a blind eye

The 3Yen gets inquiries all the time from young people about wanting to come to Japan to live. From now on I think I will just send them the link to this short film.

link via EX-SKF

blind-YouTube scene from film
Kickstarter-funded short film project “BLIND (post-nuclear Tokyo commute)” was created in Japan by Jamie / Sho …more at …

—Turning away from today’s reality will blind our future.—

11 thoughts on “a blind eye”

kickstarter.com/projects…blind-post-nuclear-tokyo-commute
blind-slash-screen

Ha, ha, the folks at “BLIND” (blind-film.net) look like they take the New York Post way too seriously.

See the New York Post front page:
http://twitpic.com/4a6f25

More info on the film…

Blind: The tale of a post-nuclear commute
—A new short depicts gas masks as the norm on the streets of Shibuya—
Time Out Tokyo | Aug. 17, 2011
As foreigners living in Tokyo, the questions we deal with most these days concern safety. These questions come in a variety of guises, from the point-blank ('Is Tokyo safe right now?') to the cautiously silly ('Are your fish glowing green?'). The answers aren't easy, and can probably be best summed up thus: 'Tokyo looks normal, but there's a sense that something's not quite right.' Even more accurately: 'There's something in the air…'
...

…spoke with the film’s director, Yukihiro Shoda, and Pasha Alpeyev, a producer and journalist living and working in the capital…
Explained briefly, what is Blind?
Blind is a short film, a 5-minute sojourn through a parallel-universe version of Japan which also suffered a nuclear crisis but was less lucky than its real world counterpart. It is a place where fallout readings are part of the weather forecast and gasmasks are as ubiquitous as black suits and Gucci bags.
How did the idea come about?
We wanted a piece that reflects the surreal quality life in Tokyo has acquired since the disaster, a kind of low-current tension of daily routines heightened by a hidden threat of radiation. One of the producers suggested using gas masks as a way to make that fear visible without being overdramatic.
More...

Fiction Forcasts Future with Eerie Accuracy
NYTimes.com | 2011/09/04
Last year, he had described, in his dystopian comic novel “Super Sad True Love Story,” a near future world in which economic chaos followed the United States’ default on its debt, and Chinese creditors scolded America for its profligate ways.
Now the story seemed to have an echo in real life. Washington’s extended impasse over raising the debt ceiling was resolved with a last-minute vote, but the nearness of the miss and the subsequent credit downgrade by Standard & Poor’s sent markets on a wild ride. The admonition from China’s official Xinhua news agency — “The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone” — might as well have come from Mr. Shteyngart’s laptop.
[big snip]
The cultural commentator Kurt Andersen asked Mr. Shteyngart on his radio program, Studio 360, what it was like to have, to an eerie extent, anticipated the future. “I’ll turn on the news, I’ll vomit from nervousness,” he joked, “and then I’ll wipe my chin and say: ‘Oh, you know? I kind of got it right.’ ”…
In an interview, Mr. Shteyngart … gets messages on his Facebook page almost daily from people who see his colorfully depicted future coming to pass, from smartphone applications that might help people hook up in bars to transparent clothing (he called the jeans “Onionskins”).
When he read about a Paris fashion model in a transparent blouse over a see-through bra (the reviewer wrote, “you could still make out the relevant parts”) he recalled thinking, “Oh, my God, it’s happening so fast.”
After publishing his book and watching the world catch up, he thought: “Well, I think this is the last book about the future for a while. The present outdoes anything you set out to do.”
The prediction game has generally been the bailiwick of science fiction, and many authors have shown startling foresight. Jules Verne placed his launching site for shooting men to the moon in Florida — Tampa, not Cape Canaveral, but let’s forgive that as a rounding error. And William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have mined the near future for years, in novels like Mr. Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition” and Mr. Sterling’s “Holy Fire.”
James E. Gunn, the director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, said science fiction could even help encourage the future by preparing minds. Hugo Gernsback, the creator of a pioneering scientific magazine in 1926, predicted radar and night baseball, among other things; Arthur C. Clarke described satellite communications.
But, Mr. Gunn added, while science fiction may deal with the future, its true commentary is almost always on the present: “the human condition, experiencing change.” The basic premise, he suggested, is “something interesting might happen, and this would change the world in interesting ways.”
To Mr. Brooks, the predictive elements of gee-whiz classic science fiction appealed not at all. “I didn’t believe in flying cars,” he said. “I have seen how people drive on the freeways. I watched the way my stepfather drove. He wasn’t going to be flying to work.”
The point was not so much to predict the future as to present a possible one. He envisioned tremendous destruction to an American city, but chose not to portray nuclear terror, which he calls a “healthy possibility,” explaining, “I’m not interested in Armageddon stories.” Of the book, he said, “people ask, ‘is this optimistic or pessimistic?’ ” Mr. Brooks, whose work is rarely sunny but shows tremendous heart, suggested that the answer should be obvious.
“Hey! We’re still here! We’re still functioning!”

Marked Trail… It’s not the New York Post, It’s the Daily News… the newspaper you find near the counter in discount supermarkets featuring batboy or the wedding of the 2 headed man with the 3 legged snake woman…