Japan Cuts ’20: Tora-san, Wish You Were Here

Even though he had plenty of heartache, Tora-san never really grew up. However, Japan watched as his family matured and came of age. Twenty-three years after the death of the beloved star, Kiyoshi Atsumi, longtime director Yoji Yamada reunited his surviving cast for the 50^th Tora-san film, the moving tribute, Tora-san, Wish You Were Here, which screens as part of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

Tora-san has been gone for many years now, but he still exerts an influence over his family, especially his beloved nephew, Mitsuo Suwa. The film starts with a memorial service to Suwa’s late wife, but it is really an elegy for Tora-san. For several years, Suwa has cared for his teenaged daughter Yuri, as a single father, but he is also just beginning to realize his ambition to be a novelist. Yet, recently he has been flooded with dream and memories of his high school love, Izumi Bruna. Tora-san knew her pretty well—and most definitely approved.

Of course, he is delighted when she happens to appear at his book signing. As luck would have it, the married Bruna has returned to Japan briefly for the UN and some family business. There is definitely a bit of the old spark between them, but he refuses to burden her with his own tragedies. He is his uncle’s nephew, after all.

Throughout Wish You Were Here, Yamada flashes back to important scenes from the previous Tora-san films. However, this is not a cobbled together clip package, like On the Trail of the Pink Panther or certain disappointing series finales (that means you, Seinfeld). The Kuruma and Suwa families’ lives have gone on, so their stories continue here. In fact, Suwa’s reunion with Bruna is quite touching, in a wistful, Brief Encounter kind of way.

Along the way, characters regularly ask, WWTSD? What would Tora-san do? However, that does not always mean it is the right thing to do—sometimes quite the contrary. Indeed, one of the film’s most heartbreaking moment revisits the time Tora-san was too timid to grab the love he had always yearned for.

Yamada shrewdly selects clips that showcase Atsumi’s flair for comedic delivery, as well as his sensitivity as an actor. He really made Tora-san the insecure but lovable slacker, who became like family to his Japanese fans.

Japan Cuts ’20: The Murders of Oiso

Kazuya Ito and his three goony “friends” are your basic kick-down kind of guys. Their job is basically to do mild thuggery and some occasional hard labor for the construction company owned by Ito’s uncle. He runs the town of Oiso, much the same way he ran their high school when he was the basketball coach. However, they are rather confused by the power vacuum left by the boss’s suspiciously sudden death in Takuya Misawa’s The Murders of Oiso, which screens as part of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

Ito is the one with the family connections and he is not about to let the other three forget it. Eita is the one with the attractive girlfriend. This is also a fact Ito is keenly aware of. The entire town is in for a surprise when Ito’s uncle dies falling on his lawnmower (sounds painful). It turns out he secretly remarried a much younger woman, who now expects the condolence money and her inheritance.

With “Murder” in the title, Misawa’s film sounds more thrillery than it is. It is more of a deconstruction of the thug life than a mystery or crime procedural. It’s about sucking up and doubling-down. Misawa’s elliptical narrative structure is so coy about the actual crimes and sins going on behind closed doors, it is hard to feel much investment. We can respect the rigorous severity of his aesthetic approach, but the net effect is rather cold-blooded.

Likewise, the twenty-ish cast clearly commits whole-heartedly, but they blend in more than stand-out as the mumbling, self-loathing, and embittered toughs. These are honest, but not necessarily showy performances.

Japan Cuts ’20: Voices in the Wind

Nearly 16,000 souls were documented killed as a result of the 3/11 Fukushima hurricane and tsunami. Over 2,500 are still listed as missing, denying their next-of-kin the catharsis of final closure. Haru is related to three of them: her parents and little brother. She found a home of sorts with her Aunt Hiroki, but she even loses her to a stroke (presumably). With nobody left to lose, Haru feels compelled to travel home in Nobuhiro Suwa’s elegiac road movie, Voices in the Wind, which screens as part of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

Haru is a sad young woman, but Hiroki is patient and understanding. Haru probably only realizes how so, after discovering her comatose. The collective totality of her loss sends Haru off on a compulsion to visit her old home, but it will involve a long, not well-thought-out trek. Fortunately, she encounters several people willing to help her, because they share a similar sense of grief and survivor’s guilt.

For a while, it seems like Japan is a paradise for hitchhikers and runaways. However, Haru eventually escapes a potentially ominous encounter only through the intercession of Morio, a former power plant employee, whose daughter would have been Haru’s age. He has been living out of his minivan, but he agrees to return to their home district with Haru, after taking a detour through Tokyo in hopes of finding Mehmet, a Kurdish immigrant who volunteered for the Fukushima rescue effort.

Voices takes its title from the final impromptu leg of Haru’s journey, which almost seems spoilerish. Yet, even when you know—as the festival description and prior reviews have revealed—Haru ends her trip at the so-called “wind telephone” booth (where survivors place “calls” to deceased loved ones), the scene is still emotionally devastating.

It is truly a remarkable performance from 17-year-old Serena Motola, culminating in the extremely cinematic phone booth. She never resorts to cheap shtick, but instead she expresses the depth of Haru’s sorrow through her haunted eyes and twitchy body language.

Japan Cuts ’20: Labyrinth of Cinema

Usually, when characters fantastically enter classic cinema, it is to find comfort and sanctuary, as in The Purple Rose of Cairo, but nobody would want to magically travel inside a film like Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima. Three Japanese film buffs find themselves in that position when they are sucked into a marathon screening of vintage Japanese WWII movies during Nobuhiko Obayashi’s final film, Labyrinth of Cinema, which screens as part of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

Sadly, this is the final night of business for a quaint little neighborhood movie theater in Onomichi, Obayashi’s hometown and the setting of many of his favorite films. They are going out in high spirits with an all-night screening of WWII propaganda films (an odd choice, but its Obayashi’s world). Mario will miss the theaters because of Noriko, a young teen employee, as much as the movies themselves. When she gets vortexed into a jazzy musical (the innocuous kind allowed by Imperial censors), it is all well and fine, but when the films start depicting combat, Mario goes in after her. Reluctantly, Hosuke (a diligent film student) and Shigeru (an aspiring yakuza) go in with him.

Despite the wartime themes and the shifts from the Edo era to the Great Pacific War, the three audience members-turned-participants navigate the film landscape fairly easily. Yet, they are always powerless to save Noriko in her various film guises. However, the stakes really go up in the film’s final hour (out of three), when the three film-lovers befriend a travelling drama troupe visiting Hiroshima in early August, 1945. Now they want to save all their new friends from what they know is coming.

Labyrinth is probably not Obayashi’s best film, but it might be the ultimate Obayashi film. Here he combines the breakneck pacing and surreal wtf-ness of House with the wistful nostalgia of his coming-of-age films, like I Are You, You Am Me and Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Seacoast. The general anti-war sentiments and specific anger regarding Imperial militarism he expressed in Hanagatami (and the documentary Seijo Story) is here in spades, but he also evokes memories of his “school girl” films, like The Little Girl Who Conquered Time.

The deliberately fake-looking aesthetic (reflecting the 1940s era) takes some getting used to and the tripped out interstellar prologue will be a stumbling block for some. However, Obayashi builds to a real smack-down of an emotional payoff. Granted, it takes three hours to get there, but the film is never boring along the way. In fact, it is one weird episode after another, including a meeting with Yasujiro Ozu, discussing his wartime compromises.

No matter how adventurous they might be, viewers need to fortify themselves before starting Labyrinth, because it is a three-hour visual barrage. It is also truly distinctive auteurist filmmaking. In Seijo Story, Obayashi seemed to be constantly editing this film—and now we can see why it was such a painstaking process, but his efforts with cinematographer-co-editor Hisaki Sanbongi bear considerable fruit. Every character call-back and each narrative parallel reverberates with significance (and there are many).

Japan Cuts ’20: Sacrifice

Before Japan was traumatized by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, it was traumatized by cults like Aum Shinrikyo and the United Red Army. Midori is a college student who was traumatized by both. Her mother forced her to join the Sacred Tide cult, but she snapped out of their spell when she witnessed the destruction of 3-11. She never freed herself from the Tide’s clutches, but Midori did. Unfortunately, the cult has not forgotten about the young woman or her psychic powers in Taku Tsuboi’s Sacrifice, which screens as part of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

Just before the disaster struck, Midori (the evil collective called her “Ap”) saw visions of it in a prophetic dream. That certainly impressed the Sacred Tide. Even though she managed to escape, they still keep tabs on her through brainwashed members stalking her on campus. To make matters worse, she is having catastrophic visions again.

Meanwhile, the popular but under-achieving Toko tries to take out her frustrations on loner Okita, after discovering his morbid fascination with a string of cat mutilation-murders. However, his interest is not what she assumes. Instead, he is conducting his own investigation, because he suspects the crimes are linked to the murder of a classmate.

Although Sacrifice lacks the operatic sweep and outré imagery of Sion Sono’s Love Exposure, the films are close cousins thematically. However, there is a ripped-from-the-headlines matter-of-factness to Sacrifice that just might make it more unsettling. Tsuboi vividly portrays how cult members willingly surrender their individuality. He also makes it clear doomsday cults are in the doomsday business.

Japan Cuts ’20: Special Actors

This cult supposedly worships a god from Jupiter about to celebrate its 8,396,825,800^th birthday (hey, who’s counting anyway?), but if it all sounds very Thetan, you’ve got the right idea. Of course, what the cult leaders really worship is money. A complex con worthy of The Sting is underway to expose them for what they are, but a struggling thesp with an acute physical aversion to confrontation is surprised (and a bit alarmed) to play a leading role in Shinichiro Ueda’s Special Actors, which screens as part of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

Poor Kazuto literally faints at the first site of aggressive behavior, so all his auditions quickly go from bad to worse. It has also made it difficult to hold down a job. His doctor makes it clear his issues are mental, not physical, but he is not ready for the rigorous work required to change. He also happens to be broke, but he fortuitously meets his long-lost brother, Hiroki, who hooks him up with an unconventional acting gig.

At the “Special Actors” agency, Kazuto and Hiroki are sent out into the real world to fulfill clients’ practical requests, like making them look good in front of a woman they are trying to impress. However, the stakes dramatically escalate when the agency is hired by a young woman, whose older sister has fallen under the cult’s influence. The brainwashed sibling is about to sign over ownership of the family’s quaint country inn to the cult. Obviously, this is a job for the Special Actors, who send nervous Kazuto and brash Hiroki into the lion’s den as undercover cult recruits.

Ueda caused an unlikely international sensation with his debut film, One Cut of the Dead, which maybe features the biggest perspective changing twist since The Sixth Sense. He keeps the switcheroos coming in Special, but we are primed to expect them, especially since this is essentially a big con movie. Ueda maybe presses his luck a little this time around, but it still jolly good fun.

More importantly, Ueda’s sophomore is just brimming with heart, just like One Cut. Kazuto is painfully shy, but we feel for him as much as Ueda clearly does—and we root for him accordingly. As his namesake, Kazuto Osawa looks like the saddest of sad sacks and acts like a nervous puppy dog, but when he has his day, it is quite satisfying.

Japan Cuts ’20: Seijo Story

Nobuhiko Obayashi was the mad genius behind House (and the sensitive auteur who helmed many other great Japanese films). Kyoko Obayashi is the producer (and den mother and caterer) who helped make them possible. As their names suggest, they were also happily married for over sixty years. Isshin Inudo & Eiki Takahashi profile the Obayshis and document the post-production work on their final ambitious collaboration in Seijo Story: 60 Years of Making Films, which screens as part of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

Seijo is to Tokyo a lot like what Studio City is to Los Angeles, but it is also home to a first-class university. That is where the Obayashis met as undergrads and collaborated on their first 8mm films. He somewhat logically decided his emerging talents as novelist and musician made him best suited to be a film director. She used her organizational skill to support his films. At first, she refused all credit, but eventually she has been duly recognized as a top producer.

As a filmmaker, Obayashi has helmed celebrity commercials, experimental films, coming-of-age dramas, and unclassifiable genre films. Initially, House was a flop, but in recent years, it has become a smash hit at midnight screenings. If you haven’t seen it yet, go watch it now. Yet, he is the first to admit their films have been a team effort.

Japan Cuts ’20: Extro

If you want to work as an extra in the Japanese film industry, you will find yourself wearing a lot of Edo-era historical costumes. If you’re really lucky, you might get crushed by a kaiju or two. No matter what the context, extras must blend-in and never stand-out. It sounds easy, but it will be quite an adventure for some extras pursuing their trade in Naoki Murahashi’s mockumentary, Extro, which screens as part of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

Kozo Haginoya is now semi-retired, so he has time for the extra work that comes his way through the Lark Agency. He mostly appears in Jidaigeki period productions filmed at the near-by Warp Station Edo, a model samurai-era town. Yet, his dream is to play a fireman, like Steve McQueen in Towering Inferno. Regardless, it will be touch-and-go for him just trying to make it through this episode of The Claws of Edo.

Unfortunately for Lark, Haginoya will not be Lark’s most embarrassing client. That’s when Extro takes a rather madcap turn. Murahashi definitely gives Japanese extras the Waiting for Guffman treatment, but he is so deadpan about it, the film’s zaniness totally sneaks up on the audience. For at least the first hour, viewers could be fooled into thinking they are watching a legit documentary, especially given the presence of real-life stars like Yuki Saito, Koji Yamamoto, and Riho Miaki (a.k.a. J-Pop star Riho Kotani), playing themselves.

Japan Cuts ’20: Tora-san, Our Lovable Tramp

His full name is Torajiro Kuruma, but everyone calls him just plain Tora-san. After forty-nine films, Japanese fans felt like he was a member of the family. Technically, the movie franchise reincarnated him. Tora-san originally premiered in a one-season TV series that outraged viewers by killing him off in the final episode. Yoji Yamada never made that mistake. He would helm Kiyoshi Atsumi in all but two Tora-san films, starting with the original, Tora-san, Our Lovable Tramp (a.k.a. It’s Hard to Be a Man), which screens as part of the Tora-san sidebar celebration during the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

Tora-san always fought with his father, so he left home early and never came back. However, he has started feeling sentimental, so he decided to return home. His kid sister Sakura is all grown up now, but she still lives with their aunt and uncle, because her marriage prospects are limited without a dowry. In fact, Tora-san comes home just in time to spoil a potential marriage negotiation arranged by her employer.

Poor Tora-san will never master the art of courtship. However, this will be the first time he tries to romance a woman on his own behalf, when he starts putting the moves on Fuyuko Tsubouchi, the daughter of Gozensama, the temple priest. She is way out of his league, but there might be hope yet for Sakura.

A Tora-san statue has been erected in the Shibamata district of Tokyo, where the films are set—and appropriately so. Starting with Tramp, the films lovingly capture the rhythms of life blue collar, lower-middle class neighborhood. Everyone works hard and does the best they can there, even Tora-san.

Despite the cliched description of Tora-san as a “lovable loser,” Atsumi’s portrayal is much subtler than you might expect. He is a bit of an idiot, but he has heart and we definitely feel for him when it is broken. There is no question Atsumi was the sort of clown who could also make viewers cry. Indeed, it is rather sweet to watch his sibling chemistry with Chieko Baisho, who portrays Sakura with wonderful sensitivity. As a result, it is easy to see why Yamada had her return in many subsequent Tora-san films.

Japan Cuts '20: Wolf's Calling (short)

It was a questionable application of a problematic law. Much to his dismay, director Toshiaki Toyoda was arrested (but never charged) for possession of an antique firearm that had been passed down through generations of his family. At least it inspired this short film. A young woman will uncover a similar heirloom in Toyoda’s Wolf’s Calling, which screens as part of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

The woman did not know what to make of the piece, but presumably her ancestor did. Toyoda now flashes back to the Edo era, more or less. Samurai like Rurouni Kenshin largely thought guns were cheating, but if you had someone packing, you definitely put him in front. Eventually, that warrior will come to the fore. However, Toyoda will not show us the battle. Instead, we only witness the call-to-arms and assembly at Kasosan Shrine. It sounds simple, but it is still pretty awesome to behold.

The forest-shrouded shrine is an enormously cinematic location that Toyoda films from many dramatic and inventive angles. This is one of the rare short films that really deserves to be seen on the big screen—the bigger, the better. The sound should also be cranked up, because the evocative soundtrack was composed and performed by Seppuku Pistols, who bring a punk rock aesthetic to traditional Japanese courtly music. As a bonus, Calling features a number of prominent Japanese films stars, including Tadanobu Asano as the veteran Takashi Shimura-like samurai.

Japan Cuts ’20: Beyond the Night

Folks in this provincial village need a paintball range or some kind of venue for letting off steam. Their anxieties are running high, but being Japanese, they keep it locked inside. Sometimes, it is hard to tell from descriptions whether a film is a proper thriller or a drama. In this case, it is still hard to decide after screening it. Simmering emotions will indeed erupt into violence during the course of Natsuki Nakagawa’s Beyond the Night, which screens as part of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

Mikiro Toyama has recently arrived in town, under rather murky circumstances. He is struck by Sotoko Hashida, a woman on his UPS (or whatever) delivery route, who seems to be bullied at work and abused by her husband. Yet, she is decidedly unreceptive to his cautious offers of help. We quickly learn she has a ragingly dysfunctional and codependent relationship with Atsuya Hashida, the underachieving son of a powerful local family. He definitely has sadistic tendencies, but she is not a masochist, per se. Their marriage cannot simply be boiled down to a dominant-submissive relationship. There is something more twisted going on between them.

The Hashidas also seem to share some dark secrets regarding her disappearing family members. In short, it is complicated, but Toyama is not inclined to let things go, even though the last time he developed a savior complex, it apparently did not work out so well. He will look to Sotoko for a cue, but her signals are definitely quite mixed.

Japan Cuts ’20: Fukushima 50

Thanks to the fifty brave plant workers, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear emergency was not Chernobyl. It wasn’t Apollo 13 either, thanks to irresponsible behavior of government and utility executives. Nevertheless, the courage and sacrifice of those who stayed behind at the Fukushima Daiichi power station has made them folk heroes. Their story is told in Setsuro Wakamatsu’s Fukushima 50, which screens as the official centerpiece of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

Initially, 50 of the 800 Daiichi plant employees stayed, but eventually their ranks swelled to 580, including firefighters and sub-contractors. Fifty is still a nice round number. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault. The combined effects of the earthquake and tsunami (the shifting tectonic plates actually lowered the protective sea-barrier) just set off a chain of disastrous events. Of course, site superintendent Masao Yoshida is best qualified to lead the crisis response, but he is constantly micro-managed and second-guessed by Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) executives in the capitol, as well as the Prime Minister’s office.

Fortunately, he can rely on the cool head and expert advice of his old colleague, Toshio Isaki, the shift supervisor. He was on-duty in the control room of the most critical reactor. It will also be Isaki who assigns “suicide squads” of veteran employees in a desperate attempt to relieve pressure on the containment facilities and cool the core.

Fukushima 50 is an unabashedly old-fashioned, but immediately gripping ripped-from-the-headlines disaster movie. There are some reasonably impressive catastrophe effects in the first act, but most of the tension comes from the claustrophobic setting and steadily escalating stakes.