Kamikaze

I rented a Japanese film Kamikaze yesterday. On the cover it said it is the action blockbuster of japan this year and is controversial.

It's a long film of more than 2 hours and beautifully made. All those Kamikaze pilots are played by those young, extreme clean-looking Japanese guys. One feels so ...o..o bad to think that they knew that they were destined to die and then died in all those violent, bloody ways. This sadness is fused with a pleasure, though. Or let me put in this way, the sadness is a part of the pleasure one feels when watching this kind of war film full of beautiful people, nice scenery, and death, because the tension of death, love, youth almost creates a sort of sexy atmosphere of the film.

Only this is really dangerous for such a theme, because Kamikaze is such a stupid and ridiculous event. Any sad, tragic description of it can only serve to cover its absurdity and affirms the Japanese Imperialist aesthetics of seeking beauty and national pride in death. I sympathize with those young boys as much as the women in the film, only sympathy for all these individuals can also put a layer of positive color to the ridiculous historical event and therefore make the event sympathetic, while the fact that those young, beautiful boys had to kill themselves for nothing is pathetic. To reveal this point, there is no way but sarcasm and irony, for the simple reason that you cannot describe a ridiculous, senseless thing with a sense of tragedy.

that's why I think the beautiful film Kamikaze is a bad film. Considering it was made in Japan, I think it is a politically dangerous film.

Google

The announcement of Google leaving China is triggering a large variety of responses among Chinese home and abroad. As someone said, it seems really like great material for a film. Just read "A New Approach to China" by Google and got the feelings that the company indeed has problem with the current Chinese regime. In other words, the attraction of economic interest may no longer exist because the attempt/behavior of the regime to police (or even infiltrate) the technological and managerial operations of the company directly affects its economic growth. This is, of course, an extremely interesting case when the myth of "Chinese market" is blown out. In fact, it may be a matter of time when the magic economic growth of China will be bogged down by its increasing political tension. The leaving of Google may be just a clear signal (there are other signals such as the increasing criminal cases involving peasant migrant workers killing their bosses, but they do not cause so much attention as Google) that the economic things are getting more and more involved with political control in China now.

See "New Approach to China" at
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html