Tag Archives: japan society

INTO THE SHINTOHO MIND WARP — FROM THE SECOND AGE OF JAPANESE FILM: GHOST STORY OF YOTSUYA

Penniless samurai Iemon Tamiya (Shigeru Amachi) plots a murderous path to success in GHOST STORY OF YOTSUYA

GLOBUS FILM SERIES 2013: GHOST STORY OF YOTSUYA (TOKAIDO YOTSUYA KAIDAN (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2009)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Wednesday, February 27, $12, 8:00
Series runs February 27 – March 10
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Last year, Japan Society’s Globus Film Series, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” featured contemporary films from Japan and Korea that explored love, sex, fetishism, and violence in unusual ways. This year Globus focuses its attention on the Japanese film studio Shintoho, which broke off from the famous Toho Company during a strike and went on to make more than five hundred movies during the 1950s and 1960s, many becoming low-budget cult classics. Curated by Mark Schilling, “Into the Shintoho Mind War: Girls, Guns & Ghosts from the Second Golden Age of Japanese Film” kicks off February 27 with Nobuo Nakagawa’s Ghost Story of Yotsuya (Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan), an oft-told Macbeth-like tale based on an 1825 kabuki play written by Tsuruya Nanboku IV. Filled with ambition and no moral code, penniless samurai Iemon Tamiya (Shigeru Amachi) and his servant, Naosuke (Shuntarô Emi), decide to murder their way up the ladder to success. First they meet the innocent sisters Iwa (Katsuko Wakasugi) and Sode (Noriko Kitazawa), but they have to get rid of Iwa’s fiancée, Yomoshichi (Ryûzaburô Nakamura), if Iemon is to marry her and then Naosuke is to take Sode. Once Iemon and Iwa wed and have a child, he starts eyeing Ume Itô (Junko Ikeuchi), whose wealthy father could lift his still-low standing, but that means Iemon would have to dispose of Iwa and her loyal friend, Takuetsu (Jun Ôtomo). However, as Iemon soon finds out, death does not necessarily deny vengeance. Shot in lurid reds and greens by Tadashi Nishimoto, Ghost Story of Yotsuya takes quite a while to get going, spending far too much time establishing Iemon and Naosuke as evil characters with no conscience, but once it delves into the horror realm, it becomes wickedly good fun, including fantastic makeup and genuine chills, along with plenty of strangeness. Much of the film doesn’t make sense, and some of it is downright monotonous, but the ending is quite a memorable one. The screening at Japan Society will be followed by the Enka Ecstasy party, with attendees encouraged to wear black-and-white clothing with two color accessories (we suggest red and green, of course); Neo Blues Maki will perform. The series, with all films being New York premieres, continues through March 10 with Teruo Ishii’s Flesh Pier and Yellow Line, Yoshiro Ishikawa’s Ghost Cat of Otama Pond, Michiyoshi Doi’s The Horizon Glitters, Toshio Shimura’s Revenge of the Pearl Queen, Kyotaro Namiki’s Vampire Bride, and Nakagawa’s Death Row Woman.

ROBOT THEATER PROJECT

Robot Theater Project includes a pair of one-act plays starring real robots at Japan Society (photos by Tsukasa Aoki and Tatsuo Nambu)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
February 7-9, $28, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Last month the Resonance Ensemble revived Karel Čapek’s 1920 play, R.U.R., the work that introduced the word “robot” to the world — and a highly influential story that involved machines gaining sentience and threatening humankind. Seinendan Theater Company takes that to the next level this week at Japan Society with Robot Theater Project, a pair of one-act plays written and directed by company founder Oriza Hirata in which real robots play characters onstage. In Sayonara, a woman with a terminal illness is cared for by Geminoid F, described in the cast biographies as “a female type tele-operated android [with the] potential to go beyond an experimental platform and become a commonly used robot in human society.” In I, Worker, a man struggles to deal with the loss of his child while his robot questions the meaning of life; the mechanical being is played by Robovie R3, “a life-sized robot invented to research communications between humans and robots.” While Geminoid F is making its theatrical debut, Robovie R3 previously appeared in Hirata’s Three Sisters, Android Version. The human actors include Bryerly Long, Hiroshi Ota, and Minako Inoue. The two plays, developed in collaboration with Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University, will be performed February 7-9 at Japan Society, Sayonara in English and Japanese with subtitles and I, Worker in Japanese with subtitles. Hirata and Dr. Ishiguro will participate in Q&As following the February 8-9 shows. In addition, Hirata will lead an acting workshop, “Exploring Naturalism,” on February 9 at 1:00, delving into his unique “contemporary colloquial theater.”

Robots and humans interact in moving ways at Japan Society

Update: As the audience enters the Japan Society theater for Sayonara, the first of a pair of one-act plays, two characters are already onstage, sitting in chairs. Although it appears to be two women, one brunette and Asian, the other blonde and Caucasian, it turns out that while the latter is a living, breathing female, Bryerly Long as a young woman dying of a terminal disease, the former is Geminoid F, a remarkably realistic android playing a robot who has been hired by the woman’s father to recite beautiful poetry to make his daughter’s final days peaceful. Geminoid F, who is powered through air pressure via twelve motorized actuators, doesn’t mouth the words exactly, which, along with her vacant eyes, are the only things that give her away as a mechanical being until she is carried off at the end, a long tube connecting her to electronic controls. The interplay between the android and the human is quite moving and believable, with a new scene added involving the nuclear disaster at Fukushima and how robots can help in the aftermath. In I, Worker, Hiroshi Ota (who also plays a small part in Sayonara) and Minako Inoue (who voices Geminoid F) are parents trying to cope with the death of their child. The husband is having more difficulties getting back to a relatively normal existence, which is also the case with the family’s two robots, played by Robovie R3s. While Geminoid F was created to look like a human, Robovie R3 is more in the mode of a futuristic R2D2/Dr. Who type, with fanciful colors and round, wide eyes. Just like the parents, the male robot has lost purpose in his life and is trying to find the will to go on, but I, Worker contains much more humor, supplied by the robots themselves, including how they exit the stage at the end. The two plays work because writer-director Oriza Hirata has created two pieces in which the stories themselves deal with the interchange between humans and robots; he has not cast the androids as real people going through completely real situations, and human actors are not playing robots. The plays would not be successful if they were performed only by robots or only by humans; instead, by bringing the two together, Hirata and robotic scientist Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro have built a fascinating meta that surrounds the tales, a harbinger of things to come both on- and offstage in our ever-evolving world.

CONTEMPORARY DANCE SHOWCASE 2013: JAPAN + EAST ASIA

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, January 11, and Saturday, January 12, $28, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society gathers together dancers and choreographers from Tokyo, Kyoto, and Taipei this weekend for the fifteenth annual Contemporary Dance Showcase: Japan + East Asia. Makotocluv founder Makoto Enda, who specializes in environmental performances, teams up with former Dairakudakan dancer Kumotaro Mukai on Misshitsu: Secret Honey Room – Duo Version, what is being called “post-post-post-butoh.” The officially stated goal of Tokyo-based hip-hop superstar Kentaro!! and his company, Tokyo Electrock Stairs, is “to touch your heart and break through it,” and they’ll attempt to do just that with Send It, Mr. Monster, a work set to Japanese pop songs and standards. In Kyoto-based choreographer Kosei Sakamoto’s elegiac Haigafuru~Ash is falling, five members of his Monochrome Circus company move very slowly over a stage continually changing color; the piece was inspired by his personal reaction to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. And in the multimedia, interactive Seventh Sense, Taipei-based choreographer Chieh-hua Hsieh blends sound, movement, and color as his Anarchy Dance Theatre and the audience itself influence motion sensors that reconfigure the space and alter perception. The January 11 show will be followed by a Meet-the-Artists reception.

SILVER WIND: THE ARTS OF SAKAI HŌITSU (1761–1828)

Sakai Hōitsu, “Cranes,” two-panel folding screen, ink and colors on paper, circa 1820 (courtesy the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 6, $15 (free Friday from 6:00 to 9:00)
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Born in Edo to an aristocratic samurai family and trained in Kyoto, Sakai Hōitsu became a master artist specializing in gorgeous depictions of nature, particularly birds, plants, waves, and flowers, often painted on gold-leaf backgrounds. Dozens of his dramatic works are on view in the sumptuous “Silver Wind: The Arts of Sakai Hōitsu (1761–1828),” continuing at Japan Society through January 6. This first major American retrospective of Hōitsu, who was also a poet and became a Buddhist monk in 1797, follows his development as a student of the Rimpa school, copying and/or inspired by works by brothers Ogata Kōrin and Ogata Kenzan, and concludes with paintings by Hōitsu’s own pupil, the supremely talented Suzuki Kiitsu. In the two-panel folding screen “Cranes,” Hōitsu portrays five cranes on a gold landscape cut in half horizontally by a winding black river; the detail in the birds’ eyes and feet is dazzling. “Spring and Autumn,” a pair of two-panel screens, and “Maples and Cherry Trees,” two six-panel screens, come alive with spectacular colors so vibrant you can practically smell the grass and flowers spread across them. “Views of Xiao and Xiang” is much subtler, a peaceful purple-gray scene with emptiness leading to the titular Chinese mountains in the background. In the hanging scroll “The Poet Hitamaro,” Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, one of the Thirty-Six Immortal Poets, is shown sitting cross-legged on the right, gently smiling at a forest on the left. The last room dedicated to Hōitsu is the stunning “Birds and Flowers of the Twelve Months,” as he lyrically depicts the changing seasons with grace and beauty, featuring such birds as the white camellia, the Siberian blue robin, the warbler, and the sparrow. The exhibition ends with the work of his primary disciple, Kiitsu, whose lush style predicts the popularity of Japanese manga as a method of visual storytelling. “Silver Wind” is a breathtaking exhibition that holds that much more power as the year finishes up with dreary gray days filled with dank cold and rain.

JAPAN CUTS: 13 ASSASSINS

Kôji Yakusho sidebar at Japan Cuts festival includes Takashi Miike’s brilliant 13 ASSASSINS

FOCUS ON KOJI YAKUSHO: 13 ASSASSINS (JÛSAN-NIN NO SHIKAKU) (Takashi Miike, 2010)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, July 21, $12, 8:20
Japan Cuts series continues through July 28
212-715-1258
www.13assassins.com
www.japansociety.org

Japanese director Takashi Miike’s first foray into the samurai epic is a nearly flawless film, perhaps his most accomplished work. Evoking such classics as Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Mizoguchi’s 47 Ronin, Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, and Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, 13 Assassins is a thrilling tale of honor and revenge, inspired by a true story. In mid-nineteenth-century feudal Japan, during a time of peace just prior to the Meiji Restoration, Lord Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki), the son of the former shogun and half-brother to the current one, is abusing his power, raping and killing at will, even using his servants and their families as target practice with a bow and arrow. Because of his connections, he is officially untouchable, but Sir Doi (Mikijiro Hira) secretly hires Shinzaemon Shimada (Kôji Yakusho) to gather a small team and put an end to Naritsugu’s brutal tyranny. But the lord’s protector, Hanbei (Masachika Ichimura), a former nemesis of Shinzaemon’s, has vowed to defend his master to the death, even though he despises Naritsugu’s actions. As the thirteen samurai make a plan to get to Naritsugu, they are eager to finally break out their long-unused swords and do what they were born to do. “He who values his life dies a dog’s death,” Shinzaemon proclaims, knowing that the task is virtually impossible but willing to die for a just cause. Although there are occasional flashes of extreme gore in the first part of the film, Miike keeps the audience waiting until he unleashes the gripping battle, an extended scene of blood and violence that highlights death before dishonor. Selected for the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and nominated for the Silver Lion at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, 13 Assassins is one of Miike’s best-crafted tales; nominated for ten Japanese Academy Prizes, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay (Daisuke Tengan), Best Editing (Kenji Yamashita), Best Original Score (Koji Endo), and Best Actor (Yakusho), it won awards for cinematography (Nobuyasu Kita), lighting direction (Yoshiya Watanabe), art direction (Yuji Hayashida), and sound recording (Jun Nakamura). 13 Assassins is screening at Japan Society on July 21 at 8:20 as part of the Japan Cuts sidebar “Focus on Kôji Yakusho” and will be introduced by the actor; the July 20-21 mini-festival also includes such other Yakusho vehicles as his directorial debut, Toad’s Oil, as well as Shuichi Okita’s The Woodsman and the Rain, the New York premiere of Masato Harada’s Chronicle of My Mother, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, and Masayuki Suo’s original Shall We Dance?

NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL / JAPAN CUTS: MONSTERS CLUB

MONSTERS CLUB is another offbeat and unusual tale from Toshiaki Toyoda

MONSTERS CLUB (MONSUTAZU KURABU) (Toshiaki Toyoda, 2011)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Sunday, July 15, 6:00
Japan Cuts series continues through July 28
212-715-1258
www.subwaycinema.com
www.japansociety.org

Two years ago, Japanese auteur Toshiaki Toyoda presented The Blood of Rebirth at the New York Asian Film Festival and Japan Cuts, his first movie in four years following a hiatus involving drug charges, as well as his previous work, 2005’s extraordinary Hanging Garden. The iconoclastic Osaka-born director of such other films as Blue Spring and 9 Souls is now back at the dual festivals with his latest, another bizarre, offbeat tale, Monsters Club. Inspired by Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto that called for revolution, Toyoda has crafted another surreal mood piece that can be as mesmerizing as it is frustrating and silly. Ryoichi Kakiuchi stars as Eita, a quiet, disciplined young man who has quit society and instead lives in the middle of a snowy forest, where he calmly chops wood, cleans his cabin, and sends out letter bombs to kill corrupt corporate executives and politicians. There he is visited by his supposedly dead brother, Yuki (Yôsuke Kubozuka), as well as a strange, haunting face-painted creature (Pyuupiru) who is an oddly charming mix of Sid Haig’s freakish Captain Spaulding from House of 1000 Corpses and Hayao Miyazaki’s adorable Totoro. But soon the idyllic little life Eita has built for himself is threatened as he discovers it’s not so easy to escape from today’s must-stay-connected world. A weirdly meditative tone poem, Monsters Club is screening at Japan Society on July 15 at 6:00 and will be followed by a Q&A with director Toyoda.

NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL / JAPAN CUTS: ASURA

An animal-child is hungry for food — and blood — in Keiichi Sato’s striking anime, ASURA

ANIME FROM HELL: ASURA (Keiichi Sato, 2012)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Thursday, July 12, $12, 8:00
Series runs July 12-28
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.subwaycinema.com

Based on George Akiyama’s banned 1970-71 manga and inspired by the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, Keiichi Sato’s Asura is a striking and shocking tale of survival. In fifteenth-century Kyoto, a child is born in what seems like the middle of hell. His starving mother has thoughts of devouring her newborn son, but he manages to survive, becoming a ferocious cannibal himself, living off of human flesh while he roams a nightmarish, postapocalyptic landscape. Named Asura (voiced by seventy-five-year-old actress Masako Nozawa), the animal-child is taken in by a gentle Buddhist monk (Kinya Kitaoji) and later helped by a young woman named Wakasa (Megumi Hayashibara), both of whom try to teach him elements of humanity, but it might be too late to change him from a monster into a young boy. Using a hybrid of 2D and 3D techniques, Sato (Tiger & Bunny) has created a visually stunning world of muted colors and effects that meld with a powerful soundtrack, resulting in an unrelenting battering of the senses. Asura is no coming-of-age story; instead, it continually goes to unexpected places, filled with twists and turns that lead to yet more bloodshed, though not without a yearning if unsentimental heart at its core. And be sure to hang around through the final credits. Asura is screening July 12 at Japan Society as part of the Anime from Hell section of the New York Asian Film Festival and Japan Cuts.