radicalism in film

[Aaron Gerow]

>Just as a matter of interest, it is not, written form Maoist perspective is 
>it? 

My review of Jubaku will appear in the Thursday Daily Yomiuri, but I did 
not find the film that radical.  Despite its basis in recent history and 
earnest and well-made call for change, it is like many salary man movies 
in that it does more reassuring than critiquing: low- or middle-level 
salary men (the audience) are basically all good and it's only a few bad 
eggs at the top (and outside the hallowed Company) who have caused the 
problems.  There's little critique of salary man culture itself or of 
institutions as entities that have a life of their own apart from the 
individuals who compose them.

But I am still intrigued by Harada Masato's repeated use of communist 
images.  Remember the yakuza and the high-school girl singing karaoke in 
front of USSR flags in Bounce koGALS?  I definitely do not think he's a 
Maoist or Leninist, or that the use of such images is intended as a call 
for a similar kind of revolution.  To me, it is mostly a kind of 
eccentricity which livens up Harada's sometimes too-neatly-structured 
films, but I wondered what others think?

Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171