Brakeless<\/i><\/b> is a cautionary tale of what happens when punctuality, protocol, and efficiency are taken to the extreme.<\/p>\n
On Monday, April 25th 2005, a West Japan Railway (West JR) commuter train crashed into an apartment building and killed 107 people when a driver tried to catch up with an 80-second delay. Just what pressures made the driver risk so much for such a minimal delay? Was this accident simply the result of human or mechanical failure, or the failure of society in a larger sense?<\/p>\n
Piecing together personal accounts of those affected by the train crash, Brakeless<\/i> poses a question for a culture that equates speed with progress. It examines the way in which the characteristics that are usually considered national virtues may have become more of a danger to the people of Japan.<\/p>\n
The film revisits the train journey, in part through the use of animation, and follows the aftermath through the eyes of the survivors. The crash is examined in light of the historical and economic development in post-war Japan, a country that rose from the ashes to become a smash economic success worldwide.<\/p>\n
But its rapid modernization may have come with a price, and Brakeless<\/i> shows the side effects of privatization and the phenomena coined as the \u201cJapanese disease\u201d by writer Kunio Yanagida, who argues that the train wreck epitomizes an economic malaise he observes has been happening widely in post-bubble Japan.<\/p>\n
Director Kyoko Miyake\u2019s film shows how the impact of this disaster sent shock waves that still resonate years later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What led the driver of a Japanese commuter train to speed dangerously, causing a deadly crash? Brakeless<\/i> investigates this tragic case and whether Japanese society’s pursuit of efficiency at all costs was in part to blame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":8354,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1225],"class_list":["post-311","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-politics-and-government"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n