By Timothy Fong
I would prefer to resolve disagreements with mutually respectful dialogue. But when that fails, I’ll take fear.
On Thursday, the Colbert Report did a skit where the punchline was “I am willing to show the Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” The editor of the show’s Twitter account then tweeted the joke. In response, Suey Park, a writer and activist instigated the hashtag #CancelColbert. That same evening, the tag trended, and received wider media attention, with Park appearing on HuffingtonPost Live. Park’s follow up tweets attracted positive and negative attention, including the all too predictable misogynistic psychos. Some prominent Asian American bloggers and celebrities thought that Park was going too far.
I think her callout of Colbert was completely appropriate.
Takao dreams of being a shoemaker, a fantasy that distracts him from classroom lessons and the drudgery of his home life. When he encounters Yukari Yukino, a pretty twenty-something woman, in a gazebo in the garden on one rainy morning, Takao at first barely acknowledges her presence, focusing on his sketches while she, in this early morning hour, makes a meal of beer and chocolate. As they share the shelter of the gazebo on subsequent rainy mornings, they get to know each other, in a way, as Takao shares his dreams and Yukari shares an encouraging word, a sympathetic ear, and very little of her own life.
The first forty minutes of the film is dedicated to the exploration of this friendship, and it is beautiful and poetic and possibly inappropriate, and colored with so much sadness and bittersweetness that, like so much great Japanese art, it made me want to weep for my own loneliness and impermanence. There is a predominant Japanese aesthetic that finds beauty in the fleetingness of every moment: a black bird on a high-rise is bathed in red light for a moment, is seen as its natural self the next moment as the light blinks out, then takes flight, circles the building, and is not seen again. A raindrop clings to a green leaf, then trickles slowly down its length until it clings to the leaf-tip, growing in size until its weight pulls the leaf slightly toward the muddy earth before letting go and splashing into the puddle below, releasing the leaf that springs back to its former position to await the next drop. Director Makoto Shinkai takes the time to share these moments and a hundred others, leaving it to the viewer to interact with them however they will, and it’s a beautiful experience.
At forty-six minutes in duration, it is about as long as a one-hour television episode, minus commercials, and is structured very much like one, except that it is a self-contained story, and those first forty minutes are the stuff of halls of fame, so wonderfully are they sequenced and framed. But those last six minutes are a baffling continuation of another Japanese dramatic tradition: my people (I’m half Japanese) have an embarrassing flair for melodrama, at least in television and cinema. Japan’s is such a reserved society that perhaps it needs exaggerated, comical catharsis in its popular media just to keep itself functioning normally, the way teenaged boys need to joke about sex in order to have any conversation at all about it.
