懐かしいなあ！*

*natsukashii naa!
 

'Welcoming' me to Japan with a nihonjinron lecture in Kyoto JR Station.

 Over the term, I’ve had a few existential crises in which I despaired over whether I, as a non-Japanese, could even legitimately begin to study this culture, and whether a desire to study it wasn’t inherently “Other”-izing my subjects.  I’ve butted my head against the realization that some of my own past conceptions of Japan were, without knowing the proper term for it, based in ideas that smacked frighteningly of nihonjinron.  I’ve realized how glad I am to be receiving an education in the United States, and as a woman, to be a citizen of the United States – before coming to Japan, my study of Japanese film and the language had given me a general sense that Japanese women had it a lot worse than Japanese men.  Living here, as a girl, and taking a Gender and Sexuality course with Professor Hester, I’ve had the opportunity realize the complexity of the plight of Japanese women, and also that gendered oppression in Japan isn’t restricted to female-identified people, although they certainly have been getting the short end of the stick in terms of things like higher education, career-tracking, and marital division of labor.

But being in Japan has also changed the way I think about or orient myself to ‘the West.’  Before I came to Japan, I don’t remember myself being particularly nostalgic – or at least, I don’t remember expressing my ‘nostalgia’ quite so often.  But now 懐かしい - natsukashii - is a staple of my vocabulary, and I wonder whether it is bringing out fond memories I didn’t know I had, or reflecting, through its linguistic existence, the current Japanese tendency to be, for lack of a better English word, ‘nostalgic’ about the past – particularly the recent past.  As other bloggers and scholars have noted, the Japanese word “natsukashii” has no exact equivalent in English, although ‘nostalgic’ probably comes the closest.

This giant Christmas tree in Harajuku is the kind of thing that makes me ちょっと懐かしい for America...

Admittedly, I’ve spent a fair amount of the past 4 months feeling natsukashii about things I never expected to – the Seattle’s Best coffee shop on campus (I’m from Olympia, Washington…), anything vaguely Christmas-like, the overwhelming Western influence at USJ, an Our Family shopping bag at seminar house four (from a grocery chain native to my scholastic home-base of Minnesota…).  In America, I would never feel that way about a chain coffee shop or shopping tote (I feel that way about Christmas every year), so I wonder how much of this nostalgia is constructed through distance – in a way, am I exoticizing my own memories of the West, seeing it through the cultural lens of my life in Japan?  Perhaps this distance is at the root of akogare – the feeling of longing that the Japanese purportedly have for things Western (read: American, usually) – and as I feel it, I am in fact getting more in touch with some aspect of being fully in Japan.  Or maybe I’ve just been homesick all along – who knows?  Probably some of both.  Maybe because I came into contact with so much constructed nostalgia for the West, I felt that if people who had never even been to America could long for it, shouldn’t I, an American away from home, feel even more strongly?

I am, however, already beginning to feel preemptively natsukashii about things Japanese, with my flight home less than 12 days distant on the calendar:

 

Konomiya, where I grocery shop every Monday evening after choir to take advantage of the store-wide 10% discount…

Japanese milk cartons!  Never larger than a liter.  How frustrating for someone like me...

Settling in for a (marginally) restful night’s sleep on a 夜行バス (yakou basu) bound for Fuji or Tokyo…

I always take off from Kyoto JR on the Sunshine Tours night buses run by these friendly folks!

 

Riding my Japanese-style mamachari bicycle all over Hirakata, and their general ubiquitousness…

Being stared at in public baths…

Me, enjoying the complimentary yukata at the famous Dogo Onsen in Matsuyama.

 

The importance of lunch dates between foreign and native students at Kansai Gaidai…

The dining hall at Kansai Gaidai!

Genkan, or entryways, and having gotten used to automatically taking my shoes off and putting on slippers instead…

When I took this picture at a hostel, and older Japanese woman commented: 何でも珍しい！- "Anything is rare!" (or interesting to a foreigner like myself).  I responded in Japanese, which surprised her a little, but then - 何でも珍しいね？

Matcha softcream.  美味しい...

Matcha and hakone salt twist - an excellent reward while biking the Shimanami Kaido from Onomichi to Imabari!

The way that Haru, my wonderful, spirited, hard-working, lovely home-visit partner, welcomed me into her home and her life…

USJ, which made me natsukashii for America, but now makes me natsukashii for my time in Japan and with Haru...

Of all the many changed and changing impressions that I have of Japan, the one I feel most acutely as I write this last blog is the shift in the direction of my natsukashii kanji – from America to Japan.  But, everything that I know I will miss about Japan is simply a reason to return – to allow Japan, and everything visual and anthropological about it, to find its way into my future.

Not Telluride, Not Sundance: TOKYO FILMeX.

Yurakucho Asahi Hall, screening location of the competition films.

 I spent the past weekend in Tokyo, where the International Film Festival Tokyo FilmexNational Film Center, was wrapping up its final weekend of screenings throughout the Ginza, including a retrospective of classic Ozu and Kurosawa works among the ten new competition films.  Between people-watching in Harajuku and getting to see Kurosawa’s actual Golden Lion and Palm D’Or at his special centennial exhibit and the National Film Center, I only made it to one Filmex screening – but I picked the right one.

冬の獣

冬の獣 (Fuyu no Kemono, “Winter Beast”), a relationship drama with the English title Love Addiction, directed this year by Uchida Nobuteru, is a riveting piece of realism, psychologically complex and powerful – and not surprisingly, it was awarded the festival Grand Prize.

The dynamics of the four main characters within the film and their attempts to navigate love, connections, and gender roles in an isolating modern Japanese landscape is in itself full of anthropological potential, but what struck me beyond the film itself was the relationship between the primarily Japanese audience and the characters on the screen.  I went with two other American friends, and early in the climactic scene, the rationalizations and reverse accusations of the main character’s philandering boyfriend became too unbearable – all three of us couldn’t help but express our disgust, and then amazed amusement, at the utter absurdity of his words.  Talking during films is looked down upon throughout the world, and particularly in Japan, and particularly at film festivals (unless you’re Quentin Tarantino and you feel the need to criticize Kawase Naomi at Cannes…), but it was not long before our feelings were echoed throughout the theatre.

The cast and director take the stage after the screening.

I found myself laughing and audibly catching my breath, exclaiming in surprise or frustration right along with a hall full of people whom I would generally expect to remain quiet and attentive at such an event.  Part of this is undoubtedly due to the incredible realism of the film, a product of its largely handheld yet striking cinematography and the unscripted, quasi-method-acted interplay of the four main characters.  But the willingness of a Japanese audience to make noise at a movie is nonetheless telling.  Further, they seemed to be decidedly against the lead male character’s brazenly doubly-standard attitude that men should have multiple women, while women should be monogamous, a reflection perhaps of changing conceptions of gender roles and relations, at least among the film-festival-attending and film-making crowd.

Festival organizer, Uchida, the four stars, and translator take questions.

One thing that I love about film festivals is the ubiquity of Q&A sessions – and the way this one proceeded, as opposed to what one might experience outside of Japan (especially in the U.S.), reveals much about Japanese culture and the Japanese approach to the creation of art.  One of my film profs back home says that the first question (and usually the second, third, fourth…) for a director is always “What was your budget?” or “What cameras/equipment did you shoot with (and how much did that cost you…)?” or other similarly financially-oriented questions.  But at Tokyo Filmex, not a single question touched on economics – discussion of the title, the film’s inspiration, the relatability of the characters and the approaches to characterization and creation of meaning were directed to Uchida and the four main actors.

The four stars of the new film listen during the Q&A session.

Admittedly, the low budget of the film is to be commended, but the tone of the Q&A session, and the verbal freedom of the audience during the screening, revealed how deeply affected the audience was by the themes of desperation, alienation, and uncertainty and the discourses regarding gender that the film so artistically articulates.  Personally, I find this commitment to form and function, rather than finance, in film, refreshing – but even more so, the fact that a Japanese film that looks so frankly at modern relationships, and where they break down, tops a film festival devoted to new Asian cinema, says even more about modern Japan – how it mediates its fears about the 21^st century (check this out for another interesting take on the festival), and how willing it is to engage in that mediation.  I would say the festival lived up to its mission statement, and then some.