ZERO: SCREENING INTRODUCTION BY Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain

ZERO

In Seishin Zero, we meet Dr. Masatomo Yamamoto and his wife Yoshiko in Okayama ken in Japan 12 years after director Kazuhiro Soda’s award winning 2008 documentary Mental, which focused on Dr. Yamamoto’s outpatients in his mental health clinic.

This time, Kazuhiro Soda’s film Zero turns the focus of the lens on the psychiatrist, Dr. Yamamoto himself as the pioneering doctor is facing into his retirement and becoming a full time carer for his wife Yoshiko who has developed dementia.

The drama of patience, respect, and humanism are unearthed through the ordinary and mundane scenes of everyday life of Dr. Yamamoto in his practice with his patients who are distressed at his retirement and the fear of losing his support and respect.

The title of the documentary – Zero comes from Dr. Yamamoto’s philosophy with his patients that when they feel out of control with desire or disappointment or just in a low mood, to try to reset themselves to zero. He encourages them, once a week, to stop wishing for that new manga or game or dwelling on bad thoughts, to try say I am happy to be alive or I am grateful for this meal. By doing this and creating these moments of gratitude, he argues that this will make one feel better by placing yourself at zero.

He recognizes and thanks his patients for all of their ‘hard work’ (お疲れ様でした) – the work that they have done to survive until the present day in an increasingly ‘hostile’ society.

As a sociologist whose main methodology is participant/observation (or ethnography), I felt almost as if I was in the field doing research when watching this film as it brilliantly touches on many of the social, cultural and demographic shifts that Japan is currently experiencing including:

First is a decline in social cohesion in Japan where obligations/responsibilities to others and larger society are declining (think sushi terrorism on social media….something unimaginable when I was living in Japan in the 1990s).

A rapidly aging population with 29% of the population in Japan over the age of 65 with deaths far outweighing births (one of the lowest fertility rates in the world) and the population set to decline by 1/5 by 2050.

Japan is therefore also experiencing a growth in the percentage of elderly in their society with this group (with average life expectancy one of the highest in the world at 84 years of age) only set to increase.

Care for the elderly has also shifted as social support networks in Japan are shifting and fewer and fewer older people in Japan are cared for in intergenerational households and an increasing number of elderly live alone, many of whom never married or had children. These ‘lonely deaths’ are a worry because as Dr. Yamamoto points out in the film, to care for the elderly at home takes social support not only for the aging, but the caregivers as well, both of which are on the decline in Japan.

Zero provides us with a very real snapshot of what these demographic and social shifts mean not only for the struggles of a modern Japanese society but the globalized world as a whole.

Dr. Yamamoto navigates these issues with gentle humour, patience and respect for his patients who reveal their issues of: poverty, feeling lonely, disrespected, and cast adrift by society.

In modern Japanese society one patient of Dr. Yamamoto says that we are living an age where people are “late to start, but quick to finish” without listening, respecting, or thinking about others. The digital era of infoglut and artificial intelligence, makes it difficult for us to stop, look and listen (かんさつ) 観察 at the society we live in today and film encourages, if not forces, us to reflect.

The pace of Soda’s cinematography encapsulates the everyday tasks that slowly get done, but which may become more difficult and time consuming the older you become – finding a clean dish, opening a bottle of sake, all the while still wishing to maintain respect for others (it would be too tactless to use a paper cup for soup). I found myself, as a product of a ‘fast generation,’ wanting to just snatch the bottle of sake from Dr. Yamamoto’s hands and impatiently help him as watching him struggle to open it was so difficult for me – the impulse to care and to help him was so strong and will most likely be activated in everyone who watches this documentary. But the film forces the audience into slowing down, listening and observing.

Ultimately, Zero is a wonderful and nuanced glimpse into discovering and accepting reduced capacity and slowing down in everyday life. In the end, no matter how much we accomplish or how fast we move throughout our lives, Kazuhiro Soda gently reminds us that we all begin – and end at – Zero.

Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Associate Professor of Sociology, Maynooth University

1 April 2023