Some fine Japanese movies

When it comes to Japanese cinema most people will first say the name of Kurosawa and Ozu, and sometimes Mizoguchi. These giants of film did perform some miracles (Seven Samurai; Tokyo Story; The 47 Ronin), however there is also plenty of enjoyable and some outstanding contemporary Japanese films to see. I will recommend a few which I've seen in the last years.

Departures (2009)

Departures is an excellent tale about a 30ish couple facing new challenges in life, both at work and in their relationship. After the husband looses his job in the big city, they return to the countryside to reboot their life. The film handles difficult topics (death, jobs, love, trust) with sublime, genuine humour. It is one of those rare gems of a movie where one laughs, sheds a few tears, and feels touched too.

Our Little Sister (2015)

Our Little Sister is a touching family story of reunion, or learning about each other, and how different characters can fill each others' lives with meaning and joy. The sisters return to their hometown after the death of their divorced father and meet for the first time their younger half-sister. They agree to take her in and a splendid tale of affection begins to unfold.

Chronicle of My Mother (2012)

Harada's movie is based on Inoue Yasushi's novel of the same title. Chronicle of My Mother does address some topics - care for an older relative with dementia, discord in a tight-knit large family between generations - but it does not psychologise or dramatise them overly. Rather, it puts them in their place: instead of creating problems larger than life out of them it shows that a family that works normally and supports each other can tackle and overcome most issues. Certainly a nice and heart warming message in an age when the extreme individualism most developed countries embraced - one of the sad influences of too much US cultural and political influence - is causing enormous social difficulties.

Recall (2018)

This is an exciting movie about corporate corruption and how it can be fought. The actors in Recall are doing a great job, and the script splendidly addresses several of the main issues of our age: the total takeover of large money, rule of interest, influencing of media by big business owners, and the difficulty of average people to be independent of such huge organisations. The movie shows that on their own neither the young people wanting to reform big business from the inside, nor media, nor the owners of smaller companies have enough influence and information to affect a real change in things. However if everyone in society works together - or at least for the same goal, even if separately - and the police is willing to listen, then things can be achieved. An exciting drama with great tension, revelations and good tempo!
The movie is set in Japan where it is particularly actual due to the many recall and quality issue scandals since 2010. But it is obvious that in one sense at least Japan is admitting and making such cases public. One can only guess how many similar cases would be uncovered if the US, China, and some other larger countries would be as open and critical with their companies as the Japanese were willing to be in the last decade.


Haru's Journey (2010)

Haru's Journey is a sad, slow and meditative movie. It deals with old age, aging society, loneliness, the lack of guidance and identity that current modern states offer for youth, and especially for young Japanese females. Haru accompanies his old and jobless uncle on a trip to visit the uncle's still living relatives. The meetings don't bring any joy, rather bitterness, as they reveal old conflicts about which way to head in life and failures that no one wants to admit. It is a hard movie to watch, but useful. One can get a sense of the very real despair holding the hearts of many people at this very moment who are alone and without any outlooks. It can spur one into motion, it can make one a bit more sensitive and compassionate.


Dolls (2002)

Kitano's film is a true romantic masterpiece about love that does not fear sacrifices and love that does not rest until the fates of the lovers merge. A fantastic visual feast with shots of the Japanese mountains and seasons that will forever linger before your eyes, Dolls is a real treasure. For lovers, for those who are not in love at the moment, for those who loved, or who want to love, for those who don't care about love and just want to see a well done and masterfully shot movie, and for everyone else too.

Hugh de Selincourt's 'Oxford from Within'

I've just finished the a nice old edition of Hugh de Selincourt's Oxford from Within. The book is short and readable, although the style is fairly outdated and at times very circumstantial. It is about an imagined journey the writer takes in Oxford, and an internal conversation between his positive and negative  memories and opinions of Oxford. In the end the good opinions are overwhelming, and much of the more condemning criticism is written down as understandable ideas of the author's younger self.

The book is nice, if one is in a dreamy mood. However if you hope to get some real insight into the workings or student life of Oxford don't choose this book. Besides some nice description of mostly known things and a few additional details you won't find much new information. The freshest and clearest parts of the book are - somewhat surprisingly - the sections praising the changes that women were allowed to study at Oxford, and that science and the classics were achieving a complementary position (something that has changed a great deal since the early 1900's when de Selincourt was writing).

The book - at least the older hardcover edition published by Chatto & Windus in 1910 - features some lovely paintings by Yoshio Markino, who lived and painted in London for a long time. The pictures bring to life how Oxford looked a 100 years ago. They are very atmospheric, complementing the text well. As someone who loves the places depicted - Trinity's gate, the front of All Souls and the Radcliffe Camera, Iffley Church, New College Tower - these pictures are really heartwarming.

Yoshio Markino's rendering of Turl Street and the tower of Exeter

All in all, I would recommend this to someone who hasn't yet read much about Oxford, and who wants an easy reading that can be finished in one or two afternoons.

What is natural for children?

A friend of mine voiced the opinion that it is important for kids to spend much time in nature. I always viewed claims aspiring to tell us that we should do something 'because it is natural', 'because that's how we did it always', etc., with suspicion. And not without any reason.

You often hear claims like: 'we should eat food X because it is natural food for us and our ancestors ate it always, and they never had cancer', or that 'in my time kids used to play outside a lot and ... [insert your favorite beneficial outcome for your life]'. There are three problems with such claims.

First think about it this way: evolution is a slow process. Most of the features of our body have evolved a long-long time ago (tens of thousands of years ago) and have changed little. Our basic structure is the same, our basic bodily functions (blood circulation, digestion, hormone transactions, etc.) are the same. And our ancestors have lived a very different life from ours. So, our body is basically not really 'made' for the sort of lives most people in second and first world countries live.

Nevertheless we live much-much longer and healthier lives than did our ancestors. Thanks to the development of moral skills and cultures we aren't killed by other humans at first sight, stronger individuals cannot just simply take what is ours or kill off our kids, males don't regularly rape females, we don't have to use physical violence to get our food, and so on. And thanks to medicine, fertilization, crops growing, vaccines and a whole lot of other inventions we are not subjects to mass early childhood death, to 30-50 years of average lifespan and so on. So, our inbuilt mechanisms aren't necessarily a good guide to how we should live.

Thanks to our basic architecture we are pretty adaptive and can lead lives substantially different from the ones our bodies evolved to live. And thanks to the lucky cultural basics we developed we did not became a fiercely competitive but a very cooperative race. Furthermore, we can now use these bodies in much-much more efficient ways than 'nature told us to', and have far greater knowledge how to gain pleasure, fight inequality, fear, depression, death and pain, than any other animal, which lives a natural life.

Second, The 'keep to the well trodden path' style of arguments deserve no credit either. What was working as a good rule of thumb ten, twenty, or fifty years ago has not much to do with what will work nowadays. Don't misunderstand me: it might work. There are social settings and economic areas where the structure remained largely unchanged since long time. Also, these rules might work due to luck. But they surely aren't rules you should accept because they worked earlier, or someone found them useful. 

This does not necessarily apply to rules which pertain to personal matters, such as family or relationship matters. Since in these things it is extremely hard to get right what is beneficial both for individuals in terms of subjective feelings of happiness, security, etc., and what is good for society, plus these categories are - as we have them nowadays - almost purely social constructions, it is very much possible that a good constellation is one that we hit on earlier.

Third, what about the personal experience based views, for example when your friends say that kids should definitely start doing a part time job when they are 15, or when they want their kids to learn music, since it was such an important experience in their lives? There are two problems with these kinds of ideas: one is, that they are based on subjective thoughts formed here and now. But these thoughts do not reveal anything about the real processes that led up to the stage one is in. It does not underpin a relation between one's satisfaction with certain aspects of one's own life and the earlier experience. Also, it does not take into account all the people who had the same experience, but failed in life in all sorts of way - they ended up lonely and suffering from it, jobless, homeless, and so on.

The other problem with these sorts of views - held by everyone - is that they are very likely to be affected by cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological mechanism at work in all of us. It ensures that we have a picture of ourselves and our lives that is easy to live with. For this purpose it very often 'cheats us'. For example, if we are wrong about a factual question and someone points this out, and later we get to know that we were wrong, we like to look for explanations that suggest that the question is still open. There was a problem with the proof, with the evidence. We didn't understand the question in the same way. And so on. Everyone is good at giving excuses.

The same happens in cases of relying on personal experiences of what was and what wasn't useful for one. Most people would like to see their relatives, their partners and themselves in favorable light. So, they like to glorify and justify their methods and choices in raising them, living with them. Therefore we often adopt methods, or justify adopting method that have nothing to speak for them. Except that adopting them makes us feel better about our own lives.

Also, in many cases it might be true that it is useful to spend a lot of time outside. Kids might have hardwired, innate developmental segments which only activate or work really effectively if they receive particular stimuli. But whether this is so or not can only be decided by neurology, psychology and education studies. It is not something you should take guesses at, nor should you take advice from non-professionals.

Should we abandon all such rules of thumb? All such 'traditional' advice? I think not. The problem is, that we do not have anything better to rely on as long as we don't have sufficient relevant statistical data. Professionals in healthcare, education studies, psychology, sociology and other fields are working actively to gather such data. You can always find good books, correct websites with the most up-to-date positions, gathered and interpreted by professionals. 

If possible, do not rely on journals or websites run by journalists or other non-professionals. They might misinterpret the data, or even the interpretation of the scientists. Usually understanding research results is very difficult. Don't try it yourself. Let the professional explain it to you. If you don't understand it try again, try harder. It's no one's fault. You just lack the skills and education. We all face this problem and no one is good at everything. Take your time. Ask for help. Learn a bit. And don't run to easier solutions, don't read esoteric and alternative stuff. If it seems too plausible and easy, it's probably false. And it can seriously harm your kid's or your own development.

The critical way is hard, but the only good one. See this for example.

On the role, usefulness and value of the humanities

When one studies a subject in the humanities or works in any of its fields one can often encounter complaints from students and even from professionals that the humanities are useless and it does not make sense to learn or practice them.

Most of these complaints come from students in other fields. Accordingly, the source of their complaints is probably that they don't know what one could be working on in the humanities. They have no knowledge of what is studied, how it is studied, what one working as a professional in the humanities does, how this relates to society and whether it is useful or not. Their ignorance and intolerant attitudes can usually be dispelled quite easily if one spends a few minutes explaining what they don't know.

The problem is worse if one encounters serious grown ups voicing such concerns. A few years ago in one of his books for wider audiences Stephen Hawking pushed that the job philosophy did earlier is now entirely taken over by science and therefore we should stop doing philosophy. Hawking is surely a great physicist but we should treat his claims regarding other fields with due suspicion. Of course they can be right, it is just that he is not a professional on education, on teaching or on research, but on physics. Thus we should require a bit more detailed information and argument before we accept big - and superficial - words.

Another instance of condemning the humanities occurred just recently in Hungary. The leading party, Fidesz, is in a governing-frenzy. The country's economic situation is bad, Fidesz enjoys two-thirds majority in the parliament, that is they can pass any law they want, and accordingly they try to reform everything. The under-secretary responsible for higher education, István Klinghammer, voiced the view in an interview with him that "In today's world it is the natural sciences and the mechanical sciences are producing value. The humanities, and culture, are very important, but they do not produce values, they give people delight and  enjoyment."

Are such views justified?

There might be many reasons why they aren't. First, there is an organization trying to test whether teaching philosophy in primary schools helps kids develop better skills, needed both for science and humanities related subjects, but of course also beyond school subjects - such as when reading news, instructions, contracts. According to some studies on the effect of their classes critical thinking group-games, with philosophy related material, can lead to such development. They also recently argued for this publicly.

Another function philosophy and other fields of humanities serve is one of being information sources that can shape decision making well. This happens on three levels: first, we all learn the basics of literature, history, the structures found in society throughout school. This shapes both our identities, our notion of what sort of beings we are and what has happened to communities of humans before our birth. An adequate preparation of this sort can help people spot dangers and threats, both on the personal and the community level, thereby guarding them against making immoral judgments, accepting very bad choices from their representatives, and so on. Second, keeping track of good and bad decisions, of different types of states and their relations, on how people conducted themselves and what good and bad effect that had (on their psychology, personal happiness, groups, economy, etc.) is important, both in order to avoid similar pitfalls, and in order to get good ideas for solving problems. Third, many practical questions touch on the lives of individuals, on the lives of communities, nations, institutions. If these questions are to be answered well, they need to be informed by data about how the individuals and the groups behave, what they are, what they value. It is not much use to push certain developments at all costs, if it radically undermines the life-quality of those whom it should serve. This mechanism at large explains why it is a bad decision simply to push forward production rates, without taking into account their effects on our environment, or its effects on small and large scale societal changes.

Any type of humanistic discipline, but especially literature, has an additional virtue: it provides us with a special understanding of others. Understanding isn't used here either its emotional meaning (as to forgive), nor in its scientific meaning (as to give a good causal explanation of it). Understanding in this sense means that we can see the motives for which others act, why those motives are important for them, why they resist forms of rationality that rely on values or reasoning that are external to theirs, and why certain people and groups cannot handle some problems. This sort of understanding can serve the role of disabling our animal instincts to react aggressively and hostile to anyone unknown, or belonging to a different group. Understanding disables our ability to condemn other people for things that stem from their being different from us.
Fostering this form of understanding does not mean - and as clever democrats and liberals know it never did - that one should accept evil, harm bringing means or the condemnation of virtues. A good liberal will stand up and try to show that she or he is right, and act accordingly. But that does not mean that she takes away the right of others to try and defend their views. Bad and faulty views fall, since questions of morality, conduct and norms aren't relative within a group. Nor are they relative on a general human level. (In relation to what would they be relative in the latter case?)
In connection to understanding consider literature for a moment: when one reads a book like Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher, the book takes about 10-16 hours to read, depending on your tempo, your imagination and level of tiredness. It tells the story of a single person - in the course of this it touches on other people, but all the way through, the protagonist is in the center. How often do you take the time and effort to pay attention to someone else for this amount of time? How often do you spend time on trying to figure out why and how it happened that one did just what one did? How often do you make so much effort to understand how someone's position in society makes them feel? Literature can enable us to do this.
Of course there are many different types of works, not all of them aim at giving us better understanding of others (some of them do not even aim at being entertaining, but for a good reason), some are just shallow forms of entertainment. There is not much wrong with fun, but those books are not the ones doing a lot of important work. The ones combining entertainment and enabling understanding are the great ones.

Also, a charge often brought against people studying humanities is, that many of them do not get jobs in their fields. Let us have a more careful look at this claim, and at why it is problematic.
1. What exactly does this mean? What percentage of people getting diplomas in humanities subjects do not get a job in their field? What's the percentage in law, in engineering, in economics, in management? One rarely sees such claims backed up by data.
2. Why is this a problem? A good training is not necessarily a vocational training. One can gain many skills, experiences and value without preparing for one given job. What sorts of skills can one obtain if one gets a decent humanities diploma with a decent result? A) one will be good at organizing large amounts of data quickly, B) learning new theoretical constructs quickly, C) use models to understand meaning, communication, social interactions better, D) communicate clearly.
3. If there are so many people getting humanities degrees that they cannot get jobs in their fields, why did the governments adopt a uniform and unrealistic support scheme for universities, where you get more money if you have more students? Obviously, this led the universities in every field to accept more and more people. Inevitably, the standards dropped. Since to do well in any field of the humanities appropriately one needs to be quite clever, it could easily be foreseen that the faculties will get lots of people who actually won't be able to do well in these subjects, and cannot get a job in this field with their diplomas. This is similar to the huge droup-out rates in informatics, maths or in other difficult fields.
4. Many people make the following mistake. They look at one or a few undergrad(s), someone who is at most average, or below that in his/her subject and conclude that the people studying in that field aren't studying anything useful, since they cannot give a clear account of what they will do, what their professors research, etc. Of course there is no field where, with the exception of a few outstanding students, young people could answer such questions well. They can give you textbook definitions. What can they tell you about the inner workings, the everyday, the many connections of their field to other social institutions? What can anyone without determination and aspiration tell you about such things? So, why not ask the best ones who have finished and have gotten jobs?
5. What exactly does it show that many people getting a diploma in the humanities do not settle for 'a job in the humanities'? It surely does not show that the overwhelming majority of them don't have the abilities, or knowledge to do so. There simply aren't too many jobs in the humanities. So, they work in all sorts of fields.
Where, you ask? At companies, at hospitals, for the government, as writers, and so on. Would it be better if all these jobs were filled by people with different diplomas? Is it so: the good and giving private sector would love to create more jobs, it is only that there wouldn't be enough people to fill them? No, this isn't the situation. And people with humanities diplomas are obviously capable of doing these jobs well.
But wait, couldn't they do these jobs just as well without their diploma? Well, it isn't sure that they could. Think of the following: people after leaving school with 16 or 18 aren't usually very reliable and disciplined. University gives them many skills in this. Even if at a humanities faculty you learn certain things not related to how a business is run, or a car constructed, you do not just read pulp. You have to exercise your capacities in many ways, figure out solutions to problems, prepare for exams, grasp difficult material, organize your life well and get through exams. All tests and experiences that strengthen the confidence and enable you to handle a job much better.

Also, let us not forget that most systems that are important in our lives, including moral, political, cultural systems (and by cultural I mean habits, forms of leisure and punishment, duties, all in all: forms of life) are not systems that emerge simply from the workings from underlying natural systems. Of course they are realized by such systems, but this does not mean that from the workings from the underlying systems we can understand the workings of the higher level systems. Anything in this world has an underlying natural realization. But this does not mean that the logic of a higher order system is always determined by the functioning of the lower one. Also, it does not mean that we can read off good suggestions on how to make a system work better by understanding natural systems.

Of course, no one clever is against cooperation between the humanities and sciences. Why would anyone be? Why wouldn't we use all the methods we have to discover interesting answers to interesting questions? The suggestion simply is, that the material of humanities is well worthwhile funding and studying, even working on it as a vocation, it can change lives, and thus it is valuable. At the same time when more and more people in the humanities understand how the sciences can be used to contribute to the pursuit of truth, the general public should understand why the humanities are doing just fine, doing good work and can solve many of their problems on their own. You just have to study them, before giving an opinion.

Plus: maybe it is not entirely fair to weigh this in, but most fields in humanities are still way more cheaper than research on sports cars, on far away galaxies, on new anti-depressants, on oil mining, etc. Many of these fields also receive large amounts of funding from the private sector. Although they contribute to economy and create jobs, taking into account their negative consequences - such as enforcing bad consumer choices, creating extra profit for already wealthy companies, pushing non-sustainable energy usage, etc. - is it sure that that's where government funding is best spent? Let's rather spend more on cancer research, Alzheimer's, good economic models, and research in ethics.