vison wrote:Some years ago when Japan's economy was the envy of the world, there were countless articles about how "Western" businesses and workers just couldn't measure up to the Japanese model.
For instance, did the late Michael Crichton ever update his 1992 novel,
Rising Sun, which concludes with a call to action against Japanese economic agression?
I love many Japanese films from the 1940s-1960s, some of which I consider to be among the greatest movies ever made, but they often portray Japanese society in a harsh light. One prominent Japanese critic described Masaki Kobayashi's samurai-drama
Seppuku and Akira Kurosawa's samurai-comedy
Sanjuro (both 1962, I think, and both superb), as reminders to the audience that Japan had been a feudal society not even one hundred years before, and a suggestion that elements of that arrangement persisted.
Kobayashi, by the way, also directed
The Human Condition (1959-61), a three-installment, ten-hour film based on a six-part 1950s novel, which was released to great acclaim (one film history book even calls it the greatest film ever) -- something I like to remind those who claim that Peter Jackson's
LOTR was unprecedented.
Every one is a romance novel that guys can appreciate, too, told in language that is practically poetry. It's no wonder they are popular world wide. Reenactment seems a bit odd, since so much of those books revolve around scenery that's unavailable and horses most people don't generally have... but , whatever makes them happy....
