Toronto Japanese Film Festival: A Sushi Platter for All Tastes and Ages

By Liam Lacey

Canadians really like visiting Japan, with this year on pace to surpass last year’s record of more than a half-million tourists. If you cannot make it in person, there is the annual Toronto Japanese Film Festival — happening June 12 to 26 and presented by the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre — which in its 14 years has emerged as the most prominent showcase for Japanese cinema outside of its home country.

A scene from Muromachi Outsiders.

The festival is a chance to catch up on a national cinema known for its distinctive genres — samurai movies, J-horror, monster movies and anime. Japan’s animated films have earned nine Best Animated Academy Award nominations, with two wins as well as an honorary Oscar for animator Hayao Miyazaki.

In the last decade, Japan has also developed a reputation for its sensitive human-scale dramas that have earned three International Best Picture Oscar nominations: 2018’s Shoplifters, 2021’s Drive My Car —also Japan’s first-ever Best Picture nomination — and the German Japanese co-production Perfect Days from 2023.

Some stereotypical elements of Japanese cinema include the struggles of aging, social anxiety and loneliness, environmental threats, tales of samurai warriors and the love of tasty food, but the art is not just the common ingredients but their combination and presentation.

Youth

Through video games, manga, anime and J-Pop, Japan has been an engine of global youth culture for the past four decades. This year’s festival opens with the manga-to-live-action adaptation, Cells at Work! (June 12), a comedy about anthropomorphic blood cells, including a girl red cell who delivers crates of oxygen around the body, and her male crush, a white blood cell on the hunt for threatening pathogens, which he dispatches acrobatically.

All this takes place in the bloodstream of a 14-year-old Niko, who worries about the unhealthy habits of her widower father whose interior body is the dystopian opposite to her own pristine palace.

For college-age crowd, the bittersweet She Taught Me Serendipity (June 14), follows a painfully shy college student who falls for a beautiful reclusive classmate and is insensitive to the bubbly teenager girl at his part-time job who carries a torch for him.

For high school–age audiences there’s Give It All (June 15), an animated film about a teenage girl on an underdog high school rowing team. Let’s Go Karaoke! (June 18) is a comedy about a star choir student hired by a yakuza lieutenant who seeks instruction in karaoke.

And for the elementary school set, there’s Nintama Rantaro Invincible Master of the Dokutake Ninja (June 22), the first feature film based on a long-running television anime series, about the titular Rantaro, a bespectacled aspiring ninja and his first-year friends at a ninja academy.

Age

Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world with more than 28 percent over 65, and thus a tradition of films that focus on resilience and second chances.

The 35-Year Promise (June 14) is a drama based on the true story of an illiterate senior who took night classes to write his wife a love letter for their anniversary.

Less optimistic is Teki Cometh (June 17), black-and-white psychological study that swept the recent Tokyo Film Festival, winning for best film, best director (Daihachi Yoshida), and best actor for Nagatsuka Kyōzō for his tour-de-force performance as a retired French professor and widower, drifting in and out of his imagination, haunted by fear of an attack from enemy invaders, the ghost of his late wife and indiscretions he may have committed.

With a rhetorical question for a title, 90 Years Old — So What? (June 21) is another real-life tale of renewal. An editor undergoing a mid-life crisis persuades 90-year-old writer Aiko Sato to come out of retirement and she produces a popular hit. The 90-year-old actor, Mitsuko Kusabue, stars as the real-life Aiko, who is now 102.

A scene from Hakkenden: Fiction and Reality.

Family and Connections

Japan rates among the most prosperous nations in the world and, according to some surveys, is also one of the loneliest. Several films focus on the struggle to find and hold onto connections.

In Petals and Memories (June 23) an orphaned older brother has dutifully looked after his younger sister. She prepares to marry and is ready to move on, but a secret with a supernatural twist holds her to the past.

Aimitagai (June 16) follows Azusa, a wedding planner who, after the sudden death of her best friend, photojournalist Kanami, postpones her own wedding. She continues to send messages to Kanami’s phone and discovers a network of connections between Kanami and the people who cared for her.

Based on the memoir by Dai Igarashi, who grew up with deaf parents and went on to become a writer, Living in Two Worlds (June 21) traces his journey from teenager, embarrassed and resentful of his parents’ disability, to an adult who learns to appreciate the deaf culture he shared with them.

Environment

Catastrophic events, both natural and human-caused, mark Japan’s history and in recent years the theme of natural despoliation has become increasingly prominent.

Set in 1958 during Japan’s industrial book, River Returns (June 21) is a parable about human intervention in nature. The story focuses on a mute boy, Yucha, a village plan to sell off the local mountain and dam the river, and an ancient fable about a romantically disappointed girl who drowned herself in the river’s source.

Sunset Sunrise (June 26) is a serio-comic film set during the COVID 19 lockdown, when a young corporate employee Shinsaku decides to work remotely, renting an abandoned coastal house in an area that had been devastated by the 2011 tsunami. The drama explores the connections of community to place, romantic second chances, the long shadow of trauma and the healing power of nature.

Biography: Films That Honour Witnesses and Artists

Hakkenden: Fiction and Reality (June 13) offers two stories in one. One part is biographical portrait of the 19th century pulp fiction author Takizawa Bakin whose 108-volume Satomi-Hakkenden has been a continuing wellspring of Japanese fantasy fiction.

The other part of the film is a bang-up Marvel-style special effects action movie based on his masterwork that follows a curse placed on the Satomi clan by an evil queen, and a team of eight warriors, each with a magic orb, who can set things right.

The Lens of Tamio Wakayama (June 15), directed by Vancouver-based Cindy Mochizuki, chronicles the little-known story of the late Japanese Canadian photographer who spent part of his childhood in an internment cap, and later documented the civil rights movement in the Deep South in the 1960s and the Japanese community in Vancouver.

Ravens (June 20) by British director Mark Gill is a portrait of another photographer, the avant-garde Japanese artist Masahisa Fukase, famous for his obsessive photographs of his wife, Yoko, and his landmark 1986 photo book, which gives the film its title.

Marking the 80th anniversary of the United States dropping atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, The Vow from Hiroshima (June 24) is a portrait of 85-year-old Nobel Prize winner Setsuko Thurlow, a Hiroshima survivor and activist, and her friendship with second-generation survivor, Mitchie Takeuchi. Following the screening, Thurlow will take part in a panel discussion about her life and work.

Samurai

Samurai tales, American Westerns or chivalric tales involve action, and declined in popularity since the 1970s though, in the wake of the success of the series Shogun, the genre may be ripe for revival.

Muromachi Outsiders (Samurai Fury, June 22), is an action film, involving a Robin Hood–style folk hero, who leads a band of misfit heroes (a strong man with an iron club, a Korean woman archer) who take on the evil authorities.

The sombre, artfully shot Bushido (Gobangiri, June 25) follows a ronin, falsely accused of theft, whose daughter borrows money from a brothel owner to save his honour.

Seppuku: The Son Goes Down (screening on July 17 after the festival) replaces samurai action in favour of an intense psychological study of a samurai and his family, who’s superiors have ordered him to commit suicide for a false charge of damaging his master’s bow.

Crime Thrillers

While series like the HBO hit Tokyo Vice leave us with images of tattooed yakuza cutting off fingers and plotting in steam baths, the Japanese fascination with crime takes many forms.

Cloud (June 14), the latest from popular auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse) follows the increasingly chaotic trajectory of a factory worker turned online reseller, whose greedy practices earn him the vengeful enemies. The film was Japan’s submission to last year’s Academy Awards.

Angry Squad: Civil Servants and Seven Swindlers (June 15) is caper comedy in which a middle-aged tax office employee, who gets swindled on a car deal, ends up joining ranks with the con artist for a significantly bigger caper.

Another film about the dangers of e-commerce, Last Mile (June 19) takes place on the eve of a Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year when Elena Funato, the new head of an e-commerce distribution centre, has to find out who’s responsible for packages that keep exploding and terrorizing the public.

Fine Dining

Anyone who has tasted a matcha-flavored éclair or a sakura macaron knows that some of the tastiest French delicacies are made in Japan. La Grande Maison Paris (June 22) is based on a Japanese television drama series, which follows chef Natsuki Obana and his mission to gain a coveted three-star Michelin rating with his Grand Madison Paris in France. Kei Kobayashi, the chef of Restaurant KEI — who, in real life, has won the three-star Michelin rating — oversaw the film’s cuisine.

So bon appétit or, in Japanese, meshiagare!