Hacker Cinema
The Great Passage
舟を編む
2013 · Film · 133 min
Directed by Yuya Ishii
Majime, an eccentric man in publishing company, who has unique ability of words, joins the team that will compile a new dictionary, The Great Passage. In the eclectic team, he becomes immersed in the world of dictionaries. But the team is overwhelmed with problems.
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Tangentially related: there's a good recent Japanese film, available with English subtitles, called The Great Passage. It includes two intertwined love stories, one between a man and a woman and one between two men and their magnum opus, a new comprehensive Japanese dictionary, which takes decades to complete.
Highly recommended if, for nothing else, a window into why at least some salarymen feel like their sacrifices are worth it.
The film also explicitly asks and answers the question of why a publisher would fund a decades-long quest to produce a work with very limited commercial appeal (which this article might set you to wondering about): they're willing to subsidize certain prestige projects with rent from being in the elite fraternity of Japanese publishing houses, and capability of publishing new dictionaries is a status marker for that. There are limits to this largesse and they come a key subplot to the movie.