The Condimental Op

by Andrez Bergen

  The other thing I’ve indulged in over the past few years here in Japan has been acting out (literally) as a bit-player and extra in local cinema. I wrote about my first brush with the industry in an article published in Geek in 2008.

  I Was an MP in Post-WWII Japan*

  (*…in a new Japanese movie, anyway)

  Ever feel like you’ve been thrust into a ‘60s revisionist version of World War II?

  Not so much Catch-22.

  I’m thinking instead of 1965’s The Battle of the Bulge, helmed by regular Disney director Ken Annakin, starring journeymen soldier actors Henry Fonda and Robert Shaw.

  Far be it for me to tart up the battle itself, but I’d like to draw your attention to a subplot in that movie. It was one that related to the real-life, duelling-scar bearing German Waffen-SS commando, Otto Skorzeny, who assembled a unit of English-speaking German soldiers, dressed them up in American and British uniforms and dog tags snatched from corpses and POWs, and operated behind enemy lines (here read our side) to misdirect traffic and generally cause disruptions aplenty.

  Operation Greif was nicknamed the Trojan Horse Brigade, as the Allies mistakenly believed Skorzeny & Co. were planning to kidnap or kill their commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The general was subsequently assigned a lookalike in Paris, while thousands of American MPs were waylaid from more important chores, and put to work instead trying to hunt down Skorzeny’s men.

  The American MP bit is vaguely ironic, because this February I got tapped on the shoulder to play an extra in a Japanese movie set just after WW2 — as an American MP.

  And I’m Australian.

  None of the other 12 gaijin roped into the movie to play American MPs were from the USA, either. Russian, sure. French, German, Brazilian, British, another Australian. The closest we got was one Canadian.

  Which brings me to the Battle of the Bulge reference.

  Weird as it may have been to see so many people wearing WW2-era American GI and MP uniforms, more surreal was the fact that the majority of these “soldiers” didn’t speak English without a heavy accent, and they preferred rattling on in Russian, French and — yes — German between takes.

  It was like those phony enemy infiltrators from the Bulge all over again.

  Oh yeah, but we each had tags to prove our international flavour. These read “Gaikokujin”, which is basically another reference to gaijin, or foreigners — as if it wasn’t already obvious that we (collectively) stood out on the set like sore thumbs or dismembered left feet, with our white helmets, wooden truncheons, faux M1 Carbines, and menacing scowls.

  One of the reasons for these scowls was the cold weather; another the God-awful coffee on offer. A third was the title of the movie itself. It’s one that a lot of people here seem to have trouble translating into English: Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai. The title has been variously interpreted, but seems to shape up best as I Want to be a Shellfish, and is listed on imdb.com under this moniker.

  Due for a theatrical release early next year, the movie stars actress Yukie Nakama (Trick, Shinobi, and one of the hottest faces in Japanese advertizing right now), alongside Masahiro Nakai — a member of domestically famous J-pop band, SMAP.

  Unfortunately, in my two days on set doing the MP rounds, I didn’t get to see either of these people, but it was February, a particularly cold winter, and the shoot was outdoors. No doubt they were somewhere cushy and warm with their feet up, laughing at the outtakes.

  Instead I got to push and pull heavy prison gates, and wandered dusty streets with an actress dolled-up as a particularly unattractive prostitute. Going by this movie, all post-war hookers in Japan were hideous creatures, and American MPs six decades ago must’ve had remarkably open taste.

  My only aspiration in this wasteland of extras was to ride about in the white on-set military jeep, which the Brazilian and the Canadian MPs got to do on both days. Lucky bastards.

  They were the escorts for the military bus, on which rode Nakai’s character, Toyomatsu Shimizu, who’s been abruptly arrested as a war criminal following the cessation of hostilities in World War II, and is now being tried for murder even though he believes he’s not guilty of any wrongdoing.

  This story was also made as a TV drama last year, for NTV (ntv.co.jp/watakai/), starring Shido Nakamura from Letters from Iwo Jima and Death Note.

  It’s based on autobiographical notes by Tetsutaro Kato — during the war years, reputed to be one of the more brutal commandants of Niigata 5B POW camp, located 160 miles northwest of Tokyo — under the pen-name Ikuo Shimura.

  During the subsequent occupation, Kato was tried and found guilty of an array of sordid activities, including beatings which left some POWs permanently disabled, and was sentenced to death by hanging for the bayonet execution of an American prison escapee named Frank Spears.

  In 1959, Kato’s yarn was adapted into a screenplay, dramatized, and directed by Shinobu Hashimoto — a man better known as the co-writer, with Akira Kurosawa, of The Seven Samurai (1954) — and the movie starred Frankie Sakai, of Ghost Story of Funny Act in Front of Train Station (1964), and Mothra (1961).

  The ending was also vamped up to tweak the tragic.

  Whereas Kato’s sentence was conveniently commuted by Douglas MacArthur, thanks to family connections, and he left Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison on good behavior in 1952, the fictional Toyomatsu Shimizu goes all the way to the noose.

  Prior to his execution, Shimizu writes a longwinded farewell letter to his wife and son, the gist of which says that if ever he were to be reincarnated, he would hate to come back as a human being, and would prefer instead to be a shellfish living on the bottom of the sea.

  Hence the strange title of this affair.

  While Kato no doubt had a lot of time on his hands during his initial interment for war crimes, Sugamo Prison was an interesting place for the conjuring up of the original tale.

  Built in the ‘20s to a European blueprint, the prison was located in Ikebukuro in Tokyo, on the site that the 60-storey Sunshine 60 building now stands, erected in the ‘70s as part of the Sunshine City shopping metropolis.

  It’s confided that the ghost of wartime Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo — himself an executed Class A war crim — haunts the retailers there, but in amenably Japanese style: after closing time.

  So it came as some surprise to find myself dressed in that American MP uniform, standing beneath a huge sign that read “Sugamo Prison”, with a big blue back-screen that’ll no doubt be used to superimpose the CG ring-in for the prison complex itself.

  My VIP job in this all-encompassing human drama? Ceremonial gatekeeper. Sure, I got the helmet, the gun, and the girl. But I also had to drag two huge prison gates open and closed again, open and closed again, ad infinitum, as the director and his extensive crew shot and reshot that white jeep (with the Brazilian and the Canadian) and a military bus driving through, for about eight hours all up.

  Even more interesting, it seemed, was that the other gate-keeping sentry doing this manual labour was also an Aussie.

  60 years on, Americans are, it seems, too busy for such mundane chores in Japan — as are the British, French, Brazilians, Germans and Russians.

  Give the job instead to the newer kids on the block. It’s a job that may in fact suit our talents, if you take into account that 220 years ago Australia started out as a penal colony.

  Bah; humbug.

  In November 2005, our daughter Cocoa was born — hard to believe this was going on eight years ago. What a life-changing experience, clichés be damned. Never looked back. Thank you, C-chan. Simple as that.

  This article was written for VICE magazine in the weeks leading up to Cocoa’s birth, but some of the VICE-ish changes done thereafter were not so much my cuppa —‘Japanese’ changed to ‘Japs’, and the main title appended with a subber saying ‘Being Pregnant in Japan is Weird’ — so I removed those things here.

  Gaijin, Baby

  There are somewhere in the vicinity of 34 million people liv
ing and working in the Greater Tokyo area, of which 691,000 (two percent, according to my rough calculations) are non-Japanese.

  About three percent of these gaijin freeloaders (i.e. over 20,000) get married to a local and/or have kids.

  I know a bit about this because, well, I am one of them. In fact, by the time this article is published I will be the first-time father of a half-Japanese baby girl and it is totally freaking me out. In a good way. I have basically gone, in a really short space of time, from someone who would stop calling friends who had kids to someone who knows tonnes of inane facts about everything to do with miniature humans.

  I have also prepared myself for the likelihood that I am probably also going to lose most of my more exciting friends. That’s cool though because I’m not really going to have time for them either.

  The Japanese have some pretty out-there customs and when it comes to something like having a baby, they turn them on big time. Here’s a bit of a diary I’ve kept of the experience.

  Thursday Sept. 1st

  According to the Japanese, a pregnancy takes ten months, not the predictable nine cited by the rest of the known world. This is because the Japanese count lunar months instead of calendar months. So, today, at the Japanese nine months, Yoko visited her midwife and found out some pretty disturbing news.

  The ultrasound, or “echo” as it’s known here, revealed that the baby was the wrong way around. The midwife told her that she was going to have to do upside-down exercises, stick bizarre adhesive incense sticks to various pressure points on her legs, and have her belly tightly bound in a 10-odd-meter cloth called an iwata-obi for the rest of the pregnancy which, at the height of a particularly hot Tokyo summer, is pretty heavy.

  Thursday Sept. 8th

  We found out today that Yoko was also an upside-down baby and that her parents turned a picture of a hen upside down to rectify the problem — which apparently did the trick. As stupid as this sounds and as un-superstitious as we are, we will spend the next couple of days upending everything in our apartment — books, furniture, posters and anything else that we physically can.

  One traditional belief states that Japanese women are not allowed to eat any seafood with claws such as crabs or lobsters, as it causes the child to become a thief. Yoko doesn’t rate this. Another belief is that pregnant women should clean their toilet daily for a healthy and good-looking baby.

  Again, it’s totally ridiculous, but imagine if we didn’t do it and happened to have an ugly kid. Let’s just say Yoko is cleaning the toilet daily.

  Thursday Sept. 15th

  It’s pretty difficult to afford everything associated with having a baby in Japan as the insurance system doesn’t seem to cover anything that we actually need. Instead, they pay the mother a “congratulations” fee after the baby is born.

  I feel like all I’ve been doing is working, but I took today off so we started reading a book which detailed all the horrendous things that can happen to babies during pregnancy, from toxic-shock to dissolving fetuses. After hearing myriad number of horror stories from this tome, everything starts to seem really ominous and I am basically reduced to a nervous, quivering mess.

  Friday Sept. 16th

  Today I got an SMS on my mobile phone, from Yoko. It says “Baby’s upside-down has been fixed. Girl. I’ll buy princess blanket.”

  While we’re on the subject of Cocoa’s birth, this movie review was published in the Daily Yomiuri newspaper the day she was born.

  I vividly remember an hour or so later celebrating and being somewhat overawed (about the birth, not the review I’d written) as I chugged away at a genuine Cuban cigar, Ozeki One Cup saké in hand, outside a shrine somewhere in Tokyo on a cold November afternoon in 2005.

  Artistic Shoot-out in Takeshis’ House of Mirrors

  Two years after dusting off Shintaro Katsu’s blind Zatoichi persona for his quirky period-drama rejig, Takeshi Kitano is back in his own original territory — with a somewhat intriguing inclination toward double vision.

  Takeshis’, which debuted at this year’s Venice International Film Festival and subsequently screened at the celluloid festas in Vancouver, Toronto and London, has thus far traversed a bumpy course, with critical mauling riding shotgun up there alongside the more expected superlatives.

  On one level a homage to the yakuza gangster flicks Kitano helped define (since taken to the violent extreme by Takashi Miike in Ichi the Killer), this movie also doubles as a parody of the style and might just be Kitano’s farewell kiss to same.

  The 58-year-old writer-director has quipped that this is a funeral for the genres he explored over his last dozen movies, in particular the gangster premise. Die he apparently does — several times over — as do more than half the cast and extras in a series of grandiose shoot-outs. The yakuza die. The samurai and the sumo wrestlers die. Heck, even the deejay in the club scene dies.

  In the process, Takeshis’ throws together a smattering of melancholia, a whacked-out sense of humour, tap-dancing musical interludes, a Bonnie and Clyde twist, and more guns than a John Woo slugfest. The fractured narrative structure peppers the screen like a spray of bullets from an Uzi.

  The gist of the story is a shakedown of two characters played by Kitano himself: one the “real life” movie star and director, and the other a shy, deadbeat convenience-store clerk who aspires to be an actor. But there’s a third overwhelming id here, and that’s Kitano’s own on-screen alter ego from those earlier yakuza romps. The question — which one of these three is the real McCoy? — disintegrates as proceedings reach out on a surreal, metaphysical limb in which dreams interplay with reality, nightmares become farce, and then it all swings violently back into an unsure version of the here and now. This makes for a sublime visual feast that’s as baffling as it is refreshing.

  Kitano’s trinity of parts aside, there’s a bevy of other doppel-gangers, mirror images and dead ringers running through this movie. Kotomi Kyono, while a tad dull as the girlfriend of movie star Takeshi, shows more than just costume jewellery sparkle in her ulterior role as a glitzy, ditzy yakuza girlfriend who happens to be the deadbeat Takeshi’s tormenting neighbour.

  Kitano certainly isn’t afraid to poke fun at himself or the genres he’s looked at more seriously in the past. But, after teasing with some mischievous insights, he then skirts the issues. And the weak moments in Kitano’s earlier film Dolls (2002) — self-conscious “artistic” references — are stitched into Takeshis’ with abandon. A recurring clown motif, a bullets-as-star-constellations riff, and heavy-handed symbolism (in this case a caterpillar) almost bludgeon the viewer, as if Monty Python had taken a blunt instrument to David Lynch, rendering it all a bit like Eraserhead on a bad hair day.

  Not that this is such a bad thing; at times, it’s brilliant. In some bizarre manner — don’t bother asking how — Kitano pulls off the slapstick Mothra-sized larva pantomime that appears at various stages throughout proceedings.

  But on the whole it’s these asides that make the movie lurch, and offshoots like the World War II scenes that bookend the film come off as just plain obscure.

  Takeshis’ could have been a stronger movie. As it stands, in spite of (or because of) the pointed vignettes, the tap-dancing, and the associated meanderings-within-daydreams, it’s a minor masterpiece. Just.

  Movie reviews were my secondary niche (after music-related inter-views) in the mid-2000s, and I do miss tweaking them — but now (again) I get to kick back and enjoy a cinematic romp without taking notes or trying to conjure up uncatchy one-liners.

  One of my favourite comedies of all time is The Producers (1968), and I was asked to view and review the remake in 2006. So, yeah, I was biased from scratch.

  A Gay Old Time for The Producers

  Arguably Mel Brooks’ most rib-tickling movie, the 1968 production of The Producers showcased Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel at their comedic best. Then it lay dormant in the vault, before being dusted off in the form of a Broadway show at the beginning of this d
ecade with a few bonus song-and-dance numbers penned by Brooks.

  In the polished renewal, Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane filled the formidable boots of Wilder’s Leo Bloom and Mostel’s Max Bialystock and, according to most reports, their shoe sizes were compatible. Lane in fact won a Tony award.

  This movie, based in turn on the Broadway rejig, reveals just how much the whole shebang relies on the ‘68 original. Everything is the same. Well, almost — aside from the tunes and one or two plot changes.

  It’s 1960s New York. Max, a failed theatrical producer who’s lost his musical shtick as the architect of a string of Broadway flops, crosses paths with the meek, anxiety-ridden accountant Leo — who just happens to conjure up an ingenious plan for raking in millions of bucks on the back of a bona fide Broadway bomb.

  First they have to raise the funds from Max’s aged female financial backers, to whom Max acts out the role of toy boy, offering to sell the old dears a stairway to the stars with half the steps missing.

  Step two? Locating the worst play ever written: Springtime For Hitler, penned by German helmet aficionado Franz Liebkind, whose lasting memory of the Führer is that he was “a good dancer.” Add to this an egocentrically self-preoccupied director and an utterly incompetent cast, and all that’s left for Max and Leo to collect are their plane tickets to Rio. Or so the plan goes…

  While Broderick’s interpretation of Leo is occasionally (high) pitch-perfect, he isn’t up to the persona that Gene Wilder so effectively nurtured 28 years ago. By contrast, Lane genuinely excels as Max, the double-dealing slimeball impresario with a heart buried somewhere deep beneath his hefty production money belt.

  It’s a similar story with the rest of the cast. Uma Thurman positively smoulders in the role of the sexy Swedish blonde bombshell Ulla, but Will Ferrell — who strangely was nominated for a Golden Globe for this performance — fumbles his take on playwright Liebkind, a part that equally off-the-wall comedian Kenneth Mars had down pat back in 1968.