Um, You Mind If We Screen That?
This video explains the gist: Yasukuni is a documentary about the infamous shrine which enshrines war-criminals, and the attitudes and beliefs it evokes. Oh, and a Chinese dude directed it. You can see where this is going.
LDP members recently got a little antsy and requested a preview screening of the film, which the Japanese government itself provided some of the funding for via the Japan Arts Council’s use of the Japan Arts Fund.
Recently the Japan Times reported:
A documentary film on Tokyo’s war-related Yasukuni Shrine was given a prerelease screening in the capital Wednesday at the request of Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers who are concerned it may be “anti-Japan.”The distributor of the film “Yasukuni” had argued that such a screening would be tantamount to censorship, but accepted the request later on condition that the screening would be open to every Diet member and not just to a certain group of lawmakers.
The film, to be released in April, received ¥7.5 million in grant money from the Japan Arts Council under the Cultural Affairs Agency.
One kinda feels like busting out the popcorn just to see the politician’s reactions.
More than 80 people including 40 lawmakers from the ruling and opposition parties attended the screening of the film on the Tokyo shrine, which honors convicted war criminals along with the war dead. Japanese leaders’ visits to the shrine have been repeatedly criticized by China, South Korea and other Asian countries.“I attended the screening just to see if this film should have received a government subsidy,” said Tomomi Inada, a House of Representatives member from the LDP who requested the pre-release screening.
“I do not intend to censor this film but I do wonder if this is a politically neutral Japanese film that should have received a subsidy,” Inada said.
Inada said she will discuss the issue of the subsidy with officials of the cultural affairs agency Thursday.
Is that all the LDP member’s reactions amounted to: a whimper about how maybe the government shouldn’t provide money to political documentaries? I was expecting more drama.
Not much more info is out there in translated media at this time, and this Japanese article offers no different tidbits, save for the line “Can we really call this a Japanese movie [considering the Chinese influence]?”
