Opinions from women who didn't like the film.

I'm shocked by the figures myself - but I'm afraid that I can't help you there - just to say that I'm a woman in her 20s who just watched this film and very much liked it. I can't for one second comprehend all the negative votes by women. If there were lots of mid range votes like 4s and 5s I wouldn't be suspicious but because there are so many 1s (nearly 17% of the female vote is very high) - well that just indicates that there are a number of people (not necessarily women - it's just a case of ticking a box one way or another) who quite likely took offense to (or were immensely bored by) the film. I for one have never given a film I sat through a '1' (nor anything lower than a 5 for that matter) and it just seems bizarre that there are 193 '1' votes by women aged 45+.

The funny thing is that it's usually one of the categories with the lowest number of votes... It just seems to me like the work of a small group who have vehemently set out to knock down the film. I mean, not too long ago all you needed to join IMDb was an email address - and those cost nothing to make, right? I thought it might be one of those old films that is played too much in Japan that women are sick of - but most of the votes are from the US. If you check the 'US Voters' section almost 40% of the votes are 1s! What gives? Maybe they just found it boring? I don't like to reinforce stereotypes but if you took the votes at face value it would seem to suggest that Americans, chiefly American women aren't very responsive to things they don't know. I mean this film not only deals with a foreign country, a different culture & time period, but it's in a foreign language (some people hate 'reading' films) and the pacing and way it's shot is quintissentially Japanese (and not American) - oh and it's in black and white, some people also hate that. That can rule some people out but so many? - honestly I'd be more likely to go along with the 1st theory that there might have been tactical voting.

You know, I can see how a young Westerner might misinterpret the film and see it as reinforcing ideas that a woman's place is in the home with her husband (although that idea would jar more with younger people rather than older women). But I don't think the film was overtly trying to critique society - just showing things as they are and indicating how we just have to go along with the social order. I genuinely sympathised with Noriko - that she felt she had to get married because that was just the way things are done, and I also sympathised with her father because he knew that he had to push his daughter away or people would talk about how strange she is. The two seemed to be bound by cultural norms, to the detriment of the happiness that they already had. You hope that Noriko will be happy in her marriage and that her father won't be too lonely. It just seemed like a slice of life of 1940s post-war Japan, a culture and time period that I don't profess to know that much about, but that's what drew me to the film in the first place. I'd give it an 8/10 - certainly not a 1!

Hector Barbossa; now that's a pirate!

Is this really surprising? Is a woman of today likely to approve a film in which the protagonist is put into an arranged marriage not of her choosing?