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Before Next Spring
Movie

Before Next Spring

2022 • Unknown

Woke Score
2
out of 10

Plot

Where is home? For a group of Chinese students studying and working in Tokyo, it might be the Nankokute restaurant whose manager has been in Japan for years without ever managing to obtain a residence permit. The cook left his family in China and hasn't yet managed to have them brought over to join him and one waiter's father is sick while the other's is a violent alcoholic. An engaging fresco of everyday life with touching moments and an authentic, natural atmosphere.

Overall Series Review

Before Next Spring is a gentle, slice-of-life drama about a group of Chinese students and expatriates working in a Chinese restaurant in a Tokyo suburb. The story follows the new exchange student, Li Xiaoli, as he integrates into this makeshift family of fellow Chinese nationals who are all grappling with financial struggles, family pressures, and the difficulty of obtaining legal residency in Japan. The film is based on the director's personal experiences, offering an authentic and unadorned look at migrant life, focusing on universal feelings of loneliness, nostalgia for home, and the search for belonging. The narrative features personal conflicts such as a male waiter's romantic jealousy and the female manager's life-altering health and relationship dilemmas concerning motherhood. The film is a humanistic portrait that emphasizes individual and collective struggle against bureaucratic hurdles and life's uncertainties, rather than delivering political lectures. Its cultural context as a Chinese film about Chinese people in Japan inherently bypasses the specific anti-Western and race-based political themes common in Western 'woke' media.

Categorical Breakdown

Identity Politics3/10

The plot centers on the challenges faced by Chinese immigrants and students in Japan, which naturally involves a theme of group identity and 'red tape' discrimination based on nationality and legal status. The film illustrates difficulties for Chinese immigrants in determining if they will ever truly feel at home in Japan, touching on cultural differences and occasional hostility from the host country. This focus is on national and migrant identity struggles, not the intersectional hierarchy or vilification of 'whiteness' as defined in the 10/10 descriptor. Character merits are a major factor in their ability to cope and form relationships, moving the score away from the extreme 'woke' end.

Oikophobia1/10

The film is a Chinese production about Chinese people. It does not display hostility toward Western civilization, one's home, or ancestors. Characters experience nostalgia and miss 'the warmth in life and family love at home' in China. The outside culture, Japan, is shown with a balance that includes both bureaucratic difficulties and opportunities for human connection, such as a Chinese student becoming close to a Japanese couple who run a barbershop. The core institutions of family and nation (China) are viewed with warmth and longing.

Feminism3/10

The female manager, Guan Wei, is portrayed as a 'burdened yet determined' boss who runs the restaurant and tries to help new workers like Li Xiaoli. Her story includes a subplot where her unmarried status is cited as a reason for being denied permanent residency, and she has a fight with her boyfriend over having children after a health scare. This creates a narrative centered on a woman's struggle between career, self-determination, and the cultural/legal pressures of traditional family structure and motherhood. The male characters are flawed (e.g., one is a 'damaged Chinese-Japanese bad boy,' another is an undocumented immigrant, and the new student is clumsy) but not depicted as uniformly toxic or bumbling idiots.

LGBTQ+1/10

The plot contains no discernible themes related to alternative sexualities, gender ideology, or the deconstruction of the nuclear family. The romantic subplots that exist are conventional, focusing on a traditional male-female pairing and a romantic rivalry between two men for a female classmate. The primary family-related conflict revolves around the manager's marital and child-bearing status due to legal/cultural pressures and an older cook's inability to bring his wife and children over from China.

Anti-Theism1/10

The film's focus is entirely secular, dealing with material and emotional struggles of migrant life: legal status, finances, work, family issues, and romance. There is no mention of religion, hostility toward Christianity, or discussion of objective morality in the plot summaries. The conflicts are grounded in daily life and bureaucratic obstacles, which are morally neutral and do not suggest an embrace of anti-theistic or moral-relativist themes.