Original subtitles

JIKANDES - It's time

tell me, is it the fog or is it me?

show a country, speak of a culture, in whatever way,

and you'll enter into fiction while yearning for invisibility

ravers' madness a new form of kindness

how tall is Japan? height, weight, age?

AGE

PASSAGE

RITES OF PASSAGE

Japanese written on every facets of life

calligraphied in the thousand plays of neon signs

the speed of light

where are you now?

in a train

facing the window-screen

second-class seat

speeding through Japan's likeness

Kogo tokitsukusazare

As people say here, "in a good talk, don't explain everything"

GISHIKI

Rituals and the formation of identity

the skill of behavior,

the craft of framing time,

the art of paths

why travel, if not to be in touch with the ordinary in non-ordinary ways

SHINKANSEN

the bullet train

part of a new class structure

the luxury of going faster

while sitting in one place

start in a room sealed with darkness

and a window immediately etches itself onto the viewer's mind

again, it's that unbearable fellow

traveler who won't stay behind

whom one cannot get rid of

opening at dawn, closing at dusk

sorrows forming and falling away

heavy

like drops of water from a lotus leaf

every day from a blossoming lotus

something's emerging

every day from deep in the mud

someone's being reborn

SUKURIN RIZUMU

SCREEN RHYTHM

painting, photography and cinema used to offer different realms of images

today the gap becomes the bridge,

what tends to separate film from video can offer a passage

a world, not of motion pictures, but of images on the move

pushing, no piercing

the match last the time it takes

for horns to unlock

no crisis, no bloodshed

when "gravity is the root of lightness"

the seated interface carries with it a danger

both geophysical and spiritual:

that of body losing touch with body

everyday, controlled by a computer brain in Tokyo

over a 150 bullet trains crisscross Japan

their whereabouts neatly mapped in tiny lights of wall panels

the truly real world is there where you see trains.

For Soseki Natsume,

nothing represents better the civilization of the 20th century

than the train.

Hundreds of people crammed in a box that rumbles along heartlessly.

All taken at uniform speed to the same station...

He wrote:

"Modern civilization uses every possible means to develop individuality,

and having done so, tries everything in its power to stamp it out.

It allots a few square yards to each person,

and tells him that he is free to lead his life as he pleases within that area.

At the same time it erects railings around him,

and threatens him with all sorts of dire consequences

if he should dare to take but one step beyond their compass...

The railway train which blunders ahead blindly into the pitch of darkness

is one example of the very obvious dangers

which are bound in modern civilization."

inside outside, host guest

the role assigned like the role assumed

at first seems fixed

carefully enforce, scrupulously performed

but once the initiation rites have passed

from one closure to another

the inside surreptitiously draws its elements from outside

without being any less inside

meticulously adapted, extended, and transformed

nothing is natural,

for the natural in its most natural is carefully created

look at how long this fellow has been sitting here

our original face has never been hidden

Ko doja

in the matted room

a solitary painting

barely line, barely shape

that frail shadow of a bodhisattva

shading its human frame

the mask:

what makes the face into a molding of society and history

performing one's gender

is part of the boring social contract

commenting on the sexual ambivalence in girls comic books,

Imaizumi Fumiko insists that

girls' "deepest desire is to be neither male nor female"

they take on a sexless role

that departs from the adult woman's subservient role in life,

feeling that reality and dreams

can be reversed by changing male and female appearances.

only when behavior carefully rehearsed becomes collective

do difference fully take on the individual color

the relentless pressures to confirm

the endless demand for freedom

GISHIKI

like nature, human nature itself is carefully molded

GISHIKI

the choreography of everyday activities

and of every stage role

has been kept alive for centuries

GISHIKI

suddenly here I am

carried by the cadence and a swift metamorphosis of the line

its continuity, tensions, improvisations and repetitions

the exact train system mirrors the structure of the society it serves

machines and people work in mutual accord

once the choice where destination is made

it can be altered at any time in any way during the journey

for the fare registered by the machine

can always be readjusted by the human hand

itineraries a modified has so desired

without any fuss or distrust

for no one seeks to beat the system

HUMAN TIME - MACHINE TIME

when treated with mutual respect

HUMAN TIME - MACHINE TIME

human and machine share the same devotion to duty

the infinite lines of railways regulating the urban space

On the Noh dance, Okakura kakuzo decreed:

"the standard of excellence is an infinite suggestiveness,

naturalism the one thing to be condemned."

Nothing is more lustrous than ice

Hitori Goto

Time

-time frozen in its movement.

long ago Dogen warned:

"If you neglect the formality of guests and hosts,

you can understand neither the true nor the phenomenal"

In the seventh century

during his visit of the Shadows' Cave

in the kingdom of Nagara Hara,

the Chinese traveling monk Xuan Zang noted that,

in olden times, one could see there the shadow of Buddha,

as radiant as his natural appearance,

and one would have thought it was the living Buddha himself.

But for the last few centuries,

one has no longer seen the shadow clearly.

Whatever one sees is only a weak and doubtful resemblance."

look at how long this fellow has been sitting here

our original face has never been hidden

Ko doja

to survive,

spirituality would have to come to us

from all the ordinary images of life

It is said that when Shakyamuni lost his ordinary sight

one branch of a plum tree blossom in the snow

“the principle underlying [Japanese] cultural forms,”

says Nyozekan Hasegawa,

“is the control of feeling”

a control ideally meant to intensify emotion

without flooding the recipient

bridge, train, passenger

what's in motion?

windows closed

muted soundtrack

no body movement

only the erotic rocking of human against machine

landscape, image, wagon, viewer

what's moving in the midst of stillness?

traveling anew with video images put on line displayed on screen

from one spectacle to the next

mobility of human sense

possession of window images

the landscape wires

now gleams now the longer seen

morphing changing from one minute to the next

shooting in rural Japan

one often shoots in corporate mentality

collective highlights

collective shots

collective climax

collective photography

a night heron sitting tense on one leg

ready to strike in clear water with one single swoop

passing through the torii gate,

one encounters an inside Japan

only to be made more aware of an outside Japan

torii gate setting off the mundane from the spiritual

what we see passes away

the more evident becomes the background

while the minor details

go on shifting what is seen and heard

the other dimension:

gaseous and liquid

because what appears evident to the eye is a straight line

normal perception is solid,

geometric, clearcut and divisive

Direct pointing to the human heart

seeing one's nature becoming Buddha Written by the 83-year-old

priest Hakuin sitting beneath the Sala tree wuthout his glasses

"vast emptiness, nothing holy"

ingrained in modern social interaction and political performance

ritual is not compatible

with industrial speed

to perform a ritual one must slow down

WOMEN'S TIME JAPAN'S TIME

Japanese women of old are said to have this impassive look of the mask

and to live like masks,

with their deepest energies turn inward

surface is surface

and yet

boundless is the depth of the surface

that neither conceals nor reveals

what if, in this journey,

like Enchi and Soseki,

I were to regard events

as parts of a Noh play

and the people as its actors?

Curbing my emotions

to get near to the Noh atmosphere;

no, not to probe the whys and wherefores of the character's behavior

and to pry into their daily worries,

but to let them move about

and come to me in full lines

from a two-dimensional picture

video: a delight for the drowsy body

screen again screen mutually access

mutually processed activated and shut off

trains, processions, parades, time organized in sequences

the time of light

The Sanman gate of Nanzenji

massive, unique

one among the thousand gates

gates, bridges, corridors

intricate passages in time

sequences of infinity

in the Nihonshoki,

the introduction of the art of gardens

is linked to the arrival in the year 612 of a Korean refugee

who in order to gain residence in Japan,

called attention to his talent for representation

and was put in charge of tracing the figures of mount Sumeru

and a bridge of Wu in the southern garden of the palace.

People called him then the "pathmaker"

Seen Flower

Not Seen Flower

Unseen Flower

MIENU HANA

FUKASHINA HANA

walking with Basho

the lines of a haiku come to visibility

"travelers' heart never settled the long in one place

like a portable fire"

small, restrain, evocative

-anesthetic in tune with the fragility and uncertainty of life

a model of understatement

with its shades of gray

Japan,

"the home of the module unit,

the first of the prefab lands"

- wrote a foreign residence (Donald Richie)

a governing system

whose organization is largely based on microstructures

and prefabricated cells

stopped by the side of a merry-making event

and a procession reveals to the mind's eye clear and loud

as a cluster of melodic, rhythmic,

actionpropelling and structure bearing cells

the mobile people telepresent in a transmitted scene

where? where to?

groping one's way in the midst of Time

as the fog slowly dissipates

leading to a clearing

a new place, a new picture

all lie uncomfortably between fact and fancy

there where in the heart of an insular culture

even the mobile world of invisible narrators

of uneven times an odd rhythms finds its place

in the precise framing of daily activities

Zen picture:

demythologize

Open distance nothing sacred

"In the realm of the thousand Buddhas

He is hated by the thousand buddhas:

Among the crowd of demons

He is detested by the crowd of demons

he crushes the silent elimination heretics of today,

and massacres the heterodox blind monks of this generation.

This filthy blind old shavepate

adds more foulness [ugliness] still to foulness”

Hakuin Zenji

May 19. Democracy was crushed by state power.

The parliament forcibly adopted the revised Treaty

binding Japan to the American security system.

June 16, 1960

the Asahi evening news and the Mainichi Daily News

reported the death of Kamba Michiko

during a bloody demonstration against the Government of Prime Minister Kishi

and the signing of the renewed Japan-US Security Treaty

Kamba Michiko, a student of Tokyo University

and a well-known leader of the 20,000 Zengakuren students

who besieged the legislative building,

had previously been arrested

for taking part in the earlier demonstration at Haneda

to prevent the prime minister from leaving for the United States.

The official narratives unanimously condemned the violence of the event

that shook and shocked the nation,

while alternative voices blamed the ultranationalist

for having set the demonstrators afire

by attacking them ferociously.

Such an insurrection - also referred to

as "Bloody leftwing riots in Japan" -

happening before President Eisenhower's scheduled arrival in Tokyo

was said to have appalled Washington and America's president

who declared "he would not permit unpleasant incidents...

to interfere with the goodwill tour he was undertaking

to improve the climate of international understanding.

Upon looking at how time is expressed in writing

and how a death can express the passing of a historical age and its people,

Kenzaburo Oe particularly recalls the death of Tsuburaya Kokichi,

a young runner in the Olympics, who committed suicide in 1968

because, in his own words, the man was "too tired to run" for national prestige.

But in the history of women's resistance and of women pathmakers of the 60s,

it is the name of Kamba Michiko that comes to many women's lips

as I inquire about the one political figure that strikes their memory.

Kamba Michiko's death may be said to have marked the turning point

for the image the world had of Japan.

With the repression of a civic society,

what was then launched was the new image of Japan as a corporate society

for which the only way to progress was the Western way.

coed killed in diet demonstration

More than 400 hurt, 56 students arrested in melee near building

Highly advanced and yet not independent

a global economic power struggling today to reorient itself

to turn to what Asia

without turning its back on the West

"Ambivalent Japan":

isolated from other Asian nations

and confined to Her half scrutable strangeness by the West.

In America, the very nation with which She signed the Security Treaty,

suspicion is always lurking at the slightest sign of trade competition

FUTSU ふつう

the ordinary

IJO いじょう

the extraordinary

part-time women's labor

the million yen wall

full-time family shadow work

the issue of homemaking indispensable

but invisible

Japan's stigma:

a lot of its millions of outcasts and others -

natives, exiled and immigrants

discriminated against

(the Ainu, the Okinawan, the Burakumin,

the ethnic Koreans and also the Chinese,

the workers from Southeast Asia and the Middle East) -

all essential to Japan's progress and identity as a modern nation,

but confined to the underpaid, underprivileged margins

sliding open the blinding screens

I find myself stepping suddenly into the fourth dimension

speeding:

everywhere one turns,

someone is trying to sell speed

the fast species

the peculiar vibrations of graphic space, graphic time

the whole of visual environment

finds its dynamism in the graphic line

keep to the time as required by television

screen space, say TV programmers is always, always limited

but, as novelist Hisashi Inoue once said,

"I don't like bonsaiism...

it's perfectly alright for some trees to grow big and wild"

the journey unfolds through the unseen but dominant framing of time

three times in one:

present past future

as soon as one is in time time the longer flees

standing still, it opens out

TRAIN TIME - NOH TIME

NO

NO TRAIN

Noh performance, as Soseki affirmed,

is "3/10 real emotion, 7/10 technique" 정(情) 3할에 예(藝)7할

layers upon layers,

clad with "art" to weave a tapestry of gestures of serenity

that is to be found nowhere else in this world

yet, for Enchi Fumiko, we are Noh actors

moving in the screen space of ritual, ethical life

the skill of behavior,

the craft of framing time,

the art of path

what else but the shape of living

caught in the unfolding course of a digital play?

The determination to never wage a war again,

as Kenzaburo Oe remarks,

is a resolve adopted not by innocent people

but people stained by their own history of territorial invasion

ritual on-screen

whenever it happens in a context dominated by a machine

which one defies the very rhythm

feeding that machine's needs

video time:

a temporal trap

individual inertia

as the result of ever increased speed of programmed agency

I'm inside the train

looking up at a wide sky

moving on wireless bootless and black

Kisho Kurokawa spoke of Japanese aesthetics

as being primarily two-dimensional and gray

He laid focus on temporal intervals,

intermediary zones and silent spaces;

on the necessity to create with the ma of things and events,

for a person without ma is scorned as a stupid fellow,

one who lacks calm

and is unable to tune in with the gray zone of Japanese culture

images have come upstream toward the traveler

they appear on a screen with each step

front foot back foot one moves with them

one stops by the road to chat with them

and they know how to show certain things

but cannot always tell why they show things the way they do

He wrote:

"No one knows where and when this dewlike existence

will drop into the grass."

VAST EMPTINESS NOTHING HOLY

the fourth dimension:

to be attentive to the infraordinary

an intrusion of eternity

"When you see autumn colors,

do not be partial to them.

You should allow the four seasons

to advance in one viewing,

and see an ounce and a pound with an equal eye."

Dogen Senji

early rice fragrance pushing through to right

the "Rough Sea" - Basho

the antiwar is our mind, the mind of a flower

- Dogen zenji