Searching Japan for Soul Survivors

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

If “Does Your Soul Have a Cold?” strikes you as an unusually arresting title for a documentary, you can probably put it down to the fact that it was the slogan for a SmithGlaxoKline advertising campaign that brought antidepressants to the Japanese market in 2000. In other words, it’s the work of a professional copywriter. The idea was not only to introduce the Western concept of depression to a culture still leery of it, but also, by suggesting that, like a cold, anyone could “catch” it, to reduce the shame the Japanese felt about being depressed. (We Americans — New Yorkers especially — are, of course, proud to be depressed, and are suspicious of anyone who isn’t at least seeing a therapist: What’s wrong with them?)

The other good thing about the title “Does Your Soul Have a Cold?” is that it automatically inspires irreverent responses. Such as, “No, it’s more like bronchitis,” or “Actually, I think it’s the flu.” But there’s nothing irreverent about the film itself, which airs Monday night on the IFC Channel. Directed by Mike Mills (“Thumbsucker”), it unspools as a procession of hushed, gorgeously composed images in which five depressed Japanese people — three men and two women — all of whom are on a variety of antidepressants, explain their lives and their feelings of sadness before the compassionate, understanding gaze of photographers James Frohna and D.J. Harder.

In 83 minutes, we get to know these people remarkably well in some ways, less so in others. While the pills they swallow may be Western, everything from the subjects’ extreme politeness to the Tokyo apartments they inhabit (all five are resolutely single) will strike the viewer as distinctly Japanese and, on some level, culturally opaque.

They’re an interesting bunch. Mika is a pretty woman in her 20s who delivers medical supplies for a living. She has been depressed for about five years. After she tried to hang herself (only a stroke of luck saved her from death), she began taking Paxil, among other medications. She is better than she used to be, but is now deeply addicted to the drugs. No longer is she “fighting the depression,” she says — she’s “fighting the antidepressants.”

Kayoko is a slightly older woman who has also been taking Paxil. She felt much better for a while, but then the good feelings leveled off. Now, instead of actively wanting to kill herself, she merely wonders what the point of living is.

Though they gobble down vast quantities of antidepressants (most of which I’d never heard of), drugs are not quite so central to the portraits of the three men. The youngest, Daisuke, is a pudgy, bespectacled engineer who no longer works much and spends most of his time staring at his computer in a tiny, epically messy apartment, swigging pills with alcohol and soda, and smoking all the while. He says he agreed to appear in the film “to have a record somewhere of having been alive.” Because, more than any of the others, he appears almost totally isolated, it’s a remarkably moving statement.

Records, whether in the form of diaries or photographs or talismanic objects, are important to all these people. It’s as if they need external proof of their own existence. Taketoshi, a slender man in his late 30s who ties his hair in a ponytail, has been depressed for the entirety of his adult life. He keeps journals of everything from his sleeping patterns to his daily moods to the relative dilation of his pupils, minutely mapping out the progress he is or isn’t making. He has never worked (his parents support him), and there are moments when one almost suspects him of having made depression, and the quest to cure it, something akin to a spiritual calling. For all the pills he swallows, he believes “hope is the most important thing in medicine.”

Ken, a computer programmer in his 40s, is strongly attached to his photograph albums, which date back to early childhood. But that’s probably the most normal thing about him. He doesn’t appear to be depressed so much as simply unusual. A cripplingly shy, bisexual masochist, he is nonetheless also an exhibitionist who walks around town in tiny shorts, sleeveless tops, and high heels. We see footage of him on stage at an S&M club, where he is repeatedly punched and slapped by a tattooed woman. Though he is obviously fascinated by Japan, Mr. Mills describes his film not only as an “examination of the everyday lives of five people taking antidepressants in Tokyo,” but also as “a meditation on the issues of globalism, pharmacology, and social shame.”

Here things get a bit slippery. Although we meet the parents of a couple of the subjects, no therapists or drug company executives appear. The history of anti-depressants in Japan is presented (very briefly) in printed statements that appear on screen. In these we are told that SmithGlaxoKline introduced not just anti-depressants, but the concept of depression itself, to Japan in 2000. However, in another printed statement we learn that Japanese pharmaceutical companies began educating their countrymen about depression in the late 1990s. Presumably, they would not have done so without some drugs to sell. But whether they came up with the idea on their own, or were merely copying what they saw happening in America, is not made clear. Nor can we be sure whether Mr. Mills himself has any opinions on the reality of depression as a clinical condition.

The press notes also discuss the Japanese attachment to Buddhism, whose first precept is that “suffering exists,” and describe Japanese feelings about happiness as being very different from American ones. For the Japanese, happiness is “fleeting,” not something to be demanded or expected. Hence the very notion of curing sadness through medication is fundamentally alien to the culture and an example of what Mr. Mills considers “globalism” and a part of Japan’s fascination with all things American. Pharmaceutical imperialism is being hinted at, but in a slightly murky, unsatisfying way. The film is much more successful in its five portraits. It also offers a visually beguiling travelogue of Tokyo, whether in the form of massed umbrellas, crowds descending on a crossroad, the familiar neon lights, or quiet pockets of the city where we observe ranks of untended bicycles, bursts of cherry blossom, rain drops on telephone wires, as well as the buses, trains, and escalators that, as they carry the citizenry to and fro, subtly convey a sense of urban passivity.

At times the film is possibly too lovely and self-consciously “composed.” A few more hard facts might have interrupted the flow of images but strengthened the overall effect. Nonetheless, Mr. Mills’s preference for showing rather than telling has its own quietly convincing power.

bbernhard@nysun.com


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