More Kurosawa

Fortunately, I have begun to utilize Netflix instant streaming for something more substantial than watching reruns of the Office or bad mid-90s sci-fi (Johnny Mnemonic excluded, of course - review to come). Basically, Netflix feeds me all of the Kurosawa I can digest at the moment, and the latest was "Ikiru", a really nice piece about an elderly bureaucrat (the always-awesome Takashi Shimura) who discovers, after having wasted 25 years of his life in the department of public affairs, that he has stomach cancer and 6 months to live. He swings wildly from depression to benders to taking a young co-worker on dates and all the while his co-workers speculate as to what has gotten into him (he doesn't tell anyone he has cancer - not his co-workers, not his son).

The film makes a really nice turn when Watanabe dies and the last hour of the film alternates between his wake and flashbacks via his co-workers' memories of the last 5 months of his life, when he endeavored tirelessly to have a small playground built on the site of a cesspool in the middle of the city. As in 'High and Low', the question of values and morals looms large, and like in that film, it is difficult to ascertain just how ironic or subversive Kurosawa is trying to be with his story. Watanabe is seen ultimately as rebelling against the bureaucracy, but he does not cast off the shackles and rage against the machine, so to speak; instead, he submits himself fully to the bureaucracy, debasing himself to the various officials, politicians, even 'peons' as one wake-attendee notes - all in the service of creating this little park before he dies. It is an open question as to whether this is to be seen as truly heroic, or as ironically heroic. Is it absurdity that heroism is to consist of successfully navigating bureaucracies? Or is Kurosawa really identifying modern virtue in this manner? This may simply be a cultural divide between Japanses and American culture, but I feel that this kind of sentiment pervades most of Kurosawa's films, even those set in feudal times. A sense of absurdity certainly pervades the wake by its end, once the attendees are noticeably drunk: the younger workers vow to take on the bureaucracy and make it more efficient, doing so with the fervor of revolutionaries and urging one another, "don't forget this feeling!"

Infrastructure! In 1930s Tokyo!

From the Visualizing Cultures Department at MIT:

The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto largely inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be).

Among other amazing imagery, the site has 100 woodblock prints by Koizumi Kishio depicting Tokyo's transition to modernity:

“100 Views of Great Tokyo in the Shōwa Era,” a series of woodblock prints produced between 1928 and 1940 by Koizumi Kishio, explore the rebirth of Tokyo in the years following the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. Koizumi’s prints depict the transformation of an important Asian city as it embraced modernity, maintained traditions, and became the site of ultimately disastrous political policies. In addition, Koizumi was a member of a new, modern printmaking movement in Japan known as sōsaku-hanga or “creative printmaking.”

No. People NEED sunlight.

A lot of crazy stories come out of Japan. Cramming people into trains. Vending machines with used panties. Hordes of Crows. Hordes of bee to attack the hordes of crows. Suicide Clubs.
And now this. Is Tokyo really so expensive that people will do this to themselves? Or are the crows really that bad? From Boing Boing:

The BBC reports on a cyber cafe outside Tokyo that has a dark room divided into tiny cubicles where 60 people "who rarely emerge" live. These folks are called cyber drifters and "they have just enough money to stay off the streets." It costs $500 a month to live in one of these "coffin-size booths," which have no natural light or fresh air. "In Tokyo it doesn't get any cheaper than that, or more claustrophobic." The owner of the cyber cafe is making a tidy sum off the rent: 60 X $500 = $30,000

“The whole world lives together in New York. And we use a lot of poly bags.”

[photo by Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times]

There is apparently a century-plus-old dispute between Japan and South Korea regarding the Dokdo Islands. Chang-Duck Jeon, president of the Korean Dry Cleaners Association, has been trying to raise awareness of it by having dry-cleaning bags printed with this image and slogan, selling them mostly to dry cleaning businesses in New York City.

“It was a way to speak out,” Mr. Jeon reasoned. “What’s ours is ours.”

The islands, known as Takeshima in Japan, are not as big of an issue for the Japanese-American community in the city. From the New York Times:

“The conflict doesn’t really come up,” he said. A spokeswoman for the Japanese Embassy in Washington said she was having a hard time finding someone to comment on the dispute, and she referred a reporter to the Web site of the Japanese Foreign Ministry. There, “Japan’s Inalterable Position on the Status of Takeshima” is spelled out in 10 languages.