Picture: Japanese shampoo dispenser

Picture: Japanese shampoo dispenser

Learn more about 

Japanese shampoo dispensers

  here

 #japanesecustomer, #japan, @jcustomers, www.japanesecustomer.com, #shampoo, #dispenser, #innovative, #picture

Book Review - Bending Adversity by David Pilling

Book Review  

  Bending Adversity Japan and the Art of Survival by David Pilling

Author:         David Pilling

Publisher:    Allen Lane, Penguin Books, UK.2014

                        ISBN:         978-1-846-14546-9 

                      Pages:         359

Important insights to modern Japan

© Copyright. 2015.  All rights reserved.

Bending Adversity shares with the reader, author David Pilling’s detailed knowledge, insights and abilities to find information about what Japan is, how it operates, it’s weaknesses, its strengths and it resilience in the face of many enormous setbacks some of which are manmade. As a country and a culture Japan is still relatively undocumented. Newspapers, magazines and websites still tend to focus on the bizarre aspects of Japan not the everyday and these days we seem to get less news than before from mainstream media.

If you want to learn more about modern Japan then this book will get you up to speed with interviews, statistics, personal insights and a balanced view of what has occurred, possible reasons why and what Japan may do in the future.

The book is structured into six parts broken down into sixteen chapters with a foreword, afterword and bibliography.

As Japan continues to generate interest in the West this book provides an up to date guide which sheds insights into their ability to bend and survive adversity. Japan is the third largest economy with 8% of global output and is a culture that is competitive, adaptive and innovative when under pressure.

Japan has survived the last two decades in a deflationary low growth environment and may have lessons for Western countries now facing the same environment.

               

Book Review

  Bending Adversity Japan and the Art of Survival by David Pilling



#japanesecustomer, #japan, @jcustomers, book review, david pilling, bending adversity, modern japan, insights, www.japanesecustomer.com 

Movie Review: The Ballad of Orin

Japanese Movie: The Ballad of Orin

The title in Japanese is

"Hanare Goze Ni Orin"

A young blind girl Orin is abandoned by her mother when she runs away in a small seaside town. The girl is then taken by the town’s people to a school for blind entertainers by a medicine salesman. At her new house she is trained by other blind women who teach, show and share the songs and music they play together as travelling entertainers. The troupe travel the country entertaining groups of people at various locations including bath houses, meeting halls and local houses with songs, stories and performances that allow them to get paid money or with food. The young girl, Orin takes time to adjust to her new life, the clothing, instruments, songs, walking in the snow, advances of drunken men, etc.

She trains for over eight years and graduates become a Goze (blind entertainer). 

Mastering her new life she is popular as an entertainer but this also brings a darkness that is hard to shake off.

An encounter with a customer is hidden and when it surfaces among her handlers she is thrown out of the trope as an outcast being disowned. She continues to perform as a solo act and befriends many men, none who last and take care of her. She then meets a man who is a deserter from the army who refuses to sleep with her and insists she call him her brother so as to hide his identity. But fate catches up with him and he has to flee leaving her once again to fend for herself. 

Attacked by a man known to her, the deserter returns and learns of this incident and kills the man and flees. She follows the deserter to the police station when he is captured where they meet briefly but he dies shortly afterwards in custody. She continues to wander the countryside in a lovely red gown.

A powerful historical story that will share the era, lifestyle, people and hardships of Orin the blind entertainer.

"Ballad of Orin (はなれ瞽女おりん Hanare goze Orin^?) is a 1977 Japanese film directed by Masahiro Shinoda. Its alternate English-language titles are Banished Orin and Symphony in Gray.

It details the life of a Goze, a blind female minstrel (played by Shima Iwashita, the director's wife), in early 20th-century Japan." Source: Wikipedia

Watch the full movie with English subtitles below

   

Movie: The Ballad of Orin  

Leave your review, impressions

 below as a 

comment