Talk:Japanese Story

Untitled
"Sandy can warn him of the danger"

WHATS the DANger???? Obviously it was violent, gah —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.17.213.44 (talk) 01:31, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

He dives head first into shallow water and breaks his neck. I am australian, when I watched this film in lido cinema (an arthouse cinema in bankok) all the thais in the audience laughed when he jumped in the water. I however knew that something was wrong immediately, although I was surprised that he died.

--59.167.85.44 (talk) 01:11, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

The whole film led up to the moment of Hiromitsu's death - the inability of the two cultures to understand each other, the games they were playing, the depth of their knowledge of various subjects - and his death occurs within that context. For myself (and clearly for a lot of other people), there was another culture barrier to overcome: my own.

The pond scene confused me - I felt they hadn't shown a threat, didn't show his interaction with the threat, and didn't explain afterward why the threat became real and ended his life. But I spoke to a couple Aussie friends, and they had no idea what I was talking about: according to them everybody child growing up in Australia KNOWS that you don't jump headfirst into any water whose bottom you can't see, specifically because if you're going to survive your childhood you'd better ASSUME that there is a threat in the water just to be on the safe side. Sandy's entrance into the pool was even considered to be a bit irresponsible... a sign that she was becoming so caught up in their relationship that she was ignoring common sense. But her instincts kicked in when she saw Hiromitsu preparing to dive into the pool, though she was too late to stop it.

So the threat was assumed to be known a priori for both Sandy and Australian viewers, and this is, after all, an Australian film. Not just filmed there, or starring and directed by Australians, but actually informed by Australian culture and idiom. For the Japanese character and (in my case) American viewers, there is going to be more meaning lost in translation than one would expect from a movie where we speak roughly the same language. We can't really jump the filmmakers for not making it more understandable for us... doing so would have wrecked the film. 24.21.189.34 (talk) 23:37, 2 January 2011 (UTC)


 * AS a US citizen, I'm quite familiar with the "foreign notion" of shallow water, especially having dived into such many time, amazingly surviving, which is far less common. Simple notion, dive fully and hard, as the character did, break your frigging neck, it was between 4-6 feet of water! After breaking a few pool bottoms, I learned far better, as I tired of an aching neck! Is the concept THAT hard to fathom? Or has my European, Middle Eastern and farther Eastern experience jaded me in terms of common sense?Wzrd1 (talk) 05:25, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

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