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whatisonthemoon · 1 year

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Kumi Taguchi’s first Dateline report, The Church and the Assassin, which investigates links between the 2022 assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, and the Unification Church, aka “the Moonies”, opened her eyes to a side of her ancestral homeland she hadn’t seen before.

On family trips, and while filming her 2019 ABC documentary, Kumi’s Japan, in which she sought to understand her father’s last wishes, the Insight host came to know only a peaceful, harmonious country.

“It was the first time I have dug into a current, controversial story, and it felt different being there,” says Taguchi. “It was such a privilege, and a great way in which to look at my own sense of that country, still with these gentle, polite, lovely people, but there’s a lot going on beneath the surface.”

In the potentially explosive documentary, Taguchi meets with investigative journalist Yasuomi Sawa at the Yokohama Archives of History in Tokyo to learn about Abe’s connections with the Unification Church. (Abe’s alleged killer told investigators he was motivated by a grudge he held against the church over his mother’s bankruptcy.) Bizarre footage is also shown of Abe and Donald Trump at a Church event.

“What I know from my dad [who was an investigative journalist in Japan] and what I saw in Mr Sawa, is that Japanese journalists are very thorough,” says Taguchi. “You’d think maybe there’s a sense of restriction and they don’t want to criticise the government. There’s none of that. Speaking to Mr Sawa reminded me of that robust journalistic heritage in Japan, especially in that massive building in which every newspaper in the country is archived daily. Japan still has a very strong print industry where physical newspapers are still massively popular.”

In heartbreaking interviews, Taguchi speaks with people who claim their lives have been destroyed by the church’s donations requirements. She also conducts conversations, inside a shuttered church premises, with church members, including a leader.

“There’s a lot of fear among church members. But when we arrived, they were so welcoming. I was worried it might feel a little like [dealing with the Church of] Scientology, like, ‘Oh god, now I’m on the radar!’ I didn’t feel like that at all. We were very open and honest with what we were doing and what questions we were asking, and why we felt we needed to ask them.”

Regular viewers of Dateline, which is Australia’s longest-running international current affairs program, broadcast since 1984, may notice a shift in tone towards the end of the report. After a commercial break, Taguchi appears in the home of a young mother who has prepared for disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear explosions or military attacks, by installing a tiny portable bunker in her living room.

“It feels like a quirky thing at the end,” says Taguchi. “But it’s part of the culture in Japan and such disasters are not out of the realm of possibility.”

The structural change to include a five-minute human interest segment, following the main 25-minute report, is intended to broaden audience appeal and cater for digital platforms.

As well as umpiring Insight forums for her second year, a job Taguchi relishes because, “I feel like that’s where we need to constantly be aiming for in our daily lives – it’s OK to disagree and it doesn’t have to end in fisticuffs”, she plans to film another, as yet unspecified, report for Dateline. Other topics in the program’s 2023 slate include Scotland’s housing crisis due to the short-term rental industry and stories from Jamaica, Turkey, Ukraine and Denmark.

“I find it amazing that a program like Dateline can be still so strong when there’s so much competition in such a globalised market,” says Taguchi. “Twenty years ago, I remember switching on Dateline, and it was my only window into the world. I wonder whether its longevity is because it’s not a deliberate Australian lens, but there’s a way in which Australians ask questions and frame stories. Generally, as Australian storytellers, I don’t think we’re afraid to be a bit bold.”

#shinzo abe #unification church in japan #japanese church #moonies #kumi taguchi #japan #unification chur #ffwpu #family federation for world peace and unification #religion

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yougetsu · 18 days

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Books & B-T

Books/stories that might have inspired B-T lyrics or albums:

Salome by Oscar Wilde Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare Hamlet by Shakespeare Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson Neuromancer by William Gibson Solaris by Stanisław Lem Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Lewis Carroll Season in Hell Arthur Rimbaud The Stranger by Albert Camus Fantomas by Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau The Fall of Icarus by Ovid Dada Manifesto by Hugo Ball The Surrealist Manifesto by André Breton The Rosicrucian manifestos The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman JoJo's Bizarre Adventure by Hirohiko Araki Hearts by Kumi Himeno The Soul of the Night by Chet Raymo Vita Mechanicalis by Inagaki Taruho

Books mentioned by Acchan:

Villain by Shuichi Yoshida Kokoro by Natsume Soseki Audition by Ryu Murakami Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami The World Five Minutes From Now by Ryu Murakami No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai Hakyoku by Tono Haruka Kairyou by Tono Haruka Neko Nari by Numata Mahokaru On Decadence by Sakaguchi Ango Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima Death Spirits by Yutaka Haniya Living Tips by Itsuki Hiroyuki Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino Shiki by Fuyumi Ono Bride of Deimos written by Etsuko Ikeda & illustrated by Yuho Ashibe The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Other authors mentioned by Acchan:

Junji Ito Randi Taguchi Ryunosuke Akutagawa Yasunari Kawabata Natsuhiko Kyogoku Ayatsuji Yukito Sakuraba Kazuki Nobuyuki Fukumoto Hermann Hesse Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sources:

nopperabou.net Jrockarchive This is not greatest site Buck-Tick Zone Vk BT group FT bulletins B-T profiles through the years I've saved Personal scans & magazines

Feel free to add more books/novels/mangas <3

#i'll update this soon #cause i have more authors but i need to confirm the sources #buck-tick #sakurai atsushi #<3

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sheeks99 · 2 years

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SBS Insight

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rajsuri · 5 years

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Kumi Taguchi | Photo by Raj Suri

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A post shared by R A J S U R I (@rajsuri) on Mar 12, 2019 at 12:56am PDT

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I made this candid portrait of KUMI TAGUCHI - Japanese Australian ABC TV host. Kumi represents a modern diverse woman in Australian media - we need more such role models in Australia who inspire women from diverse Australian backgrounds to be more active in the Australian media space.

Pleased I could attend an honest insight & open discussion on “Women in Media and Politics"and #Diversity in Australia with KUMI TAGUCHI.

Kumi Taguchi by @rajsuri

#FCA briefing

@dfat Sydney

12 March 2019

#rajsuri #film #photographer #story #journalism #Australian #diversity #media #KUMI TAGUCHI

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brody75 · 7 years

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Wolf Guy (1975)

#wolf guy #kazuhiko yamaguchi #kumi taguchi #Sonny Chiba

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justfilms · 6 years

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Wolf Guy - Kazuhiko Yamaguchi 1975

#Wolf Guy #Kazuhiko Yamaguchi #Etsuko Nami #Kumi Taguchi

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peashooter85 · 2 years

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The Last Kamikaze

Born in 1947 Mitsuyasu Maeno was a down on his luck actor who just couldn't seem to score a big role. He had a troubled personal life, undergoing two marriages that ended in divorce and surviving a suicide attempt. Unable to make movie stardom, he settled into a career as a porn star, playing roles in 20 films. You might remember him from such films as Tokyo Emmanuelle (1975), a film most famous for the lead actress having sex with an entire soccer team.

Maeno was also a staunch right wing ultra-nationalist, who believed in the ideals of bushido, supported the overthrow of the Japanese constitution, and wanted a return to the authoritarian and nationalistic government of Japan that existed before World War II. One of his greatest heroes was Yukio Mishima, a Japanese writer who in 1970 attempted a coup by taking the commander of a military base hostage. He forced the commander to assemble the base personnel, who he intended to win to his cause with an impassioned and rousing speech. Rather than overwhelming support, Mishima was met with laughs and jeers. In one final act to inspire the soldiers to his cause he produced a dagger and committed ritual seppuku, the traditional suicide of the samurai where the person stabs himself in the abdomen and disembowels himself. This likewise failed to garner any support, and thus the coup ended in failure.

Another of Maeno's heroes was the politician Yoshio Kodama.

Kodama was a war criminal and yakuza gangster turned politician who often worked as a fixer for other right wing politicians and political groups. Of course, Kodama was super duper corrupt and it's no surprise when in 1976 he was caught bribing Japanese officials on behalf of the Lockheed corporation so that Lockheed could get some good deals on selling airplanes in Japan. Kodama was also perpetually under investigation for tax fraud.

Of course I say that Kodama's corruption was no surprise to many, but to Maeno the scandal was shocking and soul crushing. Maeno saw the scandal as a betrayal of Japanese honor and ideals, and vowed to rain divine wind on Kodama as revenge for his treason. Maeno was also an amateur pilot, who often used this skill in his many films. In fact in one film he even had sex with the actress Kumi Taguchi while simultaneously flying a plane, which I have to say ... that's a pretty impressive piloting skill! Over the span of a couple weeks he flew a plane over Kodama's house in order to recon the area.

On March 23rd, 1976 Maeno and two friends rented two planes at Chofu Airport in Tokyo. All three were dressed in World War II Japanese pilot uniforms. Airport officials were, of course, suspicious because of this but the three men claimed they were filming a World War II movie. Before taking off, Maeno posed for a photograph with his rented Piper Cherokee airplane while in full kamikaze regalia.

Maeno and his friends flew to Kodama's home, making a few passes before settling on a route of attack. Maeno began a dive while his friends in the other plane filmed the event. Maeno shouted over the radio "Long live the Emperor!" before crashing into the second story of Kodama's home.

Fortunately for Kodama, he survived the kamikaze attack as he was situated in the first floor of the house, the second floor having sustained the brunt of the damage. The Japanese government was never able to make any tax fraud charges stick and he was never punished for his role in the Lockheed scandal. He died of a stroke in 1984.

#history #suicide #kamikaze #mitsuyasu maeno #fail #weird #weird history

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riseofthecommonwoodpile · 2 years

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A short round, but easily one of the best i’ve had doing this. To be fair, it was half re-listens, which accounts for nearly all of the 9's, but even outside of that, almost unanimously great. It did have 3 albums that got the boot, which is also a high amount, but eh, they're gone now.

Arca- Stretch 2 (7.5/10)

Biosphere- Substrata (8.5/10)

Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys- The Tiffany Transcriptions (10/10)

Carissa's Wierd- Songs About Leaving (8.5/10)

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone- Answering Machine Music (7.0/10)

The Cherry Point- Misery Guts (8.0/10)

Clinton Green- Iliad (8.5/10)

CVRSED CHXRCHES- a place between time (7.0/10)

David Wise- Donkey Kong Country (9.0/10)

Dean Blunt- Stone Island (9.0/10)

Dolly Parton- Jolene (9.0/10)

Domino- GO GiRL (7.5/10)

ECCO UNLIMITED- NHK REMINDS YOU TO BOOST YOUR SIGNAL (6.5/10, deleted from library)

Frank Zappa- Lumpy Gravy (9.0/10)

Have A Nice Life- Deathconsciousness (9.0/10)

Hecker- Speculative Solution (5.0/10, deleted from library)

Honey Popcorn (허니팝콘)- Bibidi Babidi Boo (5.5/10, deleted from library)

Hot Chip- One Life Stand (8.5/10)

I Hate Myself- 10 Songs (8.5/10)

Jamosa- LUV ~collabo Best~ (8.0/10)

The Junior Varsity- Cinematographic (8.5/10)

Kumi Taguchi (田口久美)- Tokyo Emmanuelle Fujin - Amai Yoru No Tameiki (エマニエル夫人～甘い夜のためいき～) (8.0/10)

Lee Perry- Roast Fish Collie Weed & Corn Bread (9.0/10)

Manfred Schoof- European Echoes (9.0/10)

Maxwell- Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite (9.0/10)

Mika Vainio- Life (...It Eats You Up) (8.0/10)

.mp3Neptune- Empty Faces in Digital Spaces (8.5/10)

Neil Young- On the Beach (9.5/10)

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds- Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (8.5/10)

Pierre Boulez- Répons; Dialogue de l'Ombre Double (8.5/10)

Saves the Day- Through Being Cool (9.0/10)

§E▲ ▓F D▓G§- STORM MEMORIES (7.5/10)

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culturalgutter · 7 years

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One of the greatest joys in my life is coming across almost ineffable wonder. I take pleasure in the good and the bad, sure, but there are wonders in this world. There is art that transcends our petty categories of “good” and “bad.” Things I find difficult or even impossible to evaluate because they fill me with awe. The merely competent rarely contains wonders. Most merely competent art rarely contains wonders because it often sensibly makes do with what it can accomplish what it can with the resources it has and the ambition or fervor to try anyway. Most art that is widely considered bad contains one or maybe two such wonders. Then there is Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope (1975).

Wolf Guy is a film adaptation of the two-volume manga, Wolf Guy: The Origin (1971), written by Hirai Kazumasa with art by Hisashi Sakaguchi. The manga is itself an outgrowth of Kazumasa’s 1969 short story, “Vice School.” Kazumasa really felt wolf guy and over the next three decades his short story expanded into young wolf guy and adult wolf guy stories, novellas, manga and two film adaptations, Toho’s Horror of the Wolf (1973) and Toei’s Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope. Wolf Guy: The Origin concerns an American-Japanese middle school student, Akami Inugami, who is a werewolf. Akami transforms into a very groovy werewolf who reminds me of Wendy Pini’s wolf-riding elves in his personal wolf style. (Elfquest’s Wolfriders didn’t mount up till 1978).

Sakaguchi’s cover art for Wolf Guy: Origins, Vol. 2

ElfQuest art by Wendy Pini.

But rather than fun hijinx as Akami tries to hide his nature from the faculty and his fellow students, the manga is dark. There are stabbings and rape. I have both volumes in Japanese, but I don’t read Japanese. So I’m going with what I can gleam from the volumes, Sakaguchi’s curly, twisty art and Patrick Macias’ introduction to Arrow Video’s blu-ray release of Wolf Guy. Incidentally, I highly recommend all the special features including interviews with Sonny Chiba, director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, producer Toru Yoshida as well as essays by Patrick Macias on “the resurrection of Wolf Guy” and Jasper Sharp on the context of Wolf Guy in film history. Sharp uses my favorite Japanese aesthetic term, ero guro nansensu–“erotic grotesque nonsense.”

In the film, our enraged lycanthrope, Akira Inugami, is played by Sonny Chiba. Inugami is the only survivor of a clan of werewolves who were massacred by their human neighbors. Now he lives in Tokyo and his wardrobe and soundtrack are fully 1975. The film opens as a terrified man in an immaculate white suit and gloves stumbles into traffic, screaming, “The tiger is coming!” Inugami slaps the man trying to get him to calm down. But Inugami is much more compassionate than the street fighters Chiba often played, and slaps him almost delicately. The man is still in no state to explain as he raves about the tiger and how “Miki has cursed us!” Surrounded by stopped cars in all four directions, he flops from hood to hood before his back is slashed open by invisible claws. He turns and we see as his chest and throat are torn open. Inugami covers the dead man with his trench coat. As he looks into the neon, he sees a ghostly tiger panting–but he’s the only one who sees it.

Inugami is questioned by the police, and it seems like he always is. As the detectives grow impatient with Inugami’s answers, they bark at him, “Wherever you go, there’s always an incident!” A werewolf just can’t get along in this human world. But Inugami’s in luck. He’s exonerated by the autopsy report. The blame is placed squarely on a demon.

The detectives argue briefly before releasing Inugami. “It’s the only possibility. I can’t do anything about it,” the chief detective says.

“It’s unbelievable.”

“A human being wouldn’t be able to slash a body like that and not in such a short time, either.”

Miki sings at the strip club.

Yes, that’s the world we’re in. Is it noir? Is it horror? Is it martial arts? Is it science fiction? Is it a yakuza picture? A movie about a cat demon lady? It’s all of them. Inugami is released and begins an investigation into this tiger and the stripper/singer Miki who has cursed these men. And I think it’s more of an enticement than a spoiler to say that he discovers so much including: amazing 1970s fashion; relentless funk and psychedelic guitar; blood like tomato sauce; a murder romper**; intriguing burlesque; labial butterfly club decorations; a distraction mouse; gangsters playing ring toss using a broken mannequin; threatening chanteusery; a grudge turned into a tiger; a band/ group of heavies called, The Mobs; government conspiracies; and a secret intelligence agency willing to weaponize the paranormal whatever the cost–including gross surgery represented with real surgical footage. There are so many wonders I cannot share them all.

Sweet opening titles

Do you notice anything about this butterfly

Distraction mouse!

The murder romper.

In making Wolf Guy, director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, writer Fumio Konami and producer Toru Yoshida created a wonder, even if maybe they don’t feel like it now, at least according to the interviews included in the special features. And while there are so many things I could talk about with this movie, I am going to focus on one. Sonny Chiba never transforms. He becomes invulnerable on the full moon, to the point that he can break steel bars and suck his own organs back into his abdomen with a smile. But he never gets hairy. When I first saw the movie, this disappointed me. Because part of the draw was the idea of Sonny Chiba turning into a werewolf. I wanted to see his transformation. Seeing the film again, with time to ponder, I feel differently. It makes sense to me, not just in terms of the limitations of the resources given to the filmmakers and the time they had to research werewolf movies and read up on European folklore, (i.e., none). It makes sense that Sonny Chiba’s werewolf form is Sonny Chiba. In fact, Sonny Chiba might be the ideal werewolf form.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, “The Werewolf or the Cannibal.” c. 1512

Historically it’s not all that off. While the werewolf now is very much about the transformation, in the past the werewolf had mostly been recognizable for murder and cannibalism, often targeting children. So much so that when French missionaries encountered First Nations accounts of windigo, they understood the stories as about werewolves.*** During the period of the European werewolf trials, the accused didn’t always transform into a wolf. Some acted like wolves. Some just killed and ate people. And when given stories of how someone had transformed into a wolf by means of a salve, belt, robe or skin, there were judges and scholars who would dispute that the werewolf had in reality transformed. Instead, they argued that it was a matter of perception–that the accused believed and perceived themselves as changing into a wolf and that any eyewitnesses’ senses had been deceived.

And Wolf Guy is not alone in its cinematic presentation of a werewolf in human or mostly human form. A few recent movies present werewolves that way. In When Animals Dream (2014), Marie’s nails crack, she grows more body hair in awkward places and eventually her eyes change, but mostly she changes mentally. As her town’s doctor tells her, “You’ll also change emotionally and be short-tempered and aggressive.” Her mother, who goes full werewolf never looks like Lon Chaney Jr. or Benicio Del Toro in their respective transformations. Ginger Snaps (2000) has almost a sliding scale from the vaguely lupine Ginger when she’s having fun to angry, monstrous wolf. As far as I remember Sybil Danning remains constantly Sybil Danning in Howling 2: Your Sister Is A Werewolf (1985).**** And in Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001), Béatrice Dalle’s Coré has all the signs of being a werewolf without the furry looks. Driven into a frenzy, she bites her lovers to death during sex.

Wolf Guy is much more peaceful than some of those werewolves. He doesn’t bite or eat human beings. Completely human JCIA Agent Katie (Kumi Taguchi) might lick his blood off his hand during sex, but he eats a steak at a fancy restaurant. In fact, he’s such a gentleman, I don’t remember ever seeing him without his pants on. In his most intimate moments he removes only his jacket, tie and shirt. He doesn’t kill in a ravening fury. He only kills to protect himself or others. Akira the last of his kind. As she died, his mother told him that it was his responsibility to avenge the wolf tribe, but he walked away from that. The brutality is reversed. He is a victim of human violence and still compassionate towards humans, even protecting terrible people. He tries to help the man killed in front of him, the last member of The Mobs and Miki (Etsuko Nami), the woman who has been tormented into becoming demonic. He is loved by three of the five women in the film: Kate; Miki, whose grudge is killing men; and, Taka (Yayoi Watanabe), a woman from his old village who loves the werewolves for their kindness. (One of the women was his mother).*****

Sonny Chiba in his werewolf form.

Even when he is driven too far, Akira’s instinct is to retreat from the world, to live peacefully by himself. His lycanthropic tragedy is not that he is cursed to kill, to reveal the beast controlled and restrained by civilization. Instead his curse is that humans perceive him as an animal to be used or destroyed. And in the modern world, this human cruelty is inescapable.

If Yamaguchi had more resources, he might have made a werewolf movie that was more like a traditional Western werewolf movie, transformation and all. But I think the movie would be worse for it. As it is, Wolf Guy is a work of wonder.

*Horror of the Wolf was based on Kazumasa’s Wolfcrest novels, available in English from Kodansha.

**Inugami, as I note, is not murderous, but I really like the phrase, “murder romper” for his final outfit.

***No, you’ve read too much about werewolves!

****No, your sister is a werewolf!

***** Miki is also named after his mother. And then there’s a very awkward sex scene.

~~~

Wherever Carol Borden goes, there’s always an incident.

Wonder of the Wolf Guy One of the greatest joys in my life is coming across almost ineffable wonder. I take pleasure in the good and the bad, sure, but there are wonders in this world.

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