For our field trip on Friday, we were allowed to pick our courses again, and I decided to go to the Yokohama Art Museum. It turned out to be a lot smaller than expected (I think it was really only about 5 rooms), so I finished up pretty quickly. It was interesting--they had a fair number of works by famous artists...but no actual famous works. But it was still an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon.
Saturday and Sunday I hung out with Mary, who was visiting Tokyo before she headed to the US for her first visit in two years. (She is in the US now!) I hadn't seen Mary for about a year and a half, so it was nice to have some time to hang out, catch up, and walk wayyyyyy too much.
Some places we went include:
Tokyo Tower!
(We didn't go up to the top, though, 'cause that costs money. More money than it did last time I went.)
(Also, Ueno Park, but I didn't take pictures there, so you'll have to take my world for it.)
Meiji Shrine! (We actually got pretty horribly lost on the grounds, because I have the best sense of direction in the world.)
Last time I went to Meiji Shrine, it was closed (I went after 5 p.m.), so it was nice to see inside the gates.
Both Mary and I were pretty strongly reminded of Heian Shrine in Kyoto, which makes sense, I guess, given that they were both built in roughly the same era.
We also went to Yoyogi Park, which is right next door, and had some really great peach soft serve.
(I'm not addicted to soft serve.)
The Imperial Palace!
Which includes a moat full of slime, I guess.
I dunno what the deal is, 'cause the other moat was clean.
The Imperial Palace is actually a pretty great place to walk, and it cooled down enough for the weekend that we weren't totally roasting in the sun.
See? Non-slimy moat.
And finally:
The Tokyo Sky Tree, which is the replacement for the significantly shorter Tokyo Tower. We didn't go to the top of this either, 'cause it cost 1,800 yen, and I could eat a really nice meal for that much.
Anyway, yes, it was really nice to see Mary, even if I was totally exhausted and lost my voice a little bit afterwards.
Yesterday we got over 100 milimeters of rain in the course of an hour. Also, lightning. We made the news! Because our weather was that ridiculous!
Our sensei had a fever today, which meant that we didn't have class. So we get to have a make-up class next Saturday, fun, fun, fun! I should note that that's the Saturday immediately before the final. *lies on the floor dramatically*
Also, I went to see the new Studio Ghibli movie, Kaze Tachinu, today. I went to see it with Ma-san (another Harvard student) and...neither of us was entirely sure how to feel about it. Scattered thoughts (some spoilers) below, although they may coalesce into something more coherent at some point in the future:
To be fair, I think I only understood about 70% of what was going on, because every time anyone started talking about anything having to do with engineering planes, I was completely lost. Airplane terminology: not a thing I understand. There was also a subplot fairly late in the movie having to do with the secret police that neither Ma-san nor I understood a word of--we know what happened because of the secret police, but weren't entirely clear on why they had gotten involved. Also, a weirdly large proportion of the dialogue is in German and Italian with no subtitles.
On a side note, there is a German character with worse Japanese than me, which makes me feel weirdly okay about my Japanese, because you know your Japanese must be pretty okay if the movie!foreigners have worse Japanese than you. (Movie!foreigners tend to have pretty good, non-garbled-if-pretty-thickly-accented Japanese, mostly because horrifyingly bad grammar will tend to confuse the audience, and an accent will get across the message that they're not a native speaker just fine.)
People (mostly people who haven't seen the movie) have been branding the movie as "anti-Japanese propaganda," but, honestly, it's significantly less political than a lot of Miyazaki's movies. You could interpret the ending as having an anti-war message, but...you could also totally not. On the other hand, you can't really interpret Princess Mononoke or Nausicaa as not being about the environment. While Miyazaki's movies tend to have pretty strong messages (like "DON'T POLLUTE" and "DON'T WAGE WAR" and "DON'T CUT OFF THE HEAD OF A FOREST DEITY"), Ma-san and I spent several minutes puzzling over the closing scene of the movie, which could be interpreted as "DON'T WAGE WAR," "DON'T DO BAD MATH WHEN MAKING AIRPLANES," "DON'T LOVE AIRPLANES MORE THAN YOUR WIFE," or even "DON'T BECOME AN ENGINEER BECAUSE ENGINEERING IS HELLISH." Heck, the movie ends on such an ambiguous note that we couldn't tell whether one of the major characters was alive or not.
Despite the fact that the movie is basically about the guy who designed the planes that killed a whole bunch of people during WWII, it's not a movie about war--it's a movie about planes. As one of the characters remarks fairly late in the movie, "We make planes, not weapons." The characters all know what they're making the planes for--at several points, the main character asks who Japan is going to go to war with, and other characters respond with increasingly long lists of potential targets (all of whom Japan did go to war with!), but none of the characters have a moral dilemma or dwell upon the destruction that their planes will rain down. Perhaps that's the point--perhaps the audience is supposed to question the characters' motives and wonder whether saying, "I make planes, not weapons" is really a free pass.
On the other hand, the rest of the audience seemed just as puzzled about how to react as we did.
It's really not a kid's movie, not necessarily because of any sort of mature content (okay, there is probably the most kissing that I have ever seen in an animated movie, but that's about it), but because I think kids would find it excruciatingly boring. It's a very slow movie--very gorgeous, but just sort of rambles along until it reaches its conclusion. In terms of pacing, it reminded me very much of Only Yesterday, in that it just sort of...goes...without a particularly clear build to a climax. And then it just...ends.
Ma-san and I also weren't entirely sure how to feel about the main romantic relationship in the story. There are essentially two ways to interpret the role their relationship plays in the narrative. You could interpret it as a cautionary tale about putting your work ahead of the people in your life (can we talk about what a lousy brother the main character is), which ends in a bittersweet manner (and the main character realizes that he has made a terrible mistake). Alternatively, you could interpret it as a woman putting her partner and her partner's interests before everything else in her life--including her failing health. I would prefer it to be the first--Ma-san interpreted it as the second (i.e. as another one of those "ladies, stick by your man no matter how bad he is at taking care of you while you're bedridden" movies). ...on the other hand, you could also interpret it as a straight-up love story, I guess. Again, the ending is so ambiguous (and there's enough evidence to interpret it any way you want) that I have no idea how I feel about it.
I'm also not sure how well it will be received in the US, as I'm not sure how watchable it would be for someone who isn't well-acquainted with Japanese history. Or how many people want to watch a movie about a dude trying to make planes. Or if people will be as puzzled as the audience we walked out of the theatre with.
...so that's my scattered thoughts about the movie. Really unsure how I feel about it at this point, and will probably have deep conversations with Yuting about it tomorrow (she saw it this weekend and has been waiting for someone to talk to this whole week like the trooper she is). May have more coherent thoughts on it at some point, but yeah.
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