Sad Samurais and Yakuza Ghosts

By Miroslav Marinov

It’s Friday night and I am sitting in the dark cinema of the National Film Board watching a movie. It’s a samurai story from the Tokugawa times, but there is something strange about it. There are no battles, no heroism, just mundane everyday work, because the samurais now are just shipping and receiving clerks who trade goods for the castle (and just like “salary men” go for a drink after work). The main character is a master swordsman, but in this changing world his math skills and the cleanliness of his clothes are much more important than his ability to fight. When his fighting skills are needed, he is asked to use them against another samurai, who doesn’t want to kill himself after his master’s death, because the old moral code has lost all its meaning. It’s a sad world, turned upside down, in which heroism is not needed anymore.

That strange world reminds me of another movie seen there, about later times. Two junior Yakuza members attack a rival gang and everything goes well for them (meaning they have shot almost everybody) until the boss of the gang, an old man with long white hair, grabs the neck of one of them and tries to strangle him. After more shooting they kill the boss, but his hands wouldn’t go away, so they have to sever them from the body and the man walks around for a while with hands still on his neck. As if this is not strange enough, the attack sparks a full-blown Yakuza war, in which we see many unusual people acting in unusual ways, fighting with weapons that are getting bigger and bigger. When everything is done, the survivors go to the supreme Yakuza leader, a man in plain kimono sitting in a Zen garden, who ends their conversation with them with the Zen-like statement: “Sometimes death is part of the training of the warrior.” We are left for a moment to contemplate that strange statement, but suddenly the ghost of the boss killed in the beginning appears (like a semi-transparent hologram) and yells: “Rock and roll!” followed by loud heavy metal music.

This is the world of the real Japanese cinema. It’s a strange world indeed, because it is designed to make you think and often to shock and provoke. The plots often look difficult to comprehend and you really need to think in order to get into the minds of people from a very different culture. And for me, this world would have remained closed, if not for those Friday night shows organized by CJS. This is the only opportunity to see some of the best works of the Japanese cinema in Toronto on a regular basis. Sadly, the mainstream media, cinemas and TV channels, have done very little to bring that world to the Canadian audience, if we don’t count the ninjas and all other B-movies.

And the most interesting thing here is that the event has come to life and continued for five years mostly through the efforts of one person: Jeff Harju. He is the guy who greets you at the door before the movie starts and asks you to right your name on a piece of paper. If you are lucky, this piece of paper will let you win a bottle of sake (or some tickets if the sake is already won). But the most valuable thing is that after the movie you can talk to him and when you do, you will quickly find out how knowledgeable he is about the Japanese movies. From a layman’s point a view it is very difficult to navigate in that wide world, but somehow he manages to do that and select something that is hard to forget.

I hope that CJS will continue its Movie Night program. Not only is it a program that makes us familiar with a different culture, but is also a tool to make our brains work again and liberate them from the Jon and Kate stupor.