Himizu is a movie that took me by surprise and made me use my undergraduate abilities to diagnose and try to understand the characters because the movie is about the victims and survivors of the March 11 Tsunami and Tohoku Earthquake that shocked Japan last year. The movie is an adaptation of a manga that came out in 2001 on a hypothetical psychologically distressing situations of tsunami and earthquake hitting Japan. However, the live action movie is about a real recent event that illustrates the need to be disillusioned about the real psychological turmoil’s the survivors suffer. The term Himizu means a type of mole in Japanese and uses it as a theme to illustrate the difficulty of surviving in a difficult man made world. The movie is by no means an easy watch and is violent and bloody due to the topic being dealt with at hand. This review strives to both summarize and analyze the reasons behind the some of the main character’s choices of how they relate and react to their situations. This is not a review where numbers play a role, but rather the idea of whether human relationships in the most difficult of settings is portrayed as believable and not only pitiable, but worthy of an energetic cheering on to keep trying to rise above inner and outer turmoil.
The movie follows the male protagonist Sumida played by Shota Sometani (Best known for his role in Sadako 3D aka the Japanese version of Samara 3D adapted recently to North America) and female protagonist is Chazawa portrayed by Fumi Nikaido. Both have won awards for Best New Young Actor and Actress Marcello Mastrioanni Awards for their roles in Himizu.
The movie illustrates the psychological well being of youth in developed countries, whose lives are instantly mutilated by the harsh conditions and the realization of Sumida that he now has only the ambition to live normally. Chazawa, his classmate in their final year of junior high understands the beauty of Sumida’s goal in life to live normally. The normal is actually posited as a series of Chazawa’s delusions of grandeur, or rather Chazawa epitomizes the idea of being able to live a long and fulfilling life of normal and mundane events after the earthquake and tsunami. The ideal of their student lives leading through highschool, then post secondary education, then college or university is actually grossly interrupted by the tsunami and quake. Their normal lives are grossly altered because of the psychological distress characters suffer in reaction to their losses. Chazawa’s mom suffers extreme survivor’s guilt and utilizes projection of her survivor’s guilt to contemplate suicide and going so far as to build a guillotine to kill her daughter. The idea, to kill herself, not being good enough, Chazawa’s mother wants her daughter to die in her place due to her projecting all her problems outside herself to cope with her own psychological dischord.
Sumida’s mother is also no saint. She becomes a participant in the immorality and lawlessness of the marginal zones of the affected areas. She partakes in having many lovers and even abandons her own son. She makes very telling comments about how there is a great fear of the tsunami victims being ‘radioactive’ and would prefer they do not set up their tents near her shack home by the water wreckage. There is extreme stigma against survivors, if it is not enough that people managed to survive the tsunami and the power plants explosions, some can not even afford to be relocated, so instead they live in tents outside the shack because Sumida allows them to. Sumida holds extremely low expectations of his future in this shack, but he still exerts his agency and desire to help these marginalized ‘radioactive’ tent-living neighbours by building them a makeshift bathtub out of metal wreckage when his mother desires they stop using their shower because of her stigma. Ultimately, her mother’s selfish and intolerance results in her abandoning her son altogether to fend for himself.
Sumida’s family is also no longer the nuclear family of father and mother due to his mother’s abandonment. Instead his father becomes a gambling addict, suffering the effects of depression as well as the beginnings of alzheimers disease. His father perpetually repeats the phrase that he wishes his son had died in the natural disasters, this too can be interpreted as survivor’s guilt but instead his father does this because of his extreme greed- his desire to obtain the insurance money that would result from his son’s death to pay off loan sharks and continue gambling. But due to his father’s great ignorance, he does not realize that his constant goading of his son to kill himself currently, the insurance would not cover it because it would count as suicide. Sumida out of extreme stress and bullying and physical beatings from his father ends up fighting back to the point of killing his own father.
Chazawa is the first to notice Sumida leaving school at this point. She thinks it is because of her characteristically annoying cheering for him in the midst of class for him to continue his goal of trying to lead a normal life. She ends up finding out how low priority education has become to Sumida because of his destitute situation living in such a small shack and his mother’s subsequent abandonment. Distressed that he would give up on himself, she screams at him “your parents have left, and you quit school, you can’t be normal anymore!” What Chazawa is standing for is for a developed ideal path in an industrialized world, and that one should not live in such destitution or give up on their future just because of destitution. However, it is hard for Sumida to take Chazawa seriously because she is such a rich girl. Therefore Chazawa makes the choice to help Sumida part time at his shack to rent boats out to let people row themselves around the relatively debris free body of water nearby. Chazawa becomes quite endearing to the audience because of her choice to live, despite her mother’s growing anxiety. Chazawa gives a book to Sumida about a Himizu, or a mole in hope of inspiring him to continue his education and recognize that he is in control of how he perceives the world and always has a choice on how to live his life. This is in large contrast to Chazawa’s mother’s perspective that her ‘child is in the way’ of her own progress. But this is a perceptual problem as a result of her mother’s selfishness and inability to overcome her own survivor’s guilt.
Perhaps it is even a commentary on the problematic perceptions of Japan’s aging population possessing a dysfunctional view on what children represent. Yoruno (played by Tetsu Watanabe), a possibly radioactive victim of the natural disasters that lived in a tent near Sumida’s shack decides to ask a criminal how to steal money to help Sumida get out of constantly being beat up by his father’s debt collectors. Yoruno is an old man that fully wishes for Sumida to meet his full potential despite his difficult circumstances. It is Sumida that shows acceptance and tolerance of the entire group of radioactive refugees. Yoruno posits that Sumida is a piece of the future, the ‘mirai’, that will go on and should deserve a chance to go on and not hold the responsibility of the previous generations’ wrongs. Yoruno does get the money illicitly to pay off the loan shark that pesters Sumida, but he also points to the fact that the entire area after the quake and tsunami has become a largely lawless zone. Yoruno says convincingly to the loan shark that after all the disasters that “you and I could drop dead at any minute, and with this money we could live on” in the future invested in Sumida.
The movie actually is a very long 2 hours showing how Sumida is so disgusted with Yoruno for acting like this, that he takes up becoming a knife wielding vigilante. However, this is short lived because Sumida meets other knife wielding individuals that take out their aggression and discontent with their own lives on innocents. Sumida manages to stop these aggressive individuals with other civilians without resorting to knife violence. Chazawa makes Sumida at the end of the movie admit his real wishes for the future, to grow up and be a responsible adult unlike his mother and father. But more importantly “even if my life’s worth less than a speck of dust, I want to live it for the good of society”. Chazawa at this point goes with Sumida running towards the camera to turn himself in for killing his father and no longer blaming his situation for his crime, and to truly begin his life after. This movie fights so strongly against existentialism by always positing the possibility of agency and forcing the young characters (supposedly 14 year olds in the story) to always keep dreaming of the future. That even in the most dire of circumstances they are allowed to dream. The movie also posits that the reason why an entire area can be immoral or lawless, is because of the choices people make within that area, not because of the destruction of infrastructure and bulidings- but because people choose to relate to their surroundings negatively. Chazawa is a strong bright beam of personal agency and an almost OCD desire for the people around her to recognize their own freedom of interpreting and what it means to do good in the world. The movie ends on a truly memorable note.