This weekend I watched a movie, Go-Con! Japanese Love Culture that I had spotted quite a while ago, and thought might be interesting.

A Go-con is certainly a formal institution in Japanese culture, although it isn’t really quite clear to me what role it plays, and how I personally should relate to the phenomena. It is basically an en-masse blind date, where one male invites a number of his single friends and a female invites an equal number of her single friends to a dinner, everyone meets everyone else, and people chat over drinks.

I know that I have never encountered this kind of thing on such an organized level in the United States. Of course, blind dates exist, and group outings with friends exist, but it seems to me like one of the main points of a Go-Con is to introduce single people to each other, with the hope that some permutation will result in non-single people eventually.

I didn’t particularly think the movie was very interesting, despite a reasonable score from the imdb. The main joke, that three guys organize many go-cons over and over, and follow a predictable script in each encounter, was played out in the opening minutes. It was interesting to see who their chosen fourth patsy would be for each evening, and what character foible would be used to highlight his complete unsuitabilty (hence improving the other three’s chances at having a good conversation with one of the ladies, who effectively outnumber them by one now) but otherwise there wasn’t much interesting until the closing scene.

In the final scene there was some introspective commentary about the surface nature of Go-Cons, where judgments are made quickly based on appearances, and the competitive nature was just a way to comparatively measure one’s own worth against the others in a battle to impress the women.

An alternative viewpoint is offered by the older Japanese chef narrator who says that this is just a modernization of a long-time Japanese cultural practice (which I can’t really comment on since I don’t know the historical basis) and that despite the surface appearances it is important to speak from the heart. That viewpoint is hardly shown by any of the male actors outside of the final scene, and even then they have all been portrayed in such a superficial light that I can’t believe any of the emotion that they try to bring about to redeem their characters to make for the happy ending.

A thid semi-interesting point is the view that the Go-Con is a team endeavor that requires brains, thinking, and planning in order to “win”. Of course, I don’t really like how this sets up the Go-Con as essentially a battle of the sexes in which women must be tricked into thinking that men have some redeeming quality, because as everyone knows, we’re devious beasts after only one thing. Which, indeed is the impression that the movie gives out for 95% of the movie!

Most unbelievably, if I was the main female lead, a waitress who works in the restaurant where the Go-Cons all take place, I certainly would have no interest at all in any of the repeat Go-Con attendees. That was the hardest leap of faith of all to make.

All that being said, I’m going to a Go-Con set up my by friend Watanabe-san this week, and have been thinking about what sort of role I play in the outing. Am I the unlucky fourth, chosen because my lack of mastery of the Japanese language will confine me to a corner seat where I’ll eat my food and nod my head? Or am I going to steal the thunder of my fellow Go-Conners and dominate the conversation because I’m exotic? Most likely I’ll just have a nice evening chatting with people about inconsequential things because frankly, I’m not Japanese and I don’t think too hard about what a Go-Con is supposed to be. I don’t really know what it is to the Japanese experience, and no matter how many bad movies I watch, I won’t; I’ll have to form my own (slightly biased) opinion as seen from foreign eyes.

If anyone knows of any other Go-Con related movies please let me know.