Asakiyume mita

This remarkable movie, Kiku to Isamu, is about the lives of biracial siblings, older sister Kiku and younger brother Isamu, being raised by their frail grandmother deep in the Japanese countryside. It was made in 1959 and is an amazingly clear-eyed, unsentimental depiction of Japanese prejudice--that also contains a stinging indictment of American racism. People keep telling the old granny that she should see about getting the kids adopted through a program that brings the offspring of Japanese women and American servicemen back to the United States, but one kindly neighbor says,

You think it will all be fine if they go to America, but I read the papers. The discrimination between white and black is terrible in America. People say blacks stink and spit on them. It happens even among the soldiers here on the bases.

And when another neighbor says, "The seed is from over there and should be returned," the kindly neighbor says, "It's not as if they were pumpkins or something. With humans it's women who have the eggs." Whereupon the other retreats into well-I-don't-know-about-all-that-book-larnin'-type-stuff.

What's really remarkable about the film is that they don't cast some tiny, adorable little girl for Kiku. She's only eleven, but she's *big*. She's not only a girl, not only Black, not only poor--she's not even conventionally pretty (though she shines with beauty at moments). But she's *such* a complete, real person. She gives as good as she gets ... until it all gets to be too much. You believe in her 100 percent, and your heart breaks for her. (Isamu also is teased, and feels it, but he's smaller, thinner, cuter--and a boy. All of which makes things easier for him.)


(CW for suicide attempt, racism, family separation)

And then you stop and realize, the actress (Takahashi Emi) no doubt faced some of the very things that the character faced. Wakanomori found several articles about her. She did indeed have a hard time, but her love of acting gave her a path forward. You see some of that in the character of Kiku too. Here's a short clip of her performing, all while babysitting (notice the baby on her back?)



Here's an image of her as an adult:



It's a really good movie, and also a beautiful look at how daily life was lived in rural Japan in the period of Tonari no Totoro. As Wakanomori said, it's highly likely Miyazaki saw it.

A friend on Tumblr introduced me to this short-film series by Cecile Emeke, "Strolling," which Emeke describes as "connecting the scattered stories of the black diaspora."

These videos let you fall into conversation with complete strangers. It's not really conversation, of course; it's monologue (even in the first one embedded below, each of the people takes turns talking to you-the-viewer rather than talking to each other), but the intensity with which they address you, and the inherent interest of the things they're talking about, make you feel like it's important you're there.

All of the conversations are with people of color, and so all of them talk about the experience of *being* a person of color--but not (mainly) in the United States: elsewhere. As aliettedb and others have pointed out, racism in the United States is not the only style and pattern of racism, and it's really enlightening to hear people talk about what it's like elsewhere.

But that's not the only thing that the people talk about by any means. The young woman in France talks about how what makes fast-food jobs so exhausting is the emotional effort of being sociable and smiling all the time, and about what makes something true, and the two in Jamaica talk about Patois and the language of education there, for example. I've only watched the two below, but I love them and intend to watch the rest, a bit at a time.