In Memory of Yujiku

 

Whenever I am back in Tokyo, I have two priorities – to see my friends and to go to the cinema. The last two years I lived in Tokyo I went to the cinema on average about three times a week, and the independent theatres there form a huge part of my emotional map of Tokyo.

I am going back to Tokyo this weekend, and after letting my friends know, the first thing I did was check movie times. And that was when I learned that my absolute favorite cinema, Yujiku, is closing this Friday.

So I want to talk about Yujiku. I want to talk about my memories of the cinema, and to say thank you.

I found Yujiku when I first moved to Suginami ward and was sitting in my new apartment googling “things to do in Suginami ward”. I lived in Koenji, and the cinema was in Asagaya, so I could easily walk there, and at that time there was nothing I loved more than movies. It was perfect.

The first movie I saw at Yujiku was Toni Erdmann. I had heard about it in the news since it had made a big splash at Cannes but hadn’t planned to see it until a coworker of mine recommended it. This coworker, Mr. K, became a really important person to me, and that, too, is because of movies. He taught math and I taught English, and demographically we couldn’t have been more different. But somehow we heard that we shared a love of cinema, and once we started talking about movies we didn’t stop. He was one of the absolute kindest people at my old job, and always encouraged me to live life outside of our school.

So I saw Toni Erdmann, and I loved it. It’s easy to remember firsts, but as it happens, I also remember the second movie I saw at Yujiku. This is where I have to tell you something a little bit far-fetched. Yujiku changed my life. My reasoning may be a little bit tenuous, but bear with me please.

The second movie I saw was The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie. This will probably surprise anyone who knows me now, but back in 2017 I didn’t really know much about Bowie. I could name exactly one song of his, and that was because it was used in Frances Ha in a scene that was itself a nod to Mauvais Sang, by Leos Carax. But I had nothing to do one Saturday, and Yujiku was playing The Man Who Fell to Earth, so I went.

It’s not my favorite movie, truly. I can’t say I even liked it. As much as I have come to appreciate Nicholas Roeg, I wouldn’t call myself a fan. The movie itself didn’t rock my world.

But Bowie did. After the movie, I started listening to his music, and that became part of my routine – walk to Asagaya while listening to Bowie, buy a movie ticket, wander around the secondhand shops, see a movie, wander back home. That was my ritual every weekend for about two years.

To give you some context: I had realized around the end of 2017 that I needed to change my life. I wasn’t happy with my job, and my job took up pretty much all of my time and energy, so I started looking for new hobbies. I bought a guitar and started writing songs, I took up painting, I dedicated more time to photography, but nothing really clicked. Nothing made me think, this could be a path into the future.

And then, I was reading one of Bowie’s biographies while waiting in line for bread at this amazing little bakery in Koenji. I don’t remember, but I’m sure I was buying a snack to take to the cinema. What I do remember is reading that Bowie had studied mime for many years. I know now that he studied pantomime, not corporeal mime, but nevertheless, I went home that night and searched “mime classes Tokyo”. Why not? I’d never tried theatre, or dance, or anything physical before. If Bowie liked it so much, it was worth a shot.

That would have been a Tuesday or a Wednesday I guess, because the next open class was Thursday.

A small digression: last night I watched Julie and Julia, which is a movie I could watch a thousand times over, and when Paul Child talked about how he fell in love with Julia, he said something like, “We were eating in a restaurant, just as friends…. and it turned out to be Julia.”

Well, reader, I went to this mime class on a lark because of a line in a book about Bowie… and it turned out to be mime. I like to think that in any possible universe I would have found corporeal mime, but when I trace things back – I had to be in Japan, I had to be unhappy with work, I had to have moved to Koenji, and I had to have walked into a little cinema in Asagaya to see this movie with a singer I didn’t really care about to set me on this path.

I told you the logic was a bit tenuous… but the first time I ever performed in front of people (last year! Can you believe that?) I had to talk about what mime meant to me. I had to tell my story. And I told my teacher I really didn’t want to talk about it, and he said: this is your life now. You have to get used to telling it.

So this is my life now. And when I have the space to tell it, I start my story with a cinema.

But to step back from such a grand scale – I had so many smaller, yet important moments at Yujiku.

Yujiku was the place where I first saw Emir Kusturica’s movies, which got me really interested in Eastern European history. His movies also reminded me how wildly fun cinema can be. Cinema can be a party. I also saw the six hour uncut version of Underground, which taught me that cinema is also a marathon, but one that will leave you exhilarated and transformed.

It was the place where I finally learned to appreciate Godard. I had seen Alphaville and liked it, but wasn’t that moved by his work. When I was having a particularly bad week at work, Yujiku was playing Le Mepris and a few other early Godard films, and they played a huge role in getting me out of my head and into a cleaner, brighter mindspace.

It was where I saw Smoke, which made me miss New York powerfully and reminded me of how much I love Paul Auster.

It was where I saw Deep End, which I didn’t even like, but which got me on a huge 1970s British film kick. Incidentally, I also ran into one of my other favorite coworkers at that movie. In the last year I lived in Tokyo, we often went to the cinema together, and we’d get dinner afterwards in Asagaya and talk about film, history, work, philosophy… she was one of the other hugely important people I worked with, and we so often found common ground at the movies.

There were movies I saw for the first time, like Battle of the Sexes, God’s Own Country, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, and there were movies I’d loved for ages, like Chungking Express, Call Me By Your Name, and In the Mood For Love. I saw documentaries about the Jomon period and Okamoto Taro. I saw odd little Spanish films, Italian movies that I never learned the English titles for, and old Russian animated shorts. One very early movie I saw, Baron Munchausen, became a big source of inspiration for a mime piece I worked on earlier this year.

You might think that what I’m mostly talking about is a love of cinema, rather than a particular theatre. But I’m both very picky and very habitual when it comes to watching movies at home. I need a movie theatre to kick me into watching something I’d never normally consider. And I need a movie theatre to hold me in place with no distractions for the whole length of the movie.

That’s why it’s cinemas like Yujiku that mean so much. It’s not just about movies. It’s about putting certain kinds of movies in front of an audience. So much of our lives and our worldviews come from the media we consume, and if all you do is watch the latest big release at Toho or io9, or whatever is playing on TV or in Netflix’s “currently trending” category, you end up with a very narrow universe in which to live.

Yujiku shattered a lot of boundaries I had put up and showed me parts of the world I had never thought about. It chose movies that weren’t necessarily popular or easy to understand, but that would leave you thinking about them for weeks, even years, afterwards. It chose movies that looked so unassuming, even dull, in summaries, and that would leave you breathless.

I’m not sure how they decided their programming, but I know it wasn’t by an algorithm that would sort a person’s tastes and keep them travelling along in the same cinematic rut forever. I can’t even count the number of times I checked the weekly schedule, thought, man, there’s nothing good on, and went anyway and always, always, always saw something interesting.

If I don’t stop writing now, I never will, so let me just say: it was a privilege to be neighbors with Yujiku. I will never forget the days I spent and the movies I watched there. And I’m going to hope, and hope, and hope against everything that this isn’t permanent, and that one day I’ll be able to go up Tokyo and walk through Yujiku’s doors again.

A Chance with China

When I was in university studying political science, China was becoming the country to study thanks to its growing economic power. Today, studying China has gone from being trendy to being a potential matter of national security.

The two countries I am closest to–the US, by citizenship, and Japan, by residency–are two of the countries with the most alarmist rhetoric about China. I see it in the news from both countries and I feel it most acutely when I speak to people. Not until I moved to Japan did I hear so much casual racism against Chinese people. Not until a president like Trump was elected did I imagine that a US leader could be so incautious in his words as to potentially provoke bilateral crises.

I worry when I talk to people in Japan that I come across as a starry eyed China apologist, because the fact is that I used to live there too, and I have nothing but good memories of that time. I’m well aware of China’s problems, but unlike a lot of Japanese and Americans I have personal experience of the good parts as well.

But I don’t want to base my arguments on anecdotal experience. The reason I can be so aggressive about defending China is because I’ve learned the political and cultural history of the country and I believe it’s worth defending. I don’t believe it’s worth specifically defending many of its current policies, including its draconian stance on Hong Kong, the colonization and violent subjugation of Xinjiang and Tibet, the increasingly strict controls on freedom of speech of Chinese citizens, and Xi’s apparent desire to take things back to the Mao era.

At the same time, none of those issues are worth declaring a cold war with China. And there is a difference between criticism of policy and condemnation of a nation. It’s been years since I’ve been in deep with Chinese studies, but I remember some things and I’m brushing up on others, but I want to write specifically about the importance of historical relations between China, the US, and Japan, and why the irresponsible and imperialist actions of the latter two nations helped bring about the problematic era of the former we’re struggling with today.

Chinese history (all 5,000 years of it if you believe the CCP’s count) is extremely complicated, but everyone knows the basics: China was an astonishingly advanced empire for thousands of years, one of the early cradles of civilization. In the 19th century, the empire began to fatally crack, to be finally overthrown in the 1911 revolution, which established the Republic of China – a democratic, extremely progressive state. However, infighting between imperialists and nationalists contributed to the undermining of that state, a civil war was fought, and finally there was another revolution in 1949, which established the People’s Republic of China – the current Communist state.

One of the big reasons for the numerous uprisings, revolutions, and civil war was internal – the imperial system was broken and people wanted to ensure that a new government would represent the wishes of the country at large. One of the other big reasons, to simplify things in the extreme, was foreign involvement in China.

You could write a whole book about this topic (and I’m reading one now called Out of China, by Robert Bickers, which I highly recommend) but the Sparknotes version is that from the 19th century to the early 20th century, China had a number of foreign concessions and spheres of influence carved out of it, owned and operated by the major foreign powers at the time–the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, etc.

These concessions and spheres operated under extraterritoriality, which meant that foreign citizens were not subject to Chinese law, but rather the law of their own countries. I’m sure the majority of foreign residents weren’t out to prey on China and abuse privileges, and that many had the mindset of working with Chinese people to create a more successful society at large. Nevertheless, people were coming into China under conditions generated by an imperial machine and engineered for foreign profit. The world is very different now, but to put it in extreme terms – imagine China seizing a bit of California, having complete control over that region, and having all of its profits sent back to China while Californians are treated as second-class citizens in their own state.

There were also, at this time, a number of unequal treaties that foreign countries were pushing on China, knowing that the state was far too weak and vulnerable due its internal issues to fight back. One of the relevant examples here is the 21 Demands imposed by Japan in 1915. These demands included greater control of Manchuria, Japan’s inheritance of formerly German-controlled parts of China, as well as the hiring of Japanese advisors who would be able to exert considerable control over the Chinese police force. It was, essentially, a prelude to Japan’s imperialistic war on Asia in the next few decades.

Skipping ahead in history, we have the occupation of China by the Japanese, who were indescribably brutal during their reign, as well as increasingly contentious relations with Russia, who were initially allies in the global communist cause and then dire enemies, and finally an embroilment in America’s Cold War. I think the more modern parts of Chinese history are relatively well-known and this is also getting really long so I’m just glancing over those parts, but I think having a list of these issues like this explains why China refers to 1839 – 1949 as the century of humiliation, and why it’s been so hard to forget that.

To a great extent, I would argue, China does like to play the victim card. Even as it races forward economically, technologically, and politically, it is an intensely backward looking nation, and Xi, far more than his predecessor, has made clear that his policies are rooted in Chinese history. There is a point when every nation has to start looking forward.

At the same time, to offer a contemporary example, a lot of criticism towards China has focussed on the environment – how China was one of the world’s biggest polluters, how environmental conditions in many parts of China were growing more and more deadly. However, countries like US and France and Germany all had nearly a century of industrialization and mechanization that were heavily polluting, and as those countries became richer they gradually became more environmentally friendly.

China, on the other hand, was going through the same process at a tiny fraction of the time. That doesn’t mean that it has the right to large-scale pollution, but it does mean that outside criticism of China was hypocritical at best and unreasonable at worst. And by now, China has spent far more money than other so-called advanced countries in exploring alternative fuel sources, and has consistently pushed itself to innovate for cleaner ways of operating its industries.

This highlights how China has often been held to demands imposed from abroad while its successes have been largely ignored. Even after World War I, in the context of all the unequal treaties and concessions I mentioned, China sent delegates to the Peace Conference in Paris who were  prepared to advocate for an internationally united front against imperialism. These delegates had largely been educated abroad, spent time in the foreign service, and believed that China was ready to stand alongside other world powers and protect the hard-won peace and freedom of World War I. They were shut down, Japan was granted huge privileges on Chinese territory, and Chinese people at home grew increasingly disenchanted until things piled up and the civil war broke out.

China isn’t an innocent country, and it’s not purely a victim. But time and again, China has reached up and tried to make something of itself – alongside the global community, alongside a few select nations, or entirely independently – and time and again the world has reached up and slapped it down. It’s deserved some of those slaps, to be sure, but if we can see any consistency in Chinese history it’s that after every failure the nation has come back stronger than ever. The US and Japan have a chance to acknowledge China’s strengths and work together for common goals. Some say it might already be too late for that, but offering a hand nearly one hundred years too late has to be better than ushering in a new cold war.