Introduction
Tokyo Godfathers is a film about waste, human resolution, and the night. Directed by Satoshi Kon and released in 2004, it is a Christmas film and Kon's least-known work, sitting behind the more widespread influences of Perfect Blue (1997), Millenium Actress (2001), and Paprika (2006). As an illustrator and filmmaker, Kon sits within a lexicon of artists who have historically straddled both roles in the Japanese animation industry, where animated works are often adaptations of graphic novels. The industry experienced a boom in the post-war period when successful adaptations of popular series such as Astro Boy gave studios the funding to expand. In the following decades, Japanese animation came to be known for its exploration of science fiction and technological themes, shown in the successes of the Mobile Suit Gundam Wing (1995) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) series.
However, as the turn of the millennium arrived, the industry saw the entrance of artists who sought to explore the blending of real and fantasy, a theme that runs throughout the body of Kon's work. Tokyo Godfathers is unique in that it is the only Kon film that explores this theme while also sitting in a category of Japanese animated films that examines the nature of urbanity, specifically the identity of the Japanese megacity. While previous films in this category use the strengths of animation to imagine the metropolis through a science fiction lens, Tokyo Godfathers is unique in exploring the animated city with a faithfulness to realism. In harnessing the strengths of animation to circumvent the limits of traditional filmmaking, Satoshi Kon depicts a type of urban night that had thus far evaded capture. By focusing the setting of the urban night at the center of his narrative, Kon is then able to explore and make visible the hidden nocturnal Tokyo, and more importantly, the people that shape its understanding.
Thus, this paper will begin with an outline of the history of Tokyo's urban night and the development of its hidden nature. Then, I will describe how the hidden Tokyo night shapes urban waste, and how animation as a medium can be instrumental in showing these landscapes. Finally, I will show how Satoshi Kon, through his directorial choices that give visibility to these hidden landscapes, allows Tokyo Godfathers to contribute to a culture of material and social resistance.
1. Tokyo Night
Modern Nocturnal Tokyo
Although the nightscape of Tokyo today feels unmistakably modern, the formation of a nighttime economy in the metropolis began before the formation of modernism as a global culture. Due to Japan's rapid expansion of colonial powers in the Pacific Ocean, increased exposure and adoption of Western industry, and a subsequent boom in population, urban life developed rapidly in Japan, leading to the emergence of new types of middle-class consumerism. These new modes of consumption "drove the emerging night-time economy, including cinemas, dancehalls, and jazz venues, as well as bars, cabaret spots, and nightclubs"[1]. During the 1920s, night culture in Japan echoes that of the swinging 20s in America. Boosted by the growing popularity of Western media, music, and dance, Tokyo witnessed a boom in dance halls and music venues. However, this growth was not met without opposition from the local government, as the night-time economy became increasingly associated with the "underbelly" of Tokyo, i.e. illegal operations and sex work. A restrictive policy was introduced in 1928, which required all dance halls to operate with a license and be controlled by the police.[2]
Tokyo's night economies, and by extension the night itself, were further restricted in World War Two, during which Japan's cultural industries came under political control for propaganda purposes. This forced the night into social niches and the hidden spaces of the city. In subsequent years after the war, Japan's reluctance to associate its image with its cultural industries caused "the Japanese government to refrain from introducing any comprehensive administrative structure or policy to regulate the cultural economy".[3] On one hand, this allowed night economies to develop and flourish by occupying hidden space within the city. On the other hand, the government's use of law enforcement as the only regulatory force within night economies persisted, resulting in a truce between the two parties requiring that "the alternative subculture of the night-time economy remained untouched as long as they did not interfere with the wider social world".[4]
By the 1960s, urban centers such as Tokyo's Shinjuku district had become hubs for the city's nighttime economies. As a major commuting hub, Shinjuku station was historically the major landing point for migrant workers traveling into Tokyo. However, as Tokyo rapidly de-industrialized in the '70s and '80s, following the emergence of globalized corporations and subsequent liquidation of wealth, Shinjuku station and its surrounding area became a hub of night-time economies for a white-collar population, many of whom need to commute back to the suburbs before the rail system closes after midnight. As a major urban hub that continues to shape the global image of Tokyo, Shinjuku is "well known for its gaudy neon sign, advertising Golden Gai bars, nightclubs, restaurants, karaoke venues, theatre and 'love hotels' to entertain Japan's rising middle class".[5]
Shinjuku in Tokyo Godfathers
Shinjuku is also one of the main settings of Tokyo Godfathers. The film opens with the characters in a church in the area, where they are lining up for the Christmas day meal service. Before transiting to the next scene, Kon inserts two establishing shots that show central Shinjuku at night. The shots recall stereotypical imagery of Tokyo's urban night, characterized by colorful lit-up semiotics lining the facades of buildings, busy sidewalks, and the streaking lights of traffic. Bright reds, oranges, and yellows that contrast with the blue of the night are emphasized by the background artists in these shots to heighten their aestheticized look (fig. 1, 2). Here, the urban night is a pastiche that sits among countless other images of "oriental" urbanity. Tokyo is reduced to a certain "feel", and the setting itself is decontextualized from a real location. The urban night here is commercial, recognizable, and accessible to the average viewer.
In the next scene, however, Kon cuts to a sequence showing Miyuki on a Shinjuku rooftop. Waiting for Gin and Hana to return, she kills the time by sending spitballs to unsuspecting civilians below. When the spitball reaches its target, the civilian cranes his head to look for the culprit, but cannot see anything other than the giant illuminated billboard, with the text "tears of an angel" advertising jewelry, obscuring Miyuki's figure from their view (see fig. 3). From the very beginning of the movie, Kon is using elements of the nocturnal city to show how its commercialization and aestheticization hides our marginalized protagonists, traversing the urban night, from public view. From there on out, Shinjuku transforms from a pastiche into a real location, exposed and formed by the experiences of the protagonists.
2. Tokyo Waste
Waste and Urbanity
As home to one of Tokyo's busiest commercial centers, Shinjuku has also become a site where the urban condition of the metropolis can be most readily observed; namely, the waste generated by human excess. These landscapes of urban waste are the principal setting of Tokyo Godfathers, where our main trio not only depend on them to survive but are shown to navigate them familiarly in their ecosystems of mutual care.
The image of the city as one that is associated with waste has a longstanding history. From the beginning of "urbanity", cities have garnered a reputation as a “dirty” environment rampant with overcrowding and disease. This reputation was exacerbated during the Industrial Revolution; the onset of industry drew people towards urban centers in search of work, and what came to be known as "slums" formed in the process as a particularly urban condition. The association of cities with waste was a factor that drove the conception and formation of suburbs, a form of urban design that was successfully exported worldwide. In the present day, advancements in waste management facilities and the onset of neoliberal "urban renewal" efforts, most of which were designed to displace the poor, have turned cities back into attractive places of residence. Nevertheless, the nature of modern urbanism continues to describe humanity's complicated relationship with the presence of waste.
As a megacity, Tokyo is not exempt from this relationship. Waste management in Japan, particularly in its urban centers, has a turbulent past. Tokyo was largely destroyed in the August 1945 firebombing by the US Air Force. The city's vernacular, built almost completely of wood, was lost in the process and replaced by the material of choice for modern construction: concrete.[6] At the same time, Japan's post-war economic growth meant the country was accumulating new types and quantities of construction and consumer waste at exponential speeds. As local governments were incapable of predicting these rapid changes, urban centers lacked sufficient treatment facilities for these newly generated wastes.[7] Furthermore, an increase in Japan's middle class in the 1980s led once again to major changes in lifestyle, leading to an increased demand for daily products, which "was especially true for small plastic containers and wrapping materials".[8] The increase in single-use product waste coincided with the growth of urban nighttime economies, of which a large percentage is comprised of fast-paced food service businesses that may depend on take-out orders to turn a profit.
Nocturnal Waste and the Tools of Animation
It is here that we can see the relationship between waste and the night, in which waste is the way by which night remembers the day. All bars, restaurants, and even grocery and convenience stores throw out their garbage at closing during the dead of night, usually into back alleys, where it will sit until garbage collection comes at the crack of dawn. The night is thus the time when waste accumulates and is then removed from the city. The treatment of what collective society has become averse to is delineated by the cover of darkness. In the mountains of trash bags left in back alleys and outside apartment buildings, the night is forced to remember the day. After the garbage trucks come along at the rising of the sun, the day need not remember the night. Tokyo Godfathers, however, is a film that reverses this narrative to remember succinctly not just the physical landscapes of the night (defined by waste), but also the community that calls this landscape home and depends on it to survive.
At this point, it is important to discuss why animation is an important medium for the depiction of real urban night landscapes of waste. Kon's choice to animate a city in the style of realism presents a whole new understanding of the strengths of animation in city building. In science fiction, city building can be a creative and aesthetic exercise. In realism, city building must be a selective exercise. Because the filmmakers have full reign over the film's environments, the new task is to filter and select the parts of the city that are shown and how they are framed, lit, and interacted with. Yet the removal of this limitation presents to the director the novel challenge of intentionality. If curated well, only in animation can a city be portrayed in forms and ways unknowable with a physical camera, and by staying loyal to the physicality of the city, animation allows the city and built environment to express itself in new, unorthodox ways not previously found in the realm of cinema.
One of the greatest examples of this in the film is the number of scenes that prominently feature trash in its background art. As seen in fig. 4, Kon and his team of background production artists took great care in composing and rendering the elements of garbage in these environments. In extant journal articles where he documents the process of creating the film, Kon directly states the importance of trash as a subject in the film, and thus must be beautifully and carefully depicted: "It may seem a bit contradictory to say that trash is beautiful, but trash must leave a lasting impression."[9] Using a 2D animation software that allows up to 24 layers in a frame, Kon superimposed multiple images until the desired effect was achieved. Rather than simplify the process by making the trash bags opaque, Kon chooses to stay faithful to reality by accurately depicting the garbage bags as the translucent, calcium carbonate bags distributed by the Tokyo municipal government. By taking the time and effort to undertake this extensive process, Kon and his animation team imbue these landscapes of urban waste with a certain sense of dignity and make sure that these environments come to the forefront of discussions of the film.
In addition to using animation as a tool to formalize hidden environments, Kon also uses animation to make the night visible. Night shooting is a long-standing obstacle in the history of filmmaking, with the biggest contest being that of sufficient scene lighting. In traditional filmmaking, lighting in night scenes is heavily controlled, and in many cases supplemented to ensure the resulting image is clear. Scenes that call for no lighting are the most difficult. Although becoming less common, these scenes were often shot day for night, in which shooting takes place during the day and then altered in postproduction to appear as night. Darkly lit night scenes in urban cinema are mostly used to emphasize the nature of darkness and the terror of the city at night, and details are purposefully thrown into shadow to enunciate mystique.
Animation can overcome this limitation in traditional filmmaking as a medium that allows the filmmaker to control the brightness, contrast, and level of detail in a frame. An example of this in Tokyo Godfathers is shown in fig. 5, which shows Gin as he collapses in a dark alley in Shinjuku after being beaten by a gang. The composition and contents of the alley were planned from the conception of the storyboard, with the Tokyo Tower shining brightly beyond. With a traditional camera, the unevenness in scene lighting would have either left the Tokyo Tower overexposed or thrown the dark foreground into total darkness. However, using animation to compile layers of nuanced color and shading, Kon can insert deliberate and explicit detail into the clutter of trash that resides in these dark Shinjuku alleys without sacrificing realistic lighting, allowing these environments to be seen with clarity despite the darkness of the night.
3. Tokyo Resistance
Urban Homelessness
As home to one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods and one of the city's busiest commercial centers, Shinjuku has also become a site where income disparity in Tokyo can be most readily observed. Tokyo's elite mixes with white-collar workers next to the city's largest homeless encampment in Shinjuku Park, which is also the home of Godfathers' homeless protagonists and features prominently in the second act of the movie. Kon introduces the camp with a downward tilting shot, which establishes the trio's blue tarp-covered home sitting directly at the base of the towering, Kenzo Tange designed Tokyo Metropolitan Government building.
Kon’s choice to feature homeless protagonists is radical, but not out of nowhere. As Hayashi observes in Opening Up the Welfare State: “Homelessness in and after the 1990s radically challenged Japan’s well-organized construction of urban public space as well as the nations homogenous self-portrait of domestic society as ‘all-one-hundred-million middle class’”.[10] This challenge to homogeneity was both fed into and fueled by films such a Tokyo Godfathers, an effect noted by Thornbury: “The huge size of Tokyo…is manifested in the cartographic reality of a city that does much to obscure its population of outsiders. Fiction and film, however, give visibility and voice to that population.”[11] Thus, by centering the humanity of his homeless characters, Kon gives voice to another Tokyo that "lives on the leftover of frenetic consumption."[12]
Waste as a Culture of Resistance
Indeed, the urban environment represented in Godfathers sheds light on a culture of resistance born out of the discarded. This culture of resistance is poignantly described by Maria dos Santos in Design, Waste, and Homelessness:Today, the downtown areas of large cities have become receptacles of discarded products, industrially produced under the reign of new technologies. Here, the homeless and the collectors of recyclables are important agents of waste reutilization, creating a parallel, informal economy. But more significantly, the dispossessed, the homeless, are creating another material culture based on the transformation of refuse. Their actions promote a metamorphosis of products and materials, constituting the base of a culture of resistance, defining their place in the world and history.[13]
As previously established, Kon uses the tools of animation to depict the urban night with clarity, thus making visible this culture of material resistance. At the first critical turning point in the plot, the trio is rooting through a local apartment’s outdoor trash room (see fig. 6) in search of a Christmas gift that Hana had found for Miyuki. The urban night plays an important role here, as a setting that allows the trio to search with less worry of being interrupted. While Hana’s present is now gone, they find the most precious gift: Kiyoko, who upon reveal glows impossibly, illuminating the shocked faces of the trio (see fig. 7).
This subversion of sociocultural spaces of waste continues as we follow the trio to their makeshift shelter in Shinjuku Park. The direct contrast between the city hall, one of many towers in West Shinjuku that “exude power and wealth”[14] (fig. 9) and the row of homeless shelters is intentional, both in scale and color as the blue of the tarp pops against a palette of greys (fig. 8). The shot also juxtaposes “formal”, or acceptable enclosures, with the “informal”, or socially unaccepted forms of shelter that the trio depend on for sleep security at night. Kon’s choice to show the trio sheltering in Shinjuku Park, which is home to a homeless encampment in real life (fig. 10), is also significant when contextualized in a country that at first glance seems to not have a significant homeless population.
The shelter itself is a form of “spontaneous design and informal recycling”, and are “powerful elements that materialize an alternative, radical practice of design and cultural resistance.” This is shown when the scene cuts to the interior of their shelter, rendered in detail with a warm and rich color palette (see figs. 11, 12). A closer look shows that the shelter is equipped with living necessities and personalized with various objects and images. Thus, Kon almost insists on the validity of the shelter as a home; indeed, Thomas Haven observed of Japan’s homeless population that many who lived “beneath blue tarps denied their marginality and believed they were contributing to family and nation by living on their own”[15].
The characters themselves are Kon’s way of insisting on the validity of their humanity. All three characters represent the symptoms of a society trying to hide its social precarity; where “saving face” and fitting in with societal norms, even at one’s expense, is integral to its cultural values. However, Hana, as a transgender woman, exists at the forefront of Kon’s resistance against Japan’s strict idea of social acceptability. In a country where same-sex marriage remains illegal and the LGBT community truly exists as a subculture, the depth of Hana’s character development and her role in the story as the glue that holds her found family together grounds Kon’s stance of resistance against societal values that include people in its definition of waste. His choice to show Hana’s old drag bar as the only space of commercial night economy in the film once again makes visible the hidden and underrepresented spaces of Tokyo’s urban night.
Conclusion
As noted by Lucy Andrew, “Capital Cities are representative of national identity…[that] can be threatened by those considered ‘other’ within their midst.” Although not a capital city, Tokyo is arguably the most prominent urban center of Japan, and thus global perception of it greatly informs our consciousness of the country at large. The need to shape this consciousness is part of the project of neoliberalism, where the marketability and profitability of the city are the main goals of the entrepreneurial municipal government. Thus, this paper seeks to sit in a wider conversation about how capitalism in the postmodern age attempts to construct the image of the “clean city”, and how a closer study of the urban night can play a role in subverting this goal.
Tokyo, like other metropolises, has evolved into a city that seeks to obscure the physical and social waste it produces under the parameters of the night. However, in his film Tokyo Godfathers, Satoshi Kon uses the strengths of animation to give visibility and voice to the spaces of nocturnal urban waste. Finally, in placing his protagonists within these spaces and rendering their experiences in the city with faithfulness and love, Kon defines their place within the world and a culture of material and social resistance.
[1] Christian Morgner, “Cultural Policies and Night-Time Economies in Germany/Berlin and Japan/Tokyo,” in ICNS Proceedings, ed. Manuel Garcia-Ruiz and Jordi Nofre (Lisboa : ISCTE, 2020), 105.
[2] Morgner, “Cultural Policies and Night-Time Economies in Germany/Berlin and Japan/Tokyo,” 105.
[3] Morgner, “Cultural Policies and Night-Time Economies in Germany/Berlin and Japan/Tokyo,” 115.
[4] Morgner, “Cultural Policies and Night-Time Economies in Germany/Berlin and Japan/Tokyo,” 115.
[5] Morgner, “Cultural Policies and Night-Time Economies in Germany/Berlin and Japan/Tokyo,” 108.
[6] Jordan Sand, Tokyo Vernacular Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (Los Angeles: London University of California Press, 2013), 1.
[7] Keishiro Hara, “Historical Evolution and Development of Waste Management and Recycling Systems – Analysis of Japan’s Experiences,” in Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences no. 2 (2012), 297.
[8] Hara, “Historical Evolution and Development of Waste Management and Recycling Systems – Analysis of Japan’s Experiences,” 298.
[9] Satoshi Kon, “東京ゴッドファーザーズ雑考 -決算2002より- 05”, (2003).
[10] Mahito Hayashi, “Opening up the Welfare State to ‘Outsiders’ Pro-Homeless Activism and Neoliberal Backlashes in Japan,” in Civil Society and the State in Democratic East Asia, ed. David Chiavacci (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 270.
[11] Barbara E. Thornbury, “Locating the Outsider within Tokyo,” in Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 151.
[12] Maria Cecilia Loschiavo Dos Santos, “Design, Waste and Homelessness,” in Design Philosophy Papers, no. 3 (2015), 157.
[13] Dos Santos, “Design, Waste and Homelessness,” 159.
[14] Thornbury, “Locating the Outsider within Tokyo,” 150.
[15] Thornbury, “Locating the Outsider within Tokyo,” 165.