The Asahi Shimbun – May 14, 2016 – The public housing complex, or “danchi” as it is known in the local lingo, was once an emblem of upward social mobility during the postwar boom era. More than just multifamily dwellings, they functioned as self-contained communities, with their own supermarkets, restaurants, barbers and other amenities.
These robust concrete structures are still fixtures of urban scenery, although they have long since lost their luster. Storefronts are often permanently shuttered, and even extensive renovations to the units fail to entice enough new residents. Many local governments would prefer to just tear the aging buildings down.
I live upriver from one famous exception, the Icho (ginko tree) Danchi in Yokohama’s Izumi Ward. This expansive estate has staved off the inevitable by welcoming immigrant families from Southeast Asia and South America. Ethnic food stores sit next to long-established shops run by elderly Japanese proprietors. To an outsider like myself, it looks almost utopian.
Located on a spacious plot of land with tree-lined paths and open spaces, Icho Danchi provides an unexpectedly pleasant contrast with other residential neighborhoods nearby, where farmland and unprotected woodlands are being consumed by avaricious development to build identikit houses and condominiums, which are inevitably jammed up against each other like rush hour commuters.
Danchi have featured in Japanese cinema in various guises ever since they began being built in the 1950s.
Yuzo Kawashima’s meticulously crafted classic “Elegant Beast” (1962) details a scheming family’s downfall within the claustrophobic confines of their hard-won apartment, shown in long shots to be located in the middle of a desolate semi-industrial wasteland.
In Yoshitaro Nomura’s lurid demon seed thriller “The Shadow Within” (1970), Go Kato’s salaryman rejects his socially ambitious wife, Mayumi Ogawa, and her gossiping friends in their stylish new home to indulge in a torrid affair with widow Shima Iwashita in her backwater hovel.
Modern films generally tend to be devoid of that kind of scathing satire and social commentary and as the popularity of housing complexes has waned their symbolic usage has been replaced with alternating feelings of nostalgia and dread toward them.
Yoshihiro Nakamura’s offbeat coming-of-age tale “See You Tomorrow, Everyone” (2013) featured Gaku Hamada as a prisoner of his own making, choosing to never leave the comfort of the womblike estate where he grew up.
Released in the same year, Hideo Nakata’s fitfully effective horror “The Complex” was more of an acting workshop for its idol star and consequently failed to reach the unsettling heights of the director’s single mother-punishing “Dark Water” (2002), which memorably capitalized on the sinister potential of antiquated danchi architecture.
One relatively contemporary movie that has more in common with the deep bite of “Elegant Beast” is Toshiaki Toyoda’s “Hanging Garden” (1997). It paints a portrait of another dysfunctional family, whose problems originate in mutual deception and emotional distance rather than money. Kyoko Koizumi stars as the mother who, true to the title, finds herself suspended in the air in her anxiety-ridden highrise apartment.
Junji Sakamoto’s latest film “The Projects” falls on the softer side of the danchi movie spectrum, but its understated absurdity and surreality betrays expectations in a delightfully weird way, while the more serious elements are handled with poignancy rather than sentimentality.
It also happens to be far and away the best film by Sakamoto since his rural kabuki-themed farce “Someday” (2011), and features some of its distinguished veteran stars: Ittoku Kishibe, Michiyo Okusu and Renji Ishibashi.
Sakamoto’s most noteworthy screen reunion however is with Naomi Fujiyama, a prolific and revered comedic actress in theater and television with few film credits to her name.
Her best known and most celebrated role was as the protagonist of Sakamoto’s unusual road movie “Face” (2000), one of his most accomplished works, which swept domestic film awards and was invited to numerous festivals overseas.
Tracing the travails of a downtrodden shut-in who sheds her sheltered life and psychological shell after inadvertently murdering her sister, it was anchored by a commanding lead performance from Fujiyama, who brought pathos and full-bodied humor to what could have been an unsympathetic character.
“Face” also benefited from its superb never-a-dull-moment script, co-written by Sakamoto and Isamu Uno, who also had a hand in Masashi Yamamoto’s amazingly ambitious Hong Kong-Osaka oddity “What’s Up Connection” (1990) and Sogo Ishii’s dissonant urban nightmare “Tokyo Blood” (1993).
Sakamoto wrote the screenplay for “The Projects” himself as a “love letter” to Fujiyama, who broke her self-imposed exile from film acting to team-up again with her fellow Osaka native.
Although the English title (the Japanese is simply “Danchi”) may conjure images of abject poverty and inner-city gang warfare, Sakamoto’s original concept actually blends melancholy slice-of-life family drama with subtly delivered conversational comedy, as well as the oddball influence of favorite sci-fi authors Shinichi Hoshi and Arthur C. Clarke as its secret ingredient.
The deadpan, arrhythmical comic timing of some scenes may remind some viewers of the style of the late filmmaker Yoshimitsu Morita, namely the similarly housing complex-set “The Family Game” and its satirically skewed take on everyday reality.
Although “Face” was an episodic road movie and “The Projects” largely unfolds in a fixed location, due to Fujiyama’s busy performance schedule, they both share the underlying theme of life being an ordeal that must be endured to savor its joys.
In the case of the latter film, Hinako (Fujiyama) and her husband, Seiji (Kishibe), are still coming to terms with the loss of the son. The aging couple moved to a time-worn complex in Osaka six months earlier after closing their Chinese medicine business, but handsome young client Shinjo (Takumi Saitoh), who constantly spouts malapropisms, tracks them down to acquire his regular prescription.
While Hinako works part time at a local supermarket, Seiji only leaves their apartment to walk in the forest behind the complex, which leads a gaggle of housewives to wonder if Hinako has murdered Seiji.
They try to alert the philandering tenants association leader Gyotoku (Ishibashi), whose waste separation-supervising wife, Kimiko (Okusu), is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He is running for re-election against Seiji and a roughneck named Yoshizumi (Takayuki Takuma), who violently disciplines his spacey son (Hiroaki Ogasawara).
The election’s outcome, and Seiji’s discovery of how he is perceived by the other residents, send him into a permanent sulk in the storage cabinet under the kitchen floor. His subsequent absence inevitably adds further fuel to the housewives’ over-active imaginations.
Then Shinjo returns to request a massive quantity of Seiji’s herbal remedy for his “countrymen”…
If you’re familiar with Japanese cinema’s tendency to drearily extol the mundanity of day-to-day life, you might find the first act hard going, and it does take a while to get the hang of its peculiar but addictive comedic styling. Nevertheless, skeptics are strongly advised not to pull the ripcord too soon.
Propelled by the consummate versatility of Fujiyama and Kishibe, what starts out as a downbeat kitchen sink study of an emotionally devastated husband and wife gradually morphs into an ensemble comedy of misunderstandings, which then reveals itself to be a whimsical fantasy that ends on a perfectly delivered message of hope.
“The Projects” is preceded in theaters by two other noteworthy housing estate-set films. Newcomer Kei Tanaka’s documentary “Under the Cherry Tree” looks at the elderly working-class residents of a complex in Kawasaki, while “After the Storm” reunites writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda with the stars of his highly regarded “Still Walking,” Hiroshi Abe and Kirin Kiki.
Incidentally, Kore-eda’s feature was shot in the Tokyo complex where he lived between the ages of 9 and 28. That just goes to show: you can take the filmmaker out of the danchi, but …
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Editor’s note: New Zealander Don Brown is a longtime resident of Japan who specializes in creating English subtitles for Japanese films, as well as other cinema-related translation. His column runs on the second and fourth Friday of the month in AJW.