A movie about Zainichi (Koreans living in Japan)? Of course I have to watch that!
Mizu no koe o kiku
Japan 2014, Masashi Yamamoto, 129′
Minjung and Mina start a cult in Okubo, Tokyo’s Koreatown. All Minjung does is listen to the poor souls that come to her and then she does some vaguely shamanistic Korean stuff and answers with Horoscope-style platitudes in Korean. For some reason however, people willingly buy into “God’s Water” and with the help of a few business-minded acquaintances the thing spirals into a full-on commercial new age cult. In the middle of this, her estranged father laden with Yakuza debt shows up and asks for money. Slowly, the cult and the Yakuza spiral out of control until the big clash. At the end Minjung, who actually started to take her mission in the cult seriously, comes out broken and turns to her Korean roots to heal.
What a rollercoaster! The movie starts out as a biting satire of first-world trash-spirituality, introduces identity and family conflicts, turns into a coming-of-age movie and goes into soulsearching, broken up by a highly dramatic and close-hitting scene that almost seems to much but in this context somehow makes sense. One implicit point the movie makes is, that commercial cults and organised crime basically happen in the same way, as the rise and fall of the cult mirrors that of a classic mafia story perfectly. While the story takes many serious turns, the lighter moments help bond with the characters and make you care about them.
Other than that, the movie also has value as a look into life in the Zainichi community, showing the struggles and the assimilation that happens with the young Koreans in Japan. It seems like Hallyu (the wave of Korean pop culture drowning all of Asia) actually helps the Zainichi by fueling their self-worth in a country that seems otherwise hellbent to view them as second class citizens.