After the Oscars, many complained that this year's award-winning film The Shape of Water won by a large gathering of monsters, disabled people, sexual minorities and ethnic minorities, and that art compromised "political correctness". Leaving aside for the moment whether the film award is well deserved, it has to be admitted that in recent years, there have been more and more film and television works featuring monsters, disabled people, sexual minorities and ethnic minorities, and the ideological depth and artistic expression of the works have become stronger and stronger, but the works that show the mainstream groups of glamorous social culture are lackluster - at least in the field of Japanese dramas.
At the beginning of this year, Japan's NHK Television produced "Women's Life" that shows the life of Kobe women's clothing gangsters, in which "gender identity cognitive impairment" thinks clearly and lives clearly, and the social response is good. In March, NHK continued its efforts to focus on sexual minorities again, launching a three-episode TV series "Brother's Husband" that shows the story of gay men.
Brother's Husband comic cover (left) and TV series poster (right)
"Brother's Husband" is adapted from the manga of the same name by Japanese manga artist Goro Tagie, depicting the daily life of former IT company laid-off employee Yaichi Origami (played by Kenta Sato) and Canadian Mike (Played by Ryoto) living under the same roof.
Yaichi's twin brother Ryoji came out to his brother when he was a teenager, and after his sexual orientation became public, the relationship between the two brothers, who had no words and was intimate, became increasingly distant. After that, Ryoji went to Canada to study and immigrate, and his brother rarely contacted until Ryoji died unexpectedly in Canada.
Ryoji's married partner Mike obeys his agreement with Ryoji to visit Yaichi in Japan, and Yaichi, who was originally resistant to Mike, cannot refuse his daughter's request and begins to live with Mike.
Yaichi was originally a workaholic, working day and night for the company to go public, but the listing failed, was fired by the company, neglected to take care of the family, the wife cheated, the two divorced, as the father of the no-fault party obtained custody, but the wife did not marry the lover, the two maintained contact with the daughter, and the relationship also turned around due to mike's arrival.
Mike's arrival inspires the endless curiosity of her naïve and ignorant daughter, forcing Yaichi to re-recognize life in the midst of her daughter's countless and evocative questions, rethinking what prejudices are, what are misunderstandings, and who recreates social injustice, and even extends to the question of the education of the next generation. The TV series is light and humorous, the picture quality of the film is bright and harmonious, and the warm daily life reveals the humanistic care for profound social issues.
This manga serialized in the Japanese gay manga magazine Monthly ACTION is "little fresh" compared to the author's previous works. The author, Gengoro Tagie, is a gay man who first published manga works during his time at school in the 1980s, became a freelance manga artist from the mid-1990s after graduating as a film director, and soon switched from part-time to professional, and has been active overseas for a long time.
The author's own experiences, experiences, and preferences are inevitably projected into the manga, and the manga storyboard has a strong sense of lens, with the hairy tall Mike and the tall Origami Yaichi, although unrelated to same-sex feelings, but still carry traces of the author's previous works.
Originally not favored by the manga editors, "Brother's Husband" won the 19th Japan Media Arts Festival Manga Excellence Award in the first year of the series because of its reflection on social prejudices and delicate depictions of the emotional transformation of the characters, and the following year it was nominated for the Best Manga at the Engram International Manga Festival in France, and the overseas response was more enthusiastic than in Japan.
Unlike European and American works that think about sexual minorities from a heterosexual perspective, this Japanese manga is still Japanese in thinking, with a strong sense of self-blame, understanding and mourning, and the same Orientals may have a more empathetic understanding of many concepts.
In recent years, Japan has vigorously promoted the protection of the rights and interests of sexual minorities, and has also made some progress, more and more popular cultural works on related themes, more and more mainstream film and television actors have begun to take on the role of sexual minorities, sexual minorities have gradually become normalized in Japanese film and television works, no longer strange people set up for curiosity, but ordinary people who can share cute elements with the protagonist, and even become the only person who holds a normal concept in the entire film and television work (see Ryuta Sato in "Loveless Chocolate Worker"). gay chocolate shop manager).
However, the prejudice of Japanese society against sexual minorities has not been eradicated because of the normalization of the screen image of this group, and at the social level, sexual minorities are still plagued by prejudice, and many people still subconsciously "criminalize" and "morbidize" sexual minorities. In the comics, this prejudice is manifested as the parents of the hero's daughter's friend preventing their children from meeting the onlookers Mike, believing that contacting the gay Mike would cause "bad effects".
Baruto Ying-katsu
Other parents inadvertently a sentence triggered a strong reflection and self-blame of the male protagonist, in the process of initial contact with Mike, the male protagonist also doubted and rejected Mike because of sexual orientation problems, the most essential psychological reason is still to regard homosexuality as a pathology and deformity, with the contact with Mike, gradually regard Mike as a family, only began to reflect on this issue from different positions.
Sexual minorities are not uncommon, heterosexual groups may rarely think about their existence, before the actual contact, very few people will reflect on whether there is such a prejudice in their subconscious, the vast majority of people began to attack "political correctness" before trying to understand the so-called "political correctness", the result of the attack in addition to embarrassing themselves, probably will also make less multi-genre film and television works become ugly.