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Morita Yoshimitsu is one of the representative directors of the Later Launch of the Japan Arts Theater Alliance (ATG), and like many of the directors in the ATG Department, Morita Yoshimitsu has a distinct and varied directing style. He is known for at least three categories of works: first, adaptations of purely literary works, such as After (1985), adapted from Natsume Soseki, Adapted from Junichi Watanabe's Paradise Lost (1997) and Adapted from Kuniko Xiangtian's "Like An Asura" (2002); second, idol films, such as My Summer Time (1984) starring Hiroko Yakuza Maru; and third, a series of genre comedies in which his personal creative talent and interest are based, "Something Like This". (1981) and Spring Love Letters (1996) are light comedies, while Family Games (1983) are excellent noir comedy films.
In the early stages of his directing career, Morita Yoshimitsu put the tuandi element into two feature films. In his debut novel "Something Like This", Tuandi is only a place used to connect with the main line of the Rakugo Troupe. Two years later, in "Family Game", Tuandi completely became the stage of the film.
Family Games (1983)
Morita Yoshimitsu's Tuandi images have the attributes of a documentary, and they are synchronic with the actual state of Tuandi. Conversely, the scenery of Tuandi in the early 1980s may have attracted newcomer director Yoshimitsu Morita and even made him aware of the need to document it. In fact, these two films do fill a gap in the 1980s Tuandi imagery. The famous Tuandi wives series of Roman spring paintings basically ended in the last decade, and there is still a lot of time before Tuandi becomes a relic to be remembered. This is the initial stage of disintegration, which is not only manifested in the relocation of households. Morita Yoshimitsu is actually talking about the collapse of the "Japanese Dream" as a middle-class lifestyle in the period of rapid economic growth. The peculiarity of the disintegration of the regiment is that it appears in the form of a fortress, and the disintegration first occurs within the smallest fortress unit of the family.
Things like The Statue Of The West
8.0
Starring: Kumiko Akiyoshi Akiyoshi / Katsunobu Ito / Isao Bitô / Dendenden
Director: Yoshimitsu Morita
Genre: Yoshimitsu Morita / Japan / Japanese Film / Comedy / 1981 / 1980s / Kumiko Akiyoshi / Rakugo / Drama / Youth
Family Games
7.8
Starring: Matsuda Kosaku Yusaku Matsuda / Itami Juzo Itami / Yuri Yuki / Ichiro Hikawa Ichirota Ichirôta Miyakawa / Jun Tsujita / Yonko Matsugane / Kaori Okamoto / Shinobu Tsuruta / Jun Togawa
Mold: Yoshimitsu Morita / Japan / Nihon Kokage / Matsuda Kosaku / 1983 / Itami Juzo / 1980s / Home / Matsuda Yusaku / 电kage
The disintegration of space myths
The myth created by the tuandi in terms of living space can be summed up in one word: separation. This "separation" has two meanings, one is the functional separation, in the traditional Japanese house, the various parts of the space often do not have a clear functional positioning, an eight-fold space can be used for both dining, can also be used for hospitality, and can even be transformed into a family bedroom. In such a space, family members have little privacy at all. This is the second meaning of "separation", which promotes the separation of people through the separation of space, so that the family can ensure the relative independence of its members under the premise of a community.
From its inception, Tuandi has targeted its audience as "nuclear families" (i.e., families with only two generations of parents and children), with two-bedroom units (2LDK in Japanese). There is nothing wrong with this positioning, but given the high proportion of Gemini families in the Japanese nuclear family (not having a Gemini child, but having two children), the problem of tuandi is highlighted. (Note: According to a 1982 survey conducted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Japan, the proportion of only children and 55.6% of twins in Japanese families who have been married for 15 to 19 years is 9.2%).
I once read a review article in the movie "Deeper Than the Sea", when analyzing the personality causes and relationships between Liangduo and his sister, the article had this description: "Many rooms are on the shady side and cannot shine on the sun, while the sister's room is full of sunshine." "It is not difficult to see that because of the allocation of rooms, the status of the sisters and brothers in the family has been subtly different. In Morita's Family Game, this problem has already appeared, but in a different form.
The two brothers Shinichi and Shigeyuki seem to have their own rooms, but in fact, there is only a paper sliding door separating them. Moreover, the two share a large door, so Shinichi will definitely pass by his brother's room when he walks to his room. What does this mean?
Shigeru's room
The brothers' room setting up completely exposed Shigeyuki in preparation to the eyes of the whole family. First of all, outside the door of Shigeyuki's room is the living room, and his parents can know Shigeyuki's actions as long as they push the door lightly. Even if he doesn't open the door, he can keep an eye on the movement in the living room at any time, and after inviting the tutor played by Yusaku Matsuda, Shigeyuki's mother is almost constantly monitoring his room. At the same time, shinichi, who lives in the inner room, naturally becomes a part of the surveillance: he passes by his brother's room every day, so he can't not look at it; and his brother's room is only separated by a layer of paper sliding doors, so it is impossible not to listen. It can even be guessed that the arrangement of the brothers' rooms is related to the academic year they are in, and when the younger brother goes to high school the next year and the older brother prepares to enter the university, Shinichi and Shigeyuki's rooms will be reversed.
Therefore, Shinichi and Shigeyuki actually share a room, and there is another result of separating the two, that is, Shigeyuki's compartment loses its window. Perhaps to enhance this contrast, Shinichi's hobby was set to astronomical observation, with his telescope facing the window of the room. In different scenes, Shinichi is also particularly concerned about the window: he likes to look out the window when he is distracted in class; when he arrives at the room of his favorite female classmate Mieko Yamashita, his first reaction is to open the curtains and look at the scenery outside the window. It must be noted that Yamashita lives in a detached apartment, and the scenery outside the window must be very different from the group.
Tuandi itself is a politicized landscape, and orderly things more or less contain elements of blindfolding. The children's play facilities in Tuandi when they were young mostly contained water towers, because the water tower is the highest point in tuandi, and for children who cannot go out of Tuandi without parental accompaniment, this is the only place that can break the space limit and see the scenery farther away. Shigeyuki's denial of even the right to look outward is Morita's critique of ascensionism (which is also one of the backgrounds of the film) and a challenge to the myth of Tuandi space.
Water tower in Deeper Than the Sea (2016).
The disintegration of the autonomous myth
Tuandi was not invented for the purpose of autonomy, or rather, tuandi's autonomy was a little bit pushy and half-pushed at first. At first, due to the high rent in the center of Japan's cities, many regimental plots were built on the outskirts of the city, connected to the urban area by transportation lines. Therefore, various facilities supporting the residential area have naturally emerged. Over time, the various needs of residents can be met around the tuandi, and because there is only a residential function around the tuandi, people from other areas rarely visit specially, so the tuandi has become an island-like existence.
At the maturity stage, many regimental areas have set up committees to manage the affairs of the regimental areas, and the residents of the regimental areas are appointed on the committees. However, the formation of the governing unit hastened the disintegration of the community.
This disintegration manifests itself in two ways. First, the concept of a community has been deepened. The regiment is becoming more and more like a fortress, a country that pursues a closed policy. In "Family Game", Matsuda Yuji, who plays the role of tutor Katsura Yoshimoto, stands at the bow of a speedboat and is heading to the regimental land by the harbor. Isn't this picture very similar to U.S. Navy Commodore Perry sailing in a black boat to Edo Bay? Tutor Katsuru Yoshimoto, like Perry, is a myth-breaker. Yoshimoto's behavior after getting off the ship was naïve, and he went around asking people "where Numata's home is", and naturally no one paid attention to him. He was an outsider, and outsiders were unwelcome in the regiment.
Yoshimoto Katsu set sail to tuandi
But isn't it an outsider to live in the regimental land? Of course not. Jun Togawa made a cameo appearance in "Family Game" as a human wife who had just moved to Tunchi, and her reason for complaining to Numata's mother was: "In these days of moving, you are the first person to take the initiative to greet me." This is also the second manifestation of the disintegration of the autonomy myth: the actual community no longer exists. Why is that? Because there is an almighty committee, if there is anything that cannot be solved in the family, please go to the committee, why bother the neighbors? "My family doctrine" has developed by leaps and bounds in the developed regimental society, relying on the committee, which nominally demonstrates the superiority of the regimental autonomy. There are also fortresses within the fortress, and combined with the disintegration of the above spatial myth, it can be summarized that the triple fortress:
Autonomism (regimental land as a fortress) - My family as a fortress ( Family as a fortress ) - Further education doctrine (inner space of the family as a fortress)
Jun Togawa in Family Games
Together, these three barriers create a fourth fortress, the fortress of the human heart. The most important prop in Family Game— the long table used by the whole family to eat together — illustrates this point. The members of the Numata family never really faced each other seriously, even when they were in the same room. (This relationship between family members involves the division of labor between the family members at that time and the relationship between this division of labor and the regiment, and will not be repeated here.) The general cause is that during the child's growth, the full-time mother is absent because of the busy housework, and the father is absent because of the busy work. ）
Dimensionality reduction strikes
In 1980, Yasuo Tanaka, a fourth-year student at hitotsubashi University's Faculty of Law, wrote a novel called "Always Feel Like a Crystal" (なんとなく, クリスタル) that was shortlisted for the Following Year's Wasagawa Prize. But more importantly, the book made more than four hundred annotations for the brands that appeared in it, which was called "brand fiction" by reviews. The novel, which could even be read as a merchandise list, was immediately caught up in the whirlpool of public opinion, but its sales were considerable, selling more than a million copies.
In the year that followed, the Japanese Residential Corporation, which led the construction of the tuandi, was replaced by the Residential and Urban Improvement Corporation, which was a signal of the change in the Japanese government's real estate policy, and the government would invest more energy in the field of private real estate, and the Tuandi was squeezed into a secondary position from the policy. Looking back from today's day in 2017, you can even interpret it as a prelude to the bubble economy.
Combining these two events, we can deduce that the Japanese government's policy tilt pushed the consumerism that gradually prevailed in Japan in the 1980s into the real estate sector, and actually accelerated the decline of Tuandi.
Morita Yoshimitsu in "Something Like That" uses one of the few tuandi shots to talk about the direct effect of consumerism on tuandi. The fortress of Tuandi seemed to be pervasive, but the radio waves easily broke through this barrier.
Popular rakugo artist Kotaro enters Tuandi in a radio van and broadcasts directly to users in surrounding buildings on Tuanji Plaza. This is actually a visualization of the radio boom, in order to make the audience see clearly. How many listeners listen to Kotaro's radio program every day, just look at the red hand towel sticking out from the window sill, and look at the crowd of people around the van. And much of the enthusiasm is due to the interaction between the radio show and the audience: the award-winning audience can get a variety of daily necessities, which is the most popular thing for boring and busy housewives.
Kotaro's noon quiz program in "Something Like That"
The Zhiyu Troupe, which has not been popular, has a unique means of attracting the audience, and they publish a prize quiz on the TV station in the troupe's field, the object of the quiz is the weather the next day, and the prize in the guess is a discount ticket from the supermarket, which in turn points to the housewife group. In the climactic stage of the weather quiz, various camps appeared in the square to seek rain and snow and sunny, and the Shiyu Troupe also took the opportunity to start an open-air rakugo performance. This plot may contain some meanings such as: the square was invaded, the square was originally a place of communication for the residents of Tuandi, at this time, the people in the square without exception turned their eyes to invisible radio waves; the weather was manipulated, and the TV station of Tuandi actually did not have any actual content, except for the advertisement for the residents of Tuandi (the advertising object was mostly shops near Tuandi), which was a more practical weather forecast. But now, even weather forecasts have been manipulated into content that is no different from advertising. The power of radio waves is so great that it is possible to manipulate natural phenomena. Morita, who is familiar with McLuhan's media theory, once again used the symbol of the weather forecast in his 1996 Spring Love Letter to refer to the psychological state of urban people; the alienation of people, the sudden appearance of people of various identities in the various weather camps gathered: meteorologists who explain weather conditions, analysts who observe celestial phenomena with ladder telescopes, diviners waving flags and praying for rain and snow... These people are usually just residents of tuandi.
Crowds of different camps in the square
Why pay attention to the disintegration process of tuandi? Probably because of the realization that the decline of tuandi is far more than just the migration of residents and the aging of the remaining people, but also includes issues such as spatial politics, landscape politics, urban planning, consumerism, media theory, and so on. Of course, the discussion of Morita's two films is not comprehensive enough, and many views are quite subjective. However, looking at Japanese society in the 1980s based on this is an interesting and potentially beneficial thing.
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Unconsciously, the article on the topic of tuandi has been written to the third article, and it is estimated that it will be written again later. Here are the links to the first two articles:
Godard and the Tuandi Wife, The Isolated Man: Deeper Than the Sea, and Some Observations from Tuandi
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<b>The author of this article, "Haiashi", who lives in Beijing, has published 28 original texts and is still active in the Douban community. Download Douban App to search for users "haiashi" to follow Ta. </b>