BOOK REVIEW World Film Locations: Tokyo
Not long after launching their ambitious Directory of World Cinema book series, a multi-volume printed database of essays and film critiques dedicated to various regions of world cinema, Intellect Publishing have now released a new series entitled World Film Locations. This series differs from the former in that each edition is dedicated to a specific city and the films that are set there. This instalment focuses on the Japanese capital of Tokyo.
Studio Ghibli's animation Pom Poko laments the amount of forest that has been destroyed to facilitate growth.
Tokyo means many things to many people. In reality, it is a vast megalopolis made up of skyscrapers, heaving urban and industrial conurbations, hundreds of miles of public transport connections and over twelve million citizens. It is also an important financial hub – the third largest after London and New York – and a world leader of science and technology. In the popular consciousness, Tokyo is seen as a brand and an identity that is almost separate from – or perhaps seamlessly interchangeable with – the rest of Japan. For many, it represents a whole other universe; a futuristic dreamscape where the world of tomorrow exists today.
Such Westernised wool-gathering can be attributed to the droves of visual media exported by the city each year that’s become increasingly more popular. A huge quantity of film, television, manga and anime gets produced, making it a pop-culture Mecca for the hip and misunderstood alike. In contrast to this ideal of chic that has emerged in recent decades, there is also the undercurrent of centuries-old tradition – continually on the brink of being swallowed whole by the city’s rapid modernity.
Indeed, the Tokyo we know of today has not existed for long; the result of expedient re-development after the large scale fire-bombings during the Second World War. There are also environmental concerns to consider. Large amounts of surrounding forest has been destroyed to facilitate growth (as lamented by Studio Ghibli animation Pom Poko (1994)), not to mention the ongoing worries with regards to pollution and general quality of life in one of the most densely populated areas of the world.
World Film Locations: Tokyo attempts to address all of these issues, as all of them (and more) have been brought up to some degree over the last century within the frame of moving imagery. Edited by Chris MaGee, this volume collects various essays and analysis of key scenes from classic, undervalued and contemporary films set in the city…
MaGee – founder of the Toronto J-Film Pow Wow blog – introduces the book with a simple but perhaps not immediately obvious truth: “Cities are cast in films in much the same way casting directors hire actors. Each have their own unique characters that have been refined in the popular imagination by their repeated appearances in movies.” In essence, this is what World Film Locations: Tokyo is all about; the process of understanding a place through its various on screen depictions.
But like any location in the world, our knowledge and expectations of it can be largely informed through film. However, we tend to forget that film is merely fiction. The thoughts and impressions that we have of somewhere, as generated through media, do not necessarily translate when we first encounter the stark reality of it. But although films influence our perception of a place, it surely stands to reason that that place has gone some way to influence the film; how it looks, sounds and feels. The result is a mix between the reality of the location and the artistic licence carried out by the filmmakers. The aim of this book seems, then, in part at least, to be an unravelling of this merging of fact and fiction to better appreciate both entities.
MaGee, with the help of a small team of contributors, presents short, individual critiques of 45 scenes from 45 films, each set in a different real-life location. Split into various sections across the book, each group is headed with a basic map of Tokyo. Each scene discussed is numbered, which in turn corresponds to the numbers that pin-point that scene’s real-life location on the map. Films are dealt with in chronological order, starting with the rare, pre-war relic Tokyo March (1929) – only 28 minutes of footage have survived after an over-zealous censorship campaign at the insistence of the subsequent US occupation during the 1940s – and running through to recent world cinema successes such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata (2008). MaGee’s choice of films is an interesting mix of celebrated classics and lesser known treasures.
What is perhaps most interesting about this approach is that we see tangible growth in two areas. The first being Japan’s film industry and how it has developed over the years, exploring various genres and artistic concerns – from the kaiju (monster) movies of the 1950s to the disaffected youth cinema of the 1970s; the blood-soaked yakuza (gangster) movies of the 1990s, through to the multicultural, neon-flavoured megalopolis as seen in the present day. The second being the growth and development of the city itself and how that in itself has affected film output. For instance, Kinji Fukasaku’s If You Were Young: Rage (1970) is a reflection and product of Tokyo’s post-war reconstruction coming to an end, leaving many workers directionless and out of a job.
"Lost In Translation frequently emphasised the anomie of being isolated in a foreign land as a main component to its story."
Having said that, MaGee also includes non-Japanese films that are set – or contain scenes that are – in Tokyo; vintage James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967) and Chris Marker’s cerebral travelogue Sans Soleil (1983), for instance. The book also includes more recent entries such as Quentin Tarantino’s east-meets-west homage Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation (2003) and Gaspar Noe’s Enter The Void (2009). It is perhaps these western co-productions that have had the most impact on Tokyo’s current international image. This is especially true of Lost In Translation, which frequently emphasised the anomie of being isolated in a foreign land as a main component to its story – it very much views the city through alien eyes. But unlike, say, You Only Live Twice, which paints Tokyo and Japan very much in broad strokes, almost to the point of stereotype (let us not forget the naïvely racist moment where Sean Connery’s Bond undergoes surgery to make himself appear more Japanese), Lost In Translation was able to capture the quirks and realities of Tokyo far more accurately, not to mention giving westerners a glimpse of the very loud and very popular Pachinko parlours that are scattered throughout the city. The scene in the film where Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) escape from a disgruntled, BB Gun-toting bar owner by slipping through one such parlour is one of the scenes selected for analysis. It no doubt inspired many people to visit.
Both the essays and critiques are short and punchy, never exceeding a two page spread.
In addition to the scene critiques, the book breaks these chronologically arranged sections with longer essays based on various Tokyo related subjects. Topics include: post-war Tokyo in film, Tokyo as depicted in anime, the depiction of the city’s immigrants on film, as well as a more detailed look at master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, among other choice articles, all of which are specially commissioned for this book. The style and quality of writing is highly accessible and isn’t weighed down with hefty academic ballast, but remains intelligently structured.
Both the essays and critiques are short and punchy, never exceeding a two page spread. In fact, the whole book is pretty nimble – less than 130 pages – making it very easy to dip in to at the reader’s convenience. However, some may be disappointed by this brevity; the articles perhaps not as nourishing as some film scholars would like. But this is not strictly the function of MaGee’s collage. Instead, it works as a primer of sorts and, in MaGee’s own words, is “a gateway to hours of movie watching.” Many of the films discussed here have been discussed elsewhere and at greater length. This book doesn’t attempt to merely regurgitate the same information, instead it connects the real Tokyo with that of the Tokyo portrayed in film. The writing here is just as much about the city than the films themselves, perhaps more so.
Alternately, one could use the book as a film-buff’s guide when visiting the capital (this book may just inspire you to make the effort). Want to know where to find the large chiming clock that irritates Godzilla in Ishiro Honda’s 1954 classic? It adorns the roof of the Wako Department Store building in the Ginza shopping district. The seedy streets and night clubs that appear in the first rapid-fire minutes of Takashi Miike’s Dead Or Alive (1999)? Try Kabukicho in the Shinjuko Ward…
While brief and compact, World Film Locations: Tokyo provides a lot of interesting and informative titbits. It may not be particularly deep, but the breadth of films and real city locations covered serves as an excellent starting point for further investigation. On the other hand, knowing Intellect, the concept of a single, more thorough tome was probably disregarded in favour of a long term strategy; producing further volumes on the subject sometime down the line.
Release date: 9th November 2011 / Author: Chris Magee / Publisher: Intellect
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By Mark Player
Mark Player is a writer and film director. Setting up his own production
company in 2009, Mark has helped produce a number of short films; some of…
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