Title: Air Doll
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Year: 2009
Notes: Based on the comic “Kuuki Ningyo,” by Yoshiie Gōda.
TLDR: Amelie, if Amelie was an inflatable sex doll that magically came to life, and if Amelie made you really, really sad.
I mistook her for a hump of discarded flannel until I saw her face, the unmistakable color of braised meat. She’s sleeping, sprawled across a cardboard box in front of a taxi stand. Her head rests on a plastic shopping bag filled with crumpled newspapers.
Her feet are on the mat, in stockings. Two blue slippers are on the sidewalk. The Japanese take this bit of hygiene seriously – shoes bring the filth of the outdoor world into clean domestic spaces, introduce mites to the tatami, kick rocks into the bathtub.
The homeless woman doesn’t let her shoes step on the tattered piece of discarded cardboard that she calls her home, tatami room and futon.
On the first day in the office I met an intern I had mistaken for a teacher. I had taken a default position of addressing everyone with safe formalities and bowing at an angle just short of tying my shoes.
The intern returned a deeper bow and I bowed in return, which he returned even deeper. This action recycled itself until the intern literally ran from the bowing radius.
I’d find out later that the poor guy was bound by tradition to bow deeper than me. I was actually being an asshole.
Since then, I’ve learned a bit more about bowing in Japan.
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Taking Golden Week off to entertain a friend from home and celebrate my birthday.
But, I post my toy-camera and iPhone photos from Japan at least once a day over at The Birdwatcher’s Report.
You can also check out some other J-Bloggers who are awesome writers and nice people:
See you next week.
Title: Battle Royale
Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Year: 2000
Notes: A 3D version of this film is being re-edited for American release in 2011. This article refers to a subtitled Japanese edition of the original, 2000 theatrical release.
TLDR: High school kids are inexplicably drafted into an annual government-sponsored contest where students must fight to the death until only one survives.
There’s some irony that the English “convenience store” is such a misnomer. There aren’t real conveniences, just bathrooms and cigarettes, packaged food and buckets of shaved ice smothered in anti-freeze colored syrup.
Japan has adopted the concept – and word – for convenience stores into konbini, but konbini are a whole other creature. They actually make life easier for you.
