Je suis japonais

A club for toy boys, light years away from the T’ang-style geisha costumes. Its young managing director, himself a former “host”, who has adopted Lemmy Caution’s formula of “Cigarettes, whisky et p’tites pépées”, and teenage girls learning Western dances after their initiation to the tea ceremony and flower-arranging. Je suis japonais explores the shaping of man and the illusion of freedom that adorns it, where the focus is on the similarities rather than differences between civilisations. Wherever you are, in France or the Empire of the Rising Sun, no one does without cultural models, no subject is without a framework, no man without training. Je suis japonais takes us into a Japan at the antipodes of Barthes’ Empire of Signs, a Japan where we discover-while France is at the height of its identity crisis-that the Japanese are French. (Yann Lardeau)