Category: Urban Essays

An event in Saga

On Friday, April 8th, 2005, I went to my parents’ house in Saga prefecture to help out. When I served a cup of tea to one of their guests, he asked me if I knew about the filming down there. I had just arrived that morning, and no one had said anything about movies. As more guests arrived, I found out they were shooting the film version of Shimada Yôshichi ’s memoir Super Saga Granny.

The newspaper we subscribe to is strong for local articles so we can read something about Saga prefecture sometimes (it’s the prefecture next door to Fukuoka). I even know my hometown is going to be merged with other two towns next year and will become a city. So I knew the movie would start shooting in Saga from April. But who knew that the day I went there I would accidentally come across the film shoot near my parents’ house. I heard Shimada Yôshichi himself also visited there, but I couldn’t see him because I was busy at the time. After things slowed down at the house, my sister in law said she would go to the Saga Bank branch near the location so I followed her. It was really happening, and there was a hand-written sign tied to a chair saying ‘Please go around because of the movie shooting’. Timid us murmured that ‘Maybe cars have to go around, but maybe it’s alright for people to go through, right?’ and we passed over a bridge by the town office. It seemed the main location of the movie was around the river. Actually, it sounded like anybody could watch it if they were quiet, so we watched it for a while. Many small bugs were flying above the river. It was sunny and the temperature was around 25 degrees. It was my first experience to see a movie being shot. Each scene was over so quickly, and they shot the same scene again and again. I thought it was harder work than I had imagined. I felt it was hard work just watching it.

The city where we used to live is famous as a movie location. We could spot the shooting when we saw a long line of big trucks. We weren’t connected to any movies so we didn’t know which movie was shooting at any one time. Later, we often noticed a city that was supposed to be New York but that was actually our city by watching the movies themselves.

My sister in law had the original paperback of Shimada Yôshichi ’s story so I read it. It’s a thin book I could finish in not so long a time. Shimada’s Granny knew how people should live. She was a really cheerful, impressive grandmother. I want to extract some words from ‘the analects of Granny’ in the book.

· Don’t say ‘It’s hot’ or ‘It’s cold’ many times. You just appreciate winter in summer and summer in winter.

· There are two kind of being poor. Negative poor and positive poor. We’re all right because we’re positive. And don’t worry, we didn’t get poor recently. Be proud of yourself. Our family is poor from generation to generation.

· ‘Grandma, I don’t understand English at all.’ ‘Then you can write you’re Japanese on your examination paper.’ ‘I’m also bad at writing my Chinese characters…’ ‘You can write that you are living with only simple scripts on your exam.’ ‘I also don’t like history.’ ‘You’re bad at history, too? Then, you can write you don’t care about the past.’

Hey, Chris. These ideas are really helpful for our home, right!

Picture Note! Shimada’s granny used to walk around dragging a magnet behind her, to collect scrap metal they could sell.

Incidentally, I taught Chris some Saga dialect long ago. One of those happened to be ‘super’ as in ‘super Saga granny’!

–YS, 11 April 2005

11 April 2005