LiC

I went to the Hawaii Film Festival 2009 with the hopes of being able to catch Pidgin: Voice of Hawaii and also the Barbarian Princess, but the shows were sold out by the time I got there. So I ended up watching an Okinawan film called “Nada Sou Sou”.

The Hawaii Film Festival brings together a kind of cultural exchange among the peoples of Asia, the Pacific and North America through the medium of film. I thought this was a great event to attend to be able to experience the differences of culture and languages in Hawaii. The wide array of films in different languages available is evident to the great diversity of ethnic groups in Hawaii. It is even considered the largest “East meets West” Festival in the United States.
Nada Sou Sou tells the story of a young boy and young girl – Yota and Kaoru – who are brought together as a family when their parents marry. The two siblings become inseparable. However, tragedy strikes the children when the father abandons the family and the mother dies of heartache, leaving Yota and Kaoru orphaned. After the mother’s death, they become separated. The story continues when they are reunited again after they are all grown-up. Kaoru returns to move in with Yota because she gets accepted to a prestigious high school in their old hometown. Yota takes on a father-like role in looking after Kaoru, giving up his dreams to work intense shifts and different jobs in order to pay for her education because he vowed on his mother’s deathbed that he would provide the best for Kaoru. In his sacrifices, Kaoru begins to develop deep affection for her brother. Kaoru leaves again because she does not want to be a burden to him. In the end, Yota’s bad health catches up to him and he dies.

The movie was actually inspired by a song, “Nada sou sou,” written by a Japanese female artist. The official English translation of this movie is “Tears for You,” however in Okinawan dialect, this translates as “Never Ending Tears.” This was a very heart warming but tragic story. However, even through all the tears, I was able to observe some things relevant to our class. First, it was brought to my attention as a LiC opportunity because Okinawa, a prefecture of Japan, is made up of hundreds of little islands. For me, it rang a bell: small scattered islands = different language and dialects. A fishing village island, Okinawa has ample supply for living without much interaction with its counterparts. And because of this, Okinawa seemed to have developed its own separate identity away from Japan. From this separation, came a development of a different kind of dialect. Okinawans have a completely different lifestyle than the Japanese. This reminded me of the small Pacific Island groups we talked about in class that also have their own dialect even though they are geographically part of a larger language group. One of the differences in language that I noticed was the use of the word “brother”. In Japanese it is “ani,” but the word they used in the movie was “niinii”. It is similar, but different. I could also hear differences in sounds and pronunciations in other words. Okinawan dialect sounds more slurred than the Japanese language.