Directors who return to the same theme over and over commonly use the same actor to embody it. Kurosawa Akira cast Mifune Toshiro as the intense hero in film after film about masculine, if not always traditionally macho, heroism. Itami Juzo starred wife Miyamato Nobuko as the tough cookie taking on charming, unreliable guys in comedy after comedy satirizing the excesses of bubble-era Japan.
In a similar way, Hamada Gaku has become the go-to actor for Nakamura Yoshihiro, making five films to date with the director since starring as a naïve college student in Nakamura’s 2007 The Foreign Duck, the Native Duck and God. Diminutive and pixie-faced, Hamada looks more like a cast member in The Hobbit than a hero in the usual Japanese commercial film.
But as he shows again in the director’s latest, See You Tomorrow, Everyone (Minasan, Sayonara), he is also perfect, and not only physically, as the “little guy” who turns out to be more feisty in a hostile world than he seems at first glance – that is, the center of many a Nakamura film.
He plays Satoru, who has grown up in a danchi – one of the many housing projects built the postwar boom years as self-contained communities. That is, the Japanese version of “workers’ paradises” in the West, as a grainy old newsreel illustrates with shots of happy housewives shopping and chatting and happy kids learning and playing – all in the danchi!
So when a 12-year-old Satoru (played by an obviously adult Hamada) tells his ever-patient mother (Otsuka Nene) in 1981 that he plans to spend the rest of his life in the danchi and not attend the junior high school outside it, we half understand why she agrees, though his decision is not fully explained.
When his former classmates traipse off to their new school, Satoru remains behind, but instead of vegetating in front of the TV, he embarks on a rigorous regime of study, martial arts training and patrolling the danchi with a clipboard to make sure all his neighbors are safe, month after month, year after year.
Yes, Satoru is a bit off, but he is also a nice guy, befriending an effeminate boy (Nagayama Kento) who is being bullied at school. He also has the usual adolescent male sex drive, as he proves when the no-nonsense girl-next-door and his closest confidant (Haru), invites him over for (strictly controlled) make-out sessions. At age twenty he even finds a girlfriend in the sweet, cute Saki (Kurashina Kana), who shares his desire to stay close to home, and lands his dream job as an apprentice to the gruff master baker (Bengaru) of the danchi cake shop.
But as the years pass and the number of his former classmates dwindle from the original 107 (with on-screen titles tracking the decline), Satoru’s already small world steadily shrinks. But every time he tries to go down the long flight of steps leading to the bigger world outside, he freezes and panics. Will he end up an urban Robinson Crusoe, marooned on his crumbling island of concrete?
Based on a novel by Kubodera Takehiko, Nakamura and Hayashi Tamio’s script finds an answer to this question that also makes excellent, if un-obvious, sense for Satoru’s character and situation. Similar to the climax of Fish Story (which screened at FEFF in 2009), Nakumura ties up all the carefully spun plot threads in a reveal-all ending, this time in a “paradise” far different than the one glimpsed in that long-ago newsreel. Even Satoru (especially Satoru) is not the same.