Cannes for absolute beginners

What can Japan learn from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity? Quite a lot, according to Teruhiko Ikegami, media producer-in-chief at Nikkei’s N-Brand Studio — including learning about creativity from the world’s finest communicators

ONE OF Japan’s most popular TV shows is NHK’s Station, Airport, Street Piano, which features passers-by playing street pianos in cities around the world. As a Japanese person, I look forward to seeing if foreigners will play any Japanese music. Quite a few people play theme music from Japanese anime — but there’s one piece that’s played so often that I think, “Not this again…” It’s Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Sakamoto’s composition is the music to the film of the same name, directed by Nagisa Ôshima. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was entered into the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, where it lost out to Shôhei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama. But the fact that two films directed by Japanese directors were competing for the Palme d’Or in Cannes was not only unprecedented but undoubtedly one of the pinnacles of Japanese cinema. Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie, who appeared in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence became stars associated with Cannes. Forty years have passed since then and director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, which was screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, was Sakamoto’s last film score. Sakamoto died in March this year at the age of 71, following Bowie, who passed away in 2016 aged 69. However, Sakamoto’s techno-pop film scores and Bowie’s rock music are arguably attracting more attention today than they did during their creators’ lifetimes. Their music is now seen as classical work that will be passed on to the next generation. Music, film and advertisements are all creative endeavours. But unfortunately, in Japan, commercials are not generally seen as creative works — other than by those involved in the creative industries. There seems to be a deep-rooted perception among the Japanese public that advertising is only a practical tool for marketing. I wonder if this helps to explain the relatively low number of Japanese campaigns that have won awards at the Cannes Lions? The Cannes Film Festival is held in May, followed by the Cannes Lions in June. I’d like to see better recognition in Japan at the latter — the world’s biggest creative festival — as well as a greater appreciation of the value of creativity.

Absolute Beginners is one of

Bowie’s most famous songs. What can we Japanese learn from the Cannes Lions by going back to being absolute beginners?

In preparation for my first trip to Cannes, I watched Cannes Lions 2022 exhibition, the third instalment of World Class Creatives Here and Now! 2022 held at the Ad Museum Tokyo. Among last year’s awardwinning campaigns were works that were quite different from the advertisements and TV commercials that we watch every day in Japan. At the entrance to the venue, Cannes Lions guide Koichi Kawajiri posted a preface entitled Fighting Creatives. Looking at the award-winning works projected one after another on the monitors, it’s clear the world’s creatives are fighting on a lot of fronts, from war, poverty, prejudice and social injustice to climate change and natural disasters. They are facing current affairs head-on to send out vital social messages. As a beginner, I couldn’t help but be surprised that these campaigns, which should surely be called creative works rather than advertising, have reached such a high level of social awareness. For example, the video campaign

‘The Lost Class’ was broadcast on the internet by the US gun-control advocacy group Change the Ref. It won a Gold in PR. The two-minute film shows the former president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) giving a speech arguing against gun control to an empty auditorium of 3,044 seats — one for every high-school student who was killed by gunfire in 2021 and could not graduate. The tragedy of the US’ gun society is brilliantly illustrated by empty seats and empty speeches. The soundtrack to the film gradually increases the sense of urgency, as do the high-quality aesthetic effects, including video composition and frame delivery. All in all, it is a true work of art that succeeds in touching the viewer’s heart. As I watched it, the word “resistance” came to my mind.

It’s not possible to compare Matsuo Basho’s three-line haikus with Marcel Proust’s lengthy novels. But ‘The Lost Class’ shows that a two-minute video can equal a 120-minute film in terms of its social impact and ability to persuade. Japan, an island nation at the far end of the East, has created its own unique culture by adopting and adapting the cultures of other countries. In the process, the Japanese who visited Europe and the US from the end of the Edo period to the beginning of the Meiji period in the 19th century went with an attitude of humble learning, recognising they were absolute beginners in terms of understanding these distant worlds. Recently, there has been some concern about the cultural insularity of the Japanese. Young people, for example, have turned their backs on Western music. Despite their awareness of the value of speaking English, they no longer listen to Coldplay or Ed Sheeran, preferring instead their home-grown J-pop idols. People in the music business will tell you this is because J-pop is now as sophisticated musically as Western pop. But it is precisely when Japan is celebrating itself that it takes the wrong path and heads for decline. History proves this. Against the backdrop of a weaker yen, people are doing their best to enjoy domestic travel. This is understandable economically — but is it good that the number of Japanese students studying abroad is faltering or that there’s no sense of ownership of the international situation?

The US writer Scott Fitzgerald was living in France when he wrote his masterpiece Tender Is The Night, set in Cannes and Antibes. He learned something from the south of France. For those who love Fitzgerald’s novels, just breathing the air of Cannes is a magical experience. It’s as if there’s a fountain of creativity that cultivates beautiful works that appeal to people’s hearts. Japan has once again an opportunity to go back to being an absolute beginner and learn about innovation from the world’s finest creatives. Japan has finally emerged from the coronavirus disaster and is attracting ever growing numbers of tourists from abroad. The Nikkei stock average reached its highest level since March 1990 in June. On the other hand, there is serious anxiety about the future, driven by a declining birth rate, an ageing population, rural depopulation and a spate of natural disasters. Creativity offers one way to break through this sense of stagnation and uncertainty. So let’s learn from the creatives of Cannes, like the great American writers of the Lost Generation and the samurai who struggled with the Meiji Restoration.