Opinion

Lost in translation

By Roger Pulvers

Director Sofia Coppola's excellent and subtle film, "Lost in Translation," presents two strangers, both American, who meet in Tokyo. The older man has seen love slip between his fingers; the younger woman has yet to feel its grasp. "Lost in Translation," which opens in Japan this spring, is set against the backdrop of contemporary Japan.

Since the middle of the 19th century, many Western authors, dramatists and, subsequently, film makers have chosen Japan as an exotic setting for the drama of drifting, confused or lost Occidentals. Invariably the Japanese are depicted as quirky, quaint and inscrutable. In this sense, "Lost in Translation" is no exception.

There have been four eras of Japanese Inscrutability in the West, and the first dates back to the Meiji period when Americans and Europeans delighted in every difference in custom and mores that they encountered. Difference itself was taken as eccentricity; each little bow was a cause for joy. Westerners took to the trappings of humility that they found in Japan. It all made up the perfect setting for real people with real emotions - mainly the Americans, British and French - to search for their temporarily lost soul.

The second era came when these quaint and humble little Japanese proved equal to the West at industrializing and militarizing their society. Westerners living and traveling in Japan began to see the Japanese as a threat. The ones who were well-disposed to the Japanese bemoaned the "loss" of the old Japan. Why did the Japanese stray, they lamented, from their exquisite traditions? The representatives of European and American civilization who would allow no competition from members outside the White Man's Club turned all nasty and belligerent toward their former self-effacing friends. In this era Japanese were seen as drones: robotic conformists, marching wind-up toys headed in OUR DIRECTION.

The third era of the stereotyped Japanese began in the late 1980s, when Japanese people were called economic animals, depicted as industrial samurai once again intent on beating the West at its own game. Again Western novels were written with Occidentals as heroes and heroines interacting with cardboard cutouts of Japanese: drab men in grey woolen suits, demure women in deaf suburbs. The Japanese were never portrayed as whole people. They were there solely to serve the character development of the Occidental.

"Lost in Translation" is a beautifully crafted drama about two Americans in need of love. But it has only managed to portray Japan in a multitude of cliched settings, from the karaoke box to the raunchy club; the golf course below Mt. Fuji to the shinkansen ride to Kyoto. There is even a genuinely inscrutable Shinto wedding ceremony at a Buddhist temple (Nanzenji). The Japanese people in these settings are no more than amusing caricatures.

Even after 150 years of wandering we are still lost in Japan. We are standing in this country of people who are, deep down, in every way like us. They share our every feeling, as we do theirs. And we still seem to see their role in life as a foil for our own angst.

Will we, I wonder, ever find each other?

Shukan ST: Jan. 23, 2004

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