Manual to Living in Poverty in Greater Tokyo

I also can’t lay claim to leading a lifestyle anything like that of Kosuke’s, as he is truly impoverished and lives in an unfurnished one room apartment without even a rice cooker to his name.  My situation is far more comfortable than that.  Yet it has been really interesting, over the past couple of weeks, to see how my attitude towards spending has evolved.  I have significant expenditures to think about, like rent, a new cell phone, public transit, room furnishings, etc.  And although I have enough of a financial cushion to get by just fine, barring any unfortunate turns of events, I also have a fair amount of uncertainty regarding my future income due to the nature of my contract work as an English teacher.

These inevitabilities have led me to refashion the way I think about spending money, specifically to categorize everything in terms of need instead of want.  Food and shelter, reasonably I think, come first.  And ensuring my food and shelter means that everything else I could spend money on becomes colored in terms of how much food and shelter I could get in its place.  Ordering a beer at a bar suddenly seems like a reckless frivolity (dude, I could get a whole set meal at Yoshinoya for that and be full until morning!).  Thus, ordering more than one beer at a sitting seems more like the act of a lunatic than one looking to relax after work.  My amazingly comfortable urethane pillow, though I feel it is worth every yennie, is even harder to justify (holy crap, I spent a week of groceries and lunches at Sukiya on that lump!)  I should also note that at least one person, who shall remain unnamed, has claimed that this soft object of my nocturnal affections looks “gross” and “like I bought it at a thrift store,” which is neither here nor there, but offended my sensibilities and therefore seemed worth mentioning.  Let the record show that, while I think a great deal of life’s necessities can be obtained at a good thrift store, pillows and other intimate accessories are not among them.

In any case, all of this thinking about spending reminds me of a conversation I’ve had numerous times with different people, most memorably with my friend Justin.  A coworker of his was telling him that no matter how many raises he got, his expenses would simply grow along with his income, such that he found it impossible to set any significant amount of money aside.  I have usually scoffed at this kind of thinking, because I was on the conservative side with my money for my first three years in Japan, and I’ve been able to set some kizzash aside to start a nest egg.

But it was easy to do so with a cushy package from the Japanese government including subsidized housing, tax protection, and a free car.  Out in the real world, now, with no clear path to the standard of living I took for granted a mere two years ago, the way I have spent money until recently seems downright profligate.  There must be a lot of truth in the idea that expenditures will naturally expand in lockstep with earnings.

The true test will come once I’m earning decent money again, in how effectively I can remind myself of the satisfying lifestyle of my first weeks in Japan, when I rented fewer DVDs, chose my restaurants and groceries more carefully, got to know the library better than amazon.com, and walked from Ebisu to Shibuya to cut down my commute by one transfer.  The poignant glory of Kosuke’s story is that he doesn’t miss out on any of the good things in life, despite having hardly a tin cup of his own, and that’s something I would do well to remember on my second Japanese adventure.

Now, Japanese movies happen to be a great way to learn Japanese, and while I prefer using TV serial dramas as study tools, I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Japanese films on DVD over the past few years, watching and re-watching with and without subtitles.  I must admit, there are a lot of bad ones out there.  But there are bad films in any country, and I am still a little stuck on what it is about Japanese cinema that so often leaves a lackluster impression.

Let me be clear, they don’t all suck, and some are actually amazing works of creative genius and artistic expression.  The serious goodies of Japanese cinema are to be found in drama and animation, as demonstrated in this year’s Oscar winner Departures and pretty much all the Miyazaki films.  But more about the good ones some other day.  This post is about the suckage.  Let’s talk about M-san’s genre of choice: action.

Today I watched Dororo, a movie based on the manga of the same name by legendary artist Tezuka Osamu.  The film as a whole wavered between mediocre and pleasant, with some raging scenes of unadulterated suckage slipped in the middle, like a piece of raw bacon that made its way into your BLT.  Despite being a major cinematic release in 2007, the special effects are just laughable.  Ever seen Ultraman?  Or perhaps Power Rangers?  Then you’ve already experienced the extended raw bacon battle scene from the middle of Dororo, in which Hyakkimaru and Dororo herself slash it up with the vicious tongue demon.  The tongue demon is, quite obviously in fact, a dude in a tongue demon suit filmed to look larger than a dude in a tongue demon suit. Far more times than necessary (mind you once is more than necessary in this case)  we are treated to a cut of the tongue demon’s 30-meter tongue snaking out after the feet of his assailants, and with stunning accuracy, it recreates the image of crepe paper on the end of a stick brandished by a rambunctious 8 year-old.

To Dororo’s credit, not all of the special effects in the movie are as terrible as the tongue demon scene, and I’m willing even to give the producers the benefit of the doubt and say that there is some cultural dynamic I’m missing out on here, some bizarre nostalgia regarding the good ol’ days of Ultraman and dude-in-a-suit monsters.  Everything in perspective, right? It’s totally possible to enjoy a movie like The Lawnmower Man, even today, despite the fact that the special effects are seriously dated and when he lights up on fire it looks as if the flames were drawn in with Microsoft Paint.  But not even a healthy dose of perspective can justify effects like Dororo’s coming from today’s Japan.  This is the country of technology on the cutting edge, for crying in the night.  Even the good effects in Dororo would look more at home in the mid-90’s than in 2007.  Not to mention the aspects of an action film that are less dependent upon technology, like fight choreography, are still lousy.

It can’t be that they don’t have the resources, as other countries across the economic spectrum have put together some heart-pounding action flicks with cutting edge effects, or at least put together flicks that kicked royal ass without a lot of technology (I’m thinking of Thailand’s Ong Bak in particular here).  It also can’t be that there isn’t enough demand, as a robust domestic market awaits new releases, not to mention the untold millions in sales that would surely follow a Japanese action film as impressive as China’s House of Flying Daggers.  What’s going on here?

So don’t rush out and rent Dororo, or any other action film from Japan for that matter, unless you’re in it for the language and want to learn some phrases that don’t come up very often in other genres.  It’s the only reason I rented Dororo in the first place, and why it will shortly make its way to my iPod in mp3 format so I can be assured of never forgetting how to curse like a Japanese thief from an imaginary feudal world of 1000 years in the future.  You never know when that will come in handy.

Addition: Trailer available here, though you only get a blink of the tongue demon.