swallowtail

[Aaron Gerow]

Christine wrote,

>I'd be interested to know why the film
>might be "reducing its celebration of difference to a consumerist
>appropriation of the Other into the Japanese national self" but if we
>consider the symbolic "Fukuzawas" and the treatment of Chara the performer
>in the film then isn't that problem addressed at least tangentially within
>the film?  Or perhaps I have misunderstood Aaron's comment.  
>As a final question to Aaron, did any audience members at the Feminist Film
>Workshop held at Ochanomizu Daigaku have anything to say about Chara or
>Ageha?

I don't want to repeat what I wrote in BCAS here, but I do think the 
film's reproduction of the tourist gaze has the tendency to both 
exoticize (and thus reify) difference at the same time that it renders it 
safe and consumable.  (The Chinese in the opium den, precisely because 
they must not be subtitled, represent the threat of that which cannot be 
consumed--and thus reminds us of the necessity to reduce the Other to the 
consumable image).  The question of the nation also arises at the end 
through the iteration of "furusato": while the attempt to claim Yen Town 
as a furusato is one way of critiquing the ethnocentrism of the concept 
of furusato, it is at the same time a way of assimilating Yen Town into 
the concept of the nation (since the desire for furusato is never 
critiqued).

I would like to ask people about the Fukuzawas.  Certainly the whole 
story of counterfeiting could represent a certain critique of the money 
economy: how much it is based on images and false surfaces.  This 
critique extends to Chara's story and how she is eaten and spit out by 
the Japanese economic system.  But despite all this, the film never, I 
think, critiques the economy itself, especially the acts of selling and 
consuming.  Fake money may lead the kids to cut up real money, but that 
in part based on a "luxury" that is never questioned.  Fake money is 
still money and an object of desire.  What in the end is effaced in the 
film is precisely labor itself: obtaining money by counterfeiting is not 
too different from other money making schemes, from the flat tire scam to 
prostituting to the club.  All seem easy and don't require much work.

This relates to the issue of prostitution and Chara/Ageha. One thing 
people at the Workshop did complain about was the fact that it was so 
easily assumed at the end, when we see Ageha on the bridge, that she is 
simply going to become a prostitute like Chara. The film merely takes 
that as simply a natural turn of events in an economy (of exchange, of 
gender) that it doesn't fully question.

I am, however, still unsure of all the implications of the money issue.  
Any thoughts on that?

Aaron Gerow
YNU