Being part of this culture, I am always fascinated by how an authentic essence of Tokyo can be fully understood in American films, in particular, from a clash of enigmatic signs, which Homay King contends that the message withholds meaning from its recipients and at the same time resists decoding.

 

While the world is becoming more globalized, the quality of globality does not entail a sense of what I call “commonality” between the West and East. The transnational indifference is evident in this film through the absence, invisibility and silence of Japanese characters. By emphasizing the differences in discourses, lifestyles, customs between Tokyo people and the American characters, I am offered a sense that even though the Japanese are wiped out from most of the scenes and reinserted into the objects of Orientalist gazes and thus are defined within the parameters of ‘othering’, Bob and Charlotte are actually the ones experiencing the ‘reverse othering’ that they are unmoored in Tokyo and the mundane discomfort of their foreign surroundings brings deeper struggles to bear, as Charlotte puts it, she “doesn’t feel anything” when she encounters her cultural others. Hence, globalization has generated the notions of borderlessness and deterritorialization that makes it possible for travelers to achieve a diversified cultural landscape that reinforces the notion of ‘who is us’ and ‘who is them’, ‘who is in’ and ‘who is out’. Meanwhile, this othering is not only experienced by outsides but is a practice of which Japanese feels proud. Japan treasures the preservation of ‘self-othering’ in the face of the ubiquitous West, the banning of YouTube by the music industry (Jpop) is one of the examples.

 

After all, Tokyo in this film is represented as an amalgam of enigmatic signifiers where both characters cavorting across the surface of Tokyo with gazes, borrowing Roland Barthes’ words, have been “descend[ed] into the untranslatable, to experience its shock without ever muffle its shock.”