[KineJapan] Kawase Watch

[Anne McKnight]

I started following Kawase's Twitter (https://twitter.com/KawaseNAOMI) a couple weeks ago, anticipating she would make some sort of pronouncement. But it’s been just a string of fan tweets, her fans weighing in on her strength of purpose, coolness. Her role as emissary of culture is quite strong, and she tweets from places around the country, and regarding the Nara film fest. It struck me as a bit off for her to say:

今年も熱い夏がやってくる！
待ってるよ！
It’s going to be another “hot” summer (meaning, I suppose, energetic and awesome)! Unless you are a marathoner in the dead of Tokyo summer, in which case it is going to be a REALLy hot summer.

In lieu of tweeting her own position in, say, a thread, she has instead retweeted defenses about how it is important to divorce the Olympics from politics, the need to leave a “true record” of the events (ちゃんと記録に残して下さること), and the universalism of the event in Banpaku-like catch copy (日本が招致した人類の祭典ならば、最後まで開催に尽力する事が当たり前だと思う.). 

Given the precedent of Ichikawa Kon’s profligate and committee-enraging Tokyo Olympiad, I am disappointed that it seems to have conceded to the status of PR film. “Everydayness” will have such a different status, even if athletes are at the center of the stories…

Anne

> On Jun 6, 2021, at 8:13 PM, Frederick Veith via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:
> 
> Kawase ventriloquizing for athletes, who are specifically and contractually enjoined from political expression, in a manner which magically aligns with the interests of her patrons is…
> 
> I’m going to go back to biting my tongue on all of this.
> 
> On Mon, Jun 7, 2021 at 12:00 PM Bryan Hartzheim via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu <mailto:kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu>> wrote:
> 
> In Kawase's defense, she's spent a lot of time with these athletes and I get the sense she wants to advocate for them. Focusing on their struggles and achievements was probably a relatively "safe" approach to making a doc about the Olympics, but the politics of that decision are now magnified with the public opposing them in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. She's essentially aligned herself with ministers who say they're proceeding with the games because "they believe in the power of sports."
> 
> Bryan
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