Hundreds of teenage contestants in crash helmets pretended to feel terrified. They shrank back, they clutched each other, they shivered. In my tight-fitting red tracksuit and white crash helmet, I wasn’t pretending. Stretched high above a pond, there was a jungle-style rope-and-plank bridge on which you had to stand while the other contestants tried to eliminate you with soft cannon balls fired by a spring-gun while Takeshi jumped around doing his threatening thing. Twice as heavy as the average contestant, I had trouble keeping my balance anyway. The bridge swayed wildly to either side even when the cannon balls weren’t flying. When they did, the very first one hit me in the face and down I went, to discover that the pond had been dug shallow, in order to receive the falling bodies of much smaller people. Dug out of the slime, I was inserted into the castle to be chased by giants. They were small giants but they were good at poking you with a stick. I was propelled out of a doorway and fell into the moat. For our crew, filming the Japanese crew as they filmed me was tricky, so I had to do it again. This time I emerged from the door and did three-quarters of a somersault before hitting the moat stern-first. Anything for the camera. The massed contestants dutifully howled at the marvellous sense of humour of the gaijin – the foreign person – while Takeshi mimed jealousy with what I thought was, for him, uncharacteristic authenticity. It turned out that he wasn’t miming. He was the one who was supposed to get the laughs. He had lost face.
He lost his temper along with it but we already had what we needed, so it was no great loss to take our leave as Takeshi did the equivalent of a Hollywood sulk. In the Hollywood sulk, the star retreats to his huge trailer and refuses to come out. Takeshi retreated to a very small bus and never stopped coming out, snarling at us, and going back in again. He was probably still doing that for the next fortnight, during which time we managed to prove that most of our planned story was like a game show anyway. I had been in on the preliminary thinking so I can’t say that I was double-crossed. The problem of capturing Japanese culture would have been unavoidable however we approached the task, because so much of the old art depends on refinement, which takes a lot of explaining, and only the explanation can prove that you are looking at the real thing. A Japanese classical sword-smith takes a long time to make a sword, you need a degree in metallurgy to appreciate what he does, and the finished product looks exactly like a stage prop from an amateur production of The Mikado. In a Noh play an actor takes half an hour to cross the stage. The special walk he is using takes a lifetime’s training, but he looks exactly like an old man with arthritis setting out to buy a newspaper. You can fall asleep while he is making his entrance and when you wake up again he is still making his entrance. In Kyoto, at the Geisha training school, the top lady was one of the greatest living players of the shami-sen, the single-stringed guitar that has come down through the ages without acquiring any extra strings to compromise its purity by providing it with, say, the capacity to produce a chord. It goes plunk. It goes plink.
But from this woman we had been promised prodigies of subtlety. We had been reliably informed that there was no one in her class. A ringer for Sessue Hayakawa, she applied her fingernails in various groupings to the string of her instrument, which produced a series of noises astonishing for their lack of variation. The piece she played, which had reputedly driven many a Tokugawa nobleman to hoarse grunts of desire in times gone by, sounded like a tennis racket popping its strings one at a time under intense heat. As I sat there on my crossed legs in the listening position, her display of virtuosity continued without any hint of an ending. She went plink. She went plunk. As she did so, she moaned at seeming random, evoking the last hour of a coyote with its leg crushed by a steel trap. There was a spoken passage which I thought I recognized as a reproduction of a tannoy announcement at Tokyo’s mainline station saying that the Bullet Train to Osaka would stop at Nagoya. Then the moaning resumed, until it was finally climaxed, as she hunched with added tension over her instrument, by a virtuoso simultaneous combination of plunk and plink. The attendant trainee geishas politely told me how long it took to put on their makeup but they took just as long to tell me, and there was no way to save the sequence except to shoot reverses on my straining face while I showed the effects – no need for acting – of having to sit for a long time on my crossed legs. I couldn’t manage more than a few minutes without getting up for a rest but then I had to sit down again. We filmed me doing this. It was a true story, and to let myself in for ridicule might mitigate any impression that I was setting out to ridicule the culture, which in fact I revered, even for its way of becoming even more incomprehensible as you focused your attention on it.
Ancient Japanese arts were proving a bit of a bust from our viewpoint. The modern stuff was easier. With complete dominance of the global electronics market as a motor, Japanese economic life was booming, the ‘salary men’ were working themselves to early graves, and it was fun reporting on the way they lived. In Tokyo the men in suits slaved a long day, got compulsorily wasted with the boss in the evening, missed the last commuter train and checked into one of the new capsule hotels. I checked in along with them, changed tightly into the pyjamas provided and climbed up to a capsule on the third tier. All around me were capsules full of salary men, at the rate of one per capsule. They were in there like bees. The crew had filmed then getting in. Now the crew had to film me. With my racked legs still aching from their agony in the geisha college, I climbed a ladder whose rungs were shorter than the span of my hands. But swinging myself horizontal so that I could slide into the flesh-pink plastic capsule was trickier still. For one thing, I didn’t slide. I was exactly the same size as the space provided, which was not the idea. You were supposed to be a bit smaller, so that you had room to read a porno comic book one-handed while politely farting sake fumes. But the camera was on my face as I strained and grunted. Again, no acting necessary. The right effect first time. But it had to be done a dozen times, to get the angles and the long shots. Sweat poured from my face, suggesting that I was crammed into a microwave oven. From other capsules, voices emerged, which, our translator explained, were voices of complaint. The bees were being kept awake. All that the scene needed was Takeshi rushing in, jumping up and down, pointing his finger at me and screaming, ‘You are keeping our salary men awake, foreign devil!’
We flew down to Kyushu to film me sitting in a pool of hot grey liquid mud dotted with melons and the heads of people who were there for the melon-flavoured hot grey liquid mud. Some of them had been there for years. They were quite tolerant of the intruder, but I couldn’t help wondering why I was so often ending up submerged. (In subsequent movies the question would occur to me again: it was a kind of running theme.) The answer to the question, I realized much later, was actually quite simple. Like the wearing of the blue suit, the plunging of my body into alien liquids emphasized the only reason for my central role in the proceedings: I was the wrong man in the right spot. But the films we made in Japan had a bit too much of the wrong man and not nearly enough of the right spot.
We got closer to capturing the traditional Japan when we filmed my participation in the tea ceremony. The tea master was the top guy in the country. Radiating sacred expertise through the paper walls of his little house, he held the tea master’s equivalent of a black belt, tenth dan, and he had not arrived at this exalted rank without suffering, as his permanent frown attested. Change his kimono for a naval uniform and he could have been Admiral Yamamoto just after he got the news that four aircraft carriers had been sunk in the Battle of Midway. As we squatted facing each other, I too suffered. At several points during the first hour, while the tea master was still preparing the tea for mixing with water – the leaves had to be pounded, sifted and closely contemplated before being pounded and sifted again – I did not get up quickly enough to rest my legs. Instead I rolled over backwards, to the amusement of the third participant. Her name was Yoko Shimada and she was present at my suggestion. Back in England, I had informed my troops that the actress in
the television mini-series Shogun was the most beautiful woman on Earth and that if she were present during the tea ceremony her ethereal face might do a better job of conveying its spiritual significance than mine. This proved to be an accurate forecast and I don’t apologize for having made it. Some of my critics were scornful about the way my Postcard programmes were populated with good-looking women. A few of my producers, especially if they were female, agreed with the critics, but I thought the audience could use an effective relief from looking at me, and I would still think the same today. In Japan, especially, it was all too easy to fill the screen with brute reality. All you had to do was get a close shot of a sumo wrestler’s behind. But if you wanted to convey spiritual beauty in its most refined form, Yoko Shimada’s face was just the thing. Decked out in full kimono, she looked truly, deeply interested in the tea ceremony and declared herself honoured to be watching the tea being ceremonially mixed by the number-one tea master currently in existence. The camera could cut away to her divine countenance while the tea master got on with the job of mixing and whisking. The camera didn’t have to watch me rolling over backwards.
In the course of about an era, the tea was finally all set to go. It looked like guacamole but it tasted of nothing, which was apparently the idea. A foreigner tasting his first ceremonial tea couldn’t expect to get the nuances. Later on I asked Yoko if she had tasted anything either, but by that time she was back outside the house and had been joined by her manager, who whispered in her ear. She said the tea had been wonderful beyond all imagining, but there was a giggle going on somewhere behind that mask of translucent beauty. While she was inside the house and still on the case, however, she did a superlative imitation of someone being knocked out by subtlety. The cup came to her after it had come to me. As per the protocol, I had turned the cup around so that she wouldn’t be sipping from the same bit of the rim I had sipped from. She turned it again, so I think her delicate lips ended up sipping at the same spot. If so, it was as near as I was ever going to get to sharing Richard Chamberlain’s big moment in Shogun when he fell with her to the futon. We got miles of footage but there was never any doubt that it would have been just another slapstick scene if we hadn’t introduced an extra element. Yoko was it, and I said goodbye to her with a correctly angled bow as she was helped into the back of her limousine by her manager, who hated me very much. I have often wondered whether he might not have been the reason why she didn’t become the biggest star in the world. If so, he was probably right. She was the golden carp, and she belonged in the old imperial pond. In the open ocean, she might have drowned.
We got a lot of good material in Japan and I think the two movies it yielded hold up fairly well – they are still being screened somewhere in the world all the time – but a single movie would have been better if we could have captured the real texture. I had already figured out why it had slipped through our fingers: not because it is made of silk, but because it is all based on the language. Our fixer on the shoot, an elegant young employee of the BBC’s Tokyo office named Noriko Izumi, was a born teacher. I called her Nikki and her spoken English was so good that she called me Clive, instead of the usual local pronunciation, Karaibu. (Most of the gags about the way the Japanese pronounce English are exactly backwards, by the way: it’s ‘l’ that they have trouble with, not ‘r’, so the famous ‘Lip my tights!’ sequence in Lost in Translation is nonsense, even if amusing.) So well did Nikki speak English, in fact, that she wasn’t in search of practice, and could dedicate all her attention, during my downtime, to starting me off on one of the big adventures of my life. I won’t try to record it all here. Sufficient to say that during the shoot I learned enough phrases to play my part in the standard everyday conversation that consists almost entirely of saying hello and goodbye, and I even learned to recognize my first half-dozen written words. That second thing, the written language, is what makes Japanese so hard for the foreigner. The spoken language is comparatively user-friendly. It’s spoken in a monotone, in complete syllables, so you don’t have to worry about your intonation, and the phonemes can be strung together as easily as in Italian or Spanish. In fact Japanese sounds a bit like Italian being spoken in the next room.
But the written language is a different matter. There are three alphabets going on at once. Two of the alphabets are syllabic, but most of the action is in the third alphabet, the kanji characters, and it’s a brain-burner. The written language, with its emphasis on memory, is designed to be learned by children so as to be used by adults. An adult trying to learn it had better not be trying to remember anything else. Nevertheless, in the following years, during which I spent as much time as I could in Japan, I got quite a long way with reading and writing, but I didn’t have to get further than about a yard before I discovered what our filming trip had missed out. The biggest artistic impact Japan makes is all contained within that amazing written language. A single page of a newspaper is a work of art. The whole population shares this enormous aesthetic turn-on and if you can’t read it, you’re out of it. Ainiku, as they say. A pity. Year after year, in the magic coffee shops of Jinbo Cho, the book district of Tokyo, Nikki would check my kanji characters as I laboriously entered them in my notebook. Always more keen to form friendships among women than among men – once a mother’s boy, always a mother’s boy – I eventually supplemented her invaluable help with additional instruction from a bunch of female teachers who had daringly started a two-room outfit to teach Japanese to foreign businessmen based in Tokyo. Their little school, called Business Nihongo, was an unprecedented initiative at a time when Japanese women were still meant to mind the hearth. I staked them to a few months’ rent in return for free teaching. Eventually I could write the phonetic alphabets – the sinuous hiragana and the jagged katakana – with fair fluency, but the kanji characters were always a killer. The upside was that I got steadily better at reading and a lot better at speaking. I learned women’s Japanese – men would raise their eyebrows when I spoke it – but it sounds better than men’s Japanese anyway. (Women, even when annoyed, sound like the pattering of a light rain on a tiled roof. Men, even when discussing the weather, sound as if they are whipping themselves up for a banzai attack.) Writing, however, was dead tricky, and I never really got on top of it even before the day came that I had to put it aside for a while, and then found, when I tried to pick it up again, that it had all gone away. One day I hope to start again, because it was one of the big aesthetic experiences of my life, like getting into the Bach cantatas.
13. PAGEANT CITIES
Rio de Janeiro was tricky too but for a different reason. A water city whose beautiful setting ranked with Sydney and Venice, with overtones of the Himalayas, it looked majestic in a wide shot but when the camera got closer it was a meat market. Such was the cult of the female body that I looked like a sex tourist just for being there. There was certainly no need to jazz up a tea ceremony with a pretty woman. Pretty women were wall to wall even indoors, and out on the beach they were sitting next to each other for miles as they slaved at the endless task of polishing their fingernails. When they were sitting down, their shapely breasts, only notionally contained by bits of coloured string, were sometimes masked by their arms as they bent forward to get started on their toenails, but when they walked, darkly outlined against the sunlight, every one of them, of whatever age, sported a pair of polished, pointed nacelles like the bumper bullets of a 1956 Cadillac. This was the home city of plastic enhancement for the female chassis, a craze that was later to conquer the world. The top surgeon was on our list of interviewees, but first we had to knock off the exterior footage in case it rained. This time Richard was with us in person and he was very strict about that. If we didn’t get the beach life we wouldn’t have a movie. He was a bit irritable because of what happened at the Copacabana Hotel when we moved in. We dumped our stuff in our rooms, changed into swimming costumes and gathered around the pool to make our plans, sipping at caipirinhas as we contemplated the same stretch of cool wa
ter in which the Hollywood stars had once recovered from the heat of secret trysts in the days when the media couldn’t afford to fly. It was balm to our jet-lagged eyes, but after an hour the sun was too hot to bear, so Richard went back to his room, there to discover that it had been turned over: wallet, credit cards, return ticket, all gone. It was hard not to suspect the staff but when the cops arrived even they looked like crooks.
One of the immediately apparent things about Rio is that whereas most of the women are out of a good American surfing movie, all the men are out of a bad American gangster movie. The level of crime was doubly unsettling for being instantly obvious. I already knew something about it because I had been there before, to cover the Brazilian Grand Prix for the Observer. One of the drivers, as he walked along the esplanade in broad daylight, had been hauled down onto the beach and mugged not only for his watch and wallet but for most of his clothes. Laurence Rees, rewarded for his success in Paris by being invited to direct the Rio shoot, had arrived equipped with a theory that muggers could be deterred if you walked with sufficient confidence. On the morning after Richard got robbed, Laurence walked confidently out of the front door of the hotel and straight into a pack of teenage thieves who kindly left him the clothes he stood up in but took his watch and everything in his pockets. The doorman looked calmly on. After that, Laurence abandoned the confident walk and adopted the same nervous slouch as the rest of us. You just had to get used to the idea.
Laurence was good at the coverage, though, and while the sun shone there was a lot to cover. I cleverly decided that the reverse shots on my face would look funnier if my head didn’t turn. We could just shoot a few hundred feet with my head still and my eyeballs swivelling. Back in England, I could do a voice-over line about the strain of not looking, while the cutaways searched all over the place among the sun-kissed lovelies. There was just no end to the supply. Until now I had never supposed that my libidinous imagination could die of an overdose, but it happened. This was going to be as boringly predictable as a saturnalia, or, as we might say now, a successful suicide bomber’s first afternoon in Paradise. Actually we can’t say that now, lest we attract the bristling attention of some lethal maniac out to demonstrate the infinite mercy of Allah. But these were more innocent times, when a semi-naked female had nothing to worry about except being microwaved by the lustful glances of slavering males, and nobody bothered about the wrath of God, even though He, too, was supposedly a Catholic.