{"id":40675,"date":"2016-12-16T15:19:09","date_gmt":"2016-12-16T19:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=40675"},"modified":"2016-12-16T18:39:19","modified_gmt":"2016-12-16T22:39:19","slug":"wit-life-308-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2016\/12\/16\/wit-life-308-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"WIT Life #308: Silence"},"content":{"rendered":"

WIT Life<\/a> is a periodic series written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator <\/strong><\/em>Stacy Smith<\/a> (Kumamo<\/a>to-ken<\/a> CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends along with h<\/strong><\/em>er<\/strong><\/em> own obse<\/strong><\/em>rv<\/strong><\/em>atio<\/strong><\/em>ns<\/strong><\/em>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Last night I attended a screening of Martin Scorsese’s new film Silence, based on the 1966 novel \u6c88\u9ed9 (Chinmoku) by Shusaku Endo, himself a Japanese Catholic.\u00a0 It is the story of a Jesuit missionary sent to 17th century Japan, who is pl<\/span>ay<\/span>e<\/span>\"\"<\/span>d with great nuance by Andrew Garfield.\u00a0 He and his followers endure horrible persecution during this period when \u96a0\u308c\u30ad\u30ea\u30b7\u30bf\u30f3 (Kakure Kirishitan<\/em> or Hidden Christians) are targeted for their beliefs.\u00a0 Having lived in Kyushu I had a vague se<\/span>nse of what had taken place in Nagasaki at that time, but not the extent of the ba<\/span>rbaric ways Christians were killed and tortured.<\/span><\/p>\n

Scorsese’s pursuit of making this film<\/a> began when he first read the novel while riding the shinkansen in 1989.\u00a0 His passion for the project was sure to have influenced the stellar performances from the cast, which includes Liam Neeson and Adam Driver as Garfield’s fellow missionaries, and Issey Ogata and Tadanobu Asano as the Inquisitor Inoue and his interpreter.\u00a0 Asano is fantastic in all of his works, and Ogata successfully captures his character’s\u00a0idiosyncrasies without being too campy.\u00a0 The film’s pacing was a bit slow so its length likely could have been cut, but the educational aspects alone made it worth sticking with.\u00a0 I missed the JETAA book club several years ago when we read Silence, but I look forward to comparing it to the movie.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By the way, Silence was shown at the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI), one of our city’s hidden gems.\u00a0 Along with a Scorsese retrospective the museum is currently featuring an exhibition on his career, something worth checking out.\u00a0 It is also showing the epic five-hour Happy Hour from director Ryusuke Hamaguchi on December 31st at 1 pm<\/a>, an intriguing film I previously wrote about here<\/a>.<\/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). 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. Last night I attended a screening of Martin Scorsese’s new film Silence, based on […]<\/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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[53,263,18,1,36,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-film","category-translatinginterpreting","category-uncategorized","category-wit-life","category-writers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-aA3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40675","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=40675"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40689,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40675\/revisions\/40689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}