If You're Being Bullied, Change [Roll of 28 (9)]

A very long time ago, I was an exchange student in Nagoya. The night before a test, my neighbor had a big party, and through the paper-thin walls there wasn't much I didn't hear. I went over and asked them to keep it down. Then again. Then again with some yelling. The next morning I headed out to take my test and found my front door vandalized, the key-card slot jammed full of coins and generally a mess that I couldn't even close properly. After the test I went to student admin to report the damage and I used the word いじめ,  bullying. "Don't be silly", the staff member said, "you're a nice person. It can't be bullying."

Because bullying only happens to people who have done something to deserve it.

I understood immediately what she meant, because around the same time I had watched a TV show featuring a young man who had been bullied as a child for being fat. He had grown up to be a personal trainer and he was dedicating his life to combating bullying... by running free fitness programs to help overweight kids lose weight.

On setsubun Tiger was home sick, so we watched the pre-school kids' shows. One featured an oni (ogre) who was lonely but couldn't make friends because everyone was scared of him. The solution the show offered? Put a hat on to cover his horns, swap his club for a bunch of flowers and change his name to onii-san (big brother) not oni-san. "But", said the oni, "without horns I'm not an oni at all, and if I change my name I wont feel like myself." The response? "You want to make friends, don't you?"

The theme of Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea I found most intriguing is the victim-blaming. Therru is horribly disfigured after being gang-raped and thrown into a fire. The book notes that when people see her scarred face the first thing they ask is "what did she do?" and not "what was done to her?" Not surprisingly, this observation is absent from the Studio Ghibli film ゲド戦記, despite Therru being a prominent character (she is also considerably less disfigured in the film than in the novel).

When I told my co-workers about our intention to adopt, and began telling them how high the numbers of kids in orphanages are, one teacher chimed in with "and some of them are probably good kids, too."  During our interviews we were asked if we would agree to parent a child born out of wedlock, the child of someone with a criminal record, or a child resulting from rape. I assume those are the not-good kids. They should have chosen better parents.

My thoughts are with Michael Morones and his family.

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Loyal Dog Stories: Why Do We Enjoy Their Suffering?

A while ago I "liked" a facebook page that posted lots of cute puppy pictures. Who doesn't like puppy pictures, right? They also post dog related news, which depressingly often means stories about animal cruelty and the always inadequate sentences the perpetrators receive. Another depressingly frequent topic is "loyal dog waits X period of time for humans who won't return." Sometimes the humans in the story are dead, but mostly they have abandoned the dog. Here are some examples:

http://www.lifewithdogs.tv/2011/09/abandoned-dog-waits-three-years-for-owners-return/
http://www.lifewithdogs.tv/2013/01/heartbroken-dog-attends-mass-daily/
http://www.lifewithdogs.tv/2013/06/loyal-dog-waits-over-a-week-for-owners-who-abandoned-him/
http://www.lifewithdogs.tv/2012/06/loyal-yorkie-waits-2-days-at-rest-stop-for-truckers-return/

What is it that attracts people to these stories? A mix of pathos, admiration for the "loyal" dog, a longing for some unconditional love? They even appear as entertainment in movies from Australia's Red Dog to America's (version of Japan's) Hachiko.

I hate these stories. With a passion. I don't see heartwarming tales of doggie goodness, I see human ugliness and little else. Take perhaps the most famous "loyal dog waits" tale of them all, Hachiko, for example. The House of Two Bows does an amazing job of eviscerating the mythology around the story:

http://shibasenji.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/hachikos-drooped-ear/

To me, the drooping ear is an emblem of the years of hardship that Hachiko suffered on the streets. He did not turn his back on any happy home to keep the flame alive for his dead master. The fact is that there was no other home for him to go to. All parties involved were more interested in maintaining the myth of the downtrodden wanderer who had nothing else other than the memory of his master; his impoverishment only heightened the tragic poignancy of the story, and that’s why it had to be maintained. The pedagogical value of Hachiko’s story did not have to be steered towards imperialistically-tinged notions of unerring devotion towards a singular, grand master. It could have been a lesson in humane charity, in animal welfare, in collective social responsibilities towards homeless pets, or really, any needy living creature. But the fact that any alternative interpretations were drowned out by the dominant ideology of loyalty and national unity in a time of heightened militarism is represented by that single, falsely pricked ear.

 In this interview, well worth watching, Malcom Gladwell talks about the hubris behind the human creation of dogs:

Dogs were evolved to pay attention to us...
They are this extraordinary example of a species that we have bred on the basis of how much attention they pay us; how closely they look us in the eye and hang on our every word. I mean, it's the most narcissistic thing we have ever done as human beings.
A dog pays more attention to your face than a human being does.

And that's the thing. We made dogs to love us, to be devoted to us, to DEPEND on us. And we let them down, often and catastrophically.

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Japanese Drama... Gray's Anatomy Inspired?

  Recognize who is who? (Image Source Here)

OK, Resident: Story of Five Interns is very heavily Grey's Anatomy inspired. One would almost be tempted to say that it is a Japanised version. Resident has been out for a while now and it has been gradually moving further away from Gray's, but the first few episodes had some very familiar elements. I'm not bagging the show out by noting the similarities to Gray's by the way, I find inter-cultural re-makes fascinating.

Resident tells the story of five young doctors starting their surgical internship. The main character is trying to prove that she can make it as a doctor to her overbearing father, who is a successful doctor. She works with a tall and model-looking female resident (who uses a pink stethoscope), a severe but talented female resident, a fluffy-haired and accident prone male intern whose adoration she is oblivious to, and another male intern who is an abrasive and seemingly self-absorbed womanizer with hidden depths. The romantic interest is a divorced senior doctor with awe-inspiring hair. Early cases in the hospital include a patient who is swallowing magnets due to family problems and a teen-aged girl making herself ill trying to please her perfectionist and never satisfied mother. There's even an emergency in a stalled elevator.

Despite these similarities, there are some huge differences necessitated by the dissimilarity of the Japanese medical system and Japanese television's much more conservative attitude towards sex. One of the pleasures of watching inter-cultural interpretations is seeing what has been changed and what hasn't (Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, based on Macbeth, is fascinating in this regard). Although it has developed into much more soap-opera and less medical-drama, Grey's still places medicine and ethical conundrums pretty firmly in the center of each episode, while Resident is all about the emotional connections between the interns and the patients. There's little discussion of medicine and not many scenes featuring surgeries. The biggest thing that jumped out at me is the simplistic attitude to metal illness and emotional problems in the show. In one episode a man who has been allowing his wife to gradually kill him rather than confront her illness has his situation resolved by the residents handing him a pamphlet on mental illness. After being willing to die rather than confront his wife's situation, it seemed less than probable that he would come around so easily. I guess it was a good pamphlet. Then there was the teenaged girl who was repeatedly attempting suicide. All it took to "fix" her was a trip to the OR to see a dead car-crash victim's family crying. Problem solved. And the girl with the overbearing mother? The residents just told her mother to be nicer to her, and she felt bad for being mean and all was well.

Here are the opening sequences to Gray's and Resident in one video, for your enjoyment.

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ひまわりと子犬の７日間 Sunflower and (Her) Puppies’ Seven Days

This was is of those movies you don’t really want to watch but feel like you should. The titular seven days refers to the period dogs are kept in the government shelter before being killed (in Miyazaki prefecture specifically, but I think the period is pretty standard). So it was obviously not going to be a feel-good movie. I went with two dog loving friends, one of whom has a shiba adopted from our prefectural shelter. We were expecting to have a bit of a cry, but we really weren’t prepared for how quickly the film moved into “dear god someone save that dog” territory. The entire cinema was in tears literally five minutes in, with the first dog dying within two minutes. It was utterly wrenching (don't worry, the trailers are relatively free from "I hate the human race" moments).

My local Board of Education has been promoting the film to schools and there has been an accompanying poster campaign about being prepared for a life-long commitment to a pet before deciding to keep one etc. This is sorely needed in Japan. I follow a no-kill privately run shelter called “Heart Tokushima” on facebook and although it is cheering to see the wonderful work they do, the sheer number of cats and dogs who come through and the number that the local government shelter kills rather than allowing them to take is heartbreaking. 

As a movie I don’t think ひまわりと子犬の７日間 was particularly well made. The plot is a vehicle for the message, and the story line suffers as a result. Nevertheless, it wasn’t terrible and the message is important enough that I’m happy to overlook the slightly torturous script. You can see some of the additional campaigning for shelter dogs accompanying the movie on the official website.

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“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” Movie Re-made in Japan

The 1997 German film Knockin' on Heaven's Door (co-written by director Thomas Jahn and one of the stars, Til Schweiger) is one of my all time favourite films. It came on late one night when I happened to be sitting in front of the TV and I was hooked in the first five minutes. When Rutger Hauer made his cameo appearance towards the end I felt like my heart would break from the perfection of it.

The story is a perfect combination of unlikely but passionate friendship, inevitable tragedy and cheeky action. The characters in the original film are a good-for-nothing bad boy and a timid, knitted vest-wearing man who meet in hospital after being told they both have weeks or maybe days to live. They steal a car to visit the ocean before they die, but the car belongs to gangsters who subsequently chase them across the country to get it (and the contents of the boot/trunk) back.

The Japanese version came out in 2009, so this isn’t really news, but I only just got around to watching it. I was curious how a Japanese film would handle the road-trip aspect of the story. In Germany driving to the sea side is a convincingly epic adventure, but in Japan no-where is all that far from the coast. And, of course, the Japanese version replaced the timid man with a fourteen-year-old girl. I was expecting it to be pretty terrible, but it was really good! It lacked the incredibly moving man-love that made the German original so compelling, but instead the bad-boy character (played by Tomoya Nagase) adopted a very sweet older-brother attitude to the young girl. It didn’t enter the creepy territory I had worried about. I had hoped that Rutger Hauer's character might have been played by Beat Takeshi, but sadly it was not to be. They changed the gangster boss to a tax-fraud motivational speaker, which was quite cleaver. They also suggested a link with the governor of Tokyo, which I suspect may have been a dig at Ishihara Shintaro (who certainly deserves it).

Some scenes were taken shot-for-shot from the original (lemons pouring from a cupboard in the hospital kitchens for example), while others were given a Japanese spin (shopping in Harajuku). I was disappointed that the bank robbery, one of my favourite scenes from the original, occurred off screen in the Japanese version. I did enjoy the Japanese take on it though: they rob a post office rather than a bank, but in Japan all post offices are also outlets for the post office bank. For the rest of the film they kept talking about the “not bank robbery, post office robbery”.

I definitely recommend seeing the original first if you haven’t. It packs a much bigger emotional wallop. But do also check out the Japanese version, it is a lovely re-make and quite sweet. If at all possible I would avoid “The Bucket List”, which takes one of the key premises from the German film.

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