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Jay Rubin: A Career in Translation

Interview and profile

Haruki Murakami, a contemporary author from Japan, is lauded for being translated into over 50 languages. This number is bandied about to show his worldwide popularity, but behind each of his foreign publications is a translator’s endeavor to recreate that work in a new language. Jay Rubin is one of those translators, bringing the music of Murakami’s words to the English speaking world.

Born in 1941, Rubin is an Emeritus Professor of Japanese Literature at Harvard University. He began studying Japanese entirely by chance in his sophomore year at the University of Chicago and was hooked. “I just found it pretty exciting,” he told me during our interview in April. “I still do.” After receiving his Ph.D. in Japanese Literature from the same university, Rubin went on to work as a professor of Japanese at the University of Washington and at Harvard University. It was during this time that he was introduced to Murakami’s work and as he put it, “pretty much got obsessed with Murakami for…fifteen or twenty years.”

The first work of Murakami’s that Rubin translated was the now-famous The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. At more than 600 pages, it took Rubin two years to translate. Author and translator met at the end of the process, and Rubin regretted waiting until then to ask all of his questions. “I saw [Murakami] in Tokyo,” Rubin recalls, “and we spent the entire day just going through these nitpicky little things and he was groaning at the end. We got through it but it was not fun.” Since then, Rubin has always just emailed Murakami his questions as he encounters them, though generally he receives “Do whatever works!” as the very trusting standard reply.

Rubin is best known for translating Murakami’s works, but he has also worked on traditional, long-dead literary figures like Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Natsume Sōseki. These scholarly translations are very different from those Rubin has done of his contemporary Murakami, dotted as they are with footnotes and other academic paraphernalia. It’s because, Rubin pretends to complain, that unlike Murakami, Sōseki won’t answer any of his emails.

Now retired from teaching, Rubin still deals with the publishing industry, though from the new point of view of an author. His debut novel, The Sun Gods, will be published later this month. The story follows a Japanese mother and her adopted American son during the WWII incarceration of Japanese and Japanese-Americans. When I asked what made him want to write a book, he replied, “I think everybody who works on literature academically secretly wants to write a book. Don’t you?”

 

Jay Rubin Interview – Edited Transcript

Via Skype; April 6, 2015 4:30 pm. Duration 40 minutes.

KJ: Well, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me. This is really, I’m absolutely thrilled.

JR: (laughs)

KJ: No, I’m serious! I’m a current student at Wellesley College. I’m a senior so I’m graduating in a couple of months now, and I’m a French and Japanese major and last semester I took two courses on translation, one in French and one in Japanese, and so, I kind of wanted to talk to you from a translation point of view.

JR: Okay. How far back do your two languages go? Did you grow up with one of those languages or, uh, you’ve got two languages that you’re working seriously in.

KJ: Yes. I’ve been learning French for a while. I started learning French when I was five…

JR: Wow.

KJ: …and I’ve been learning it pretty consistently since then.

JR: Great. When did you start Japanese?

KJ: In college, actually. So four years ago now.

JR: Nice.

KJ: Yeah. My Japanese still isn’t the greatest but I’m working on it.

JR: Welcome to the club.

KJ: (Laughs) So, when do you start learning Japanese?

JR: In college. I was second year, I think. Second year I took—oh no, I took a course during my second year in Literature and Translation and then started studying that summer.

KJ: What drew you to Japanese? I’m just curious. Like there’s a bunch of languages…

JR: Total chance. Just total chance. I happened to take a course. I wanted to take a course in something non-Western. Edwin McClellan was teaching – this was at the University of Chicago – he was teaching a course in Introduction to Japanese Literature, and if it had been Chinese history I might have…Who knows what I would have done. He made the language sound interesting and of course I had never done anything with Japanese language. I just found it all pretty exciting. I still do.

KJ: Had you learned any other languages before then? Like, when I started learning Japanese, I had a background in French.

JR: Well, I was pretty serious about German for a while but I had let that go for a year or so. I was kind of missing working in foreign language. And that was part of the motivation, was to get into a situation where you have to use your brain for thinking in another language. It was exciting.

KJ: Yup. I definitely agree with you there. So, was this course the reason why you also became interested in translation work? Or…Where did that interest come from?

JR: Oh, well. Do you know that name, Edwin McClellan?

KJ: Not particularly. It sounds familiar but I wouldn’t be able to tell you where I knew it from.

JR: If you’ve read any Sōseki in translation – you’ve probably read his Kokoro translation?

KJ: I haven’t.

JR: His Michikusa translation?

KJ: No, I haven’t read any Sōseki yet. I’m looking forward to reading I am a cat. I will be reading that over the summer.

JR: Are you going to read it in Japanese or English?

KJ: English.

JR: Yeah, well. Good luck with that. Keep the Japanese text close by, cause it’s really, basically an untranslatable book.

KJ: Oh, is it? Okay. I’m looking forward to reading it though. One of my friends recommended it to me. But I feel like I need to read it along with a textbook or something that explains more about the period because it’s really a critique of that era. But anyway, that’s a summer project of mine after graduation. When I have a bit more free time again.

JR: So what level – you say you took a translation course in Japanese?

KJ: Yes. It was actually one of Professor Zimmerman’s courses. We read some original works in Japanese, or excerpts of them, and then every week we had to translate only about a page or so, two pages, in English. So after taking that course, I got much more interested in translation than I had ever been before, and this semester I’m doing an independent study where I’m trying to translate all 60 pages of Tsushima Yuuko’s story “Fusehime.”

JR: Oh yes, you mentioned that. Right, right. It must have something to do with Hakkeden, doesn’t it?

KJ: Only as an allusion. Only in the title and the fact that dogs are a fairly recurring motif. I haven’t finished doing a close reading of the story yet. I read the story in its entirety over winter break without a dictionary –

JR: (Laughs)

KJ:  – so I have a general gist of how things go, but there were definitely some points that I got completely wrong. And now as I’m doing my first draft translation I’m rereading it and getting a much more accurate accounting of events and what’s going on.

JR: Hmm, sure. Nothing like really bearing down and getting every word, especially in a foreign language.

KJ: Yeah.

JR: So, what sort of things did you want to ask me about, talk to me about?

KJ: Just kind of your methodology and philosophy towards translation. So, for example, when you have a language like Japanese that is so completely different from English, unlike French, you can’t really do a translation that adheres closely to the original. Sentence structure inherently has to change. So how do you manage to stay true to the original and keep that kind of integrity of the text while also translating it into a foreign language, and what do you consider to be the artistic license of the translator? So to speak.

JR: Have you ever tried to compare any of my translations to the original text?

KJ: I have not.

JR: But you’re assuming that I am maintaining fidelity to the original –

KJ: Not actually, no. And that’s part of why I wanted to ask you this question. I know that in Wind Up Bird Chronicle, you ended up rearranging a couple of things and taking out a couple of things. So that’s why I wanted to know what’s the governing philosophy when it comes to translation.

JR: The governing philosophy in that case was Knopf’s desire to make money. Alfred A. Knopf had become Murakami’s publisher. They were definitely behind him in that early stage of his career. But, one editor in particular, a guy named Gary Fisketjon – have you come across that name? Gary Fisketjon.

KJ: No.

JR: I mention him in my Music of Words book. In fact, he’s got some of the last comments in the book. I think the very last comments in the book are by him. He, or maybe he along with some of the other people in the company, decided that they couldn’t profitably sell a book as long as The Wind Up Bird Chronicle for a writer as, as unknown still as Murakami was and they simply said, “It has to be 25,000 words shorter.” I got very worried that they were going to hand it to an editor who was going to just chop it up any old way. I didn’t want that to happen, so I took it on myself to decide what I thought should come out of the book. It had to come out. They were insisting on it.

I suppose I could have insisted upon artistic integrity and they would have simply gone ahead and had an editor cut the book instead of having me cut it. That was the primary motivation to mess around with Murakami in that case. Simply a matter of practicality. When you’re dealing with writers who are not classic figures, who are living, who are being published as living writers, you get involved with the messy business of publication and profits. I don’t have to deal with the profits, but of course I have to deal with the company that’s concerned about such things.

KJ: Is it really different to translate a work, for example like Murakami’s, that is being marketed for general public reading versus something like Sōseki where it’s much more of an academic audience?

JR: Absolutely. You look at my translations of Akutagawa – have you that book, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories?

KJ: Uh-huh, I’ve read a couple of those.

JR: Well, you probably noticed that they were full of footnotes and I couldn’t put footnotes in the New Yorker and they certainly didn’t want footnotes in a book by Knopf. They tried to make it appear as seamless as possible in transfer from Japanese to English. So, again, it’s a question of house style, of whether they want academic paraphernalia attached to their text. And they tend not to. I always found that a challenge and rather exciting, to try to make, to get across as much of the text as possible without any footnotes, without stepping outside the text and telling the reader what to think. Which ends up making, encouraging you to secretly footnote the text. You pad a little here and there, you tell the reader what a fusuma is or whatever it happens to be. Fortunately with Murakami there’s not a lot of that. There aren’t that many Japanese cultural artifacts that you have to get inventive about.

KJ: Yeah, I noticed that, reading him.

JR: So it’s quite a different thing. When, say, when I was translating Sōseki’s Sanshirō, I would point out inconsistencies. There was one point where Sanshirō is a tall young man, and then a few chapters later he goes to the public baths with his professor and they talk about how short he is. And in a classic book, you make a footnote: “Notice that Sōseki forgot himself here.” You don’t do that with Murakami. You go to the author himself: “Make up your mind. Do you want him to be short or do you want him to be tall?”

KJ: (Laughs).

JR: I couldn’t do that with Sōseki because he wouldn’t answer any of my emails.

KJ: (Laughs). Yeah, kind of hard when you’re dead. So did you consult with Murakami a lot when translating his works or was it more of a kind of ‘you did your best and then at the very end you presented it to him with a couple of questions’?

JR: Ah, well, the first novel of his that I translated was The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and I did the saving up the questions until the end and both of us were very sorry I did that. It was just so much to go through. You know, I saw him in Tokyo and we spent the entire day just through these nitpicky little things and he was groaning at the end. We got through it but it was not fun. No, ever since then, I ‘ve just simply emailed him about one question or another. If there’s a sentence I don’t understand, I write to him and say, “Well, in this particular case, this sentence could either, it could be either first person or third person, you know, because it just sort of floats somewhere between the two. Which do you prefer?” And his answer is, “Whatever works! Do whatever works. 適当にやってください。[tekitou ni yatte kudasai; please do as you see fit.]” is his standard response.

Somebody, something I read recently quoted him as saying, “Sometimes my translators ask me questions about the meaning of the text. Very often I don’t know what the meaning is myself.” And that’s not really commonly the case with Murakami. He’s a very lucid writer and he thinks about what he writes but, there are passages where you really can’t be 100% sure. I have my wife to help me too. She’s a native Japanese, so I have that resource which is useful to a point. But finally, if the text itself is dense or opaque, I ask him. And then he says, “Gee, I’m really not sure what I was getting at here. Make it say whatever works.”

KJ: So you take a lot of translator’s license with the Murakami texts?

JR: Not a lot. There aren’t that many passages like that so you have to do that once in a while. No, I say for the most part, you know you’ve got a lot of different translators working on Murakami and I think he comes through not that different between one translator and another. You know, there’s still that Murakami voice that makes it through. There aren’t that many…you know, because the text is basically pretty straight forward. The language is fundamentally simple. So it’s just in a rare case he’ll leave something a little vague or, say, put something in a way that isn’t that obvious. So I’ll ask him about it. But it doesn’t happen that often.

KJ: Okay. And then, something else I was curious about was – so I actually did read your book on Murakami, The Music of Words, and you mentioned in it how word-processing and computers really, they kind of changed Murakami’s way of writing in that it opened up a lot of possibilities for him and he really enjoyed having a computer instead of having to write by hand or anything like that. And I was wondering if the same was true for translating work. What sort of methodology do you use? Do you just sit down with an electronic document like Word, and just translate from one document to the next? Or do you prefer having a hard copy? Electronic dictionaries versus paper dictionaries? That kind of thing. How has modern technology changed your way of working with translation?

JR: I remember when I first started using computers that I felt really liberated from the typewriter. I was never able to compose on a typewriter. I just could not. Everything I wrote up until 1985, I wrote on yellow, legal sized yellow pads. I just couldn’t get my fingers to work and get my head to work at the same time. So I would invariably write in English, I mean write in longhand, revise in longhand, make, you know, all these messy things on the page. Then, then, input into the typewriter, type it up. When I started using the computer to write on, I just loved it because I didn’t have to – you know, you don’t have the white stuff?

KJ: The white out?

JR: The white out. You can put it on the screen, but then you realize it’s on the wrong thing. You white out something on the screen because the text moves up. So it was very liberating to be able to write on a keyboard because you don’t have to worry about mistakes. Mistakes; you’ll see them and you can fix them, later. So, I really enjoyed that. I did at first though, as I remember, finish a translation, print it, revise it on paper with a pencil then go back to the electronic text and put in all the corrections that way. I haven’t done that for a long time though. After a while, I simply got so used to working with a computer that I don’t have any trouble just doing the whole process on the computer. In fact, I kind of hate to print things out now. (Laughs). Until the very end, if ever.

KJ: Do you have the Japanese text on the computer too or is that still hard copy?

JR: That depends. If I’m translating something that Murakami has sent me, if he has sent me the electronic text of a story, then I’ll – well, although I don’t split the screen, I write – I’ll do it paragraph by paragraph. I’ll input the English right on the same page as the Japanese then alternate paragraphs that way so that it’s all in one big messy file. So that it makes it very easy to go back and revise and you know continually compare. It also makes it easy to use my electronic kenkyūsha because you just, if it’s a word you don’t even know the reading of, you can just copy it off the electronic text and put it into the kenkyūsha. It gives you the reading and it gives you the meanings. I haven’t used a paper dictionary for a long time. Come to think of it, I got a kenkyūsha, an electronic dictionary, oh god, it must be – when did they come out? Eight or ten years ago? I’m not sure when they came out but that was another wonderful advance. So I’m very much into enjoying all the advantages of the digital age. For sure.

KJ: I was just curious because ever since I’ve started studying Japanese basically, we’ve always had electronic dictionaries, the ability to copy and paste kanji if you don’t know the reading and stuff like that. And, for example, when I’m working on translating “Fusehime,” I do a split screen within a word document. So I have the Japanese on one side and the English on another. But I was just wondering if everyone did that, or if that was just me.

JR: No, I’d say it’s great to be able to do that kind of thing. And also, it gives you the advantage of being able to continue to refer to the original text even when you’re getting fairly late in the revising process. I remember in the old days, I had heard that Ed Seidensticker would translate his text into a kind of Japlish, you know, translate it into a very awkward and clumsy English, at first. Then, he would get rid of the original text and fix it all up and work on it strictly as an English text. I could never work that way. I always wanted to have access to the original text, right to the very end. Yeah, that’s really good to be able to do that on a split screen. Most of these longer books, I mean like translating 1Q84, I was doing it out of a paper text.

KJ: Oh really? Out of paper?

JR: Yeah. I didn’t have 1Q84 in a Japanese electronic file. I had that just as a book. Gee, when I got started with that, I think I was working from galleys. Translating his stuff started before it was published. So [Murakami] had the editor send me galleys.

KJ: Oh wow. So –

JR: And I’m sure he’s doing that with Phil Gabriel and Ted Goossen, the people who are mostly translating him now.

KJ: Uh-huh. So when you translated, or started to translate Wind Up Bird Chronicle, was that from galleys too?

JR: That was from galleys of the magazine in which it was originally serialized. That was really a clumsy process because he serialized the whole first volume of that book in, I don’t know what it was. Gunzō, or some, one of those literary journals. It was over several months’ time that he was serializing that book and I remember that really became a hardship because once he got it into a full-length volume, he did a lot of changing and I had to go back [and revise] since I got started on the text while he was still writing it, even before it came out in the magazine. There were a few changes as it got into the magazine. Then, when he published the book, he did a lot of changing. Fortunately he was aware of this. He was sympathetic and would send me marked up texts saying, “Look, you have to fix this, this, this and this.” But it was a bother, a real bother.

KJ: Yeah, I can imagine. How long did it take you to translate Wind Up Bird Chronicle? Like, I only read the [edited] English version, and that was still fairly long.

JR: Gee, I don’t remember. The one thing I do remember was the first two volumes of 1Q84, that was a year and a half to do those two volumes. That was after I had retired. So I wasn’t going to faculty meetings and I wasn’t grading student papers. And that was a pretty fast job for me. A year and a half to do two thick books. Usually, I kind of assume it takes about a year to do a volume, and if it’s a thin volume, a little less than a year. But it did take me just about the time that I allotted to it, a year and a half, to do those two books. I’m sure I kept some notes about how long it took me. I kind of had a work diary or something, and I would just simply write down the days when I started, when I stopped, how much I got through. I think it was probably two years to get through that book. I can’t say for sure.

KJ: That’s really quick, in my opinion. Just being able to translate all of Wind Up Bird Chronicle while teaching, in two years, that’s pretty impressive. Are you still translating now? I mean, as you mentioned, you’re retired now. Are you still working on translations?

JR: The last thing I translated was Murakami’s interviews with Seiji Ozawa. Did you know about that book?

KJ: Not the book, but I think I remember hearing about the interviews.

JR: It’s a book, about 377 pages, I’m looking around for it. Oh well. The book I’m working on these days in my own novel.

KJ: Yeah, I saw that! On the Wikipedia page, it mentions that The Sun Gods is a novel that you’re working on and it’s coming out in May.

JR: Yeah, yeah, so actually, today was the last day I could send them any corrections. Fortunately, I did a bunch of those a couple days ago. So we’ve gotten to the stage now where it’s done. Even if I find something that I’m sorry that I wrote that way. I’ve had it. It’s been pretty intense working on this thing, especially the whole editorial phase has been very intense. I’m really looking forward to it.

KJ: What made you want to write a book?

JR: Well, I think everybody who works on literature academically secretly wants to write a book. Don’t you want to write a book?

KJ: Yeah.

JR: (Laughs). This book is about the incarceration of Japanese, Japanese-Americans during World War II. It’s set in Seattle and it’s all about how the people were sent from here out to the camp called Minidoka. Do you know about…?

KJ: Yeah, I’ve heard about it. I haven’t studied it in class or anything but I have read up some on my own.

JR: So, I spent a long time working on that thing. It was a subject that got me annoyed, got me angry because I didn’t learn about it until I was in graduate school. I didn’t know that it had happened.

KJ: Really??

JR: People didn’t know about it back then, people really didn’t know about it until after 1980. [From then] on it became a topic of conversation. Even now, on the east coast, a lot of people don’t know it happened. There’s much more awareness of it out on the west coast, which is where the people were rounded up and moved out.

KJ: That surprises me. That does surprise me.

JR: Well, I’m glad to hear that because that means there’s more awareness of what happened. There used to be none and that’s part of what got me writing, was realizing that I had remained ignorant of this until I was in my twenties. I just didn’t know that it had happened, that this country had locked people up, especially the people I was close to, since I was working on Japanese and starting to become so much more aware of Japanese people as an ethnic group. Yeah, I got angry. That’s what motivated me to write that.

KJ: So how long have you been working on it?

JR: How long–? I would say, to do the whole thing took about three to four years. But I started it thirty years ago. I thought it was finished after about two, two and a half years, couldn’t get anybody interested in it and just forgot about it cause then I got busy with Murakami’s translations. Just before I started working on Murakami is when I was working on that and then I pretty much got obsessed with Murakami for another fifteen or twenty years. And it only occurred to me lately that if I don’t publish this damn thing, this year, the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, I’m not going to live long enough to ever publish it, so now’s the time. And I fortunately found a publisher this time. I think that had a lot to do with it, with the increased awareness there is of the whole phenomenon. So I got very good, very warm reception from this little Seattle publisher. They’ve done a beautiful job of producing the book and it’s going to be a really nice book, I think, when it comes out. It’s going to be paperback. It’s going to be a kind of paperback with flaps. (Laughs.)

KJ: Oh! They’re like fancier paperbacks that—

JR: Somewhat fancier paperback, but still, it’s only fifteen dollars, so it’s an affordable book.

KJ: I’m gonna buy it and read it so, you have at least one reader.

JR: That’s very encouraging. I need at least one. (Laughs).

KJ: Yeah. Have you read The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet?

JR: Yes. I was very angry about that book because I had written my novel thirty years ago and this guy came along and he was the first one to write about this kind of phenomenon in Seattle. He set it in Seattle, he did a great job. (Laughs). So it was kind of annoying to me that someone else beat me to it even though I had already written the book. But yeah, it’s a nice little book. My book’s not the least bit sentimental, or at least not that kind of sentimental. It’s rather sentimental, don’t you think?

KJ: Yeah, it’s definitely sentimental. I mean, it addresses a lot of issues but they’re all framed within the context of what’s basically a love story.

JR: Yeah, yeah. Well, I got a love story in mine too, but it’s much less…optimistic, let’s put it that way.

KJ: That’ll take some doing, cause that one wasn’t exactly the most optimistic love story, I’d say.

JR: Yeah, I know what you mean. But it’s sweet, it’s a very sweet book.

KJ: True. The ending definitely reinforces that.

JR: I enjoyed it. When he came to town, I went and got his autograph. I definitely enjoyed the book. There’s another one, what is it? The one I haven’t read is Snow Falling From Cedars, no, it’s Snow Falling on Cedars. You know that book?

KJ: I haven’t heard of it.

JR: Yeah, they made a movie out of that one. Kind of a detective story. That’s also set in this area [Seattle]. So mine is going to be looked upon as the third novel, when in fact—

KJ: It was written many years ago.

JR: But I’m excited about it. I’m really very pleased that a real publisher—a small publisher, but a real publisher—wanted to do it and gave me an editor to work with and the editing process was just marvelous. He was so good at giving me feedback on all kinds of things in the book. It’s a whole lot better than it was four or five months ago.

KJ: You said it was a really intense process?

JR: Very intense. Especially, there was a good solid month where—he lives and teaches down in Claremont, in the Claremont Colleges down in California. So I’ve never met him. We were just constantly emailing back and forth, and he would send me marked up texts, and here’s another wonderful thing about working in electronic text: track changes. You know track changes?

KJ: Uh-huh.

JR: Yeah. I am a great admirer of track changes. It’s a great way to send revisions to people.

KJ: Yeah, that’s what Professor Zimmerman uses to correct my translations of “Fusehime.”

JR: Oh good! Sure, sure.

KJ: Well, I don’t want to take up too much more of your time so I guess my last question will be if someone wanted to get into translating, either academically or for the more contemporary publishing industry, what would be your advice to them?

JR: Get a job.

KJ: Get a job?

JR: (Laughs). Yeah, I’m afraid so. You need to support yourself and you’re probably not going to do it with literary translating. Not too many people can do that. Even—what’s her name? Grossman, the Spanish translator. I can’t remember her first name. She’s very well-known and I met her once. I really enjoyed meeting her but it’s a real struggle for her. And she’s very widely read. She publishes books that get printed and reprinted. It’s really hard to make a living as a literary translator. And if you think you’re going to do commercial work to keep yourself fed and do your literary work at night or something, very few people can do that. Cause it really is hard on the brain, you know. You have to concentrate to translate.

KJ: Oh yeah.

JR: I can’t take more than four hours of that in any one day. It’s very hard. We can’t make a living doing that kind of thing. Or I couldn’t, I could never had made it. So, literally, I know it’s not very exciting but, I have basic advice for budding translators, and that is get a job of some kind and probably an academic one cause it’ll give you time to do other things, and write a lot. Just practice. The more you translate, the more you get your tools ready to do the job, and it’s like practicing a musical instrument. You’ve got to use it all the time and keep it ready. It’s boring but it happens to be the case. To get through a book like 1Q84, you get up in the morning, you sit down at the computer and just do as much as you can until your brain fries and then you go off and do other things and the next morning do the same thing. If you’ve got this much down one morning, and this much done the next morning, you know, if you have enough mornings, they pile up and you can do it.

KJ: Alright, well. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me.

JR: I hope it’s been of some use.

KJ: Yes. I definitely, I enjoyed speaking with you. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with me.

WARNING: Not for Realists

Book or movie review

Animated film Millennium Actress (2001) is at its heart a drama, following the life of a Japanese actress as she chases a man she meets in passing, falls in love with and sees only once more. In the hands of Satoshi Kon, a master director of animated films, this simple love-story turns into an adventure that takes you from present day to feudal Japan to the moon and blurs the fine line between reality and fiction. From setting to animation to storytelling, Millennium Actress is unconventional and fantastical as it explores the love that drives the actress through her life.

The film begins with two men, Genya, a documentary filmmaker, and Ida, his cameraman, traveling to interview the actress, Chiyoko Fujiwara, for a documentary on the story of her career and life. She starts to tell them the story of the painter she fell in love with as a girl and in what starts as a typical flashback, present day Genya and Ida appear to follow a young Chiyoko around. Kon smoothly inserts them into the scene, so smoothly that we don’t even notice the transition at first. And odd though it may seem when we think about it, the symbolism works perfectly. Not only do the two men represent us as we breach the barriers of time and privacy to witness Chiyoko’s life, but their presence comments on the absurdity that we expect, in documentary films such as theirs, to see such “original footage.”

Millennium Actress’s wonders don’t stop there: the film gets even better as Kon plays with the fluidity of the scene and setting. Unbeknownst to us, the flashback that we, Genya and Ida are watching has morphed into a scene from one of her dramas. As Ida so elegantly puts it, “When did this turn into a movie?!” The setting shifts fluidly between the present day, Chiyoko’s past and the movies she stars in, and we are never sure of how much of what we see is fact or fiction—and it doesn’t matter. It is Chiyoko’s desire to reunite with her painter that drives her through both her life and her movies, and the search for plain, realistic facts pales in comparison to the emotional journey she takes.

Kon risked bringing down the entire film with this constant changing of setting and deliberate obscuring of fact and fiction. The wide range of settings—from Chiyoko’s past to the present day interview (1920s Japan to 2000s) and all her different movies that span historical dramas to futuristic sci-fi—would be a lot to keep straight in a realistic film, let alone one that tells realism “Sayonara.” It could have been all too easy for us to get lost in the plethora of times and the gray area between reality and movie. There is an even greater risk of this happening with Western viewers since much of the distinction between settings is based on an instant visual recognition of period costumes, technology and architecture that we don’t have.

And while this narrative style can be challenging to follow at times, overall Kon and his team do an amazing job clarifying settings shifts. They use jumps cuts where the movement of a character stays the same between shots, but everything else—scenery, make-up, other characters, costumes—changes. Chiyoko may be a ninja running through a forest when she starts to fall, but it is a geisha in the pleasure quarters of Kyoto who hits the ground.  Thanks to Kon’s stunning design team, we might not know which era a costume and scenery is from, but we can certainly tell that it’s different from the previous one. Moreover, Kon and his team use Genya and Ida as on-screen spectators to reassure us that we’re not crazy, and yes that did just happen. See? Ida’s stunned too. Not only do these characters’ exclamations and comments guide us as we change rapidly from setting to setting, but they also inject some much needed humor and comic relief into the film as the tension in Chiyoko’s drama skyrockets.

The other factor that keeps us from losing track of the central story is the reappearance of supporting characters, in different costumes for different settings of course. Eiko Shimao, the former star who must now give up her place to the young and beautiful Chiyoko, reprises time and again the role of the older women Chiyoko must confront. There is also the wraith who condemns Chiyoko to burn in the flames of eternal love during a movie sequence and then haunts her through the rest of her real life. The twist at the end of Millennium Actress makes us think about the regrets we have in life as it finally explains the wraith’s words, “I hate you more than I can bear. I love you more than I can bear.” The characters and Chiyoko’s desire stand out in sharp relief against the backdrop of a ceaselessly changing set, holding the film together as a united whole.

That these characters reappear so often throughout the story of Chiyoko’s life means that like her, they must age, and I want to take a moment to recognize both the voice actors’ and the art designer’s stellar work in aging the characters. It is no small feat in anime to subtly change a character’s design as they age. The artist in charge of character design does a spectacular job of aging Chiyoko and others gradually, making Chiyoko at thirteen as different from twenty-five as from seventy, but still recognizable as herself. The mole under her left eye certainly helps to make her always identifiable, but considering how useful I find it, I won’t call it the easy way out. On top of that, three separate actresses voice Chiyoko, one for each time period of her life, to give her voice the authentic wide range of sound as her story unfolds.

Brilliant though I think this movie is, it is not for everyone. Aside from the challenge of keeping up with the various settings, the lack of definitive answers could drive some viewers nuts. We never do find out at what point Chiyoko’s story becomes a movie, and that only continues to hold true as the film progresses. Millennium Actress is not for the viewer who wants to put every detail into nice little boxes labelled “real” and “fictive.” For all those who aren’t realism prudes, though, I highly recommend this spectacular and unique film.

Letter to the Editor

Letter to the editor

RE: This is not a study abroad blog post (3/18/2015)

Writing for the audience back home does reinforce the mentality of viewing life abroad from an American perspective, but it’s a symptom, not a cause of this “ ‘traveler’ mentality.” We students are so comfortable in American culture, and we have easy enough access to it even when abroad thanks to the internet, that we lack the desire or impetus to try on another culture for size. Not keeping a blog doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll become part of the local culture.

The issue is that we learn to live as Americans surrounded by a foreign culture instead of assimilating into that culture. When I was in Japan, it was hard enough for me to eat an unfamiliar cuisine, communicate in Japanese and adjust to communal bathing, let alone abandon the comfort of my American self for a new set of cultural values and way of thinking. Culture shock after culture shock wears down our endurance and ability to integrate, and we fall back on our American point of view, regardless of whether we’re keeping a ‘study-a-blog’ or not.

Burying the Hatchet

Op-Ed

Japan claims to have fulfilled its responsibility towards the tens of thousands of women, euphemistically called “comfort women,” whom it forced to work in military brothels during WWII. The rest of the world begs to differ, and on March 1st, South Korean President Park called the Land of the Rising Sun out on it, telling Japan to apologize to and to provide for these women. Despite the passage of 75 years since the end of the war, Japan has yet to satisfactorily atone for the atrocities it forced on Korean, as well as Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Filipino, Burmese and Indonesian, women. Japan should give up its belief that it has fulfilled its responsibility and do as President Park demands.

The first step Japan must take to accept its continued legal and moral responsibility is to understand why the treaty it signed, the organization it founded and the statement it issued didn’t resolve the conflict. The treaty mentioned here, the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations, required Japan to pay 364 million dollars to South Korea in war reparations as compensation for the conscription of Korean laborers under the boot of Japanese imperialism. The flaw is that the treaty only addressed forced labor, omitting forced prostitution. It simply never took these women into account because the issue of comfort women wasn’t even a blip on international or national radars until the 1970s. A treaty that predates the recognition of an issue cannot redress it and Japan should stop believing that this 50 year old treaty ended its legal responsibility.

As for the organization which Japan founded to address its moral responsibility, it was called the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF) and it operated from 1994 to 2007. Japan lauds it for being a joint collaboration between the government and the public to financially compensate former comfort women with a combination of private donations and government funding. And while the AWF itself wasn’t perfect (because of the mix of private and public funding, it wasn’t official government redress), its biggest flaw was that it closed.

During its 14 years of operation, the AWF only awarded direct compensation to a mere 285 women from South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines and built some medical facilities in Indonesia. Considering that 50,000 is the conservative estimate of how many comfort women existed during the war, 285 is a dismally small number. Japan didn’t even give women in North Korea and China the opportunity to apply for compensation because their governments and Japan’s weren’t cooperating at the time. Moreover, many South Koreans who could have been awarded money refused to accept it because it wasn’t official government redress. When the fund closed in 2007, many known comfort women were still uncompensated, leaving Japan’s responsibilities unfulfilled. As with the case of the 1965 treaty, Japan should realize that the AWF did not lay the matter to rest.

Last is the deficiency of the statement the Japanese government issued in regards to comfort women, called the Kono statement. Issued in 1993, the Kono statement was an explicit victory for comfort women by recognizing and apologizing for Japan’s crimes during the war. However, despite the sincerity with which it was originally given, recent political changes call into question whether or not it continues to apply. The current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and other revisionists promote a whitewashed version of WWII where Japan was not an aggressor and comfort women were regular prostitutes, thereby undermining the statement’s validity. Japan must recognize that the statement in its current easy-to-ignore state can’t contribute to Japan’s atonement.

Closely linked with this first step of acknowledging continued responsibility is the second step of actively doing something about it. The most basic and immediate way this should happen is the reopening of the AWF to work ceaselessly at identifying and compensating former comfort women. Even if they meet with very little success, either for diplomatic or social reasons, it is vital to show at least symbolically that Japan is trying to make amends. Moreover, when it is reopened, the AWF should be made a part of the Japanese government so as to meet the demand that the money it awards is official government redress. In order to counter the views of revisionists like Prime Minister Abe, the Kono statement should be given more political weight and the role of the AWF should also be expanded to include advocating for the truthful and fair education of the history of comfort women. Burying the hatchet doesn’t mean Japan is free to forget about their wrong-doing. It means learning from the past to make sure the hatchet stays in the ground.

The U.S.-Japan Express

Report on a cultural event

I took the train to go to a panel on public transportation in downtown D.C., which was only fitting. Unfortunately for me and the rush hour commuters I was traveling with, the trains were running extremely late that morning because of the unusually cold weather. The old equipment that Washington D.C.’s Metro system relied upon couldn’t take the frigid temperatures and trains were malfunctioning inbound and outbound. The more trains malfunctioned, the more commuters were crammed into the functioning ones, and the overcrowding caused even more malfunctions.

Needless to say, I arrived at my event much later than I intended. I completely missed the welcome speech and the introduction to the presentations. In this at least I was fortunate: I was already familiar with the event I was attending. Called the 3rd JASC-KASC Trilateral Symposium, it was a series of three presentations put on by college students who had participated in either the Japan-America Student Conference (JASC) or the Korea-America Student Conference (KASC) the previous summer. Each panel addressed some issue that was of particular importance to the United States, Japan and Korea. The presentation I was most interested in seeing was the third, Urban Challenges, which specifically tackled public transportation.

I had grown up here in the suburbs of D.C. where public transportation was inconvenient at best and where getting a driver’s license was a rite of passage for a typical teen. Having a car was a basic necessity and most families I knew owned two. I was completely unaware of the importance of public transportation until I spent a year living abroad in Tokyo, a city of millions whose public transportation system is renowned. There I was empowered, so to speak, to go anywhere I wanted in the city quickly, cheaply and without a car. For example, I could make it from my local station in the outskirts of the city to downtown Tokyo in 25 minutes or less. Public transportation opened the doors of Tokyo to me in a way that D.C.’s metro system never had. I wanted to know what the student presenters, with their Korean, Japanese and American backgrounds, thought of the differences in public transit between our three countries.

The overarching theme of their presentation was that public transportation systems have developed differently in different parts of the world and that the U.S., Japan and Korea can all benefit from studying each other’s systems. The students gave three specific examples. The first was London’s system of using new technology to wirelessly charge drivers for driving in the city. The second was D.C.’s bike share program that opened in 2008 and expanded into the suburbs in subsequent years. The third was the extensive networks of trains that are common in and between Asian cities, with Tokyo cited as the prime example.

However, as the presentation went on it became clear to me that it was really our Asian allies who could teach the U.S. about developing, structuring and implementing public transportation on a city- and country-wide scale. The heart of the matter is that Japan, like many other Asian countries, is a train-centric society. Trains, buses and bikes are integrated into daily life, city infrastructure and the economy in a way that is rarely seen in the car-centric U.S.

Take for example Kichijōji Station, located near downtown Tokyo. The first time I went out the turnstile, I was shocked to find myself in the bowels of a four-story mall looking at shops, restaurants and cafes. The train station was literally inside the mall. Unlike the U.S.’s suburban set-up where strip malls and restaurants are located off of highways and surrounded by large parking lots, in Japan shopping and dining are clustered around train stations, which are the accessible hubs of urban life.

Being a train-centric society also means that more time and effort is invested into the development of trains. Simply put, the train technology in Asia is better than anything we currently have in the U.S. The most famous example of this is the shinkansen, dubbed “bullet train” by English-speakers, that travels between all major Japanese cities at 200 mph. But more importantly, Japanese technology is more advanced on a local level as well. Not only are trains in Tokyo newer on average than trains in U.S. cities, they are more reliable and extremely precise. Every time a train pulls into a station, its doors align with certain markings on the platform, which tell riders where to wait.

This is a far cry from the state of trains in the United States. Assuming your city has a train system, chances are its trains are the same ones that were being used thirty years ago. Out of date and unreliable, public transportation is a nuisance that most Americans avoid in favor of their cars. Without a car, the 18-minute drive from my comfortable neighborhood to my doctor’s office becomes an hour-long trek whose timing is dictated by the train. Low demand for train service means that even with government subsidies, most cities can’t sustain a public transportation network that would be sufficient for anyone making do without a car. This has substantial socioeconomic repercussions, as the JASC-KASC presenters rightly pointed out. Inconvenient, unreliable public transit causes low-income families to sacrifice time that they do not have to lose. And for low-income workers, time is literally money.

In their ideal view of the world, the student presenters hoped that the U.S. would learn from Asia and, by improving public transportation, improve the quality of life of the people who use it. Waiting for the still-delayed train to take me home, I mulled over how challenging adapting such a system would be, and not just because of the more practical funding concerns. Our cities and suburbs have developed based on the assumption that residents own cars and we as a country are practically married to them. Giving up our cars would be more than a question of functionality. We believe that we have a right to drive everywhere and we have convinced the government to support that right, to invest in new highways and not new train lines. So it is our responsibility to convince ourselves, our friends and our government that it is in our best interest to build, and then take, the train.

Beer-ful Apologies

Blog post on a cultural experience

My friends and I were flabbergasted when the hostess of our bed and breakfast, after asking us if we enjoyed drinking beer on occasion, proceeded to give us four large bottles of it. We had come to the north of Japan to see the Snow Festival in Sapporo, but being on a budget meant staying in this bed and breakfast on the western coast of Hokkaido, about an hour’s train ride away. I fell in love with it there since the coast was even snowier than inland Sapporo, with snow banks taller than my five foot eight self.

This night was the last night of our four day trip and staying up late drinking liters of beer hadn’t been part of the plan. Refusing the gift, however, would have offended our hostess, so we accepted the beer as graciously as possible. We waited on the tatami mats in our room for her to bring us four glasses, one for each of us. As soon as our hostess left us to drink, however, we started frantically trying to contact our Japanese friends back in Tokyo for some much needed advice.

The ins and outs of Japanese gift-giving weren’t intuitive for us Westerners in the first place, and our awkward arrival at the bed and breakfast only complicated matters further. Somehow, our reservation hadn’t gone through properly and our hostess hadn’t been expecting us. In a country that views customer service as an art form, her unpreparedness was a black mark against her, despite her immediately preparing a room for us and letting us into her own home to wait. Had we been Japanese, we would have been quietly annoyed at her and sure in our belief that it was her duty to rectify the situation. Instead, we were internally panicking about possibly having to find another place to stay, in the middle winter, during the country’s most famous snow festival. Our hostess needed to do something special for us to make amends and we needed to know how to properly accept her gift.

Fortunately for us, being foreigners gave us some slack in the manners department. But just because we weren’t expected to have perfect manners didn’t mean we couldn’t offend our hostess with the wrong response. The four of us just sat and stared at the beer for a little while. A hobbyist could have fit an entire fleet inside these bottles. There was no way we could drink it all. Did she really expect us to drink that much beer? Would she be offended if we left some of it behind? Or would we have to be sneaky and pour it down the sink? The last suggestion, made by me, seemed even worse than leaving some behind, especially if she ever found out about it. Secrets always seem to come out in the worst way possible, especially in Japanese comics.

Since sitting there and marveling at the beer wasn’t going to make it disappear, we started drinking it instead. We each took a glass from the tray and poured each other’s drinks. It was only halfway through our year abroad and we had already adopted Japanese drinking traditions. You drink from an individual glass, which someone else always fills for you so you do not have to fill it yourself. It’s another layer of hospitality, one which says that your friends, acquaintances or colleagues will take care of you and you will do the same for them. We started off our evening of drinking with the traditional Japanese cheer, “Kanpai!” It might not have been part of the plan, but there is certainly something to be said for relaxing with friends on a snowy winter’s night far from home.

As Rosie, the one among us who was most familiar with Japanese culture, got tipsier and tipsier, she had an epiphany. “Of course we don’t have to drink everything! Our hostess made sure to give us too much so that we wouldn’t have to!” Our hostess had given us an excess of beer on purpose: she didn’t expect us to drink it all because it was too much to drink. She simply needed to give us enough for there to be some left, so that she knew we didn’t want for more. It reminded me of Thanksgiving dinner back in the States. My family always prepares way too much food to make sure that’s there’s more than enough to go around. Having food left at the end tells us that no one went home hungry. It might not have been Thanksgiving, but our hostess was certainly thinking the same way.

The following morning when we checked out, we made sure to thank our hostess again for her hospitality and her generous gift. Thanks to Rosie, we could leave worry-free, the undrunk half of that gift still sitting in our room.