koGALS

[Anne McKnight]

Hullo,
Sorry I haven't seen Tokyo Eyes yet, but I had a couple of thoughts on the
general subject of films' representation of teenage girls & their relations
to cash and sex.  Thanks for posting the article citations.

An interesting counterpoint to Harada's film might be the film Love & Pop
that came out about 6 months ago, based off a Murakami Ryu script or novel
(I can't remember which).  In it the koGAL has a family, and day-trips to
Shibuya.  

Murakami's discussion of the way kids are getting various bad raps which
quite closely resemble the contours of economic viscissitudes & desires of
their parents is quite interesting, in Sabishii kuni no satsujin (Murder in
a Lonely Country, available in a bi-lingual edition with CG by the author
himself!  The title refers to the Kobe Sakakibara murder of last year.) 
Here he gets away from some of the "reefer madness"-like tendencies of some
critics, and picks up on some of the critiques of various kinds of
productivity he starts (in my opinion) in Almost Transparent Blue.  It
seems a little bit like Murakami's update, slightly more poppy version of
Vivre sa vie, no?

He also has a film called Kyoko (a book, and probably a lunch box too, if
you look...) and recently 2 other books in which his repertoire seems
increasingly directed towards providing and asking questions about fantasy
"escape routes" for teenage girls; the turn in his work from sentimental
connouisseur of transgression (the sex industry stuff) to concerned parent
is quite interesting.  He has one collection of essays from the fashion
magazine An-An called "Futsu no onna no ko toshite sonzai shitakunai anata
e," a collection of letters "to you who don't want to live your life as a
normal girl.  Also, there's one with some funny title like Murakami Ryu
talks to 50 high school girls, it's interviews & dialogues.   Note: I am
not making claims for the totally redemptive nature of An-An, but
suggesting a different perspective than the one Ian Buruma ends up
advocating is available even in the mass comm & pop sociology industries. 
The way he associates "individuality" with success on the corporate ladder
(and the uninterrogated universal standard of US democracy) was rather
puzzling to me...

In Harada Masato's bounce koGALS again the other day, I was really struck
by 2 things.  The first is the sheer amount of "ethnographic realism" that
is in the film.  It gave so much procedural, semiotically digestible data
and lore it's almost a script for walking into the (imagined) part of
koGAL, I thought.  Where to sell your underwear for how much, the
conversations of a date transaction on a cell phone, etc etc.  The film is
kind of a closed circuit which both provides the parameters of realism for
the "phenom" of koGALS -- the data and types and classifying systems for
various systems -- and then critiques this highly selective ethnographic
script..  

The most interesting moment of critique to me came when the tough girl (the
one with barrettes, sorry I can't remember her name) has just engineered a
dazzling series of late-shift assignations for Lisa, the kikoku-shijo
dressed in white, and in a demonstration of frustration at her own
entrapment, the film has her jump up and down on a landing overlooking the
bright lights of Shibuya, and scream "ori da, ori da" -- it's a cage, it's
a cage.  

The second thing that struck me was the rather muddled hints at
geo-political events outside the film.  The (arguable) heroine Lisa is
about to take off for the US, for New York, clearly the "outside" in this
film, a place she has previously described as being somewhere you can be
what you want and people, including teachers, won't make fun of you:  she
and it come across as both innocent and full of possibilities. Then, as one
of her gigs, she is set up to talk to an old man who is, she is told, going
to ramble on about the past.  The "past" turns out to be a rant on the
jugun-ianfu (comfort women) which defends all sorts of colonial aggression
& thunders against US domination.  I wondered about this strange blip,
which continues even later, when the girl with the barrettes tells Lisa
something about it's just about "Asian woman," and Lisa sternly reminds her
she, too is "Ajia no josei," an Asian woman.  The last scene, where Lisa
gets on the Narita express for a beeline to NYC & her 2 friends are left on
the platform, seems like a love-letter to the kind of stuff I see on the
news coming out of Washington regarding US-Japan relations -- which is to
say, a constant reminder & reprimand of how bad things have gone to the
dogs ( it's a cage! etc., there really is a payback for the bubble, etc.)
at the same time how willing "the Japanese" are to pitch in and help the
US, whose representative in this film has more or less the moral center of
the film (aside from the lechy yakuza character played by Yakusho Koji, who
has a kind of ubiquitous presence, as well as paternal authority).  

This is kind of an "ozappa" (way rough) reading, but I think gets maybe at
some of the intertexts that the koGALS  and/or the phenomenon which scripts
their apparations in street & print are bouncing around in. 

Anne Mc.