One of the ironies of living in an age of plenty is that it becomes impossible not to feel as if the walls are closing in. The commodity that seems to be in shortest supply during Japan’s period of high prosperity is space and it’s the lack of it, both physically and mentally, that begins to drive people quietly out of their minds until they themselves become the metaphorical termites they so feared quite literally undermining the foundations of their own home. It’s a desire for clearly-defined individual space that sees the Kobayashis longing to escape the cramped conditions of the post-war danchi housing estates, but achieving their dream of becoming homeowners only seems to compound their anxiety. After all, what are they supposed to want now?
The cinema of the 1980s is filled with “crazy families” and a sense of impending doom that the salaryman dream is about to implode. The danchi had been a byword for post-war aspiration, but all the respectable salaryman wants is to get off them and become master of his own domain, as the owner of a home in the suburbs. One of the chief reasons the Kobayashis wanted to move seems to have been a mutual desire for privacy in which the children could have their own rooms leaving the parents space to restore their intimacy as a couple. Of course, this desire is immediately frustrated by the arrival of the grandfather, which forces the parents to sleep apart and provokes a crisis in their new utopia as it becomes clear that once again there is simply not enough space for everyone.
The Kidos, a similarly ordinary middle-class family, experience something similar in A Sandcastle Model Family Home (砂の上のロビンソン, Junichi Suzuki, 1989), in which the parents spend their evenings sitting in a cupboard watching TV with headphones on to avoid waking their children who all sleep together in the main room of their tiny danchi apartment. When they win a mansion in the suburbs in a competition to find the ideal family for an ideal home, they think all their dreams have come true, but the changing nature of aspiration in the high pressure Bubble society quickly undermines their familial bonds. All they have to do is live in the house for a year for it to become their legal property, but during that time they must agree to have their entire lives on show and allow the general public – including, at one point, a party of elderly people determined to hold a funeral there – into what is quite literally a show home. Not only do they experience constant harassment from unsuccessful applicants to the competition, but also fierce, class-based resentment from those around them and, most particularly, the father’s colleagues, who demote him to demonstrating their revolutionary blender at a supermarket until the act of performing family life eventually destroys the familial unit completely.
Yoshimitsu Morita’s The Family Game (家族ゲーム, 1983) similarly hinted at the hollow performativity of contemporary family, though the Numatas are among the small number who show no desire to leave their danchi home, even if the father is forever ordering people to his car so they can “talk without whispers”. Like Mr Kobayashi and Mr Kido, Mr Numata is a hardworking salaryman, largely absent from the domestic space, though on the rare occasions he is present simply orders everyone around, at one point telling one of his sons that they have no need to think for themselves because it’s his job to think for them. He also tells his wife it’s her job to manage the domestic space, over which he accepts no responsibility, largely leaving her to parent alone but forever blaming her when his sons don’t live up to his expectations. A traditional housewife in a very conventional family, she is lonely and unfulfilled, quietly regretting having had children so young and reflecting that her life would be easier if her kids were just nicer. The children, meanwhile, are forced into the roles of good son and bad, with the youngest rebelling against social expectation by slacking off at school until the incredibly strange tutor his parents employ begins to take a paternal role and teach him to think for himself only to see him accept conventionality on achieving their shared goal of getting him into the better local high school.
Mr Numata’s obsession with getting into the right schools is indicative of a society ruled by status and hierarchy with the father, of course, sitting at the top. Mr Kobayashi and Mr Kido are evidently less comfortable in that position or with the constraints of the salaryman existence, while Mr Kobayashi’s conviction that his family suffer from the “disease of modern life” also hints at his own anxiety about the negative effects of consumerism. He worries about his daughter’s immaturity and precociousness and his son’s obsessive studying to get into a prestigious university, reflecting that the space he thought would save them has only driven them further apart, while putting distance between himself and the corruption of the city has in fact compounded the family’s madness. The solution that he finds amounts to a deconstruction of the family unit, in which the world they inhabit becomes open and borderless, perhaps devoid of privacy but equally of constraint.
These Bubble-era families are all in their way “crazy”, struggling to redefine themselves in age of excess and increasing individualisation which leaves them dissatisfied with their allotted roles and the diminishing returns of conventional success. The persistent claustrophobia of life lived under oppressive social structures and the breakneck pace of a nation shooting straight past the economic miracle can’t help but drive them out of their minds, resulting only in a kind of unseeing mindlessness or an unstoppable desire to burn it all down and seek freedom in the now abundant space of civilisation’s ashes.
Hayley Scanlon
Weird Weekend present The Crazy Family on Friday 26th April, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Hayley Scanlon is a Japanese and East Asian Cinema specialist, writing at Windows on Worlds. Follow Hayley on X, here.