Yummy yummy yummy, I've got love in my tummy!

Tonght I saw two documentaries by filmmaker Kim Longinotto: Dream Girls and The Good Wife of Tokyo, brief glimpses in the lives of Japanese women. Dream Girls follows performers of the Takarazuka Revue and students at the Takarazuka school where girls learn to dance and sing to become temporary performance stars. The dances choose between playing women or men, the male performers being allowed freedom and authority for their brief time in Takarazuka. But most women eventually give up their careers and education to follow their cultural calling to be married by age 25.

The Good Wife of Tokyo was a look at a Japanese performance artist's mother, who find exigency and purpose as a woman through her role as a spiritual leader for a religion called the House of Development. Begun as a melding of Shintoism, Buddhism, and Christianity, the House of Development has come to serve mostly middle-aged women as a support group for them. The have face conflict over their societal obligations to their husbands and mothers-in-law and their desires to have freedom and be independent. It made a nice follow-up to the previous film, to see the result of women’s following the ideals of Japanese society and finding methods for coping. I feel so sorry for the women, living their lives always in the shadow of their potential, but in the context of their culture they are successful. Ai.

But the daughter, the performing artist, is in a band called Frank Chicken, which is composed of 3 women total. They sing and dance in early 90s fashion, in costumes to match. They sang Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I Got Love in My Tummy with huge fanny-pack sized lips pasted on their stomachs. They also sang a song about the Rockefeller building, where the ghost of Rockefeller visits his building and sees that it is owned by Japanese business men. He mistakes them for Native Americans and wonders how they came to own his building when they were conquered.