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THEY
call this place “Shitamachi”, or downtown. Cinema as
they know it in the Western world was introduced in this
area. The night we walked the street, we saw
streetlights with the faces of the stars of the Japanese
movie industry in the ’20s and ’30s. This is a sad
place. You recall the good times for the Japanese before
the A-bomb was dropped on the two cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, before the World War ruined the images of
Japan
before the world. Soon after that war, the world, by way
of the US, initiated the reformatting of the country and
its culture. Cultures, however, are never reformatted.
They are much too strong for overnight radical changes.
In
Japan, downtown is not merely a geographical point. It
is a normative position that comments on how the people
in this land believe that things are good when
segregated, perfect when boundaries are clear and
maintained. When tourists come to this downtown, the
locals wonder what attracted them to this territory. Are
the tourists interested in finding the downside of the
nation? Are the tourists eager to get to know the inside
of this country, the innards of Japan?
Still,
Asakusa, for that is the name of the place, is really a
tourist’s town. By that term, safe, the place is not a
dangerous site. The danger—if there is such a term for
Japan—is
really more metaphorical. And ideological. There is the
danger of being outside and being called the outsider.
If there is a country where you are made to feel a
person from outside, it is
Japan,
or Japan is one of them. Gaijin, the person from
outside. That’s what we are. We are from outside and we
shall never belong to this place.
This is
the opposite of the
Philippines.
Even as the outsider may never really feel as truly
belonging to the Filipino universe, he will realize—much
to his discomfort—that the Filipino wants him to belong.
At this
moment, it is good to be an outsider. In this inn, with
the students, backpackers are talking about moving or
traveling to other countries. With our budget and in our
reality, the trip to expensive Japan is already good in
itself. Our mission to learn from others can end here.
Other people, however, are talking about traveling to
Spain from Tokyo. That seems like a long haul for me.
And a wider, if not impossible, budget.
I read notes from other people and I feel like an
outsider. Like how some critics are raving about the
latest film from Will Fredo. The film carries the title
Ang Pagdapo ng Mariposa. This was the film that
saw its poster being questioned by the MTRCB. It is out
now, the film, and film readers articulate how the
filmmaking of Will Fredo is odd. Nice odd. Elegant odd.
Dark odd.
I should
watch this film. His Compound left me dazed and later
initiated to a different kind of storytelling. Will
Fredo is a devil-may-care kind of director. He seems not
to respond to the median perspective. His views of life
carry us always back to that which we do not want
explored: the dark, gooey side of humanity. If there is
hope in his narrative, it is always in his ability to
exorcise the evil or the weak in his characters. His
exorcism comes in the form of the verbalization or the
audiovisualization of those things we otherwise would
want to stay hidden, in our own shadowed psychology.
Now
there is this film of Will Fredo and people are saying
his ending is marvelous. Surprising. A twist.
The
twist in his endings are a marvel not because they pull
things out from under you but, rather, because the
elements for those endings have been there right at the
start. In Compound, it is in that room and the door with
voices. It is in the room of that house. In the minds of
the people in the compound. In the compounds in the
compound.
The
director plays tricks with his tales but his camera
conjures magic. Let’s see if the potency found in his
Compound will be there again in this film. As of now,
the film readers are talking about the love/lust between
the athlete and his caregiver.
As far
as I know, this film was threatening to carry the sedate
title Caregiver. At present, a different film has
that title. Sharon Cuneta is the star of that film.
Now, I
cannot imagine Will Fredo’s version of caregiving. In
the mainstream world of Sharon Cuneta, we can imagine a
story hinged on the realities of a caregiver somewhere
outside the Philippines. In Will Fredo’s mystic field of
the super-real, I wonder how caregiving will be told.
Perhaps,
it is best that he decided not to go into that story.
Or, perhaps, now we have missed the subtext of
caregiving because a director with a tongue-in-brain
perspective decided to let go of that title.
Letting
go of history is a theme that is always Japanese. A few
days back, the ban on students going on a field trip to
the Yasukuni Shrine, the ultimate shrine for the War
Dead in
Japan,
was lifted. The interpretation of the ruling set off a
debate, with one parliamentarian announcing that now
students can go there for their study tours. Another
parliamentarian was on the other side, saying that with
the lifting of the ban, it does not follow that all
students have to be pushed to go there.
This
debate will rage on, with the complementary issues of
apologies for the cruelties the soldiers of the Japanese
Imperial Army wrought upon the Filipinos and the other
Asian victims during the last World War.
There
is, however, a history we cannot let go here in Tokyo,
the unwritten history of the first Filipino entertainers
who sallied on to conquer the entertainment world of the
Japanese. Dolphy was here. Bimbo Danao is still being
talked about by the old-timers. Annie Brazil wowed them
in Shibuya.
Now, I
walk around the streets of
Tokyo and its suburbs and the Japayuki is no more. There are
remnants all over the town, like a club named “Aliw.”
And old Japanese men eyeing the young female students
with me. This thing will never go away.
For all
our concern about how the world looks at us, there is no
mention of the Philippines in the Japanese papers, the
English broadsheets.
Japan
Times, The Mainichi Shimbun, The Daily Yomiuri. There
was one about how Japan was planning to donate tons of
rice to the
Philippines
but their hands are tied given the rules of free trade.
These economic and trade complexities will never go,
too.
I love
the Japanese newspapers in English. They are real
newspapers. When I open them, I am reminded of our
BusinessMirror, a real broadsheet. I just have one
problem: in trains there are etiquettes to be observed,
like not using much your cell phone or putting them on a
silent mode, and not spreading wide open the newspaper
you are reading because you may inconvenience the person
beside you. These etiquettes shall never go away, too.
And that is good. |
