Tokyo Christmas Luck

[setsuled]

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Merry Christmas, everyone. It's already Christmas Day here in Japan and I watched a Japanese Christmas movie a couple days ago, the only one I know of, actually, unless I'm forgetting something. 2003's Tokyo Godfathers(東京ゴッドファーザーズ) isn't just Christmasy, it's Dickensian, more Oliver Twist than Christmas Carol. It also has Dickens' penchant for unashamed melodrama and sentimentality. Director Kon Satoshi did much better work on Perfect Blue and Paprika but Tokyo Godfathers has plenty of good points.

On Christmas Eve, three homeless people in Tokyo discover an abandoned baby girl in a trash heap. They argue over whether to take her to the cops or care for her themselves. Over the course of the story, they have an adventure comprised of extraordinary coincidences. This movie must have set a record for the number of coincidences employed to propel its plot forward. The three characters, by pure luck, happen to save a yakuza boss' life, who happens to be the father of a woman they've been looking for. At almost every location the characters visit throughout the film, one of them runs into a long estranged family member or someone tied to the baby's life, by pure chance. It's worth remembering Tokyo is the biggest city in the world.

Kon said he was inspired by John Ford's 1948 film Three Godfathers but the sentimentality and coincidence reliant plot are more likely to remind the viewer of Oliver Twist, as are the colourful personalities of the three homeless protagonists.

Gin (Emori Tooru) is an irascible old man, Miyuki (Okamoto Aya) is a surly teenage girl, and Hana (Umegaki Yoshiaki) is a gregarious, middle-aged trans-woman. They form a found family unit with Gin as the father, Hana as the mother, and Miyuki as the daughter. The screenplay was co-written by Nobumoto Keiko, the lead writer on the original Cowboy Bebop, another show with a trans-friendly character. I also watched an episode of Ally McBeal a couple days ago in which the normally bigoted character Richard Fish passionately argues for the right of a trans-woman client to marry a man and, when he loses the case, personally officiates over the marriage in a legally unsanctioned ceremony. Both that episode and Tokyo Godfathers have elements that would be labelled as problematic by academics, which leads me to wonder if this is why people seem comparatively shy about making trans-friendly plots to-day, over twenty years later.

Tokyo Godfathers also has an interesting scene in which Miyuki finds herself in the home of a Latina mother and the two manage to communicate despite despite Miyuki's lack of Spanish and the Latina's lack of Japanese. They get by with gestures and a few words of broken English. It's frankly the kind of model I'd like to see more of to show Japanese people how to communicate through a language barrier, a better example than the popular Degawa English, which I think tends to exacerbate rather than dispel shyness.

So, again, like Dickens, the politics in this film are stridently progressive. If I were the conspiracy minded sort, I might wonder at the fact that Kon and Nobumoto both died of cancer at relatively young ages.

Tokyo Godfathers is available on The Criterion Channel.

And don't forget, there's a new chapter of my webcomic online to-day.

And Merry Christmas.