Watching Japan

PAREDES

Football fans are usually a rowdy crowd that don’t care leaving behind a pile of mess at a stadium after a game. So we were all surprised and awed seeing that video of the Japanese audience during the last World Cup held in Moscow staying for a little while after a game to collect everyone’s garbage at the stadium. They came prepared with big garbage bags.

It wasn’t a publicity gimmick. We all know that the Japanese were really obsessed with cleanliness. It’s a habit that is inculcated early on in preschool. You see Japanese kids scrubbing floors of their classrooms or even washing their own dishes after lunch at the canteen.

Along with cleanliness, Japanese children are also brought up to traditional virtues of courtesy, politeness, promptness, and orderliness or organized living. Like the ancient Greeks, the Japanese believe in the importance of discipline in order to achieve excellence in whatever they do. Such is their sense of perfectionism.

It is no wonder that everything they do is turned into a work of art, whether it is making a wooden cabinet, a plate of sushi, a sword, or a digital camera. Japanese craftsmanship is known for its precision, durability, and an aesthetics of simplicity that adheres to function.

If the Japanese seem to be control freaks, they have to. After all, they are a nation constantly threatened by natural and man-made disasters. There is the endless anxiety over when the next big earthquake or tsunami would strike. Or if it will suddenly rain ballistic missiles from neighboring North Korea.

And yet, amid all these threats of doomsday, the Japanese try to cope by trying to be in meditative mode whenever possible. Japanese commuters consider it rude to talk aloud in public transportation. The Japanese value silence and solitude. Nature provides the ultimate retreat and inspiration. The love of serenity and nature is reflected in their need for gardens, tea ceremony, and such arts as sumi-e (ink painting), pottery, and haiku (very short verse).

It’s not that the Japanese have always been a good people. Well, we just had to go back to not so recent history for that. Take, for instance, the horrors Japan brought to the world during the Second World War. But after being devastated and humiliated in that war, the Japanese rose from the rubbles of the first atomic attack to renounce militarism and embrace democracy. Japan has since tried to pay back by helping developing nations.

Japanese cinema is perhaps the most intimate way to learn more about this unique country. For 21 years now, Japan has promoted its films to countries like the Philippines through the Eigasai Japanese Film Festival. Cebu has been hosting this festival of selected Japanese films for years. I watched my first Eigasai in a small room with a selection of early Akira Kurosawa films screened in 16 millimeter reels back when I was a student in the mid-90s here in Cebu.

This year, the Arts Council of Cebu is once again sponsoring the Eigasai Japanese Film Festival here in Cebu. The three-day festival, which began last Thursday and will end today, features mostly films meant for younger audience screened for free at the Cinema 3 of Ayala Center.

Watching JapanToday’s program starts with the screening of the film “ReLIFE,” a teenage romantic drama based on a popular manga app comic. It starts at 12:30 p.m. but come earlier as the queue starts as early as 30 minutes before screening. And so far, based on my own experience, the film screenings start on time–Japanese time.