Before the Season Turns

Ten issues. For those of you who have been reading since the beginning, thank you genuinely. Oblique started as a passion project and has become something I look forward to writing and publishing every week. If you know someone who might enjoy it, please forward this along. And if you've been reading just in email form, we now have a dedicated Instagram account (@oblique.mag) where each issue gets its own visual carousel — a different way to move through the same material.

Now, to the issue this week.

The end of summer is approaching sadly. Maybe someone is looking forward to it. Whatever the feeling is, it is a season wrapping up, and we all need good reasons (and contents) to enjoy it fully. This issue talks about three films that use the summer season as the backdrop or even the main object of the plot, three albums that feel right for this moment between seasons, a photographer whose work finds warmth and connection in the most ordinary human gestures, and a new Japanese word coined this year for a kind of heat that didn't used to exist.

Enjoy the rest of the summer, everyone!

— Yubin

The late 1990s and early 2000s were an extraordinary moment for Asian cinema. In Korea, the relaxation of decades of censorship gave a new generation of directors the freedom to explore subjects that had previously been off-limits. In Taiwan, a movement that had begun in the early 1980s with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang was producing its second wave, with filmmakers turning toward personal, intimate stories rather than grand historical statements. 

The creative freedom made room for, among other things, stories about ordinary time, summer light, and the specific textures of youth. The three films below all came from that window.

Kikujiro is structured as a boy's summer diary. Nine-year-old Masao has no plans for his school holiday and sets off to find the mother he's never met, accompanied by Kikujiro, a middle-aged yakuza played by Takeshi Kitano, who volunteers for the job mostly because he has nothing better to do. What follows is a road trip across Japan, shot in warm summer light, scored by Joe Hisaishi (who you might know from all the Ghibli movies). The film opens with Hisaishi's Summer — a piano theme so simple and so perfect for the season that it has become one of the most recognizable pieces of Japanese film music. If you know the melody but not the film, this is where it came from.

Kitano was already internationally known for his crime films such as Sonatine and Hana-bi, and Kikujiro was a deliberate departure. He plays the title character as a man who is unreliable, occasionally absurd, and more tender than he intends to be. The film doesn't push its emotional moments. It lets them arrive in a subtle way: a stranger who joins them for part of the journey, and a roadside encounter that goes nowhere in particular. The premise is simple and the execution is well thought through. For a director normally associated with violence and stony cool, this was a genuinely surprising film.

Stream free on Roku (Trailer)

The Way Home (집으로…) — Lee Jeong-hyang (Korea, 2002)

A seven-year-old city boy, accustomed to video games and convenience stores, is left with his elderly grandmother in a remote mountain village in Korea for the summer. She is mute and illiterate. He is initially contemptuous of everything about her life. The film is built from that tension between the two and its slow dissolution. Kim Eul-boon, the grandmother, was a 77-year-old farmer with no acting experience. She had never seen a film. And then with this movie, she won Best Actress at the Grand Bell Awards. The boy was played by Yoo Seung-ho, who was seven years old and is now one of Korea's most prominent young actors. The film sold 4.8 million tickets in South Korea, making it the second-highest grossing domestic release of 2002, and became the first Korean film to receive major studio distribution in the United States. Watch it and you will want to see your grandmother.

Stream free on OnDemandKorea (Trailer)

Blue Gate Crossing (藍色大門) — Yee Chih-yen (Taiwan, 2002)

This film is set during the last weeks of a Taipei school year, just as summer begins. Kerou is persuaded by her best friend Yuezhen to approach Zhang Shihao, the school swimming champion, on her behalf. Shihao falls for Kerou instead, who is slowly realizing she's in love with Yuezhen. What could easily become melodrama stays quite ordinary. The film shows the characters cycling home in the afternoon, folding and passing handwritten notes, and saying something they meant and then pulling back. Gwei Lun-mei, who plays Kerou in this debut work, went on to become one of Taiwan's most celebrated actresses. The film screened at Cannes Directors' Fortnight and was nominated for Best Asian Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards. It is relatively short (83 minutes long), but uses almost all of them well.

Available only on DVD (Trailer)

Jannabi formed in the Seoul suburb of Bundang in 2012, two friends who had grown up on the Beatles, Queen, ELO, and Simon and Garfunkel. That lineage is audible in everything they make — generous melodies, orchestral layering, relaxing vocals and instruments. Their 2019 album Legend was their commercial breakthrough, propelled by "For Lovers Who Hesitate," which became one of the most beloved songs in recent Korean indie history. 

The Land of Fantasy, released two years later, is a different kind of album. Whereas Legend was emotionally weighty, The Land of Fantasy is joyful and energetic. Strings, horns, layered harmonies across thirteen tracks that make you realize they were made by two artists who know each other well and are genuinely happy to make music together. 

Fun fact: The band stated that they had drawn inspiration from the Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ album when designing the cover art. If you’re able to find the LP version of this album, it’s worth the purchase for the beautiful packaging alone.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

NOW — Se So Neon (새소년, Korea, 2025)

Se So Neon has been one of Korea's most respected indie bands since 2017, led throughout by Hwang So-yoon who is the vocalist, guitarist and songwriter. NOW is the band's debut full-length album, released after a period in which Hwang relocated to New York, spent months in the studio trying to reconnect with why she made music, and eventually found her way through. The album was recorded across New York and Los Angeles, blending blues, psychedelic rock, new wave, and synth pop in ways that are hard to categorize. One track, Remember!, is a tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto, Hwang's friend and mentor, whose music has appeared in Oblique before. The album is not easy, breezy summer listening. It is honest late-summer listening, which is something slightly different. I’ll let you decide.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

CHAI — CHAI (Japan, 2023)

CHAI formed in Nagoya in 2012 as a four-person band with a self-described ethos of "neo-kawaii" — a deliberate reclamation of a word that Japanese culture has often used to diminish women, turned into something playful and defiant. Their fourth and final album, released in 2023 on Sub Pop (a Seattle label!) before the band disbanded in 2024, finds them returning to the Japanese cultural heritage they grew up with, drawing explicitly from the city pop sounds of the 1980s and updating them with their own punk sensibility. Critics called it "warmly inviting yet still exciting." CHAI are gone now, which makes this a document as much as a record. Put on PARA PARA and see if it makes you want to move.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Hannah Reyes Morales grew up in Manila, mostly indoors. Her neighborhood was not safe, and her parents kept the world outside at a distance. Her first images of what lay beyond the Philippines came through letters and photographs from cousins who had emigrated abroad. She found photography through a class at the University of the Philippines Diliman, then interned with the European Pressphoto Agency while still a student, and graduated cum laude in Speech Communication.

She has since photographed human trafficking for the New York Times, documented war crimes against Cambodian women for Al Jazeera, and covered the Philippine government's violent war on drugs between 2016 and 2018 — work that required being in the city's darkest corners and staying present through things most people look away from. She received the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism in 2020, one of the field's most significant recognitions.

Living Lullabies is the project that sits alongside all of her previous work. It began with a simple observation: across cultures, across languages, across every kind of circumstance, caregivers sing to children at night. Parents, grandparents, older siblings, sometimes strangers, someone who will hold a child and make a sound that says you are safe. Reyes Morales has been documenting that gesture across Southeast Asia, Mongolia, the Turkish-Syrian border, and elsewhere. The project connects to the one thing she has said most consistently about her work: resilience. 

Her work has been exhibited in Manila, Copenhagen, Chiang Mai, Suwon, and Telluride. She is a National Geographic Explorer and grantee, and a member of the MAPS collective.

Follow her work on IG @hannahreyesmorales

Japan already had a word for every kind of hot day. Natsubi (夏日) for days above 25°C. Manatsubi (真夏日) for days above 30°C. Moshobi (猛暑日), introduced in 2007, for days above 35°C. Each threshold had a name, and the names were used in weather forecasts so that people knew what kind of day they were about to have.

Then temperatures kept rising, and the existing vocabulary stopped covering what was happening.

On April 17, 2026, the Japan Meteorological Agency officially adopted a new term for days when temperatures reach 40°C or higher: Kokushobi (酷暑日). The word combines koku (酷), meaning harsh or cruel, with shobi (暑日, hot day). Literally: a cruelly hot day. The name was chosen through a public vote. The Japanese public voted for the word that sounded most like what it felt like.

Between 1872 and 2017, Japan recorded temperatures above 40°C exactly three times in total. Since 2018, it has happened every single year. Japan experienced nine kokushobi days in summer 2025 alone, with a national record of 41.8°C set in Isesaki in August. July 21, 2026 was the first officially designated kokushobi day since the term was adopted. Three cities topped 40°C simultaneously.

Governments do not coin new vocabulary for weather they expect to be rare. The creation of kokushobi tells the story. When a country runs out of existing words for what its summers have become, it means the summers have changed in a way that is no longer temporary or exceptional. Japan has been meticulous about naming the heat for over a century. It has now named something it did not previously need a name for.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com