About Tenzo
by Nanako Tsukidate
"When we were young, did you ever imagine that Japan would become so bad?" This is the question Katsuya Tomita was asked by his cousin, a buddhist monk who was once one of the thugs in his first feature film, Above the clouds. The landscape and the ground have been wrecked by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the bodies and souls have withered away. Tenzo does not only reflect on Zen, but it also delves the audience in present-day Japan, pitiful, ragged, as it has never yet been pictured or portrayed in Japanese cinema.
