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djkubik favorited a video
(4 months ago)
So how's your credit crunch going? Cancelled the family holiday? Job under threat? Imagine it's 15 years from now and things are even worse. The bu...
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So how's your credit crunch going? Cancelled the family holiday? Job under threat? Imagine it's 15 years from now and things are even worse. The businesses you used to run are a distant memory, as are your three marriages. Now, middle-aged and broken, all that stands between you and homelessness is a part-time job at the post office (£3.50 an hour) and the waning tolerance of your young girlfriend whose tiny studio flat you share in a dead-end provincial town. Sounds like the sort of vision of the future that might have kept the G20 bigwigs awake in their London embassies last week. In fact, it's the all-too real life of Naoki, an entrepreneur who fell between the fissures that tore apart the Japanese economy in the early Nineties and ended up as part of its unenviable underclass, the "new poor".
Despite being the world's second largest economy, Japan has never recovered. As a warning to us all of how deeply long-term recession can hobble lives, Sean McAllister's intimate portrait of Naoki and his 29-year-old girlfriend Yoshie, Japan: a Story of Love and Hate (BBC4) almost unbearable. Luckily, if that's the word, the weird extremities of Japanese society kept the privations of their lives at an almost surreal distance. Yoshie's flat in Yamagata city was so small that McAllister conducted half of his interviews with Naoki at the foot of the bed in which you could see Yoshie sleeping fitfully. And, when Yoshie was at home, she was in bed, the result of holding down several jobs, one of which was as an escort to tipsy Japanese businessmen in local bars. If she wasn't half-cut from work, she was compulsively wolfing down a midnight feast, a bizarre side-effect of the anti-depressant she took nightly. Imagine a short story somewhere between Haruki Murakami and Raymond Carver, and this might have been the scenario.
It's a mystery how Naoki maintained the rueful grin behind the cigarettes he chain-smoked. There was some light relief: unlike his sad-looking fellow wage slaves at the post office, Naoki couldn't help sniggering at his boss's po-faced pep talks about road safety on their rounds. And the only way he and his girlfriend's disapproving father got along, finally, was by comparing their experiences with Viagra. Most memorable, though, were Naoki's old cine films of the mass protests against the Vietnam war he took part in in the late Sixties: along with many others, the young Naoki violently objected to the presence of US airbases in Japan. You were left wondering why the Japanese have not been able to muster any of that old, insurrectionary energy in the past two decades of their decline.
After the deathly quiet streets of Yamagata city, downtown Baltimore, gangsters, bent cops and all, looked a hoot in The Wire. The BBC has done the decent thing, finally, and given David Simon and Ed Burns's crime-and-punishment epic its terrestrial debut. If you're new to it, and haven't been thoroughly put off by its Greatest TV Drama Since The History of Forever reputation, you're already five episodes in and possibly reeling. The Wire, notoriously, doesn't hang around for anyone who's not au fait with Baltimore Police Department general orders or the fruity language of its drug-dealing 14-year-olds. A bit of advice then: catching it at the fag end of every weekday night without the box-set DVDs' pause or rewind button (or subtitles) is asking a lot, so just persevere with the hoppers, re-ups and burners and all, eventually, will become horribly, wonderfully clear.
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