Rating: 
Summary: Understated Gem
Review:
Another story about a mis-matched couple who make an unlikely connection under some unusual circumstances in the most improbable of places. Australian geologist Sandy Edwards drives a reserved Japanese businessman, Hiromitsu, through the Australian outback hoping to close a sale for her company. When their car strands them in the desert they both become changed by the experience. Soon their odd personal relationship begins to escalate. Each finds in the other something that they have been looking for but what that is isn't revealed until the emotionally moving end of the film.
What I liked best about Japanese story was that it wasn't over-scripted. Everything doesn't have to be explained. In some scenes the absence of dialogue perfectly matched the vast open emptiness of the magnificent Australian outback. In the more intimate scenes the dialogue was replaced with some hauntingly beautiful scoring. As such, Japanese Story isn't a fast moving film. Rather, it's a slow journey with which one connects on an intellectual and emotional level. I thoroughly enjoyed this film.
Final note: I am not too familiar with Toni Collette but I thought she gave an absolutely terrific performance.
Rating:
Summary: Sue Brooks, Toni Collette, Alison Tilson: A Great Team
Review: "Japanese Story" swept the Australian version of the Oscars for films released in 2003, claiming eight awards. It's easy to see why. First, there's Toni Collette, recently horribly under-used in Nia Vardalos' "Connie and Carla." She's Australia's top actress and proves it here in spades. I'll watch anything with Toni Collette. End of story. Go see "About a Boy" and "Muriel's Wedding" (among others) if you question why.
I get a kick out of some of these other posts here about the "boringness" of this movie, or about Gotaro Tsunashima's Hiro not talking, etc. What's going on here is scriptwriter Alison Tilson and Director Sue Brooks showing you two intensely different cultures and bringing them to a jarring (and how) intersection. Hiro doesn't talk a lot because:
a) When he arrives, he's the prototypical Japanese Salaryman, a bit beaten down by life.
b) He's taken aback (culturally) by the presence of a "woman driver."
c) There's some unspoken, intense stress in his life right now (this is noted subtly in many ways, including his clipped phone calls back to "Mr. Suzuki" in the office).
d) He is adapting to the wide-open emptiness of Australia (compared to the crush of urban Japan).
Tilson and Brooks depict all this tension in a sparse, almost Zen-like fashion. As a result, we get wonderous swatches of dialogue that almost read like Haiku, such as when Hiro describes the meaning of "Hai" to Collette's Sandy:
"Hai" means "I am listening."
"Go on. Yes."
"HAI?" means "What? I don't know."
Sometimes, it means "No."
But nobody ever says "No."
That, friends, is both elegant beauty in a script and a true look inside the Japanese character. Check out 'Japanese Story' as soon as you can for great moments like these.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth watching just for Collette's performance alone
Review: "Japanese Story", an Australian film, works very well--just as long as you don't think about it too much. Geologist Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette) is given the very unwelcome job of hosting VIP Japanese businessman Tachibana Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima) on a tour of the backcountry. They immediately get off on the wrong foot. He doesn't seem to grasp the fact that she's a professional woman, and he's a bit offended that he's stuck with a "woman driver". She's already annoyed that she's been relegated to chauffeur status, and then when she's expected to lug his suitcase around, well it's all a bit much. Before too long, and after a little adversity, there's a nice little romance simmering away on the billabong. It's all made extra glamourous and interesting by the absolutely breathtaking scenery. After the film ended, I found myself realising (and I will admit that this dawned on me slowly) that I'd been sold a bill of stinky goods. This film only works if you plug into the racial stereotypes at the foundation of this film--nice polite, shy Japanese businessman meets rough and tumble Aussie girl. All this big sky, big space business. Well it's just a bit cliched. If Tachibana had been an American, an Italian, or a Frenchman let's say, would we have same the final impression, or would the word sleazebucket spring to mind? I was fascinated, however, with the erotic scene we were privy to. He was feminized, and she was definitely the masculine figure here. A bit kinky if you ask me.... Toni Collette is a phenomenal actress, and she really acts her heart out for this role. In "Japanese Story" she's so good, that it's easy to think you're watching something extraordinary. I can't say enough complimentary things about her performance, and she'll have most viewers reaching for their hankies. She's worth a dozen Hollywood starlets any day. The extra features included deleted scenes, and it was just as well that they were deleted as they did not work and fluffed out the story too much--displacedhuman
Rating:
Summary: The Pilbara
Review: "The Japanese Story" should really be called the Australian Story in that Australia's gorgeous Pilbara desert plays such a big part in the success of this alternative, out-of-the-box love story between a Perth based Geologist (a stunning Toni Collette) and a Japanese businessman (Gotaro Tsunashima).
Initially both of these people dislike each other: both finding the other obnoxious and strong-willed. But Love soon blooms and all is sublimely idyllic, with lovemaking and skinny-dipping in the red-sanded desert. Then tragedy strikes and it is really at this point that director Sue Brooks and Collette's movie begins in earnest.
Toni Collette gives the performance of her life as a woman who has fought for everything she has: respect and a place in a field that is usually reserved for men. But she has never made a place for Love in her busy life and yet, despite this she finds it on this excursion through the desert with a man she initially hates...and then it is gone.
The 360-degree turn of this film from a love story to a tragedy is unexpected and the film becomes richer and deeper for it. And Toni Colette, in an emotionally available performance that packs a genuine wallop, reminds us once again what a versatile and provocative actress she really is.
Rating:
Summary: Worth watching just for Collette's performance alone
Review: "Japanese Story", an Australian film, works very well--just as long as you don't think about it too much. Geologist Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette) is given the very unwelcome job of hosting VIP Japanese businessman Tachibana Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima) on a tour of the backcountry. They immediately get off on the wrong foot. He doesn't seem to grasp the fact that she's a professional woman, and he's a bit offended that he's stuck with a "woman driver". She's already annoyed that she's been relegated to chauffeur status, and then when she's expected to lug his suitcase around, well it's all a bit much. Before too long, and after a little adversity, there's a nice little romance simmering away on the billabong. It's all made extra glamourous and interesting by the absolutely breathtaking scenery. After the film ended, I found myself realising (and I will admit that this dawned on me slowly) that I'd been sold a bill of stinky goods. This film only works if you plug into the racial stereotypes at the foundation of this film--nice polite, shy Japanese businessman meets rough and tumble Aussie girl. All this big sky, big space business. Well it's just a bit cliched. If Tachibana had been an American, an Italian, or a Frenchman let's say, would we have same the final impression, or would the word sleazebucket spring to mind? I was fascinated, however, with the erotic scene we were privy to. He was feminized, and she was definitely the masculine figure here. A bit kinky if you ask me.... Toni Collette is a phenomenal actress, and she really acts her heart out for this role. In "Japanese Story" she's so good, that it's easy to think you're watching something extraordinary. I can't say enough complimentary things about her performance, and she'll have most viewers reaching for their hankies. She's worth a dozen Hollywood starlets any day. The extra features included deleted scenes, and it was just as well that they were deleted as they did not work and fluffed out the story too much--displacedhuman
Rating:
Summary: Touching, Shocking Love in Australia
Review: (...). Director Sue Brooks gives us a rare gem of a film about intercultural love against the backdrop of an alternately desolate and lush Australian desert. Sandy (Toni Colette) is a gritty Aussie geologist, attractive and hard, it seems, with little patience to chaperone fresh-off-the plane Tachibana (Gotaro Tsunashima). The young man has arrived from Kyoto to look after his father's mining project. Sandy sulks at the traditionally Japanese Tachibana's commands. She's a cog in his eyes and he clearly is the boss in these parts. Brooks' straightforward direction develops the relationship between these opposites at a realistically uneven pace. Sandy takes Tachibana deeper into the interior. At one point he marvels from a mountaintop overlooking the vast desert colors and up at the arching silver blue sky. Clearly, cramped Japan offers nothing like this to him. He has met his match in Sandy and the rugged land, and new feelings stir within him. Tachibana revels in meeting obstacles head-on as they plow forward, with his virtual 'bushido' determination. The jeep falls into a quagmire, Sandy wants out, but Tachibana will move heaven, but mostly earth, to get going again, and so they do. Exhausted, they collapse into sleep in the cold night desert air. Sandy gently nudges close to him. Later they make love in a motel, curiously, deeply. We are left anticipating what direction the story will take. The next day, everything changes, the silent intimacy is replaced by sheer joy in their love and life - these are two 'kids' in love, tender in expression, sitting beside a lush oasis, the river rippling, seeming to call to them. Tachibana ambiguously says of his wife back in Japan, "I will make it right". The rest of the film contains some shocking events which, well, impact all that has gone before. Late in the film, we see the wistful, knowing eyes of Tachibana's beautiful wife (a memorable cameo by Yumiko Tanaka). And through her, we understand everything at once, it seems -- about Sandy, Tachibana, and the gut-wrenching depths of cross-cultural love. This is both a deeply touching and shocking film brought to vivid life by superb character acting and Brooks' restrained direction.
Rating:
Summary: plot twists make movie work
Review: ***1/2 The best thing about "Japanese Story," an Australian film directed by Sue Brooks and set almost entirely in the Outback, is its unpredictability. Just as you begin to think that the story, written by Alison Tilson, is headed in one particular direction, it does an amazing about-face and leads us down an entirely different, utterly unexpected narrative path. The movie starts off as a fairly standard romantic comedy, involving two strangers who don't like each other very much yet who are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time together. Sandy is a geologist whose company, against her will and better judgment, has asked her to escort an important Japanese businessman through the wilds of the Australian desert on a sightseeing tour. The film even begins to seem a bit like a landlocked "Swept Away" for awhile, as these two headstrong people - he a Japanese traditionalist with male chauvinistic tendencies and she a no-nonsense, freethinking, independent woman (but both filled with doubts and insecurities beneath the surface) - find themselves stranded in a hostile and remote environment, fighting for survival. But then the first of the film's numerous plot reversals kicks in and we find ourselves in an entirely different situation altogether. I certainly don't want to spoil anyone's experience of this film by revealing just what those plot twists are, so I will merely state that the film, in the second half, becomes a fairly profound meditation on the precarious nature of life and the almost lightning-paced speed with which tragedy can intervene to bring our worlds crashing down around us. Toni Collette is heartbreaking as the feisty yet warmhearted Sandy and Gotaro Tsunashima is both tender and stoic as the man from an exotic culture with whom she eventually falls in love. That, of course, is the predictable part. But if you think you know where this story is going, you will be pleasantly surprised at how wrong you will be.
Rating: 
Summary: Ambling through the outback
Review: A rather disappointing story as Sue Brooks struggles to find a way to explore the Australian outback. Toni Collette is captivating enough, but it is a quixotic tale to say the least. The movie lacks the poetic vision of Roeg's "Walkabout," or the whimsey of Jarmusch to handle strange bedfellows in strange situations. The movie jerks along at its own ineptitude pace, before doing a 180 have way through. I did't get the sense Brooks had any idea what she was trying to say, but rather was throwing out a whole bunch of images of the outback, with the hope that they might fall together in the end. I failed to see the Japanese story in it, despite the young Gotaro Tsunashima, who was little more than an effiminate caricature, over which Toni's character's romantically muses. She assumes the male lead in this movie, unadorned and unabashed. She tries valiantly to make something out of the role but to no avail.
Rating: 
Summary: On the road with Toni Collette and Gotaro Tsunoshima.
Review: After her internationally acclaimed Muriel's Wedding, and a list of Hollywood films including her Oscar nominated The Sixth Sense and a scene stealing performance in The Hours to the failed Connie and Carla, it was wise that Toni Collette go back to her roots to make a film that showcase all that she's got. So Japanese Story is the perfect vehicle for the former Austrilian Diva to win the "Austrilian Oscar", because Hollywood isn't ready to let her carry a dramatic movie like Nicole Kidman would, a fellow Austrilian Diva.
Yes, Collette does have a very heavy-duty role to tackle, and she gets to go from one side of the emotional spectrum to the other throughout this movie, and she's more than capable at it. And it was nice to see her speak in her authentic Austrilian accent since years ago. Also, she's totally deglamourized, and the focus is just on her performance, not her image.
The multi-layered story is about a roadtrip, cultural clash, interracial romance, and tragedy. Collette met her business associate Gotaro Tsunoshima, and they went for a drive in the outback of Austrilia to see the landscape that their company bought. They drove too far out, and the car got stuck on the road, and they were experiencing some Survivor episode. Collette is tense and aggressive, and she was freaking out, because the weather was changing drastically by nightfall. Tsunoshima is funny and carefree, so the two clashed a great deal. Also he didn't speak English very well, and pronounced desert as dessert. Anyways, they eventually got the car working again, and they slowly became fond of each other. They even got intimate with each other in the heat of the moment, even thought he has a wife back in Japan. Collette's world turned upside down when Tsunoshima dived into a shallow lake, and died instantly. She was beyond horrified, and couldn't conceptionalize what to do about the body and breaking the news to his wife and the company......
Tsunoshima is the comic relief, and collette is the dramatic force, and she is in every scene. This is probably her best performance to date, and it's a must-see if you are a fan.
Rating:
Summary: "It's desert not dessert"
Review: Directed by Sue Brooks, JAPANESE STORY delves into the love-hate relationship between two unlikely individuals: an Australian geologist and a Japanese businessman. By means beyond her control Sandy Edwards finds out she is stuck escorting Hiromitsu through the desert in Western Australia while visiting various mining sites. As they drive through the arid landscape both seem to barely tolerate each other's company. To make matters worse after their Land Rover gets bogged down on an unpaved road in the middle of nowhere their nerves appear to be frayed beyond redemption, until they join mental and physical forces to rescue their vehicle and themselves from a dire and dangerous predicament. Both are in high spirits signing songs and they actually make an effort to communicate for the first time. It is at this time that they lay aside their weapons and begin to appreciate each other for the first time. One of the most interesting aspects of this film is its stunning cinematography of the Pilbara Desert in Western Australia and the red rock formations. It is truly gorgeous and magnificent. JAPANESE STORY is a good film with an excellent soundtrack and a good deal of heartfelt drama.
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