Trailer -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMSCpG2pLYo
Extended trailer -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvBvkp-r4C4
I just wanted to do a brief write up of
Kano. I don't expect anyone to actually watch it, but I found it interesting because it touched on an aspect of history that I really don't know much about - the Japanese colonization of Taiwan.
In brief, the film is about the first non-Japanese team, Kano, to ever make it to the Koshien finals. Now if you have seen any Adachi or baseball anime, you know that Koshien is the big national high school baseball tournament that every teenager who plays baseball dreams of playing in.
As a sports film, it's a very familiar rehash of the tropes that have become engrained in you through countless sports stories. A plucky team of loveable losers meets up with a tough-as-nails coach. The coach teaches the kids the actual mechanics of playing baseball so that they get better, while the kids love of the game and their hardworking spirit brings life back to the coach and allows him to appreciate the sport. Now add onto that by framing it in the context of the team being both dirt poor and also racially diverse, and you also get the classic underdog sports struggle. That's not even considering that this film is based on a true story.
What elevates it beyond your standard Disney sports film fare is how Kano treats the relationship between Taiwan and Japan. Although there are countless horror stories about what the Japanese did to the mainland Chinese in the occupation years, Taiwan seemed to be treated completely differently - with an emphasis on integration and assimilation. So Chinese films about the occupation tend to be about events such as the socalled Rape of Nanjing... while in Kano, you get a story about Japanese, Han Chinese, and Aboriginal Taiwanese all working together in harmony.
That's not just limited to the baseball team - coach Kondo is allowed to give a speech where he basically says that their team has an advantage since he is able to take the best of each racial group to make a great team - but to Taiwan itself. Set against this simple sports story is the struggle of the Taiwanese farmer, trying their best to grow rice as best they can. But while the native Taiwanese toil in the fields, the Japanese are helping by inventing new ways to grow better crops at the Agricultural College or building the Kanan Irrigation System to help bring water directly to the farmers. You get the sense that even if Japan occupied the country, the filmmakers concede that the Japanese helped bring Taiwan into the 20th century and improved their lives. In fact, the movie begins in in the 40s, when Japanese soldiers arrive in Taiwan before being shipped off to the various fronts in the Pacific Theater, and one of the soldiers unironically says "Under the rule of the Great Japanese Empire, Taiwan has prospered". There is no judgement, no malice. It's just given to the audience as a statement of fact.
The thing is that the Japanese that are in the film are presented as patriots as well, inasmuch as they are proud of Taiwan and see it as part of Japan. I feel like this sums it up fairly nicely:
Here you have Yoichi Hatta, the man who spearheaded the Kanan project, telling the kids to make Taiwan proud. He may be from Japan, but he sees his work in Taiwan as important, and has bonded with the farmers he is trying to help through his irrigation project and to kids.
If you've considered post-colonial literature in any way, you know that most of the time, po-co authors/filmmakers/artists typically see colonization as a trauma. In the realm of English language art, this is usually people in North America, the Caribbean, and South Asia dealing with the scars of the British Empire. On an individual level, questions of identity are raised as many people in a po-co world feel as if they don't belong to any one place. This can be in terms of problems integrating into the dominant culture or feeling anxiety over losing the culture associated with ones ethnicity.
But that's what makes Kano so fascinating to me. Both this, and the other two films in the so-called Taiwan colonization trilogy (Cape No 7 and Seediq Bale), treat colonization in a much more ambivalent manner. Being "forced" to be Japanese wasn't necessarily a terrible thing, and that it is simply a part of both Japanese and Taiwanese history. The fact that these kids, who are a mixture of the three different races living in Japan, dream of participating in what is a Japanese sports institution tells you that for at least some people, being colonized was simply a fact of life. Heck, there's even an interracial marriage in the film, complete with a mixed race baby.
The film does touch on the racism that the Japanese presumably had against the Taiwanese - seeing them as "lesser" - but (and I don't think it's a spoiler to say this) the kids from Kano win the Japanese over by playing their hearts out and by the end of the movie the Taiwanese players are seen as equals.
One other aspect that fascinated me was the fact that all the kids on the team had Japanese names - presumably to better assimilate into Japanese culture. But in the final montage that reveals what happened to everyone on the team, all of the Chinese players on the team later changed back to their Chinese names after the end of the war. It's the one and only sign in the film of a potential fracture in the rosy picture the film seems to paint about Japan's role as occupier.
But even if you don't care about what Japan did in the 30s, the film itself is still a fine sports film. It hits all the sports film cliches (and you have to wonder how many facts were embellished to make for a better tale), but does it in a way that is just fun to watch. It's an earnest version of
Major League or
The Mighty Ducks. And funny enough, I've never been so on the edge of my seat watching a baseball game whose outcome was determined over 70 years ago. Because it spent so much time building the characters, I cared about how they performed in the games that they played.
tl;dr - Kano is an interesting primer in an aspect of Japanese history that we never see in art. It is also a pretty good baseball movie.
Incidentally, it's fascinating to watch a celebration of Taiwanese baseball, given that the last film about Taiwanese baseball that I watched (
The Winds of September) dealt with the match fixing scandal of the 80s.
