TOKYO CULTURE STORY. MEN MAKE WOMEN CRAZY THEORY

I was recently in London, and I had the pleasure to visit Japan House. It's a cultural institution that's home to Japanese art exhibitions, a library, a café and a store.

When I visited, the library at Japan House was hosting a fashion book exhibition. I spent some time there, browsing through the numerous publications. Most of them were books that have only been published in Japanese, and they're generally hard to find online.

One of the books that really caught my attention was What's Next? Tokyo Culture Story by Beams Japan. I had already heard of Beams, they sell products inspired by Japanese culture, and they also publish books and magazines.

I was surprised to find out that a book centered around Tokyo's fashion, film, music and culture- a topic that might interest a vast quantity of foreigners- was actually only published in Japanese. It just goes to show how much Japan still is, in a way, hard to penetrate, and therefore it still holds a lot of its charm and mystery.

The book explores Tokyo's styles and trends through the different decades of the 20th Century and early 21st Century. The two pages I'm posting here, are about those filmmakers and music artists that became milestones in Tokyo's culture.




Not being able to grasp written Japanese, I was thankfully able to at least understand the names  written in Roman characters. 

I noticed that, in a paragraph about Sofia Coppola's work, another filmmaker was quoted: Zoe Cassavetes. Apparently, one key factor in Tokyo culture history was her 2000 short film Men Make Women Crazy Theory.

I looked online for information about it, but I couldn't find a single thing. This 20 minute-movie is not available for streaming, and I also didn't find any Western websites that sell it. Ironically, the only place I found it, in DVD form, was a couple Japanese websites. 

The early 2000s original DVDs are being sold for a price ranging from 6.50 to 10 U.S. dollars. So it's safe to say, it's a lesser known, and even rare movie here in the West! I wanted to post about this movie, because it simply intrigues me that an American filmmaker like Zoe Cassavetes reached that much success in Japan, while here in Europe (or in the rest of the world, for that matter), no one seems to have heard of this film.

I've checked out the movie soundtrack on Wikipedia, and it seems quite bizarre. Most songs are not available online, but those that are, gave me a nice feel of late 90s postmodern extravaganza. I'd love to be able to watch the full movie.

The cover of the DVD is also brilliant. I'll include it below.







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