Pure Japanese

Pure Japanese (2022)

Action actor Tateishi Daisuke who struggles with loneliness after suffering a traumatic experience due to an accident during filming. One day, he comes across a senior high school girl Ayumi who is being harassed consistently by Chinese brokers and the local yakuza. He decides to protect her from them. However, after this incident, he comes to develop a mindset of seeing violence as a way to gain the affirmation and approval of others thus gradually loses himself and behaves in an extreme manner.

Date of release
2022-01-28
TMDB
7.4 / 10 (29)
Runtime
1h 28m
Genres
Action, Drama
Director
Daishi Matsunaga

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Japan, Tochigi Prefecture, and Edo Wonderland Nikko Edomura

Pure Japanese is a 2022 Japanese action film directed by Daishi Matsunaga and starring Dean Fujioka, Aju Makita and Tetsu Watanabe. It is also Fujioka's first created and produced film.

Production

The inspiration for Pure Japanese came from Dean Fujioka's appearance in the 2018 drama The Count of Monte-Cristo: Great Revenge (Fuji Television). After the production of the drama ended, Fujioka found that he—a live individual—had been left behind in the bizarre energy vortex that had condensed during the filming process. After much thought about what he needed to do to move forward, he decided to create and produce original video works.

Having spent considerable time performing abroad at the beginning of his career, Fujioka only started working in Japan in 2011. As he had been observing Japan from an "objective" standpoint, the question "What defines Japanese people?" arose and led him to hypothesize that users of the "operating system (OS)" called the Japanese language are the nihongo-bito (日本語人), and that the Japanese language OS controls the thoughts and actions of the nihong…

Religion also soon became a prominent theme in Fujioka's approach. He invited director Daishi Matsunaga to read up on the relationship between religion and violence before commencing filming. Matsunaga explained it further in an interview with Rooftop:

For those who believe in their religious teachings, believing and fighting is a just cause. ... You are right that there are no overwhelmingly evil [people], and they are living their lives to the best of their ability within their positions. Even if someone is not serious, it is not a big deal; everyone insists on a fair argument, so that is where collisions and violence arise.

Additionally, the part of the plot in which the main character is being crushed by absurdity and he gives his life away like a sacrificial offering was the one Fujioka had envisioned from the beginning. Concurrently, he also desired more opportunities to showcase the stylistic beauty inherent in Japanese action film, and thus he made it one of his missions to shed light on the existence of action stars and stunt performers in the creation of this…

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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