Millennium Actress (千年女優) and the Fantasy of Japan’s Destiny

 

 

One of Japan’s many remarkable contributions to world culture must be its animation (or ‘anime’). Not only is the Japanese anime industry of huge scale and its production of very high quality, it is often the cultural sophistication and imagery/imaginary sumptuousness of the anime productions that are truly amazing. Unsophisticated audience appreciates them sensuously—thus, generations of Chinese (and other nationalities too) youths grew up enthralled by Japanese amine series, knowing that their own country is incapable of producing anything that is even a hundredth as interesting as the Japanese stories. A Chinese boy probably first got to know about Greek mythology through Saint Seiya, just like he is also likely to have encountered Detective Conan before Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie. As a teenager, I marvelled at how the Japanese anime The Twelve Kingdoms (十二国記) appropriated ancient Chinese culture and language in such a phantasmagorical fashion that made me ashamed of the state of Chinese culture in China itself… But apart from the endless and awe-inspiring creativity of the Japanese when it comes to making serial anime stories, in this essay I am more concerned with the extent to which the Japanese has also been able to make anime a medium for more serious cinematic experiences. In other words, compared to any other countries, Japan probably has done much more to make anime films ‘proper’ films, which are in turn proper subjects for literary and socio-historical interpretations. Here, I focus on the 2001 anime film Millennium Actress (千年女優 MA), which I recently watched at Oxford’s Magdalen Film Society (praise be to the MFS, they really choose good films!).

    In China, the Japanese invasion during the WWII is a traumatic experience that is constantly reiterated and a ‘strategic’ wound that is frequently re-opened as need arises. The prevailing understanding is that Japan has never really repented for the war, and therefore it harbours militarist ambitions. In reality, however, although Japan did not and never will ‘repent’ in the fashion that the Chinese in their victim complex desires, the WWII is clearly an experience that is also painfully mulled over and agonized over by the Japanese themselves. In this regard, MA is similar to Grave of the Fireflies (蛍の墓, GF, 1988), as they both regret and condemn the war experience. But while GF is entirely set in the War and its primary topic is just the War, MA can be viewed as a more encompassing allegory of Japan’s agonizing search of destiny in the 20^th/21^st centuries.

    The word ‘Millennium’ in the film title has a threefold meaning, in and outside the film. The actress Chiyoko has played in roles that span over a millennium—thus, ‘Millennium Actress’; with the film being produced just at the turn of the 21^st century, millennium also referred to the historical juncture at which the Actress Japan stood then; and finally, if we count Japan’s civilizational history from the time in which her culture really started to flourish—Heian Jidai—then Japan is also an actress that is just over a thousand years old. Therefore, it is not really a wild leap of imagination to read the story as really a story of Japan. The wild time travels and the enactment of various historical scenes and significant events in Japan’s history (though this tend to be social history) throughout the film makes this suggestion even more plausible.

    If we understand Chiyoko as really a stand-in for Japan herself, then the storyline immediately assumes a level of meaning deeper than just a sentimental tragic love tale. Throughout the story, Chiyoko keeps on searching for someone—the soldier/painter who she came across on a snowy day, fell in love with, but did not even see the face of. The soldier/painter accidentally left a key, and Chiyoko holds onto that key which she must return to its owner. The key becomes the ultimate signifier for its elusive owner, but we knew that the key was also supposed to open something. Yet, that something, just as the face and real identity of the soldier/painter, was never revealed. In other words, in the entire story, Chiyoko was chasing after a dream: an object of her love/desire that she doesn’t even know—nor do we—what is at all. But she knows that she had fallen in love with him, and that to find him and be with him was her destiny, and she would not settle for otherwise. She searches for a destiny that is obscure, unknown, but that is endlessly romantic. Let’s not beat about the bushes: Japan is searching for her destiny.

    There is one minor interesting point in the film that I think was really really clever, and made me admire this film more. In various flash-back sequences of Chiyoko’s acting, it is the earthquake that abruptly wakens us from the dreamy sequences, and returns us to the grim world of reality and real time. There is no better signifier that captures the tragedy of Japan as a nation better than the earthquake. Every time when Chiyoko and we as spectators are deeply engaged in her search for her desire/destiny, and when such searches seem to promise to turn up some positive results, the earthquake comes and shatters the fantasy. Japan, enchantingly beautiful as she is, is nevertheless plagued by that disease that seems to be a perpetual curse on her. March last year, the world over has seen how devastated an earthquake/tsunami has left the world’s second/third largest economy; but even without this, we also know that Tokyo is always preparing for a devastating earthquake that is bound to occur some time down the line. This curse from the nature regularly interrupts in Japan’s fantasizing about her destiny. She may be rich, she may be beautiful, she may be technologically-advanced and powerful, but it probably only takes a huge earthquake for everything to be completely nullified again. Her destiny is in constant jeopardy; and it is this kind of fundamental anxiety that has produced doomsday films such as Japan Sinks (日本沈没2006)—nothing very complicated about this.  

    Apart from recapitulating Japan’s historical experience through Chiyoko’s acting in various old Japanese eras and scenarios, what’s also interesting is Japan’s more recent fantastic ambitions that are illustrated in two of her flashback sequences: the one with Chiyoko sitting in a western horse-drawn carriage, and the spaceship launch episode. For me, these are allusions to Japan’s fascination with the West (西洋) and its ambition in technological or even military supremacy. And both these two aspects of fantasy had also been the true experience of Japan in the 19^th and 20^th century. Setting Chiyoko’s theatrical endeavours not only in historical Japan but also in these two frames declares beyond any doubt the allegorical relationship between Chiyoko and Japan.

    So finally, what is Chiyoko/Japan’s destiny? Near the end of the film, on the snowy hills in Hokkaido, Chiyoko finds not the soldier/painter, but only the painting he has left. The painting in fact paints nothing else than where Chiyoko actually stands at that moment—snowy hills. Thus, the painting does not give any fresh clues to Chiyoko as to the whereabouts of the soldier/painter/destiny, but only refers to her present agony; it only refers to itself. Destiny again escapes Chiyoko/Japan, and she despairs.

    The one detail that was not revealed to Chiyoko but revealed to us the audience was the fact that the soldier/painter was killed long ago in Manchuria. It would be too harsh a fact for Chiyoko to know—she has in fact for all her life been looking for someone/something that has long been irrevocably lost! But the message for us can’t be clearer: the life-loving soldier/painter who did not want to go to war in Manchuria/China was forced to go, and killed. In other words, Japan’s destiny was already lost when she went into that war—an unjustifiable war. After the WWII, no destiny was possible for Japan. The search for Japan’s destiny will just be like Chiyoko’s fantasies—only after an object of desire that is not only unknown/unknowable but also already lost.