Bokura no nanoka-kan sensō

Bokura no nanoka-kan sensō

Frankly, I have no idea how to write a review of a movie, of all things. But let us try.

Having watched the anime Bokura no nanoka-kan sensō (official English: Seven Days War) this evening made me realize that I do quite enjoy these kinds of coming-of-age stories. It makes me nostalgic, in a sense, evoking a cathartic state of melancholia.

Content

The movie itself is easily described: a wholesome, slightly bittersweet coming-of-age drama that hardly polarizes. The primary, thematic dichotomy that the plot revolves around is one between two states of being: the world of the adults (interestingly, pretty much all of them are men) who are expected to “suck it up” to society, or at least to the immediate representants of power and status within society, and the prerogatives of the young in their liminal state of adolescence, who are still permitted to stay true to themselves—although their inability, their struggle of coming to terms with themselves is precisely the irony of their privileged condition.

As expected of such a plot in movie-format, the execution is very straightforward: the high-schooler Mamoru convinced his neighbor and classmate Aya, on whom he secretly has a crush on, to run away from her domineering, status-obsessed politician father a week before her birthday, and a few days before her supposed move from rural Hokkaidō to the bustling metropolis of Tokyo. Four other classmates join the plan to hide in an abandoned mining facility on the mountain top for a week until Aya’s birthday. (Of course, Mamoru had some ulterior motive, namely intending to finally confess his feelings before it’s too late.)

The hideout, however, is discovered quite quickly by the adults, because a seventh child had the same idea: the 11-year-old Thai runaway Mullet was hiding from the immigration authorities in the very same facility. These, however, show up very quickly, and the six high-schoolers decide to stage a little rebellion against the adult authorities that want to take custody of Mullet. For several days, a back and forth between the protagonists and the authorities, as represented by the immigration office agents and the associates of Aya’s father, ensues.

In this, the teenagers enlist the aid of the anonymous masses through savvy usage of the internet: video uploads, twitter accounts. The event immediately becomes a favorite of the public media discourse, until Honda, the secretary of Aya’s father, utilizes the social media machinery himself and exposes the identities of the six high-schoolers to the internet. The tides of online opinion turn quickly: in the end, the support of the many, one might think, was merely for the novelty, the transience of the interesting event, and not for the cause itself. And it is the very social media debacle which expose these uncomfortable sides—the dark sides they are afraid to face, to come to terms with—of the teenagers to everyone, including the six “comrades-in-arms” themselves. In the movie’s climax, this culminates in a mutual confession scene where everyone is finally being honest with, and learning to accept, themselves.

Nevertheless, using a makeshift balloon, the teenagers escape from the authorities after reconciling with each other, and with the sides of themselves they kept bottled up, safely reuniting the Thai runaway Mullet with her parents.

The epilogue implies that even Aya’s father, although he still retains his domineering attitude, has learned at least a little lesson, as it is implied that he became somewhat more accepting of the idea that his daughter might have a will of her own. All is well that ends well: this is not a movie that engages deep reflection on the many issues that are being referenced almost in passing, and whether there were any consequences for the protagonists is up in the air.

Reflection

Still, the main theme of the movie—at least the one that stuck out as the most central theme to me—is the notion of being true to oneself; therefore, of identity. Authenticity seems a usable term, although too strong seems the idea of a rule-based adult society, and respite from said rules in the state of childhood: society forces adults to compromise, and inevitably has them pretend to be something they are not. In contrast, But a reversion to the state of childhood as a being-not-yet, something that might be comprehended as a perpetual state of liminalty, is being reached during the movie’s climax even for the adults, as well: when the wig of Aya’s father slips, altering his physical appearance, the rules that demand of everyone else to subjugate to his will seem suspended for the moment: his secretary Honda finally quits, being fed up with a career of pretending to be something he is deeply dissatisfied with, and the construction workers enlisted to aid his cause—much to the bewilderment of the immigration bureau officers—join Honda in throwing mud at the politician, who for a moment is staged to be no longer who he usually is. In a normal situation, this would have been tantamount to social suicide, but the rules of the social game are voided for a brief moment in time. That the alteration of the body plays a role in this scene evokes associations with the concept of the carnival, where the rules of the everyday are also suspended.

What the freedom associated with adolescence refers to exactly, however, is another question. At one point in the movie, this is being referred to through the idea of “wagamama”—selfishness—being the privilege of youth. The idea of not being selfish, of being able to look beyond the confines of oneself, for example, has been expressed in the modern ideal of Bildung: an idea of becoming aware of oneself, of developing an identity within this world, precisely by making the external, the alien, one’s own—and by doing so, becoming capable of looking beyond the confines of the selfish desires, and consequently, also of understanding others. This is the idealized objective of education, but also of taking up a profession. And the ability that comes with this process of Bildung: being able to see beyond one’s own desires—the human wagamama—may then be proposed to be what the notion of adulthood embodies.

The movie’s woefully underdeveloped critical side refer to this problem, and to the problem that being an adult in modern society requires more of us than overcoming our desires, and making something external—such as a culture, or our profession—part of ourselves. As expressed especially through the function of Honda, the secretary, in the worst case this may result in a situation where one is expected to be something, to do morally questionable things that one actively rejects.

That these problems, the problems of identity, of growing up, of becoming part of a society which lies beyond our own selves, outside of our control, have always been an important aspect of our human condition is unquestionable. But the movie’s take appears to be strangely modern, almost anachronistically so. That these issues have been exacerbated in recent decades, in large part through the very social media used by and against the teenage protagonists in this film, that there are many more channels of interaction all not merely demanding the proposal of identities, but also attempting to enforce their own ideas of such identities on us, that remains another, much more contemporary, issue.