KJ
Selections
Filming
the Foreigner
Wendy Nakanishi, KJ #66
‘Are you busy these days?’
The question is phrased in the politest, most tentative Japanese, but
I feel shocked. Startled into candor I demand: ‘Why are you asking?’
The official-sounding voice retreats in some confusion.
‘What is mean is...that is...if you were contacted by a television
company interested in filming the life of a foreigner in Japan, would
you be interested in being considered? That is, it would be a family
program: you, your husband, your children....’
I’m dumbfounded by the sudden enquiry, by the unexpected offer.
Flustered, I wax effusive and insincere:
‘Oh, yes, sounds great!’
A flurry of phone calls ensues, most originating in the offices of TV
Tokyo.
Are we sure we want to appear on national TV? Can we bear the intrusiveness
of being filmed? Do we realize that we will need to be accessible to
the camera crew for at least five days to complete a twenty-minute televised
sequence about our lives?
We wonder what we are getting into, but decide to take a chance, reasoning
that it will be ‘interesting,’ that it will be an ‘experience,’
that the finished product might be an invaluable memory in years to
come, both for my husband and me and for our three sons.
Admittedly, too, I am lured by the Warholian notion of the celebrity
conferred by appearing on the ubiquitous silver screen. It’s the
perennial debate, the contemporary rephrasing of the Berkeleyan philosophic
query of whether a tree falling in a forest uninhabited by man makes
a noise as it hits the earth. Do we truly exist before we have been
captured for posterity — and public consumption — on the
medium of film? Is anonymity a form of non-being in our media-obsessed
age?
We treat the children to an unusual luxury — a meal at a restaurant
— intending to broach the matter with them there.
Over the courtesy drinks and salads accompanying the set menus we have
ordered, we find that the reactions are mixed.
Initially dismayed, the two elder boys are quickly won round to the
view that our request for their participation can be seen in the light
of a favor they are granting us and which will require compensation
in the form of the purchase of a TV game for them afterwards. Our youngest
boy simply keeps repeating, like a magic mantra, the word ‘camera,’
‘camera.’
The advance guard arrives a few days later, a bespectacled, baseball-capped
head peering at our home from the interior of a black sedan cab idling
outside our carport. But as we are staring back, peeping between the
blinds in the front room, the cab whirls briskly away, leaving us to
wonder whether, in our tense expectancy, we have simply dreamt up an
apparition. Minutes later, Y-san turns up at the front door, having
jumped from his taxi further down the road, to scout out our neighborhood
before condescending to grace us with his presence at our house.
He exudes a faint, sour odor as he sits in our kitchen, reminding me
of the smell of my babies after their nightly feedings.
He sets up a camera and positions my husband and I before it, and we
automatically adopt the relationship we will maintain throughout the
filming — malleable, docile students obediently following our
teacher’s instructions. The blank eye of the camera hypnotizes
and attracts, prompting an uncustomary disclosure of intimacies from
my normally reticent husband and myself. I tell it, and Y-san, my worries
about my children and my marriage and my work. I blush in retrospect
at my indiscretion, flooded with relief and a sense of release when
I see the tail-lights of the cab which whirls him back to the train
station.
‘Have we made a terrible mistake?’
My husband hugs me, unexpectedly affectionate.
‘It’ll be fine.’
It has been arranged that the TV crew will meet me at the university
where I work. They want to film me in all aspects of my life: at my
job, in my home, in my community. I am expecting their arrival but it
is disconcerting, nevertheless, when the familiar security of my office
with its book-lined peace is disturbed by the appearance of the five-man
crew. Or, to be more precise, by four men toting cameras and lights
and sound equipment and one diminutive, self-effacing woman who predictably
acts as the ‘gopher,’ fetching drinks, moving furniture
and, when the ‘action’ moves to our house, entertaining
the children when ordered.
It is odd suddenly to find myself the object of such intense scrutiny.
A plump young man wearing horn-rimmed glasses aims a spotlight in my
direction, a muscular-looking individual points a heavy-looking camera,
while a third, earnest-looking man blushes as he request my permission
to disarrange my blouse, taping a tiny microphone within its collar.
Y-san, still wearing his baseball cap, orchestrates the action, choosing
Shakespeare’s complete works and a volume of Ruskin’s essays
from my bookcase, laying them on my desk, and instructing me to begin
typing industriously on my computer. I try to look ‘natural’
but begin blushing myself. I desperately try to absorb myself in Ruskin’s
notion of the pathetic fallacy but find myself stupidly grinning and
trembling.
And so it goes over the course of the next five days, from morning until
evening and sometimes well into the night. I am filmed teaching, driving
my car, cooking dinners, being taught how to make Japanese sweets by
my mother-in-law, hanging up laundry, preparing a banquet for the neighborhood
firefighters with young mothers at the community center. We are all
involved. My husband is filmed in the bath with our three boys, and
our sons are filmed practicing the piano and doing their homework. The
most mundane activities of a normal day are invested with a new significance,
by physical and mental exertion which sends me thankfully to bed each
night, to collapse into a coma-like sleep.
I am both exhilarated and exhausted. And amused when, for example, the
TV crew wants to film me riding my bicycle to the nursery school to
collect my youngest. As they drive their battered brown van on the road
beside and behind me, Mr. Muscular aiming his camera at me from a roof-top
opening, I glimpse neighbors peering at us from behind their curtains
and blinds. Unwonted celebrity! And, ultimately, unwanted. I begin to
feel great pity for the ‘famous.’
Too typical. This being Japan, the TV crew is determined to wrench the
greatest emotional poignancy from their program, to dredge up any vulnerabilities
possible. Y-san dreams up scenarios and my husband and I and occasionally
our children adopt the unaccustomed role of actors. Y-san is able to
make me weep twice, which I find almost unforgivable.
The camera becomes an instrument of torture. I grow nearly to hate the
amiable, grinning five people who so completely have taken over our
lives. At the same time, I become indifferent, even blasé, about
having my shirts and blouses and dresses opened each morning for the
ritual taping of the microphone, to having wires draped through my clothing,
to carrying a sound-transmitter concealed in a back pocket or clipped
to a waistband. The camera and camera crew acquire an invisibility and
inevitability as they accompany me on my round of household tasks. I
think I adjust to being filmed so quickly because, as a foreigner in
Japan, I’ve become used to being an object of curiosity, the subject
of inquisitive stares. Eventually it becomes a source of amusement to
me to observe friends and relatives as I watch them drawn within the
camera’s orbit: virgins to its attentions, they blush, look away,
place hands before their faces and then gradually, so slowly, achieve
the necessary obliviousness.
Y-san is ingenious and mercilessly intense, allowing nothing to deflect
him from his mission to portray the life of a foreigner in the context
of Japanese society. Only on his final evening with us does he allow
his professional mask to slip, even temporarily doffing his baseball
cap. We are shocked to see the rumpled black hair underneath, to realize
that he is a human being. Y-san confesses that he has recently married
and that his wife is due to have a baby within the next few months.
How, we wonder, can she cope, left on her own for weeks at a time while
he is on assignment?
On the last day, Y-san stage-manages a date for my husband and I. He
wants to inject an element of romance into our mundane routines. A camera
has been taped onto the dashboard of our car, and the brown van follows
us, Mr. Muscular again histrionically visible as he stands on the back
seat, his camera, head and shoulders poking through the roof-top opening.
First we are required to visit a picturesque local park where, perched
awkwardly on swings, my husband and I embarrassingly must re-enact the
proposal scene which led to our marriage. This needs so many ‘takes’
that I nearly fall prey to motion sickness, rescued, in the nick of
time, from the humiliation of vomiting on film by a soft drink kindly
fetched by one of the crew. We stroll by the beach. We hold hands.
Finally, we are treated to a sumptuous meal at an expensive seaside
restaurant, given a private room with a view onto the Seto Inland Sea
but with my husband awkward and ill at ease, our dining out ordinarily
confined to the cheapest noodle shops in our area. On our return home,
I find a cassette player stationed on the dining room table. Instructed
to play the tape inside, tears stream down my cheeks as I am forced
to face the camera whilst listening to my three darlings speaking sweetly
to me in English and then in Japanese, thanking me for being their mummy.
It is such a relief, that evening, to wave the camera crew farewell.
I hope never to meet any of them ever again.
Nagging questions and doubts remain. Have we somehow prostituted ourselves
for the vicarious entertainment of television viewers? Has the private
language, the intimate currency of our happy household, been debased
by making it public? I had thought it would be ‘fun.’ I
was wrong. But somehow it has felt like an education of sorts —
perhaps in self-knowledge — however involuntarily acquired, however
unwelcome the conclusions.
My husband and I, for example, have been forced to confront difficulties
in our marriage. Under the pressure of Y-san’s gentle but probing,
seemingly innocuous questions, a fine tracery of cracks mars the pleasant
facade: how often do my husband and I actually talk? When was the last
time we went out on a date, just the two of us? Do we gladly contemplate
living together for the rest of our lives?
Too, in the interviews Y-san conducts, I have stumbled uncomfortably
again and again upon the painful fact of my inadequacy in communicating
in Japanese and, a related issue, much is made of the language gap between
my children and me — a disturbing problem which ordinarily I manage
to suppress from consciousness or to compensate for by adopting a physical
demonstrativeness with my boys unusual in this culture.
My family’s living arrangements provide a never-failing source
of interest to neighbors and relatives curious about whether we eat
Japanese or Western food, whether we speak in Japanese or in English
at home, whether we conform to the customary Japanese family order,
with the husband, the ‘sarariman’ or office worker, out
all day, and the wife at home, single-handedly managing finances, child-care,
and all domestic duties.
With his customary command of Japanese niceties, Y-san affects all interest
and concurrence in our arrangements, but I am not convinced by his performance.
I suspect that he finds it deplorable that my Japanese is insufficient
to cope with even casual conversation with my children — whose
comprehension of English is good but who invariably address me in Japanese.
He obviously has speculated, too, on my relationship with my husband,
probably finding our marriage wanting in romance or passion.
Only our youngest son has been completely unaffected by the experience.
He loves the ‘gopher,’ calling the poor young woman ‘Big-Sister-Camera’
and insisting on her attendance and attention at every possible opportunity.
We had started out congratulating ourselves on being ‘chosen.’
We ended up hoping we wouldn’t look fools. We had cherished thoughts
of celebrity. We were left contemplating the grim specter of personal
failure.
When the program is aired, we find we scarcely can bear to watch it.
Wendy
Jones Nakanishi is a professor of Comparative Languages and Cultures
at Shikoku Gakuin University. She is an Associate member of the Ruskin
Programme, based at Lancaster University in England, as well as belonging
to the Iris Murdoch Society of Japan. Her academic research ranges from
work on her special interest in 18th-century English literature (she
earned a doctorate from Edinburgh University with a thesis on Alexander
Pope's letters), to articles on Ruskin and Murdoch, to analysis of contemporary
Japanese and British authors, and she also publishes stories based on
her experience of living in Japan for the past 23 years, as the wife
of a Japanese farmer, and the mother of three sons.
Copyright
held by the author
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