Golden Week!

Posted on August 6, 2024 by eli

At the end of April and beginning of May, I took a big Golden Week trip westward and down through Kyushu. I have multiple friends who’ve visited or who have extended family in Fukuoka – they’ve all had nothing but great things to say about it, and likewise I’ve wanted to visit Hiroshima on my own as well. I had a week off for the holidays, so with this, plus my general enjoyment of traveling and seeing new places… and motivated by the fact that Kyushu is unequivocally the best place in Japan to get tons and tons of IC cards… I made a spreadsheet to plan and figure out how to handle all of these magnetic paper tickets:

Most (not all) of my tickets. Not as complicated as it might look. I promise!

This was my first time making (heavy) use of both stopovers (途中下車 tochuu gesha) and round-trip discounts (往復割引 oufuku waribiki), as I was traveling along a single, straight route via shinkansen but wanted to stop off at various places along the way.

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The (R)ides of March

Posted on April 18, 2024 by eli

It’s been a while! I frankly got a little burnt out on writing (and still am, honestly) but finally got some motivation to write about my trip last month. March 16 was a big day for public transport in Japan: the Hokuriku Shinkansen got extended from Kanazawa to Tsuruga, the Thunderbird and Shirasagi limited express trains had their routes shortened as a result, JR West gave up ownership of the local Hokuriku Main Line over this portion of the track, and timetables & fares for public and private trains across the country were revised. The third of these reasons was the impetus for my trip, though – with the new Hapi-Line Fukui third-sector railway company beginning operations, they also released a commemorative ICOCA!

My big transit-focused hobby is collecting IC cards (I have 54, as of this post, all obtained myself, and all via public transport, in my five-ish months since moving to Japan) and a trip up to the Hokuriku region was a good way to snag a lot more, explore a part of the country I hadn’t been to much, and get a fun weekend vacation out of it.

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Koki Mitani’s Odessa

Posted on February 21, 2024 by eli

“Three characters. Two languages. One truth.” This is the idea behind Odessa (オデッサ), Koki Mitani’s first new play in three and a half years, set in 1999 in the American town of Odessa, Texas. A Japanese tourist is detained on suspicion of murder. The detective, while of Japanese descent, only speaks English. And so an interpreter, a Japanese student studying abroad, is brought in to translate. But as the tagline tells us, “現実 (genjitsu, ‘truth’) is stranger than TRUTH.” Confused? Hell yeah.

Kōki Mitani is pretty much the theater world’s version of Juzo Itami: a sensationally multitalented artist who writes and directs all of his own productions, frequently re-casts the same groups of actors in everything he makes, working to create intertextual comedies that are often inspired by American sensibilities… He’s even, fittingly, the recipient of last year’s Juzo Itami Award, which honored his achievement and outstanding talent in many of the same areas Itami worked. And while, also like Itami, he’s (for some cruel and baffling reason) practically unheard of in the West, writer Nobuko Tanaka starts off her 2012 article and interview in the Japan Times about his domestic popularity with a simple fact: “Koki Mitani is far and away the nation’s best-known dramatist.”

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RRR × TAKA“R”AZUKA ～√Bheem～

Posted on February 9, 2024 by eli

If you pay attention to movies at all, you’ve probably heard of – and should have seen – RRR, the incredible, ridiculous, and insanely over-the-top 2022 historical action-drama epic about colonialism, friendship, and loyalty. The film was directed and co-written by S.S. Rajamouli in the most expensive Indian film production to-date. Rajamouli previously made waves on the internet for this preposterous scene in his previous film, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion, and he’s probably the world’s most well-known director in Tollywood (not Bollywood, as his films are in Telugu, not Hindi). Japan loves Indian films, too – a recent ad at my local cinema taught me the word マサラ上映 masara jouei, or “masala screening”… which is apparently the Japanese term for a participatory/singalong-style showing of an Indian film where moviegoers are invited to recite dialogue (or, well, the subtitled dialogue) in real-time, dress up in costume, and emotively react to scenes. (This seems like the antithesis of most Japanese movie theater experiences I’ve had so far, so honestly I’d be interested in going…)

I think RRR really began to take off in Japan once its iconic “Naatu Naatu” scene & song won Best Original Song at the Oscars and Golden Globes last year, causing its associated dance and awards show performance to finally spread eastward on social media like wildfire. So what was this country to do with an outrageously over-the-top foreign movie that depicts one of the greatest bromances ever? Well, have the Takarazuka Revue adapt it into an even more over-the-top musical with super gay undertones, of course.

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The Itami Juzo Museum

Posted on January 19, 2024 by eli

Ever since I began planning my move to Japan in mid-2023, there was one place I promised myself I’d go at the first possible opportunity: the Itami Juzo Museum (伊丹十三記念館 / Itami Juzo Kinenkan) in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. Shikoku is the smallest and least-populated of Japan’s four main islands, and I’d never been off Honshu, which added to my excitement. So with a full week off work for the New Year’s holidays, I made the trip.

Juzo Itami is my favorite film director in the world, a true visionary and master of subtle social satire and life-affirming comedy who dared to poke fun at and push back against his own rule-bound culture’s customs (“I make movies to get the Japanese to look in the mirror”, he said in 1996). He made his directorial debut at age 51 after spending decades as an actor and essayist… and editing a 1980s psychoanalytic magazine, designing commercials, illustrating print ads, translating Western cookbooks, living in London and becoming fluent in English and French… After writing and releasing ten feature films, he was murdered by the yakuza in 1997 for criticizing them and mocking their practices, remaining unafraid after a prior violent attack and continuing to investigate their ties to a religious cult. I can only dream of what the film and literary landscape could have looked like today if he had been able to keep making movies into the 21st century.

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