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Tag: Kanae Kobayashi
The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka (華岡青洲の妻, Yasuzo Masumura, 1967)
Posted on January 6, 2022 by Hayley Scanlon
The close relationship between two women is disrupted by the reintroduction of a man in Yasuzo Masumura's fictionalised account of the rivalry between the wife and mother of pioneering Japanese doctor Seishu Hanaoka. Scripted by Kaneto Shindo and adapted from the novel by Sawako Ariyoshi, the refocusing of the narrative is apparent in its title, not the life of but The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka (華岡青洲の妻, Hanaoka Seishu no Tsuma) less a tale of scientific endeavour than of domestic rivalry born of the inherently patriarchal social codes of the feudal society which cannot but help pit one woman against another while forcing each of them to play a role they may not wish to fulfil in order to secure their status and therefore their survival.
Samurai's daughter Kae (Ayako Wakao) first catches sight of the beautiful Otsugi (Hideko Takamine) at only eight years old and is instantly captivated by her, a fascination which persists well into adulthood when she is approached to marry into the Hanaoka household as wife to oldest son Seishu (Raizo Ichikawa) away studying to become a doctor like his father. Kae's father originally objects to the match because of the class difference between the two families, Seishu's father Naomichi (Yunosuke Ito) being only a humble country doctor of peasant stock whereas they had envisaged a grander station for their only daughter. Yet Kae is already old not to be married and continues to decline prospective suitors and so her mother and nanny (Chieko Naniwa) are minded to put it directly to her discovering that she is in fact more than willing to become a Hanaoka though mostly it seems in order to get close to Otsugi whom she has continued to idolise.
The strange thing is that the wedding is conducted in Seishu's absence, a medical text standing in for him while Kae in effect marries her mother-in-law Otsugi. These early days are spent in blissful tranquility as Kae does her best to be the ideal daughter-in-law, Otsugi even remarking that she's come to love her more than a daughter. The two women share a room, Kae often staring longingly at the back of Otsugi's head, their relationship one of mutual respect and affection that allows them to forget their respective stations but when three years later Seishu finally returns, it forces them apart in reverting to the roles of wife and mother their statuses conferred only by proximity to a man.
Pregnant with her first child and about to become a mother herself, Kae's resentment towards Otsugi begins to boil over. In an ironic premonition of the way the relationship between Masumura and his muse would eventually break down, she claims to have seen through Otsugi's beauty and concluded that she is cold and calculating believing that she only brought her into the household as an unpaid servant forcing her to work a loom to raise money for Seishu's medical training. Alternately jealous and condescending, Otsugi's resentment is mediated through attempts to undermine her daughter-in-law's authority finally leading to an ironic and absurdist battle between the two as they attempt to outdo each other volunteering to become test subjects for Seishu's ongoing experiments to discover a safe anaesthetic in order save patients who require surgery but cannot endure the trauma.
The marriage itself perhaps represents a moment of change in the feudal society, it becoming clear that the samurai are on their way down while skill and knowledge will define success in this new age of enlightenment. While Seishu works on his anaesthetic, the superstitious local community begins to view the Hanaokas with suspicion, believing that the misfortune that befalls them is the result of a curse owing to the large number of cats and dogs which have become casualties of Seishu's failed experiments while a pedlar brings news of a mysterious disease attributed to the rain which is in fact due to mass malnutrition following a famine caused by the bad weather. When news of Seishu's prowess as a doctor spreads they are soon overwhelmed with patients, many of whom cannot pay but are seemingly treated anyway.
Seishu's eventual victory is one of science over superstition, but it also requires faith which is the battleground contested between wife and mother. Having found a successful solution in cats, Seishu needs human test subjects with both instantly volunteering only to become locked into an absurd, internecine contest to prove who is the most self-sacrificing. The competition goes so far that it effectively becomes a game of dare with each determined to be the one to die for Seishu's discovery but later realising that the stakes are even higher than first assumed because the winner will be dead but the loser saddled with guilt and possible ostracisation as someone who allowed their mother/daughter-in-law to die to in their place.
Even so, the pair of them are described as "wonderful examples of womanhood" in their willingness to risk their lives for their "master's success". Kae is reminded that a woman's job is to give birth to a healthy baby, later weaponising her ability to do so as currency in realising that Otsugi has all the control but the one thing she can't do is bear Seishu's child. Ironically enough, the cases Seishu is trying to treat are of aggressive breast cancer, the oft repeated maxim being that a woman's breasts are her life and to remove them is as good as killing her contributing to the sense that maternity is the only thing that gives a woman's life meaning. It's not without irony that the first successful surgery under anaesthesia directly juxtaposes a massive tumour removed from a woman's breast with a baby being removed from a pregnant Kae who, at this point having lost her sight as a consequence of Seishu's experiments, must bear the pain with no relief.
Brought together by tragedy, Kae comes to a better understanding of her relationship with her mother-in-law only after she dies learning to see her once again as the kind and beautiful woman she met at eight years old while her unmarried sister-in-law having witnessed their painful war of attrition prays that she won't be reborn as a woman glad that she was never forced to become a bride nor a mother-in-law. "The struggles of the women in this house were in the end just to bring up one man" she laments, suggesting that Seishu most likely noticed the conflict between the two and used it to his advantage in getting them to participate in his experiments as they desperately tried to prove themselves the better through dying for his love.
Going one step further, it seems that being a woman is an exercise in futility the only source of success lying paradoxically in birth or death alone, the natural affection between Otsugi and Kae neutered by the presence of Seishu who inserts himself as the pole around which they must dance for their survival. Kae becomes a local legend, a woman who sacrificed her sight in service of her husband but now rejects this mischaracterisation of her life along with the implication that it's somehow a wife's duty to deplete herself for her husband's gain retreating entirely from the society of others while Seishu's practice continues to prosper. Even so Masumura ends on a note of irony in the literal transformation of Kae into the figure of Otsugi recreating the opening scene as she walks among the bright flowers she can no longer see.
Tagged 1960s, 1967, Ayako Wakao, Chieko Naniwa, Chisako Hara, Gen Kimura, Haruko Sugimura, Hideko Takamine, Hikaru Hayashi, Japan, Japanese, Kanae Kobayashi, Kaneto Shindo, Kanji Uehara, Kenzo Tabu, Kiyoshi Ito, Mineko Takagi, Misako Watanabe, Noboru Taki, Raizo Ichikawa, Saburo Date, Sawako Ariyoshi, Setsuo Kobayashi, Shinjiro Akatsuki, Shozo Nanbu, Taketoshi Naito, Tokio Oki, Yasuzo Masumura, Yatsuko Tanami, Yoichi Funaki, Yunosuke Ito
On the Road Forever (無宿者, Kenji Misumi, 1964)
Posted on May 21, 2021 by Hayley Scanlon
"I take to the road whether or not I am alive" confesses the spiritually defeated hero of Kenji Misumi's filiality drama, On the Road Forever (無宿者, Mushukumono). Two sons each seeking vengeance for a wronged father become first accidental friends, then almost enemies, and finally something more like brothers bound and ruined by the failures of the samurai code. The villain may not unfairly claim that the system of the world is one "dirty great monster", but the implications of his revelations lead directly back into the infinite corruptions of the samurai order as mediated through the failures of fatherhood.
"Drifting crow" Ipponmatsu (Raizo Ichikawa) temporarily teams up with fallen samurai Kuroki Yaichiro (Jun Fujimaki) who has become desperate enough to unwisely attempt robbing a gambling den. Nevertheless, we are clued in to the idea that these are the good guys when they're helped by a young village woman, Haru (Mikiko Tsubouchi), who lends them her father's horse instructing them to return it to him at a nearby village which the guys later do even attempting to hand the old man some of their ill-gotten gains as a thank you though he refuses and warns them not to hang around too long because "it's a rough neighbourhood". All too soon we discover what he means. A big wig former yakuza who suspiciously came into massive amounts of money two years previously has pressed the villagers into debt and is currently inducting them into indentured servitude on Sado island in order to recoup costs. Perhaps Ipponmatsu doesn't approve, but he's on a journey for a reason and would have carried on by had he not heard word that that shady yakuza Shima-ya Jubei (Toru Abe) may be connected to the death of his father during a high stakes robbery on a mountain pass.
Ipponmatsu, whose name literally means "a single pine", is the archetypal wandering son who ran away from his clan without permission in rebellion against his authoritarian father who raised him alone after his mother's death and tried to instil in him the values typical of his class through the medium of violence. Having come across a decomposed body with his father's distinctive sword at the scene of the robbery, Ipponmatsu has had a change of heart and dedicated his wandering to avenging his memory. Sticking around in the town, he comes to suspect that Yaichiro's father Hanbei may have been behind the theft of the missing imperial gold only later realising that he too is on a quest to learn the truth in the hope of clearing his father's name. The two men end up raising swords against each other but discovering they are indeed different, Yaichiro a gentle soul who apparently excelled in the dojo but has no "courage" in the field and Ipponmatsu a fiery hothead who thinks killing is less a matter of skill than "courage and explosiveness".
There is, it has to be said, a fairly obvious twist that neither man perhaps too bound up in their own sense of responsibility fully considers. Nevertheless, they are both faced with the decision of what to do should they discover the truth considering that raising a sword against one's father is an unforgivable sin while knowing that such a heinous betrayal of their code cannot go unpunished. The villains boast of their well connected networks and supposed untouchability laying bare the essential corruption of the samurai order as they wilfully manipulate and exploit impoverished peasantry for their own ends while cruelly joking that all classes are alike in their greed when tempted with riches, entirely unrepentant even as they lament the hypocrisy of the samurai who have no money yet continue in their arrogance.
Despite having been raised in a homosocial environment told that falling in love with women is a pointless waste of time, Ipponmatsu picks up the affections of two firstly earnest farm girl Haru and secondly misused mistress and sister of Shima-ya, Osei (Eiko Taki). This is however a manly drama concerned with the ways in which men interact with other men, firstly in the awkward fraternity of Ipponmatsu and Yaichiro and then in their mutual and continually changing relationships with their absent fathers living in the shadow of patricide and justice. Elegantly composed as always, Misumi frequently shoots through obstacles imprisoning the men within the broken beams of ruined buildings or spying in a POV shot from an upstairs balcony while making full use of his trademark love for the natural world in closing with a painful confrontation in which the nature of filiality is turned inside out as a corrupt father falls on his sword for his noble son amid the rocks surrounded by rolling waves. As the title suggests, the melancholy ending severs the hero from his ancestral "home" leaving him forever a wanderer untethered yet in a sense never free of his paternal legacy.
Tagged 1960s, 1964, Chikara Hashimoto, Chikashi Makiura, Chizuko Takamori, Daiei, Eiko Taki, Hideo Kuroki, Japan, Japanese, Jun Fujimaki, Kanae Kobayashi, Kazue Tamaki, Keiichi Taki, Kenji Misumi, Kenjiro Ishiyama, Koichi Aihara, Koichi Mizuhara, Mikiko Tsubouchi, Mitsuhiro Sugiyama, Osamu Abe, Raizo Ichikawa, Ryonosuke Azuma, Seiji Hoshikawa, Shingo Hosoya, Shosaku Sugiyama, Shuzo Sakai, Sonosuke Sawamura, Sumao Ishihara, Toru Abe, Yukio Horikita, Yusaku Terashima, Yushi Hamada
A Lustful Man (好色一代男, Yasuzo Masumura, 1961)
Posted on December 22, 2020 by Hayley Scanlon
"Why are women in Japan so unhappy?" the carefree Casanova at the centre of Yasuzo Masumura's 1961 sex romp A Lustful Man (好色一代男, Koshoku Ichidai Otoko) laments, never quite grasping the essential inequalities of the world in which he lives. Masumura is best known for extremity, a wilful iconoclast who flew in the face of golden age cinema's genial classism, but shock was not his only weapon and he could also be surprisingly playful. Adapted from a well known novel by creator of the "floating world" Ihara Saikaku, A Lustful Man finds him indulging in ironic satire as his hero sets out to "make all the women in Japan happy" chiefly by satisfying their unfulfilled sexual desire while resolutely ignoring all of the entrenched patriarchal social codes which ensure that their lives will be miserable.
Set in the Edo era, the film opens not with the hero Yonosuke (Raizo Ichikawa) but with his miserly father who berates a servant after discovering a single grain of rice on the hall floor. According to him, the central virtues necessary to become rich are endurance, diligence, and vitality. You must treasure each and every grain of rice in order to accumulate. A cruel and austere man who only thinks of money, Yonosuke's father keeps his wife in earnest poverty despite their wealth, angrily grabbing an obviously worn kimono out of her hands and insisting that it's still good for another year, apparently caring nothing for appearances in the otherwise class conscious Kyoto society. It's this meanness that Yonosuke can't seem to stand. He hates the way his father disrespects his mother, and her misery is a primary motivator in his lifelong quest to cheer up Japan's melancholy women though the weapon he has chosen is sex, a convenient excuse to live as a genial libertine to whom money means essentially nothing.
Yonosuke's father has set him up with an arranged marriage into a much wealthier family, which is not something he's very interested in despite the fact she seems to be quite pretty but on learning that she has transgressively found love with the family butler he determines to help her instead, ending the marriage meeting by chasing her round the garden like a dog in heat. Several similar stunts eventually get him sent away from his native Kyoto to Edo but he takes the opportunity to escape, travelling all over Japan making women "happy" as he goes.
As the first example proves, Yonosuke genuinely hates to see women suffer. His own pleasure, though perhaps not far from his mind, is secondary and he never seeks to take advantage of a woman's vulnerability only to ease her loneliness. Despite that, however, he remains essentially superficial opting for the transience of postcoital bliss while ignoring the very real societal factors which make an escape from misery all but impossible. During an early adventure, he spends all of the money he conned out of his new employer on redeeming a geisha (at more than three times the asking price) so that she can be with the man she loves, but he continues to visit sex workers without interrogating their existence as indentured servants, "merchandise" which is bought and sold, traded between men and entirely deprived of freedom. In fact, he proudly collects hair cuttings from the various geishas he has known as a kind of trophy only to later discover the grim truth, that the hair likely doesn't belong to the geisha herself but is sold to them by middlemen who get it by digging up dead bodies.
Yonosuke remains seemingly oblivious to the duplicitous hypocrisy of the yoshiwara, but is repeatedly confronted by the evils of Edo-era feudalism with its proto-capitalist cruelty where everything is status and transaction. He is often told that as he is not a samurai he would not understand, but seems to understand pretty well that "samurai are idiots" and that their heartless elitism is the leading cause of all the world's misery. To some a feckless fool, Yonosuke refuses to give in to the false allure of worldly riches. As soon as he gets money he spends it, and does so in ways he believes enrich the lives of women (even if that only extends to paying them for sex), eventually getting himself into trouble once again reneging on his taxes after trying to prove a geisha is worth her weight in gold.
Yogiri (Ayako Wakao) complains that women are but "merchandise", valued only as toys for men. "Japan is not a good country for women" Yonosuke agrees, suggesting they run away together to find a place where women are respected, indifferent to Yogiri's rebuttal "no, wherever you go, no one can change women's sad fate". Yonosuke's naive attempts to rescue women from their misery often end in disaster, a runaway mistress is dragged back and hanged, the woman he was set to marry goes mad after her father and lover are beheaded for having the temerity to speak out about corrupt lords, Yogiri is killed by a samurai intent on arresting him for tax evasion, and his own mother dies seconds after his father only to be immediately praised as "the epitome of a Japanese wife". Yet he remains undaunted, wandering around like an Edo-era Candide, setting off into exile to look for a supposed female paradise without ever really engaging with the systems which propagate misery or with his own accidental complicity with them. Nevertheless, he does perhaps enact his own resistance in refusing to conform to the rules of a society he knows to be cruel and unfair even if his resistance is essentially superficial, self-involved, and usually counterproductive which is, in its own way, perfectly in keeping with Masumura's central philosophies on the impossibilities of individual freedom within an inherently oppressive social order.
Tagged 1960s, 1961, Akira Shimizu, Ayako Wakao, Bontaro Miake, Chitose Maki, Eiji Funakoshi, Eiji Takamura, Fumihiko Yokoyama, Ganjiro Nakamura, Hajime Koshikawa, Hiroko Nakagawa, Hiroshi Murai, Hisako Takihana, Ichiro Sugai, Ichiro Takakura, Japan, Japanese, Jun Fujikawa, Jun Osugi, Kanae Kobayashi, Kazuo Obayashi, Keiko Koyanagi, Keiko Ootani, Keishiro Yamaoka, Kenji Oyama, Kimiko Tachibana, Koichi Aihara, Koichi Mizuhara, Kuniichi Takami, Masako Tomura, Masayoshi Kikuno, Michiyo Ai, Midori Komatsu, Mieko Kondo, Noboru Taki, Nobuko Tanei, Okuyama Asao, Osamu Okawa, Raizo Ichikawa, Reiko Fujiwara, Reiko Kongo, Ryonosuke Azuma, Ryuzo Shimada, Saburo Date, Saikaku Ihara, Sanemon Arashi, Seishiro Hara, Shiro Miura, Shiro Otsuji, Shozo Minabe, Tamao Nakamura, Tetsu Mikami, Tetsuo Tsukahara, Tokio Oki, Yaeko Mizutani, Yasuhiko Shima, Yasuzo Masumura, Yoko Uraji, Yuji Hamada, Yukio Horikita, Yutaka Nakamura
Blood End (天狗党, Satsuo Yamamoto, 1969)
Posted on May 22, 2020 by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment
When the black ships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853, it provoked a moment of crisis which eventually led to the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Meiji Restoration. Between those two events however lay a period of intense confusion as several groups and movements attempted to lay claim to the future direction of the nation. Many, such as the legendary figure Sakamoto Ryoma, held that above all else Japan needed to Westernise as quickly as possible in order to defend itself against foreign powers now far more technologically advanced than the Japan which had attempted to hold back time for over 200 years. Others felt quite the opposite, that what was needed was an end to the corrupt rule of the Shogunate and the restoration of power to the emperor while expelling foreign influence and going back into isolation.
Satsuo Yamamoto's Blood End (天狗党, Teng-to) dramatises this debate through the melancholy tale of the Mito Rebellion as a brutalised peasant farmer is sucked in by the idea of revolution but eventually betrayed by it in discovering that the samurai, even revolutionary samurai, will never change. They may claim they want an end to the feudal caste system and to live in a world where all men are equal, but continue to feel themselves entitled to more equality than others and insist on deference from those they still believe to be inferior.
The action begins with a scene familiar from many a jidaigeki in that a small farming community is being pressed to provide the usual amount of rice despite the failure of the harvest. Revolutionary yakuza Jingoza (Kanemon Nakamura) and egalitarian samurai Kada (Go Gato) stumble on the scene of a "stubborn" peasant being subjected to 100 blows as punishment for the village's raising the unfairness of their situation with the local lord. Surviving his ordeal, Sentaro (Tatsuya Nakadai) asks only for water but is denied by his cruel samurai tormentor. Jingoza intervenes and offers him his flask along with some money by way of an apology on behalf of these savage nobles, a gesture for which Sentaro remains grateful. While many of his friends are exiled and lose their lands, Sentaro disappears from the village and becomes a yakuza himself, learning the art of the sword in preparation for his mission of revenge.
Meeting Jingoza by chance, he takes the opportunity to thank him and agrees to transport some money back to his family in a nearby village while he engages in urgent business in the mountains. While there, Sentaro ends up defending Jingoza's steely daughter Tae (Yukiyo Toake) who is running something like an orphanage for children rendered fatherless by the ongoing chaos. It's at Tae's that he ends up running into Kada, who is a member of revolutionary movement "Tengu-to", named for the mythical ogres with long noses and bright red faces. Sentaro ends up joining the movement, but gradually discovers that Tengo-to is not all he thought it to be. In the modern parlance, many of their actions are terrorist, they care little for human life and have no issue with looting wealthy houses as they prove after helping Sentaro assassinate the man who beat him, killing the man's wife and servants and making off with his money as "military funds". Sentaro is shocked, but only manages to get some of the money for himself to take back to Tae as a way of making amends. He continues to associate with Tengu-to despite his growing disillusionment with their philosophy.
The Mito clan were perhaps outliers in the great Bakumatsu culture war, running under the "Sonno Joi" banner but doing so alone and forcefully advocating that the emperor's instruction to expel all foreigners with immediate effect be enforced. At least as far as Yamamoto's revolutionaries go, they advocate for this not so much because they reject foreign influence but because they resent the country's elites maintaining a stranglehold on the riches to be gained by foreign trade. Kada, however, claims to have a more revolutionary spirit in that he wants to improve conditions for farmers like Sentaro, protecting them from the "corrupt system" but he's still a product of his society and finds the programming increasingly hard to break. Having recruited vast numbers of peasants to their cause and witnessing the failure of their campaign, the other leaders want to go to Kyoto to talk to the emperor but are embarrassed to go there in the company of so many men who are not samurai. The solution is that they simply kill them, because peasants aren't really people anyway.
Sentaro thought they were "doing something good for peasants and the poor", but samurai will always be "samurai" and eventually they will betray him. He wavers when Kada and the others ask him to assassinate Jingoza because he's gone over to the Westernising cause, and is half talked round by his insistence that he's acting blindly without thinking far enough ahead but himself finds it hard to break with the idea that samurai are honest and know what they're doing.
Yamamoto is perhaps making a direct allusion to the imminent failure of the student movement in Japan which finds itself in much the same place as the Tengu-to, torn apart by infighting and increasingly corrupted by duplicitous dogma. Kada has a lot of fine ideas but he doesn't act on them, doubling down on ruthlessness in complaining that Sentaro is too sentimental, insisting that emotion is the enemy. Sentaro, however, has figured out that the enemy is the sword and everything it represents. Jingoza's "Restoration" is the one he should have been fighting for if he wanted to see a classless Japan, but the Tengu-to have misused his idealism for their own ends and turned him into a defender of his own oppression. Still, the Tengu-to are the ones who pay the price, their entreaties to the emperor falling on deaf ears with 353 retainers beheaded as punishment. Sentaro lives on, vowing he will never die, as he walks towards the "Restoration" of the future and away from the Blood End of an inherently corrupt insurrection.
Tagged 1960s, 1969, Akira Natsuki, Akira Shimizu, Asao Sano, Ayako Wakao, Chikashi Makiura, Go Kato, Goichi Yamada, Hajime Koshikawa, Hideki Hanamura, Ichiro Nakatani, Japan, Japanese, jidaigeki, Jun Fujikawa, Juro Miyoshi, Kanae Kobayashi, Kanemon Nakamura, Kazuo Moriuchi, Kazuo Obayashi, Keiko Koyanagi, Koichi Ito, Manabu Morita, Masayoshi Kikuno, Mineyuki Umeda, Mizuho Suzuki, Saburo Nagaoka, Satoshi Suzuki, Satsuo Yamamoto, Sei Ikeno, Seiichiro Kameishi, Shigeru Koyama, Shinjiro Akatsuki, Shintaro Nanjo, Shun Inagaki, Sumao Ishihara, Tadashi Iwata, Takaji Fukui, Takeshi Date, Takuya Kitano, Tatsuya Nakadai, Tokio Oki, Tsuyotake Matsuda, Yoshitaro Asawaka, Yuji Hamada, Yukio Horikita, Yukiyo Toake, Yutaro Ban
Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (子連れ狼 子を貸し腕貸しつかまつる, Kenji Misumi, 1972)
Posted on December 12, 2016 by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment
When it comes to period exploitation films of the 1970s, one name looms large – Kazuo Koike. A prolific mangaka, Koike also moved into writing screenplays for the various adaptations of his manga including the much loved Lady Snowblood and an original series in the form of Hanzo the Razor. Lone Wolf and Cub was one of his earliest successes, published between 1970 and 1976 the series spanned 28 volumes and was quickly turned into a movie franchise following the usual pattern of the time which saw six instalments released from 1972 to 1974. Martial arts specialist Tomisaburo Wakayama starred as the ill fated "Lone Wolf", Ogami, in each of the theatrical movies as the former shogun executioner fights to clear his name and get revenge on the people who framed him for treason and murdered his wife, all with his adorable little son ensconced in a bamboo cart.
The first instalment in the series, Sword of Vengeance (子連れ狼 子を貸し腕貸しつかまつる, Kozure Okami: Kowokashi Udekashi Tsukamatsuru), begins with Itto Ogami's fall from grace when he's framed by a rival clan, Yagyu, who have their eyes on his family's historical position as the Shogun's official "executioner". In fact, when we first meet Ogami he's in the middle of an unusual job – he's to be the "second" in the seppuku of a noble lord, only this noble lord is a toddler whom Ogami must behead (the child will obviously be spared the horror of cutting his own stomach, but not excused the execution). Returning home after completing his grim task with seemingly no reaction at all, Ogami embraces his own young son, not so different in age from the boy whose head he just removed, and talks warmly with his wife who describes to him an ominous nightmare she's been having in which some of the lords Ogami has been the second for come back for revenge.
Though Ogami decries his wife's fears as ridiculous, his house is indeed raided, his wife killed and a tablet bearing the Shogun's crest placed on his memorial altar neatly incriminating him for plotting against his master. Ogami manages to defeat the Yagyu clan members who've been sent to arrest him and sets off on a quest for vengeance, wandering the land as a swordsman for hire with his little son, Daigoro, also apparently for rent too.
Despite his cool exterior and lack of outward expression, Ogami is clearly attached to his son both as the head of his clan and as a father. In deciding what to do with the child, he gives Daigoro a simple test in which he positions a sword and a ball on the floor and instructs his infant son to choose one, even knowing that he can't understand well enough to make anything other than an instinctual choice. Had he chosen the ball, Ogami would have sent him to meet his mother but Daigoro chooses the way of the sword and so the pair are forced onto the "Demon Way", a path filled with blood and violence as they journey onward to avenge the death of a wife and mother, and restore the good name of their clan unfairly tarnished by a dark plot.
Though his quest is for bloody vengeance, Ogami is not a cruel man as evidenced by the first job the pair receive which is for little Daigoro who finds himself seized by a woman driven mad by grief following the death of her own infant son but seems to calm down a little after being allowed to breastfeed Ogami's boy. Though the woman's mother apologises and offers to pay for "borrowing" Daigoro as it says on the large sign attached to his cart, Ogami refuses to take the money seeing as Daigoro needed feeding anyway. Similarly, when the pair find themselves swordless and trapped among vicious bandits, Ogami saves the life of a prostitute who just attempted to stick up for him by giving in to the bandits' demands and publicly sleeping with her.
This earns him the woman's eternal admiration, not only for "degrading" himself by sleeping with such a lowly woman as herself and in such a public way, but apparently making quite a success of it for someone supposedly terrified into silence. No one, she says, could be so considerate and bring such satisfaction to a woman in a state of fear. Indeed, Ogami has been playing the long game, pretending to be just another terrified hostage of this tiny hot spring town but when the bandits suddenly declare it's time to get rid of anyone who's seen their faces, Ogami leaps into action with a series of cleverly hidden tools secreted about Daigoro's cart.
That is to say, he's there on a job, saving the townspeople is more of a happy byproduct than his ultimate intention. On his entrance into the town, Ogami comes across the scene of a local woman failing to escape the bandits' clutches before being stripped, molested, raped and murdered in front of the father who has come to try and save her and is also murdered for his pains. Ogami, end game in mind, does nothing. The bandits eventually find their comeuppance on the edge of Ogami's sword, but it's too late for a poor young woman and her elderly father.
Inhabiting a similar cinematic world to the also Koike scripted Lady Snowblood, Sword of Vengeance is a Leone-esque, western-tinged tale of a mysterious wandering assassin, albeit one pushing a baby cart. Complete with the more expressionist aesthetics of the Japanese '70s exploitation film from the colourful ice and fire opening to the exaggerated blood spray in the genre's characteristically thick, too bright red, Sword of Vengeance is a worthy start to the cycle which casts Ogami downwards from his elite samurai roots and onto the "Demon Way", bound for hell by way of vengeance, and all with a smiley faced toddler peeking out from a constantly moving cart.
Tagged 1970s, 1972, Akihiro Tomikawa, Asao Uchida, Chikashi Makiura, Chizu Kobayashi, Criterion Lone Wolf and Cub box set, Fumio Watanabe, Goro Kumon, Hajime Etsukawa, Hideaki Sakurai, Hiroshi Hasegawa, Hisao Hamita, Iwao Kasumi, Japan, Japanese, Jun Fujikawa, Jun Soloni, Jun Takigawa, Junichi Naitou, Kanae Kobayashi, Kauji Sokiyamo, Kazuo Koike, Kazuo Mortuchi, Kazuo Obayashi, Kazuyo Yanaka, Keiko Fujita, Kenji Misumi, Koji Fujiyama, Koji Sekiyama, Koji Uehara, Kyoichi Sato, Lone Wolf and Cub, Manabu Morita, manga to movie, Massmi Koshiomon, Michimaro Kotabe, Reiko Kasahara, Ryutaro Gomi, Saburo Date, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi, Shinji Nunome, Shun'ya Wazaki, Sumao Ishihara, Tadashi Iwata, Taketoshi Naito, Tamotsu Fujiharu, Teruo Matsuyama, Tokio Oki, Tomisaburo Wakayama, Tomoko Mayama, Yoshi Kato, Yoshumitsu Shimonura, Yuji Hamada, Yukio Horikita, Yunosuke Ito, Yusaku Terashima, Yutaka Nakamura
Enjo (炎上, Kon Ichikawa, 1958)
Posted on March 4, 2016 December 1, 2016 by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment
Kon Ichikawa turns his unflinching eyes to the hypocrisy of the post-war world and its tormented youth in adapting one of Yukio Mishima's most acclaimed works, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Inspired by the real life burning of the Kinkaku-ji temple in 1950 by a "disturbed" monk, Enjo (炎上, AKA Conflagration / Flame of Torment) examines the spiritual and moral disintegration of a young man obsessed with beauty but shunned by society because of a disability.
The film begins near its ending as a young boy with a monk's haircut sits in a police interrogation room. He was found passed out in the woods behind a burning temple with two knife wounds on his chest plus the knife and a packet of matches lying next to him. The police would quite like to know why he, obviously, set fire to one of Japan's most popular historical monuments, but the boy refuses to speak.
At this point we enter a series of extended flashbacks as the boy, Goichi (Raizo Ichikawa), enters the Soen Temple after his father's death as an apprentice to the head monk there, Tayama, who was a friend of his father's. The assistant chief monk is unhappy about this as he's long wanted his own son to be accepted as a novice with an eye to one day inheriting the temple as the current head monk is not married and has no son of his own. When the other monks find out that the reason Goichi rarely speaks is his stammer, they begin to doubt his suitability to become a representative of their organisation.
Having grown up in a temple, Goichi idolised his father and wants nothing other than to become a monk himself. His father also loved the golden temple, "Shukaku-ji" more than anything else in the world and so it has come to symbolise a shining pillar of purity for the young Goichi who will stop at nothing to protect it. Simply being allowed to be near it is enough for him. That the temple survived the wartime air raids and subsequent chaos is nothing short of a miracle, if not proof of the gods' love for it.
Yet, Goichi burns it down. He destroys this thing that he loved above all else, so why did he do it? The temple is too good for the world, too pure to be permitted to exist. Simply put, we don't deserve it. One of Goichi's earliest attempts to protect the sacred environs of the monument sees him physically push a woman away from its doors. The woman, dressed in a very modern style, had been having an argument with a GI and though it originally looks as if Goichi may come to her rescue it's the temple he runs for. After the woman lands flat on her back, the GI thanks him for saving them "a lot of trouble with the baby".
After having committed an unintended sin in defending his beloved temple from being defiled by an impure woman, Goichi has the urge to confess but never quite brings himself to do it. This begins to create a rift between himself and his mentor the head priest. Though the priest had been his champion, Goichi always doubted that he really saw him as a possible successor because of his stammer and only now realises that the priest has lost faith in him because of his cowardliness in not informing him of the incident with woman outside Shukaku-ji. After this slight the priest goes on supporting Goichi but not with the same warmth as before and Goichi eventually comes to resent him.
The priest has feet of clay – though it's not unusual for priests to marry and have families, Tayama has nominally dedicated himself to the temple only, leaving himself with a problem as to its succession. However, Goichi discovers that the priest has a mistress in one of the most popular geisha houses in Kyoto. The monks are some of the wealthiest people around thanks to pimping out Shukaku-ji as a major tourist attraction and Tayama has already forgotten himself, becoming lost in the "worldliness" necessary to manage a religious establishment which is actually a lucrative business enterprise. The temple is itself defiled, prostituted, by the very people who are supposed to be protecting it and the proceeds fed back into funding an "immoral" lifestyle for its "CEO".
This hypocrisy adds to the injustice dealt Goichi by the uncharitable nature of the monks who also, like just about everyone else, shun him because of his stammer. Though he never stammers reading the sutras and can even speak English plainly, his lifelong stutter has left him reluctant to speak and he finds only one friend at the temple. Later he meets another bad tempered man with a lame leg and the two develop an odd bond based on their shared "deformities". Kashiwagi (Tatsuya Nakadai) is at odds with the world and encourages Goichi further onto the course of mistaken anger born of insecurity. He urges Goichi to test Tayama's true virtue by constantly provoking him which only leads to a further fall in Goichi's fortunes. However, Kashiwagi is also shown up for a hypocrite who exploits other people's reactions to his disability for his own advantage.
All of Goichi's idols fall. His parents – his mother an adulteress and his father a sickly heartbroken monk, his mentor a lecherous hypocrite and his friend a self hating coward. The world he saw in Shukaku-ji can never exist, humans are fallible and always will be including Goichi himself who is tormented by dark thoughts. An idealistic absolutist, the existence of Shukaku-ji in this imperfect world becomes to much for him to bear.
Ichikawa tells his story in a fractured, dreamlike way full of gentle dissolves as one period segues into another without warning. Goichi's memories become more disparate and keenly focussed at the same time as his spiritual health deteriorates. Ichikawa tries to capture some of Goichi's inner claustrophobia through the oppressive architecture of the temple environment but can't get close to the pervading sense of dread in Mishima's novel. Enjo is the dissection of one man's self immolation in the fire of his own spiritual disintegration but is also a condemnation of the corrupting modern world which enables such pollution to take place and its tale of the doomed innocence of the idealist is one which is retold throughout history.
I can't seem to find any video clips of this film, but as a side note 炎上 is current Japanese netslang for a flamewar so I did find a bunch of other "interesting" stuff.
Here's a short video featuring clips from several of Ichikawa's films including Enjo which you'll be able to spot what with the temple on fire and everything…
Tagged 1950s, 1958, Akio Miyata, Atsuhiko Shiga, book to film, Daiei, Ganjiro Nakamura, Hiroshi Ueda, Japan, Japanese, Jun Fujikawa, Jun Hamamura, Kanae Kobayashi, Kazuo Miyagawa, Kazuo Nishizaka, Keiko Koyanagi, Kinzo Shin, Koichi Mizuhara, Michiyo Aratama, Raizo Ichikawa, Ryosuke Kagawa, Saburo Date, Sentaro Godai, Shiro Osaki, Sumao Ishihara, Taiju Yamamoto, Takashi Hata, Takeo Inoue, Tamao Nakamura, Tanie Kitabayashi, Tatsuya Nakadai, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Yoichi Funaki, Yoko Uraji, Yuji Hamada, Yukio Mishima, Yusaku Terashima


This page is about Age. Visit Bellcross to see his Nodos spirit.
Age (エイジ Eiji) is the protagonist of Heroic Age series.
Age's character is most likely based on the mythological hero Hercules.
Age was born sometime before the War and before the colonization mission and was raised by the Golden Tribe.
Age has the body of a sixteen-year-old boy, but is actually 120 years old; it is unknown how much of this time he was actually "living", as he may have been in stasis for over 100 years.
Age lived on the ruined planet Oron, a world that was once verdant and peaceful, but later suffered from a cosmic cataclysm. Wild by nature, he is nevertheless extremely good-natured. Having grown up on a deserted planet, he can easily fend for himself and often hunts. His prey also seems to be a sort of pet or close friend to him (the limbs that Age eats eventually grow back). Like other Nodos, Age has shown enhanced agility and immense strength; he was able to tear the Argonaut's outer shell with his bare hands. Since he was taught by the Golden Tribe, who he considered to be his fathers, Age has a limited knowledge about human society, not even knowing the meaning of 'numbers', simple words, or common phrases; the Golden Tribe apparently had no use for numbers and such.
He lived in an old, abandoned ship, and he addressed the mainframe A.I. of the ship as his mother. Though the ship's A.I. did not understand most of what he said, Age truly believed it to be his mom and genuinely cared for it. When the Bronze Tribe attacked Oron, his ship was destroyed, which prompted his transformation into Bellcross.
His wild and childlike nature has earned him the nickname of "monkey" among the crew of the Argonaut.


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Barad's Agential Realism from a RE Perspective
Dr. Svein Sando, associate professor Queen Maud University College, Trondheim, Norway
This paper was presentet at the Nordic Conference of Religious Education (NCRE) in Trondheim June 2019
One of the outstanding researchers within posthumanism, is the American Karen Barad (1956-), with PhD in particle physics, to day professor in feminist studies. Her theory Agential Realism in Meeting the Universe Halfway (MUH) find arguments from the discussion within quantum physics in which Niels Bohr is central. Barad claims that her enterprise also have great ethical impact, by uplifting the concept entanglement, derived from phenomena in quantum physics, and. She raises questions like what/who is entangled with what/whom? What matters? How does matter matters? Her ethics is post-human insofar as she encompasses almost everything in what is ethically relevant, and that both human and non-human agents intra-act.
Barad's ethics seems however largely to be old stuff in new clothes. Arne Næss broke out of pure inter-human ethics about 50 years ago with his deep ecology. Earlier ethicist like Lévinas and Løgstrup have anticipated most of her ethics. It is also a similarity that both Barad and Løgstrup have references to prominent physicists from the early era of quantum physics. Both are also hampered with a difficult language, which obscure their ability to be understood and grasped by others. Thus, there is an education challenge to reach out with this otherwise fruitful relational/ontic ethics.
One of the most outstanding researchers and proponents of the new materialism branch within posthumanism, is the American Karen Barad (1956-), with a PhD in particle physics, to day professor in feminist studies in Santa Cruz, California. Her theory Agential Realism in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) (abbreviated MUH), finds arguments from discussions within quantum physics, especially methodological questions about scientific apparatuses posed by the Danish scientist Niels Bohr. The whole field of quantum physics brought complete new ways to think about realities that not only shattered Newtonian and classical physics, but also have implications that even Einstein, in opposition to Bohr, could not agree to. Einstein's famous comment that he "could not believe in a dice-throwing God" (Einstein in Jammer, 1974, p. 188).
Barad takes things even further, considers matters as the fundamental entity in universe, and gives it agentive status: "Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things" (MUH p. 137). Using Bohr, she claims in MUH chapter 4 that the border between the observer, apparatus and object in experiments is not sharp. An apparatus must be configured to observe some specific phenomena, whereas others are cut off. Barad replaces the concept 'interaction' with "intra-action" to emphasize that interacting agents are in fact entangled.
Barad's project is enormous: "Agency needs to be rethought. Ethics needs to be rethought. Science needs to be rethought. … every aspect of how we understand the world, including ourselves, is changed [by her project]" (MUH p. 23).
In this short paper, I restrict myself to test her claim that ethics needs to be rethought. Is Barad's ethics really so novel and original? What kind of consequences will this have for education?
The impact of Meeting the Universe Halfway has been increasing exponentially since 2007, with more than 1000 citations in 2016 (Hollin, Forsyth, Giraud, & Potts, 2017, p. 920). In pedagogy posthumanism has become increasingly popular, but also controversial (Time, 2017). My interest for MUH was my own background as physicist (B.S. 1976), ethicist (PhD 2014), and papers on the connection of embodiment and ethics (Sando, 2003, 2006). Quantum physics is familiar to me, so it was interesting to see how Barad connects this to ethics.
Barad's ethics in Meeting the Universe Halfway
One of Barad's main concepts is entanglement, used throughout MUH, but especially in chapter 7. Entanglements are important phenomena in quantum physics, but Barad rescales it to macro and mental levels as well, for which she are criticised (Hollin et al., 2017, p. 936). This critique seems relevant since Barad herself rejects both analogical methods and reductionism (sociology -> biology -> chemistry -> quantum physics) (Barad, 2007, p. 24). Entanglement is based on diffraction instead of reflection, the latter she criticizes to be an out-worn metaphor for thinking since a mirror just reflects the same things, whereas diffraction "attends patterns of difference" (p. 29) and is creative: "diffractions involves reading insights through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge: how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter" (p. 30).
Ethics is in Barads view entangled with both ontology and epistemology, which she claims otherwise are "separate fields of study" within the metaphore "reflextion" (p. 90). Instead she makes the neologism "ethico-onto-epistem-ology" (p. 90) which should be the outcome of diffractive thinking because they are not separable. She makes a lot of new concepts by putting together known concepts or splitting them by means of hyphens. 'Interaction' becomes 'intra-action', in order to emphasize the entanglement between those having interaction.
In general, Barad seems to use the concept 'ethics' whenever something or someone intra-act due to their entanglement. This goes along with her stressing that agency is not about a commitment one has, but something that takes place in given situations: "Agency is "doing" or "being" in its intra-activity" (p. 178). Barad makes the concept "cut" to differentiate where intra-actions take place or not, to discern what matters or not:
Cuts are agentially enacted not by willful individuals but by the larger material arrangement of which "we" are a "part". The cuts that we participate in enacting matter. Indeed, ethics cannot be about responding to the other as if the other is the radical outside to itself. Ethics is not a geometrical calculation; "others" are never very far from "us"; "they" and "we" are co-constituted and entangled through the very cuts "we" help to enact. Intra-actions cut "things" together and apart. Cuts are not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once and for all. (pp. 178-179)
At first glance, this ethics seems to be a kind of relational ethics emerging out of given situations. Moreover, Barad has an affirmative reference to Emmanuel Levinas (pp. 391-192) and Martin Buber: "All real living is meeting.1 And each meeting matters" (p. 353, see note 1 p. 466). Another place however, she widens the scope completely: "Ethicality is part of the fabric of the world; the call to respond and be responsible is part of what is. There is no spatial-temporal domain that is excluded from the ethicality of what matters" (p. 182), at least in principle. Which kind of entanglements an agent is part of, will, I presume, be what matters in a specific situation or instance.
Barad's ethics is in my view a meta-ethic. It gives no rules or principles. In the following quote, she seems to discard consequentialism: "ethics is not simply about the subsequent consequences of our ways of interacting with the world, as if effect followed cause in a linear chain of events" (MUH p. 384). In general, she has very few references to ethical scholars; Levinas as one important exception. Her ethics seems to be crystalized around two concepts: mattering and entanglement. The last chapter in MUH is named exactly "Toward and ethics of mattering" (p. 391). She combines the two concepts nicely in this quote a few pages earlier: "Ethics is about mattering, about taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are apart, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities – even the smallest cuts matter" (p. 384). By this, she broadens the ethical scope to encompass everything. Man is no island. We have responsibilities to more than other human beings, to everyone we might be entangled with, and not only close to us in space and time.
In a world with increasing ecological crisis and growing polarizations among people almost everywhere, Barad's ethics seems to carry important messages to everyone, and even more in 2019 than when she published this in 2007. That may be one reason for the increasing interest MUH has experienced the last years, as mentioned earlier. This ought to be an argument for using her insight in education.
A new ethics?
Is, however, Barads ethics new or original? Is it but old speech in a new language? And is it speech in a language that are too complex and strange in order to reach out?
Barad has herself referred to both Levinas and Buber, and thereby given hints about her mentors. There are further similarities with earlier ethicists. Zygmunt Bauman claims (1996) that there are two main paradigms of ethical theories; those many based on the myth of Moses getting the ten commandments on mount Sinai, and those very few based on the myth of Eden where Adam and Eve become ethically responsible by discerning between good and evil. The latter lack rules and principles, the first is about making rules or principles. Bauman claims that Levinas and the Danish philosopher/theologian K.E. Løgstrup are two of the very few ethicists within the Eden-paradigm. Løgstrup's ethics is about being entangled with other people (Løgstrup, 1956/1991, p. 25), and is about being responsible not because of rules or principles but by knowing intuitively what matters in the given context (Løgstrup, 1996, p. 20), i.e. in Barad's language: ethico-onto-epistemic! And these situations are for Løgstrup neither restricted to only human-to-human meetings, but to the whole environment (Løgstrup, 1994, 1995). Like Barad (e.g. MUH p. 133), Løgstrup is an anti-representationalist (Løgstrup, 1995, pp. 20-29). Like Barad (MUH Ch. 4) Løgstrup writes that matter matters, or more precisely that the importance of sensation of the materiality is neglected by most because meaning and understanding takes effective precedence over matter; but matters have ontic precedence (Løgstrup, 1995, pp. 19-20, 27-28, 30-34) in Løgstrup's view. It is also interesting to note that Løgstrup cites Erwin Schrödinger several times in Opphav og omgivelse, one of the other important physicists describing the quantum physics in the 1930-ties. Both Barad and Løgstrup have thus drawn similar philosophical conclusions from the same scientific field.
Concerning ethical scope, environmental or ecological ethics have been around for some decades. Arne Næss wrote about deep ecology back in 1973 (Curry, 2006, pp. 72-81), which is clearly post-human even in today's notions: "…non-human life on Earth has intrinsic value" (p. 72). My impression is thus that then content Barad's ethics is not new at all. The novelty is however that she underpins it with deep insight in quantum physics, and thus strengthens the arguments for ethics of the Eden-paradigm using Bauman's classification, or what Løgstrup calls "the ontological tradition" of ethics.
Consequences for education
Barad's works have obtained much interest the later years, as mentioned above. Some are inspired by her work (Bazzul, 2018; Lange, 2018), some in between (Hollin et al., 2017), and some very critical (Rekret, 2016). Elizabeth Lange claims that Barad's "relational ontologies offer significant possibilities for revitalizing" the stagnating field of learning theory (Lange, 2018, p. 280). Relational ontologies, or entanglements using Barad's own concept, is obviously important facing today's global crisis, especially if ethics is used as critique "to tear down destructive hierarchies" (Bazzul, 2018, second page). In Scandinavia, Løgstrup and relational ethics has been around for decades, especially in training of health personal (Martinsen, 2003) and teachers (Bugge, 2014). These educations in ethics may, however, have been too human-to-human oriented, even if Løgstrup himself argued for a wider scope, as mentioned. These parts of Løgstrup's philosophies are regrettably not very easy to understand and are claimed to be controversial (Andersen, 1995, p. 38).
Important thoughts in obscure wrapping seems to be a problem for some parts of Løgstrup's philosophy, but also for Barad. Her creativity in making neologisms, combined with those followers who make it even more exotic (Time, 2017), is a contra-productive enterprise. Using Vygotsky's / Bruner's metaphor scaffolding (Shvarts & Bakker, 2019), both Barad and Løgstrup could be criticized to place the scaffold too far away or make too broad zones of proximal development, so that most people fail to reach the points. An educational task is thus twofold: 1) Teachers must themselves grasp these ideas. 2) Teachers must adapt or translate the relational ontology/ethics so it fits the actual students. How this could be done, is however beyond the reach of this short paper, but my own recent experiences with education in ethics in small groups, using cases from the profession the students are educated into, is promising.
Enhanced to count as Big Idea
How can this paper be enhanced to address Big Ideas / Core Issues in RE?
Ethics in general IS a Big Idea since ethics is "important and concern essential questions (i.e. questions concerning core issues that we return to throughout life)" (Call for special issue Nordidactica).
Barad's concept entanglement, and making that an ethical concern, stress the ubiquity of ethics, and thus makes it relevant from close micro-level human-human relations to the large ethical questions in economics, political conflicts, environmental problems etc. A lot of these issues is already addressed by several other ethicists who can give input to the discussion on various narrow issues within a broad range of that the concept entanglement help to rise.
Barad's important contribution is that she underpins her ethics of entanglement not only in materiality, but also by the "hardest" way deriving it from quantum mechanics. Entanglement is part of the very fabric of the world, not just human-human relations.
Education in ethics should make entanglement as a pedagogical key concept to induce questions and discussions about issues like
With what or whom other agents am I entangled? (Agents should be taken in the Baradian way, to be more that other humans; even artefacts and environment are agents in her view.)
What are the power relations between these agents? Symmetric or asymmetric?
Do these other agents give me freedom to act or do put restrictions on my actions?
Or do I hamper other agents in their possibility to act freely?
Can such restrictions on actions be defended in some way?
Andersen, S. (1995). Løgstrup. Frederiksberg: ANIS.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway : quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bauman, Z. (1996). Levinas' og Løgstrups strategi for morallivet. In A. J. Vetlesen (Ed.), Nærhetsetikk (pp. 111-121). Oslo: Ad Notam Gyldendal AS.
Bazzul, J. (2018). Ethics, Subjectivity, and Sociomaterial Assemblages: Two Important Directions and Methodological Tensions. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 37(5), 467-480. doi:10.1007/s11217-018-9605-8
Bugge, D. (2014). Løgstrup og skolen. Aarhus: Klim.
Curry, P. (2006). Ecological ethics: an introduction. Cambridge: Polity.
Hollin, G., Forsyth, I., Giraud, E., & Potts, T. (2017). (Dis)entangling Barad: Materialisms and ethics. Social Studies of Science, 47(6), 918-941.
Jammer, M. (1974). The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Lange, E. A. (2018). Transforming Transformative Education Through Ontologies of Relationality. Journal of Transformative Education, 16(4), 280-301. doi:10.1177/1541344618786452
Løgstrup, K. E. (1956/1991). Den etiske fordring (2. ed.). København: Gyldendal.
Løgstrup, K. E. (1994). Teknologi og etik. In D. T. Andersson, F. R. Johannessen, & A. Lindseth (Eds.), Skabelse og etik. Motiver i K.E. Løgstrups filosofi (pp. 238-248). Tromsö/München: Mimer.
Løgstrup, K. E. (1995). Ophav og omgivelse: betragtninger over historie og natur. Metafysik III (2 ed.). København: Gyldendal.
Løgstrup, K. E. (1996). Etiske begreber og problemer. København: Gyldendal.
Martinsen, K. (2003). Fra Marx til Løgstrup. Om etikk og sanselighet i sykepleien. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Rekret, P. (2016). A critique of new materialism: ethics and ontology. Subjectivity, 9(3), 225-245.
Sando, S. (2003). Vulnerable bodies as ethical sensors. In M. Thorseth (Ed.), Applied Ethics in Internet Research (pp. 171-188). Trondheim: Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Sando, S. (2006). Medynk og nestekjærlighetsbudet. Tidsskrift for teolog og kirke, 77(1/2006), 20-39.
Shvarts, A., & Bakker, A. (2019). The early history of the scaffolding metaphor: Bernstein, Luria, Vygotsky, and before. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 26(1), 4-23. doi:10.1080/10749039.2019.1574306
Time, J. K. (2017, 2017-09-29). Posthumanisme i barnehagen. Morgenbladet. Retrieved from https://khrono.no/files/2018/06/22/Posthumanisme-i-barnehagen.pdf
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Democrat Jumaane Williams says he's running for NY governor
Nov 16, 2021, 1:09pmUpdated on Nov 16, 2021
Democrat Jumaane Williams, New York City's elected public advocate, is running for New York governor, making the self-described activist perhaps the most progressive candidate in next year's increasingly crowded race already featuring two formidable and potentially history-making candidates.
Williams, a 45-year-old a former New York City councilman who serves as a public ombudsman in his role as the city's public advocate, told The Associated Press he plans to formally roll out his campaign announcement Tuesday.
"I'm usually pushing and tugging at someone who has the levers to get it done," Williams said. "At some point, you have to stop looking to other folks and say, 'I'm going to do the best I can for the people of the state.' And for me, that's running for governor now."
He faces Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who took office after former Gov. Andrew Cuomo stepped down over allegations he sexually harassed 11 women, and Democratic Attorney General Letitia James, whose investigation of the allegations prompted Cuomo's resignation.
Williams said what he offers in the Democratic primary next year - and Hochul and James don't - is a longstanding record of speaking out against the status quo and Cuomo, even when it was politically inconvenient. He said even before the allegations emerged against Cuomo, Hochul should have spoken out against Cuomo and what he described as a generally toxic culture in Albany.
"We have a vision that runs against just incumbency protection, against status quo and for taking political risks on behalf of the people and presenting a vision, unabashedly about that. And that vision is what we're going to run on and we think we'll be successful," he said.
In 2018, Williams unsuccessfully challenged Hochul in the Democratic race for lieutenant governor. While Hochul was Cuomo's running mate and presented a united front with the then-governor, Williams said he would use the largely ceremonial role of lieutenant governor to serve as an independent voice and challenge Cuomo rather than serve as a rubber stamp.
That same year, as Cuomo and Hochul ran as a team, Cuomo was also one of James strongest political allies as she sought the attorney general's office. He endorsed her and headlined a fundraiser on her behalf.
Since the allegations emerged about Cuomo's treatment of women, both Hochul and James have distanced themselves from him and said they believe his accusers.
When asked if he was implying that Hochul was part of a generally toxic environment at the state Capitol, Williams said, "Clearly, there was a different vision that the lieutenant governor had, but I do again think that we would have been better off if there was a lieutenant governor that was expressly saying what was wrong and speaking out."
Hochul, 63, became the first woman to serve as New York governor after succeeding Cuomo in August. The Buffalo native quickly began running for the office in her own right, making frequent visits to New York City, rich with voters and deep-pocketed donors.
Since the allegations against Cuomo surfaced, Hochul has stressed how her duties as his deputy kept her separate from Cuomo and that she was unaware of his alleged behavior. After the attorney general released a report into the allegations, Hochul said she believed the women. Since she was sworn into the governor's mansion, she quickly worked to set a different tone from her former running mate, promising transparency and ethics reforms.
James, 63, is the first woman elected as New York's attorney general and the first Black person to serve in the role. She, like Williams, hails from Brooklyn but has greater name recognition and has proven she can win a statewide campaign.
Hochul or James would be the first woman elected to the governor's mansion in New York. Williams, if he won, would be the second Black man in the office after former Gov. David Paterson.
Williams said he thinks James has been doing "a good job" as attorney general, but thinks his vision has been "really consistent" in comparison to the others in the race.
The son of Grenadian immigrants, Williams has served as public advocate since 2019, giving him the power to investigate citizen complaints, sponsor legislation and use the bully pulpit of his office to push for change.
In that 2018 Democratic race for lieutenant governor, Hochul defeated Williams by 7 percentage points. He won more votes than Hochul in Manhattan, Brooklyn and two counties elsewhere in the state but Hochul swept every other county.
This time around, Williams said he thinks he'll be successful because he's more well-known as someone who holds a citywide elected office, and said he aims to build a more robust campaign team and fundraise more than he did in his insurgent 2018 bid.
Williams is the most unabashedly progressive candidate to jump into the race. He's often seen wearing a "Stay Woke" button on his lapel and has developed a reputation as a progressive who has been arrested several times for civil disobedience at demonstrations for liberal causes, especially on matters of immigration and police misconduct.
He said he will seek and accept the endorsement of the liberal Working Families Party. James was once aligned with the party but later distanced herself.
Williams has been criticized in past political campaigns, including his 2018 race against Hochul, for his 2013 comments saying he was personally opposed to abortion. Williams later said he supported a woman's right to access an abortion, saying, "that's what choice is about."
"You can have whatever belief you want but government has to make sure that women have the right to safe, legal, affordable abortions and those are under attack right now," he told the AP.
In a campaign video he plans to release Tuesday to kick off his campaign, Williams addresses his diagnosis at a young age of Tourette syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary, repetitive movements and vocalizations.
Williams, speaking in a voiceover, said the diagnosis never defined him.
"But it has represented a truth about my life and my work," he said. "I'm always moving."
(Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)
11/16/2021 7:58:21 AM (GMT -5:00)


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package com.zaradai.distributor.events;

public interface EventPublisher {
    void publish(Object event);
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


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Comments by bob
On "Eli Zaretsky: Trump's Charisma – LRB Blog"
I guess I've always found sociology more descriptive than explanatory. so charisma in the Weber sense seems to be more of a property of the masses which we as observers project onto the leader. I recall a phrase from The Invisible Man in which the narrator says something about the masses "throwing up" their leaders.
I not sure I've got this right, but the observation/explanation distinction of sociology may have been made nicely by the Officer Krupke number in West Side Story, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7TT4jnnWys
happy 4th.
presumably we'll get to see that fellow's charisma on full display tonight.
for me, however time induced hazily it may be, that fellow calls to mind Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism, relying on, as I think I recall, authoritarian child rearing practices. Writ large, the petty tyrannies usually played out in the family become compelling politics to enough of the populace.
in this way the charisma of O and that fellow differ fundamentally in the family dynamics they echo.
glad to see even just a reposting here. hope if portends more.
to the grill!
On "The Video of Our Moment – This is America"
btw I didn't get the confirmation email and it wasn't in spam. also my icon didn't show up here so if you do restart blogging cld be worth fixing, otherwise just random glitches between the nets.
On "Gutenberg: The Invention of the Printing Press, the Destruction of WordPress"
the Gutenberg post makes it sound like if would be all but unusable for me. the image discussion is really distressing. I haven't paid that much attention to their upgrades - I've gotten used to the changes they've made in various things altho they mostly seem cosmetic to me. but all this seems pretty user unfriendly.
how responsive have they been in the past to negative feedback? are they likely to go ahead no matter what anyone says, or work hard to fix the problems?
On "Holy American Major League of Nations (Notes on Baseball and the Re-De-Nationalization of Americanism)"
just a note on your observation about the whiskey rebellion
https://youtu.be/ASZ7NXD4i1s
On "While 2017 happens…"
I suspect that as you may suspect that lawn obsessed behavior correlates poorly with more general rightish political tendencies in the general pop. As the older generation of local lawn obsesses bow to their infirmities, the new generation, so far somewhat less obsessed, seem more mainstream politically. While still susceptible to the siren call not only of overly frequent mowing, but to fertilizers and weed killers, they seem to be otherwise agreeable humans.
I had a more specific, very un-sympatico reaction. In the recent past, my neighborhood was populated by several lawn obsessed types who mowed their lawn 2, even 3 times a week. Imminent rain, especially thunderstorms (tornados are fairly rare here), seem to cause in them an uncontrollable urge to mow, lest the unmowed grass grow too much from the fresh rain to be outside acceptable limits. So it can be fairly common for them to mow through approaching lightning and thunder, right up to, and frequently past the arrival of downpours.
This is only part of a larger pattern of annoying behavior, including lecturing lawn slackards and remowing their lawns whenever neighbors have outdoor gatherings. Lawn signs seem to indicate a high correlation with Tea Party politics and a fondness for that fellow.
So I took this guy to be merely marginally more committed to the project of the perfect lawn (and by extension, the perfect libertarian world) than my neighbors. That is, anything but sympatico.
Maybe I observe here only a local correlation between excessively committed lawn behavior and excessive political beliefs.
On "Tweet-Drizzle on Merkel on New World Disorder (OAG #12)"
All this seems less clear to me than you present here. So far, I've heard left libs bewailing as you say, but others cheering that fellow on for undermining NATO (alas, I haven't paid much attention to who said what).
At any rate, my first impulse is to say that the current situation is a poor example of what withdrawalism might look like - maybe if some one with a more reliable grasp on just everyday reality were doing it...
For instance, I think a withdrawalist could see a vital value in maintaining NATO to keep Russia in check.
Certainly I would be only barely marginally more optimistic if Bernie were doing his version. A continuation of the unevenness, fits and starts of the O years provides a more plausible map to withdrawalism. Enough of everything to make everyone unhappy.
Then if occurred to me that one could take a similar approach to strong interventionism - that GWB was a poor proponent of it, and it is unfair to judge that approach based on his execution.
In the end I see that fellow with no strong commitment to any ism other than that-fellow-ism, which may have tactical similarities to a wide range of isms, but is a poor fit for all of them.
On "Jennifer Rubin: Pro-Trump Republicans will get nothing, not even retention of a House majority – The Washington Post"
to Wade McKenzie
Wade you raise a lot of good points pointing to the frequent political dynamic of not only both the R's and D's, but pols everywhere through all time ie snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. While I don't agree with a number of your specifics, the general point remains.
However what I had in mind especially in my comment, and for some time now, is how many people seem to vote R but want the D program to a significant degree. The current health care debate illustrates this.
Many people voted for Trump, and R in general, but want the benefits and protections of the ACA. Or rather want, enhanced benefits and at least the current protections of the ACA.
R's frame this as "of course people want to keep stuff once they get it" as if the task of the R's is to protect people from themselves. Most people don't like the ACA not because it impinges on their liberty, but because it doesn't sufficiently solve the problem of obtaining medical insurance for people in the individual market.
Building on CK's comment, the R's sunk costs in the ideology of negative liberty have made it quite difficult for them to propose govt actions to even begin to solve the problems people identify themselves.
Put another way, Paul Ryan's frequent appeal for "conservative solutions" just about always, to this observer, privilege "conservative" over "solutions".
P Ryan's first assessment of the AHCA's chances of passage, something like "this is our only shot" seems to express a greater anxiety that they only have the WH and Con. majorities because of a variety manipulations they've been able to make to the electoral process, and to the biases of the processes itself. And they these are not durable against the long term trends. So it's "now or never" ie there is a basic desperation to their political calculus. My experience is that people do not make consistently good decisions under the duress of desperation. So a variant of political survival has already kicked in, and for the time being seems to be crowding out the form That JR wonders about
On "All the News that's Fit to Kill (OAG #8)"
For what its worth, the Guardian has a long read on Accelerationism that's covers a lot territory.
On "Jeffrey Goldberg: The Obama Doctrine, R.I.P. – The Atlantic"
Wade, your last paragraph is crucial to your argument. Certainly it expresses economically the source of the weight of a country's foreign policy, and to an extent any leader of that country, but not entirely. GWB rather easily evaded that weight and embarked on a pre-emptive policy in Iraq.
Obama evaded that weight by taking no kinetic action in Syria.
Whatever the weight of a country's foreign policy, individual leaders mostly do, and should have their own ideas based on their understanding of their country's interests and place in the world. These ideas rise to knowing what you're doing, only when they rise to a level of detail, logic and sophistication. There is no evidence that fellow has this, not only in foreign policy, but man other areas as well (who knew it could be so complicated?)
Knowing what you're doing increases the chances of success in the aggregate but not necessarily in the particular. Once when my wife was facing a difficult surgery, I asked the surgeon how many of his patients died from the procedure. He gave me a number and said it was because he took the difficult cases. That was the correct and reassuring answer.
That fellow merits the charge that he doesn't know what he's doing because he has no track record of success and failure in the matters of State, and has been disinclined to educate himself.
Were it only the case that people praise actions because they think the actor knows what he's doing. On second thought, such a state may have messy consequences for households with small children and pets.
That fellow is notorious for his need for praise and attention. What better way to try to influence him than to praise him when he happens to do something of which you approve?
He expresses respect for his military advisors, as do most others. As I said in my first comment here, "people around him who do know what they're doing cannot save the day because he's the Pres and they are not."
That this strike fits into the general past weight of US foreign policy means little in the current situation. A "one off-er" was a common description of it.
Until he shows otherwise, I will regard him as the Pres leading from no where, who doesn't know what he's doing.
Yes you and many of us have been alarmed for some time, and said so many times, and with considerable force and insight. What I'm advocating, tilting away at windmills, spitting and pissing into the wind, is to make at least a gesture away from the insight, understatement, hope, sincere and pro forma both, that somehow it's not as bad as it seems, or maybe things will get better, of maybe somebody will be able to influence that fellow to follow a better, more informed, considered path, a gesture away from all of that and say something as clear and bald as, "He doesn't know what he's doing!"
Imagine the effect of mass marches at which the slogan shouted and signed was "He doesn't know what he doing!" Or of panel after panel of pundits saying, one after the other, not clever insightful wisdom, but simply, "He doesn't know what he doing!" Or of Chuck and Nancy not saying well honed political stilettos, but only "He doesn't know what he's doing."
As usual, JG writes a well written thoughtful piece that helps one to better understand events. Since Trump incomprehensively provided Assad with a atta boy fireworks display, (military strike you say?????) I been reading and seeing/hearing all kinds of thoughtful, well presented perspectives about this event.
I do think it's time for these well informed, articulate commentators to just say in plain language what seems obvious to me.
That fellow doesn't know what he's doing.
For example, JG's dry, "President Trump's governing foreign policy doctrine is not easily discernible, of course." will not do.
He doesn't know what he's doing and that should be alarming to everyone no matter what your political orientation. The people around him who do know what they're doing cannot save the day because he's the Pres and they are not.
Of course we can observe that no one can "know what they doing" in that job. But the present situation far surpasses this baseline meaning, and it cries out for the explicit, alarming observation that "He doesn't know what he's doing!!!!!!"
On "Brain 'rewires' itself to enhance other senses in blind people – Harvard Medical School"
I misquoted you with my "We strip away..." What I meant to refer to was your "So the business of cognitive science will be to strip away what is non-essential to thinking and confine it to the realm of mere things." So as I understand you, thinking would be not a mere thing. But what is it? Your characterization of any characterization as an interesting failure is interesting.
Nagarjuna goes on to distinguish essences as nullities versus things without essence that drive their "thingness" from their functionality, their place in the matrix of causes and conditions. This contains all the begged questions and paradoxes of mereology in general.
So his solution is to argue that things are only things because of their functionality. That we can perceive them and how they function proves they are things. "Essence", since it does not reside in the matrix of causes and conditions, does not function, so therefore does not exist.
Nargajuna occupies a unique place in Buddhist thought. He is regarded as the person whom Buddha prophesied as the only person following him to really get it right. So, at least Mahayana-ites all have to assert they conform to his writings - with more of less success.
So all this is probably way more response than is functional, but its been tough writing for quite a while now, and this just flowed to a greater extent than has been true. So I went with it. Hope you found it reasonably interesting.
Perhaps my Buddhst buddies' long version can be condensed to a stanza.
Augmenting the Dalai Lama's famous (poorly paraphrased as)"if science contradicts anything Buddhism teaches we'll have to revise it" he said something about science's basic "ontological confusion". That is describing how something works is not describing its essence - since essence does not exist.
The essential Nagurjuna puts like this:
Essence arising from
Causes and conditions makes no sense.
Essence arisen from causes and conditions
Would be created.
So if "we strip away the non-essential" fully, we are left with nothing.
Absolutely. As I said, a quibble. But on reflection, the idea that brains can develop differently in an observable way as a result of a difference in the sensory field it processes is pretty breathtaking.
For me, the word "rewiring" has a visceral immediacy that perhaps over emphasizes the "re" part of it. Still, I think science reporting too often is not as precise as it could be and still retain readability.
Your last paragraph interests me... At this point in the proceedings, how can we think anything else?
A rhetorical quibble:
In this context, "rewires" seems not quite the right metaphor. Not surprisingly, the abstract uses more scientific rather than metaphoric language. Since the paper examines the scans of very early onset blindness, it may be more a case of their brains developing differently rather than "rewiring" which suggests individual brains changed structurally.
Such adaptability in development would be just as significant as any acquired changes in structure.
On "Benjamin Wittes: How to Read What Comey Said Today – Lawfare"
Yeah, I read C's comments as trying to do a variety of things at the same time, having the effect of making interpretation more difficult.
Any investigation of T himself would seem to be conducted in a very closely held way. If there is a there there about T himself, C's probably got one shot when he goes public. You can't read the tea leaves until the tea stops roiling around the cup.
If C was describing an ongoing investigation that is "one step away from the president", how does it not constantly invoke the "what/when did he know it" question, ie be about the pres himself.
On "Isenstadt and Vogel: Paranoia seizes Trump's White House – POLITICO"
to bob
Oh, avatar's back.
Sure, so why do they have "work Phones" they take home? Even if they don't have fate of the world responsibilities, who they work for does, and if I'm that person and I call up Bob R&F's work phone for a point of info, I want an answer right then.
A minor point at best....
BTW what happened to my avatar?
On "The Deep State vs the Derp State (OAG #10)"
You clearly got the gist, but for clarity's sake I want to amend my last sentence. It reads "The DS here would be anything at all preventing the speed and efficiency of carrying out nuclear weapons orders."
It should read, "The DS here would be anything at all preventing the speed and efficiency of carrying out nuclear weapons orders in carrying out all Presidential orders, Exec Actions etc."
Or rather it should read as a smoother version of the meaning of that.
Yeah, at any rate the DS definition I offer would render the use of such a portentous phrase "DS" trivial. My reading is that B/T use it portentousness to disguise the vacuousness of what they are saying. Kinda like watching something by David Lynch, but less entertaining.
To me the crucial element is how one construes agency. T/B and perhaps the Right in general have, to my mind, too robust a sense of individual agency. When that seems thwarted, it must only be because of some other, stronger individual agency at work, rather than the force of the political/physical ecology we, or "we", are embedded in.
Well done. And as such deserves thoughtful responses. But a lot to get to, so let me start with some prelim remarks. I did read up to the moment comments at OT but decided to respond here.
So part of the definitional issue is whose DS are we talking about. The Bannon/Trump one seems the most relevant, so what's going on with their use of the term.
It does not seem to refer to the entrenched bureaucracy, but rather a sinster version of it, in league with non-govt elements. The "in league with" is I thnik important because it suggests intentionality and agency to the DS, rather than the accumulation of millions of individual actions done only with the intention of doing one's work, and generally without any or much coordination.
So this DS alludes to, if not actually asserts, the DS of say Turkey. This is, I think part of the frequently allusive rhetoric of T/B that seems to lie, but also seems to strike a chord with a part of the population. Even if they don't understand the specific reference, they get the affective one.
I only have so much juice today, so I'm going to skip ahead in my response, hopefully to fill in later.
The one place the Pres is able to perform a radical action is launching nuclear weapons. Excellent posts on this by Alex Wallerstein here and here.
As he notes:
And from a practical standpoint, we know the system is set up so that the people at the very bottom, the people "turning the keys" and actually launching the missiles, are trained to not question (or even deeply contemplate) the orders that reach them. They are trained, rather explicitly, that if the order comes in, their job is to execute it — not quite like robots, but close-enough to that. The speed and reliability of the system requires these people to do so, and they are not in a position to inquire about the "big picture" behind the order (and would not presume to be qualified to evaluate that).
Perhaps this is what T/B is after in running the entire govt. Perhaps this partially accounts for his fetishization of nuclear weapons.
The DS here would be anything at all preventing the speed and efficiency of carrying out nuclear weapons orders.
On "One doctor's experience telling patients Trump is president – Slate"
See, this is why I'm as you say "an enemy of irony". So to avoid past ironic feedback loops, please extend to me some latitude as a friend of this site.
"Ah, to be him for a day."
Fuck you doc.
kinda tragic
Portrait of a Failed Presidency: "What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?" by Kevin Mattson
Books, US HistoryBarack Obama
As though to make it inescapably clear that the Carter Presidency lacked the Mandate of Heaven, even the national 4th of July celebrations in Washington DC were rained out, and a week later Skylab came crashing to Earth...
After East Ghouta 2: Nowhere To Be Found
International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, WarAfter East Ghouta neo-imperialism Syria
The mass annihilation of civilians in war, the conversion of citizens or subjects into eradicable vermin, ought to refer us to events at the inception of the American-centric international order as we know it, its immediate predicate in a shared experience of total war and a victory both in and against it, and its older predicate in the longer movements of history.
And many nations shall join themselves to the Eternal in that day
History, International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, Philosophy, Religional-Farabi al-Gahazali America Arab Middle East Buddhist Christian Enlightenment God Hegel Heidegger Hermann Cohen Hindu Ibn Rushd Israel Jew Kojève Moghuls Mongols Murder Muslim Nietzsche Nihilism Palestinianism Physics Post-Modernism prophecy Rosensweig Sikh Strauss Stupidity Sufi terrorism Theodicy United Nations World War Zechariah Zionism
There is no Christian, there is no Muslim, there is no American, there is no atheist, there is no Buddhist, there is no Hindu, there is no Sikh, there is no nihilist, there is no anyone else.
"Shared identity" seems to me more a product of primate evolution than that of the "imperial nation state". What's a difference of at least [...]
You know who else used to oversimplify history?
The appeal of this sort of historical what ifs, time travel fictions and whatever permutations I've left out includes (certainly not limited to) a [...]
Almost Everyone vs. The Whole Thing
CK MacLeod
bob wrote:
The multiplicity of Hegels alone should be proof enough for the existence of parallel universes.
Parallel incomplete self-consistent universals. My Hegel describes the "revel." [...]


This charming and highly original story reveals what happens at a vacation cottage once the summer visitors have left for the winter. With fewer than two dozen words, the story is told primarily in pictures.
Children and adults will revel in the activities of a family of bears that takes up residence in the empty camp.


Are there any exclusive facilities and events for holiday home owners?
As an owner you'll get to enjoy exclusive events throughout the season and a number of our parks also feature reserved facilities - including owner-only lounges.
What annual running costs do I have to pay on my holiday home?
Do we have to find our own finance to purchase a holiday home?
What practices do you have in place to protect me when buying a holiday home?
Do you offer holiday home finance to everyone?
Does our holiday home come with a warranty?
Your holiday home will come with our comprehensive 12-month warranty - which we offer on all holiday home purchases.
How long can I keep my holiday home on a holiday park?
How many months of the year can I enjoy my holiday home?
You can enjoy visiting your holiday home throughout the ownership season, which varies between our parks - ranging from 8 to 12 months.
How much are the holiday homes for sale?
I already own a holiday home on another park (not Parkdean Resorts). Can I move?
Is it possible to buy a holiday home on the holiday park?
What can I part-exchange against a holiday home?
You can part-exchange your existing static caravan or lodge for a new holiday home. Please inquire with your holiday home sales advisor for further details.
Does the amount I pay for my caravan include VAT?
Some elements of the sale may include VAT. A VAT invoice will be provided to you on request.
Will my holiday home be insured for any damage?
Will my holiday home be secure when I'm not there?
Can I choose my pitch and location at the holiday park?
What if I want to sell my holiday home?
We have Parkdean Resorts administered letting schemes. These are dependent on the age of your holiday home and its condition.
How much is the holiday home deposit?
Deposits for holidays vary depending on the cost of your holiday. Please refer to the deposit table on our cancellation cover page for more information.


text:
We are Diligent
Our people are our greatest asset and biggest differentiator. They are passionate about results, and also believe in having a lot of fun along the way
Venkat Rajaraman
CEO/Board of Directors
Venkat Rajaraman is the CEO of Cygni and an Advisory Committee member of National Center for Photovoltaic Research and Education (NCPRE), India.
He has over 25 years of experience in Product Design and Engineering Management. Prior to that, he was the CEO of Su-Kam Power Systems, a leading power back-up and RE solution provider from India. Earlier to moving to renewable energy space, he was the Vice President of Engineering at Portal Player, a company that was acquired by NVIDIA Corp in Jan 2007. He worked at Sun Microsystems, USA. He has BE degree from Madurai-Kamaraj University and a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Specialties: Solar / Renewable Energy, Project / Engineering Management, Product Design and Development.
Venkatji , this is how everyone knows him in Su-kam, a gifted leader and excellent human being- down to earth.
Rahul Saraogi
Rahul Saraogi is the founder and Managing Director of Atyant Capital Advisors, advisor to the Atyant Capital family of funds.
In the last 14 years he has focused on the Indian markets. His mission is to consistently identify the best 10-15 investment ideas from among the thousands of publicly-traded Indian corporations. Rahul's value-based investment philosophy stands apart due to his belief in the paramount importance of corporate governance, specifically how management operates with its minority shareholders in mind. Rahul is the author of Investing in India: A Value Investor's Guide to the Biggest Untapped Opportunity in the World a definitive guide on navigating the Indian markets published by John Wiley & Sons. Rahul graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Economics. Outside of Atyant, he practices Vipassana, a 2,500 year-old meditation technique that helps people see things as they really are. Rahul splits time between Chennai, India and Miami.
Rahul Saraogi runs an India-focused investment fund and has spent the past decade researching and analyzing the Indian markets.
Sateesh Andra
Sateesh Andra is the Managing Director of Endiya Partners & serves on several boards. He was Founder/CEO of Euclid, a Silicon Valley start-up, in the IT Management Software space.
Sateesh Andra loves entrepreneurs with grit, clarity and focuses on execution. So, when he finds strong entrepreneurs, he rolls up his sleeves and becomes part-coach, part co-founder and part investor. Technology start-ups with strategic focus and clear value proposition drive Sateesh. His investing, co-founding, leadership and engineering experience, for the past seventeen years in U.S/India, all veer around technology.
Besides helping evolve ideas into real businesses, Sateesh is involved with the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy with the objective of popularizing sports and promoting awareness of chronic diseases in the corporate world. Sateesh was a top-ranked Table Tennis player representing A.P State in Nationals.
Sateesh holds a Bachelor's and Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering.
Paramjit Singh
Paramjit is the Co-founder & COO. He has over 23 year of experience in power & telecom sectors in both private and government sectors.
He has been part of Indian Telecommunications Service with Govt of India and has worked with companies like NTPC, BSNL, and Airtel. He has also been into multi-country leadership role at Colt Technologies. He held multiple leadership positions at Airtel for close to 10 years like national core planning head and national core operations head. Prior to Cygni, Paramjit was Circle CTO at Airtel for over a year. Paramjit holds a B.Tech in instrumentation and control engineering and an MBA in Marketing and Business Strategy from MDI Gurgaon.
Praveen Boda
Chief Finance Officer
Praveen Boda is the Chief Finance Officer at Cygni. He has over 16 years of experience in Finance and Accounting.
He was in past associated with at Innoviti Payment Pvt Ltd, Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, Qualcomm India Pvt Ltd, Microsoft India (R & D) Pvt Ltd, Nvidia Graphics Pvt Ltd, Mentor Graphics India Pvt Ltd, and Saint Gobain Vetrotex Ltd. He is a Chartered Accountant and Cost & Management Accountant. He also completed his General Management Program from IIM Lucknow and Certification course on Forensic Accounting, Diploma in IFRS from ICAI.
Vipul Kumar Jain
AVP – Operations
Vipul Kumar Jain is the AVP– Operations at Cygni. He has worked for various organizations & MNCs like Machino Polymers Ltd., Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd., Kamla Dials and Devices Ltd., Ind-Sphinx Precision Ltd, The Oriental Engg. Works (P) Ltd. He comes with 22 years of experience in Manufacturing , Operations and Production. He did BE in Mechanical from Marathwada Institute of Technology.
Sudhir Padala
AVP– Business Development & Marketing
Sudhir Kumar Padala is the AVP – Business Development & Marketing at Cygni. He has around 14 years of experience in sales, cross-functional stake holder management,strategy development. He was associated in the past with Royal Philips, Mercedes Benz ,Safran Aerospace India and Dassault Systems. Sudhir holds MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and he has done Executive program in growth Strategies for emerging markets from Harvard University. He studied engineering (B.Tech) from IIT Madras..
V. Ramakrishna
General Manager – HR & Admin
Ramakrishna (RK) is the General Manager – HR at Cygni. He has over 25 years of experience in HR and Project Management. Prior to Cygni, he was with Su-Kam as Senior Project Manager and with Nvidia as a Sr. Executive. He has over 25 years of relevant industry experience. He has an MBA degree in HR from Osmania University.
Ramakrishna brings vast experience in Human Resources Management and General Administration.
Sasidhar Rayasam
General Manager – R&D
Sasidhar is the General Manager – R&D at Cygni. Sasi has over 20 years of experience in design and development of products for telecom, infra and power sectors. He was associated in the past with Enersys Astra Limited, CMC and ICSA India Ltd in various senior technical positions. Sasi has a B.Tech degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering.
Sasidhar has a sharp eye for details and has the unique skill of grasping complex technical issues and narrow it down to the minimal viable product.
Shantanu Srivastava
General Manager - Projects
Shantanu Srivastava is General Manager- Projects at Cygni. He has over 16 years of experience in projects & operations. His previous assignments were at Bharti Airtel India, Nokia Siemens Network, Infosys, Shivam Data Tech and I.C.F.I. . Shantanu is a Certified Project Management Professional from PMI . In addition to this, he holds a Masters in Computer Application and a Master of Science degree in Telecom Technology.
Prateek Bhattacharya
General Manager – Field Service Management
Prateek Bhattacharya is the General Manager – Field Service Management (National & International) at Cygni. He has over 23 years of experience in Customer Service Operations & Field Service Management with various Multinational and Blue Chip Companies like Samsung India, Sharp India, Casio India, Kohler India Corporation and Samtel Color Limited. He is an Electronics Engineer with Post Graduate Diploma in Customer Relationship Management from Symbiosis University, Pune. He is also a certified Six Sigma Green Belt professional.