By nature we desire food and sex
They say that when you die, you will see something like a movie. Like watching a kaleidoscope of life in a few seconds, and I was looking forward to that movie, the last movie of a person.
— — Yoshihiro Ikeuchi, Dandelion
Rituals
How many rituals will human beings experience in their lifetime? If there were no rituals, would we live in oblivion? From birth, to school, to faith, and all kinds of gatherings, even a simple meal, or facing a good meal. All are full of rituals.
Arnold van Gennep (23 April 1873 -7 May 1957, in full Charles-Arnold Kurr van Gennep), As a Dutch-German-French ethnographer and folklorist, he is recognized as the founder of French folklore. His published work “The Rites of Passage” (French: Les rites de passage, 1909) divides the ritual into three stages: “préliminaire”, “ liminaire”, and “ postliminaire”.
Victor Witter Turner (28 May 1920-18 December 1983 , Scottish Cultural Anthropologist) is best known for his work on symbols and rituals. He delved into Arnold van Gentner’s triple structure in ordinary passing rituals and on the theory of liminality stage extensions. Turner argues that during the liminality period, the state of transition lies between the two preceding and following stages, and that the individual is in limbo, neither belonging to the society to which he or she formerly belonged nor yet reintegrated into that society. The liminality period serves as a limbo, an ambiguous period characterized by humility, withdrawal, testing, gender ambiguity, and communitas.
In movmg from experience of soctal life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these became relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequently that it is not a ·theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic contextand applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They ev~n show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience.
— — Victor Witter Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, 1974
If we put aside these bitter and difficult words, rituals are actually a way to shift from one state to another.
The ritual itself allows us to move temporarily from the scene of the moment to another scene, usually one that requires serious attention or focused expression. It may be a new scene, but it is more of an “artificial”, spiritual “survival” scene.
A scene of spiritual re-creation is exactly what a film is trying to do. And the film itself should both create a scene that expects to bring the audience into another person’s life and be able to flirt with this scene, then this is what “Dandelion” (日語：タンポポ ，1985。IMDb: tt0092048), written and directed by Yoshihiro Ikeuchi.
Yoshihiro Ikeuchi
Yoshihiro Ikeuchi (Yoshihiro Ikeuchi，日語：伊丹十三/假名：いたみ じゅうぞう；羅馬拼音：Itami Jūzō。May 15, 1933 — December 20. 1997. Real name: 池內 岳彥, いけうち たけひこ; Household name: 池內 義弘, いけうち よしひろ。Japanese actor/writer/director. IMDb: nm0411631) met his later wife, Nobuko Miyamoto (日語：みやもと のぶこ；Real name: 池內信子. March 27, 1945. Famous Japanese actress, 10-time finalist for the Japanese Film Awards, recipient of the Japanese government’s Purple Ribbon Medal.IMDb: nm0594421), when he appeared in “Sing A Song Of Sex” (Japanese: 日本春歌考.1967. IMDb: tt0062042). Subsequently, Nobuko Miyamoto also became the royal actress of Yoshihiro Ikeuchi, and was also the star of “Dandelion”.
Yoshihiro Ikeuchi ‘s death may be a mystery that will never be uncovered, but in May 1992, his film “The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion ”(Japanese:ミンボーの女,1992.IMDb: tt0104874) was released. The film depicted female lawyers who fought against yakuza figures, and as a result Yoshihiro Ikeuchi was attacked by a member of the Goto group of the Yamaguchi-gumi and stabbed in the face and neck.
On December 20, 1997, the body of Yoshihiro Ikeuchi was found in a commercial and residential apartment adjacent to a parking lot. The next day, a typed suicide note was found in his office, proving his innocence by his death in response to a report about him soliciting prostitutes in a Japanese FLASH (Japanese:寫真週刊誌/フラッシュ) weekly magazine.
But Yoshihiro Ikeuchi’s handwriting is so beautiful that even if he left a suicide note, it should be handwritten. Naghisa Oshima (Japanese: 大島渚,March 31, 1932-January 15, 2013. Japanese film director, known for his works of artistic alternative and avant-garde novelty. IMDb: nm0651915) believes that the suicide note was a forgery and that Yoshihiro Ikeuchi would not have committed suicide. At the time, Yoshihiro Ikeuchi was filming the Japanese medical waste scandal, exposing the scandal of unscrupulous operators using unused vacant land to illegally bury medical waste. Later, a witness also wrote a book stating, “On that day, five hoodlums broke into Yoshihiro Ikeuchi ‘s house, forced him to drink brandy, carried him to the top floor while he was asleep, and pushed him down to his death.”
Yoshihiro Ikeuchi’s brother-in-law is Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburō Oe (Hiragana romanization: Ōe Kenzaburō; Japanese: 大江 健三郎／おおえ けんざぶろう Kenzaburō. January 31, 1935; famous contemporary Japanese existentialist writer). Ōe Kenzaburō wrote the novel The Changeling (Japanese: 取り替え子, 2004) based on the event.
The Japanese word for “child” is derived from Buddhist terminology and includes the meaning of serving the emperor. Yoshihiro Ikeuchi wrote “The Book of Japanese Gossip,” in which he said, through an old man who was hard of hearing, “Since Japan has lost the war, their lives are in such a mess that he has become less respectful of the emperor than before, and has even expressed disgust for the noble emperor.”
The old man also recalled the funeral of Emperor Taisho (Japanese: 大正天皇／たいしょうてんのう [たいしやうてんわう]. August 31, 1879-December 25, 1926. The scene at the funeral of Emperor Taisho.Tadokoro Kahito, the 123rd Emperor of Japan and father of Emperor Showa. 30 July 1912–25 December 1926) was a pungent smell of disinfectant emanating from the coffin of Emperor Taisho from time to time. When the master of ceremonies asked the reason, the old man said that since His Majesty had to be buried in the ground and it took time to prepare the tomb, a lot of antiseptic potion was put inside the coffin to prevent the corpse from corroding. On the day of the Emperor Taisho’s funeral, many royal princes came. Since the imperial tomb is located in the densely wooded Western Tokyo (Japanese: たまちいき Tama chiiki; also called Tama area, たまちく; Tama area, たまちほう; San Tama, さんたま. It refers to the area in Tokyo, Japan, excluding Tokyo 23 wards [Tokyo metropolitan area] and the island area [Izu Islands, Ogasawara Islands]), mosquitoes are particularly abundant, the solemn ceremony, the royal family can not wave their hands to drive away, so they have to suffer the bite in silence.
Yoshihiro Ikeuchi’s flirtation with the funeral rituals of the emperor is also brought out at times in “ Dandelion “ to stab at the “ritual” life of a serious human being.
By nature we desire food and sex
告子曰：“食色，性也。仁，內也，非外也；義，外也，非內也。”
— — 孟子·告子章句上·第四節
The philosopher Gaozi said, ‘ The desire for food and sex is nature. Benevolence is internal and not external; righteousness is external and not internal.’
— — Mencius
Gaozi, whose name is Gao Buhai, is said to be a Chinese thinker of the Warring States period. It is also said to have been a student of Mencius (372 BC -289 BC, Ji surname, Meng family, name Khor, a native of Zou [present-day Zou City, Shandong Province, China], revered as the sub-sage of Confucianism. His name is not recorded in ancient books before the Han Dynasty). Or maybe it is a fabrication of Mencius.
By nature we desire food and sex. As the saying goes, Time, such as the White Horse Flashing by. Never fail to live up to delicacy and love. And “Dandelion”, in fact, is the story of food and beauty under the unique ritualistic expression of Yoshihiro Ikeuchi.
The whole film is based on the main line through a driver helping the noodle shop owner’s wife and making delicious noodles, but the series of stories interspersed are mindless.
The solemn Western dinner for the bigwigs in suits is broken by the secretary who accompanies the solemn and pretentious ritual. Probably Yoshihiro Ikeuchi felt that the clever irony of this scene was not enough, and arranged the scene of a female teacher teaching a beautiful woman to eat spaghetti.
The awkward scene of a man who has his teeth pulled and eats ice cream. The man pretending to be a retired professor cheating to eat. The housewife who died after cooking for the family. Men and women full of ritualistic sex ……
Fukumi Kuroda (Japanese: 黑田福美, July 21, 1956, Japanese actress. IMDb: nm0475837) has a fancy display of a naked body in the film full of Yoshihiro Ikeuchi’s flirtation with a sense of solemn decorum.
The soft body is unfortunately surpassed by Yoriko Douguchi (Japanese: 洞口依子, March 18, 1965, Japanese actress. IMDb: nm0235345), who appears for less than two minutes.
Yoriko Douguchi’s stunning, Lolita-like beauty combined with the mature torso of Venus, wrapped in the wet shirt of a fisherwoman, lustful performance is helped by Kôji Yakusho (real name: Koji Hashimoto; Japanese: 役所広司/やくしょ こうじ, 01/01/1956. Japanese actor/director/screenwriter. IMDb: nm0945131) plays a man eating an oyster, which becomes the man’s “dying eye”.
Yoko Higuchi’s best film is The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl (Japanese: ドレミファ娘の血は騒ぐ , 1985. IMDb: tt0214636), released a little later that same year, a film in which Yoshihiro Ikeuchi starred with her. In that film, Yoko Higuchi is nude as if she were a soft cherry blossom petal.
For Dandelion, it is the perfect fluffy flower of ritual that dissipates invisibly with a gentle blow. A life without rituals is a “child” without community, and a life drowned in rituals is a blown off flower.
In the “ice-like transparent” world of the monks, the sound of burning incense sounds like a house on fire; the sound of falling ashes also sounds like thunder and lightning. I am afraid this is true. The mystery of all art lies in this “dying eye”.
— — Yasunari Kawabata (Japanese:川端 康成, 11 June 1899–16 April 1972, was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968), dying eye, December 1933
Blooming Runner (A sexy Philosopher, in this mundane world of nature, gives you the sexy truth), January 26, 2023
Follow me, we watch the flowers bloom and fall together; share me, this life is difficult, only bonding.
— — Blooming Runner
