One way to make sense of Japan is by understanding the concepts of wabi and sabi, two words which sum up much of what makes Japan special to outsiders. These ideas -- which are closely tied to the Japanese tea ceremony -- are a bit hard to pin down in English. Wabi essentially means sober refinement or the beauty that can be found in simplicity and imperfection, while sabi is the austere serenity that comes with the passage of time, allowing us to appreciate how an object has aged. Although they sound like concepts only Zen Buddhist monks would concern themselves with, they come up in daily speech surprisingly often, like when Yasu and I were admiring the outside of an old abandoned house built during the Showa Period, and he said, "Isn't this house cool? It's really wabi-sabi!" The Japanese fascination with haikyo, or the ruins of our supposedly modern age, is definitely linked to this. I often see a tendency for stories in Japanese film and anime to follow this simpler "less is more" aesthetic view, like Eve no Jikan, an anime about a coffee shop where humans and robots can interact as equals, which has no plot to speak of other than the interesting characters we meet there. Another example might be the "Endless Eight" arc in season two of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, in which Haruhi (who is a God) wishes summer would never end, and so the last week of summer repeats over and over again...for a total of 15,532 times (although we only see eight of these repetitions). While many fans outside of Japan were angry about having to watch the same events eight times, albeit with entirely new animation and visual design for each episode, the avante-garde concept was somewhat better received by fans here in Japan.
Poor Yuki had to relive the same week 15,532 times -- I feel so sorry for her..
6 comments:
So did you hate Endless Eight? I found it was not that bad, if you take it with some good 25 proof Jinro...
I admire what they tried to do. But I still cant digest the whole: "8 ep which are basicaly the very same thing".
The second seasson had so few episodes and half of then were the "same" one -,-.
It would be way more interesting if they ,for instance, showed an summer by yuki´s point of viewn and other by mukuru´s and later by haruhi´s ...
...Is it me or they planned all this so they could do a movie about the disappearance arc? Danm u kyoani raping us like that! >.<
(they really know how to steal money from our otaku wallets dont they?)
V2, yes, it was a goof up for sure. In the Disappearance of Haruhi movie, there's a scene where she looks at the camera and says, "I'm sorry for making you all wait!" She's talking to Kyon and the others, but she's really talking to us.
I don't know the books well enough to know what other material they'd have used. It's kind of a disfunctional thing from the inside out, considering their inability to get the 10th book out. I mean, it'll only make you millions, therefore you never release it and make sure that fans just move on?
Haruhi is an excentric project in more wayz than one.
Although I cant deny that Im still love whit it. And Im sure that its the same whit most of haruhi fans, thats the only explanation for the dvds sell numbers. Maybe they burned some kind of sublimal message in our brains and now we really belive that haruhi is god (I do).
"less is more"
except for when it comes to giant breasts..??? and i mean GIANT.
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