At 81, Nobuhiko Obayashi has terminal lung cancer, but his confrontation with death began so long ago it has characterized his decades of filmmaking.
Obayashi has stayed true to himself through more than 40 movies and thousands of TV shows, commercials and other video, devoted to warning of the horrors of war.
“I’ve been doing the same thing and never wavered,” Obayashi said at his Tokyo office, appearing frail in a wheelchair but his eyes bright with a mischievous energy.
Photo: AP
The works reflect that he grew up during World War II, years remembered for Japan’s aggression and atrocities against its neighbors but also a period during which Japanese people suffered hunger, abuse and mass death.
“Someone could push the button any minute,” he added, tapping on his desk as an imaginary switch to set off a nuclear bomb.
His voice, gentle and raspy, reflected his conviction, as he stressed in a recent interview how he believed in the power of movies. Movies like his, he says, ask that important question: Where do you stand?
Photo: AP
“Movies are not weak,” he said, looking offended at such an idea. “Movies express freedom.”
He has never made a single film to make money, be famous or pander favors, he said, not hiding his pride.
Obayashi, who has helped define the legacy of Japanese filmmaking, is being honored at the Tokyo International Film Festival, opening on Monday and running through Nov. 5.
“Obayashi has been dubbed a ‘cinematic magician’ for his dreamlike visual expression,” the festival said in a statement.
Among the Obayashi works being screened is his just-completed, three-hour Labyrinth of Cinema, characteristically anti-war but also an homage to filmmaking. The main characters — young Japanese men who go to an old movie theater but increasingly get sucked into crises — have names emulating cinematic giants, Francois Truffaut, Mario Bava and Don Seigel.
Also being shown is 1985’s Miss Lonely, shot in seaside Onomichi, the picturesque town in Hiroshima prefecture where Obayashi grew up. Onomichi is also the site of Yasujiro Ozu’s classic Tokyo Story.
Kaleidoscopic in gorgeous imagery, Obayashi films are filled with what have become his trademark motifs — colorful Japanese festivals, dripping blood, marching doll-like soldiers, shooting stars and winding cobblestone roads — all with a faraway fairy-tale feel.
Obayashi showed an interest in films from childhood and made animation clips by hand.
His pacifism was reinforced early by his father, who was an army doctor. His father used to say doctors can save not only their fellow countrymen but enemy lives as well, Obayashi recalled. When Obayashi decided to be a filmmaker, his father gave him an 8-millimeter camera.
Obayashi believes the masterpieces that propelled Akira Kurosawa to stardom like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo were overly commercial, while his late-career works of slum-set Dodeskaden and Rhapsody in August, about the suffering caused by the Nagasaki atomic bombing, were true Kurosawa films.
Obayashi recalled that Kurosawa, whom he lovingly called “Kuro-san,” was aware of such points, and had remarked how Obayashi made from-the-heart films.
Unlike many Hollywood movies, Obayashi’s works lack an obvious plot of a hero fighting a villain. Like many Japanese films, they don’t rely on an action-packed plot that drives toward a climactic resolution.
Instead, his movies appear to start from nowhere and end, then start up again, weaving in and out of scenes, often traveling in time as well.
When asked if war is the villain for mankind, Obayashi looks as if he thinks he has been asked a dumb question.
For him, what people throughout history have faced is complex. A soldier may be killed but he may also kill, he said.
Obayashi is working on his next film. He acknowledged it might take time, given his health. To demonstrate his lifetime goal for his filmmaking, he showed his hand, three fingers held up in the sign language of “I love you.”
“Let’s value freedom with all our might. Let’s have no lies,” said Obayashi.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist