Links to stuff mentioned:
Related Playlists:
Movie Reviews playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x6N06WoIoV2fLb6xRYrepTk&si=EDHi2_Y41ACLnCmA
Movies that I Watched in 2026: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x4MSFWzU5IicG0H3orcJ1tV&si=7Xu-ASHaL36-7DER
Thoughts after Re-Watching: Movie Review Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x7FpJlwdur1iZDUZJh5xV-u&si=JztauLH1N-x1OaRq
Stuff Connect with Japan Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x6SEX_17-owvbxrDnJSfkMr&si=rGQCAMoWjVenVz_U
Japanese Movies Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x738yBNX9ZmrWVmm5Jp7m2d
Battle Royale Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x4s5kfMDRo0Zl_73YkOkpJN&si=Zc3ec5vVk2LEQdqN
7 comments:
No wonder why people in the West or U.S used the word "classes". Whenever I used the word myself I just meant to say "period" instead.
Maybe some more time to bond, although just like anybody in the world, the students will have to study in different schools eventually. Point still holds. But still, if I may have a guess then maybe it's more taboo because in the culture, schools are considered sacred or places you're supposed to take serious. I can't really make good guesses judging from my own culture given that there would be even more reasons to make such a movie taboo here.
Actually it makes sense, if even the Chinese or Koreans made a movie about students killing anybody at all, that would still be likely considered unacceptable. I just don't know how to rationalize this.
BR is a very typical Japanese movie. Even more so can be said about the sequel (which I liked but doubt most people share my preferences). It's hard to know if the movie has seeped into Japanese culture a lot or it's just being typical Japanese, but stuff similar to BR is just everywhere. The genre of "survival game in which only one person would be able to stay alive" must be a prevalent preference, a lot of Japanese entertainment works are about it.
This reminds me of how people on English internet always ask about "Why Japanese always make anime or stuff about school life" and then they proceed to conjure armchair sociological explanations. Well, perhaps those people have never managed to see many other grotesque yakuza manga the Japanese publishers have managed to churn out? There are way too obvious answers that make sense for the question, but the people always decide to ignore and choose to think it's because Japanese seem to consider school life the best time of their life and they're protected then blah blah.
Why did I forget to mention this? Talking about how prevalent the motif or elements of the movie is also to say... it's no longer horrifying as it should have been. Speaking for myself by the time I managed to watch it I have consumed way too much Japanese media to find anything thrilling but how exaggerated Japanese actings are. But maybe people these days may also find the movie to be plastic in terms of the props (the nastiest thing in the movie I can only say is the chopped head). It's a decent movie still.
Japanese being competitive is something I don't remember to have seen in this movie. The only genre of entertainment when they do that that I managed to see are anime or manga about sports. Other than that it's backstories about academic records at best.
There's a whole another topic to be said about competitiveness, but the term is just like Ayn Rand's notion of selfishness that no longer means anything. Given that a Soviet student just has to haul their arse prepping for maximum exam scores, just like anybody anywhere at all. Chopsticks lands just have the peculiarity of being more punishing of minor offenses.
I miss being told by my sister incessantly as to how Hunger Games adaptation lacked the abc xyz of the novel while watching. Had to watch while she wasn't around IIRC. Can only remember well the ending.
And why do I always forget the existence of the manga. Even though I first read some chapters of it when I first heard about BR on the internet, before I finally watched the movie. I was still a scaredy cat then thinking the movie could be too scary for me (and other internet limitations). My memory only suggests the manga is gory or violence to a degree. Don't know if it's interesting. It's amazing I managed to forget its existence up until this very moment because typically I should always grasp every single adaptation of the Japanese stuff I'm interested in.
...no I checked out the manga now and the art belongs to the category of grotesque manga I mentioned. I for sure won't read it. I don't think I can recommend anybody to read it.
And speaking about Japanese school life they seem to have such a great seishun. Imagine being born Japanese. They get to experience love and youth when they were still students. They get to experience love that doesn't feel dirty, transactional. They get to buy the best manga just by stepping to the stores in Akihabara or lining up in some Comiket, whereas the rest of world has to pay double tripple for the shipping fees alone (not sure if the fee here being lower than farther countries is something to cherish given that earnings are still low). If they studied hard they would get a great job, if I studied hard I would have to be absolutely picky to find an earning job at all. In school they get to kokuhaku, they get to have a date, they get to share bento, they get to invite each other home, they get to go to some places together, they get to be jealous about each other, they get to give each other 2nd shirt button, they get to pinch the other's nipples, they get to ride Shinkansen together, they get to study/do homework together, they get to go to school together, etc. My seishun on the other hand involving having to go to advanced math classes that I don't even understand in primary and being treated like an animal by my father, having to go to English classes for gifted students just to learn a language I don't even want to pursuit more than I need and get sidetracked from the main studies and any side coding stuff I could have learned for future compsci stuff (and still get treated like an animal), failing high school and get treated like an animal by teacher and classmates and family. Their entire seishun involving themselves. My entire seishun involving having to be lorded around by other people and having to engage with a foreign language/culture that loves to villify/look down on me and what I love. They get to dream, they get to sing, they get to draw, they get to write. I and my own countrymen keep having constant language existentialism, wondering if the language is just way too primitive to write anything decent at all (to the point plenty of them including myself sometimes prefer to read and write in the lingua franca despite not being good at it). They have friends and lovers. I have classmates, teachers and family who I always have to be on guard toward. They have people who will come over to collaborate. I have people who are more than willing to tear me apart. They get to absorb the best of foreign cultures, unlike some certain somebody only managed to absorb the worsts. News about them makes fascinations.
My impression of Japan, based on my years teaching English there, is that the young people actually have quite a hard time of it. High school is very grueling and competitive, and a lot of them get very stressed out. Of course, it's difficult to speak in generalizations. Some Japanese youngsters do drop out of the rat race early on and get involved in subcultures, but that's certainly not the majority of them.
That being said, university in Japan is considered to just be a 4 year party.
But at the end of university, they have to get a job. And the work culture in Japan is very gruelling.
I kind of figured (internet and the guy who invented blue LED did say as much that structural issues made Japanese university students not spend a lot of efforts, unlike their U.S peers who may eventually build startups as the latter believe their efforts will pay off).
Maybe Japan isn't rosy for people from other developed countries, but compared to things in mine I just find nothing that isn't an upgrade. At least if Japanese students studied hard they may get a chance to become a nuclear scientist, physicist, engineer, etc. Sure, that doesn't exclude the possibility of having a "bullshit job", but that seems to be much better than graduated in Vietnam and had to ride Grab bikes eventually, or studied some advanced physics program in the top university just to end up going home opening a "Bún bò" store. Part of the reason I aimed for Information Technology right when I was still in early middle school was also a pragmatic one: I couldn't imagine myself have the opportunity to do any possible job at all except for being a teacher which seemed nightmarish to me. Japan is among the last countries that would worry about their STEM degrees not having a place to use.
Most importantly, Japanese still got a chance to try their best, to hone their talents. If a Vietnamese student wants to improve their math skills then maybe their parents or teachers would at best give them some book that contains them a bunch of hard math exercises and just tell them to do without giving a single motivation or explanation or guidance of any sort (the book itself contains nothing but bare exercises and tiny answers at best). [People love to complain about lazy students but they never give any proper chance to study anything meaningfully at all. The one classmate who had to go through endless of gifted math classes back then even asked me why I even bothered to borrow a math book, and when I said I wanted to do extra/advanced maths he made it like that was silly like you was supposed to learn it to pass the exams.] Perhaps in Japan there's a similar lack of emphasis on understanding just like in my country (so talking about math materials may be a moot point). Still, I see the Japanese being able to learn many other different special skills, unlike my country where that would be difficult or impossible for so many reasons, just to learn things like drawing or coding. I lost count the number of times my sister told me to "focus on studies instead" even if that was during the summer (even if I should have studied what was I supposed to study?) and the techie stuff I was learning could very well benefit me greatly in finding some future jobs. Many Vietnamese parents sent their children to English classes or whatever extra classes for reasons they didn't even comprehend at all, but mostly I believe because they have zero trust on their own children (typical of the country being a low-trust society) - perhaps this is similar in Japan where the students still have to waste times on things they themselves don't even benefit from, they still seem to have more spare time to spend on honing their own talents, in Vietnam if you was good at coding you had to attend English classes to study the word 'cat' 500 times (parents don't want to see their kids having free time at all, and will find some ways to allocate that on some stuff). Apparent similarities don't explain why the Japanese managed to churn out endless number of talents like Makoto Shinkai or who else, or being able to read a great number of Western literature (even Vietnamese literature teachers may not ever read more than those they were required).
I don't know how competitive high schools in Japan are, but in my country students are being competitive by cheating during exams (I once read somebody's claim that cheating is mandatory, and they came from some gifted school in Hanoi). I don't know how rampant cheating is in Japan still.
For all the talks about competitive East Asian education systems, I think they are all "competitive" more because of parents and curricula pressures, more so than because they thought somebody else is going to take away their job. Many of the Asian students went to schools and university not because they figured out what they would do in the future even just as a mundane paying job, but because their parents commanded them to do that way before they knew what they were going to do. You can't have competition when the students don't even know the materials they are forced to learn, due to time constraints, and what they essentially do is just to try to have maximum scores as possible anyway so it's more like competing against oneself (it's not like they are trying to hone some portfolios that showcase their unique talents when apply to jobs, not a lot to compete for when standard Asian companies just check for scores and certs). It is as if the culture here is antithetical toward understanding, the teachers don't even bother to explain in a comprehensible way, and they prefer students to memorize 100 phrasal verbs that they would forget later rather than have them understand one by one so they will manage to use them all their lives.
All this is to say, I don't think they or any Asian country at all need to be competitive when what they all should do is to grasp the fundamental materials first, which is denied to them because the culture cares more about the results than the process, and many other stuff.
Maybe their work culture could be really bad, but I doubt that would be something I never managed to expect before. I went through a culture that constantly throws insults for every perceived shortcoming they saw, and incessant demands no matter how much efforts one put. I will never forget the constant sayings of how lazy I was and how I didn't do anything by my parents despite throwing away most of my youthful summers through the windows attending the whatever xyz classes, spending extra amount of time doing English during Tet (I lost count of how many Tets I couldn't rest literally, or rest at ease without being anxious about some future tests) while zero of my friends did but get ignored like nothing, opening the computer to relax is already enough to get labeled as lazy and doing nothing (I guess the expectation after you went to school, then extra classes until 7pm is that you was supposed to only do exercises without any entertainment and go to sleep).
I guess the Japanese work culture would just be typical and one would need to find ways to pretend to be busy and cheat around anyway. There was some Japanese article I once read that contained some SNS messages of some Vietnamese workers over there talking about how sly the Japanese were by shifting the works to the former. Some article about TSMC Arizona also mentioned how some Taiwanese only pretended to be hard working despite doing nothing. One can't be so naive to believe one's own hard works will pay off in a culture that will never stop demanding no matter how unrealistic it seems.
And I don't think day-to-day living in Japan could be any more horrid than over here. The Japanese language doesn't even have a lot of curse words or insulting pronouns. The Vietnamese language arguably has much more revolting and dehumanizing (to say the least) words than all of the racial slurs in English combined. The experience of having my friends who don't know what they are saying while calling me insults with confidence loudly right to the face is just cute. Maybe the Japanese are still crude, but I don't see them taking pride in their own crudeness on the extent Vietnamese do. (Would love to know if the endearing Asian practice of touching children's penis is still a thing in Japan).
Although all this is comparing Japan to my own culture, which is like comparing Sodom to Jerusalem - it's a far stretch, a low bar. Still, I love to think Japanese culture itself still manages to provide their own youth a lot of joys, instead of forcing their own people to reach out for foreign cultures to scrape whatever they can have their hands on. I love to think the crappy things of their own culture can be avoided and at the level they can handle. Love to think some of them were lucky enough to have something that is called a beautiful youth. Their own elevated fictions must have come from somewhere, all those charming elements can't be just conjured in the prison like Cervantes wrote his novel. If those didn't come out from interpersonal interactions, then I would love to know how come the Chinese still haven't managed to copy their fiction writing skills.
And not just the Japanese, I find the Chinese to have it much better than where I'm from in terms of youth as well.
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