Interpreting Isao Takahata's 'The Tale of Princess Kaguya'

Interpreting “The Tale of Princess Kaguya"

There was a moment, when I was returning home after watching “The Tale of Princess Kaguya”  that I thought, “Ah, ha!” If I was Buddhist, I would have called it satori—a moment of enlightenment. Suddenly, I wanted to see the movie again.

At my moment of cinematic satori, I was remembering the playful segment between the princess as a toddler and a frog. She imitates the frog and eventually catches it after frightening her adoptive father.

In Japanese the word for frog is “kaeru”　（蛙）、but kaeru is also a homophone for the dictionary form of the verb meaning to return home, “kaeru” （帰る）. Toward the end of the movie, that is what the princess must do. She must return to her people and to her own kind. From the very beginning, even for those unfamiliar with the tale of Kaguya, this is poetically foreshadowed during this delightful frog passage.

This foreshadowing of the princess’ return to her own world is only one reason why the frog is significant. There’s also a Japanese saying “Kaeru no ko wa kaeru” (蛙の子は蛙）or even a frog’s babies are still frogs (no matter the appearance). And so is the case with the princess. The saying means to assert that one is what one is born to be and at one time was meant to reinforce the class system.

As I have discussed previously, kaeru is also a homophone for kaeru (変える) meaning to change or transform such as transform something into something else and this is very much a part of the story as well.

The movie “The Tale of Princess Kaguya” is filled with poetic references to time and seasons, but it is also about responsibility and the conflict between duty and love (giri and aijō) with a Buddhist twist. The giri-aijō conflict is a common device in Japanese literature. The movie made me consider the difference between a country like America that doesn’t have princesses and a country like Japan which has a constitutional monarchy and thus has an emperor, empress, princes and princesses.

The story of the bamboo cutter and Princess Kaguya is old, References are made to it in the oldest Japanese poetry anthology, the “Manyōshū” (circa 759 AD). The bamboo cutter Okina （翁 meaning old man）discovers a small doll-like girl in a bamboo stalk. When we first see her in the movie, she resembles a doll from a Hina-Matsuri arrangement, then she become a regular almost-human infant (During Hina-matsuri, girls set out their dolls which represent the full Imperial court). She’s just one that grows as fast as a bamboo.

Okina (Takeo Chii) and his wife Ōna (媼 meaning old woman or mother) raise her as best they can. The peasant kids call her “Little Bamboo” while her adoptive father Okina calls her princess.  An older boy Suteru (Kengo Kora) attempts to protect her and they are fond of each other.

In the bamboo forest, Okina finds gold and fine silks. He rejoices, knowing that the divine spirits mean for him to raise her as a princess. He takes her to the capital of Kyoto where she is schooled in court etiquette by Lady Sagami (Atsuko Takahata).

Eventually, she attracts numerous suitors. Five of them, she gives impossible tasks. The men all fail and one of the men dies during his quest. This saddens her, but it doesn’t stop the Emperor for attempting to force his attentions on her. Notice when in a close up of the emperor behind him the Chinese character for negation (not) is framed behind his head (不不).  The emperor is also not worthy of this princess, even if, as according to myth, he is supposed to be a direct descendant of the sun goddess.

Of course, this princess longs for Sutemaru and to see him and her childhood home again.

I wonder if the Disney princess is as popular in Japan as in the United States. The fate of the princesses in Japan has been the topic of much sympathetic talk. While American audiences are quite familiar with the travails of the British royalty, they are not with the Japanese monarchy and aristocrats.

Whatever one might say about the Emperor Hirohito, now called Emperor Showa, he did stubbornly refuse to take courtesans in order to produce a male heir to the throne.  His wife had already given birth to four girls (three of whom survived into adulthood). Then in 1933, his wife Empress Kōjun, produced Akihito and two years later, his brother Prince Hitachi. Their last child would be a daughter.

When Akihito was the crown prince he fell in love with the eldest daughter of an industrialist (flour milling), Michiko Shōda. Her family was Catholic, which is unusual for Japan, and she attended Christian schools. Christianity had been outlawed until the Meiji era and thus was practiced secretly for a while, but by the time of Akihito and Michiko, Christianity, including Catholicism were practiced in the open in Japan.

Not only was Michiko not Buddhist or Shinto, she was also a commoner and the first commoner to marry into the Japanese Imperial Family. Empress Kōjun opposed the union.  The psychological pressure on Michiko was so intense, she was unable to speak, once in the 1960s and once in the 1990s.

The current crown prince of Japan, Naruhito, has commented that in comparison the Royals of Great Britain are more relaxed because Queen Elizabeth can pour her own tea and serve sandwiches to her guests. His future-wife attended the top university in Japan, Tokyo, and went on to study in England. She, Masako, like her mother-in-law suffered similar psychological stress.  In Japan, being a princess, particularly a crown princess is not something to be envied.

Students of Japanese might easily relate to Empress Michiko’s speechlessness when they try to deal with the complexities of keigo or polite speech. When do you use verbs mairu or irrasharu instead of kuru (to come)  or iku (to go)? In Japanese, levels of formality are one of the most important factors in sentence construction. The kind of formal speech you might use in an office is different still from the verbs and noun phrases used by the emperor and his court.

For speakers of Japanese, you can hear the change in verb inflections and in the word usage in “Kaguya.” We see Kaguya as not only a child becoming an adult, but she is also becoming a princess. Her stifled spirit might somewhat reflect the reality of Empress Michiko and Crown Princess Masako but Kaguya lives in ancient times.

Unlike Empress Michiko and the Crown Princess Masako, Kaguya is under the social customs of a different era. During the Heian period (794 to 1185 C.E.) daughters became tools for political power. The Fujiwara family rose to power by marrying its daughters into the Imperial family (Fujiwara period was 900 to 1200 AD). However, the political power rarely resided with the women so women without men to support them lived precarious lives. Who would protect Kaguya after her adoptive parents died? Who would feed her? Who would cloth her? Noble women would fall into poverty without a male relative to support them.

So because Kaguya is a princess and because she is an alien or supernatural being, she could not find love with Sutemaru. In Japanese, a frog won’t turn into a prince (although there is one old folk tale where a frog does turn into a man but not into a prince). In “Kaguya,” a frog is still a frog. Kaguya is still a princess, even on earth. Her adoptive parents are still peasants despite the money they have found. Sutemaru is still a peasant.

Moreover, a speaker of Japanese would instantly know their love was ill-fated—not only because of their different worlds and class, but also because of his name. His name means to throw away (suteru捨てる). Maru or maro was once often added on to male given names. He is going to be discarded.

Our wish for Sutemaru and Kaguya to be together is romantic, but hardly practical. He was so poor, he resorted to thievery. He was beaten. You have to wonder if his child was his first or if others had died due to malnutrition and poverty. While a samurai might make an appeal in another era as in “HaraKiri” which took place during the Tokugawa period (1603-1867), a peasant had few rights and few opportunities unless they could marry up.

Sutemaru wasn’t going to turn into a prince and while Kaguya had refused to marry, he had not. He had a family. He had a child. He was not free.

So because of the Heian era custom of political marriage and the general powerlessness of the peasants, it should come as no surprise that the father wishes to marry Kaguya into a well-to-do family. The suitors may or may not be sincere and men were allowed dalliances and courtesans. Consider “The Tale of Genji” or how the famous Heian poet Ariwara no Narihira is generally the object of honor, even after deserting one of his loves, but famous female Heian poet Ono no Komachi is portrayed in later literature as lonely beggar woman.

By the Heian period, Buddhism had been introduced into Japan and would eventually combine with Shinto in many aspects of the culture. The concept of kū 空(emptiness or voidness) became the ideal. Romantic love and lust are attachment to the physical world.

While in human form, Kaguya sees the value of love, she has felt suffering and she feels regret. Yet in order to enter the world of the Buddha, you have to leave the concerns of the world behind. She is offered a crown and a robe. Once she puts on the robe she will forget the impurities of earth. The special robe is a common theme in Japanese folklore where heavenly spirits (sometimes translated as angels) come to earth and if their robe is stolen, they cannot return to their world.

Surrounding the Buddha-like figure who is seen as being yellow are what looked like Kannon, the goddess of mercy, as well as bodisattvas. A bodisattva is someone who has reached enlightenment, but in order to help others find the path delays entering Nirvana.

Isao Takahata’s movie deals with issues of spirituality, class and the restriction on women in a manner that is both poetic and nebulous. We see images and references to the seasons in the flowers. We see a contrast between the beauty of women in the Heian times—the round face of Lady Sagami and the more modern visage of Kaguya. The life of peasants and aristocrats are both tragic; poverty prevents love and the restrictions of class prevent Kaguya from enjoying her life.

Takahata’s movie doesn’t have any clear-cut message about family or environment like one finds in Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” or “Spirited Away.” There is no happy ending, no resolution, no well-defined message about the class system or gender roles.

For women, the movie shows the restrictions women were once under and the now absurd notions of beauty can be, yet we know things aren’t so different now, even outside of Japan.  An Australian news anchor Karl Stefanovic wore the same suit every day for nearly a year in response to the criticism his co-anchor, a woman, received. No one noticed. (http://www.people.com/article/karl-stefanovoc-wears-same-suit-year-sexism)

At a universal level, the movie deals with the call of adulthood and responsibility. Kaguya escaped from her world to the world of humans just like Prince Hal escapes to the kingdom of Falstaff and ignores responsibilities of being crown prince in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 1.”

In some respects, the movie reminded me on my adventures studying abroad. There’s a lot of freedom when you’re in a country where you have no relatives and thus no family obligations and you’re not held to the confines of a culture since you are an outsider. Yet if you stay too long, if you become too much part of the culture or if you want to join the society, particularly by marriage, then you give up a lot of freedom. A year studying abroad can be liberating and life-changing, because I’ve heard the same sentiment from Japanese women studying in the U.S.

In this tale of a princess and a frog, “The Tale of Princess Kaguya,”  even the beautiful princess from the moon has responsibilities that she was born to and eventually must return. A frog is still a frog. A princess is still a princess and the court and its duties await. Everyone must grow up and live within the restrictions of their society.

“The Tale of Princess Kaguya” was nominated for Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year, it won the Animation Film Award at the Mainichi Film Awards and the Audience Award at the Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX.

On becoming a dad according to Kore-eda: 'Like Father, Like Son'

There might be some confusion at to what the movie "Like Father, Like Son," is about. Written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the movie centers on two boys who were switched at birth and how the situation is handled. "Like Father, Like Son" opens at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 and the Royal.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL3MQ9VNjmI]

The movie seems to set up a class comparison along with a nature versus nurture paradigm. Ryota Nonomiya (singer-songwriter Masaharu Fukuyama) is a driven highly paid architect. He and his wife, Midori (Machiko Ono) have taken their son, Keita (Keita Ninomiya)  to "audition" for an exclusive private school that Ryota had previously attended. Keita has been coached to have the right answers which may not be true at all.

You might notice that there's some similarity in the names. The kei in Keita means to congratulate or rejoice. The ryo in Ryota means good. The ta in both names means plenty. The child playing Keita is actually named Keita; that seems a bit of luck. There's a naming convention in Japanese where one Chinese character from the father's name appears in the son's name. This strengthens the feeling that Ryota feels an important connection with his supposed son.

Midori gets a call from a hospital in her hometown. Eventually, the hospital reveals that Keita is not their child. They introduce them to the parents of their child: Yudai Saiki (Lily Franky) and Yukari Saiki (Yoko Maki).  The father's name is almost a comical contrast: Yūdai means grand, majestic. The yū means great leader.  (The last names of both parents are also place names).

The Saiki are struggling lower middle class. The father runs his own shop, selling mostly light bulbs,  and the family lives above. The mother works part-time at a fast-food ramen store. The child they have been raising, Ryusei (Shogen Hwang) is the oldest of three. The Saiki, particularly the father, seemed to be focused on the financial possibilities and the father, Yudai is crassly often more interested in the food served.

According to the director's notes, Kore-eda noted that while his wife "appeared to transform into a mother" when their daughter was born five years ago, he felt "somewhat estranged." He asked himself, "At what point does a father truly become a father?"

The question about shared blood and time spent together isn't one new to traditional Japanese culture. Should a family not have a son, they used to resolve it by adopting a son. They also might wait until one of their daughters married and take in an adult "son," a mukoyōshi (婿養子). Yoshi, in Japan, can mean both son-in-law and adopted son. The practice hasn't died. According to a recent BBC News article, it continues.

In the interest of full disclosure, my father's youngest brother was sent back from the United States after both parents died in the same year. My youngest uncle was adopted into a related family and took a different last name. Eventually, he returned to the United States and lives in Japan. He has two sets of parents.

For this reason, the concept of nature versus nurture is less strong in Japan. The original Japanese title suggests this. In Japanese, the title is "Soshite chichi ni naru (そして父になる or "Then I Become a Dad"). As any student of Japanese knows, family terms are very important to the Japanese. Someone else's father and my father are different terms: otōsan versus chichi. You don't need a possessive adjective to differentiate. It is built into the language. With the influx of English, the word パパ could have also been used, but I think it would have meant something else. When talking about your father in Japanese you'd say something like "Chichi wa yasashii" (my father is kind, but when speaking to him, and using an address term, you might say "Tōsan." Yet the Chinese character used would be the same: chichi 父versus otōsan　お父さん.

Kore-eda sets up a contrast between a modern family, the Nonomiya, who sleeps on Western-style beds in a home that is "like a hotel" and a merchant family squeezed into a home/workplace that has tatami. Because he works at home, the father has time for his kids and the son must take care of his siblings while the parents run the business.

The movie is about Ryota becoming a dad, because most men can father a child, but not everyone sticks around to be a dad. Here, Kore-eda puts the responsibility fully on Ryota because when this problem crops up, his boss encourages him to slow down and take time to sort out his family situation.

As with his 2004 "Nobody Knows"（誰も知らない） and the 2011 "I Wish" （奇跡), Kore-eda is concerned with the conundrums of the modern family but in "Like Father, Like Son," the focus is not on the children, but on the fathers and, in particular, the kind of father who doesn't find time for his children. It's a question we've asked in America as well, most poignantly in the Harry Chapin song, "Cat's in the Cradle."

"Like Father, Like Son" won the Cannes Jury Prize and is nominated for Best Picture by the Japanese Academy. 

"Like Father, Like Son" is currently playing at the Pasadena Laemmle Playhouse 7.

47 Ronin and the wrong hairdresser?

The rumbling could be felt before Comic-Con. Dark Horse was hurrying to get out their version of the Japanese loyalty saga of the 47 rōnin--they wanted theirs out before the release of the Universal movie. A look at the first trailer gave fans an idea that the animated trailer only solidified. What Universal was trying to sell was new wave Orientalism.

By Orientalism I mean the belief that one theory of culture could be used to describe all the peoples from North Africa to the Pacific Islands. I've felt uneasy sweeping winds of Orientalism even as a graduate student when I argued that to describe someone as Asian didn't paint any more detailed a picture than to say someone was European. We expect to know there are differences between Italians and Germans, even if they were allies during the last official world war yet not with the Japanese and the Chinese who were not.

Sure, a person of East Asian ethnicity can sometimes pass for Japanese or Chinese or Korean when they are not. You'll get no argument from me there and that has been one of my favorite games when in Japan or parts of China and even Korea. Yet in the case of a historical drama, there are many differences and Universal's team for "47 Rōnin" ignored cultural differences between Japan and China.

Samurai films are very popular in the United States and one festival in Los Angeles was founded specifically to counterbalance the lopsided image of Japan that resulted from the focused importation of Japanese samurai films and videos over other popular genres. With that in mind, people in America (as well, of course, as Japan) know what a samurai should look like.

The samurai had a specific hairstyle, chonmage.  Nagisa Oshima's 1999 "Gohatto"(御法度) or "Taboo" pointedly pushes this issue as the protagonist, Kanō Sōzaburō (Ryuhei Matsuda), refuses to cut his hair to conform, resulting in tension within an elite samurai group. In the 2002 Oscar-nominated "Twilight Samurai" or "Tasogare Seibei" (たそがれ清兵衛), before Iguchi Seibei (Hiroyuki Sanada) goes out to battle, because he has no assistant, he asks his childhood sweetheart to help him perform the traditional rituals, including shaving and styling his hair.  Both movies are set at the end of the Tokugawa period (the 1800s). 'The Last Samurai" which is mentioned in the Variety article by Ramin Setoodeh and Scott Foundas is also set in that time period. For the most part, the traditional samurai hairstyles were used in that Tom Cruise movie.

The proper hairstyle also comes up in Takashi Miike's 2011 "Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai" or "Ichimei" ( 一命 Ichimei)  a remake of the Masaki Kobayashi 1962 "Harakiri" (切腹).  Both Miike and Kobayashi's movies are set between 1619-1630. In both movies, samurai fake being sick because their top knot has been cut off.

Historically, "47 Rōnin" is based on the Akō Incident of 1703. People know what samurai are supposed to look like before, during and after that time, and the filmmakers of Keanu Reeves' version ignore that.  We see the samurai with long hair and, before their ritual suicide, a funny bun on the top. Compare that to the 1991 version of "Chūshingura."

My family, descended on my father's side from daimyo and my mother's side from the merchant class, know something about hair.  While Japanese women did have wavy hair it wasn't encouraged and considered ugly. This prejudice was still strong in the Meiji period, something you might miss in movies from the Criterion collection such as "Apart from You." Modern girls wore their hair in curls.

For the women in "47 Rōnin," the some of the hairstyles in this new "47 Rōnin" are more Dr. Seuss or Marie Antoinette meets kabuki than court style. Wavy hair was considered bad hair for Japanese women, something that has been pointed out to me in Los Angeles in modern times so the prejudice lingers. Further, what aristocratic woman would be without her ladies in waiting in Japan or any other royal house--not that the women are really aristocrats.

During the Tokugawa period, Japan was ruled by the Shogunate through the aristocracy. The emperor was a puppet and he held his puppet court in Kyōto. The shogun was in Edo (now Tokyo). In the original version of the tale, an imperial envoy was sent annually to the shogun in Tokyo and the shogun's master of protocol, Lord Kira,  supposed to instruct the Lord Asano on proper manners for the occasion. Yet in this 2013 version it is the shogun visiting Lord Asano and the shogun is addressed as your "highness" instead of using a military term. Is that a mistake in translation or just ignorance on the part of the screenwriters?

During the Tokugawa period, there was a rigid four-class system: samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants. The aristocracy was above system. Also outside the class system were the Ainu, the burakumin, actors, criminals, prostitutes and courtesans.

This 2013 movie repeatedly implies that Keanu Reeves character can't be a samurai because he's a half-breed.  Yet during that time period only samurai were allowed to have swords and knives. A peasant could be killed on the spot for possessing a sword and we are repeatedly told that his character, Kai, is the son of a British sailor and a peasant. I'm not saying that there wasn't and isn't prejudice against mixed race persons in Japan, but that class was an important factor during the Tokugawa period. Kai was of the peasant class through his mother.

Although I am not a native speaker of Japanese, I have been told that originally there was no word for privacy in Japan. In a country with walls that might literally be made of little more than paper, it is hard to get real privacy so to a large extent, privacy is a mental state.

You can't feel the claustrophobia of the mountainous island nation of Japan in this movie. Some of the scenes, perhaps filmed in Budapest, make the castle look vast and Japan filled with long, flat plains. Further, geography is all mixed up. The warriors travel easily from the Tokyo area to Deshima, the Dutch colony in the bay of Nagasaki, where Keanu Reeve's character is fighting monsters. Yet in reality that's a journey that would require 205 hours on foot according to Google maps (or 8 hours by public transit).

You get a sense of geographic confusion when you see the castle of the evil Lord Kira is shown as being in a dark and cold place and yet other scenes are in a bright place with cherry blossoms blooming. Cherry blossoms generally bloom in April and not for long. The winters in Tokyo are generally bright and dry. Instead of studying geography, the writers seemed to have fallen back on emotional scenic design. Dark and cold means evil. That didn't work for me in the 2013 "The Wolverine" when the action could have taken place in the distant north and it doesn't work for me here during the Tokugawa period where the fastest mode of transport is a horse.

Turning the "47 Rōnin" into a white-man-saves-the-day spectacle is cultural imperialism and in this day and age, that might have been a bad judgment call. The need to insert Keanu Reeves as a half-breed reminds me of Raymond Burr in the 1956 "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" Is a white man--or in this case a half-white man as in the 1972-1975 "Kung Fu" TV series--really necessary after the success of Ang Lee's 2000 wuxia film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" or his 2012 "Life of Pi"?

While the dragon in Ang Lee's movie wasn't real or even CGI, the dragon in "47 Rōnin" is not Asian. Dragons are considered lucky in China and Japan, but the evil enchantress becomes a dragon in the "47 Rōnin." Dragons are associated with wind and water in Asia, but this CGI dragon is one that breathes fire. The script does incorporate Japanese legendary characters: the tengu who are mountain warriors and the fox who can transform itself into a beautiful woman, but brings in one unnamed beast instead of incorporating the kirin or the kappa. And why bring in that nameless beast for one appearance?

The kind of imperialism of this version of "47 Rōnin" isn't as bad as the 1939 "Gunga Din" which was banned in India at the time but somewhat insensitively was used later as the inspiration for many scenes in 1984  "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." The movie has a half-white character teaching the Japanese how to handle Japanese beasts and the true nature of bushidō. It fuses Japanese and Chinese culture with Western in a way that might be more digestible if this were food and not a movie.

The Variety article says that the film when it opened in Japan "needed support from the region, where the cast was well recognized. But it never gained traction there...Market research showed the key demographic of young men didn't buy enough tickets."

Why would young Japanese men buy tickets to this movie? The advertising for the movie clearly shows that the production team doesn't understand what makes a woman sexy in a kimono. (It's not the cleavage, it's the back of a woman's bare neck and the glimpse of her white foot.) The trailers depict the samurai without the hairstyle of their class. Should a tale about Japan seem more Japanese?

While the Variety article talks about the first-time feature director Carl Rinsch didn't find a "balance between classic Eastern tale and the more Western touches" and that Rinsch wanted a more arthouse samurai film and also talks about the many writers (Chris Morgan and Hossein Amini) and many editors, what about finding the Japanese part of a story set in Japan?

Traditionally the story of the 47 rōnin, known as Genroku Chūshingura (the Genroku era loyal retainers), is about the conflict between human feeling (aijo) and duty (giri). Having Japanese actors as Japanese is a start and preferable to yellow face, but that isn't enough to make a good movie about Japan. Adding some Japanese items like swords and Japanese style armor, Japanese mythical creatures or a cherry tree doesn't make something Japanese. In my opinion, the "47 Rōnin" failed as a movie because it didn't respect the  culture or traditions of Japan or the samurai, or show respect for the fans of either.