Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
The first easily overlooked point is the obvious symbolic significance of Hanzawa’s father and the older guy from Osaka.1 Bear in mind that the overarching backdrop to the drama is the bubble era.2 During Japan’s economic takeoff, the contradiction between the suburbs and the city erupts with full force (precisely the contradiction between Hanzawa’s father, who runs a small local factory, and Ōwada, who represents a large global bank).3 Naoki Hanzawa decides to enter banking because of his father’s death, which means the death of the suburbs = the local world. Hanzawa’s first decision is to accept that the happy past (the factory) is utterly lost. The local world = the suburbs has become wholly dependent on the city; the only way to save the local world = the suburbs is to change the vast institution called the bank. The institution is clearly flawed: that is the premise Hanzawa accepts. It is with this same thinking that Hanzawa helps the older guy from Osaka. And the older man understands his own situation perfectly well: he knows he cannot do much on his own.
A kind of restoration of family relations takes place in Naoki Hanzawa. It is precisely this restoration that fills the void left by the death of the suburbs. This needs to be considered along several dimensions:
- Naoki Hanzawa and his companions form something like a family.
- Naoki Hanzawa himself places great importance on his own family.
- Naoki Hanzawa wants to bring his family-like relationships with colleagues into the upper ranks of the bank (the vast institution).
Make the city suburban again; make the institution humane again.
That is one level. On another, however, Hanzawa is precisely a metaphor for the institution itself. He continually remedies the bank’s own problems, benefiting the bank in the process. Hanzawa believes he can reach an endpoint: making the bank wholly humane. But this inhumanity is the very foundation of the bank. We can see quite clearly that the bank needs people like Higashida. It needs to sacrifice other people for their sake. Only in this way can the bank achieve its balance. That balance involves many different interests, and information about them cannot be brought into the open. Hanzawa’s mistake is that he says these things outright. He reveals the bank’s other side. The problem is that without this side, the bank cannot sustain itself. Just as Higashida is the truth of Asano, the bank too must depend on its dark side, kept out of public view.
So for the institution to improve, Hanzawa must be removed—but he cannot be removed altogether. For one thing, he is too formidable to dispose of outright; for another, he is still useful. Hanzawa believes he can move closer to his goal (reaching the top of the bank and changing the bank’s institutional structure itself), but for the bank, his progress toward that goal is already the purpose he serves (his value).
Of course, if Hanzawa had merely exposed the hidden truth about one or two bankers, he could have used those revelations as bargaining chips and gradually built up his strength. The problem is that he gets too close to the secrets of the upper ranks too quickly. When we approach something too quickly, our actions themselves change it. Bank president Nakanowatari’s original character is therefore irrelevant: Hanzawa’s actions have already changed it. The same reasoning applies to many of the villains Hanzawa deals with. His excessive haste and his insistence on avenging every slight bring him up against far too many villains. He forgets that some of these villains are his own creation.
Capitalism turns its own defects into its driving force, continually reproducing itself. From this perspective, Hanzawa himself is a manifestation of bank capital. The more messes the bank has on its hands, the more Hanzawa can turn them to the bank’s advantage. Hanzawa wants to bring the bank to a state of equilibrium, to make it humane. He overlooks the fact that, for the bank itself, imbalance is equilibrium and inhumanity is humanity.
What, then, of Hanzawa’s own humanity? Clearly, Hanzawa has a very happy family life, but this depends on having a perfect, ideal wife. Without her, he would probably face an uphill battle. His ideal of making the bank like a family rests on his own ideal family. At home, Hanzawa is a good husband; to his friends, he is like a good member of the family. This leads Hanzawa to seriously muddle the distinction between public and private. (Of course, that boundary is itself blurred, but this does not mean there is no distinction at all.) He treats his enemies at work as enemies of his family—as he would his father’s killer. Yet the drama keeps reminding us that these bastards at work care a great deal about their own families too. In this sense, Hanzawa retains a trait of Japan’s traditional community = the suburbs: a failure to distinguish public from private. It is precisely this disposition that structures Hanzawa’s actions. And it leaves him unable to defeat the institution itself.
To stress the point again, Hanzawa is a curious fusion of a suburban disposition and an urban mode of action. It is precisely here that viewers recognize themselves. Modern Japanese people hate the coldness of work and workplace relationships, longing to return to the supposedly warm world of Shōwa nostalgia, where public and private are one.4 Hanzawa represents their wish, and at the same time how unrealistic that wish is. Although Hanzawa is always failing, every time he fails there is tremendous tension in his eyes. Here, in imagination, we recognize ourselves, forever thwarted by work. When his expression is shown in close-up, his body of course disappears; at the same time, the viewers fill in that body and identify with Hanzawa’s gaze.