Chapter 4 Botanical Regeneration Fire and Disturbance Ecology in the Films of Yanagimachi Mitsuo and Kawase Naomi

Disturbance Ecology

Fire Festival and Vision demonstrate how disturbance and destruction help sculpt and maintain both the material ecology of the forest and a botanical subjectivity that sees itself as a part of the forest. The multispecies anthropologist Anna Tsing describes the importance of disturbances in facilitating the resurgence of ecosystems: “Disturbances, human and otherwise, knock out multispecies assemblages—yet livable ecologies come back. After a forest fire, seedlings sprout in the ashes, and, with time, another forest may grow up in the burn. The regrowing forest is an example of what I am calling resurgence. The cross-species relations that make forests possible are renewed in the regrowing forest. Resurgence is the work of many organisms, negotiating across differences, to forge assemblages of multispecies livability in the midst of disturbance. Humans cannot continue their livelihoods without it.”11

We can see in Tsing’s figuration of disturbance ecology something similar to Catherine Malabou’s notion of destructive plasticity, as I have been invoking it in this book. As the forest ecosystem is destroyed by fire and subsequently reconfigured, so, too, is subjectivity as it becomes botanical. The transformative properties of fire kindle a rethinking of the human. As Catherine Malabou explains, violent transformation can be generative: “Destruction too is formative. A smashed-up face is still a face, a stump a limb, a traumatized psyche remains a psyche. Destruction has its own sculpting tools.”12 Just as the somabito sculpts the forest with his axe or chainsaw, the films of Yanagimachi and Kawase use the image of destruction by fire to carve out a notion of the future for the fading horizon of the somabito and the multispecies assemblage that is the forest.

Although the science of disturbance ecology is the model through which I argue that the films discussed in this chapter become botanical, once again, a spiritual understanding of plant life is paramount to the transformation at each film’s core. Both Fire Festival and Vision stage the plasticity of disturbance ecology via a spiritual relationship to the forest that is inscribed into the respective settings of each film. They each make legible a spiritual presence that permeates the forest, not unlike the presence of kehai that floats throughout the texts discussed in the previous chapter. Whereas Haniya’s figuration of kehai was decidedly nonreligious, the spirituality found in both Fire Festival and Vision is closely tied to local manifestations of Shinto and Buddhist practice. Where Haniya resisted a State Shinto that abstracted such practices to imperial ends, the religious affect of the films discussed in this chapter are closely tied to the land and the very ecological connections between humans and plant life that the films look to renew.

This spiritual presence is visible in both films in part through cinematography that creates what I call a cinematic-botanical subjectivity. As the camera floats between the trees of the forest and the human foresters, the films of Yanagimachi and Kawase portray forests as multispecies assemblages that give equal weight to the subjectivity of both, creating a visual botanical poetics. Here is where these films take on a plantlike form, a trait I have been arguing is necessary for the trope of becoming botanical. The subjectivity fashioned by each film’s cinematography is multiple and at a scale and tempo more aligned with the botanical realm than the human realm. Read against the long religious history of the film’s settings (the Kii Peninsula in Fire Festival and the Yoshino region of Nara Prefecture in Vision), the free-floating subject position sculpted by each film’s cinematography likewise takes on an all-seeing perspective inhabited by the kami, or local gods, that move among the trees. This botanical-spiritual presence participates in the enacting of disturbance ecology, leading to a revitalization of economically depressed rural communities far outside the capitalist framework proposed by the Kizukai Movement. Therein lies their botanical resistance.

Fire Festival and Vision understand that disturbance renews the “cross-species relations that make forests possible” (to return to Anna Tsing’s claim), but they arrive at this conclusion in dramatically different ways. Fire Festival reaches the conclusion that destruction is necessary for resurgence through its fiercely masculine protagonist Tatsuo, a character so egoistic and vulgar that critics at the time of its release were largely unable to recognize the ecological logic he embodies and subsequently dismissed him as a “pigheaded reactionary” and the film overall as “not ecological.”13 Vision, on the other hand, reaches the logic of disturbance ecology through the outright elimination of the human ego at the level of the species. Unlike Fire Festival, it does not cling to the notion of a unique, individuated character who ultimately must sacrifice himself for the greater good of the forest ecosystem. Rather, Vision takes the ecological logic of disturbance ecology and imagines that the destruction of fire can usher in a future in which all of humanity undergoes an evolutionary change that results in the dissolution of the human ego. It suggests that anyone can become botanical by adopting the subjectivity of the somabito and embracing the generative potentiality of destructive plasticity.

Another significant difference between the two films concerns the politics of their writers. This chapter places side-by-side two figures whose politics appear at sharp odds with one another: the prominent postwar novelist and critic Nakagami Kenji and director Kawase Naomi. Nakagami, who wrote the screenplay for Yanagimachi’s Fire Festival, was a fervent critic of the Japanese state, a stance informed by his Burakumin (or outcaste) status in Japan.14 Kawase Naomi, on the other hand, has recently demonstrated nationalist sympathies, as glimpsed in her official two-part documentary film covering the highly controversial 2020 Tokyo Olympics.15 While their respective relationships to the state sit on opposite sides of the political spectrum, both Nakagami and Kawase think deeply about plant life in their work, and both arrive at the logic of disturbance ecology as a means of regeneration. That these two share an affinity for the forest and its regenerative shokubutsusei demonstrates the ambivalence inherent in becoming botanical. As we have seen in previous chapters, becoming botanical, for all of its radical possibilities, also holds the potential to be activated in more conservative contexts. Once again, this chapter demonstrates that context matters. After all, not all fire leads to regeneration.

The Otherworldly Atmosphere of Fire Festival

Yanagimachi’s Fire Festival opens with an image of fire. Flames burn against a black backdrop as the film’s opening credits run, for nearly three minutes, accompanied by a ghostly score written by the renowned composer Takemitsu Tōru. In these opening moments, droning tones of low-end brass instruments are punctuated by swells of shrill flutes that give way to a quiet undercurrent of marimba. The flames these sounds accompany are almost certainly from the torches used in the ritual Fire Festival of the film’s title. The Fire Festival (which is held annually in the city of Shingū on the heavily forested Kii Peninsula in Wakayama Prefecture) is a ritual of purification performed to welcome the coming of spring. Within the cosmology of the festival (which is properly called the Lantern Festival, or Otōmatsuri), fire leads to new growth. By the film’s end, protagonist Tatsuo will embody the logic of this festival and leave a fiery legacy behind. He will kill himself and his family for the greater good of the forest.

It is a shocking tale but one well in line with Yanagimachi’s provocative cinematic oeuvre. Yanagimachi began his career with the 1976 film God Speed You! Black Emperor (Goddo spiido yū! BLACK EMPEROR), a 16mm documentary that follows a bōsōzoku motorcycle gang. His second (and first feature) film was a 1979 adaptation of Nakagami Kenji’s tense and violent novella A 19-Year-Old’s Map (Jūkyūsai no chizu). In 1982, he released Farewell to the Beloved Land (Saraba itoshiki daichi), a harrowing tale of a violent drug addict set against the pastoral beauty of Yanagimachi’s native Ibaraki Prefecture. Fire Festival was Yanagimachi’s fourth feature-length film. Nakagami Kenji produced the screenplay, marking his first foray into screenwriting. He subsequently wrote a novelization of the story as well.

Fire Festival is set in the small village of Nigishima, on the Kii Peninsula in the Kumano region of Mie Prefecture (also known by its historical name Kishū). Nigishima is home to lush, mountainous forests that have supported Tatsuo (played by Kitaōji Kinya) and his family since time immemorial. The Kii Peninsula was also Nakagami Kenji’s birthplace and a frequent setting for his work. Nakagami had previously explored the region’s complex intersections of history and mythology (and, yes, plant life) in his 1977 book Ki Province: The Tale of the Land of Trees and the Land of Roots (Kishū: Ki no kuni, ne no kuni monogatari). The forested landscape of the Kumano region, it has been said, is a place in which “the mythologies of the past inhabit the present.”16 Kumano is home to many important religious sites and is the birthplace of Shūgendō, a form of Buddhist asceticism that is intimately tied to the mountains and waters of the region. This spiritual history infuses the landscape of film and plays a central role in its eventual embrace of disturbance ecology. Characters in Fire Festival frequently discuss the Yama no Kami, the “mountain goddess” who resides in the forest and with whom Tatsuo is shown to have a singular relationship. The presence of the Yama no Kami is signaled both visually and aurally: branches waving in the wind seem to signal the kami manifesting itself through botanical media (as discussed in chapter 3), as does Takemitsu’s haunting score.

The spiritual landscape of Kumano holds religious and political significance that is inseparable from images of death, fire, and rebirth and stretches back to Japan’s earliest extant mythological histories. According to the Nihon shoki, an official mytho-history dating to 720 AD, the Hana no Iwa Shrine in Kumano marks the spot where Izanami (a deity who, along with her male counterpart Izanagi, gave birth to both the islands of Japan and the myriad gods, as briefly mentioned in chapter 1) was entombed after dying while giving birth to the deity of fire.17 The Kii Peninsula is likewise home to the mythological site in which Japan’s first emperor ascended the land. This latter belief plays directly into the film’s narrative, as the villagers of Nigishima attempt to use the myth to rebrand their town as a potential site for tourism once the local economy falls on hard times.

The rich confluence of history and spirituality has made Kumano a popular pilgrimage destination for centuries. D. Max Moerman explains how this rich tapestry of religious and political history has resulted in Kumano’s otherworldly aura. Kumano, he argues, is seen as a place that has “contained a multiplicity of other worlds: the homelands of an ancestral past and the celestial paradises of Buddhist rebirth.”18 Yanagimachi himself has spoken of Fire Festival’s setting as just such a place of otherworldliness: “I went time and again into the mountains of Kishū to hunt for locations . . . I went all over the place. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to say these were unique experiences, I encountered enough phenomena along the way that I can imagine that kind of world: one in which the present world and the other world [takai] coexist.”19

Yanagimachi’s description of Kumano resembles works discussed in chapter 3 of this book, as they presented the forest as a meeting place for the living and the dead. Indeed, the forests (and forestry) of Kumano are tied to the spiritual history of the region, as the Hongū Shrine (one of the three major shrines of Kumano) enshrines the deity Ketsumiko no Ōkami, a god connected to the forested mountains and the forestry industry of the area more broadly.20 The Kii Peninsula is famous for its old-growth cedar (sugi) and cypress (hinoki) forests, although ecologists and historians remind us that these forests are far from primeval. According to entomologist Gotō Shin, the cedar forests of Kumano are both a natural legacy of the region and a product of Japan’s postwar “greening” efforts to rehabilitate the war-torn landscape.21 Conrad Totman claims that human management and planning of the region’s forests can be traced back much earlier, to the eighteenth century.22 In either case, it is clear that humans have long lived and worked in these forests, and their understanding of the plant life that populates the forests is both scientific and spiritual. As an exploration of the failing forestry industry in Nigishima, Fire Festival lingers in the forest, giving long stretches of screen time to the tree-filled landscape, one that has historically existed in the flux of human management (see figure 4.1). As somabito sculpted the forests of Kumano for generations (managing the cycles of death and renewal in the forest ecosystem), they likewise sculpted a subjectivity through destructive plasticity and became botanical. This is Tatsuo’s goal in Fire Festival—to usher in a new cycle.

Forests of Conflict

Fire Festival portrays the Kumano region as an ecosystem in dire need of change and regeneration. Like many rural communities in postwar Japan, Nigishima suffers from depopulation and economic depression. By the time of the film’s release, rural depopulation (kasoka) had been acknowledged as a crisis for over a decade. In 1970, the first national law aimed at countering depopulation took effect. The goals of this countermeasure were fourfold: “to prevent excessive decreases in population,” “to strengthen the infrastructure of local communities,” “to improve the welfare of local residents,” and “to correct regional disparities.”23 When the law was revised and reenacted ten years later in 1980 (five years before the release of Fire Festival), these objectives were partially rewritten to better address the economic effects of depopulation. The first objective of the 1980 version of the law reads: “promotion of depopulated areas.” Gone is the language of strengthening infrastructure. In its place is a call to “increase employment.”24

Fire Festival features several flashbacks that demonstrate the optimism the village experienced in the early years of Japan’s postwar economic regrowth. The film highlights the completion of the Kisei Honsen Railway Line in 1959, an important piece of infrastructure that connected Mie Prefecture and Wakayama Prefecture along the Kii Peninsula. The enthusiasm and hope for the future witnessed in these flashbacks contrast sharply with the village’s narrative present roughly twenty years later. The railway has not solved the region’s economic woes. Both the lumber and fishing economies have become unsustainable in this remote area. As Fire Festival opens, the village has decided to rebrand itself as a tourist destination, a decision very much in line with the depopulation countermeasures discussed above. The focus of this revitalization is a proposed aquatic park that would commemorate the ascent of Japan’s legendary first ruler, Emperor Jimmu, and effectively end the traditional livelihoods of the village. There is an irony at play here. The villagers believe the only way to survive as their local economies collapse under the weight of the state’s increased dependence on imported natural resources is to construct a monument celebrating the divine authority of the imperial household.

Not all of the villagers consent to this plan, however. Nigishima’s forest people (the somabito) and its ocean people (those involved in fishing) are at odds over the village’s prospects for the future. The fishing community embraces the idea of the aquatic park, while Tatsuo adamantly opposes the development and changes it will bring to the forest ecosystem and the profession of the somabito. He believes these changes will not lead to regeneration. The tension between the village’s vision of the future and Tatsuo’s embodiment of an older, now largely incomprehensible (to his fellow villagers) way of inhabiting the world is at the heart of Fire Festival’s tale of becoming botanical. For the creators of the film, Tatsuo is as much a representative of the mythological era that resides within the otherworldly space of Kumano as the mythological Emperor Jimmu. Nakagami Kenji saw Tatsuo as directly linked to Japan’s earliest mythology. In a conversation with the feminist critic Ueno Chizuko, Nakagami likens Tatsuo (at Ueno’s suggestion) to the figure of Susanoo, brother of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu within traditional Japanese mythology. Susanoo is a wild and excessive figure, much like Tatsuo. Nakagami sees Fire Festival as “the tale of the final Susanoo—the one that leads into destruction.”25 Yanagimachi echoes Nakagami’s eco-mythologizing, claiming that, with Fire Festival, he wanted to explore a world in which the separation of humans and the natural world had not yet occurred: “I wanted to go back to the Jōmon Period [a pre-agriculture, prehistoric time, c. 7000 BC–300 BC] . . . and incorporate that period of mythology into contemporary life in a very concrete way. Back then human beings and animals were not separated but were harmonic and fused.”26 Tatsuo’s subjectivity is fused in the way Yanagimachi describes. He is not separate from the forest and its spiritual presence. Rather, he is an integral part of it.

Where in the previous chapters of this book writers turned to new theories of evolution and botanical science (and paranormal pseudoscience) to forge a new relationship with the botanical world, in Fire Festival, Yanagimachi and Nakagami attempt to return to prehistoric understandings of plant life (however idealized they may be) in order to rethink the human. According to film critic Ogi Masahiro, Yanagimachi’s mythical imagining of Jōmon-era harmony between humans and more-than-humans belongs to a world not fully domesticated. He invokes botanical language to make this point:

When a certain botanist told me that “the English word ‘domestication’ cannot be rendered into Japanese,” I was shocked. Of course, one can find a matching idiom in an English-to-Japanese dictionary, such as kainarashi (tamed) or junchi (acclimatization). But, the botanist said, the substance of the concept (of domestication) cannot be found in Japan. This claim was something of a hyperbole. But I had occasion to think about it, and I had a thought that stood out—Encyclopedia Britannica concisely summarizes the concept of domestication as “a process of genetic reorganization in which wild animals and plants are cultivated to live within a household for human benefit.”27

The thought that stood out to Ogi after reading this definition was that the Japanese are a “misfit” people that never fully made the historical transformation from a hunter/gatherer existence to that of an agriculture-based existence. He claims this helps explain the contradiction of a people that “openly destroy nature and yet worship natural objects.”28 For Ogi, Tatsuo represents a plant or animal that is only partially domesticated: “While I watched Yanagimachi Mitsuo’s Fire Festival, I entered an odd state of exaltation. I thought, ‘This is it.’ This was my hypothetical Japanese misfit, that fundamental contradiction between ‘gatherer’ and ‘cultivator.’”29 Tatsuo’s practice of forestry contributes to this misfit subjectivity. As a somabito, he does not fit in the changing world of Nigishima or that of postwar Japan writ large. He is an anachronism facing the crisis of being left behind by a rapidly changing national economy that benefits from the exploitation of timber resources abroad. In their adherence to the traditional profession of forest management (and their adherence to its sometimes-brutal ecological logic that results in the death of more-than-humans), the somabito are misfits. Inamoto Tadashi has referred to somabito as “woodcutter(s) of a former age.”30 Fire Festival, in turn, asks how the somabito might be able to usher in a new age.

Those in favor of building the aquatic park think tourism will revitalize the village. This was a common response to the economic woes of rural Japan around the time Yanagimachi filmed Fire Festival, as John Knight explains in relation to Hongū, near Nigishima: “By the late 1970s and early 1980s, forestry was in decline, and the strategy of kigyo yuchi (the beckoning of industry to rural areas) was widely seen to have failed as the scale of industrial relocation was not sufficient to offset trends in rural depopulation. The rural exodus continued. . . . National subsidies such as support for rice prices, infrastructural investment, and general revenue support for rural municipalities looked endangered. . . . Some new source of employment was seen as vital. Tourism expanded greatly throughout the 1980s but it did not meet local developmental aspirations.”31

While efforts to build a tourist economy in the area did not pan out, in Fire Festival, members of the local Nigishima community (along with developers from the city) pressure Tatsuo to sell his family home, as his land sits within the proposed site for development. Tatsuo’s family is the last holdout. The local land broker explains to Tatsuo’s wife and mother that if they refuse to sell, the plans for the aquatic park must be abandoned. Tatsuo’s mother is begrudgingly open to the idea of selling the land and is tasked with convincing Tatsuo to change his mind. In the film’s final scenes, Tatsuo visits the neighboring town of Shingū to participate in the annual Fire Festival. It is here that the film arrives at its botanical solution for change. Believing that he is doing what is best for the continued survival of the forest, Tatsuo returns home and kills his entire family (including his mother, wife, and two children) before turning the gun on himself. Nakagami took inspiration for this murder-suicide from an actual event that occurred in the Kumano region in 1980.32 Although the specifics differ from those depicted in the film, Nakagami clearly saw in the horrific incident a model through which to explore the crisis of kasoka, or rural depopulation. Nakagami rendered this horrific incident environmental, for through his murder-suicide, Tatsuo brings the ritual fire of the Fire Festival home and introduces a disturbance akin to a forest fire into the ecosystem of Nigishima in order to, in Anna Tsing’s words, renew the “cross-species relations that make forests possible.” In the process, he controversially takes on the role of a martyr, sacrificing himself for the greater good of the forest. Tatsuo reaches the outermost boundaries of becoming botanical, and his violent actions open up the potential for a future made possible by his own fiery death.

Cinematic-Botanical Subjectivity

As he acts on behalf of the forest, Tatsuo embodies a shocking form of botanical subjectivity. Through his death, Tatsuo appears to put his human needs aside and do what is best for the future of the forest. Yet there is a curious tension at play in Fire Festival, as Tatsuo is the only member of the somabito forestry community shown to have this ecological knowledge. While the film goes to great lengths to show how Tatsuo sees himself as part of the forest, it ends up highlighting the uniqueness of Tatsuo’s character. Ultimately, Fire Festival carves out an egoistic botanical subjectivity available only to Tatsuo and not to the other somabito characters in the film. It is a far cry from the utopian, multiple botanical subjectivity of Osaki Midori (as discussed in chapter 1) and also a far cry from the botanical subjectivity of Miwa Yoshi discussed in chapter 3. In becoming botanical, Miwa Yoshi was unable to declare “I am myself.” Tatsuo’s sense of “I” is overbearing in Fire Festival. This is why his enactment of disturbance ecology takes the form of suicide. He believes, egotistically, that he must become a martyr and that his death can become the very disturbance that leads to the regeneration of the greater ecosystem.

The botanical subjectivity that leads Tatsuo to believe that he alone can renew the forest is legible in the opening moments of the film. As the opening credits fade out, a high-angle wide shot of a cedar grove (in which a group of foresters are diminished and barely visible) appears and changes to a shot of a cedar falling directly toward the camera, its angle moving downward with the movement of the falling tree. This is followed by a low-angle shot showing the group of foresters at work. From here, the camera returns to a wide expanse of trees, with several distant mountains visible in the background. Tatsuo emerges and partially fills the foreground, along with his younger friend and coworker Ryōta. A cedar begins to fall directly toward the two men (and the camera). Tatsuo calmly warns Ryōta to move out of the way and then casually walks out of frame. As the two return to the frame and begin trimming the newly fallen tree of its branches, the camera pans up, looking back out over the forested mountains in the distance. The camera moves from the high treetops into the world of the foresters and further down to the perspective of Tatsuo, only to return to where it started among the tall trees, bringing together different scales of the forest, both human and more-than-human, but clearly marking Tatsuo as centrally important.

Famed cinematographer Tamura Masaki’s camerawork suggests a flowing subjectivity that moves through the assemblage of trees and Tatsuo himself. It is a cinematic-botanical subjectivity. Indeed, Yanagimachi has claimed that several scenes of the film are meant to demonstrate the perspective of the trees themselves.33 Tamura’s cinematography highlights the relationship between the somabito and the trees to which they tend and portrays the work of the somabito as a natural and necessary cross-species relationship that maintains the ecological health of the forest. Yet it is Tatsuo and his unique botanical subjectivity that serves as the crux through which Fire Festival develops its ecological vision of forest health. He is repeatedly shown as having intimate knowledge of the forest that eludes everyone else. He alone knows when trees will fall and when rain will stop. He alone knows what will please and what will anger the Yama no Kami that presides over the forest. He repeatedly calls the spiritual presence “his girlfriend” and exposes his naked body to please her.

Even with this overwhelmingly strong sense of self, Tatsuo experiences himself as a part of the forest. He, in turn, thinks as a part of the forest. In one scene, Tamura’s camera pans from a medium angle over a darkened forest grove, where we see Tatsuo and his crew standing on ladders hacking away at branches through the gaps between trees. The axe blades hitting wood is the only sound we hear. The camera pulls up toward the forest canopy, and light streams in between the branches. Ryōta calls out for Tatsuo, shattering the relative silence. Suddenly it is revealed (in an apparent temporal jump) that the two men stand on opposite sides of a gorge, their lewd conversation echoing back and forth over the gorge’s expanse.

The scene is stunningly verdant. The men speak with an exuberance that carries over the mountain, as if they are overcome by the life teeming around them. Ryōta informs Tatsuo that he has caught something in his hunting trap. As the men run over to see Ryōta’s handiwork, they discover he has used a sacred tree to make the snare. As the men begin to panic, Tatsuo tells them not to worry. He reminds them that the Yama no Kami is his girlfriend. He then squeezes the blood out of the dead bird that has been caught in the snare and smears it up his arm. Fire Festival suggests that a sense of order has been restored by Tatsuo’s ritualistic embrace of death. The cedar tree directly behind Tatsuo suddenly begins to rustle, as if in agreement with Tatsuo’s actions. The tree and Tatsuo come together in this moment, and a botanical subjectivity flows between them to alert viewers to the fact that they are partners in maintaining the proper balance of the forest. Throughout the film, Tatsuo is shown to have this kind of unique insight into an ecological system that includes humans, more-than-human animals, and plants, as well as the spiritual beings that inhabit the mountains and sea. This forest thinking affords him an intimate ecological knowledge of what the forest needs to renew itself.

Tatsuo has an epiphany in the forest near the end of the film. The scene in question opens with the silence of the forest, the only sound to be heard emerging from Tatsuo’s axe as it strikes a giant cedar and echoes across the forested expanse. After a few trees fall, the film cuts away to a scenic shot of the forest reflected in water. The ghostly soundtrack of Takemitsu Tōru’s score becomes audible. The high-pitched swells of flute come and go against a low rumble, just as they did in the opening moments of the film. We then see the group of somabito looking up, commenting on the coming rain. The otherworldliness of the music overlaps with the dark atmosphere visible in the rain clouds that come to fill the screen. A thick mist descends on the mountains. The somabito decide to descend the mountain in anticipation of the approaching weather. Ryōta continues to work, and the sound of his chainsaw becomes hidden in Takemitsu’s increasingly ominous soundtrack. Suddenly the atmosphere becomes palpable and the mysterious spiritual aura that has clung to the forest throughout the film materializes as a heavy rain that floods the land. The rain’s near-deafening sound erupts over Takemitsu’s score and covers over all other noises. The heavy rain drenches fallen trees and the somabito alike. Everything within the forest matrix comes together through this atmospheric intrusion.

Once again, Tatsuo is singled out as having a unique insight into the significance of this event and its implications for the ecology of the forest. Tatsuo and Ryōta climb down the mountain together, but Tatsuo stops at the base of a massive tree. Ryōta pleads with Tatsuo to keep going, but Tatsuo brushes him off, stating that the rain will soon stop. He leans back on the tree and confidently declares: “I know the mountain” (Yama no koto wa ore ga shittoru).34 Tatsuo (in his egoistic role as protector) holds Ryōta in an embrace for a brief spell to keep him warm, until Ryōta decides to leave Tatsuo and head down the mountain alone. Throughout the film, the somabito share a homosocial bond that brims with both violent and sexual energy. They talk openly about sex and engage in physical contact through wrestling and the like. The bond between Tatsuo and Ryōta is particularly close. It is clear throughout that Ryōta idolizes Tatsuo, admiring his sexual prowess. Ryōta enters into a sexual relationship with Tatsuo’s childhood sweetheart/current sexual partner Kimiko and, in one scene, adopts Tatsuo’s characteristic way of walking while visiting Kimiko. The tenderness Tatsuo shows Ryōta in the scene in the rain, however (as he embraces him in silence and holds Ryōta’s face against his chest) seems too much for Ryōta to bear. It is as if, in the lack of wildness or violent affect, Ryōta is no longer able to share affection with Tatsuo. Or perhaps it is the fear of the coming storm that sends him running. In either case, it is clear that Ryōta does not understand the mountain or the Yama no Kami in the same way Tatsuo does and that this understanding bears on the homosocial and potentially sexual energy that flows between them.

Once Ryōta leaves, Tatsuo faces the massive tree, spreads his arms wide, and embraces it with his whole body (see figure 4.2). Takemitsu’s score reemerges, signaling the presence of the Yama no Kami. A close-up of Tatsuo’s hands shows him slapping and groping the tree in a manner equally violent and sexual. Yanagimachi has characterized this scene as Tatsuo having sex with the Yama no Kami.35 The camera pulls back into a wide angle that diminishes Tatsuo at the bottom of the massive cedar. As he continues to pound his body against the tree, the rain suddenly stops.

Tatsuo then has an ecological epiphany that links the spiritual renewal of the Fire Festival to the material renewal of the forest ecosystem through disturbance ecology. A forceful wind blows from the foreground of the frame into the background where Tatsuo stands embracing the tree. Tatsuo walks through the trees blowing about violently in the wind and watches as one tree breaks and falls into the front of the frame. The camera now moves behind Tatsuo, who stares at the fallen tree for a moment before declaring: “I understand” (Wakatta). Something important has passed between the forest and Tatsuo, and his egoistic botanical subjectivity is encapsulated in this statement. He understands what the forest needs him to do, but no one else (including the viewer) has access to this knowledge until the final moments of the film.

In this scene, Tatsuo alone understands the wishes of the Yama no Kami and the greater forest assemblage. He subsequently thinks like the forest. He becomes botanical and finally understands what the forest wants him to do in response to the threat of development. He now knows something about the relationship between destruction and resurgence, between death and futurity. At the forest’s behest, Tatsuo taps into the spiritual legacy of the land and attends the Fire Festival, where he partakes in the ceremonial ritual of renewal by fire. He then returns home and commits murder-suicide as the Yama no Kami watches over him approvingly.36 In the final moments of his own life, Tatsuo becomes botanical through death within the logic of disturbance ecology. Like a forest fire burning wildly only to open space for new growth, Tatsuo uses the regenerative properties of destruction to create space for a potential future for the forests of Nigishima. The revitalization Tatsuo sets in motion is a far cry from the “future made out of wood” that the Forestry Agency would envision just a few decades later.

Fire and Futurity in the Forest

The Fire Festival plays a brief yet important role in the vision of the future that Yanagimachi presents. Images of the Fire Festival do not appear until the final fifteen minutes of the film and only constitute approximately five minutes of the film’s running time. Yet the festival provides Tatsuo with an answer for how to renew a forest ecosystem that is no longer viable. The Fire Festival introduces the potential for plasticity. Through the destruction of fire, the forest assemblage can change, regrow, and become anew in Tatsuo’s absence. The festival is an ancient ritual held in Shingū, Wakayama Prefecture every year on the sixth day of February.37 As the film demonstrates, the ritual is exclusively for male participants. A large group of men all wearing white share a sacred flame, passing the fire between wooden torches. The men ascend the 538 stone stairs of Kamikura Shrine and eventually enter a sacred building on top of the mountain. Shut inside, the men must endure the painful smoke and fire until the doors are opened, at which point they descend the stairs. The Fire Festival welcomes the New Year and carries with it the significance of a “fire renewal” (hi no kōshin).38

Tatsuo concludes that it is only in his absence that something new can grow, that he is like an old, dying tree blocking the sun from the forest floor. Tatsuo enacts the destructive power of ritual when he kills his mother, wife, children, and himself. As his killing spree is briefly interrupted by the return of his children, the three wooden torches he carried in the Fire Festival (one for Tatsuo and two for his young sons) can be seen hanging in the entryway to the house. The film lingers briefly on these torches as if to suggest they have reignited through Tatsuo’s destruction. Fire Festival thus links, quite problematically, the symbolic regenerative properties of fire to Tatsuo’s murder-suicide.

From a botanical perspective, however, fire can be an important element of a healthy ecosystem, leading to physical regrowth and reconstitution within a material ecology of the forest. As Sara E. Jensen and Guy R. McPherson remind us: “Fire has been a part of nearly all the world’s ecosystems for millennia. It plays a crucial and irreplaceable role in the ecosystems that support all life. . . . Fire is both inevitable and ubiquitous.”39 Ecologically speaking, fire can be beneficial. As Nathaniel Brodie et al. explain: “Repeated disturbances, such as periodic wildfire, are critical influences on ecosystem development, patterns of forest age-classes across the landscape, and species evolution.”40 Certain plants, called pyrophytes, have evolved to tolerate and even thrive as they come into contact with fire. Certain trees, for example, have evolved to develop thick bark that prevents fire from damaging the living tissues within. In addition, there are trees that produce serotinous cones, which only open and spread their seeds when they reach a high enough temperature through fire.

Fire can indeed lead to regeneration and to a notion of futurity predicated on the destruction of the present. This connection is reinforced and performed in the Fire Festival, as it leaves the old year behind and welcomes the new. As Tatsuo comes to think like the forest, he gains an ecological understanding of this relationship between destruction and regeneration. In Tatsuo’s forest-thinking, he and his family must burn in order for the forest, and thus the village of Nigishima, to live. Of course, this line of interpretation is dangerous and risks justifying extreme domestic violence. This is particularly true given the fact that Nakagami based his screenplay on a real-life incident of familial murder-suicide, as discussed above. For all of its thought-provoking figurations of botanical subjectivity, Fire Festival ultimately reaches a highly dangerous conclusion and exposes the dark potentials that also lay within the realm of becoming botanical.

Botanical becomings, as I have been discussing them throughout this book, take place in the loss of an individuated self as it forms an alliance with the botanical world in the service of sculpting something new. But instead of envisioning plant life as an alternative to a backdrop of violence, Fire Festival envisions becoming botanical as a necessarily violent act in and of itself. Nakagami Kenji reinforces the botanical nature of Tatsuo’s murder-suicide in his conversation with Ueno Chizuko, where he claims that Tatsuo’s death resembles that of bamboo: “After bamboo plants go to seed, they completely dry up. They are completely destroyed. It is that kind of image. That’s what was in my mind at the time (I wrote it).”41 Like bamboo, Tatsuo withers and dies in order for the seeds of potentiality to emerge. Unaccounted for in Nakagami’s image of the bamboo going to seed, however, is that act of Tatsuo killing his own children (and wife and mother). The slippage here between the human and the botanical renders Nakagami’s botanical becoming dystopian even as it strives toward a new opening of futurity.

Even if we take Nakagami’s image of the bamboo going to seed at face value, the final moments of Fire Festival do not make clear what exactly will grow from these seeds of potentiality. It ultimately does not present a clear-cut vision of the future. In the aftermath of Tatsuo’s murder-suicide, the film cuts to a few scenes demonstrating how quotidian life continues in Nigishima. The village’s merchants close up shop and head home. Fire Festival ends with a shot of Tatsuo’s hunting dogs sitting calmly and looking over a cliff at the harbor below. The sun is setting, casting a pinkish light over the water. Takemitsu’s ethereal score, with its high-pitched flutes, drowns out any diegetic noise. Suddenly, the film cuts to a close-up of the water. A black substance is seen bubbling up to the water’s surface from below. Dead fish float to the surface, filling the frame. Sunlight reflects brightly against the oil collecting at the water’s surface until the screen turns a uniform shade of red that evokes the color of both fire and blood. A group of village fishermen stand on a dock looking out at the water. The red of fire/blood reflects back onto them, tinting their devastated faces.

Throughout the film, it has been rumored that Tatsuo has been responsible for dumping oil in the ocean to protest the building of the proposed marine park. The villagers now look perplexed. With Tatsuo dead, how did the oil get there? The suggestion is that Tatsuo has not “died” in the manner that humans conventionally die. Rather, by becoming botanical, he has survived in the forest in the way a plant might. He is no longer corporal, but he is still a part of the forest, albeit in a new way. Simply put, his death is a part of the life of the forest, a necessary condition for the maintenance of a cyclical ecosystem. If Tatsuo were shown the images produced by the Kizukai Movement, he would likely argue that it is not just the trees we need cut down to usher in the next forest cycle but also the anthropocentric worldview that renders trees nothing more than resources in the first place. Rather than “building a future out of wood,” Tatsuo would advise that we build a future as wood.

Fire Festival ends with one last wide-angle panoramic view of Nigishima. A red sun hangs low between two mountains above the water. In the center of the water is the area where the oil has surfaced, which reflects the sun in a way that makes it look as if the water is on fire. The screen slowly fades to black but does so in a manner that leaves the bright red oil spill in the center of the frame illuminated as the final image of the film. In the end, it remains unclear if Tatsuo’s fiery act has prevented the development of the aquatic park and the ecological damage it is sure to bring. In short, Fire Festival does not present us with an image of the future but rather lingers on the state of possibility that Tatsuo’s death opens up. The final image, in which the very site of the proposed development appears to burn, suggests that perhaps it, too, has been set aflame by Tatsuo’s becoming botanical in death. Anna Tsing claims that in the aftermath of disturbances such as fire that “livable ecologies come back.” Fire Festival does not reward viewers with an image of the livable ecology of Nigishima coming back. It does, however, attempt to plant the seeds for this possibility, however devastating the immediate present (and likely traumatic aftermath) of the film’s ending may appear to be.

The Somabito in the Films of Kawase Naomi

The economic precarity of Japanese somabito villages did not improve in the years following Fire Festival’s release. With the collapse of Japan’s “Bubble Economy” at the end of the 1980s, rural depopulation and economic downturn continued to afflict rural villages. Legal countermeasures intended to combat rural depopulation were repeatedly revised. The 2000 version of the law introduced new language into its objectives once again. Where the 1980 version (as discussed above) called for the “promotion of depopulated areas,” the 2000 version called for “the promotion of self-reliance in depopulated areas.” This neoliberal turn is bolstered by yet another new objective: “to form regions [kokudo] with distinctive beauty.”42 Such revisions hold a certain irony when we consider areas like the ones portrayed in Yanagimachi’s and Kawase’s films. These regions struggle to be self-reliant because of the collapse of the timber industry, and the beauty of these regions is tied to the forests to which they cannot adequately tend—forests that are largely a product of postwar greening efforts that also looked “to form regions with distinctive beauty.” In any case, the governmental countermeasures have not proven effective, and in 2022, more than half of all municipalities in Japan were designated “depopulated areas” for the first time since the classification began with the 1970 law.43

For Kawase, the plight of the somabito amid the ever-worsening depopulation crisis was felt close at hand in her native Nara Prefecture:

For more than ten years I have felt that “something is strange with the mountains” and that if we don’t do something about it, something bad will happen. The forestry profession is in decline, the people connected to it are aging, and the young people that could take over are leaving. It’s a dangerous job—the roads are not maintained, and two acquaintances of mine died in accidents involving the felling of trees. If you get hurt, it can take two hours to get to the nearest hospital because the work is so deep in the mountains. The state of the forest is the state of humanity. I want to pass along to future generations a beautiful forest, and the idea that we continue living along with it.44

Kawase’s filmography demonstrates a strong investment in the relationship between the human and botanical world, in particular within the forests of Nara. Many of her films prominently feature plant life and explore the impact of plants (and trees in particular) on human subjectivity. Her 2018 film Vision feels like an answer to the question left hanging at the end of Yanagimachi’s Fire Festival: Just what kind of future is opened up in the destruction of fire? While Fire Festival finds the potential for futurity in its final fiery moments (an image screenwriter Nakagami Kenji likened to bamboo going to seed and then drying up), it does not offer a clear vision of what would grow in the aftermath of Tatsuo’s death. Its ending leaves the future open, dangling in possibility. Vision closes this loop by mimicking the unfolding of cyclical time as experienced by the forest and tying the future back to the past.

Kawase has explored the ecological connections between the somabito and the forest beginning with her debut feature-length film Suzaku (Moe no Suzaku, 1997). Suzaku shares many similarities with Fire Festival, including the verdant cinematography of Tamura Masaki. Set within the forested landscape of Nishiyoshino in Nara Prefecture, Suzaku narrates the economic decline of the local logging community. The village and forests of Nishiyoshino lie some seventy kilometers west of Nigishima (the setting of Fire Festival), and, like Nigishima, the Yoshino region is a crossroads of several overlapping histories. It holds long-founded significance as a mythological and spiritual site while also being home to a long history of forest management. In a narrative echo of Fire Festival, the father of the Tahara family (the family which serves as the narrative focus of Suzaku) concludes that he must die in order for something new to grow. As he can no longer support his family, the Tahara patriarch kills himself, creating a disturbance in the village ecosystem meant to open space for renewal.

In the same year she released Suzaku, Kawase returned to her documentarian roots and released The Weald (Somaudo monogatari, 1997), a film that follows the hard lives of the somabito (or, in this case, somaudo, a variant of the word somabito that is used in the Japanese title of the film) of Nishiyoshino, the same setting as Suzaku. The film plays like a supplement to Suzaku, depicting the actual somabito that served as the inspiration for the fictional narrative of Kawase’s first feature film. On her official website, Kawase explains that she attempted with the documentary to envision a future for the economically disenfranchised forestry community: “Replacing the ‘facts’ of the life they have spun with my own ‘truth,’ I spin a tale in cinema, so that this may become a film that continues from the past to the present, the present to the future.”45 She discusses the somabito phytomorphically, as if they were themselves trees imbued with a resilience that could weather the storm of economic depression: “I was given a lot of hints on how to enrich life from the soma people who live in Hirao, Nishiyoshino-mura, Nara Prefecture. The accumulation of their lived days has taken root in the earth and returned to nature. Just as massive trees withstand the wind and the rain, the cold and the heat, these people endure the twists and turns of life by simply existing, developing deep wrinkles.”46 Kawase would return to this image of the somabito as a resilient tree some twenty years later in Vision.

In Vision, Kawase finds the future for the somabito that she sought in both Suzaku and The Weald. Vision is a botanical becoming in the form of an eco-fable that finds life and futurity in the aftermath of fire. The film articulates the principles of disturbance ecology, as I have been discussing them in this chapter, wherein ecological disturbances such as fire are necessary for the continued health of an ecosystem. Like Fire Festival before it, Vision arrives at this conclusion through a deep investment in the ritual/spiritual traditions of its setting. Unlike Fire Festival, however, it does so without the presence of a singular, egoistic character at its narrative center. Rather, it explicitly imagines, through destruction and renewal, that the human ego itself can be overcome. It imagines that the entirety of humanity can become botanical.

Forest Time

Like Fire Festival, Vision is set in a region of deep political, religious, and mythological significance. The film takes place in Kawase’s native Nara Prefecture, in the mountainous and highly forested region of Yoshino, the same setting as her earlier films Suzaku and The Weald. Yoshino is located at the southern end of the ancient province of Yamato, home to the imperial capital of Heijōkyō (present-day Nara) from AD 710 to 794. In several respects, Yamato Province is a point of origin for the modern Japanese state. It is here that Buddhism became tied to the imperial court. Central to the legitimization of the court was the embrace of Buddhism as a quasi-state religion, which led to the construction of monumental Buddhist temple complexes, including Tōdaiji—a marvel of sacred wooden architecture and one of the causes, according to Conrad Totman, of Japan’s early deforestation.47 These forests, in their contemporary form, are the focus of Vision.

Photographer Dodo Arata serves as the film’s cinematographer, his second collaboration with Kawase. Dodo’s cinematography moves between the scales of the forest, from the minuscule life found on the forest floor to the somabito climbing and felling trees, and even farther up to the expansive forest canopy. The forest canopy is full of rich colors: deep greens that give way to more autumnal hues of red and yellow as the narrative progresses through the seasons. Bright light streams through the tops of the trees for several moments, and fog moves throughout the spaces between giant trees, illuminating the spiritual aura characteristic of Yoshino that clings to humans and more-than-humans alike. Katherine Connell has referred to the film’s cinematography as “vegetal camerawork” (see figures 4.3–4.5).48 Indeed, as the camera moves through the forest in this manner, it highlights the interconnectedness of the cross-species relationships that make up the forest assemblage (to return to Anna Tsing’s language) and presents a botanical subjectivity that is shared throughout the forest among humans, plants, and spiritual entities. This subjectivity finds further expression within a cyclical and ritual unfolding of time.

It is clear in Vision that the village of Yoshino is suffering from the economic decline that also afflicted Nigishima in Fire Festival some thirty years before. In the opening scenes, we see Tomo (a somabito who lives a secluded life in the forest) use a chainsaw to fell a large cypress. A few scenes later, we see a group of elderly villagers (likely somabito) sitting in the forest lamenting how much the forest and the community have changed and how many people have left the village behind. Even as it highlights these hardships, Vision offers hope for the somabito profession in a way that Fire Festival did not. In its cyclical vision of time, the film sees an unbroken link among the somabito of the past, present, and future.

Late in the film, Tomo begins to teach the ways of the somabito to Rin, a young character with a complex backstory who represents the future of the forest ecosystem within cyclical time. (I explain Rin’s role in the film in detail below.) Tomo takes Rin to the marketplace where the large cypresses that have been felled in the forest are sold. As the two lean in and appreciate the impressive size of a particular tree, Tomo tells Rin they have to work in the forest for the sake of future generations: “It’s not just us, right? The previous generation, the generation before that, and even further back, those people before us grew and raised these trees. That’s why they are here now. We have to work hard and link up with them.” Tomo’s vision of time in this dialogue links generations of somabito (past, present, and future) together within the assemblage of the forest. He recognizes that the lifespan of the forest is far greater than that of human beings and that the work of past somabito informs the work of the current somabito. Their felling of the forest in the past (a period of destruction) cleared space for the trees of the present (a period of regeneration). Extrapolating forward, he explains to Rin that their work in the present will likewise influence the somabito of the future.

This cyclical time is Vision’s approximation of what I call “forest time.” Forest time attempts to capture the complex manner in which the assemblage of the forest experiences time, i.e., its temporal shokubutsusei. In Vision, forest time is entangled with the ritual flow of time inscribed into the spiritual landscape of Yoshino. Disturbance ecology, with its alternating periods of destruction and regeneration, draws the somabito into forest time. Because a forest is not a singular entity but rather a web made up of “cross-species relations,” as Anna Tsing claims, forest time does not follow the straightforward, linear timeline of the human (i.e., birth, life, death). The short durée of the human lifespan is only part of the much longer durée of the forest. Forest time is a cycle of many births, many deaths, and many rebirths. Individual humans and trees may die, but the forest remains to see the birth of new humans and new trees that come to reconstitute the forest anew.

Vision attempts to embody this temporal botanical imagination and make the long durée of forest time legible in its roughly two hours of running time. The film stars Juliette Binoche, who Kawase met in France at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Binoche plays Jeanne, a travel writer who ventures to the remote forests of Yoshino in search of a mythical herb named “vision.” (Like the title of the film, only the English word is used.) Jeanne meets Tomo (played by Nagase Masatoshi), who tells her that his job is “saving the forest,” and Aki (played by Natsuki Mari), a blind woman deeply connected to the forest. It becomes clear that Aki is a mythological figure. She occupies a narrative space similar to Fire Festival’s Yama no Kami, a spiritual entity belonging to the forest. It is suggested throughout the film that Aki is actually a tree (or group of trees) in human form. In certain moments, she is shown performing dancelike movements in the forest that mimic the swaying of trees in the wind. In such moments, she communes with the forest in such a way that she appears to be one of the surrounding trees.

At the start of the film, Aki is shown to have a special knowledge of the ritual unfolding of forest time. She tells Tomo that she is one thousand years old, born “when the stars were born.” Aki states early on that the time has come to ritually renew the forest, claiming (in an echo of Kawase’s own claim quoted earlier in this chapter) that “there is something strange [okashii] with the forest lately.” Aki’s role throughout the film is to teach the other characters the ecological necessity of burning down the forest in order to restart the cycle of forest time. Unlike Tatsuo in Fire Festival, Aki is not a “misfit,” to return to Ogi Masahiro’s assessment. In calling Tatsuo a misfit, Ogi claims Tatsuo is out of place in his contemporary moment. As time in Vision operates cyclically, the past is not out of place in the present but rather comes back around to structure the future, just as dead trees (or “snags”) can become a site of regrowth for plants. In the same scene in which she claims to be one thousand years old, she tells Tomo that she hopes to meet him again when she “turns seventeen years old.” The comment bewilders Tomo (and the viewer) due to Aki’s advanced age. Her comment speaks, however, to the botanical subjectivity on display in Vision through its development of forest time. Within Vision’s complex timeline, the past is never just the past. The past can become the future, and one-thousand-year-old humans can turn seventeen again. Thus, like Osaki Midori, who saw something botanical in cyclical narratives and repetition, Kawase attempts to make the very narrative structure of Vision more plantlike.

Ritual Renewal through Fire

As the spiritual center of the forest and the only character to understand the strange flow of forest time, Aki sets the film’s narrative in motion. She enacts a plan to introduce disturbance into the ecosystem to keep the cyclical flow of change in flux. In order to address the “something strange” in the forest, Aki needs Jeanne and Tomo to fulfill ritualistic roles within her plan, which ultimately ends in the forest catching fire. Jeanne arrives in Yoshino with only a faint idea of her purpose. It is as if something beyond her control has called her to the forest. She says her goal is to find the herb “vision,” but her knowledge of the plant is tenuous at best. She is unclear where she has heard of it, but Jeanne believes in the tales of vision’s magical powers, which purport that the herb has the ability to “end human pain.” Arriving in Yoshino, she meets Tomo at a local shrine. Although their meeting appears accidental, it was in fact fated to happen, as Aki told Tomo to go pray at the shrine on that particular day and time. In secretly arranging this meeting, Aki has set up the conditions to ensure that the cyclical regeneration of the forest will eventually occur.

The regeneration that Aki sets in motion is ritualistic and seems to be connected to the shrine where Jeanne and Tomo meet. At the shrine, Jeanne notices a painting on one of the walls. It depicts a forest with several trees on fire and what looks like a white cloud or gust of wind passing through the forest. Tomo tells Jeanne that the painting has been there since long ago. As they talk, the film cuts from the painting to the forest around Tomo and Jeanne, making it clear that the forest in the image and the setting of the film are one and the same. In the film’s fiery climax, it is revealed that this image depicts a reoccurring event. As the film cuts away in its final moments from the charred forest back to the ancient painting of fire it presented at the film’s beginning, it shows us the future by returning to the past. The loop closes, ready to start again. We learn in the end that the “vision” Jeanne has been seeking is not a medicinal herb but rather this very ritualistic fire. “Vision” is not itself a plant but rather the conditions for plants (and humans who rethink themselves as plants) to grow anew, once again.

The characters of Vision must fulfill ritualistic roles to make these conditions for regrowth possible. In doing so, they get swept up in the cycle of forest time. They become something akin to archetypes or mythological figures that are devoid of individual egos. This egoless state is an ideal that Vision sees as a possible future for all of humanity through the plasticity of becoming botanical. To be sure, the extreme plasticity of Vision’s characters makes it difficult for viewers to understand their motivations and histories within the narrative. Their stories keep changing, to a degree that borders on infuriating. As they get written into forest time, the logistics of their personal histories get complicated and confusing. For example, when Aki meets Jeanne ostensibly for the first time, Aki remarks: “It was you, wasn’t it?” No explanation is given for this comment. It will only make sense once the film later establishes a new, cyclical history for both characters. Although Jeanne arrives in the village of Yoshino a stranger, she quickly becomes a part of the forest assemblage, and her past is rewritten (or, in more ecological language, “renewed”). Jeanne becomes (in the past) the mother of Rin, the young character Tomo teaches to be a somabito, as discussed above.

Rin is introduced to viewers in a bewildering manner. He mysteriously appears in the forest after Aki has died midway through the film. Vision suggests that Rin is thus a new iteration of Aki, who is herself a manifestation of the trees in the forest. Remember the aspens from this book’s introduction? Rin and Aki seem connected in a similar way. They are both offshoots of the same forest organism. But “Aki” is also a ritual role that Rin comes to play. Because Rin appears in the forest following Aki’s death, it seems as if Aki’s comment that she will see Tomo again when she “turns seventeen” may be referring to this moment. Although Rin seems too old to be seventeen, he does, in one scene, pick up a cicada shell and make a vague comment about how “there were many gathered long ago.” In an earlier scene, Jeanne speaks of the seventeen-year cycle of certain cicadas with Tomo. Therefore, as viewers, we have been primed to consider that the strange figures of Aki and Rin may emerge and die off in cycles, just like cicadas—or, perhaps, like aspen. Yet within the narrative web that Aki sets in motion, Rin becomes Jeanne’s son, fathered by a somabito character who was accidentally shot by a hunter in the forest before Rin’s birth (a scene viewers will come to recognize as the opening scene of the film). As Jeanne falls into the forest time of Vision’s complex narrative, she, too, becomes an archetypical/ritualistic/botanical figure. She becomes botanical as a reproductive element of the forest assemblage. In becoming the mother of Rin, she simultaneously becomes the mother of Aki and thus a mother figure to the forest itself, contributing to its regeneration/rebirth within forest time.

The Liveliness of Destruction

The complex web of cyclical time that drastically changes Jeanne’s personal history (turning her into the mother of Rin) unfolds slowly in Vision, as one might expect of forest time. As Jeanne comes to stay with Tomo and continues her research on the plants of the forest, she spends time outdoors and begins to have visions of her own. For the majority of the film, it is unclear if these visions are memories or premonitions. We will come to understand by the film’s end that they are the “backstory” of Jeanne and her relationship with Rin’s father. They tell, in fragmentary form, the new history that Jeanne adopts within forest time. As Jeanne starts to see these visions, we viewers see her subjectivity regenerating itself.

Jeanne’s knowledge of “vision” comes to her in a similar manner. She speaks with Tomo about “prime number cicadas” that only emerge from the ground every seven, thirteen, and seventeen years. Jeanne links the cycle of prime number cicadas to the periodic cycle of the herb “vision,” which she now states confidently as 997 years. She says that if her calculations are correct, it has been 997 years since it last appeared. Given Jeanne’s lack of knowledge concerning “vision” up to this point, her newfound certainty is surprising. How has she gained this knowledge? How long has she been living with Tomo in Yoshino? Vision is not concerned with these questions or with making a clear narrative arc. Like many other developments to come, Jeanne’s understanding of the cycle of 997 years comes out of nowhere, as if the forest is revealing itself to her as it sees fit. Jeanne ultimately decides to return to France but promises Tomo that she will come back to Yoshino soon. She is convinced “vision” will “release its spores” in either the fall or winter.

Jeanne then returns to Yoshino in the fall. The leaves of the trees in the forest have turned bright red, approximating the image of fire before they die off in winter. From this approximation of fire, the film turns to an actual image of fire (albeit one made with CGI). We see Rin walk in the forest and up to a giant tree that has been showcased throughout the film.49 Rin begins swaying, mimicking the movements of the trees around him, just as Aki had previously done. In an illustration of the nonlinear nature of forest time, Rin sees both Aki and the man who was his father (the man who became Jeanne’s ex-lover in her rewritten history), both of whom are ostensibly dead. They begin swaying along with Rin, and the forest bursts into flames. As the disturbance of fire is introduced into the ecosystem, forest time appears to reset. The past (as embodied in Aki and Rin’s father) participates in the fiery event of “vision” and gives birth to the future (as embodied in Rin). Tomo sees the smoke from the forest fire and rushes into the woods. On the way, he hears the barking of his beloved dog who had tragically died a few scenes earlier. Aki’s disembodied voice emerges from the forest, telling Tomo that he “is not alone.” Tomo then finds Jeanne standing at the edge of the fire. He screams for Rin and tells Jeanne they need water. Jeanne, however, has already become botanical and understands the regenerative event taking place. She responds to Tomo, “We don’t need water. ‘Vision’ is about to be born.”

As “vision” is born, the past, present, and future come together. The ritual by fire is complete, and destruction has given way to liveliness. The film cuts from Aki to Jeanne’s ex-lover (who is grasping a blanket), to Rin, who has now taken his father’s place, holding the same blanket. The camera focuses on glowing embers and the charred remains of trees. Jeanne, Tomo, and Rin look over the scorched wreckage. The sound of birds and the flowing of water can be heard. Tomo remarks, “The mountain is lively, isn’t it?” (see figure 4.6). These are the final words spoken in the film. They mark not only the renewal of the ecosystem through disturbance ecology but also a renewal of subjectivity. As the forest burns and starts anew, so, too, does Tomo’s understanding of his place in the world. He now understands that he is “not alone,” that he is multiple, that he is botanical.

Tomo sees a renewed sense of life teeming in the forest in the aftermath of destruction. He begins to think like the forest and understands the logic of disturbance ecology, that futurity comes from destruction and death. In the final moments of the film, all three characters (Jeanne, Tomo, and Rin) have arrived at this ecological epiphany and have participated in its ritualistic enactment. Where in Fire Festival it was Tatsuo’s death that took center stage in the disturbance of fire, it is new life that emerges from within the remains of Vision’s fire ritual. Producer Yamamoto Reiji likens the vision event to the ritual Yamayaki festival in Nara, where the mountainside of Wakakusayama is set ablaze annually in the month of January.50 He explains the event of “vision” as “a scene in which the forest regenerates through wildfire.”51 Echoing Nakagami Kenji’s claim that Tatsuo’s suicide in Fire Festival was like a bamboo going to seed, Kawase explains the ecological disturbance of “vision” as that which is necessary for the potential of futurity to emerge: “‘Vision’ is the ‘seed of potentiality’ that exists within us, that helps us accept things and then overcome them. . . . ‘Vision’ is necessary to move into a new world [tsugi no sekai].”52

For all of its teeming life, however, the “new world” that Kawase envisions nevertheless opens up through the death of certain organisms within the forest assemblage (including Aki and Rin’s father). As Brodie et al. claim in regard to disturbance ecology: “There are winners and losers in every disturbance event; the death of established organisms creates new niches and living space for others.”53 This was Tatsuo’s plan in Fire Festival, as he killed himself and his family to create new space for the future to take hold. As discussed above, however, Fire Festival does not show the results of his action. In Vision’s final moments, we actually see the future (as do Jeanne and Tomo) in the “lively” sound of birds and water flowing within the charred forest. We also see it in the figure of Rin, who is poised to become the new spiritual center of the forest (a position previously occupied by Aki), as well as the next generation of somabito, having been taught the profession by Tomo. We see a future growing from the remains of the past.

Evolution and the Destruction of the Human Ego

What makes Vision’s figuration of becoming botanical so extreme is that it imagines that fire can sculpt all of humanity anew, effecting an evolutionary change in the human species at large. Jeanne tells Rin near the end of the film that there “are people who say that human beings are still raw.” The fire of the “vision” event is meant to address this rawness, this imperfection that leads to “pain,” as Jeanne stresses throughout the film. Like Osaki Midori’s work examined in chapter 1 of this book, Vision turns to evolutionary theory and posits that through the regeneration of the forest, humans can evolve into something new, something more botanical. Vision imagines an evolved form of humanity that no longer possesses an individuated human ego separated from the natural world. It imagines an evolved form of subjectivity that experiences itself as ecologically enmeshed within something larger. In other words, it imagines an evolutionary change that affords all of humanity the kind of botanical subjectivity inhabited by the somabito characters in Vision (and Fire Festival before it). The new becoming it imagines is, in a cyclical fashion, quite old. It is a return to the way somabito have inhabited the region of Yoshino for centuries. Given Kawase’s politics, it is hard not to recognize a certain decontextualized idealization of the past here and a subsequent desire for regression. As Kawase has claimed: “The state of the forest is the state of humanity.”54 Vision presents us with an ambiguous view of evolution through circular time, a change at the scale of the human species that bends toward a seemingly romanticized notion of Japanese tradition (as bound up in the figure of the somabito).

What is unambiguous, however, is that Kawase sees disturbance as a necessary precondition for change, whatever the outcome of that change may be. Elizabeth Grosz argues that disturbance events are precisely what drive evolutionary change: “Natural selection, while it operates as an ordered and ordering network of processes, is in fact made up of nothing but thousands, millions of accidents, momentary events, that lead to the death of some, not because they were less well adapted but because they were, say, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”55 The “vision” event (the fire that renews the forest) is similar to one of “these millions of small events” as it forces the forest ecosystem to change and adapt accordingly. A sense of plasticity is necessary to survive and thrive in the aftermath of fire. Vision strives to grant humans this evolutionary plasticity. Yet the “vision” event presented in the film is not an accident. It is a recurring ritual. The characters of Vision (both human and more-than-human) are not “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Within the cyclical logic of forest time, they are in the exact right place, at the exact right time to usher in the future. Aki has made sure of this by secretly setting up the initial meeting of Tomo and Jeanne and by dying to make space for Rin to emerge. Like Osaki Midori’s Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, Kawase’s Vision posits a degree of agency over evolution. By becoming more plantlike, the characters of these works (separated by nearly one hundred years) find a way to navigate evolutionary time and redirect its flow.

Jeanne introduces evolutionary language in a monologue addressed to Rin (who, in this scene, she does not yet know is/will become her son): “In the ancient part of the human brain there is an aggressive instinct that is passed down genetically. And it seems that it will never change. We evolve so slowly.” The camera moves from Jeanne and Rin to a rippling shot of water flowing and then presents an abstract image: a pale blue screen that is revealed to be the surface of water only when an unidentifiable substance (perhaps a clump of gold leaf/gold paint or some sort of metal) drips into it (see figure 4.7). The shift in imagery is striking. The majority of the film has been spent in the forested realm, and yet suddenly, we are transported somewhere different, somewhere beyond the realm of botanical subjectivity. There is something strange about the image of water. It is either in reverse or upside down, but the lack of perspective makes it difficult to tell. This ambiguity is pivotal, as it poses a question that gets to the heart of Jeanne’s words: Is the figure in the image coming together, forming something new? Or is it breaking apart? Ultimately, it does not matter, as within the logic of disturbance ecology, coming together and breaking apart are not contradictory images. A forest fire does both. It creates new life by breaking apart certain “multi-species relations” and bringing together others. Like the fiery event of “vision” at the end of the film, this image of gold dripping into water is an image of futurity as well as an image of ongoing change that makes visible Jeanne’s longing for human evolution. It is likewise a perfect encapsulation of the difficulty in pinning down Kawase’s political stance in the film. Neither fully progressive nor fully retrogressive, the substance changes depending on how the viewer looks at it.

We then cut to a different image of futurity, one more literal: the interior of a hospital, where a newborn child is being handed to a parent. A new generation appears to be in the process of being born. We quickly return to water. This time, the shot is submerged below the surface, and we see air bubbles moving up to the surface. This series of images (the only ones of their kind in the film) bring us out of the local ecosystem of the forest and into a wider, more abstract visual space. This change in imagery highlights Jeanne’s move into philosophical abstraction as she continues to discuss the aggressive nature of the human ego. She continues: “We still carry that aggression inside. War and atrocity are acts of murder that only humans commit. No other living species commits such acts. Perhaps ‘vision’ is like us humans—with the power to create and the power to destroy. Maybe with its self-destruction it sends us some kind of message, at an instinctual level.” In its embrace of evolutionary thought and disturbance ecology, Vision suggests that the transformation required for humanity to see the liveliness of disturbances such as forest fires requires the destruction of the ego through becoming botanical. It requires self-destruction, not the self-reliance called for by governmental countermeasures against rural depopulation. With Jeanne’s monologue and Dodo’s cinematography throughout, Vision presents an ecological picture of the future that privileges ecosystem assemblages over individuated selves. Many selves (human and more-than-human) die by the end of Vision, but the forest matrix lives on, as do the ritual roles necessary to maintain the forest ecosystem.

Kawase aligns the destruction of the ego with the embrace of alterity, an opening up to the other that mirrors the process of becoming botanical: “In the experience of (accepting the other), there is also the experience of losing what one holds dear. There is the destruction of the ego [jibun o oshikoroshite].”56 For Kawase, this shift in subjectivity allows one to better see the future and enter into cyclical time:

Even if one is not able to accomplish what one needs to do for those people living in the same generation contemporaneously, one can sculpt out a form that will enable the next generation to do so. Humans, at most, live 100 years. What can one accomplish in 100 years? If one links oneself up with what people of the next generation will want, then one can begin to think within a span of 200 years. . . . In the past, we didn’t grow fruit trees on the land so that we ourselves could eat, we grew them for our grandchildren.57

The future that Kawase envisions is clearly utopian, idealistic, and heteronormative, if not outright naive. Yet Kawase’s utopian evolution emerges from devastation, from within the wreckage of fire. On the one hand, there is a disregard for those who perish in the flames. At the same time, the seeming contradiction of Vision’s ending, in which Tomo remarks on the liveliness of the forest as he looks over its charred remains, speaks to the potential for humanity to evolve in a more ecological manner. This, Vision suggests, is the ultimate form of regeneration for the somabito. It is a regeneration not merely at the level of economic recovery but a species-wide embrace of the logic that the somabito embodies, one both violent and ecological.

In Vision, destruction sculpts the forest anew, forming fertile ground for a future to take hold. It is a future born, in Kawase’s words, from the “seed of potentiality.” Although Vision shows viewers images of this future in its final moments, it remains unclear whether or not the fire of “vision” could ever truly affect the kind of widespread evolutionary change that would lead to a species-wide botanical becoming. If, however, Kawase is correct in asserting that humans can only accomplish so much in their short lifespans, and thus must rethink themselves within the long durée of forest time, then perhaps this uncertainty and all of the various ambiguities at the heart of Vision are ultimately not a problem. A future sculpted through destructive plasticity may enable the next generation (or the one after that) to better envision their own path toward regeneration, no matter what ideology set the forest aflame in the first place. All that future generations would have to do to become botanical would be to burn it all down one more time and start anew, yet again.