Atomic Dome, Hiroshima

The Atomic Dome, the only structure in downtown Hiroshima still standing after the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945.

I visited it a number of years ago on the day coincidentally it was declared a World Heritage Site by the UN. I was accosted by a Japanese tv news crew wanting a reaction, and the English-speaking reporter asked me if I was American. I said I was Australian. Oh, sorry, she responded with some disappointment. We fought you people, too, I said, trying to be helpful.

After Zhang Yimou’s Hero, one of my least favourite films is Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. It is the story of the Bomb fed through a narcissistic adolescent militaristic fantasy. Akira ends with a symbolic Bomb and sets up a sci-fi allegory which folds a future over the past and the present. Structured around this moment, it rewrites Japan’s military imperial history through a narrative and characterizations which argue that Japan was destroyed not by military excess in WWII but by the corruption and weakness of bureaucrats and capitalists. By inference, it loops over the present to critique Japan’s contemporary circumstances as being similarly emasculated by consumptive excess, crime and bureaucratic corruption. In the ending of Akira is the horrifying conclusion that what Japan needs now is another Bomb, to cleanse it of its weakness and allow some imaginary Bushido essence to prevail. In its way, Akira is as repulsive an apologia for Japan’s form of fascism as Hero is for Communist authoritarianism.

Ping Pong

A micro review of a Japanese film we rented on DVD a few months ago from a pretentious video store down the road in Camden, north London. I wrote this for another livejournal blog, of film reviews, but I really just wanted to get back into writing again for pleasure, after finishing my PhD.

From Japan, based on a hugely successful manga, Ping Pong is about … er … ping pong, played by two best friends, their coaches, their own loser team and fanatical rival schools. The narrative is conventional – boys get ping pong, boys lose ping pong, boys get ping pong – but in that are stories of redemption, transcendence, ecstasy and death. Well, not literally death, but in the film the drama of ping pong encodes the obsessions of Japanese culture with the pursuit of the sublime in the spiritual, in suffering, and ultimately in the valorization of death itself. The final contest, between one of our heroes and his cast-iron rival, throws contemporary Japanese slacker culture against riffs on the bushido ideology of Japanese militarism, all undercut by the joke that these samurais are just smacking little plastic balls at each other. Ping Pong is shot with a stylization which invokes its hyper-real manga origins, and although the product placement is intrusive, it’s satisfying, funny and ironic.