The first volume of the manga has been read here on Wanikani with the Beginner Book Club and then continuing to read the series as an offshoot 舞妓さんちのまかないさん・Kiyo in Kyoto 👘 Reading Club (I’ve read the first 25 volumes already so I’m ready to try the show on Netflix! Whenever I will get Netflix that is, right now I have enough other resources to use)
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Well… Another evening, another Yoji Yamada film… or rather I should say another Chieko Baisho film 
Where Spring Comes Late / 家族 (1970)
A poor family of husband, wife, young boy, baby girl and husband’s father move from a mining town on a small island off Nagasaki in the 九州 region to a farming village in the 北海道 region.
This, because the husband is tired of being ordered around and is daydreaming about living off the land, yet is short-sighted and lacks a clear vision for the future (mmm sounds somewhat familiar). The wife is reluctant to uproot but she’s not willing to let him go on his own so they embark on a weeklong trip that takes them across the whole of Japan by several trains and a couple of ferries - and from cherry trees in blossom in the South to the still snow-blanketed North.
So that’s where the English/international title comes from, although I feel the Japanese title is much more appropriate.
Because although it starts off as an almost cheerful adventure is actually fraught with hardship, regret, anxiety and even tragedy. The family relationships are put to the test, but there is a happy ending, as life goes on.
In a way it’s a collection of postcards from Japan, in another is a social commentary on the industrial churn and economic boom of the 60s-70s and its toll on the lower worker classes (similar to how China is nowadays, I suppose?).
Chieko Baisho is again very good, even though she was younger and less experienced than in the other films.
The male standout though is not the husband role, but that of his father, played rather superbly by Chishu Ryu - the patriarch from Tokyo Story / 東京物語, for reference.
So. A very good story with good performances, but held back a little (for me) by a lot of scenes shot in a almost documentary-like way and with a few attempts at humour that feel a bit out of place here.
8/10
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Thanks!
Added to the list for when I’ll have smoked through the remaining three feature films of his and will be wanting more 
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One more with Chieko Baisho, her third and final collaboration with Ken Takakura, whom I’ve only now found out was known as “Clint Eastwood of Japan” .
Station / 駅 (1981)
From IMDb:
Constantly put to the test and faced with tragedy wherever he turns, can a man finally find solace and a modicum of love or rest with what is left of his hometown, his family, love or himself?
Mikami is a police detective, who after 20 years of service is quite worn down by the job and the pressure it has put on him.
The film opens in 1968 with him seeing off his wife and kid at a train station, after their divorce. Then we get to see him work through a few tough cases over 12 years, all over the damn lovely 北海道.
While the stories here were good (and later it becomes clear how they all have an impact on the second half of the film), this first part was shot in a very 70s style that I didn’t really get on with almost to the point that I was going to DNF it - not a fault of the film itself, it’s a pet peeve of mine with that period’s style.
Mid-way through, the story makes it to the very end of 1979 and it almost feels like a different film in terms of shooting and direction… just in time for Chieko Baisho to enter the stage as bar owner Kiriko in a small village.
Can’t go into the story any more than that, I’ll just say these two really did make a great on-screen couple!
Sooo:
6/10 for the first half, 8-9/10 for the second, 10/10 for the chemistry between the two leads, 0.1/10 for the ending.
The latter not because it wasn’t good… it was really good, within the frame of the story being told and maybe the only plausible outcome. But it was not the “and they lived happily ever after” ending I wanted 
Whoever is interested in watching these Baisho+Takakura films, I’d suggest going through them in chronological order:
The Yellow Handkerchief → A Distant Cry from Spring → Station
They are not related (the first two from Yoji Yamada share some thematic elements) but it’s nice to see the on-screen chemistry between the two actors evolve over the different roles
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I’m impressed that you manage to watch one movie everyday!
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Heh, thank you!
Often enough it’s more than one a day, my spreadsheet (I need one to keep track) says I am now at 269 watched this year, and I think over a third being Japanese - compared to under 10 Japanese in total last year 
(to put things into perspective: over at the other forum there are folks who’re at 300 or even more so far)
Not that difficult these days, really: our summer has been so hot (the forecast for today is a relatively cool 36C - compared to 40-45C usually the rest of the month and similarly expected in August) so I don’t go out that much, in winter it’s very cold and again don’t go out very often… no kids to take care of and the cat doesn’t need much time to be entertained/staffed 
Oh and I follow only a few TV shows (1-2 maaaybe 3 episodes a week?) and no anime series, which I imagine would eat up a considerable amount of time.
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Hehe I see. I always enjoy people going all in with a hobby! The only time I watched so many movies was during the Online Movie Festival, it was a lot of fun but I was missing my reading! But now my pace of 3 movies a month (limited by credits to loan) is too slow, I watch them all in the first two weeks and then miss movies, might be time to look for other places where to watch…
Yeah… my book-reading time has decreased in recent years, now I put in about an hour a day usually after work to relax. But I also cheat a bit, doing my daily NHK Easy reading (or better said, decyphering 
) and some WK+BP SRS during work hours ooops! 
Soon enough (at least I keep telling meself that ) I’ll brave into actual books in Japanese and then I expect the reading time will go back up…
Ugh… it can be a quite expensive hobby. There’s the cost of streaming services on one hand (but account sharing can help there while it’s still possible) but then, everything I really like I end up buying the discs for, 'cause I want to own them not be at the whims of streaming services… it all adds up to a pretty penny over a whole year 
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And one more with Chieko Baisho, after a timejump of some 40 years from the previous one:
Plan 75 (2022)
In a near future/alternate present, Japan adopts a govt program to encourage assisted euthanasia among elderly citizens (75 and over) by offering them a $1000 “signing bonus” and making all necessary arrangements for their passing away. It is all very efficient and orderly, as you’d expect from the Japanese.
Michi is a 78yo without a family who signs up for the program, conflicted between carrying on with her life or “serving the society” by ending it early.
Hiromu is a Plan 75 employee who reconnects with his lonely uncle when he signs up for the program on his 75th birthday.
Maria is a Filipino service worker who helps dispose of the remains of those who go ahead with Plan 75.
Yes, it is quite a grim affair… Slow (very much so) but well shot and giving quite a bit of food for thought.
The three threads intersect but only marginally so, with Maria’s story being (for me) the weakest of all, while Michi’s is by far the best.
It doesn’t concern itself with how or why Plan 75 came to be, nor does it attempt to offer any solutions, instead focusing on the plight of the elderly in a society that doesn’t really want them around anymore.
In a way it rings back to the The Ballad of Narayama, but that was one I didn’t like outside of the main subject - the 1980-something version, guess it’s highly regarded but I recall finding it quite crass in execution with its ugh side threads.
But this one was much more to my liking - quiet and gentle, thanks mainly to Baisho and the very nice cinematography.
8/10
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Reminds me of Ikigami (2008) - IMDb.
(I’ve only read the manga)
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I’ve got that one on the watchlist But not in any real hurry to get to it, I’ve a feeling it might be slightly overrated because it’s based on a manga - that is to say, people like it because it’s a live-action version of the manga they loved, but usually these don’t translate well into feature films.
We’ll see…
How is the manga, by the way?
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The character stories are really good and unique, but the plot explanation and the route it takes at the end are not great.
Still, worth reading for sure.
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Good news for movie lovers!
I’m totally going to watch those
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Watched another one yesterday:
The Sting of Death / 死の棘 (1990)
It’s one I wouldn’t heartily recommend because it’s veeery slow, cyclical to the point of near exasperation, often weird in action and even dialogue.I liked it well enough (for the most part), but it definitely wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of a must-watch list.
Stil…
It made me feel slightly better about my (low-level) knowledge of Japanese, mainly because the dialogue is slow and clear and I was able to pick up from it a decent amount of known vocab even without referring to the English subs, moreso than usual.
I wouldn’t be able to say whether it’s “simple” dialogue as such, it’s not listed on Natively.
And there was one other thing that stood out, right from the very first lines - what sometimes gets lost in translation.
First, the context of the film:
Sometime in the 1950s, wife finds out husband has been cheating on her and they’re at each other’s throats, of course in that restrained Japanese way
The husband is (or tries to be) contrite, the wife cannot trust him anymore no matter how hard she tries, and disappointment, suspicion and jealousy constantly rear their ugly heads.
So then. The film starts off with the husband asking the wife:
お前、どうしても死ぬつもり？
This got translated as “Hey, are you really planning to die?”
To which the wife retorts that he shouldn’t call her お前 (which, as I understand, it would not have been all that uncommon in that period in intimate/family settings and likely what he was using before the affair was revealed) and they eventually settle on あなたさま (is さま usually written in its kanji form 様? Jisho isn’t explicit on this.) translated in the subs as “my dear”.
So in English the switch ends up being from ‘you’ to ‘dear’ - not quite the same.
There’s of course no reference to the use of sonkeigo (how could it be, in a dialogue sub?) and how the relationship status changes between the two characters just from this switch from casual to top-level honorific in addressing one.
Oh and… because this came up recently in another thread:
Both in this one and in the previous title, they’ve been happily voicing their 'u’s in です and ます
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HAHA same!! I read the book before The Handmaiden came out because I saw some gifs from the previous adaption and got curious, and I was profoundly disappointed in the book. The Handmaiden managed to resolve like all my complaints about the book AND was a more compelling story on top of that. It blows the book out of the water in every possible way.
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Godzilla Minus One is a great movie.
Godzilla Plus One is a wedding RSVP.
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Just watched Shoplifters too! One more vote from my side, wow what a movie
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Cool beans! 
l decided to leave it for August, after all. Mostly because over the last few months, the “best watch of the month” has been something by Kore-eda and in July I wanted the erm “prize” to go to a Chinese one instead - I don’t usually watch Chinese stuff 'cause the language kinda hurts my ears, but this one was worth it
It seems everyone who’s watched Shoplifters praises it… this is kinda crazy!
(I am currently on a short break from Japanese flicks, gotta catch up with recent releases over on our side of the world…)
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The funny thing is that this was totally coincidental for me that it was the movie I was going to watch today, I just go through the movies on my list one by one!
Oh which movie was that?
It’s another one hard to recommend.
The first 70 mins are extremely slow, there are a lot of shots of practically nothing much… but, ooooh so pretty - and it gave me the best feeling of “film noir” atmosphere I got from pretty much any modern movie (think… last 30 years). Then the title credits come, a whopping 70mins in, and what follows is a 60min single shot (real single take, not fake) which is technically amazing, as it involves moving around a huge area and even a “flying” sequence where they attached the camera to a drone I guess.
The first part is a question of how accurate personal memory is. The second part is more or less a dream of the main character, in which significant people and events from his life are reinterpreted.
And then the ending… it’s ambiguous, and it stuck in my mind for days - something which doesn’t usually happen. I thought it was the perfect ending, however I definitely can understand if whoever stuck with it for its whole runtime might be disappointed/frustrated.
Aaand… this rant is not completely off-topic
'cause as the film ends and the credits roll, it surprises with a Japanese song coming out of nowhere. It’s very nice and fits the ending but also… believe you me ( ), that song (well, the language) was a welcome relief at that point
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