in her latest column for Cultural Conundrums: 

Among Japanese people as well, different group attachments become more prominent or ebb in importance depending on the situation. Language plays an essential role not only in expressing but also in creating a sense of community, as the language researcher Robert Sukle observes.

Sukle investigated the requests made at a train station, a post office and a vegetable stand. In order to make a meaningful comparison, Sukle only made use of requests for things (such as tickets, stamps or vegetables) rather than requests for services. Sukle further limited his study to situations in which the person making the request was a woman and the addressee was a man. Sukle found that there were clear differences in the language used in train station and post office locations, as opposed to the vegetable stand.

The requests were divided up according to whether and how the social relationship between the speakers was specified. In some requests the relationship was unspecified, as the speaker made a brief demand, like "A 70 yen stamp." In others, after the desired item was identified, kudasai, marking a socially distant relationship, or chodai, used in close social relationships, was added. (Both words indicate requests, as "please" does in English.) In fact, chodai was used in 14.5 percent of the vegetable market encounters but in none of the post office or train station transactions.

Sukle further analyzed data he had tagged as "other" because it used language to indicate the relationship other than kudasai or chodai. He found that virtually all of the "other" vegetable stand data (24.6 percent of the total data obtained at this location) established the relationship as in-group type. In contrast, the "other" train station data (18.2 percent of that data) indicated an out-group orientation. There was no "other" data for the post office requests.

In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs

I recently finished Tobias Wolff’s first book of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. Several of the stories were included in his most recent collection, Our Story Begins: New And Collected Stories.  I took a creative writing course in college where I first read Wolff, Carver, Dubus, and other masters of the contemporary short story, the title story was in the anthology and it is a classic. I really like Wolff’s range: he can write about academia without sounding insular, but he can also talk about high school educated hunters with equal precision. I’m a little sad that I’ve read all his books to date-they are generally excellent. I guess I’ll have to wait for the next one.

Best Films of the 00s

I have been keeping pace with the  AV Club post on the the best of the 00s. But there are several other good lists out there.  Glenn Kenny did the Top 100 and Time Out NY did the best 50. Here's my Top 10, which was hard enough:

1) City of God (2002)

2) Last Life In The Universe (2003)

3) In The Mood For Love (2000)

4) Memento (2000)

5) Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)

6) Children of Men (2006)

7) Amores Perros (2000)

8) Adaptation (2002)

9) Lost In Translation (2003)

10) Sexy Beast (2000)