In October 2023, Hibiya was hot like summer, and the city teemed with foreign tourists. Tokyo International Film Festival opened with Perfect Days, which was on everyone’s lips due to Koji Yakusho winning Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. Once I sat in my seat and the movie theater became dark, I watched Hirayama, played by Koji Yakusho, waking up in a small, old apartment room. I was drawn into it the second he awoke in his wooden six-tatami mat room. The film is set in Japan and is in Japanese, but there’s no doubt it’s Wenders’ film. I knew it would be an essential work even before the end credits played, especially for creators that go back and forth between Japan and abroad. No other film had succeeded in translating the image of Tokyo in the 2020s into a visual language. This visualization of the city will become a common language for those who live in Japan and those from abroad to communicate with. We’ll be able to say, “That Tokyo.” The new year has rolled in, and several months have passed, yet the reverberations of Perfect Days remain. 

The Tokyo portrayed in Perfect Days is unmistakably the reflection of Tokyo today. Hirayama, played by Koji Yakusho, is a bathroom cleaner who lives in a small residence on the east side of Tokyo with a view of Sky Tree. The area he works in is on the west side of Tokyo, and the public bathrooms he works at are part of The Tokyo Toilet project in Shibuya. On weekdays, Hirayama always wakes up early in the morning without an alarm because someone sweeping outside wakes him up. He brushes his teeth, waters his plants, changes into his cleaner uniform, and leaves the house after fetching his belongings like a watch and some cash. He’s a cash-only person; he doesn’t use QR code payment. He rides a Daihatsu Hijet Cargo, commonly used as a delivery van. It’s a car for laborers. Hirayama goes from the east to the west of Tokyo with a canned coffee for breakfast and music playing from a cassette tape. Here, Wenders illustrates a realistic rhythm of people living on the outskirts of Tokyo, heading from downtown to uptown. This scene, which realistically shows the stark economic differences between the east and west, is handled with perfect balance precisely because Wenders is the master of road movies. The view of the road, lit by the morning sun, will feel familiar to those who know his work. It also appears in Notebook on Cities and Clothes, Wenders’ 1989 film on Yohji Yamamoto. 

In pursuit of the image of Tokyo

The days when foreign tourists couldn’t be seen in the city have disappeared. In 2003, there were 5.21 million foreign visitors and 25 million by 2023. The number multiplied by 5 in two decades. After overcoming a period marked by a slump due to the pandemic, the number of monthly visitors entering the country at the end of 2023 surpassed the number in pre-covid 2019. Sightseeing destinations like Kyoto and Niseko are full of tourists from abroad, but Tokyo is the same. There are moments when it feels like over half of the people in Ginza and Omotesando are visiting from abroad. With the help of Japan’s weak yen, the number of people drawn to Tokyo has increased. What sort of idea of Tokyo are the foreign visitors chasing after? 

A famous example of a film that successfully visualized Tokyo in the past is Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). The film, which continues to enchant audiences abroad, offers a glimpse of Tokyo culture from an outside perspective. Conflicting cultures, such as technology, karaoke, cosplay, clubs, fetish culture, fashion, music, TV programs, and traditional culture, are mixed and woven within the city. She creates an unidentifiable image of Tokyo that “economic animals” reside in. Figures such as Hiroshi Fujiwara, the late chief editor of DUNE, Fumihiro Hayashi, Kunichi Nomura, who was involved in the location scouting process, and HIROMIX make cameos. The 2003 film captured the hearts of audiences, especially in Europe and America, who were searching for a city where novelty and exoticism coexisted. If you ask the hotel staff, you can actually listen to the tracks that Nigo selected at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, the backdrop for Lost in Translation. Even today, two decades after the film’s release, people visit the city and the Park Hyatt Tokyo to chase after the elusive idea of Tokyo in the film, and they haven’t ceased. I should point out that the film illustrates life in the west side of Tokyo, such as Shibuya and Shinjuku. 

On the contrary, in the sense that anyone can access it, the Tokyo depicted in Perfect Days is approachable. It’s not the kind of Tokyo you can’t tap into if you don’t know anyone; it’s not a best-kept secret. It comprises parks, izakaya bars, old bookstores, laundromats, apartments made from wood, bathrooms in west Tokyo, the landscape of a city where its urban development never seems to end, and streets that connect the east to the west. For many Tokyoites, such everyday views aren’t rare, as they’ve encountered them at least once. 

A film that was born because it didn’t start out as one

According to the producer and co-screenwriter of Perfect Days, Takuma Takasaki, and co-producer and financer, Koji Yanai, this film was born from various coincidences. The film’s setting, The Tokyo Toilet, is a set of public bathrooms in the Shibuya ward. In terms of toilets, in In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki, he asserts that the mystique and distinct beauty of toilets lie in their gloominess, but what do you, dear reader, think? The Tokyo Toilet is a project in which legendary architects and designers shed light on the shadows of bathrooms. The 17 bathrooms, made by world-renowned architects and designers like Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando, Nigo, and Mark Newson, were born from Fast Retailing’s Koji Yanai’s curation. Perfect Days 
emerged from Koji Yanai and Takuma Takasaki casually brainstorming how to get people to use The Tokyo Toilet bathrooms cleanly. A conversation between Takasaki and Yanai detailing the film’s genesis is in the December 2023 issue, the Perfect Days issue, of SWITCH in Japanese, so I’d recommend you read it*1.

A film made from the opposite end of Hollywood

Wenders is undeniably the master of road movies. The trilogy of Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move (1975), Kings of the Road (1976), and Paris, Texas (1984), a film set in Texas, USA, that cemented his icon status, are all road movies. Perfect Days, going back and forth between the east and the west side of Tokyo is also a road movie. Wenders is also known as a director with a rebellious spirit against Hollywood films*2. One of his inspirations is the films of Yasujiro Ozu, stemming from the opposite end of Hollywood. About the director, Wenders passionately says, “I still think his cinema is truly world cinema…by not being part of the empire of the American census… but by being its own empire.” 

When I think about Ozu’s body of work, I’m reminded of a debate between Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Junichiro Tanizaki in Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Bungeiteki Na Amari Ni Bungeiteki Na (1927). Tanizaki posits that the most crucial factors for a novel are an exciting plot and narrative structure, while Akutagawa argues that there’s also a lot of value in a book that doesn’t have much of a story. Ozu’s films are made from elements that Akutagawa approved of. His works are quiet and have an atmosphere developed from movie sets with meticulous details and beautiful camerawork. There are no bizarre scenes or synopses, but what does exist is this richness born from the continuous changes in the subtle textures. That itself is a work of art. Wenders has been making films with the influence of Ozu, and Perfect Days is a perfect projection of the director’s experience of Japanese cinema. 

Ozu’s Hirayama, Wenders and Takasaki’s Hirayama

Takuma Takasaki gave the protagonist of Perfect Days the name Hirayama, which often appears in Ozu’s films, but according to Takasaki, it was a total coincidence*3. In Ozu’s films, the best-known Hirayamas are Shukichi Hirayama (Chishu Ryu), the protagonist in Tokyo Story (1953), and Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu) in An Autumn Afternoon (1962). The everyday lives of the Hirayamas in Ozu’s films seem like they were the norm for Japanese people at the time, but that wasn’t the case. Japan was still poor in the 60s. Akira Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den (1970) was made after An Autumn Afternoon, but it’s set in a poor and rough city. Nagisa Oshima’s Night and Fog in Japan (1959) was created in the 50s, like Tokyo Story, but again, the setting is a rough Tokyo, and the protagonist is a poor child. Even though these films existed in the same Showa era, the worlds Ozu built were rich. 

In Tokyo Story, among Hirayama’s children are a private physician and a teacher, respectively, and in An Autumn Afternoon, the protagonist Hirayama holds an important role at a corporation in the Marunouchi area, and many of the characters are white-collar workers*4.

*1 An interview with the people involved in the making of Perfect Days is on the official account of Bitters End, the distribution company for the film. It’s interesting to watch it paired with the film. 

*2 Hollywood films are known for gun fights, war, heroic tales, love stories, the bottom pit of capitalism, and the American Dream. Many of them have scenes that could actually happen in American society. It can be said that the reality of American culture has given Hollywood films a sense of reality, but it can’t be said the same films seem realistic in other countries. 

*3 This anecdote is mentioned in a short interview with the co-screenwriter and producer of Perfect Days, Takuma Takasaki, in POSTGENDAI, an online magazine. 
https://postgendai.com/blogs/postgendai_dictionary/takuma_takasaki

*4 In An Autumn Afternoon, the marriage arrangement of Hirayama’s daughter, Michiko Hirayama (Shima Iwashita), comes up, and one can tell that Hirayama leads an affluent life from the fashion in the film. Hanae Mori designed the costumes for Shima Iwashita. Hirayama’s furniture and the Japanese restaurant in the film all look like they could be in Katei Gaho. 

In Perfect Days, in a scene where Hirayama’s sister appears in a Lexus with a personal driver, we discover that Hirayama comes from a wealthy family but left them of his own volition and lives quietly on the east side of Tokyo. It made me wonder if Hirayama from Perfect Days could be a relative of the Hirayamas from Ozu’s films. 

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy opens with, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Many films made in the same period as Ozu’s are set in a world rife with social issues. Perhaps Ozu, who was drafted into the military in World War II and led a turbulent life, chose happy worlds of their own kind as the settings of his films because he felt his aesthetic could stand out precisely because the settings are alike. 

Hirayama from Perfect Days was given the role of cleaning bathrooms. Unlike the one in Ozu’s and Kurosawa’s era, the Tokyo he lives in is one after Japan’s rapid economic growth. Tokyo, which overcame the “lost 20 years” after the economic bubble burst, isn’t a place where Hollywood-esque stories could shine. Through Hirayama’s life, we’re reminded of the richness of everyday life in Tokyo, which we’re prone to forget. Watching him spritz water on his plants, taking photos of komorebi (sunlight through the trees)*5, falling asleep while reading, and dreaming, I can see that he understands the fulfillment of such a life. It makes me want to agree with him quietly*6.

Opposing the gaze of Orientalism

In 2023, Japan ranked first worldwide on the Nation Brands Index (NBI) for the first time*7. I believe rankings have little meaning, but I didn’t expect Japan to be number one worldwide in the same year a prominent film from Japan was released. 

Perfect Days is captivating audiences across the globe, not just in Japan. At the Cannes Film Festival last year, Koji Yakusho, who plays Hirayama, won Best Actor, and the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film this year. In January, it was number one at the box office in Italy, and the other day, an event held at the Chinese Theater the night before the American release was a success. 

Other countries will inevitably view Japanese films made with an international audience in mind through an Orientalist gaze. What they seek is the essence of the East. Many films have managed to meet such expectations. Akira Kurosawa, mentioned above, and Takeshi Kitano, who makes films about human relationships in the underbelly of society, could be examples. The same could be said about films that extracted social issues that became topical in Japan and illustrated them in a way foreign audiences can understand. The same gaze is probably on Perfect Days, but the Tokyo that Wenders, a foreign director, captured manages to neutralize such extreme expectations. 

The notion that imported things are supreme is ingrained in Japanese people. This is to be expected because people have been borderline overdosing on music, literature, and fashion from the West, and especially American culture. As a result, aside from the reverse import of Japanese content, a strange phenomenon in which Japanese people, living on the opposite end of Western society, don’t appreciate Japanese content tends to occur*8. It becomes clear that Hirayama is also strongly influenced by Western culture, as he prefers American music and novels. The production team, like Takuma Takasaki and Koji Yanai, is probably the same. They met Wenders, someone who has been following Japanese films for around five decades, and portrayed the contemporary image of Tokyo; that’s one significant story in itself. 

Perfect Days’ idea of Tokyo has given new meaning to Tokyo. The landscape of Tokyo that we know was spread to the world; one of the film’s successes lies in how we can talk about it regardless of where we’re from. The last scene where Nina Simone‘s ‘Feeling Good’ plays is inside Hirayama’s van as he drives it. The inside of a car is a small space that can exist anywhere in the world, not just in Tokyo. The scene stirs something within us; our own memories of life flicker in our minds. Much like Hirayama feeling the sound of the car engine in the driver’s seat as he goes from east to west of Tokyo, we, too, feel the hum of contemporary Tokyo in our seats in the movie theater. 

*5 Donata Wenders took some of the images of the komorebi in the film, which were exhibited at 104 Gallery from December 22nd, 2023, to January 20th, 2024, under the title KOMOREBI DREAMS: supported by THE TOKYO TOILET Art Project/MASTERMIND. 

*6 In an essay in Murakami Asahido, Haruki Murakami uses the term “simple pleasure” to mean small but certain happiness. This can also be applied to Hirayama’s daily life. It signifies the fulfilling feeling of mundane yet certain pleasures in everyday life, such as drinking a cold beer after working out. 

*7 Anholt-GfK Nation Brands Index uses six criteria to evaluate certain countries: culture, people, tourism, exports, governance, and immigration and investment. Japan was ranked first for the first time in 2023. 
You can look at the past rankings on Wikipedia. Until Trump got elected in 2016, the US was almost always at the top. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_branding 

*8 The dancing of Min Tanaka, who appears as a houseless person in the film, can be seen in Somebody Comes into the Light (music by Jun Miyake), a short film. Speaking on dancing, he touches on Ame-no-Uzume’s dancing, which appears in the Kojiki. Today, dance in the West is predominantly founded on ballet. Initially, different dances existed everywhere among indigenous groups, but they became extinct because of colonialism and the changing times. He mentioned that thinking within a Western framework can be limiting if we were to return to the idea of dance. It speaks to Wenders’ ideas regarding Hollywood films.

Translation Lena Grace Suda

The post Notebook on Fashion and Society Part 3: A New Vision of Tokyo in “Perfect Days”—A Quiet Beauty Born from an Imperfect City and Its People appeared first on TOKION - Cutting edge culture and fashion information.

Yusuke Koishi is a producer and consultant for both domestic and international brands, and an artist and critic. He explores the present and future of society through the lens of fashion in this series. In the second installment, he elaborates on the ever-growing presence of China. He explains the approach and mindset we need to engage in new, budding cultures.

“If Biden wins, China wins”

The American presidential election in November 2020 concluded with the win of Joe Biden. What stood out was the fashion industry and many others celebrating his victory. Nonetheless, the direction we’re heading in remains unclear.

One thing left an impression on me. Mass media, including various media outlets and celebrities, made it seem like Biden had the upper hand, but the difference in votes in swing states was much smaller than expected. The outcome was reminiscent of how public polls on the election missed the mark four years ago. As a result, the world witnessed around 74 million people, which makes up almost half of the voters, voted for Donald Trump, who has been harshly condemned for his ongoing failures. On top of the election being held during a pandemic, people ridiculed it for having the least popular and likable candidates. However, the candidates received the largest number of votes in American history. Biden came in first, and Trump came in second.

“If Biden wins, China wins.” I was following American discourse on social media, and I saw that this message from Trump resonated with potential voters, including blue voters in America, where the pandemic has been only getting worse. His words also reached different people across the globe. People increasingly became bitter towards Asians. Amid this, it seemed as though Andrew Yang, the energized Taiwanese-American candidate who earned the support of a sizable number of youths, felt inferior about himself.

Trump’s message only further actualized people’s awareness of China. For months, Americans and non-Americans interested in the election have been talking about China online. But the topic is always regarding Chinese politics and economics, based on information gathered on social media and Western mass media. Liberal, cultural figures and critics are seen as people with a broad education, but when these people engage in discussions surrounding China, they also only speak about money and politics.

During the election cycle, the mic was handed to public figures and public poll companies that predicted Trump’s presidency. Among the numerous interviews, one, in particular, stuck out to me. And that was an interview with a young owner of a factory that manufactured both parties’ campaign merchandise in Yiwu, Zhejiang province.

He lightheartedly says, “We’re getting many orders for Trump merchandise at the moment, so I think he’s going to win this time too.” It’s incredibly ironic to see a factory owner in China, who’s making massive profits off of such merchandise, talk about the election with a smile while both Trump and Biden supporters are cautious of China’s emerging dominance. In the video goes on to illustrate some factory workers making TRUMP PENCE 2020 flags in front of a casually stacked mountain of MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN merchandise, while other workers make BIDEN HARRIS 2020 flags right next to that. It’s a modern comedy. But the surreal scene also represents the complexity of global society.  If Charlie Chaplin were still alive, he would surely make this scene a laughing stock. As President Trump said, the owner of this factory must have been the winner of the election. The The New York Times has covered similar situation “Forget the Polls: This Chinese Indicator Is Flashing ‘Trump’“

Whenever we discuss what’s going on in the world, we tend to create a one-dimensional narrative and hastily reach a conclusion. However, things aren’t that simple; the world conceives complexities, carries contradictions in its womb, and yet, it continues to move forward. What makes China so fascinating to me is how you can’t sum up the things that happen there with a simple story. It seems like a myriad of people in China live life to the fullest while accepting the fundamental inconsistencies, multiplicities, and uncertainties of a global society.

Perhaps what the Higher Brothers sang about in “Made in China” must be the complexity of reality as described here.

”My chains, new gold watch, made in China We play ping pong ball, made in China 给bitch买点儿奢侈品 made in China Yeah Higher Brothers’ black cab, made in China.”
［Higher Brothers x Famous Dex – Made In China (Prod. Richie Souf)］

The Great Firewall and the wallpaper on it

Despite China having the world’s second-highest GDP, rational information on the country in either English or Japanese is scarce. It’s not a stretch to say that no other country receives the amount of both praise and criticism. Japan and other English-speaking countries disseminate heavily biased information on China through a heavy filter. When you look up China-related information in English, you’ll see visuals and narratives told through an Orientalist gaze, making it easier for the West to take in. If you do the same in Japanese, you’ll see that most of the information is framed with passe biases such as pro-Japanese and anti-Chinese rhetoric.

“Western media exaggerates China’s bad side too much. Chinese media praises China too much.” These are the words of Ryo Takeuchi, a documentary filmmaker living in Nanjing, China. His documentary, Long time No See, Wuhan, is a portrayal of Wuhan post-pandemic and has garnered over ten million times views on Weibo. His show, The Reason I Live Here, which shows Chinese people living in Japan and foreigners living in China, is intriguing.

There still aren’t that many media like his that show honest portrayals of everyday people in China. If you want to look up relevant, current information related to your interests, then you would have to search in simplified Chinese and interact with real people via services like Weibo, Dian Ping, and Baidu. While I type in simplified Chinese and do research, I get hit with a realization: the limits of the internet and the vastness of reality. When we look up non-English speaking countries online, we’re prone to think that the results that show up in English are the world itself. In reality, such results are just the tip of the iceberg because they’re all put through a filter geared towards English speakers.

One design team made up of different nationalities shares opinions like the ones above among themselves. Together, they founded a genderless uniform brand called BIÉDE. The brand is produced and managed by KLEINSTEIN, and the visuals are done by Quentin Shih, a photographer and film director based in Beijing (his interview is also on TOKION). He works with clients such as Dior and Louis Vuitton, and yet, he never gives in to the Orientalist gaze of the West. Instead, he continues to create works that criticize the “West” and “China” binary.

Karima Fumitoshi is a film researcher and scholar of literature who has been introducing Chinese culture and movies, including Chen Kaige who won the Palme d’Or at 1993 Cannes Film Festival, to Japan since he visited China during the latter years of its Cultural Revolution and interacted with various cultural figures . In an essay, he touches on poetry. He writes that poets and writers, who respected and trusted each other, would drink and recite satirical poetry and prose about society, only to throw them away into the trash can. Written works that picked up on the zeitgeist at the time disappeared right there and then in a second.

We must evade surface-level, wallpaper-like information made for foreigners and overcome the Great Firewall. Once we do so, we must also go through layers upon layers of hurdles. What awaits us on the other side is the silhouette of cultures and new, blooming scenes that can’t be boxed into Orientalism, ethnicism, ideology, money, and politics.

In the Analects of Confucius, Confucius says, “You need to confirm facts by yourself even if many people dislike it, even if many people like it.” These words, written 2,500 years ago, reverberate strongly today.

Scenes that could only be seen within the “wall” are being born as you read this essay. It’s up to us to take notice of them.

Transration Lena-Grace Suda

The post Notebook on Fashion and Society Part 2: “What we talk about when we talk about China” appeared first on TOKION - Cutting edge culture and fashion information.