But wait. Why is mister Togo turned into bananas? Is this just a fluke? A superfluous brain fart of the director? Or is there something else? Perhaps a deeper reason? Perhaps a reason deeply concerned with the functionality and morphology of the banana and its connection to the world of platonic forms?
Let us first of all remark that the platonic basic idea of a reality that is more supreme than the phenomenal world is very foreign to the Japanese history of thought. The confucian idea of heaven as a guiding force did not really stick in Japan, and even when Japanese philosopher use western thought as an inspiration, or example in the thought of Nishida Kitaro, they will often prefer anti-platonic philosophers such as Heidegger to the more metaphysical ontologists. Looked at in this way it is very strange that Oubayashi takes the very idealistic, minimal yellow fruit as a key symbol in his movie. The round and earthy water melon would be a much more logical choice, but let this be exactly the fruit that Togo renounces in one of the key scenes of the film. There is something very wrong.
Is it a coincidence that the first search result you get when you type in "Mister Togo" in Google is photo material of a handsome guys contest in the African country of Togo? Was Mister Togo the Japanese person not conceived by the virgin girls as a handsome person as well? Research also learns us that there are massive banana plantations in the African country of Togo. Should we treat all this as a mere accident, as a byproduct of chance? Questions pile up as our research becomes bigger. Africans are also no very apt Platonists. Should we view this allegory, mister Togo becoming a banana, as a sharp anti-occidental critique?Even after thinking all of this through on the cool porch of my house, sipping from a strawberry daiquiri, the mystery remains. The pale pile of bananas on my screen was once the handsome prince mister Togo, and there is no way for him to go back to his original form. The transformation is final and absolute, but entirely within the realm of the senses, like a bamboo princess blossoming into a beautiful woman. Could the girls have been saved? Not by a banana, not in Japan. Maybe in the west, were bananas and people are interchangeable emanations of various dimension of corporeality, yes, but definitely not in Japan, and definitely not in Togo. Finally: why did mister Togo turn into bananas? Well, after all this seems a rather simple question: because he couldn't and, more importantly, would not turn into a (water) melon, and become a victim of mystical evil. Paradoxally the becoming of a banana seems to be a voluntaristic act, the only true act of typical Japanese suicide in the movie. By becoming the atypical platonic fruit, true Japaneseness is expanded and embraced.
