The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

66 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
course! After a moment of reconsidering silence: Well, a machine
pounds the rice... Although the hand-pounded tastes so much
better!
Watching the film of course also revives memories of school life in
the thirties and later on, during the war, under the American
occupation. For someone who is accustomed to the way the
Japanese deal with this topic, it is no surprise that they show neither
signs of aggression nor resentment.
The curriculum under the imperialistic ideology does not lead to
long discussions, as someone not acquainted with Japan and the
Japanese might have expected. That was then, and there was
nothing an individual could have done about it.
Nobody remembers having worn a uniform to school, which
corresponds to the reality of the time in rural Japan. During the first
years of Shôwa (Shôwa 1 is 1926) children went to school dressed in
Japanese-style clothing: when it was warm, a cotton summer
kimono held together by a narrow belt, and in winter Japanese-style
pantaloons. Only a few in each class, children of the rich or civil
servants, would wear school clothing. They were the ones who
attracted attention (Fukaya 1996: 200). Tarô came from Shikoku, an
area belonging to the Japanese countryside. The surroundings to
which he was accustomed would thus have accepted the way he
was dressed. But he came to urban Tokyo, where changes of course
had been quicker to settle in, although his classmates had probably
just got accustomed to their school uniforms shortly before his
arrival.
Apart from not being attentive to what the teacher was saying
because of his concern over the class's reaction to his appearance, it