I myself loved “LIT”, and consider it among the top 5 flicks I’ve seen in at least a decade, so I find it difficult to find fault with it on any level. And, truth be told, I’ve had my share of Japanese weirdness, though I’ve never been over there.
Before grad. school, I worked as a tech in a lab that was funded largely by a Japanese cosmetics/pharmaceutical company. As part of the deal, many of their people came stateside to get their feet wet in the basic research arena. Hence, I worked with lots of Japanese PhDs. As nearly the rest of the lab was Italian or British, that left me the sole American, so every working day was like being in another country, practically.
I noted right away that the caucasians hung out with the caucasians, and the Japanese with the Japanese. The Chinese hung with the Chinese. It was odd how this lunchtime self-segregation just seemed part of the social order. Brits, Italians, American over here, Japanese over there, and Chinese way over there.
Anyway, due to the nature of my project, I worked often closely with this guy Toshiyuki. I was in an interesting position because, despite being only a tech, I reported directly to the P.I., and had my own project. For whatever reason, Toshi seemed to think this was a big deal. So did all the other Japanese docs, but I had less to do with them, so the effect of this perception was more profound in my dealings with Toshi. I’d be sitting there, working away, and I’d get that feeling I was being watched. I’d turn around, and there would be Toshi, standing there for heaven knows how long just waiting for me to notice his presence, with a look on his face that I could only describe as of someone trying to pretend they are not having a limb amputated.
“Uh, hey, Toshi.”
“Eh, Loopy, may I ask you question.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. Thank you. May I ask…um, is difficult in English…”
“No problem, I’m good at sign language!”
Blank stare from Toshi.
“Uh, that’s just a joke…um, so what’s up?”
“I…would you?” gestures towards door to microscope room.
“You want me to go to the microscope room with you?”
“Yes! Yes! Thank you! If it’s not trouble! I wait…”
“No, of course it’s not trouble. No problem!”
“Oh, thank you! Thank you!”
We stand there for a moment. Toshi seems to be waiting for something.
“So, uh, do you want to go to the microscope room?”
“Mmmm, yes, yes, we go…” he gestures to me to move in that direction. He won’t lead me to the room; he’s waiting for me to go on my own initiative.
“OK, well, let’s see what you got.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you, is Olympus inverted microscope!”
Another brief pause.
“OK. You want me to go to the Olympus?”
“If it’s not trouble! Yes! Thank you!”
“OK, Olympus it is.”
Now, if one of the Italians in the lab had wanted me to check something out, the exchange would have gone something like this:
“Loopy!”
“Yo!”
“Come here to the scope, this is crazy this result!”
“Be right there!”
So, you’re talking about ten seconds to fulful a request vs., oh, maybe five minutes, minimum. And every time Toshi needed to ask me something, it was the same thing. It started to drive me nuts. After a while I wanted to grab the guy by the lapels and say “Toshi, I’m a nobody, OK? You can ask me stuff. I’m serious, ask me anything! Just slap me on the shoulder, call me a dirty S.O.B., and ask the question! Please? I’m begging you man, I can’t take this extreme politesse any longer!” The P.I., who was Italian, and really was a dirty S.O.B., seemed to regard working with the Japanes post-docs as a necessary evil to obtain all that good Japanese funding. You could tell they made his temples throb, and I think part of the way he dealt with it was to engage in sly games of irony and sarcasm, things that rocketed over the Japanese docs’ heads completely, but the Italians thought was hilarious. Frankly, it became a painful place to work after a while, what with the Japanese obsequiousness and formality, coupled with the Italian frustration and calculated cruelty. I only lasted a year. And it was all I could do not to fall in to negatively stereotyping the whole lot of them.
As for Lost in Translation, I bought it completely. Nothing about it seemed untrue. If Japan was bizarre, it was bizarre, end of story. But then there’s that little voice that says “now, Loopy, is the director trying to use the ‘otherness’ of the Japanese in a pejorative manner to facilitate development of rapport between protagonists, to accentuate their lonliness, which is what draws them together.”
My impression is, yes, that’s exactly what the director is doing. Some above call it symbolism, but I’m not so sure it’s some kind of symbolic caricature she’s going after. I think it’s just the genuine perception: Japan is a whacked-out land, filled with all manner of oddity, and if you’re lonely and troubled, it’s an especially depressing place to be. Perhaps there’s a bit of tragedy to be found as subtext, the fact that the protagonists never find understanding in their surroundings (and hence must find each other), maybe as I never really got into the heads of the people I worked with at that lab. But I’m not so sure. That ride Bill Murray takes to the airport feels like a bittersweet escape, a traverse from one kind of hell to another. But Tokyo is redeemed, not by itself, but by Scarlet, his only love in the place. Murray’s character will look back on Tokyo with yearning, because it drew him to her. If they’d been in New York, they’d never have met. In Tokyo, with Japan as the foil, they found a refuge in each other.