Satoyama Concept in Fukui

Anyone familiar with the popular anime My Neighbour Totoro (となりのトトロ, 1988) will recall the lush, idealised landscape known in Japan as Satoyama (里山).  Cushioned between the foothills of the mountains and rice paddy fields, Satoyama ecosystems are the result of centuries of local, small scale agriculture and forestry.  In recent decades, the preservation of these landscapes have become central to efforts to promote sustainable living both in Japan and internationally.

In August, the JAGUAR Project (Sustainable futures for cultural landscapes of JApan and Germany - biodiversity and ecosystem services as Unifying concepts for the management of Agricultural Regions) of Justus-Liebig University (Gießen) in collaboration with the Science Council of Japan (Subcommittee for Nature Conservation and Restoration), Fukui Prefecture, DAAD (the German Academic Exchange Service), the German Embassy in Japan, and DWIH Tokyo (Deutsches Wissenschafts- und Innovationshaus Tokyo), sponsored a Satoyama Symposium and Workshop that brought together researchers from Germany and Japan.  This event included public lectures in Japanese and English and a tour of the countryside of Fukui Prefecture where the participating researchers could learn more about local efforts at maintaining sustainable Satoyama landscapes. 

I gave a paper entitled “Ecocritical Views on Satoyama in Japanese Popular Culture” where I introduced the discipline of ecocritism to the Japanese and German scientists present (the concept is a relatively new one in Japanese cultural studies, and little known by scientists), and discussed how nature is depicted in Japanese popular culture from romanticism of the landscape to fears of apocalypse.   I concluded with a discussion of Satoyama as a Japanese “Heimat” landscape focussing in particular on My Neighbour Totoro and how the popularity of the film has led to the preservation of Satoyama landscapes through organisations such as the Totoro Forest Foundation.

In my capacity as media consultant for the JAGUAR Project, I have written this series of short articles on the highlights of our tour of cultural landscapes in Fukui Prefecture. 

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La Shijimi Restaurant / ラ・しじみ

Karma (カルマ, 1977)

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

- from “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold (1867)

I first became aware of the work of Nobuhiro Aihara (相原信洋, 1944-2011) through his collaborative experimental animated shorts made with legendary pop artist Keiichi Tanaami. Their styles complemented each other well, but one could always distinguish which sequences had been done by Aihara by his distinctive use of swirls and waves.  Even the poster Aihara designed for Hiroshima 2010 used a fresh take on his swirls, bringing together the iconic The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Hokusai, c.1830/3) with colourful figures representing the many nations that come together at the international festival. 

In his early experimental short Karma (カルマ, 1977), Aihara uses water as his central motif.  The film is hand drawn and appears to be shot on 16mm using a blue filter.  At first we can only see tiny specks on the screen, coming and going like snow flurries.  The specks gradually grow larger and take the shape of bubbles, then even larger into rivulets of water on a transparent surface.  The illustration technique is so expertly rendered that it almost looks like a photograph of a window on a rainy day.   

A close up on a large drop is timed to splash when the music kicks into high gear.  The soundtrack (uncredited) is the atmospheric  “Aegean Sea” by Greek psychedelic / progressive rock band Aphrodite’s Child from their double album 666 (1972).  As with all music by Vangelis, the composition is designed to create a certain mood and evoke certain imagery in one’s imagination.  This is why Vangelis has had such success as a film composer (Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner, etc).  “Aegean Sea” conjures up imagery of the ebb and flow of tides with the way the music crescendos and decrescendos and the way the memorable electric guitar melody weaves in and out of the otherwise tranquil instrumentation.

Just as the music ebbs and flows, so does the animation in this experimental film.  Aihara transforms the droplets of water into large spheres and that multiply like organic cells dividing.  Some of the spheres are empty, some are coloured blue, and still others are filling with patterns of waves.   It’s a constant flow of wave inspired imagery which climaxes with a full screen like a kaleidoscope of shapes unfolding then folding back on themselves until the imagery gradually ebbs away, concluding on the simple outline of a circle which itself slowly fades away. 

The title of the film adds an extra layer of meaning to the film, which Aihara has left us to deduce for ourselves.  Karma, the law of moral causation, is one of the fundamental doctrines in Buddhist thought.  According to Buddhism, nothing is purely accidental.  Everything that happens to an individual, is the direct result of past or present actions.  In Aihara’s animation, the way in which drops of water and spheres flow into one another creates an unending sequence of cause and effect.  It is a visual interpretation of the flow of karma from past lives into the present, and onwards, unceasing into the future. 

On February 27^th, 2007, Osaka-based sound artist Tetsuya Umeda (梅田哲也, b.1980) performed in collaboration with a screening of Aihara’s Karma as part of a CO2 exhibition (CO2=Cineastes Organisation Osaka). Instead of “Aegean Sea”, Umeda created sound using a floating sphere and a fan.  Footage of this event can be found on YouTube and still images of the event have been posted on the blog New Manuke.  

Karma was shot on 16mm and appears on the DVD Japanese Art Animation Film Collection 11: The Animation Group of Three and Experimental Anime (日本アートアニメーション映画選集11　アニメーション三人の会と実験アニメ, 2004), which can be found in the video archives of university libraries such as Musabi and Tamagawa.  The entire 12 DVD collection日本アートアニメーション映画選集　全１２巻 can be ordered from Kinokuniya, but it is unfortunately well out of the price range of the average individual. 

Cathy Munroe Hotes 2014

Stone (1975)

Oh peace in our day, peace in our day

Our day in the sun

You got lost in a time gone by

A day in the sun

- the last lines of “Prayer”, by Spooky Tooth and Pierre Henry, 1969

Nobuhiro Aihara (相原信洋, 1944-2011) is a unique individual in Japanese animation history.  In the early part of his career he worked as an animator on many renowned anime series and films from Obake no Q-tarō (Masaaki Ōsumi, 1965-67) and Kaibutsu-kun (Masaaki Ōsumi, 1968-69) to Gauche the Cellist (Isao Takahata, 1982), Night on the Galactic Railroad (Gisaburo Sugii, 1985), and Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988).

At the same time; however, he was active in the avant-garde art and experimental film scene, frequently travelling overseas to meet like-minded artists.  Stone (1975) is an early experimental work by Aihara that he made during a six-month visit to Sweden.  It opens with a montage of Rorschach-style inkblot paintings.  As the camera distance widens between the camera and the paintings, we see that the paintings are not being shot in a studio, but are taped to a large stone with a forest in the background.  The camera distance continues to change with great regularity, as does the lighting as the series was clearly shot over an extended period of time.  Clouds pass through the sky, winds increase, and the camera continues to widen the expanse of landscape, eventually tipping up to a pixilation view of the sky altering sky shot through a fisheye lens.   The sky darkens and opens on another day.  We can see hints of a person, perhaps the artist, slightly off camera.  The camera eventually moves back into a close-up of the series of inkblot paintings and the soundtrack alters from other-worldly sounds to the lyrical strum of a guitar.

The haunting soundtrack is uncredited, but it is the song “Prayer” by UK progressive rock band Spooky Tooth in collaboration with the French electronic and objet trouvé (found-object) composer Pierre Henry.  It is the final track on their join album Ceremony (1969), which was designed to be listened to as if it were a church service.  The lyrics to “Prayer” are derived from “The Lord’s Prayer” with the additional refrain: “Deliver us, we pray, from every evil / that's here, and to come, through the Virgin Mary / peace in our day, our day in the sun”. 

The camera changes locations to a square structure made of large stones.  Figures come and go, appearing to paint colourful abstract art on the stones using a ladder.  The third setup uses the side of a red barn for the pixilated drawings.  This time the camera goes in close enough for us to see that the artists are actually using chalk rather than paint.  As the camera moves back from a close-up on the chalk to a fourth setup.  This time it is a tall brick house with the date 1926 on its façade.  Over the course several days, the chalk drawing continues with the artists coming and going.  A young blond girl dressed in typical 70s fashion with a poncho and headscarf, dances occasionally in and out of the house.  She helps with the chalk drawing, dances in the street, and runs up to put her face into the camera.  It is in this sequence that it becomes obvious that Aihara did not take each frame at a constant rate.  Sometimes the girl appears to move at a regular 24 fps, while at other times the frames are temporally much further apart. 

The film is an expression of art and temporality.  The ephemeral nature of chalk art is contrasted with the more enduring qualities of natural stones, brick houses, and the heavens above.  Yet, as the use of pixilation demonstrates, these things that seem permanent are also changing over time.  The film reminded me very much of Lejf Marcussen’s similarly named Stones (Sten, 1982), which also screened at RICA Wissembourg 2014 as part of an hommage to the late Danish animator.  Instead of drawing directly on the stones, Marcussen superimposed images on stones – finding animal and human shapes and faces among the natural faces of rock.  As Henry David Thoreau is oft quoted as saying: “This world is but a canvas to our imagination” (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849). 

I have not been able to find any information about the choice of music for the soundtrack. I think it was chosen more for its style than for the Christian text of the poem.  Aihara regularly used psychedelic and progressive rock for his soundtracks.  That being said, the feeling of spirituality that the music evokes likely appealed to Aihara.  The refrain “You got lost in a time gone by / A day in the sun” also poetically expresses the interplay of time in this unique experimental work.

Stone was shot on 16mm and appears on the DVD Japanese Art Animation Film Collection 11: The Animation Group of Three and Experimental Anime (日本アートアニメーション映画選集11　アニメーション三人の会と実験アニメ, 2004), which can be found in the video archives of university libraries such as Musabi and Tamagawa.  The entire 12 DVD collection 日本アートアニメーション映画選集　全１２巻 can be ordered from Kinokuniya, but it is unfortunately well out of the price range of the average individual. 

Cathy Munroe Hotes 2014