My name is Pieter-Jan Van Haecke, a Belgian psycho-analyst living in Japan. With my website, I aim to explore Japanese movies, from old to now, through a Lacanian psychoanalytic lens. I do not merely seek to offer reviews – giving you my informed opinion on whether a film is good or not, but offer thematical analysis that enable you to perceive Japanese films in a different way and embark on the path to explore the irresovable tension between the Other and the subject.

Make no mistake, while Japanese films are rooted in Japanese culture, delivering the building blocks for narrative structures and resulting in certain visual sensibilities, the main conflict – how to deal with the Real – that animates the production of fiction is the same. In this sense, Japanese cinema forms a cultural specific frame to look at the subjective struggle that defines us as speaking beings.

In my reviews, I do not aim to force the vision of the director into the psychoanalytic mould, but allow the director to teach me, over and over again, about how he experiences the Japanese societal field and the position of the subject within it. Lacan’s “Gardez-vous de comprende” will be one of the most important element to orient my engaged with Japanese film with. As I wrote many moons ago: “If we deny the complexity of a phenomenon, we [face] (…) the possibility of reducing it [only] to what we already know. Given the fact that the phenomenon is an element of a different culture – an element who’s defined by all the other elements of that particular culture, we face the [additional] danger of westernizing this phenomenon“.