The “end of the world” feels close for a group of Japanese teenagers in Neo Sora’s debut feature Happyend. Set in the not so distant future, earthquake alarms punctuate the film as do uncomfortable levels of surveillance. Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), Kou (Yukito Hidaka), Ata-chan (Yuta Hayashi), Ming (Shina Peng), and Tomu (Arazi) combat authorities by sneaking into techno clubs, pulling pranks, and walking home late at night only to meet back up at school a few hours later in their rumpled uniforms. In polite Japanese society, their behavior is not only frowned upon, but treated as a threat to the fragile order adults cling to. The idea is that they’ll grow out of it, but in an increasingly authoritarian state where human rights are being dismissed, the demand for obedience is less about maturity than about maintaining control.
Soon, a rift starts to form in the group. Kou befriends Fumi (Kilala Inori) and becomes politically engaged thanks to his Zainichi Korean background. He’s considered a foreigner despite being born in Japan. Yuta is Kou’s best friend, but his consciousness takes longer to bake because he’s a naturalized Japanese citizen. With his blinders on, his ignorance becomes both a personal flaw and a systemic problem, one that burdens not only Kou, but all those denied these so-called “privileges.” Sora places their friendship in a pressure cooker. It’s only a matter of time until this coming-of-age drama will hit a threshold.
Happyend‘s mise en scène is melancholy. Sora’s futuristic version of Japan is not an overblown dystopian wasteland comparable to Tokyo in Akira or Los Angeles in Blade Runner. Neon lights are muted, and the color scheme on the whole gravitates toward a gray palette. The camera favors long shots. The close-up is used sparingly, suggesting not only emotional distance, but the steady passing of time.
On the occasion of the film’s theatrical release, I spoke with director Neo Sora.
One of the things I really loved about your film is how you blended multiple genres. There’s this teenage rebellion thing going on, and there’s a coming-of-age story, but there’s also a surveillance drama happening. All of these ideas are working together, but at the end of the day, the film is an allegory about a city, a microcosm in crisis. I was wondering how you went about blending all of these elements together.
Yeah, I guess the main genre that I was really kind of playing with and pulling apart was this genre called seishun (青春), which in Japanese means like the juvenile delinquent film. It’s kind of this classic genre that’s sort of like coming-of-age, but more with a rebellious spirit to it. It usually features teens and kids in uniforms, smoking cigarettes and getting into fights and stuff like that. Oftentimes it’s a reflection of the kind of sociopolitical moment that these teenagers are responding to. It became a popular genre in the ’80s and ’90s. I really love that genre for some reason. There’s something really appealing about it, maybe because I didn’t do crazy rebellious things in high school, even though I felt rebellious.
I was also really thinking about this idea that when you’re in Japan, they’re always reminding you that within the next 30 years or less, there’s going to be a big earthquake. It’s quite devastating, so the idea is to prepare, right? Like it’s going to be your responsibility to stay safe for 72 hours, so know your evacuation routes, etc. That really got me thinking. What will Japan look like in the near future? And so that was kind of the start. Those were two separate strands that I had separately, but then there was a moment during the development process where everything clicked and I realized all of these strands could be one film.
I was also studying the patterns of history, so I was looking at the previous big earthquake that happened in Tokyo, which was in 1923. The great Kantō earthquake. At that moment, amidst this chaos of a natural disaster that kills so many people, the other disaster that often gets neglected to talk about is that there was a genocide or a massacre of society to Korean people at the hands of normal Japanese citizens. And, of course, one of the biggest causes of this was this resentment that built up due to these colonial relationships that Imperial Japan had with South Korea, or I guess Korea, in general. The other thing that I was really thinking about was this quote that William Gibson, the writer, talks about. He says that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed. So when I’m thinking about the different aspects of how to make the future world convincing and realistic, I was actually just looking at what exists in all these other different countries today that feels like the future and then bring in my knowledge of Japan in a way that doesn’t feel special, so that it just feels like something that’s really familiar today.
It’s interesting you say that, because while watching Happyend, it’s obviously Japanese, but I could see a lot of the themes fitting into an American setting as well. Our generation seems so accustomed to this kind of constant crisis management. In previous interviews, you’ve mentioned influences like the Trump administration, BLM, and the Occupy Movement. Was this sense of cultural and political anxiety that you infused into the film’s version of Japan distinctly American?
I definitely didn’t intentionally take America and just slot it into Japan. I guess, I’m just earnestly and genuinely responding to my own lived experience. A lot of my coming of age, I suppose, both in terms of my youth, but also politically, was in America at the time. That being said, I spent a lot of time in Japan as well. While I was in university the first moment that politicized me in a big way was actually the Fukushima incident. That was 2011 and then Occupy was 2012. That really kicked off this thing where once you start to notice things, you see it everywhere, right? So I feel like that’s sort of what happened for me too. I gained a political consciousness through Fukushima, and I just started to see all these other things as well. That really gave me a perspective, I think. To see Japan from this lens. But it wasn’t as if I was trying to capture this atmosphere and emotion that I felt in America, and then place it on Japan. I was trying to capture the emotion that I was feeling in my teens to early-20s, and then set it in this genre film, basically, of this coming-of-age film.
Music plays a huge role in the film, but I also feel like silence is really important. There’s that scene at the beginning of the film where there’s an earthquake and there’s no sound whatsoever. The city itself feels really quiet and barren, even though there are these huge buildings everywhere. I was wondering how the plan for silence came to be.
When you’re in Tokyo sometimes, or when you’re in Japan, you could be in the busiest place and somehow it’s the most quiet place in the world. It’s a little eerie to me. I was in one of the biggest shopping districts of Japan, during Covid, though, so that definitely inflects it, and I could hear a baby crying from like five blocks down, even though there’s tons of people around. Sometimes, I really think that the livelihood of a city comes from feeling the presence of people around you. Even if you’re far away or can’t see them in a place like New York, for example, you can really feel everybody living and having vitality, whereas in Japan, sometimes it’s just eerily quiet.
I wanted to include a little bit of that, but the other, the real silence that I think you’re talking about in the earthquake scene is actually more of a reaction to not wanting to really traumatize or, I would say, re-traumatize people who have experienced earthquakes because it is truly a scary feeling, especially if it’s a big one. I’ve made a short film in the past where we had an earthquake, but I read feedback and saw some comments of people saying, “it really scared me.” As a filmmaker I don’t want to just traumatize people for the sake of, like, making a realistic earthquake, for example. Actually, the decision to make that scene silent came more from consideration toward that fear. But that being said, I felt like it actually worked in the favor of the film because it felt like a big fracture in a way. Where it just goes to nothing and it feels like the air is sucked out of the room and you’re holding your breath in a way. I also realized that I can actually bring that back toward the end of the auditorium scene when you see Yuta and Kou are looking at each other and it just falls into complete silence in the same way.
Could you expand more on the coming-of-age film? It’s not like we’re just seeing these teenagers move from adolescence to adulthood. There’s this broader Japanese cultural tension that’s being felt throughout the film that’s asking the question, are these characters going to submit? Or are they going to self-realize? How did you fold that into each character’s personal journey?
Yeah, I think there is quite a difference between how young people respond to politically charged situations in America compared to Japan. I feel like here it’s normal to like butt heads and argue and take to the streets and all these things. That’s sort of baked into the public consciousness and a social imagination, mainly because there is this understanding that sometimes in order to act morally, you need to break laws or you need to break rules. This is really exemplified in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, for example, where we had to break laws because the laws were immoral, right? I feel like even to this day in the West, it’s just, it’s fairly normal. The consequences of it as well, like, you, breaking laws, like, is not as heavy, right? Like let’s say you protest or occupy a place for a day, and then you get arrested in the protest and you can come out in a day.
Whereas in Japan, this relationship to rules and laws is much different. It’s almost like morality, in a way, is equated to law-abidingness. So I would say since the ’60s and ’70s, when we really saw a big student movement in Japan, similar to France, and all these other countries and then the Vietnam War and all these other things, protesting (in Japan) was wiped away from this like social public consciousness as a thing that’s an available tactic or even a desirable thing to do. Actually, the priority is placed more on being quiet. If you want to change something, then go through the correct channels, and do it in a polite way. Even today, when I go to Japan and I join protests, I encounter a lot of young people who have never been to protests and are very afraid to go to one because they think that it’s just rowdy and they’re gonna break laws and all these things. But then when people go, oftentimes they realize that actually protesters are a group of very earnest people who are just earnestly trying to do something for the better of society and stuff. That softens people. And also, I think there is a really concerted effort within protesting in Japan today to try to bring in these people and make people feel safe to be there. So there’s really a different relationship with rebellion in a way. If rebellion does happen, it’s almost played out as a lashing out that’s not a politicized thing. That’s what these juvenile delinquent films portray. So I wanted to play a little bit of a spin on that.
CC: This dynamic comes across toward the end of the film. I don’t want to reveal too many spoilers, but the students are gathered in the auditorium after the sit-in and some of them start protesting the surveillance system. They stand up to fight the principal while the naturalized Japanese students disagree and argue that the cameras are good because they prevent chaos. I think there’s this common misconception that surveillance is neutral and used for safety, but obviously it’s completely biased. When did you decide to bring surveillance into the film?
NS: So for me, I wasn’t necessarily trying to almost like single out surveillance as the main theme or backbone or backdrop of the film. I was actually really responding to how colonialism in Japan has played out until today. I think the thing that illustrates it best was in 1945 after World War II ended. It’s the final law that the Japanese emperor put into place right before he lost all this political power. It was called the Foreigner Registration Act. And so what that meant for all these Koreans, Taiwanese people, Manchurians or Chinese people, all these people who were former colonial subjects, now had to register as foreigners and not Japanese people. It really codified what it meant to be Japanese and what it meant to be a foreigner.
At the time, if you were a foreigner then you were a deportable person. So there needs to be a governing body to oversee who Japan will deport and who is coming in illegally. That is actually what has remained systemically in Japan today. There’s a lot of horrible human rights abuses that are happening in this detention system in Japan. If a foreigner is caught doing something illegal, for example, then Japan has the authority to detain them and even deport them. It’s becoming a really big problem right now. Especially as xenophobia is growing more rampant and the narrative that foreigners are coming to Japan, and taking all these social privileges and doing crime and the like, and all this is, of course, fake. If you look at that, it’s just untrue. But this narrative has been pushed, and now there’s like a really concerted effort to actually fully deport people who aren’t Japanese, which is a very vague term. It’s really similar to what’s going on in America, to be honest.
I was really trying to question what even is the identity of a Japanese person and how that identity is actually inextricably linked to this idea of state authoritarianism, but also surveillance. Surveillance is like one arm of that system. That’s sort of what I was really thinking about in bringing in this idea of an Octane and the surveillance system installed in the school. I think what I was really trying to do is show that it’s often these students who are living in this world that can humorously go around it. They’re finding these loopholes and ways to trick the system and stuff like that. To me, that’s really like this kind of vitality that these young people have.
CC: Yeah, I mean, I grew up with computers and technology and I can mess with it more than older adult can. And I feel like this movie perfectly conveys that.
NS: Totally.
CC: This is a little bit of an indirect passage, but I feel like this film functions as a memory. I think you’ve said in an interview that Yuta and Kou are reflecting on their high school years from an older point of view.
NS: Yeah.
CC: I didn’t initially pick up on it until much later. I was wondering how that perspective came to be?
NS: Yeah, it really came early late in the game. I had the script written, I had all these elements put into place, and it was really intuitive. I just wanted it to feel nostalgic for some reason. I don’t know why. Then at a certain point, I realized that every tale that’s being told to you, has a perspective from which that tale is being told. Even though we’re not showing that in the film, that this is a flashback or anything like that, what if this whole film is actually a tale being told from the perspective of Yuta and Kou in their 30s. They accidentally met up one day, you know, they bumped into each other and they haven’t spoken to each other in 15 years. Let’s go get a beer and reminisce.
That felt really true to me, because I was in my 30s when I was really finishing the script. I was remembering my past. It’s a very melancholic way to end the film, but I also really do hold out hope for myself and personal life as well, that all these people that I’ve lost touch with, there is a chance that I’ll bump into them. And we can rekindle a relationship. I was really thinking about the theme of friendship throughout the film, and thinking about how especially when you’re young and you’re a high school student, the friends that you make, especially if you have a really close-knit group of friends from when you were really young, that they are your whole world. They encompass everything about you and your personality and like your whole world and the metaphor that I was really trying to work with was that like in this kind of a situation when you lose a friend, it can feel as significant and as grand as an earthquake, and earthquakes are like these big circle turning points within especially Japanese society. I don’t think you can really fully grasp how big of a difference of change that was until you were a little bit older, when you’re reflecting back on your youth.
CC: Totally.
NS: You know? It’s like, wow, that was the moment when everything changed, right? But that’s the feeling that I wanted to imbue in the film. The idea, the working metaphor, was that a friendship breaking up is the earthquake at the end. But that needs emotional distance, right? To understand that.
CC: I think that makes for a really effective coming-of-age drama. It kind of has a Stand By Me effect for me personally, where you’re an adult looking back at the past.
MS: Exactly.
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