Page 119 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

106 Nightmare Japan

described by Los Angeles Times reviewer Kevin Thomas as emotionally
‘jarring’ (para 15) and ‘profoundly disturbing’ (para 1), All About Lily
Chou-Chou, though not a horror film in the most conventional sense of
the term, contains some of the most unsettling depictions of cruelty, and
its consequences, ever recorded. It also explores the multiple social and
cultural continuities and discontinuities that inform the destructive,
antisocial behaviours of the ‘dangerously disaffected’ (para 15) characters
populating not only Iwai’s tour-de-force, but also several of the darker,
more harrowing works of contemporary Japanese horror cinema.
As the widespread practice of ijime, or bullying, is one of Iwai’s
primary concerns in All About Lily Chou-Chou, a brief exploration of
some of the socio-cultural factors behind this pervasive and disconcerting
phenomenon is in order. As Sugimoto Yoshio explains in his book, An
Introduction to Japanese Society, incidents of ijime, though faintly
declining in recent years, has been ‘rampant in schools since the mid
1980s, the very time when Japan’s economic performance became the
envy of other industrialized nations’(Sujimoto 2002: 127). As we shall
soon see, however, its roots may in fact be much older and run far deeper.
A collective – rather than individuated – activity (though often one
person’s agenda emerges as dominant), ijime is an all-too-prevalent
process by which: ‘a group of pupils…humiliate, disgrace, or torment a
targeted pupil psychologically, verbally, or physically. In most cases of
ijime, a considerable portion of pupils in a certain class take part as
supporting actors’ (127). In this sense, ijime, as Sugimoto points out,
differs from conventional notions of juvenile delinquency. Rather than
being limited to the vile machinations of one or two students dedicated to
bringing ‘ignominity upon a minority of one’ (127), ijime is distressingly
expansive, with ‘a strong group’ gaining ‘satisfaction from the anguish of
a pupil in a weak and disadvantaged position’, often out of a ‘fear of
being chosen as targets themselves’ (127). As a social practice, ijime
remains a significant aspect of contemporary Japanese culture, frequently
reflecting the larger culture’s ‘pressures of conformity and ostracism’
(128).
In The Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese
Culture, Roger J. Davies and Osamu Ikeno further illuminate some of the