Ah, well. This great adventure movie, Dersu Uzala, won an Academy Award for 1975, it's directed by the great Akira Kurosawa, and I seem to remember it playing at the Avon Cinema on Thayer Street in Providence, near here, for months, at the time. The Avon is a repertory cinema. This movie is at Netflix.
This movie brings back the power of the 1970s, as also seen in movies like Born Free, The Parent Trap and in record albums like Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. That spirit of the 70s is a precious thing.
In 1975, Asia was very, very busy, building what today is Sony, Hyundai, Taiwan Semicondutor, Lenovo, the Malaysian High-Tech Corridor, Shin and more. American concepts of gung-ho boy scoutism were important insofar as in the American mind, they were linked to concepts of Asia, concepts which are present in this film. Movies give energy, and it's a good movie, rated G, that shows what life is like between Russian army surveyors and East Asian Sibieran hunters, without going into any detail whatsoever in regards to various issues which seem more important nowadays, issues such as the strong links between Tibetan religion and Mongolian religion, to name one. These links, links of religious identity, play an important role in East Asian history, especially as pertains to ideas of civilization and living a meaningful life.
To speak in terms of sports, the culture of the 1970s is like adding a lot of energy to a system, a concept that is important in diode study - the erroneous theory of life in this case being something like: "If one pours energy into a system, the system will improve." In the case of men walking through Siberia for months on end, this theory goes very far past the obvious counterconcept: "One should organize one's thoughts." If a baseball team simply gets pumped beyond pumped, one ends up so unbelivably stoked that one forgets about the sudoku.
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In Bring the Noise, Public Enemy raps:
"Never badder than bad cos the brother is madder than mad at the fact that's corrupt like a senator --- Soul on a roll but you treat it like soap on a rope cos the beats and the lines are so dope --- Listen for lessons inside music that the critics are all blasting me for..."
Listen for lessons inside music....indeed. There is so much more positivity than meets the eye, so much more one wanted to say, the music can carry it well. So one should know. It is easy to make props and movie scenes to convey information, by making stuff that looks like words, it adds grandeur, or pathos, or detail, etc. Akira Kurosawa did a lot of work in developing cinema in East Asia, figuring out what the audience wanted to see in terms of dictionary mise en scene. If the viewer finds him or herself getting high on life by watching a Japanese movie, I would suggest that the viewer might as well look into this book instead; I mean, it seems obvious to me.
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Ginseng
There is a good scene that involves people talking about harvesting ginseng. If one wants to buy some Northeast Asian ginseng, it is available at H-Mart on the East Coast and K-Grocer on the West Coast.
Hockey
And how is Northeast Asia doing to-day? Here is the Wikipedia article link for Northeast Asia's professional hockey league: Asia League Ice Hockey
Siberia: Hockey, two flags and a metallurgy facility.
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Two Japanese-born players have been drafted by the NHL from the Seibu Prince Rabbits of the ALIH, Hiroyuki Miura by the Montreal Canadiens in 1992 and Yutaka Fukufuji, by the Kings. "Rabbits" is not a comic sports team name as it's understood that rabbits are good fighters, as that's what's done inside burrows and warrens.
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