{"id":34197,"date":"2014-03-16T11:39:08","date_gmt":"2014-03-16T15:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=34197"},"modified":"2014-03-25T22:38:45","modified_gmt":"2014-03-26T02:38:45","slug":"wit-life-264-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2014\/03\/16\/wit-life-264-election\/","title":{"rendered":"WIT Life #264: Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"

WIT Life <\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em>is a periodic series written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator <\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em>Stacy Smith<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>(Kumamo<\/a><\/strong><\/em>to-ken<\/a> CIR, 2000-<\/strong><\/em>03).\u00a0 <\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em>She starts<\/strong><\/em> her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she sha<\/strong><\/em>r<\/strong><\/em>es some of the interesting tidbits and <\/strong><\/em>t<\/strong><\/em>r<\/strong><\/em>ends along with h<\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em>er own observations.<\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em>\"campaign\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday I went to see director Kazuhiro Soda’s documentary Campaign<\/a> (\u9078\u6319) at Japan Society, being shown as part of Richie’s Electric Eigh<\/a>t: T<\/a>he Bold and the Daring <\/a>(part 2 of the film series honoring Ritchie that I talked about in a recent post<\/a>).\u00a0 It came out in 2007 and was screened at the Berlin Film Festival that year, and was loved by Ritchie who introduced it at a preview at Tokyo’s Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan.\u00a0 This fascinating, self-funded film follows Soda’s Tokyo University (\u6771\u5927) classmate Kazuhiko Yamauchi in becoming the LDP candidate in a by-election for a seat on the Kawasaki City Council, after relocating there from Tokyo for that purpose.\u00a0 Campaign tells the story of how Yamauchi is groomed as a promising newcomer for this well-established conservative party.\u00a0 The LDP is killing it with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and his reform platform on the national level, but engaged in a close battle with the DPJ on the local level.<\/p>\n

Yamauchi’s education extends to his wife Sayuri, a particularly interesting character in the film.\u00a0 He is instructed to refer to her as his “housewife” (\u300c\u5bb6\u5185\u300d or kanai) as opposed to “wife” (\u300c\u59bb\u300d or tsuma), a term they both take umbrage against but become resigned to using.\u00a0 In addition, Yamauchi’s supporters within the LDP’s well oiled local political machine later encourages her to quit her job to focus on her husband’s political career, an idea that outraged her.\u00a0 Yamauchi urges her to yes them to death without committing to anything, but she is enraged that they would even ask her to do such a thing when he hasn’t even won the election yet.<\/p>\n

Sayuri is the s\"20140315_170852\"<\/a>table breadwinner as Yamauchi is a self-employed coin and stamp collector, and in the Q&A following the film Soda provided some more insight into his unique subject.\u00a0 Yamauchi had met his wife on the Internet, not a common thing in Japan, and they honeymooned in North Korea.\u00a0 Prior to the election, which Yamauchi wins by a narrow margin, he had no political background and in fact had never once voted for the LDP.\u00a0 Though he went to Japan’s most prestigious national university, Yamauchi was a different year than Soda as he had failed the entrance exam five times.\u00a0 However, just having the \u6771\u5927 seal of approval was enough to make him a viable candidate for the LDP to back (though he is eventually abandoned by the party due to ideological differences, and become a house husband when he and his wife have a child).<\/p>\n

These sorts of details would have made viewing of the documentary take place through a different lens, which is what Soda said he strives to avoid.\u00a0 His background in television documentaries has made him averse to adding any kind of supplementary explanation, so he maintains a strict policy of only showing what he can shoot, unadorned by music, narration or any extras.\u00a0 Soda also shared that he does no research before shooting to avoid having preconceptions, as well as has no goal in mind when he begins.\u00a0 He enjoys making discoveries this way and considers his film-making process a journey.<\/p>\n

Soda released Campaign 2 last year, and it follows Yamauchi as he enters another local race, this time as an independent candidate without the powerful LDP machine behind him and in post-Fukushima Japan.\u00a0 His motivation for reentering politics was that no one was addressing the nuclear issue, and he becomes the only candidate to do so.\u00a0 I was sad to see that I just missed a screening of this film as part of MOMA’s recent Documentary Fortnight<\/a>, but am hoping Japan Society will show it soon and invite Soda back to speak, as this captivating director makes New York his home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WIT Life is a periodic series written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03).\u00a0 She starts her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends along with her own observations. Yesterday I went to see director Kazuhiro Soda’s documentary Campaign (\u9078\u6319) at Japan Society, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[53,263,18,36,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-film","category-translatinginterpreting","category-wit-life","category-writers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-8Tz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34197"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34334,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34197\/revisions\/34334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}