Japanese Story (review)
Sue Brooks (dir.) Japanese Story. 2003.
2/10
I was determined not to like this film, and so, unsurprisingly, I didn’t.
On one level, this is a film about a woman’s being forced to face and accept the reality of death. That part of it, which occupies the last twenty minutes or so, is mildly emotionally affecting. It is not, however, a particularly original theme, and nor is it exceptionally well-executed here.
The rest of the film, which is about an encounter between an East Asian man and an Australian woman, has little to recommend it. My first grievance, which I commonly hold against Australian films, is that it indulges in a view of Australia that is dominated by the outback. Since the majority of our population lives in state capital cities and their suburbs, this prevents such films from accurately representing Australian life even as they use farms or ‘the red centre’ to visually signify their Australian-ness.
Japanese Story also manifestly misrepresents East Asia and the Australian relationship with it. Why, for instance, does this encounter occur between a Japanese man and a white Australian woman? It’s not the 1980s anymore, and Japan is no longer the world-fascinating economic miracle that it once was. China and Southeast Asia are stronger presences in our cities, our culture, and our international political and economic contexts.
Accepting, though, that for whatever reason, scriptwriter Alison Tilson decided to focus on Japan (I would have done the same, Japanophile that I am), the representation of Japanese culture is stereotyped and outdated. Hiromitsu, and later in the film, his wife, are completely alien presences, whom the female protagonist, Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette), evidently struggles to understand or communicate with on all levels but those of primal emotion and desire. The Japanese characters appear, also, to have come out of the distant past, adhering assiduously to the idea prevalent in the West of the 1970s and 1980s that Japan is an unfailingly rule-bound, reserved, formal and traditional culture. To make this impression even clearer, scenes that are meant to be emotional, such as the sex-scene between Hiromitsu and Sandy, are overlaid with traditional Japanese music, rather than the J-Pop that would be more familiar to most Japanese ears (and also to many Australian ones). I get a stronger sense of Japanese contemporaneity from some historical films, such as The Last Samurai (set directly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868) than from Japanese Story.
In addition, this is a story about a gauche, uncosmopolitan Australian’s relatively neat encounter with Asia. Hiromitsu arrives on a business trip, sees some of our iconic landscape, has sex with Sandy twice, dies, and then is taken back in a coffin by his Japanese wife. Hello Asia. Goodbye Asia. This is not the Asia that Australians engaged with it know. This is not the Asia where some of my good friends, who I have known for several years, were born. This is not the Asia whose daughters I have dated. It is not the Asia some of whose values I have learned and adopted, by learning about Zen and about classical Chinese philosophy. It is not the Asia that I buy $6 meals from in the Melbourne CBD. It is not the Asia where I intend to teach English after I finish my PhD.
The director, Brooks, and scriptwriter, Tilson, seem to have no real knowledge about the realities of Asian (in this case, Japanese) life or culture, or about the ‘Australian’ relationship with Asia. For them, Japan is just a novelty, a disposable piece of the exotic.
In conclusion, here’s a list of other things that I found noteworthy about Japanese Story:
- Before Sandy has sex with Hiromitsu for the first time, she gets naked, then puts on Hiromitsu’s pants. She then rides him, cowgirl style, without us seeing her taking off the pants. Why she puts the pants on is unclear. It is also unclear how they were able to have sex, since the pants would have made it difficult, if not impossible.
- There are far too many shots of cars driving down roads, and of other things which do not advance the story or develop the characters. There is also not enough dialogue. This makes the film unneccessarily boring.
- The film was funded by numerous government agencies. This is a disgrace. Even if it had been a good film, it would still be a luxury, and the government has no business taking our money only to give it back as luxuries we did not choose. I propose an immediate end to all government funding for the arts.
- The most valuable lesson Japanese Story has to teach us is this: never dive into a body of water before you check that it is safe to do so.
“I propose an immediate end to all government funding for the arts.”
This is a joke, yeah?
I didn’t think much of JS either – a bit too drawn out and a bit too indulgent of certain stereotypes (effeminate asian man, honourable japanese, &c), but in terms of showing the Australian outback, lots of new Australian films are set in urban areas these days. Having a film that’s set in the desert isn’t entirely unrealistic, given that there is indeed a big fuck-off desert out there. Thought its setting was fair enough (and it actually did include some urban settings as well, if I remember rightly).
adam ford
28 Feb 05 at 11:44
Yeah, fair enough, Adam, there is a “big-fuck-off desert” out there, and it did include urban settings. I just really hated the movie and obviously was looking for reasons to slag it off. See the front page for a post that I’m still writing, but which will be ready soon.
Ben H
28 Feb 05 at 13:44
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benhourigan.com » Blog Archive » End government arts funding
28 Feb 05 at 14:05
Myst/Uncunninglinguist comments, on End government arts funding now!
You’re exactly right: they’re not typical. Nor is Hiromitsu, though. One thing I didn’t mention in my post was that he’s a relatively accurate depiction of the kind of person you might find in an old and powerful dôzoku gaisha (family business), especially one of the families associated with a zaibatsu or keiretsu (massive corporations like Mitsubishi and Sumitomo). This is exactly the kind of character Hiromitsu is meant to be. I get the impression, though, that the writer and director arrived at the depiction by accident: by reproducing stereotypes rather than by reading a great book about dôzoku gaisha like Matthews Mayasuki Hamabata’s Crested Kimono: Power and love in the Japanese business family
What’s curious about Japanese Story is that it chooses to insert this kind of person into the Australian landscape, rather than the still uncommon, but more visible here, banana-type asian (yellow outside, white inside, CS readers forgive the characterisation—-it’s a word such people use to describe themselves) who are the girls I’ve dated, the kids I made friends with, and so on. What it hopes to achieve by this I don’t know, but it paints a strange picture for those Westerners who aren’t eggs (white on the outside, yellow on the inside) like me or even know anything at all about Asian people or culture. This is the kind of depiction that makes country people and old people ask second and third-generation Asian Australians where they’re from, and to tell them that “your English is so good!” which drives Asian Australians crazy.
In fact the picture it paints represents pretty well what I think Said was talking about when he put forward his analysis of orientalism, because Hiro and his wife, though they represent an exotic type that actually exists in life, are not specified as just a fraction of Japanese or Asian society. Because they are the only representatives of their region and culture in the film, they stand in for Asia as a whole.
As for segmentation, I think it’s a better idea than lumping a whole lot of people together. For me, ‘Asia’ stretches east of India, south of the Russian border, north of Australia and finishes eastward with Japan and Indonesia. That sets a boundary for a particular set of cultures and ideas that I feel are somewhat related. India, incidentally, i deem to be part of the West, since it shares the basic, metaphysical foundations from which our culture grew, while China does not (and is therefore East, as is everything else whose culture it influenced to any large degree). The same thing goes for the Middle East. Africa, on the other hand, is probably a whole other story, neither East nor West (if we’re thinking about philosophical and cultural traditions). Whether or not individual people fit neatly into the East/West dichotomy is another matter: I’d suggest they don’t.
One day we’ll all be hybrid, and we’ll stop talking about stuff like this.
Ben H
1 Mar 05 at 13:03
australian films which do not feature the outback:
‘Death in Brunswick’
http://imdb.com/title/tt0101692/
‘strictly ballroom’
http://imdb.com/title/tt0105488/
‘dark city’
http://imdb.com/title/tt0118929/
‘ghosts of the civil dead’
http://imdb.com/title/tt0095217/
‘children of the revolution’
http://imdb.com/title/tt0115886/
i could go on and on and on… you need to get some australian cinema up you, cultural studies boy.
dogpossum
16 Mar 05 at 14:46
Okay dogpossum. I retract my point about the outback. Actually, I quite liked all three of Strictly Ballroom, Dark City, and Children of the Revolution. I haven’t seen the others. Actually, I don’t especially like cinema: I just posted the review because it’s what I do for all the media I consume.
Sorry you had trouble posting the comment. My spam-catcher caught it multiple times, I see. If you want to post lots of links in future, please make a post on your site and just link to that. I’d like to free things up a little, but I have a real problem with trackback spam.
More on your own site.
Ben H
17 Mar 05 at 13:07
[...] once asked me, in person, if I ever give anything less than 8–9/10. Well, I did give Japanese Story a dismal 2/10. But generally I’ve given 7–9 here. Why? Well [...]
benhourigan.com » Blog Archive » Sixteen Candles
31 Oct 05 at 17:41
[...] Quite a lot of effort has gone into these comments: someone delved as far back as my post on Japanese Story for #9, and #s 5, 7-9, 16, 21, 24 and 29 (see below) are all likely inspired by material from posts. I’m not quite sure why Declan McManus (a.k.a. Elvis Costello) is supposedd to feel “graphically abused,” although he has sung of others being “rythmically admired” (in “Welcome to the Working Week”), but hey, whatever… Observing the style and the range of allusions, I’m beginning to get a suspicion of who might be behind the whole thing. [...]
Be a man; be an asshole at benhourigan.com: musings and reviews
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