Lost in Translation

My English conversation partner recommended me to watch Sofia Coppola’s movie, Lost in Translation (2003). It is the story about two Americans who spent a week in Tokyo. A middle aged movie star, Bob, once popular in the industry, visited Tokyo to shoot Japanese Whisky Company’s commercial (Suntory’s Hibiki) for big money, while accused by his wife of forgetting their son’s birthday by fax. At the same gorgeous hotel, a young Yale grad wife Charlotte was bored to death because her photographer husband was too busy to be by her side. Although Bob is old enough to be a Charlotte’s father, they became soul mates. Both of them were embarrassed with Japanese cultural environment as total strangers. Also, they struggled to cope with their loneliness in spite of their marriage and to find the meaning of their life. They spent their leisure time to visit Karaoke studio, sushi and shabu-shabu restaurants, and even to a hospital where nobody understands English, but knew that there was no quick solution for their loneliness and uncertainty.

This movie is slow paced and doesn’t have clear story line. There is no car chase, explosion, or murder case. They just visit some places in Tokyo, drank at the hotel bar, and chatted on Bob’s bed sipping Sake, but never slept. Just as they are jaded tourists, this movie may be boring tourist pseudo-documentary for some audiences. It is probably surprising for them that Sophia won the Academy Award for Best Writing.

But I like this movie. Sophia vividly depicted the dry atmosphere of twenty first century Tokyo with simple camerawork: flamboyant westernized fashion among Japanese youngsters in Shinjuku and Shibuya, cutting edge posh hotel facilities, neon-fused downtown night, numerous people overblown on streets, noisy public announcement omnipresent in town and buildings, and so on. Of course, some description may be too stereotypical. She, however, succeeded to grasp the essence of Tokyo: the anonymity and anomie in a gigantic megalopolis and the boredom and anxiety prevailed in Japan who lost the status of an economic superpower in world economy.

Some customer reviews on Amazon.co.jp resented Sophia for making fun of Japanese accent in English which cannot tell the pronunciation “r” from “l”, and main actors for ridiculing Japanese sushi chef in English. But her portrayal is critical and precise enough for me, Japanese who lived in the town just five minutes by commuter train from Shinjuku, where the hotel is located, and now live in a foreign country alone (but, unfortunately or fortunately, I haven't yet met Charlotte-type woman here).

As for stereotypical matter, the Japanese TV Host in a blonde wig and garish suits (as “Matthew Minami”) who welcomed Bob in his program is a strongly stereotypical image of “Gaijin”, non-East Asian in Japanese. This program appeared in this movie was actually aired in Japan until recently. Matthew, a son of a Japanese cellist father and an English mother who is a daughter of an earl, is a noisy gay-type geek of Japanese pop culture. Apparently, his image is meant to parody a westerner.

As California roll, popular sushi among American, isn’t authentic at all for Japanese, any foreign cultural stuff are translated though importers’ frame of recognition and localized by and large. So, picking and accusing the "inaccuracy" in this movie from Japanese standpoint is silly.

It’s interesting that, while this movie apparently deals with incommensurability among different cultures, it consequently describes the universal characteristics of our modernized world: incommensurability among family and friends. This homeless mind in individualized urban life may be shared among many Japanese. We are embedded in complex social structure but feel some uncertainty and loneliness, and this is what “Lost in translation” is all about.