Movie from Yesteryear: "Departures"

Watching films is one of the most popular hobbies among many folks.  At home, although the screen is on daily, due to various unavoidable reasons, I only get to sit down to watch anything perhaps once or twice in a year. So when I finally settle to watch one for just once in a blue moon, the choice of film would either be a movie of suspense, or one that's emotionally-touching..... never waste that precious opportunity... yeah!

Movie of the day: Departures (Okuribito - or the "person who sends off")
This is no longer a new movie, as it was first aired in 2008.  The story line of this multiple awards-winning movie is generally predictable, but the scenes are touching.  Subtle elements of humour are present throughout the movie, something which is not very common in Japanese films.

Please forgive me for not summarising the plot of the movie in my own words, but the following is a concise write-up, 99.9% from Wikipedia, that put everything neatly in a nutshell:

Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) loses his job as a cellist when his orchestra is disbanded. He and his wife Mika (Ryōko Hirosue) move from Tokyo to his hometown in Yamagata, where they live in his childhood home that was left to him when his mother died two years earlier. It is fronted by a coffee shop that Daigo's father had operated before he ran off with a waitress when Daigo was six; since then the two have had no contact. Daigo feels hatred towards his father and guilt for not taking better care of his mother. He still keeps a "letter-stone"—a stone which is said to convey meaning through its texture—which his father had given him many years before.

Daigo finds an advertisement for a job "assisting departures". Assuming it to be a job in a travel agency, he goes to the interview at the NK Agent office and learns from the secretary, Yuriko Kamimura (Kimiko Yo), that he will be preparing bodies for cremation in a ceremony known as encoffinment (so NK is short form for nou kan or encoffinment). Though reluctant, Daigo is hired on the spot and receives a cash advance from his new boss, Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki). Daigo is furtive about his duties and hides the true nature of the job from Mika.

   

His first assignment is to assist with the encoffinment of a woman who died at home and remained undiscovered for two weeks. He is beset with nausea and later humiliated when strangers on a bus detect an unsavoury scent on him. To clean himself, he visits a public bath which he had frequented as a child. It is owned by Tsuyako Yamashita (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), the mother of one of Daigo's former classmates.

Over time, Daigo becomes comfortable with his profession as he completes a number of assignments and experiences the gratitude of the families of the deceased. Though he faces social ostracism, Daigo refuses to quit, even after Mika discovers a training DVD in which he plays a corpse and leaves him to return to her parents' home in Tokyo. Daigo's former classmate Yamashita (Tetta Sugimoto) insists that the mortician find a more respectable line of work and, until then, avoids him and his family.

After a few months, Mika returns and announces that she is pregnant. She expresses hope that Daigo will find a job of which their child can be proud. During the ensuing argument, Daigo receives a call for an encoffinment for Mrs Yamashita. Daigo prepares her body in front of both the Yamashita family and Mika, who had known the public bath owner (picture below). The ritual earns him the respect of all present, and Mika stops insisting that Daigo change jobs.

Sometime later, they learn of the death of Daigo's father. 

A reluctant Daigo goes with Mika to another village to see the body. Daigo is at first unable to recognize him, but takes offence when local funeral workers are careless with the body. He insists on dressing it himself, and while doing so finds a stone-letter which he had given to his father, held tight in the dead man's hands.  The childhood memory of his father's face returns to him, and after he finishes the ceremony, Daigo gently presses the stone-letter to Mika's pregnant belly.

Conclusion

Apart from various scenes of Daigo at work handling various clients, all which looked alright without any gross element in order to ensure that the scenes appear pleasant for viewers of all categories, the story line also includes a number of situations that occur in reality.  

Daigo's clients comprised a variety of emotional characters and background, ranging from sadness, families who quarreled and blamed each other for the deceased's departure to the very last face-to-face moments with the deceased, families who cheerfully sent off their departed loved ones despite the heavy-hearted farewell, and family members who finally accepted a deceased as who he really was after years of denial.

Another realistic scene portrayed in the movie was how some mothers like to compare their own children with another.  For instance, the scene where the public bath house owner Mrs Yamashita praised Daigo for having a good job as a musician in Tokyo and expressed how she wished her son, who happens to be Daigo's ex-classmate and works as a public servant at the small town was as talented as Daigo - right in front of her son.

Relating the movie to the reality, in summary, the overall East Asian culture (e.g. Japanese and Chinese) still frown upon certain jobs related to handling departure from the world.  However, despite the taboo, professions related to managing departure (for instance the Chinese) are generating good income nowadays, very business-like and competitive.