"wasting my life" -Keiichi

so just a little note.
I just got done watching a film called "Tokyo-ga" by Wim Wenders.
It was so great. It's basically half documentary on modern Tokyo (modern to 1985 when the film was made) and half documentary about Yasujiro Ozu, legendary director of 50 some films in his 60 years of life. Wenders just has a lot of really good points and inspirational things to say. It's interesting that what he loves so much about the films of Ozu are the same ideas I love so much about contemporary Japanese film (made since '85). Ideas like film capturing real life, telling a very simple stripped down story, use of nostalgia, and making films that are very Japanese, yet completely universal.
In the part of the film where he visits Ozu's grave he points out that there is no name on the tomb, only the Chinese character for "mu" meaning emptiness/nothingness. He then goes on a long though about this which I found incredibly fascinating: nothingness is an idea that fills us with fear;
"each person sees for himself...life. and each person knows for himself the extreme gap that often exists between personal experience and the depiction of that experience up there on the screen. we have learned to consider the vast distance separating cinema from life as so perfectly natural that we gasp and give a start when we suddenly discover something true or real in a movie. be it nothing more than the gesture of a child in the background, or a bird flying across the frame, or a cloud casting it's shadow over the scene for but an instant. it is a rarity in today's cinema to find such moments of truth... for people or object to show themselves as they really are. that's what was so unique in Ozu's films. ...films which actually and continuously delt with life itself and in which the people, the objects, the cities, and the countrysides revealed themselves. such a depiction of reality, such an art is no longer to be found in the cinema... it was once... mu, nothingness, what remains today."
So I have just been looking into this "mu" a bit more and find it extremely interesting.

http://www.soundofmu.no/2006/about-mu.html

Also, Werner Herzog had a cameo random appearance coincidentally in Tokyo at the same time as Wenders.

On a side note: I've begun my application to the JET Program. My application portion is done, now I have to write my statement of purpose and wait for my letters of recommendation to come back to me. I'm very affraid.