Los Angeles Japan Film Festival 2008 - Tokyo Cowboys - Page 4

The next morning, my flatmate asks me what I did in Tokyo. I tell her I was a writer.

"And, how was it...your writing," she asks.

It didn't suck. I could do what I wanted. I had fans. It was kind of rock and roll.

Please, God...if I go back there...please let it be rock and roll.Is it fair to read her blogs? Why not when she so clearly ties it into the movie? We see how her documentary starts shaping up:

I've been watching my old tapes of Japan trying to get a feel for it again. There were so many strange experiences... so many things that I'd forgotten... things on the street. I even filmed myself having a nervous breakdown... 5 hours of tapes of my crying pathetically.

I could even smell it... Tokyo. It was such a strange place, and I swore that I would never go back. Now I'm seriously considering it. BG has put the seed in my head.

Five hours crying? And yet she finds herself drawn to the Japanese students at her film school in London where she is a registered alien as well.

At the screening, Saft seemed rather proud that she was the only non-Asian foreigner or gaijin to have her work included in the Japan Film Festival 2008. Yet she has produced a messy traditional view of the white males' experience in Japan, without the benefit of commentary from their Japanese colleagues or acquaintances as if these gaijin lived a compartmentalized life in a highly compartmentalized world. Her documentary is a small part of Japan, but we do not see the broader view.

When I looked up gaijin on Amazon, the first page featured only books by men. Saft has given us more of the same. Is it really still a white man's world?

Article Author: Purple Tigress

Former theater critic for the LA Weekly and Los Angeles Times . For the last five years, an editing slave at a dot-com but recently laid off. Currently an under-employed freelance writer and artist.

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