To Live and Die In a Tokyo Office

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 23
Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru

Fiftyish Tokyo bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) lives like a man already dead. Widowed and bored, he repeats the same meaningless tasks so frequently, he no longer remembers names and faces. His grown son and daughter-in-law live with him, but largely ignore him. Then one day a routine doctor’s visit turns sour when he gets the news: he has a stomach ulcer. Except it’s an open secret, “ulcer” is a euphemism for cancer. He’s dying.

Writer-director Akira Kurosawa is famous for making black-and-white samurai epics, and indeed, this is a rare Kurosawa film not featuring legendary samurai actor Toshiro Mifune. Its mid-century setting, as Japan makes the transition to industrial modernism, reflects a nation without much sense of identity. But by demonstrating a grey-faced bureaucrat’s struggle to discover himself, it gives Japan a hero of liberty and initiative. Kanji isn’t yoked to Japan’s past, Kurosawa says, so neither are you.

The story involves a neighborhood association’s attempts to turn a marshy, mosquito-infested vacant lot into a playground. Kanji Watanabe is just one among dozens of bureaucrats who bounce the association from office to office: parks, public health, land use, the fire department. Nobody wants to take responsibility for making a change. But Kanji, suddenly conscious of his own mortality, and aware how his ex-assistant has become more vibrant doing work she loves, finally steps up.

Stomach cancer forces Kanji to make choices. Formerly, he assumed he had decades to improve his job, correct his self-centered children, and generally do something worthwhile. Now he has under a year. He pursues his ex-assistant, who assumes he has untoward romantic interests, but when pushed, he only wants to understand why she seems so much happier. She reveals her secret; he is moved; he greets mortality as the crowd sings “Happy Birthday To You.”

Remarkably for a big-screen movie, the protagonist dies before the halfway mark. The entire back half of the film (this was before three-act structures dominated filmmaking) deals with Kanji’s co-workers, half-drunk at his memorial dinner, gradually realizing how he turned his life around during his final months. Told through flashback and dialog, their dawning awareness speaks volumes in a country that, to this day, still prizes collective action, and sees change as progressive, not revolutionary.

Ikiru: original theatrical poster. Click to enlarge

This movie bears consideration in light of America’s recent romance with zombies. It’s easy to forget, following franchises like The Walking Dead and World War Z, that in the original myth, zombies weren’t ravening murderers. Zombies repeated their living roles, like job or family life, infinitely, mindlessly. The fear of zombies wasn’t getting eaten, it was getting trapped in a meaningless life without even being aware. Kanji is a zombie. But he’s given another chance.

Even Kanji Watanabe’s name reveals his essential meaninglessness. His personal name, Kanji, also signifies the Japanese writing system: this man spends his life signing papers. “Watanabe” is one of Japan’s most common surnames. Japanese culture conditions citizens to work toward the common good, and Kanji Watanabe, the bureaucrat, is the apotheosis of this. Except that, by denying himself, he’s not helping anybody else, either. Living without meaning has left him, and his job, without direction.

Released just months after America’s occupation of Japan ended, this movie represents a conscious attempt to redirect Japanese culture. Though Japan’s feudal aristocracy was formally abolished in 1869, the dispossessed lords shifted focus, became capitalists, and continued dominating the country. People like Kanji have always done the state’s grunt work. By suggesting that an ordinary sararīman (a slur for suit-wearing white-collar worker) could change his community, Kurosawa urged other Japanese wage workers to actually live.

Kurosawa was famous for introducing Western literature and art into Japanese film. Before this film, he adapted Dostoevsky’s The Idiot; five years after, he turned Shakespeare’s Macbeth into The Throne of Blood. This film borrows heavily from Leo Tolstoy, particularly The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kingdom of God is Within You. This cross-cultural borrowing probably explains Kurosawa’s popularity in America and Europe. Though slow-moving by Hollywood standards, Ikiru is definitely a multicultural undertaking.

This movie requires a patient audience. It lacks Kurosawa’s signature action sequences, has almost no background music, and is driven by dialog. Viewers accustomed to movies telling them how to feel may find this disorienting. But viewers willing to embrace Kurosawa’s cerebral storytelling will find a life-affirming message carried by a character we genuinely root for. Even if we’re not Japanese, we all risk becoming Kanji Watanabe. And we all have the choice to live.

Let's Just Accept It: We're Gunfire Nation

First Baptist Church, Sutherland Springs, Texas

Too soon. Old news. Repeat. We’ve heard this cycle before. After one nut riddled a Connecticut elementary school with semi-automatic weapons fire; after a distraught, drunken gambler tallied over 600 casualties at a Las Vegas country music concert; now we’ll probably hear it again following the Baptist church shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Clearly we Americans have no intention of doing anything about this. When do we admit: this is apparently just who we are?

If we use the DoJ’s favored definition of a “mass shooting,” meaning a total dead or injured of four or more (not counting the shooter), then by one count, Sutherland Springs was the 377th mass shooting in America in 2017 alone—a year with nearly two full months remaining. It was the thirty-eighth mass shooting since Las Vegas, over one per day. The previous day saw four mass shootings, for one dead and twelve injured.

According to published FBI statistics, the incidence of mass shootings continues to rise, while almost every other category of violent crime has enjoyed (if that’s the word) steady decline since 1991. You’re safer from murder, rape, armed robbery, arson, and aggravated assault, than at any time since before current traditional-age college students were born. But mass shootings have become so common, they don’t even make national news until the death toll climbs into double digits.

Frustratingly, we know reams of information about these events. The shooters are mostly white, almost entirely male, and generally suicidal. Target choices generally fall into two categories: shooters who attack their own families, and shooters who attack public places. Schools, shopping malls, cinemas, concerts, and evangelical churches make tempting targets because they involve large numbers of people packed into confined spaces with limited access to exits… and the shooters don’t much care who they hit.

We accept the necessity to hang “no guns” signs on schools, churches, and other gathering places, because some people consider it their God-given right to take guns anywhere they aren’t specifically forbidden. Starbucks? Really? This despite the demonstrable fact that guns make hostile situations worse, not better. I’ve submitted to pat-downs and bag searches going into concerts and festivals, because I know I’m not packing iron, but security cannot tell in advance who might be.

The now-iconic file photo of concert-goers escaping carnage in Las Vegas, Nevada

One man attempted a shoe bomb, and now we must strip to our socks to get on a plane. One jackass attempted an underwear bomb, and now we must permit TSA agents making minimum wage to hit second base. Many American schools and shopping malls have metal detectors and a permanent police presence like a permanently occupied Belfast housing estate. Yet 2017 has been among America’s worst mass-shooting years ever, and nobody asks about guns.

(I have friends who, whenever violence like this happens, inevitably note that these aren’t the worst shootings in American history; the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee were far worse. And they’re not wrong. Those historic catastrophes took considerably more lives, and are regarded now with shame. But those mass murders were American troops acting in unison. That’s like saying Chancellorsville was worse than a modern urban gang skirmish: they’re not the same thing.)

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t support blanket gun bans. Even if I considered that a good idea, it’s deeply impractical, because there are currently more firearms than adult citizens in America—and we don’t know where they all are. A well-maintained gun can last decades; American soldiers in Afghanistan recovered working Enfield rifles from the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Gun roundups would require invasive police actions that even the staunchest “Blue Lives Matter” types would despise.

But we’re not discussing every gun, or every gun owner. We have the technology and manpower to spot, and investigate, most people stockpiling weapons, without violating the Constitution. The Aurora, Colorado, cinema shooter was reported to law enforcement, who did nothing. That story repeats itself. Despite “Broken Windows” promises and street-level crackdowns, the police, a primarily bureaucratic institution, will do little until blood spills. Any woman who’s ever filed a stalking report already knows that.

Yes, we have the technology to fix the problem. But we don’t have the will. We’ve accepted a massive proliferation of weapons of war as the apex of American freedom, more important that having faith that we won’t die because we attended a concert. That’s the face we present to the world, and we need to be brave enough to stop lying about it. America has become Gunfire Nation. And apparently we’re okay with that.

Follow-up to this essay: Gunfire Nation, Part II

How To See the Truth in a World Gone Blind

Isaac Lidsky, Eyes Wide Open: Overcoming Obstacles and Recognizing Opportunities in a World That Can't See Clearly

Isaac Lidsky first hit the national stage as a child actor. One of the inaugural cast from Saved By the Bell: the New Class, he had high expectations… which were largely dashed when NBC discovered they couldn’t cast new actors in old roles. He struggled to find his feet, and had nearly done so, when life dealt him a second blow: a diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa. He was doomed to spend his life going blind.

Lidsky’s first book is cross-marketed in health, business, and self-help sections, none of which encompasses the author’s level of ambition. Lidsky mixes scholarship, autobiography, and philosophy in a book that deals deeply with what it means to see the world. Our eyes only provide raw data; if we want to see, we see with our minds. Unfortunately, at times, Lidsky also proves the adage that there’s none so blind as one who will not see.

Network interference, and his already failing eyesight, derailed Lidsky’s acting career at an age when other boys still wonder what they want to be when they grow up. But his parents leveraged his television prominence to start a charity advancing retinitis pigmentosa research (there’s still no treatment or cure.) At the same time, Lidsky graduated Harvard Law School, clerked for a Supreme Court Justice, and launched a Manhattanite career younger than I even started college.

At this stage, and throughout this book, Lidsky mixes memoir, and lessons learned from both success and failure, with hard scholarship. His years as a law clerk trained him well in methods of research and writing: this book reads like a more seasoned author’s product, without the digressions and cow paths most business professionals’ first books face. Lidsky lets facts drive his argument, and when he interjects personal philosophy, he knows the purpose it serves.

Except… this taut writing lets Lidsky direct our attention, so it’s tough to notice what he leaves out. Just one example: In one chapter, Lidsky’s TV career is puttering out. His character proves less popular than Screech, and with network hopes pinned on this tentpole franchise, they need numbers. Lidsky finds his Hollywood dream turning into a real disappointment. Then—shazam, he’s nineteen, attending Harvard Law, determined to live on his own. What happened between?

Isaac Lidsky

This diversion happens so fast, I just assumed he was telling his story non-linearly for improved effect. So I forgot it. Only when I consulted my notes did I realize he just basically dropped the thread. Maybe he left it because that story basically fizzled, and there’s nothing left to describe. Or maybe he’s whitewashing something truly horrific. I have no idea, because he doesn’t tell us. It’s tough to evaluate what never gets said.

Please don’t mistake me. Lidsky uses sight and blindness as remarkable metaphors for personal and professional triumph. He tells stories, for instance, about trying to negotiate Cambridge streets with failing eyes, and later, D.C. streets completely blind. This provides insights into screening meaningless data from real content that provides him literal and figurative direction. His transition from normal, if famous, teenager, to ambitious, self-directed adult, provides lessons many adults I know could stand to learn.

Yet Lidsky apparently thinks, as many self-help memoirists do, that his successes are portable; to achieve Lidsky-like success, simply employ Lidsky’s checklist of lessons. He apparently overlooks ways he started from a position of advantage. Consider his acting career, which commenced when his parents drove him to auditions for local TV commercials. Later, they flew him cross-country, on their own nickel, to audition for NBC. He was coached to consider his own success basically inevitable.

Years later, burned out on lawyering at an age when peers were paying down student loans, Lidsky took a career aptitude survey and determined his correct career was, ahem, CEO. Nice work if you can get it… which he did. Because a well-heeled friend purchased him a foundering Florida tile company. This doesn’t discredit Lidsky’s accomplishments: he turned a building subcontractor around during the housing downturn. But maybe I could, too, if somebody fronted me the money.

I found plenty to like in this book. Lidsky’s principles of controlling what we see by yoking our thoughts, have significant merit. But they apply to him too: it really feels like he doesn’t grasp how others ensured he didn’t start from zero. Like other self-help memoirs I’ve reviewed, this is a case of “take what you need and leave the rest.” Because you aren’t Isaac Lidsky, sadly, and Isaac Lidsky isn’t you.

How Often Should You (Yes You) Shower?

The tease on The Atlantic’s Facebook page was simultaneously tempting and disgusting: “What Happens When You Quit Showering?” It’s just one more that’s trickled out through the years, including Chip Bergh, CEO of Levi Strauss & Company, telling people never to wash their jeans, or Buzzfeed citing that beloved go-to, “science,” to tell Americans we shower too often. A real cottage industry has developed recently selling the idea that we just don’t need to bathe frequently.

I understand the mindset behind this thinking. Where Americans once bathed about weekly, unless they carried an absolute reek, major corporate products like Ivory soap and Listerine mouthwash have convinced us our bodies are petri dishes of disgusting microorganisms, and we need to confront BO and “halitosis” daily, if not more. Nor is it just Americans. Per The Atlantic again, the global average includes a shower or bath daily, and a shampoo every other day.

Besides the health concerns of ordinary people washing necessary, symbiotic organisms off their bodies, this anti-bathing trend also reflects a pushback against advertisers who profit from our insecurities. I certainly don’t mind seeing corporate profiteers getting a firm public comeuppance for peddling self-loathing to the public. But I spot an unexamined class-based assumption in these articles. They implicitly believe typical Americans don’t get dirty and sweaty enough to even require that much bathing and laundry.

Since I reluctantly accepted my move down society’s economic ladder, and got a blue-collar job, I’ve come to understand that sweat and dirt delineate American social class. When I worked in the factory, indoor temperature often approached eighty degrees Fahrenheit even in the dead of winter; in summer, temperatures nearing a hundred degrees weren’t uncommon. And that’s nothing beside conditions working construction, where we’re expected to work in blazing summer sun and Arctic winter chill.

If I don’t shower daily, I smell like somebody left bologna on the kitchen counter for about a week. Sweat pours off me in quantities you’d not believe without seeing it. Many joggers, cyclists, or  other high-impact aerobic workout fanatics think they sweat; I certainly did when I worked white-collar and biked regularly. But I didn’t discover what sweat meant until it bucketed off me for eight hours or longer like wringing a kitchen sponge.

Showering isn’t optional for people who work like that. Since humans expel nearly a third of our bodily waste through our skin, the exceptionally moist environment of a sweaty construction worker creates a thriving breeding ground for microorganisms that, yes, produce an odor. Many of these microbes are necessary for human health… in limited quantities. But my sweat-soaked body creates conditions where my otherwise healthful, necessary microbiome makes me stinky, and could unbalance my health.

And that’s saying nothing about other class markers. I remember watching Star Trek years ago; Dr. Crusher complained to some hirsute crewmates that, since the invention of the razor, having facial hair was an affectation. I wondered then why the hair growing naturally from men’s faces was affected, while barbering it daily was not. Now I realize something deeper: facial hair keeps hostile conditions, like wind and precipitation, off my skin. Shaving jeopardizes my safety.

Considering that Levi Strauss invented his heavyweight dungarees specifically to withstand the punishment gold miners put their britches through, Chip Bergh’s whine that washing your jeans seems remarkably obtuse. My jeans get battered, torn, grease-stained, and worse, daily. If, atop that, I had to slip them on without thoroughly washing my microbiome off (remember what we said about bodily waste above), that would be like wearing the same tattered, shit-stained BVDs, every day, for years.

So when The Atlantic and Buzzfeed insist I should stop showering, they clearly think people like me don’t read their content. They occupy a rarefied world where pundits in suits scold one another about internalizing commercial hype and selling their self-esteem to our corporate overlords. If they realize people like me exist, they certainly don’t give us further thought. They accept the hierarchy, where building structures and making stuff is too menial for their audience.

Maybe bankers and attorneys could afford showering every two or three days. Many probably should. But audiences are diverse, and many haven’t achieved the lofty standards high-gloss magazines promised us in college. These one-size-fits-all hygiene tips innately assume wealth, and indoor work, are normal. And they exclude the people who build their offices, maintain their server farms, and cook their cafeteria dinners. People like, well, me. Do I need to explain why that’s a problem?

If Time Doesn't Exist, Why Am I Always Late For Dinner?

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 83
James Gleick, Time Travel: a History

When H.G. Wells first floated the idea of a time machine (a term he invented) in 1895, it received fierce opposition from philosophers, scientists, and book critics. For an idea so well-fixed in popular consciousness that TV networks use it for everything from high drama to low comedy, the idea of critics rejecting time travel seems weird today. Yet highbrow scholars vehemently refused the idea, even as the novel flew off British bookstore shelves.

With this title, you’d possibly expect science historian James Gleick to write about time travel in popular culture. I certainly did. Instead, we have a gripping overview of how the human relationship with time has evolved across the last 120 or so years. Theologians, physicists, novelists, and ordinary people have struggled to understand what time means, and come to grips with whether it’s malleable. We accept the idea that time is travelable now… sort of.

Our metaphors for understanding time, the most popular being time as river or arrow, always disintegrate when pushed. If time flows like water, why can we not watch from the shore? Why does time’s arrow never hit its target? Despite our best efforts, the ways we understand time always imply its absence. Given the implications of time as reversible and optional, the idea of time travel isn’t illogical; one wonders why nobody invented it sooner.

Problems with understanding time are hardly new. Gleick quotes sources as venerable as Saint Augustine insisting they understood time’s existence, but couldn’t conceive a working definition. Wells quoted a then-developing hypothesis that time (“duration”) was the fourth dimension of space, an idea now entrenched in pop-cultural philosophy; but that idea doesn’t withstand scrutiny. We experience time, but unlike space, cannot rearrange it. We cannot escape time, or resequence time as we reorganize our living rooms.

Philosophers have struggled to define time, too. Besides Plato and Augustine, Gleick quotes extensively from Henri Bergson, whose path-breaking postulations on time… um… I didn’t quite follow. What matters, though, is that Bergson’s ideas gained critical acclaim and sparked new ideas in fellow philosophers between world wars, then fell on disfavor almost overnight, because they proved less than useful. This theme, of the gap between structural soundness and actual utility, recurs consistently throughout Gleick’s book.

James Gleick

Religion, philosophy’s close cousin, has a difficult history with time. God or the gods, we’re assured, are eternal—that is, they exist entirely outside time. They aren’t forever, since time implies change and, frequently, decay; rather, God stands outside time looking in. How, though, can a personal and loving God, invested in our ever-changing lives, stand outside change? Theologians have devised several work-arounds, but have most often simply ignored the question. Because time always creates paradoxes.

Most importantly, time has proven fraught for science. Newtonian physics absolutely relies upon time to measure motion… but it uses motion to measure time. The circular nature deprives science of necessary constants. Quantum physics finesses this by denying time’s objective existence. Yet why has time proven remarkably resilient? A growing minority of physicists are starting to rebel, insisting time exists, and their reasoning is so fascinating, I’ll let Gleick have the satisfaction of telling you.

So basically, time remains so close at hand that we cannot understand it objectively. We really only consider its weight when someone suggests escaping its pull. Gleick uses pop culture time travel, a distinctly Twentieth Century phenomenon, to understand the larger zeitgeist about time. For him, Doctor Who and Doc Brown aren’t interesting in themselves; he considers these a bellwether for others’ workaday understanding of time. We refine our understanding, by moving outside the question.

Gleick spends only two chapters (and the odd throwaway digression) on time travel fiction. The stories he explores favor philosophical concepts. Though he makes multiple passing allusions to Doctor Who, the only episode he explores deeply is “Blink,” the story that gave us the catchphrase “Wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey,” to explain time’s behavior when viewed from outside. This encapsulates the idea that somehow, time exists, without being constant or reliable. That’s the stage of understanding we’ve achieved.

Time travel arose, essentially, when Western philosophy grew disillusioned with constants. If nothing is forever, then “forever” doesn’t exist. We step outside time, looking for realities we prefer: some cling to disappearing pasts, while others attempt to hasten longed-for futures. Time travel becomes one more among the metaphors which describe truths we glimpse, but cannot explain. James Gleick does a remarkable job explaining this evolution. Something like time exists; now we have to travel it.