Ten Great Foreign Films Of This Decade

Train Man

by Yuki

Train Man (Densha Otoko) 2006, Japan, Dir by Shosuke Murakami

Densha Otoko may be the first commercial film of its kind to deal solely with the recent Japanese social phenomenon known as Otaku: nerdy, asocial young men who spend their time holed up in their rooms watching anime, or browsing the many manga-themed shops at Akihabara, the notorious electronics district in downtown Tokyo.  For many otaku, much of their social interactions take place in online chat rooms.
Takayuki Yamada (who looks like a Japanese Jason Schwartzman) plays the Densha Otoko or Train Man, which his character's screen name.  He is a hopeless Otaku who lives a lonely, isolated life, until one night on the train when he meekly confronts a drunken businessman bullying a beautiful young woman sitting beside him.  After the police haul the drunkard away, the woman insists on getting Train Man's address so she can send a thank you gift (a pretty common social grace in Japan), and Train Man becomes enamored by her.  The encounter is a major event in his typically bleak life, and the first interaction he has had with a woman.  He reports every detail to his online chat group, a community of strangers who we only see at their computers: a nurse, a businessman, a housewife, an inseparable threesome of computer geeks, and one Okomuri, the term for a more severe version of Otaku, for young men who live with their parents and never leave their bedrooms.  Like Train Man, their personal lives have all reached a point of stagnancy, and they live vicariously through Train Man's potential romance with the woman from the train. When he receives an Hermes tea set as a thank you present, the chatroom see the expensive brand name as a sign of her affection.  They urge him to call, and to his shock, she agrees to go to dinner.

I was looking forward to seeing this film, especially since the "Otaku" trend is at once both disturbing and fascinating to me, and it was a huge success in Japan, but I found it a little disappointing in the beginning.  It seemed too simplistic an approach to explain such a serious social phenomenon, and the sleek, commercial-like style was unoriginal and boring.  But what struck me about the film was that rather than try to explore the more deep-rooted psychological aspect, it kept things light, and I found myself laughing quite a bit at the over-the-top self-consciousness of Train Man, whose awkwardness was painful and endearing.  With intelligent attention to detail, the film also offers a sort of social and cultural midsection of modern life in middle class Tokyo, but in a much more upbeat and poppy style than past films like Ozu's Tokyo Story. Times have changed after all.  Having lived in Tokyo, I felt the film did a wonderful job of portraying the personality of the city itself as well as its social climate, which is not an easy task.

The pressure to date and marry is comparatively great in Japanese culture, and consumerism plays a big part in this process.  When the woman from the train, known throughout the film as Hermes, serves Train Man a certain kind of English tea, the members of the chat room go out and purchase it themselves unbeknownst to each other, in a very comical display of Japanese consumer conformity.  Before their first date, Train Man is showered with suggestions for where to shop for a new look, gets contacts, a haircut, and a new suit.  At first I though this was all too quick a transformation, but then that is exactly the miracle of consumerism… you can buy yourself a new look in one afternoon.

Train Man even settles on a trendy "date" restaurant and stakes it out by himself beforehand. Surrounded by cute young couples, he orders one of every dish on the menu, and takes picture of them with his cell phone to send to his chatroommates for approval.  He prepares all of his questions on his palm pilot, and reads them from under the table on their date.

Hermes, played by Miki Nakatani from Ring 2, is graceful and waif-like, and it seems at first that she is humoring Train Man.  But as the film progresses it becomes clear that she is just as lonely and naïve as he, although much more elegant under pressure.  She is able to conceal her own anxieties, while he lets his spill out.  While their relationship inches forward, we begin to see a genuine attraction growing, and it is just a matter of Train Man's overcoming his intense fears of rejection for them to be together.   

Despite a general commercial style and a some special effects I found annoying, like constant text popping into the screen to accompany the chat room dialogue, Densha Otoko was very entertaining, enjoyable, and even eye-opening.  After seeing so many dark, sometimes less accessible films about modern-day alienation, its frank, unapologetic approach towards social anxiety was refreshing, although a little unsettling at the same time.

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