Japandamonium!!!

Today's a mixed bag; there hasn't been as much of it as I'd thought there would be and It's been mostly half-hearted chore work. I stayed up a bit later than I wanted last night (as in several hours) reading through Howl's Moving Castle, which I'm liking more as I go along and which I'll send home to Ellie when I'm done with it. It's by one of our favorite YA-Fantasy authors and was the inspiration for the new Miyazaki film of the same name, which someone should see and tell me how it is. "But you're in Japan," you say. "Can't you just see it yourself?" Au contraire. True, I'm in Japan: here's where the anime comes from, here's where the Kurosawa films come from, here's where a bevy of good martial arts and action movies come from, my favorite TV show Abarenbo Shogun, a whole world of manga, haiku, art films. But I can't see any of them. I'm in Japan, where everything's in JAPANESE. It's one of those forehead-slapping moments of realization, something that should have been blindingly obvious all along but only dawned on you in a video store two nights ago as you considered renting "Ran." On the same token, I'm denied access to French or Spanish or Chinese films too: they're subtitled alright, but not in friendly friendly English. As Pepe Le Peu would say, "Le sigh!"

But a trip to the video store means that I must have got my gaijin card, my alien registration card, and now the world of points-cards and store accounts is at my greedy fingertips. The first day I got my gaijin card I raced right to the Tsutaya, the rental place a few blocks away, and walked out the proud leasor of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Haven't seen it in years, and it was hysterical. Made all the funnier by a surprising cultural relevance: "Bill," says Keanu, "Strange things are afoot at the Circle K." Although they apparently have them in San Demas, CA, the Circle K convienience store is a stranger to the East Coast ... but not to Japan! Here it's one of the most common conbini chains, the sight of many a microwave gyoza or late-night beer run and the hang-out for neighborhood highschoolers ditching cerfew. An interesting picture, Bill & Ted, very American in ways that must not be totally obvious to Japanese viewers -- things like the California surfer-dude accents probably don't call up any immediate connotative markers like they do for us, and even the film's marked vocabulary probably doesn't transfer: they didn't seem to have any way to consistantly subtitle any of the key phrases in the movie: "excellent," "dude," or "party on!" But on top of all the cultural baloney, it was also just a great movie to watch. Its stupidity is almost sheer genius, especially the parts with Napoleon eating the little kid's ice cream and cheating at bowling.

My more recent rental experience was not as satisfactory: after being assured that both the Road to Perdition and 12 Monkeys (minkeys?) were both going to be in English I ended up with a 50-50 split ... or maybe a 60-40 split, since the previews on the Road to Perdition tape were in English, even though the movie wasn't. Decievers!

But the movie-watching highlight of my life in Japan came earlier this week with two girls in Matsuyama, my friend Miyuki and her friend Ayako. You want internationalization? Two words: Mary Poppins. They made dinner and we rented Mary Poppins. We're coasting along watching it, sitting on the floor in Miyuki's sparse apartment and eating a full course of tofuey misoey soup, rice, a weird chicken-wings-and-veggies-cooked-in-ketchup kind of dish and a yummy canned fruit served in juice, soda, and italian ice desserty dish, and none of us are really too into the movie. On the one hand it was at least a break from belabored quasi-lingual conversation we'd been working at all night, which itself is fun and real but exhausting for everyone. On the other hand it's really not a very exciting movie in a lot of ways, and the otherwise engaging quaintness and subtlety of the movie's victoriana worldview seems to be lost on both Miyuki and Ayako; and you can't even commisserate about Dick van Dyke's abominable cockney accent, it's just lost on them. So we're all just barely staying with it, and then they jump into the chalk. And it's lovely. Once Dick van Dyke shuts up and just starts dancing with those Penguins, the whole movie's suddenly exciting again. And then the magic happens, or should I say, the magic word: IIIIIIIIIIIT'S......

Supercalifrajelisticexpialedocious!
Even though the sound it makes it something quite atrocious!
If you say it loud enough you'll always sound precocious:
Supercalifrajelisticexpialedocious!

Super california expedition syrup lolly osis? Suupa colly fraggle whistle jingle halitosis? Supra curly frashelipstick ....? It was hysterical. After about fifteen minutes and several rounds of back and forth transliteration, me writing it in English and them writing in Katakana and us comparing, and rewinding and pausing it so we could see the katakana subtitle, and lots of singing and shouting and laughing so hard we were all almost shooting fruit juice out of our noses, Ayako could get it if she squeezed her eyes shut and balled her hands into fists and sang it at lightning speed at the top of her lungs, and Miyuki was completely hopeless: "santa claus's frijjle lissik...." I told them I remember having the same hysterical conversation with my sister every week or so for maybe the three years before I turned 7. I also told them it was one of the most famous songs in America, which is probably true, and that any time they met an American or almost any other English speaking native, they could always make them laugh by singing it, which is definately true. Who would have thought? Internationalization in a word: "ssssssupercalifrajelisticexpialedocious!" Dumm diddle iddle iddle dum diddle ay!