Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

Last night, I went to see Jun Ichikawa’s penultimate film, How to Become Myself, a coming-of-age story about two girls trying to navigate the social cliques and rules of late elementary school, junior high, and the beginning of senior high in Japan. Despite having been in the same class, the two only bond on the day of their sixth-grade graduation when both retreat into the library; they sit parallel to each other separated by low bookshelves. Kanako, once the class rep but now bullied, tells Juri that she feels as if her true self is hiding because a quieter self is good enough for the people for whom she plays the role of the bullied girl. Juri empathizes, explaining that she too feels like she isn’t herself.

The two lose touch as they go to different schools, and Kanako continues to be bullied. In tenth grade, however, when Kanako is about to start at a new school, Juri discovers her email and contacts her.  In what follows, fiction becomes both girl’s salvation. When Kanako seems not to remember their conversation in the library, Juri takes on a false identity, calling herself Kotori and telling stories about her friend Hina which serve as a sort of how-to-be-popular guide. Meanwhile, she writes up Kotori’s story for her Modern Literature club; the club’s teacher is impressed with the tale which leads to Juri being nominated to give a speech at the school’s anniversary assembly.

At first, Juri is mortified. After Kanako tracks down her phone number and calls her, however, she gains the strength to give her speech. During the conversation, Kanako thanks her and tells her that, though she eventually ran away from her new popular persona, it was through Juri’s stories that she was able to discover that every person she has been has in fact been part of herself. Understanding this means that both girls can go forward instead of searching for some more genuine way of acting. For Juri in particular, this means bringing out who she wants to be despite her fears: accepting the challenge of giving an address and inviting her father (her parents have divorced) to the assembly.

There is something very postmodern about Kanako’s epiphany. The way the film is made, however, would seem to defy that classification. The plot is straightforward with flashbacks only showing quick images of past events the audience has already seen, mostly to visually emphasize the way things have changed. Many of the most important parts of the film are shot with the girls speaking directly to the camera and the background either simple or eliminated entirely. On the other hand, the way the story depends on technology, particularly keitai (mobile phones), means that it could belong to no other period.

I also have to admit that I felt quite a bit of nostalgia for my time in Japan while watching this film. The scenes shot in the hallways and classrooms of the elementary school brought me back to the schools where I taught.

Fujisan

I always said I climbed alone
that mountain, that perfect composite
cone    I said
I started at the shrine, the bottom

seems logical enough
but said I didn’t take the bus
halfway up

and I didn’t
but I wasn’t

alone

the woman who ran the abandoned
tea house and pointed my way
was my first clue

foxes & wings & formless
followed me
from Fuji Sengen Jinja
where I threw a coin & clapped a bell

over treeline
they lifted boulders
lifted feet
and finally lifted clouds

so I could cheer the sun to rise
a hundred thousand lives

Rite of Recall

in the fairy grove my hand is warmed
by Martyn’s   we’re always
meeting at a conference on vampires
where emergency fire doors hold in coffee’s
bitter scent, tea steam, and a very nice bean salad

we’re always walking
through Central Park at dusk
smelling roses & pansies
of the Shakespeare Garden
we didn’t find that time

and I bring him to the top of Fuji
where we shiver into each other until light
and I bring him to the top of Tai Shan
to show him that red sky I remember
deserving its reputation and its hundreds
who climb or take the ropeway

his hand like crinkling leaves
filters out the horrors, yes horrors
there’s nothing else to call it
when a man you loved has raped you
when strangers hold a knife
against your soft belly for cash

under the hawthorn we’re building
words for Francis Bacon & Edward Hopper
we’re building a home on the edge of loneliness
left since we’re together
to the ashy snow

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A recent poll suggests that while most Americans still believe that dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right thing to do, that belief is weaker among younger people. In reporting this story, the Associated Press provided a very slanted interpretation of the reasons for the generational difference. The only opinion cited was that of Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute who said:

Voters who remember the horrors of World War II overwhelmingly support Truman’s decision . . . Support drops with age, from the generation that grew up with the nuclear fear of the Cold War to the youngest voters, who know less.

Because of course there can be only two reasons to think that it was wrong to use a bomb that killed thousands of people instantly and left others with burns so severe that their skin hung off of them and their hands looked like claws: fear and ignorance. Actually, given that the fear comes from the possibility of nuclear annihilation and that Fat Man and Little Boy played a role in encouraging the nuclear arms race by demonstrating the power of such weapons on populated areas, it seems that it is a rational fear.

But let’s talk about ignorance: the fact is that it cuts both ways. I have no firsthand knowledge of the horrors of World War II, but I have taken the time to see them from a perspective that the vast majority of people who think the atomic bombings were just fine have not. I have been to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have heard the stories of the hibakusha.

Yes, I lack firsthand knowledge of the horrors of World War II, but I also lack exposure to the racist propaganda that fueled the U.S. war effort in the Pacific. I have not, at least not to the same degree as older Americans, been trained to view the Japanese as other-than-human and thus acceptable to kill en masse. I know that the Japanese did not operate with a hive mind during World War II, that people were often forced into the post-defeat mass “suicides” that have been used to support that idea, that there were dissenters who were jailed, that Christianity was one of the religions suppressed by the government during WWII yet Urakami Cathedral was at the center of the Nagasaki blast. One of the common justifications for the nuclear attacks was that a land invasion of Japan would have meant an obscene number of casualties because every Japanese citizen would have fought to the death; the truth is, however, that there were many people who would have gladly surrendered.

It is utterly offensive to suggest that those of us who see the atomic bombings as a crime do so out of ignorance. Worse than suggesting it is when a news organization with a duty to present stories objectively provides such statements as the only possible interpretation.

In this case, it is not the young who are most ignorant.

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Recently, Shared Worlds asked five well-known authors of speculative fiction the following question: “What’s your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?”. China Miéville’s answer at least comes as no surprise:

Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can’t quite make sense of, though we know it’s there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it’s a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.

It’s worth noting that not one of the authors, even those from the US, chose a US city. Certainly, I couldn’t make  an argument for any of the cities I’ve lived in within its borders. Seattle is too much on the edge of now, New York and San Francisco too marked by a too recent past.

The cities for which I could make an argument are in Asia. There’s Tokyo of course with its high-tech towers, trains, and phones as well as shrines and forests for the fantasy element; rearranging the syllables gets you Kyoto, where you have a similar level of technology as well as more famous shrines and temples, most of which have been rebuilt to appear ancient. Nagasaki would be my choice for a ghost story; its violent history did not begin with the dropping of the bomb. 

Moving on to the mainland, Kuala Lumpur could be supported as a spec-fic city for similar reasons: there are the tremendous heights of the Petronas Towers and the rain forest of Bukit Nanas. In Cambodia, Siem Reap has its proximity to the ruins of a lost civilization, which presents all kinds of story possibilities; the ever-present tourists, and the contrast between their lifestyles and the lives of the local residents provide for the possibility of sub-plots addressing social inequality.

As settings for speculative fiction, however, all of these pale in comparison to Shanghai. The obvious SF zone is Pudong with its glistening skyscrapers and the retro-future Oriental Pearl Tower. Across the Huangpu (and who knows what creatures might rise from that river, resulting perhaps from experiments conducted by the naval ships that pass?), towers behind the old colonial buildings of the Bund appear to have been fitted with lasers. Contrasting the lives of migrant workers and residents of Shanghai’s older districts with these glistening futurismic areas provides the same sort of opportunity for addressing social inequality that I mentioned in Siem Reap, only it is heightened by the general dystopian air created by the PRC’s authoritarian government. Moreover, like so many of these other cities, Shanghai possesses the temples and shrines that can serve as entrances for powerful and fantastic entities.

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