Plastic / Yamato (California)

Plastic: Promised to a record deal that didn’t work out, teenage Jun (Takuma Fujie, August My Heaven) arrives in Nagoya as a transfer student with dashed dreams. One day, his busking of songs by Exne Kedy catches the eye of fellow fan Ibuki (An Ogawa, Heaven Is Still Far Away) and the pair soon falls in love over their shared musical taste. But as adult responsibilities loom, prospects in Tokyo beckon and a global pandemic hits, they slowly drift apart… Until the legendary Exne Kedy announce a reunion tour.

Inspired by Kensuke Ide’s 2021 concept album Strolling Planet ’74, in which frontman Kensuke Ide transformed his band into the fictitious 70s glam rock group Exne Kedy and the Poltergeists, Daisuke Miyazaki’s Plastic is a colorful, rock-inflected coming-of-age tale tracking the disilliusionment of Japanese youth. Following his breakout hip-hop drama Yamato (California) (2016, also included in this release) and the Osaka-set thriller Videophobia (2019), Miyazaki showcases a keen sensibility for epochal longing, teenage loneliness, as well as for the vanishing sounds and places of everyday Japan. Dreamy, even cosmic at times, Plastic is an atypical romance examining how love for art shapes us.

Yamato (California): Sakura (Hanae Kan, Nobody Knows), a moody teenager, lives in Yamato, Japan. A small town one hour away from Tokyo, it is unremarkable in every way except for the massive US military base that remains at its center. This closeness to American culture has also shaped Sakura’s consciousness: she dreams of becoming a rapper, like the American musicians she admires. Already feeling like an outsider in her own home, her routine is further disturbed when a young Japanese-American girl, Rei (Nina Endo, Tourism), visits from the States. The daughter of an absent G.I. that her mother is dating, Rei has friendship to spare... which Sakura initially resists.

Yamato (California), Daisuke Miyazaki’s sophomore film following End of Night (2011), stands out to this day as his most personal and heartfelt: a tale of growing up in Yamato (the director’s own home town) at a particular nexus of postwar histories and imperialisms both large and small, cultural and otherwise. Taking the military base as his backdrop and symbolic gateway to address the long-standing influence of American culture on Japanese society, Miyazaki weaves a musical coming-of-age film affectionate of slackers yet propelled by a creative impulse to make life worth remembering.