2024 The End of Year Message

1)The fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, ‘Ode to Joy’ is ‘a song of joy for men who have won the women.’

2)Thoughts on Akira Kurosawa’s film Dream - Should today’s reality be called ‘nightmare’ ?

 

 

Work by Alisa Tanaka-King

1)The fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, 'Ode to Joy,' is ‘a song of joy for men who have won the women.’

 

Every year at the end of the year in Japan, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is performed all over the country, and many citizens join the chorus to sing the fourth movement, ‘Ode to Joy.’ I don’t know when this became popular end-of-year event in Japan. In the West, it is very rare for the 9th Symphony to be performed at the end of the year, and instead the year-end program is usually Handel’s oratorio Messiah, famous for its ‘Hallelujah’ chorus, as a regular feature of the Christmas season.

It was unusual for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to perform Beethoven’s 9th Symphony on 29 November this year, so I went to the concert with my wife. The venue, the 2,500-seat Haymer Hall, was packed. I had not heard a live performance of the 9th for almost 20 years, so I was looking forward to it.

However, for the reasons explained below, when the fourth (final) movement, Ode to Joy, begins, although I am always deeply moved by the beauty of the melody and the power of the rhythm, I also wonder why such old male chauvinist lyrics are still sung today. I can’t help thinking that they should be rewritten. At the end of the fourth movement, the audience stood up and applauded wildly, but I didn’t want to get up from my seat, so my wife and I remained seated.

The text is taken from “An die Freude”, a poem written by Friedrich Schiller in 1785 to advocate love of humanity and revised in 1803. However, Beethoven added the introductory words and also significantly altered the original text when he used it in the fourth movement. This wonderfully powerful chorus begins with the following:

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!

Sondern laßt uns angenehmere

anstimmen und freudenvollere.

 

O friends, not these tones!

But let’s strike up more agreeable ones,

And more joyful.

 

But “Freunde” does not just mean “friends,” it means “male friends”; and the word “Freundinnen (female friends)” does not appear even once in this song. And it is not just this opening lyric, but all the following lyrics in which “men” are the main characters. For example, the following lyrics are included here and there, with the usual English translation also noted below the German.

Alle Menschen werden Brüder,

All people become brothers.

 

Wer ein holdes Weib errungen, Mische seinen Jubel ein!

Whoever has won a lovely woman, Add his to the jubilation! 

 

Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn, Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen.

Go on, brothers, your way, Joyful, like a hero to victory.

 

In this way, women and LBGT are not included in “all people,” and women are conquerable objects for men. So, it means that we will conquer women and continue to fight for victory!

 

Therefore this ‘Ode to Joy’ should really be called the ‘Ode to Joy for Men’ who have won the women. With almost half men and half women in the choir and four solo singers, two men and two women, I can’t help but find it very strange and weird to see the women joyfully praising the joy of male chauvinism and joyfully singing along with the men.

 

Thus, no matter how loudly they continue to sing this poem, which is said to have been written by Schiller to advocate ‘love for humanity,’ I think they will never achieve the goal of ‘love for humanity,’ especially in Japan where women are heavily discriminated against.

 

Here is the Youtube URL of the fourth movement by the famous conductor Daniel Barenboim. Barenboim had temporarily stopped performing a few years ago due to ill health, but when I was in Berlin in June 2023, there was a concert of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra conducted by Barenboim. I therefore bought a couple of tickets and went with my wife. However, he seemed weak and not in his usual good health due to his illness, and I wonder how he has been since then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeO-trAbi7U

I actually like Beethoven’s Ninth, except for the lyrics of ‘Ode to Joy’ mentioned above. But I also like the Hymn to the Resurrection, with lyrics by Friedrich Klopstock, sung in the fifth and final movement of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony, Die Auferstehung. I am not a Christian, but I am a person who cannot live without music by Johann Sebastian Bach and other religious music. The URL below is a solemn and passionate performance of the final minutes of the fifth chapter of Mahler’s Second Symphony, conducted by Leonard Bernstein and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with chorus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eifZHwQ9jUI

 

Work by Alisa Tanaka-King

2)Thoughts on Akira Kurosawa’s film Dream - Should today’s reality be called ‘nightmare’ ?

 

Both Beethoven’s Ninth and Mahler’s Second, though fraught with problems, sing powerfully of human hopes and dreams for the future, and there is no doubt that they are symphonic music that has moved the hearts of many people around the world for many years.

 

In the real world, however, Israeli forces continue to carry out indiscriminate air strikes in Gaza and Lebanon; and in Gaza in particular, nearly 2 million of the 2.3 million inhabitants are facing severe food shortages, and many people, especially children, who are already malnourished, are on the verge of starvation and death. On 21 November, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘violations of international law.’ However, very few countries are likely to actually enforce ICC arrest warrants, not least the US, which is not a member of the ICC, and even Japan and the European Union countries, which are.

 

While many people in Japan and Western countries, including myself, go to concerts of Beethoven’s 9th and Handel’s Messiah and enjoy the music of ‘hopes and dreams,’ for the people of Gaza and Ukraine the situation continues to be what I would call a “nightmare.” I cannot do anything about the fact that I continue to live my normal and relatively peaceful daily life in such a terribly contradictory situation, and yet over the past few years I have always felt a little anxious and depressed because I cannot escape a kind of guilt. Yet, I don’t know what to do to change this contradictory lifestyle. I don’t know what else to do, except to keep doing what I can.

 

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the release of Akira Kurosawa’s epic film, Seven Samurai. I don't know how it was in Japan, but many cinemas in Australia had special screenings of Kurosawa’s films. In Melbourne, where I live, some cinemas showed films like Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Ikiru and many others every Saturday for about three months. I appreciate the work of Hashimoto Shinobu, who co-wrote the screenplay for Seven Samurai and some of Kurosawa’s other films, and I have read several of Hashimoto’s books. So, I re-read some of his books and watched some of Kurosawa’s films on the big screen again. I was once again struck by the sheer scale of Kurosawa and Hashimoto’s imagination and creativity with profound humanity.

 

One of Kurosawa’s late films, Dreams, consists of eight separate dreams. One of them, ‘Tunnel,’ I just can’t forget for some personal reason, and I often watch it on Youtube. The story goes like this:

 

An army officer who survived defeat and has been demobilized is walking along a deserted mountain road in Japan to visit the bereaved families of his men and comes to a tunnel when a strange dog runs out from inside and threatens him. As he runs to the tunnel’s exit, he is confronted by the ghosts of his platoon men, all killed in action, emerging from the darkness of the tunnel. He tells his men of his own agony of survival and tells them that there is no point in wandering around as ghosts, so rest in peace. He then leaves the tunnel, but the dog reappears and barks at him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30dKCzGS6-g

 

This dream ‘Tunnel’ depicts the misery of the Japanese soldiers who died in the war and the anguish of the officers who survived in a brilliant, intense symbolist way. The reason why I cannot forget this work is that Lieutenant Yamashita in this ‘Tunnel’ could also be my father. As a lieutenant in the Kwantung Army, my father fought against Mao Zedong’s army in Manchuria and was seriously wounded and taken to an army hospital in Harbin, where he survived. After recovering and being discharged from the hospital, he was transferred to his home regiment in Sabae, Fukui Prefecture, where he remained until the end of the war without returning to Manchuria. The soldiers in my father’s unit that he commanded in Manchuria were from Iwate Prefecture, and most of them were killed in the war. When I was a child, my father would leave home every year around the Obon holiday and be gone for a week or more. Each time, I worried that he had run away from home. In later years, my mother told me that my father went to Iwate once a year to visit the graves of his men and apologize to their mothers. I believe that my father’s stubborn refusal to accept a military pension after the war was due to his remorse that he was the only one who had survived.

 

My father often told me how terrible and difficult the actual fighting in Manchuria was, and that he thought the Japanese army would not be able to defeat Mao Zedong’s army because they were brilliantly disciplined and had high morale. But he never said a word about the atrocities committed by his unit and other Japanese troops against the civilian population. I think he lacked a sense of remorse as a perpetrator. Akira Kurosawa made two war films - I Live in Fear and Rhapsody in August - both about the damage done to the Japanese people by the atomic bombs, but neither touched on the issue of Japanese wartime atrocities against other Asians.

 

On the other hand, there were many US, Australian and other Allied men who were prisoners of war and survived until after the war. Many of them insisted after the war that they had been spared because the atomic bomb had ended the war. I myself became very close to some of these POWs. The many major US films that have been made about the Pacific War - such as The Pacific, made in 2010 - also show that if the war had gone on any longer without the use of the atomic bombs, the US casualty figures would have been unimaginably high. The film presents a monolithic narrative that glorifies the courageous sacrifice of their own men for the protection of their nation, while simultaneously downplaying the immense suffering of Japanese civilians at the hands of indiscriminate fire and atomic bombings of Japanese cities and towns. This is also the reason why the Youtube video clip of the film The Pacific is entitled ‘This War Is The Reason Why The USA Used The Atomic Bomb In WW II.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa6zSv0xdqY

 

It is evident that the two countries’ perspectives on war are aligned in terms of their shared neglect of the role of perpetrators. What measures might be taken to effect a fundamental transformation of this profoundly biased “view of war,” which has been shaped by the media and has become firmly embedded in the public consciousness? What measures might be taken to establish a genuinely universal and humane belief system that could serve as a basis for overcoming such biased views? The current global situation is, unfortunately, moving further and further away from these idealistic objectives.

 

I would like to conclude this year’s message with a story that may be perceived as somewhat utopian and hope that the forthcoming year will bring about a littel more positive outcome. The final story is entitled ‘Village with a Water Mill’ and is also from Akira Kurosawa’s Dream.

 

On my journey I arrive at a watermill village with a quiet river running through it. I meet an elderly man fixing a broken waterwheel and am intrigued when he tells me that these villagers reject modern technology and respect nature. As I listen to him, he tells me that there is a funeral today. However, I am told that it will be held as a glamorous celebration. My puzzled ears hear lively sounds and joyful chants. Instead of mourning and grieving, the villagers rejoice and celebrate their good life to the end, marching around the coffin with smiles on their faces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrSBRuDPNtQ

 

This old man in the waterwheel village said “Some say life is hard. That’s just talk. In fact, it’s good to be alive. It’s exciting.” I would like to end my message at the end of this year by praying that the time will come when everyone in the world can say, “Life is good, it's very interesting.”

With best wishes

End of year 2024

 

Yuki Tanaka