Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 14

Trailer for On the Road: A Document

This is the second trailer from the Documentaries of Noriaki Tsuchimoto series that my wife just put out from her small company Zakka Films. It is for On the Road: A Document, one of Tsuchimoto's early masterpieces. 

As with the trailer that I introduced last time, for Minamata: The Victims and Their World, this one was put together by yours truly. This was a daunting prospect. On the Road is a brilliantly edited work, arguably one of the best editing jobs in documentary history, so anything I did to the editing would be like colorizing Citizen Kane. All I could do was provide chunks of the film - some of which may remind viewers of Scorsese's Taxi Driver - and again use music (from the original film by Miki Minoru) to cover up my inadequacies. But I did try to create some kind of a narrative trajectory, ending with the accident, which to Tsuchimoto was a metaphor of the accident of modern Japan. 

I tried not to mess up the editing, but I did fool around a bit with the image-sound combination. Again, that was mainly to hide my bad editing, but the constructed nature of my trailer does somewhat match the constructed nature of the film. On the Road was made when Tsuchimoto was still directing PR films, movies commissioned by companies or government agencies to promote their activities. These were thus less fly-on-the-wall documents than scripted and carefully planned propaganda pieces. A number of Japan's great postwar filmmakers, such as Ogawa Shinsuke and Kuroki Kazuo, came out of PR films, and all figured out ways to rebel against the form while working within it. On the Road is definitely scripted - it even uses actors. But Tsuchimoto, instead of following the script of the sponsor, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, who wanted a film foregrounding traffic safety issues and what the Police were doing about it, composed it with the help of a rebellious taxi drivers' union. The resulting film could look so well edited because it was largely pre-planned, but it was a precursor to Tsuchimoto's later work in that he decided to side with the powerless in society, showing their reality, not some "objective" reality as propagated by the mass media. The Police were not pleased and On the Road, despite winning some awards, was largely shelved for over thirty years. 

It is definitely a film to see for anyone interested in 1960s Japanese film, documentary, Tokyo Olympics, and postwar modernization.

Koreeda Hirokazu at Yale, Day 2

This got delayed by the quake and all, but here finally is my report on the second day of Japanese filmmaker Koreeda Hirokazu's visit to Yale University at the end of February 2011. (You can read the first report here.)

I wanted to give some of our students the chance to sit down and talk freely and immediately with Koreeda in an intellectual atmosphere. Since his English is not good enough to handle such a conversation without translation, I decided to hold a workshop on Saturday the 25th that was done entirely in Japanese. Unlike the first workshop, I did not ask Koreeda to prepare anything and thus left it up to the students to lead the discussion.

The first topic was his new film Kiseki, which literally means "Miracle," but was given the English title I Wish because the international sales agent thought "Miracle" might give the mistaken impression it was a religious movie. It was in fact commissioned by one of the branches of JR, a big railroad company in Japan, to commemorate the opening of the final leg of the Kyushu Shinkansen (bullet train). The story is about two young brothers, living apart because their parents got divorced, who are convinced that seeing two shinkansen pass each other in a special way can create a miracle. Koreeda showed a long trailer the sales agent prepared for foreign distributors (Koreeda stressed that this was not his editing or music!), but you can see an early Japanese version here. The film stars the two Maeda brothers, who are famous in Japan as manzai comedians, performing under the name Maeda Maeda, but who really want to be actors some day. (Koreeda told me over dinner that he was somewhat embarrassed during the auditions because everyone in the staff knew who they were except him.) It also has such Koreeda regulars as Natsukawa Yui (whom I really like), Odagiri Jo, Abe Hiroshi, and Kiki Kirin--as well as newcomers like the granddaughter of Kiki Kirin (she's the daughter of Motoki Masahiro, of Departures fame).

About 15 attended the workshop, but it was mainly my grad students studying Japanese film who pressed him with questions. The conversations didn't always mesh, however. It was less the age-old disjunct between intellectuals and artistic practitioners, than two sides talking at cross-purposes or using different conceptual categories. People were in particular focusing on the many cinematic metaphors that appear in his films like After Life or even Air Doll (the doll could symbolize cinema because, for instance, light passes through her and she works at a video store), but as I mentioned in the first report, he strongly distinguishes himself from cinephilic filmmakers, thus from the hermeneutic, often used by both critics and film scholars, that sees movies as a self-reflexive commentary on film. Thus the air doll, to him, was primarily a metaphor for the breath of life. When pressed on the issue of what he thinks of the power and or violence of the camera, especially towards social others (a question directed, I believe, at the problem of using a Korean actress to play what is essentially a sex slave), Koreeda did not fully answer the question, but emphasized his admiration for documentarists like Tsuchimoto Noriaki and their ability to work with not against their subjects. Koreeda confessed afterwards that he found all these questions quite challenging - he had not really had to answer the question of what he thought cinema was in quite a while - but his ultimate answer in the workshop is that he thought cinema was a mode of socialization (shakaika), a means of relating elements such as characters and audiences/filmmakers. This answer can seem surprising for those who see him as an aesthetic director, but I think it is a remnant of his youthful journalistic aspirations as well as also another way he distinguishes himself from the cinephiles, who often reject subordinating film to social ends.

There were many topics discussed during the workshop, but one answer I found noteworthy was the one he gave about novelizations. Koreeda, like a number of filmmakers in Japan, such as Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Kawase Naomi, and Aoyama Shinji, has penned novelizations of some of the films he has made. Some directors do it for the money and extra publicity (indie directors don't get paid much in Japan), but Aoyama won a major literary award for his novelization of Eureka and Koreeda did have dreams of becoming a novelist when he was young. He talked a bit about the difference between film and literature, especially how the latter tends to offer more explanation than cinema does, but he interestingly noted that, while he feels that he loses possession of his films upon their release, as they become the property of the audience, writing the novelization is one means he has of taking the film back into his hands. Thus emphasizing the personalized nature of the novel put another interesting twist to Koreeda's view of cinema as socialization.

The last big event of Koreeda's visit was the 35mm screening of Still Walking (with print provided by the IFC). We had a big turnout and a lot of good questions after the screening. Many focused on the production of the film. Koreeda's own mother died in 2005 and the film emerged from that experience. Half the dialogue spoken by the mother in the film, played by Kiki Kirin, comes in fact from Koreeda's mother. The song played in the film, Bluelight Yokohama, made famous by Ishida Ayumi, was also one of his mother's favorite tunes. (The title of the film comes from a line from the song's lyrics.) Koreeda even mentioned that both he and Abe Hiroshi, the lead actor, grew up in families dominated by strong women, and so the weak men in the film fit their own experience. This personal vision, however, was in tension with other visions on the set, perhaps "socializing" it, if we want to use that word. While he did not improvise much dialogue on the set (though the first dialogue in the film when You and Kiki cut radishes was improvised), Koreeda did try to use the children, who were less tied to the script, to break up any stiffness or theatricality in the adults' acting. Some effects, such as the interesting shot of Kiki Kirin out of focus with a towel in focus in the background (after she chases the butterfly in the house), were also discovered on the set. Even the set design, like all the bric-a-brac under the porch, were not out of Koreeda's experience, but actually borrowed from what was under the porch in an old medical clinic (only the entrance to the house in the film is real; the rest was built on a studio set). In the end, Koreeda emphasized that Kiki Kirin is not his mother: the character has separated from him and become Kiki's own. 

There were the usual questions about influence, but Koreeda insisted, for instance, when asked about the impact of Ozu's home dramas, that he refuses to watch films when writing his screenplays (again, the anti-cinephilic stance). There are some similarities with Tokyo Story - the disappointing kids, the doctor in the house - but Koreeda again emphasized that he feels himself closer to the more pessimistic Naruse Mikio than to Ozu. The rather gray worldview, where no one is a villain and no one is a hero, is he argued also more a result of his work in documentary than of his viewing of Japanese home melodramas. Still Walking is stylistically quite different from Maborosi, especially in its tight editing, but it shares with that film a refusal to directly depict character psychology. Still Walking, he argued, was a drama of things, as he used shots of minor objects, from toothbrushes to broken tiles, to evoke larger emotions and thus serve as the medium for psychology. That, perhaps, was another way Koreeda "socializes" spaces and objects in cinema.

It was a great event and I would like to thank Koreeda and all the cooperating institutions for their generous support.

Trailer for Minamata: The Victims and Their World

Zakka Films is a small company run by my wife, Ono Seiko. She's the only employee and so it is far from being a major player in the business. For a long time she was a coordinator at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (that's how we met), so she has a lot of solid connections that have helped her business get started. These include top scholars such as Markus Nornes and Jasper Sharp who've written material for the fine booklets included in her DVDs. I also help out a lot with writing contributions, editing, and checking subtitles, so I can testify to the quality of her product.

But there is one thing whose quality I cannot guarantee, and that's the trailers.

Because I made them.

I've done the trailers for all her DVDs so far (including that for the Roots of Japanese Anime), and while they are not tremendously bad, they're not that great either. I guess I don't have that much talent for editing. But they have been fun to do. I got to learn Final Cut and play around a bit with images. 

Here's the trailer I did for Minamata: The Victims and Their World, one of the DVDs in the Documentaries of Noriaki Tsuchimoto series that Zakka Films just put out. It reminded me again how much you can get away with in terms of the image if good music covers your tracks. Minamata, of course, is one of the great documentaries in Japanese, if not world, film history, which takes up the struggles of the victims of mercury poisoning (Minamata disease). With radioactive poison spreading through the environment right now in Fukushima, this film is as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.

I still wonder how well the image of the octopus fisherman works at the end of the trailer. For those who know the film and its history, he is one of the work's emblematic figures and frequently featured in advertising (his scene is also one of the most beautiful in documentary film history). But his face suddenly appearing in the trailer may seem a bit confusing for those who don't know the film. I did, however, want to suggest, even briefly, that this documentary is not simply a work of agitation, protesting against injustice and seeking redress, but also a sensitive depiction of the everyday lives of those who live by and with the sea, and who suffer most from its poisoning.

Approaching Spectators of Japanese Cinema

A great new anthology has just come out in Japanese that takes up the broad issue of spectatorship of Japanese film from a variety of perspectives. I had written about this earlier.

Kankyaku e no apurochi (観客へのアプローチ)

Ed. Fujiki Hideaki (藤木秀朗)

Shinwasha (森話社), 2011. ISBN 978-4-86405-020-3

It is part of the excellent Nihon eigashi sosho series put out by Shinwasha, but somewhat different in that it is just bigger (apparently Nagoya University, where Fujiki-san teaches, helped out with the publication).

The book features a splendid variety of scholars from Japan and abroad, including some of the best working on Japanese film and image culture. 

The contents include Miyao Daisuke writing about Hayashi Chojuro's (Hasegawa Kazuo's) female fans, Nakamura Hideyuki (who also contributed to my film theory publication) writing on 3-D film in Japan, Kato Atsuko on film industry market surveys, Kim Donghoon on cinema in 1920s colonial Korea, Fujiki Hideaki on film as social education in interwar Japan, Kinoshita Chika on Makino Masahiro's Onna keizu, Kitamura Hiroshi on Yodogawa Nagaharu, Thomas LaMarre on otaku consumption, Usui Michiko on utsushie, Joseph Murphy on film and literature in 1920s Japan, Sasakawa Keiko on Mizoguchi Kenji's The Downfall of Osen in Osaka (the film is available with subtitles as part of the Talking Silents series), and Hata Ayumi on 1970s movement cinema. 

I made a contribution, one that discusses the history of Japanese film criticism in light of its uneasy relation with theory. I would like to thank Dogase Masato for translating it.

You can get the book through Amazon.jp.

The Documentaries of Tsuchimoto Noriaki

My wife runs the tiny company Zakka Films, which has been trying to fill some huge gaps in the availability of Japanese films by putting out DVDs of rare work. Her first DVD was Roots of Japanese Anime, a great collection of prewar animation, and she has just announced the release of the second set of films, The Documentaries of Tsuchimoto Noriaki. As with the first release, I helped out in various ways from checking subtitles to helping edit the pamphlet to even editing the trailers. This is a particularly important release for me given my personal relations with Tsuchimoto-san. 

Here's the press release. 

Greetings,

We would like to announce the new release of THE DOCUMENTARIES OF NORIAKI TSUCHIMOTO from Zakka Films. We were somewhat reticent to advertise our new products at a time of great crisis in Japan, but given the documentarist Noriaki Tsuchimoto's long commitment to battling environmental pollution and critiquing modern Japanese society and the corporate state, we finally felt we should release them now since his works are as pertinent today as they ever were.

Noriaki Tsuchimoto is one of the most important figures in the history of Japanese documentary, famous for his compelling films on the mercury poisoning incident in Minamata, Japan, and for his fascinating portraits of a modernizing Japan and a changing Asia. Tsuchimoto was involved in over 100 films, of different topics and styles, and Zakka Films is introducing four of those, starting with MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD, one of the masterpieces of world documentary; ON THE ROAD: A DOCUMENT, a traffic safety documentary that was so critical of modern Japan it was shelved for 40 years; and two rare documents of Afghanistan filmed in the 1980s before the Taliban, including TRACES: THE KABUL MUSEUM, the world's only moving image record of a priceless collection that was largely lost to bombs and looting. The DVD comes with the booklet, The Documentaries of Noriaki Tsuchimoto, which includes a critical evaluation of Tsuchimoto's career and commentaries on each film by prominent scholars.

New Release!

THE DOCUMENTARIES OF NORIAKI TSUCHIMOTO

Four masterworks by one of Japan's greatest documentary filmmakers

Bringing the world's untold stories to light, from the scourges of Japan's modernization to Afghanistan before the Taliban

Now on DVD with English subtitles. You can view the trailer for each DVD on YouTube by clicking the trailer link.

● ON THE ROAD:  A DOCUMENT  (DVD-R / Region Free / NTSC / 42 min. /  B&W)

A powerful, award-winning critique of the newly modernized Japan of 1963 seen through the eyes of a taxi driver. Watch the trailer.

● MINAMATA:  THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD  (DVD-R / Region Free / NTSC / 120 min. /  B&W)

Celebrated as a masterpiece of documentary, MINAMATA follows the victims of Minamata disease, Japan's most notorious case of environmental pollution, in their struggle for recognition and compensation. Watch the trailer.

● ANOTHER AFGHANISTAN: KABUL DIARY 1985 (DVD-R / Region Free / NTSC / 42 min. / Color)

An engrossing portrait of Kabul in the days before the Taliban. When few foreigners were allowed to film in the country, Tsuchimoto succeeded in revealing the everyday life of Afghanis, particularly those of women. Watch the trailer. 

● TRACES: THE KABUL MUSEUM 1988 (DVD-R / Region Free / NTSC / 32 min. / Color)

A rare tour of the Kabul Museum and its priceless antiquities before 70% of the them were destroyed or stolen. The only moving image record of this treasure house of Afghani history and culture. Watch the trailer.

For more information on these DVDs, please visit our website.  

Now at a reduced price!

To commemorate the release of THE DOCUMENTARIES OF NORIAKI TSUCHIMOTO, we've reduced the price of THE ROOTS OF JAPANESE ANIME, the first DVD we released. If you don't yet have this highly acclaimed collection of classic Japanese animation, which includes the notorious war film, MOMOTARO'S SEA EAGLE, you can get it now for $10 off!

How to order

If you are an individual customer, please purchase our films at Film Baby. Institutions must purchase THE DOCUMENTARIES OF NORIAKI TSUCHIMOTO directly through us. More information is available at our website. 

Contact:

Seiko Ono, Zakka Films

Reconsidering the History of Japanese Film Theory

I am pleased to announce the publication of Issue 22 of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society dedicated to the theme, "Decentering Theory: Reconsidering the History of Japanese Film Theory." This is the first publication in a non-Japanese language to consider the rich and varied history of Japanese film theory. It presents both translations of some of the major works and scholarly analyses of those theorists and their historical contributions to film thought. A major theme throughout the issue is the unique problem of how to approach and define film theory in Japan.



Thinkers represented include Nakai Masakazu, Hasumi Shigehiko, Yoshida Kiju, Imamura Taihei, Gonda Yasunosuke, Sato Tadao, Kitada Akihiro, and Nakamura Hideyuki, with works ranging in era from 1914 to 2011. They all focus on questions of the status of cinema and how to approach it, but other topics broached include animation, early cinema, mediation, spectatorship, documentary, meaning, and Ozu Yasujiro. A translation of one of Akutagawa Ryunosuke's "film scripts" is also included (Akutagawa wrote the stories on which Rashomon is based). 

A list of the issue contents is available on my Books site.

This publication is part of an ongoing project of resurrecting the fascinating history of Japanese film theory that I and some of my students and colleagues are pursuing. I am currently writing a history of Japanese film theory, and working with Abé Mark Nornes to create an anthology of Japanese film theory in English. This issue of the RJCS is a king of test run for that. I am also talking with Iwamoto Kenji in Japan about an anthology in Japanese.

I am quite proud of the translations. We put a lot of effort into them and I think they do justice to the splendid ideas of the original authors.



The Review of Japanese Culture and Society is published by Josai University in Japan. Single issues can be purchased for $20.00 (US). Click here for details. (Note that the RCJS website is quite out of date: Issue 21 is not even listed on the site--and it is also about Japanese film.)

Reference Works for Researching Japanese Cinema

With the wonderful cooperation of the East Asian Library at Yale University, I've prepared a research guide for Japanese film studies entitled "Japanese Reference Materials for Studying Japanese Cinema at Yale University" that has just been uploaded to the Library website.

It offers a concise introduction to the print and online reference materials in Japanese available at Yale that are essential for studying cinema. If you or any of your colleagues or students need to find out something about a film or director, this guide will help you know where to look, even if you are not using the Yale Library. It covers dictionaries, encyclopedias, filmographies, books, journals, and online databases. I believe the guide is the first of its kind on the net.

It does not substitute for the book I co-authored with Abé Mark Nornes, Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies, which not only explains reference materials in multiple languages, but introduces archives and other institutions important for researching Japanese film. It, however, is not available online.

If your library or website is able to do this, feel free to set up links to this online guide.

Since it is on the net, it is a fluid text and thus open to comments and additions. Feel free to contact me if you have any suggestions.

The Tohoku Earthquake in Japan

Last week I went to Japan as I often do at the beginning of the spring break at Yale. I pay my taxes, do some research, consult with people about projects at Yale, etc. I was actually meeting Tsuchimoto Motoko, the wife of the great documentarist Tsuchimoto Noriaki, for lunch on Friday, 11 March 2011, at a sobaya on the eighth floor of the Takashimaya department store at Yokohama Station. My wife is putting out DVDs of some of Tsuchimoto's work. 

It was at 2:46 pm when the quake hit. One gets used to earthquakes in Japan, so at first we just felt it was just another minor trembler. But the shaking got worse and worse and went on and on. I was in Kyoto when the Kobe earthquake occurred in 1995, and that quake started violently, suddenly, and lasted only about 20 seconds. This started slowly and seemed to go on forever, giving you plenty of time to wonder when the building is finally going to fail. Afterwards I found out that Yokohama experienced shaking of Shindo 5- or 5+, which is pretty serious. Motoko-san and I hid under the table. The department store immediately announced the quake on the PA system and provided warnings. It took too long, but finally the shaking died down and Motoko-san and I left the building via the stairs. There was a huge crowd in front of Yokohama Station as many people had fled the nearby structures.

It was quite clear this was a huge quake, one probably not centered in Yokohama. There was a big aftershock within about 20 minutes and people fled to the bus circle in front of the station. The trains had stopped, but with people in the roads, the traffic had stopped too. I couldn't make a call on my cell phone, but I could use the internet to see that this was a historic quake that struck off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture. 

Motoko-san and I sat by the department store for about an hour waiting for the trains to resume. We were happy to be alive and we shared the experience with others - it is at these times that you can easily talk to strangers. But it was soon clear the trains were not going to start soon, so we parted. I figured the Yokohama Municipal Subway would begin sooner than JR, so I sat down at that part of the station. There soon was an announcement, however, that Yokohama City had told everyone to walk home. 

I knew that walking home could always be a possibility if a big quake hit, but I was not expecting to have to do it from Yokohama Station. While most people were still milling around, I decided to do it and quickly went to a station kiosk and bought a map, some water, and some candy to eat along the way. I then started out on a trek that eventually took about four hours.

First walking through the area near the station, I could see there was structural damage even here. There was a small crevice formed in front of a building near Tokyu Hands. 

I kept walking, going up the hill towards Mitsuzawa Park. I wondered whether I shouldn't pick a route that went near a train line so that I could check at stations along the way whether the trains were running, but that would have involved a longer, more circuitous route, so I picked one that was shorter (I later checked on Google and saw I did pick the shortest route). But that involved going up and down a number of big hills for the first few kilometers. Lugging a heavy computer, I began to worry whether I could do this. And at first, there were not that many people walking, so I sometimes wondered whether I was not just the only one in the entire city who was foolishly walking home. I still couldn't make any calls on my phone, though I could use it to send short e-mails to my family and check some short internet articles.

The sun set and it got dark. The area I was walking in still had lights, but just before I reached Kamoi Station, I encountered an area that was suffering from a power outage. The street in front of the station had power, but the station house did not. It was closed and there were a lot of people milling around waiting for a bus or taxi. I decided to keep on walking, but from that point on, the entire area was pitch black except for the lights from passing cars. By this time there were a lot of people walking along with me. It was quite surreal, all of us walking through major urban areas with no lights. I couldn't even check my map at first because there wasn't enough illumination.

But everyone was calm and took the experience in stride. You could see local volunteers directing traffic at intersections using flashlights. There were a few factories along the way with their own generators that had lights I could use to check my map.

I finally reached Nakayama Station and it was pitch black. I used a public toilet in the dark and wondered whether I shouldn't wait for the bus that goes from Nakayama to Aobadai Station. But there were no buses in sight and a long line had formed of people waiting. So I decided to walk. I was lucky, however. After a few hundred meters, I ran into a taxi and quickly flagged it. Up until that point, I had walked about 12 kilometers, but was able to go the last 4 by taxi. The traffic was dense, and the going was slow, but I finally made it to Aobadai after 8 pm. Luckily, the area around the station had power. I ate a bit, got on my bike, and went home. Fortunately there was not much damage there.

I felt lucky. The images I finally saw on TV were horrifying. This was terrible catastrophe that made anything I experienced miniscule in comparison.

Yet I had a plane to catch the next day. And the news about the reactors in Fukushima got worse and worse. The transportation to the airport was a mess on Saturday: some of the trains had started, but at first none were going to the airport. It was clear there was no way I was going to make my plane, so I quickly decided to change flights. I was lucky to get one the next day and then just set out, determined to get to the airport whatever way I could and stay the night at a hotel. What usually takes about 2 hours took about 5 1/2, as there were few trains and you had to switch trains quite a lot because there was no real schedule and some trains only went part of the way. I also had to wait a long time for a taxi at Narita Station. 

At the hotel, I quickly learned of the first explosion at the Fukushima reactor. There was no official information from the government, so for a few hours, there was nothing but speculation on TV and one could easily begin fearing for one's life. False rumors were also being spread by internet. I could only relax a bit when Edano finally got on TV to explain what was going on. (My impression has been that Japanese news coverage has been pretty calm and rational, whereas the foreign news, especially CNN, has been overly alarmist.) 

Narita was very crowded, but I boarded my plane with no problem and arrived back home in Connecticut on Sunday. It's good to be back in the bosom of my family. 

But my heart goes out to my friends and family in Japan. Motoko-san had to walk nearly 12 hours to get back to Fujisawa. All my immediate friends and family are safe, but the grandmother of a friend is missing. I worry every moment about the potential consequences of the nuclear accident and am not getting much sleep. My wife and I watch Japanese TV on Ustream, and pray for the quick rescue and recovery of people in the other areas hit by the quake. 

I urge everyone to donate to the earthquake relief. The Japan Society in New York is helping organize donations. Please donate here. 

I was interviewed by the Waterbury Republican-American about my experiences. I don't subscribe, so I cannot check to see if they got it right. 

Japan is the place I love, study, and make one of my homes. I ask all of you to join me in prayer for its safety and quick recovery.

The Eastern Japan Earthquake

Last week I went to Japan as I often do at the beginning of the spring break at Yale. I pay my taxes, do some research, consult with people about projects at Yale, etc. I was actually meeting Tsuchimoto Motoko, the wife of the great documentarist Tsuchimoto Noriaki, for lunch on Friday, 11 March 2011, at a sobaya on the eighth floor of the Takashimaya department store at Yokohama Station. My wife is putting out DVDs of some of Tsuchimoto's work. 

It was at 2:46 pm when the quake hit. One gets used to earthquakes in Japan, so at first we just felt it was another quake. But the shaking got worse and worse and just went on and on. I was in Kyoto when the Kobe earthquake hit in 1995, and that quake started violently, suddenly, and lasted only about 20 seconds. This started slowly and seemed to go on forever, giving you plenty of time to wonder when the building is finally going to fail. Afterwards I found out that Yokohama experienced shaking of Shindo 5- or 5+. Motoko-san and I hid under the table. The department store immediately announced the quake on the PA system and provided warnings. It took too long, but finally the shaking died down and Motoko-san and I left the building via the stairs. There was a huge crowd in front of Yokohama Station as many people had fled the nearby structures.

It was quite clear this was a huge quake, and probably not centered in Yokohama. There was a big aftershock within about 20 minutes and people fled to the bus circle in front of the station. The trains had stopped, but with people in the roads, the traffic had stopped too. I couldn't make a call on my cell phone, but I could use the internet to see that this was a historic quake off of Miyagi Prefecture. 

Motoko-san and I sat by the department store for about an hour waiting for the trains to resume. We were happy to be alive and it was at these times that you could easily talk to strangers about the experience. But it was soon clear the trains were not going to start soon, so we parted. I figured the Yokohama Municipal Subway would begin sooner than JR, so I sat down at that part of the station. There soon was an announcement, however, that Yokohama City had told everyone to walk home. 

I knew that walking home could always be a possibility if a big quake hit, but I was not expecting to have to do it from Yokohama Station. While most people were still milling around, I decided to do it and quickly went to a station kiosk and bought a map, some water, and some candy to eat along the way. I then started out on a trek that eventually took about four hours.

First walking through the area near the station, I could see there was structural damage even here. There was a small crevice formed in front of a building near Tokyu Hands. 

I kept walking, going up the hill towards Mitsuzawa Park. I wondered whether I shouldn't pick a route that went near a train line so that I could check at stations along the way to see if the trains were running, but that would have involved a longer, more circuitous route, so I picked one that was shorter (I later checked on Google and saw I did pick the shortest route). But that involved going up and down a number of big hills for the first few kilometers. Lugging a heavy computer, I began to worry whether I could do this. And at first, there were not that many people walking, so I sometimes wondered whether I was not the only fool really walking home. I still couldn't make any calls on my phone, though I could use it to send short e-mails to my family and check some short internet articles.

The sun set and it got dark. The area I was walking in still had lights, but just before I reached Kamoi Station, I encountered an area that was suffering from a power outage. The street in front of the station had power, but the station house did not. It was closed and there were a lot of people waiting around for a bus or taxi. I decided to keep on walking, but from that point on, the entire area was pitch black except for the lights from passing cars. By this time there were a lot of people walking along with me. It was quite surreal, all of us walking through major urban areas with no lights. I couldn't even check my map at first because there wasn't enough illumination.

But everyone was calm and took the experience in stride. You could see local volunteers directing traffic at intersections. There were a few factories along the way with their own generators were there was enough light to check my map.

I finally reached Nakayama Station and it was pitch black. I used a public toilet in the dark and wondered whether I shouldn't wait for the bus that goes from Nakayama to Aobadai Station. But there were no buses in sight and a long line had formed of people waiting. So I decided to walk. I was lucky, however. After a few hundred meters, I ran into a taxi and quickly flagged it. Up until that point, I had walked about 12 kilometers, but was able to go the last 4 by taxi. The traffic was dense, and the going was slow, but I finally made it to Aobadai after 8 pm. Luckily, the area around the station had power. I ate a bit, got on my bike, and went home. Fortunately there was not much damage there.

I felt lucky. The images I finally saw on TV were horrifying. This was horrible catastrophe that made anything I experienced miniscule in comparison.

Yet I had a plane to catch the next day. And the news about the reactors in Fukushima got worse and worse. The transportation to the airport was a mess on Saturday: some of the trains had started, but at first none were going to the airport. It was clear there was no way I was going to make my plane, so I quickly decided to change flights. I was lucky to get one the next day and then just set out, determined to get to the airport whatever way I could and stay at a hotel. What usually takes about 2 hours took about 5 1/2, as there were few trains and you had to switch trains quite a lot because there was no real schedule and some trains only went part of the way. I also had to wait a long time for a taxi at Narita Station. 

At the hotel, I quickly learned of the first explosion at the Fukushima reactor. There was no official information from the government, so for a few hours, there was nothing but speculation on TV and one could easily begin fearing for one's life. False rumors were also being spread by internet. I could only relax a bit when Edano finally got on TV to explain what was going on. (My impression has been that Japanese news coverage has been pretty calm and rational, whereas the foreign news, especially CNN, has been overly alarmist.) 

Narita was very crowded, but I boarded my plane with no problem and arrived back home in Connecticut on Sunday. It's good to be back in the bosom of my family. 

But my heart goes out to my friends and family in Japan. Motoko-san had to walk nearly 12 hours to get back to Fujisawa. All my immediate friends and family are safe, but the grandmother of a friend is missing. I worry every moment about the potential consequences of the nuclear accident - I am not getting sleep. My wife and I watch Japanese TV on Ustream, and pray for the quick rescue and recovery of people in the other areas hit by the quake. 

I urge everyone to donate to the earthquake relief. The Japan Society in New York is helping organize donations. Please donate here. 

I was interviewed by the Waterbury Republican-American about my experiences. I don't subscribe, so I cannot check to see if they got it right. 

Japan is the place I love, study, and make one of my homes. I ask all of you to join me in prayer for its safety and quick recovery.

Koreeda Hirokazu at Yale, Day 1

The Japanese filmmaker, Koreeda Hirokazu, director of such award-winning works as Maborosi and Nobody Knows, came to Yale at the end of February to show two of his films and conduct workshops with our students. It was a greatly successful event and I want to convey my thanks to him and everyone else who helped make it possible. This is the first of two reports on what he did and said during his stay at Yale.

Although Koreeda arrived on Thursday the 24th (I look him to the famous Louis' Lunch for lunch after he got into town), we put him to work at noon on Friday with a workshop for students who couldn't speak Japanese (one for those who could was held on Saturday). I asked him to prepare a talk and he and I made up a clip reel in the morning. The result was a truly enlightening session.

He showed four clips. The first was from Hitchcock's The Birds: the famous scene of the birds assembling in the playground. Koreeda used this to emphasize that cinema should not be about "why" - for we never learn why the birds attack - but about "how." The second clip was from the end of Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, where Giulietta Masina turns to the camera and faintly smiles. Koreeda said this was the first time that he really became conscious of the palpable gaze of the director, and of the relationship between the one filming and the one filmed. Next he showed the cafe scene from Kurosawa's Ikiru, where the young woman shows Watanabe the toy bunny and he finally decides what he must do with the remaining portion of his life, a scene that signifies his metaphorical rebirth. As a young man, Koreeda was as impressed with this film as any other would be, but he began to doubt its humanistic optimism and belief in heros like Watanabe. The result of this doubt can be found in After Life, which was the fourth clip he showed: the scene where the dead begin introducing themselves, up until an old man is seen being unable to think of a single memory he feels exemplifies his life.  That man's name is also Watanabe, and he is Koreeda's answer to Kurosawa: a much more realistic figure of a man who did nothing special in his life and has little to say for it. A non-hero who interested Koreeda much more. The four clips worked together quite well.

To end the workshop, two of my students showed Koreeda their film, a quite ambitious work with some connections with Japan, and he commented on it. The comments were not only precise and helpful - he certainly has a great eye - but they revealed much about his view of cinema. He really stressed that every shot should have a reason, and complained of contemporary films in both Japan and Hollywood which seemed to just multiply shots in order to prevent the audience from getting bored. This could sound like Koreeda is a classical director, but in the next day's workshop, he stressed the "reason" need not be narrative, but can be aesthetic or ethical (this brings Koreeda closer to the realm of art cinema). Establishing such reasons should prompt the filmmaker to create a more economical style centered on "key shots" that reduce the number of shots in a scene (he thus pointed to specific shots or cuts which he felt were unnecessary). I felt I had experienced a very concrete lesson in filmmaking.

After a nice reception, we showed Koreeda's 1996 television documentary Without Memory, which is about a man named Hiroshi who has largely lost the ability to accumulate new memories (called Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome) because he was denied vitamins during a long hospital stay, the result of unreasonable rules regarding insurance at the time. The theme of memory is obviously central to Koreeda's oeuvre, and in the Q & A after the screening, Koreeda stressed how Without Memory relates to After Life. In both works, the centrality of memory to personal identity is amended with the proviso that the memories that define oneself need not be one's own; "one's memories" can include the memories others have of you. He said that at the time he made Without Memory - when he was still just a director at TV Man Union - he was wondering what it meant to be a "shuzaisha" or reporter/director/investigator. He saw Hiroshi as a kind of shuzaisha - someone who must get information from others - and took encouragement in the possibility that he himself (Koreeda) could also live on in the memories of others. (This, of course, could connect with the use of film in After Life.) 

Koreeda talked a lot about the importance of documentary in his work. In some ways, it defines the basic stance in all of his filmmaking. He in particular emphasized that he considered the fundamental ethical standpoint of documentary to be filming from the standpoint that one does not - or cannot - know the person one is filming. Not only much fiction filmmaking, but also much documentary, begins from the presumption that it knows the people in the event or the drama. That, to Koreeda, is unethical, and therefore even in his fiction films he avoids subjective cinematic structures that offer easy access to the internal states of his characters. This is again the focus on the "how," not the "why."

This aligns him with the major trend in Japanese film of the 1990s, as I argue in my book on Kitano Takeshi, but Koreeda repeatedly throughout the visit tried to distance himself from many of those filmmakers. If many of them, from Kurosawa Kiyoshi to Aoyama Shinji, were educated under Hasumi Shigehiko and took up a somewhat cinephilic approach to film, Koreeda stressed that while others may make films on the basis of what they see in other films, he makes films on the basis of what he sees apart from films. I think this is crucial to how he defines himself (as well as defends himself, since some of the Hasumi-influenced film critics have been very critical of Koreeda in Japan). That said, he was quick to stress the importance of film viewing in his education and particularly cited Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Ken Loach, Victor Erice, John Cassavetes, and Lee Chang-dong as directors whom he sees as important, if not necessarily influences. Among Japanese filmmakers, he likes Naruse Mikio the best. 

Stay tuned for the report on Day 2.