Japan is a Timewarp
A fun one at that!
Think you know Japan? I don’t. But I LOVE learning about it and sharing it with you. Kia ora Koutou, Tim Bunting, Kiwi Yamabushi here on the Japan you never knew you wanted to know.
I feel like an idiot.
Last Friday I decided to go and watch Oppenheimer. Most of you are probably thinking “that is sooo 2023”. And you’re right. It is. But not for Japan. Japan, generally, gets movies later than most places. And in some cases, as in the case of Ghibli movies, your only option of watching them at home is by… wait for it…
Renting the DVD.
Seriously.
It’s amazing that these places still exist, but they do. Only last month one of my local rental shops, a place called Tsutaya, shut down for good. Thankfully we still have a Geo (pronounced gei-oh), but for how much longer, who really knows? Tsutaya was only a matter of time, but that matter of time was much longer for Japan it seems. And many things in Japan are a much longer matter of time, easy examples are fax machines, and my personal favourite, bank passbooks, which are both still very much in use.
Yes this is 2024.
Japan 2024 is very different to other countries’ 2024. I mean, we only just got Oppenheimer. Well, there are different (political) reasons for this, but still. We got the movie late, and when I went to go and see it, well, I found out I couldn’t.
I got the date wrong.
I looked at the times for the movie, and decided I would rock on up and get myself a ticket just before the film started. I didn’t realise that the schedule would change on the exact day I went. Silly me for not checking.
But it was all good, because there just so happened to be another movie I wanted to see. Perfect Days. Yes, another movie from 2023, but a movie that was playing at the only other theatre in town, about an hour later.
Perfect for me.
I am a huge Lou Reed and Velvet Underground fan. I had a VU t-shirt at Uni and wore it so much that I made holes in it. This is a big no-no in Japan, unless it’s on purpose. Sock got a hole in it? Into the bin it goes. Either way, any movie that combines Lou Reed and Japan is my kind of movie.
The thing is though, seasoned Japanophiles like myself are highly sensitive to western interpretations of Japan. Lost in Translation does a good job on the whole, Memoirs of a Geisha not so much.
Maybe it’s something to do with the Japanese timewarp, but Perfect Days I felt gave a very accurate reflection of modern Japan. I don’t live in Tokyo, but I do know some people just like many of the caricatures in Perfect Days, especially Takashi-san.
Then of course the main character, Hirayama-san, the sorts of people who are completely fine living their life in their own way having found their place in the world. Those people are everywhere in Japan. To be honest, it does feel sort of defeatist to me. Like you’ve given up having bigger ambitions, but each to their own!
And now I have to find the time to watch Oppenheimer, before it leaves theatres in 2025.
Daily Yamabushi for This Week
Daily Yamabushi posts for the week of March 29 to April 4, 2024.
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Ka kite ano.
Tim.