Quick Tokyo Spin
by rebecca ~ July 24th, 2006. Filed under: Do the right thing, Multicultural life, New Media Musings, Whirling Dervish.
The past weekend I took a brief trip to Tokyo, and it’s such an enormous, chaotic, mad elephant compared to our slow and peaceful existence in the Hokkaido mountainside. Oh yes, I was glad to come back to fresh air and quiet, but I really love Tokyo, too, for its vibrant energy and for its most excellent people watching opportunities. It appears as if some people in Tokyo have thrown off all their fashion inhibitions, and it’s great to see the results, like men in glittery ballroom gowns and horn-rimmed glasses and teenage girls in French Maid costumes with green knee socks and yellow platform sneakers.
I attended a very hilarious and moving documentary, “Recolonize Cologne,” by Sun-ju Choi, a Korean ex-pat director in Germany, about Germany’s colonial history in Africa and about the mistreatment of immigrants from Cameroon. It was part of the Refugee Film Festival, held at the Swedish, Italian, and French Embassies.
One of my favorite parts in the film was where she cleverly used Lego characters to re-enact the invasion and deceitful tactics of the German companies/government in Cameroon – adding irony and wit to what was a horrible and inhumane campaign. She managed, with a low budget, to capture the innate idiocy of claiming superiority over others.
I also loved her idea to have the main narrative involving an impromptu public performance of a Cameroonian German, who was carried through the Cologne streets in a makeshift throne, shouldered by stereotypical, blonde-haired Germans, acting as a reincarnated Cameroonian king. The King then staked claim to a small part of the public square, with those velvet ropes seen in movie theaters, and named it the Nation of the Multitudes. He then passed out his nation’s universal passports to the bemused and puzzled crowd, declaring them free to travel, work, and live wherever they wished in the world.
Along with the passports, his ‘servants’ passed out hot potatoes wrapped in tinfoil to the onlookers as well because, his ‘page’ announced simply, “we know Germans like potatoes.”
I just looked for an English link on the film, but only found one in German, but I did discover a multilingual site working on the behalf of migrants and refugees in Europe here.