faces of japan by Yuko Enomoto & Bruce Rutledge | January 8, 2008
>> Yoshida Brothers North American Tour 2008
Ryoichiro and Kenichi Yoshida don’t exactly come off as rock stars when you talk with them. Nor do they seem like classically trained musicians. Instead, they sound like enthusiastic young kids, quick to laugh, brimming with enthusiasm and full of an idealistic dream that the older brother, Ryoichiro, describes:
“We want the world to hear the sounds of the tsugaru shamisen, not just Japan — that would be a waste — because the instrument has such power. We want to take its sounds all over the world.”
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faces of japan by Bruce Rutledge | November 12, 2007
Film director and actor Juzo Itami once said that modern Japan was a country that “failed to invent the father.” In the West, he said, the roles of mother, father and infant were fully developed, but in Japan, only the mother and infant had emerged. The mother-infant relationship is ruled by the pleasure principle, he argued, and the father’s role is to break that relationship and infuse the family with logic and rational thought. Because the role of the father had been retarded in Japan, the director said, Japan had only two cultural ideals: the motherly, nurturing type and the cute, obedient type.
In just about any Itami movie, men suckle on women’s breasts. Sometimes it’s the most corrupt or disturbed characters who suckle: the cult killer in Marutai no Onna (Woman of the Police Protection Program); the corporate tax dodger in A Taxing Woman
. But perhaps the most famous breast-feeding scene is the closing shot of the hit Tampopo
, which perfectly ties together the movie’s themes of eroticism and food.
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faces of japan by Bruce Rutledge | August 9, 2007
Japan is a funny place, and I mean that as a compliment. Life there is filled with humor — some intended, some not. Laughter breaks the tension in an overly tense society. And every once in a while, an artist comes along who has an eye for that humor and can illuminate Japanese life for us.
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