You might say Japan is having a pop culture moment.
From the multi-Emmy award-nominated drama Shogun (all episodes available on Disney+) to a steady stream of utterly bizarre Japanese contestants on America’s Got Talent, Japan is everywhere this year. If you’ve got a hankering for a little TV sushi, I have some other suggestions from the Land of the Rising Sun.
If you’re into crime dramas, two full seasons of Tokyo Vice are available on Crave. Based very loosely on the true story of American reporter Jake Adelstein’s time as a reporter for a Japanese newspaper, Tokyo Vice portrays the seamier side of Tokyo, where the criminal yakuza gangs ruled with impunity. It’s The Godfather, only with a lot more bowing.
Before the second season arrives Aug. 23, you have time to check out the splendid first season of the Apple+ series Pachinko.
Based on the best-selling novel by Min Jin Le, Pachinko is part drama, part history lesson. (Did you know Japan ruled Korea for 35 years? I didn’t.) Pachinko follows four generations of a Korean family from 1915 to 1989, and as such it’s a bit challenging in that it bounces around the decades, but it is well worth the effort. Like every Apple+ series, it’s a beautiful, top-tier production, rated 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Truth is stranger than fiction, and there is no greater proof of that aphorism than the mind-boggling documentary The Contestant, on Hollywood Suite.
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The star of The Contestant is a lantern-jawed would-be comedian named Tomoaki Hamatsu, who would later be nicknamed Nasubi (more on that later). Endowed with an unusually long face which the Japanese found easy to mock, in 1998 Nasubi got a part in a Japanese game show, a wildly popular (and very strange) genre in Japan. The thing is, he had no idea what the show was about. It would change his life.
Nasubi was locked in a small, virtually empty living space and stripped naked with no outside communication. The only way he could get the necessities of life, including food, was by entering and winning contests, which were ubiquitous in Japanese magazines. He would only win the show, and his release, by earning one million yen in prizes. What Nasubi didn’t know was that millions of Japanese were tuning into the show, called Susuna! Denpa Shonen, which featured nothing more than Nasubi dancing around naked and acting weird. (His nickname, eggplant in Japanese, came about because the show covered his private parts with a digital eggplant.) Over many months, he won hundreds of prizes, and became a TV sensation, with 17 million people watching every week. Even his diaries became bestsellers. What nobody knew was that he was almost going insane.
I don’t know if there is another country in the world that would allow, much less embrace, a show as strange, disturbing and cruel as Susuna! Denpa Shonen. Check it out.
And if all this sounds just a tad too serious for summer viewing, Godzilla Minus One is available on Netflix, in both its original color and in a retro black-and-white version.
Godzilla Minus One – which won the 2023 Oscar for special effects – is certainly the best of the 38 Godzilla films, although the best title must be Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. Set in a shattered post-war Japan, Godzilla Minus One centres around a touching human story, which elevates the film far beyond the standard monster rampage fare. If you’ve never seen a Godzilla film, start with this one. Godzilla has come a long way since his debut 70 years ago as a guy in a rubber suit crushing a toy Tokyo.
And with that, I humbly bow and say sayonara.
On an unrelated matter, this month marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most daring stunts ever performed, when tightrope walker Philippe Petite secretly strung a wire between the under-construction Twin Towers and put on a near hour-long show before a stunned New York. The documentary about the event, Man on Wire, which won the documentary prize at the 81st Academy Awards, is available on hoopla, the streaming service you can access with your library card. Petite, by the way, is still alive and well and still walking the same tightrope that he used for his Twin Towers stunt.
Daredevil Maurice Tougas walks the TV tightrope of Hidden Gems for us here at brioux.tv.
