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BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

Keywords

youth alienation, school violence, power struggles

Abstract

“Congratulations on your graduation,” broadcasts on the upper secondary school’s PA system—the first sound in the film Blue Spring (2001), directed by Toshiaki Toyoda—yet none of the students we follow for the next 83 minutes have anything to graduate for. Like a chick denied egg-shell breakage, stuck in its hard world, the film-focused boys are told to live. But where, and how? Blue Spring exists between the graffiti laden walls of high school where classes are secondary to student politics and fights are as common as words.

Annoyances lead to murders. Money is extorted. Teachers are harassed. The first image of the film is two of its emphasized students lock-picking a door, smoking cigarettes, going onto their roof: leaving a system but still remaining in its body. The film is predominantly set between the high school and its rooftop, a threshold between institutional order and its imagined outside. Within this confined setting, a group of boys disengage from school and struggle for dominance through a ritualized clapping game. A would-be leader challenges the incumbent, and the two meet on the roof, mount the railing on opposite sides of the building’s face with their hands, and clap in numbered sequence. The one who wins is the student who can accrue the most claps without losing grip and falling. It is a sharp metaphor for the pulling tension these Japanese youth face: failure is represented as social death, and at times, literal. The film frames the school’s hierarchy as a quasi-monarchical order where the only respectable thing to do in life is to be boss.

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