The Japanese American addiction

SOMETIMES, IT is hard to say whether Tokyo is really in Japan. It can well be another sprawling city in the heart of the U.S. With its towering skyscrapers, fastfood restaurants and jean-clad legs, Tokyo is perhaps more American than Washington or New York is.

It is rare to find a typical Japanese wooden home as it is to spot a kimono. At any given point of time during the day, there are more takers for a can of Coke who would happily munch into a beef burger than slurp along with a bowl of noodles or a plate of ``sushi''.

But the American cultural onslaught has been most severe in the field of motion pictures. The post-war period saw a steady roll of frames across the Pacific.

More often than not, it was a one-way lane, with films from the U.S. monopolising Japanese screens. Essentially, foreign movies meant American fare, and just nothing else.

The U.S. had, of course, an advantage. When the San Francisco Treaty was signed in 1951, Japan was still miserably poor, and the Allied Occupation was just about to end.

It was at this juncture that the ban on foreign pictures - imposed after Japan's surrender - was lifted, and the first celluloid works to arrive were American.

To the Japanese masses, they were nothing short of dreams. They dazzled them with their colour and speed.

This was in stark contrast to what their own Japanese cinema had to offer. Years later, Mr. Kazuyoshi Okuyama, then Vice-President of one of the country's leading production companies, Shochiku, said: ``I am keenly aware of the enormous distance we have to go before we can catch up with the Americans. It can take us 10 to 20 years.'' That was in 1994. Japanese films are still trying.

And, American stuff continues to top the charts, partly because it has become a habit to watch Hollywood. Which once set standards for life and living in Japan.

These movies were not just entertaining, but a window to the American people, to their lifestyle, which was then beyond the reach of an average Japanese man or woman.

Whether it was Audrey Hepburn's chic hairdo in ``Roman Holiday'' or Elvis Presley's hip-swinging melody, American movies moved and entranced millions on this island.

On the other hand, there was little that the Japanese could push across the sea. There were a couple of exceptions to this.

The late Kyu Sakamoto's song proved a hit in the U.S. in the early 1960s.

Even the late Akira Kurosawa, probably the best known Japanese director, had but limited success in the U.S. Not all his works were accepted there.

Those set in old Japan or those that told the tale of the Samurai warrior were popular in the American cities.

Some of his pictures were remade by American directors, the most interesting example here being ``Seven Samurai''. Admittedly, his cinema remains teaching material in the U.S., and some are still influenced by this Japanese master.

Beyond these, very little of the Japanese celluloid world finds a place in the American multiplexes.

Some social scientists, however, feel that the American culture has become so ingrained in the Japanese psyche that he or she may find it very difficult to shake it off, even distinguish it. You ask a young student why he sports a pair of jeans, and the chances are he will tell you that it is a dress he has grown up with, a dress he identifies his own culture with.

But for somebody else, jeans could be the other name for freedom and resistance, concepts that the piece of denim acquired and symbolised after it was introduced, as part of American aid, in Japan following the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923.

Cinema, like jeans, fed a necessity after the Allied troops left. A race that had suffered both autocracy and the atom bomb found sheer bliss in the pictures that came from the land of honey and magnificence. Today, most Japanese are addicted to it, but ask any, they will hate to admit it.

GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN

in Tokyo

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