Blue Hour – Interview with Yuko Hakota 

Yuko Hakota’s Blue Hour screened as part of the Japanese Film Festival in Sydney and Melbourne. The film is Hakota’s feature debut and is strongly written from personal experience, a story that follows 30 year old Sunada’s (Kaho) journey from Tokyo to her rural hometown of Ibaraki as she gains a stronger understanding of who she is in the world. During her visit to Sydney Addy Fong spoke to Hakota about her film, the differences between rural and city life, and being a woman in Japan:

Thank you Yuko San for taking this interview with me. Can you talk about how you came up with the name of your film Blue Hour?

I wanted to do a film that was themed around time. The period of blue hour refers to that short period of time where the sky is very blue where you’re changing from daylight to night time, this short time that really well represents this sort of transition and difference between childhood and adulthood. It’s this very short period of time that encompasses the theme of the film.

At the start of the film, the character is a TV commercial director. I heard that you started off directing TV commercials, is this true and how did this inform your script writing?

Yes, I was a TV commercial director but before that I did some editing for a magazine. For my first feature film I wanted to do something ‘namanamashi’ [which translates to mean very raw and real]. I wanted to draw from something I personally experienced that I can portray [which is] very real and raw in the film. This was also done by the actor Kaho who did a raw personal performance and experience type of storytelling for this film. 

Was it difficult breaking in and debuting your feature? Given perhaps the difficulties and challenges of being young and female and starting out?

This is actually a question I inevitably get asked a lot being a woman in Japan in film. I’ve found that it’s not actually that different from doing commercials. Going into film, many people expect it to be a very big difference but for me it’s not that big of a difference and of course there are many people involved with making a film, so it’s been fun and I’ve had a positive experience overall. 

That’s great. In the film, the family feels quite disjointed, maybe due to the differences between the city and country life. There’s a particular scene where the mum seems to have given up on cooking and has rice balls and instant noodles stocked in the fridge. Is this a comment on the lack of communication between family members? What is the significance of this scene in Japan where I guess city life is about convenience and microwavable meals, or is it more about how family is kind of broken? 

When I created this film I really felt that in terms of Japanese film there are many films that show the beauty of Japanese family, love, and the relationships, which end on a happy note. But I felt [like I needed to portray] people that have difficult relationships with their family and there’s not this sort of happy home situation. For me this film isn’t showing a family that’s necessarily showing any hatred towards each other or a family falling apart necessarily, but more trying to depict this sort of family structure where there are some unresolved feelings and difficulties that many people do experience in their lives. I wanted to show that in this film. At the end of the film there’s not necessarily a resolution or a happy ending but [the family] they’re also just accepting each other.

I felt like the women in the film had this distrust of men. The mum mentions she saw this person indecently expose himself in front of her on the train and in Japan there’s women only carriages. Can you talk about this and how there’s become this distrust of between genders in society?

Do you have female only cars here or anywhere?

No, we don’t have any of those here.

So what do you think of these female only carriages?

I think it’s quite nice but at the same time I don’t know whether it shows that there’s a problem with trusting men. I guess as a woman being on a female only carriage could make me feel safer especially travelling alone at night. I don’t know whether they exist because of that. In the film the three women are in the living room chatting about this topic, I wasn’t sure whether it’s something that’s spoken about much in Japan or there’s an overall acceptance that men are just um horrible people?

[Laughs] It’s a bit gross they have to have this sort of thing. In the film the main character’s in her 30s, her mother is in her 60s, and the grandmother’s in her 90s. I was really concerned with showing how all these different women in different generations are living in contemporary Japan. I wasn’t really focusing on men for this film. I wasn’t specifically excluding men but more focusing on women and I was really surprised that when I’ve shown the film in Japan many women cried when they watched it. I wasn’t necessarily surprised that there were people crying but I really felt that as a director seeing the reaction of Japanese women it seems like they have it really hard. I realised the reason a lot of these women were crying is because they were happy that this film showed their everyday struggles and these stories have not been told before and their experiences they had not seen it on screen before. I felt that this was something that people weren’t really talking about, the experiences of everyday women in Japan. Showing it in other countries people would also cry when they saw it but it really hit me how this film really is hitting something in Japan about the experience of women there that hasn’t been told as often in film. 

Is it because it’s true to reality that when people watch it they’re moved by it?

I find that in Japan people really like to sympathise with the media they watch so when a viewer can empathise with the characters in the film there’s a stronger connection. I found that with women they really had this connection but to a lesser degree men didn’t feel that connection quite as strongly because they didn’t see themselves depicted in the film. It’s not necessarily a negative reaction, it just wasn’t quite as strong connection for them. I’ve only just arrived in Sydney and when I went to the cafe I’ve already seen that there’s so many different types of people here from all around world. In Japan it’s a very homogeneous society comparatively. It’s really nice to see so many types of different people around mingling with one another, in Japan you don’t really see this, it’s kind of hard.

You said the film presents the three generations in the family. Is it common for the grandma to look after the grandchild? It’s not explicitly spoken about in the film but that’s what was hinted at although I think the main character says something about the grandfather passing away and the grandmother was lonely. So the close relationship with the grandma and the grandchild, that they look after each other is that a common thing in Japanese culture?

Seeing three generations together in a family together is not uncommon but I think that in Japan it is changing especially in the city families are getting smaller so you see parents with the child only sometimes Parents only and married couples living without children or even married couples living separately so they won’t live together. Even though it’s not an uncommon thing to see in Japanese culture I think maybe it’s becoming less common now to have three generations all living together especially in the countryside you have more space so you can have these bigger families and bigger houses than in the city with smaller space so people are having smaller families.

More importantly in the countryside you have more of the older culture and the old ways of thinking so they’re preserving traditions perhaps that is not so much being preserved in the city. 

So a woman will get married young, have a child and then live with her parents and that’s the traditional way of doing things. There are many places and people like that. With all these changing family dynamics this is actually very difficult in the city because you have all these different situations going on so the traditions are changing.

Do you personally want to hold onto those conditions or are you okay with that change?

Of course there are good, positive things about living with the three generations but personally I would not be able to do it. I think that people would probably say ‘oh you shouldn’t say that’ but for me personally I would not be able to live with three generations in one house. Of course the people that like that lifestyle, I’m not saying it’s a bad lifestyle, but for me personally I would not like it and people should remember that there are all different types of situation which I’ve shown in the film. Not everyone gets along so well with their family. There should be lots of different ways that people are allowed to live and that’s fine.

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Interview by Addy Fong. Many thanks to Anne at the Japan Foundation who interpreted the interview for Addy.

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