Kamome Diner

Director Naoko Ogigami

Cast: Satomi Kobayashi, Hairi Katagiri, Masako Motoi, Tarja Markus, Jarkko Niemi
Genre: Drama
Run time: 101 mins approx.
Released in 2006

Review by Fumiko Halloran

The Japanese movie “Kaomome Diner” (The Seagull Diner) sparkles with humor, friendship, cross-cultural communication, delicious food, insights into life, and enigma, all wrapped up in a Japanese diner in Helsinki, Finland.

Sachie, a Japanese woman who was in Finland for reasons unknown, opens a family-style diner in Helsinki. No Finns, however, come into what they see as an exotic diner because they don’t know what to expect. Finally one day a teenage boy wanders in for coffee and tries to strike up a conversation in Japanese with Sachie. He is crazy about Japanese animation. Unable to answer the boy’s question about an animation song, Sachie spots another Japanese woman in a bookstore and asks her about it. Midori knows the song and ends up moving into Sachie’s apartment and helping in the diner. Yet another, older, Japanese woman comes into the diner. Masako is stuck in Helsinki because her luggage has been lost by an airline. The three women work as a team and finally a few Finns come to try Sachie’s cinnamon buns and eventually sample her Japanese food.

The story has no dramatic turn of events but rather a series of small episodes of interaction between and among Japanese and Finns that sends a strong message: Regardless of different cultures, we are all humans sharing similar emotions and sentiments. This is opposite to the theme in the American movie, “Lost in Translation,” which depicts Americans in Tokyo totally bewildered by Japan and suffering from an acute sense of alienation.

My favorite scene is a drinking contest between a belligerent Finnish woman and Masako. At the end of the bout, the three Japanese take the drunken Finnish woman to her home. She starts telling the story of her life to Masako in Finnish, and Masako listens with sympathy. When the three leave the house, Masako tells the other two that the woman’s husband walked out on her and that she was lonely and wanted her husband back. Sachie and Midori ask Masako if she understands Finnish. Masako cheerfully says “Iie” (No).

Sachie is an enigma. In her late 30’s, she’s single, never tells her friends why she is in Helsinki, why she opened the diner, and how she’s getting on with her life. She is quiet, efficient, friendly and caring, yet holds back from disclosing anything about herself. We learn that she is a student of Aiki-do who easily wrestles a large Finnish man to the floor when the three women discover that he sneaked into the diner to steal a coffee maker. He turned out to be the previous owner of the eatery whose business failed and the coffee maker was actually his.

Sachie is played by Satomi Kobayashi whose superb acting molds the story and characters with subtlety and restraint into a seamless movie. Based on a novel with the same title by Yoko Mure, the director, Naoko Ogigami, has succeeded in making an excellent movie that could potentially have been difficult because it is in both in the Japanese and Finnish languages, and is played by Japanese and Finnish actors. I saw the movie with English subtitles during the Hawaii International Film Festival in Honolulu in November 2007. In this version, the audience was treated to a three-language cross-cultural experience. The theatre was packed and there was constant laughter and warm feelings among the audience.