Our trip to Japan, explained by 20 movies

Godzilla, Mishima, Jiro, Kurosawa, and an exciting ten days in the Far East.

The Shabuya scramble

My wife and I returned tonight from a ten-day visit to Japan, a trip we decided to take with the kids away at camp. We went to Tokyo, Osaka, and then back to Tokyo. A great trip, and I highly recommend it.

This wasn’t a movie-oriented trip, and I saw no movies during the trip (though I did watch a few on the plane. I wish I had spent more time studying the best of Kurosawa, Ozu, and Studio Ghibli before the trip, and I hope to do so in the coming months. But of course, as with most things in life, I saw a lot of things throughout the trip that reminded me of various Japanese and Japan-oriented movies.

The trip originated at a movie screening, a couple of months ago, of Karate Kid: Legends. During the prologue, set in Japan, which invented some bizarrely conjured new lore involving Mr. Miyagi and the Jackie Chan character having been friends, my wife whispered, “I want to go to Japan,” and I thought, “Hey, that sounds great.” About two months later, there we were.

On the first day of the trip, we stopped into the National Film Archive of Japan, which featured a couple of cool permanent exhibits, one featuring the history of Japanese film and another with animated film posters. Lots in there, predictably, about Kurosawa, Rashomon, and The Seven Samurai:

Though I did tell my wife, multiple times, that she should consider herself lucky that I’m not an anime guy, since this trip would have included some very different stuff if I were.

There’s lots of Godzilla. There is, of course, Godzilla iconography everywhere in Japan, and we saw one of the Godzilla statues near a Toho Studios building in the Ginza section of Tokyo (although I gather there are a bunch of others.)

And at the Film Archive as well:

We also went to a particularly cool observation deck in Tokyo, which at times offers a projection show of various versions of Godzilla attacking the city.

We made it to a DVD store, which still exists in Tokyo, by the way:

But they only offer authentic Japanese cinema. Like The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Ed Zwick:

Of course, it’s hard to be an American in Japan and not think of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, which was filmed in the Shinjuku and Shibuya sections of Tokyo, both of which we visited.

The Shibuya Scramble Crossing, the world's busiest pedestrian crossing, is one of the most riveting things I’ve ever witnessed - people crossing in all directions on foot, and somehow they don’t crash into each other. As experienced by Scarlett back in 2003:

It was also in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Sonic 3.

We spent three days in Kyoto, home of numerous shrines and temples, one of which was the Golden Pavilion, the site of the action in Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, as well as one of the chapters in Paul Schrader’s 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which I watched shortly before the trip. We did not, alas, make it to the military installation where Mishima tried to stage a coup, and then committed seppuku, in 1970.

Kyoto, famously, was spared the atomic bomb in 1945 because Secretary of War Henry Stimson wanted to spare the historical shrines, although Oppenheimer fudged the part about him having honeymooned there.

I thought, many times on visits to temples and shrines and former strongholds of the Tokugawa shogunate, of the “nice manbun, asshole” tweet:

We also weren’t able to make it to the zen garden in Kyoto that so moved William Friedkin, in the documentary Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist, and referenced recently on The Bear.

From Tokyo to Kyoto, we took the Shinkansen bullet train, every American train nerd’s favorite mode of transportation, and reason to ask “why can’t we have that?” It is also, of course, the site of the action in the 2022 Brad Pitt action movie, also called Bullet Train, which was even set on the Tokyo-to-Kyoto route (the train is also featured in Inception). Our ride wasn’t quite as exciting or action-packed as the Hollywood version, nor did the Yakuza (led, for some reason, by a Russian Michael Shannon) make an appearance. The train doesn’t feel that different from taking am Amtrak train up or down the East Coast, but it looks cool and goes real fast.

I love the 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about Jiro Ono, the Tokyo man who’s the best sushi chef in the world, his process, and the battle for succession between his sons. We didn’t get to his restaurant – supposedly it’s impossible to get a seat — but did partake in lots of sushi-eating, especially of that style which is very different from what’s on offer in the states.

There’s a sushi place near where I live in Pennsylvania that just shows the film on a loop all the time.

And speaking of restaurants that show things on a loop… they do that with Super Bowl LIX at Tokyo Philly, the Tokyo restaurant owned by Kosuke and Tomomi Chujo, a Japanese couple who love all things Philadelphia. If you live in Philly, you may have read about them a time or 50, or visited their pop-up in South Philly a couple of months ago.

We went there, and met the Chujos — Kosuke was sporting a Wawa hat as he cooked — and enjoyed the cheesesteak. The place’s decor is a masterpiece of Philly-specific kitsch, including lots of Gritty, and if you’d told me Defector’s Dan McQuade had been hired to curate it for them, I’d have believed you.

Baseball is huge in Japan, and Shohei Ohtani is absolutely everywhere in different advertisements for things. I saw tons of Dodgers and Yankees hats on Japanese people, but not many of any other American team.

The Tokyo Dome was near our hotel the first few days of the trip, though I unfortunately didn’t get to go, since the Yomiuri Giants weren’t at home. The Dome, by the way, was reputedly inspired by the Metrodome, the long-ago stadium that I grew up going to in Minnesota.