#haruhiko kato

[shihlun]

Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Haruhiko Kato on the film set of Pulse / Kairo (2001)

[may8chan]

Kairo - Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2001

[roskirambles]

Horror Movie of the Day: Pulse (Kairo, 2001)

Solitude, the modern plague wrecking the world. Hikikomori (ひきこもり) is a Japanese word to describe social shut ins, and it’s suspected to be a problem exacerbated through the evolution of new technologies. So ironically enough, despite the world being more connected than ever some people can die completely alone and no one would know.

Michi Kudo has recently started working in a plant shop. She feels something wrong about her coworker Taguchi, who has been absent for a few days while working on a floppy. Going to his apartment, she finds him to act strange and retracted… only to turn a corner and find him dead, seemingly since days ago. As for the contents of the floppy itself? Strange photos of him staring at his computer.

On the other side, University student Ryosuke Kawashima is realizing something is decidedly wrong with his own computer after hiring a new Internet provider, and doesn’t exactly understand why strange images of alone people are appearing on his screen. Another University student has a theory: the dead are invading the world, and trapping the living in their loneliness.

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, this movie for the most part is eerily quiet. It’s not quite bombastic even on it’s scares, but its everything feels so wrong. The lighting, the camera angles, the subtle sound cues; all of it has this sense of dread you can't quite put your finger on. And then there’s the narrative underbelly: despite its decidedly dated depiction of technology and fashion (setting it squarely at the beginning of the 2000’s) this one probably hits harder than ever in a post-pandemic world, with isolation is presented as a fate worse than death, almost the one true hell a person can fall into.

Slow and subtle, it's a movie where the absence is meant to be part of the horror itself. If you come with the right expectations, it can get under your skin just the right way.

[certified-ajumma]

回路 Pulse (2001, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

[cybercityoedo808]

Pulse (回路), 2001, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

[redsamuraiii]

Over Time (Ep 3)

😂

[randomrichards]

PULSE:

Spirits now online

Reduces people to dust

Feeds on loneliness

[resplendentprestidigitation]

Pulse (2001)

[howfishismade]

photo studies

now we just need a swansea faceclaim

[cptrs]

[lovecatnip]

Kairo

2001

[newsgola]

Japan's government has sounded out Amamiya about becoming BOJ governor -Nikkei By Reuters

© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Bank of Japan Deputy Governor Masayoshi Amamiya speaks during a Reuters Newsmaker event in Tokyo, Japan July 5, 2019. REUTERS/Issei Kato By Daniel Leussink and Tetsushi Kajimoto TOKYO (Reuters) -Japan’s government has sounded out Bank of Japan (BOJ) Deputy Governor Masayoshi Amamiya to succeed incumbent Haruhiko Kuroda as central bank governor, the newspaper reported early…

[rnewspost]

Key dates to watch out for on BOJ policy, leadership change By Reuters

© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: A man walks at the headquarters of Bank of Japan in Tokyo, Japan, January 18, 2023. REUTERS/Issei Kato By Leika Kihara TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s government is intensifying its search for a successor to central bank governor Haruhiko Kuroda, a choice that will affect how soon the Bank of Japan (BOJ) could phase out ultra-loose monetary policy. The newspaper reported on…

[latestnews2024]

Economists say BOJ's Amamiya is top governor candidate, tightening this week unlikely By Reuters

Economists say BOJ’s Amamiya is top governor candidate, tightening this week unlikely By Reuters

© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Bank of Japan Deputy Governor Masayoshi Amamiya speaks during a Reuters Newsmaker event in Tokyo, Japan July 5, 2019. REUTERS/Issei Kato By Kantaro Komiya TOKYO (Reuters) – Bank of Japan (BOJ) Deputy Governor Masayoshi Amamiya, a close aide of incumbent chief Haruhiko Kuroda, is most likely to succeed him this spring, according to two-thirds of economists in a Reuters…

[latestnews23]

Economists say BOJ's Amamiya is top governor candidate, tightening this week unlikely By Reuters

Economists say BOJ’s Amamiya is top governor candidate, tightening this week unlikely By Reuters

© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Bank of Japan Deputy Governor Masayoshi Amamiya speaks during a Reuters Newsmaker event in Tokyo, Japan July 5, 2019. REUTERS/Issei Kato By Kantaro Komiya TOKYO (Reuters) – Bank of Japan (BOJ) Deputy Governor Masayoshi Amamiya, a close aide of incumbent chief Haruhiko Kuroda, is most likely to succeed him this spring, according to two-thirds of economists in a Reuters…

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/20/2020: PULSE aka KAIRO (2001)

There's a moment in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's PULSE (aka KAIRO) in which two college students stand before a computer screen, watching a program that consists of softly glowing white dots drifting across a black void. One explains to the other that this is a computer science project in which dots that make contact are destroyed, but dots that grow too far apart will be drawn back together. This is an explicit metaphor for our ambivalent modern existence, in which internet-driven isolation becomes increasingly unbearable, but intimacy seems impossible, and even somehow perilous. This is PULSE's thesis statement, which it explores by proposing that when there is no more room in hell, the dead will come online--a breach of natural reality that dissolves the crucially meaningful line between life and death, with apocalyptic consequences.

In accordance with its obvious themes, Kurosawa's enormously creepy thriller about modern alienation--a release that was perfectly timed for the dawn of the new millennium in 2001--features a cast of disparate characters who struggle to connect with one another as they each grapple with the supernatural disaster that slowly bleeds from their computer screens into the physical world. At the start, a group of coworkers discover that their friend Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi), who has fallen out of touch while obsessively working on a computer program for them, has committed suicide. That's putting it simply; actually, when Taguchi lets his concerned friend Michi (Kumiko Aso) into his apartment to retrieve the disc, he casually hangs himself in another room. The sequence is beyond chilling, and it's relevant for me to admit that when Michi first encounters Taguchi, I couldn't be sure whether she was talking to him, or his ghost. As the group investigates Taguchi's fate, they are each contacted by spirits from the other side, which causes the living to begin to fade from existence; first they lose their will to live, then they lose their rational minds, and ultimately, they lose corporeality. Meanwhile, young luddite Ryosuke (Haruhiko Kato) installs the internet at his home for the first time, and immediately, something starts logging on independently, sending him upsetting images of people haunting their own darkened apartments. Terrified, he enlists the help of computer science student Harue (Koyuki), and together they come to the appalling realization that the dead are returning to Earth through the internet, as the living drift senselessly away.

There is so much rhetoric about the alienating powers of the internet now, that it's hard to discuss the subject without feeling like you're just cycling through clichés cooked up by an older, future-phobic generation. PULSE avoids this pitfall by remaining stubbornly abstract. When the living encounter the dead, after the invariably horrifying moment of contact, the live victim first experiences a profound lethargy, indicative of an ever-deepening depression; we understand that while the fear of the returned dead is the most immediate concern, the shattering of definitions that this causes is what catalyzes the victim's transformation from quivering flesh to a moldering stain that eventually flakes away and vanishes. Seeing the end of the world closing in, Harue observes that if the dead are forced to continue to suffer the maddening monotony of their mortal lives, then what distinguishes a person from a ghost? As life and death meld into a homogenous mass, our dwindling protagonists search for answers, trying to dismantle the mysterious images and phone messages sent from the afterlife, but they only succeed at making themselves more painfully aware of the inevitable. The audience experiences the hopelessness of this misadventure along with the heroes, unable to make any satisfyingly concrete meaning out of the bizarre phenomenon that is taking over the planet. It seems that life is made worth living by the contrast between things, and the expectation of change and evolution--even the simple daily change of being able to leave one’s apartment, and commune with others. When these possibilities are eliminated, and the disembodying effect of the digital world takes hold, life essentially becomes a version of hell.  

Western audiences (of which you are probably a part, like me, if you are reading this) tend to balk at anything they can't fully understand, as if a film were a like a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces forming a rational whole, each piece having its own tidy function. As he often does, Kurosawa defies that longing for clarity and completion, and he gets away with it by building up an intensifying terror that feeds on our lack of understanding. Without a set of rules to live by--without a silver bullet, a wooden stake, or a detailed backstory--we are left with nothing to defend us against the appalling idea of the void gazing back at us, and ultimately absorbing us. Some characters in PULSE discover that they can seal the ghosts behind a door or window using red construction tape, but this doesn't always work, as an unfortunate young man finds out when he spots a frantic mass of tape plastered all over a solid wall, only to find the movie's most dreadful specter approaching him from behind. As far as one knows, there is no salvation to be found anywhere.

While preparing for this review, and trying to figure out how I was going to avoid the embarrassment of repeating the usual nonsense about how the internet desocializes you and rots your brain, I read an excellent review of PULSE by Washington Post critic Stephen Hunter. He observes wisely,  "Pulse is best enjoyed if it's not questioned too closely. It lives visually in a way it cannot live intellectually". The truth is, I think movie viewers would benefit from this attitude in general, remembering that no movie participates in our quantum reality; they are only windows to various emotional states, demonstrations of different ways to process and cope with experiences that we can rarely fully understand and control even in "real life". PULSE provides a near-perfect description of our collective loss of control in the face of unstoppable digital assimilation. And much like the movie itself, I have no comforting conclusion to offer.