Good-Bye

Good-Bye was filmed in 1970, right around the time of the Yodo Incident, when the Japanese Red Army hijacked a Japan Airlines plane and flew it to North Korea. It was common then to describe Japanese- Korean relations as “the closest and farthest in the world.” Of course, most Koreans, understandably, could not quickly forgive their long experience of colonialism under the Japanese, and most Japanese were content to ignore their neighbor and look instead towards the powers of Europe and the US. But, the lion’s share of our ancestors came to Japan from the Korean peninsula. I hail from Tana Village which is located in Kôza County in Kanagawa Prefecture (since renamed Tana, Sagamihara). But Kôza County was first called Kôkuri County by the people who settled it. They emigrated from Koguryo [Goguryeo], an ancient kingdom in the north of Korea—and there is an obvious resemblance between the two place names. Even my family name, Kanai, shares this connection: it suggests metalwork, and we know that the early immigrants from Korea possessed fine metalwork technology. Most likely, my ancestors were among these metal-workers. It’s with this background in mind, then, that I made Good-Bye. The protagonist is an aphasic young boy who meets, on one of his regular paths, a “Koguryo Beauty” who shows him how to trace his roots. That this search takes place in a 1970 Korea that was still under martial law lends a further tension to the story, but it doesn’t stop there. Within this drama lies yet another, making Good-Bye a one-of-a-kind road movie. —NihonCineArt