May 6

WIT Life #268: New Japanese movies worth seeing

Film, Translating/Interpreting, Uncategorized, WIT Life, Writers Comments Off on WIT Life #268: New Japanese movies worth seeing

WIT Life is a periodic series written by professional Writer/Interpreter/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03).  She starts her day by watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends along with her own observations.

The cherry blossoms have come and gone since the last time I posted, truly fleeting!  I was lucky enough to enjoy them twice this year, both during a trip to Japan last month and at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s Sakura Matsuri earlier this month.  To get through the long flight over the Pacific I like catching up on movies I missed, and I spent my outward voyage enjoying Oscar nominees and the return trip watching some new Japanese movies.  During my inward flight two of the movies I picked, Judge! and The Little House, both featured one of my favorite Japanese actors, Satoshi Tsumabuki.

The former film features Tsumabuki as a young advertising agent who is forced by his boss to go in his place as an international judge for a worldwide TV Advertising Festival taking place in Santa Monica.  By great coincidence, his boss’s name is Ichiro Otaki and Tsumabuki’s character’s name is Kiichiro Ota, giving them the same name if written Japanese-style with last name first.  Ota points out that when abroad, names are written with first name before last name, but his boss ignores his concerns and sends him off.  Another name coincidence is that Ota’s female co-worker Hikari has the same last name (in comparison to Kiichiro, she is amusingly referred to as the “talented Ota” by Otaki).

Kiichiro doesn’t have confidence in his English speaking ability, so he enlists Hikari to pose as his wife during the business trip.  Upon arrival, they meet their fellow countrywoman who is an executive at the famous ad agency Hakuhodo, whose Toyota commercial is a viable contender for the grand prize.  However, Kiichiro learns that if he doesn’t fix it so that his agency’s commercial  wins, he will be fired.  Various hijinks ensue in this quirky, though predictable and stereotypical, romantic comedy.

The Little House is in a more serious vein, and in this movie Tsumabuki has a minor role as a university student looking back on the life of his great aunt Taki who has just passed away.  In 1935, Taki leaves Tohoku to become a house servant to a wealthy Tokyo family (she is played by Haru Kuroki, who won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival this year!).  While working at the house Taki is privy to family secrets, like the wife’s romantic entanglements with her husband’s younger co-worker (played by Hidetaka Yoshioka, star of Always: Sunset on Third Street 3, another movie I caught on the plane and the final film in this fabulous series).  The background of war looms heavily, and in the end it is Taki who plays a role in determining the lovers’ fate.

In non-movie related news, as a follow-up to my last posting about Japan’s underutilized female resources, here’s an interesting article about the profiled female manager’s potential for becoming a director.  In a related story, here’s another article about the rebranding of the previous Wonderful Wife magazine to the newly titled Chanto, which targets working married women with kids.  Clearly these are hot topics in Japan these days, where Sheryl Sandburg’s Lean In has also received much attention after being released there last year.