The protagonist struggles against prejudice due to strong Japanese taboos against people who deal with death – the very same taboos that made it difficult for Takita to even get his film shown in Japan. If you enjoy Zatoichi, our team also recommends Kitano’s Dolls, Hanabi, and Brother.Ī favourite of several members of the team is Departures, a 2008 film about an unemployed cellist who finds a job preparing bodies for burial. Zatoichi won the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion for Best Direction in 2003, as well as numerous other awards in Japan and abroad.
#ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU GUIDANCE SERIES#
The blind samurai is a stock theme of Japanese storytelling, and the film harks back to a long-running series of films and TV programmes from the 1960s-80s. Zatoichi is Kitano’s masterpiece, in which the director plays a blind swordsman who comes to the defence of a town being extorted by yakuza gang members. Other Koreeda titles recommended by the InsideJapan team include Like Father Like Son, I Wish, and After Life. His film Nobody Knows is based on the true story of four children who were abandoned by their mother for nine months in an apartment in Tokyo, and was first shown at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where it won several awards. When speaking to the team for suggestions, the name Koreeda came up time and time again. Seriously, don’t bother) we thought we’d put together a list of a few of our personal favourites… Nobody Knows (2004) Though all worth a watch (except Memoirs.
(dm me if you want a link to this movie.Any discussion of Japan and cinema is bound to alight on Lost in Translation, Studio Ghibli, and perhaps the insipid adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha. I’m not ashamed.” It’s a seriously beautiful and powerful scene.
They laugh in the face of their fear of intimacy and sex. Here we have two kids who for very different reasons have had their feelings about intimacy - specifically sex - become very complicated, scary, connected to trauma, and inextricably tied up with a massive amount of shame.Īnd without explicitly saying so to each other, they take this moment to take their power back. Ito, smiling, yells it again, louder. “Aaaaah and oooooh!!” She smiles and yells it again. “Aaah and ooooooh!!” So Aihara turns to look out over this river and yells “aaaaah and ooooh!” to the ether. That’s when Aihara says “so if you do that would you say aaaah and ooooh?” Ito laughs and says “yeah, I guess I would.” But after he says that he confessed to Yoshida, he says that after being rejected he kind of lost hope of finding love and thought about doing sex work. He chastises her for eavesdropping and they drop the topic. He laughs it off, but as the audience we understand that him telling her this information is a big deal.Īihara a moment before had asked Ito what he was asking his therapist about when he was saying weird stuff like “aaah and ooooh”. Ito picks up on this earnestness and tells her very truthfully and vulnerably that he has, and that he was - unsurprisingly - rejected. But this time around she asks him earnestly if he’s confessed to him yet. Before, Aihara teased Ito about having a crush on a male classmate (Yoshida). And that, naturally, she now doesn’t trust people or believe their motives.Īihara calls out to Ito as he leaves his appointment, and in spite of the fact that Ito hasn’t liked her too much so far, they wind up walking home together. We also learn that Aihara was previously raped. We learn from their scenes speaking with their therapists that Ito is putting on a brave, casual face, but holds a lot of shame and is sorting through all of society’s ideas about love, sex, heterosexuality, etc. Neither of them knew that the other was going to therapy, until now. In this scene, Ito and Aihara have just come from their own respective appointments with their psychologists.
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