Imported From Japan

Americans, as a whole, are very good at importing and adapting. From various disciplines we take an idea, tweak it, and make it work for us. I'm not critical of this; it is all part of our melting-pot charm. But one area where this practice is constantly criticized is in the arena of entertainment.

I won't really weigh in on this debate. Some see it as an unspeakable failure on the part of Hollywood and American Studios that they have to adapt and remake everything that is good from other countries. We can't appreciate or relate to the original, they believe, unless it's in an American dialect and setting. But I believe the idea that foreign remakes are always horrible is an unreliable truth at best. Yes, most British imports whose originals I liked, like State of Play and Coupling, had severely inferior versions made stateside. But I absolutely love The Birdcage and The Departed, originally a French and Hong Kong flick, respectively.

And when Hollywood wants to steal things from around the world, Japan has had some of its best stuff remade in the US of A.

But this post is not about those films. From the Godzilla re-edits to the Western-izing of most Kurosawa Samurai films (Yojimbo, Rashomon, and Shinichi no Samurai became A Fistful of Dollars, The Outrage, and The Magnificent Seven), lots of entertainment from Japan has been repackaged for American audiences. I mean, who can forget the influx of Asian horror film remakes in the last ten years? From the very good (The Ring) to cringe-worthy messes (One Missed Call).

No, this post is about the complete opposite. For as good as Americans are at importing things to adapt, the Japanese are the even better. Usually, they master something and improve upon it - such is the Japanese way.

So how these messes came about is lost on me.

I am here to present you with the reverse. American movies, television, and various parts of pop culture lovingly remade for a Japanese audience. I call it:

Remade in Japan: A Head-Scratching Interpretation

Naturally, the best place to start is with the movies. Now while we usually steal the best of the best, Japan took it upon themselves to remake Ghost.

, or Ghosto, was released in 2010. Because if anything was screaming for a remake, it was this 1990 seminal classic starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore. But in a twist to reinvent this timeless tale, we have the woman dying instead of the man. Let's take a look at the trailer, shall we?

Man, it even has the iconic pottery scene, so you know this movie is all it needs to be. But my lingering question after the trailer is not about the fate of our lovers, but who the hell that little girl is, and why she can see the dead girlfriend. I hope its not because she's a ghost also. As a rule I generally don't like dead children to be part of my romances.

But whatever the answers to these questions, I can tell you that the Japanese Whoopi Goldberg looks hilarious and slightly crazy. So in another words, spot on casting.

But it's not just moderately successful romantic fantasy dramas that get remade in Japan. I recall seeing posters for this next film about a year ago and doing and honest to goodness double take just to make sure it wasn't a glorious illusion. I stood in front of the poster for a good 30 seconds before determining it was, in fact, real. Genuinely and absurdly so. I present to you the Japanese Sideways.

Now I never saw the original movie because I was 18 at the time and not exactly the "mid-life crisis trip through wine country" demographic. But I do love that they unabashedly and unashamedly remade the same movie, just with two Japanese guys. No twist on the formula, no swapping of locations to Japan or a more familiar area, no discernible differences at all. They just shipped themselves off to California and made this movie. Assuredly, all the funny harsh edges of the original were toned down. Which begs the question, in a country that has no great love for wine or pretentious oenophiles, why did this need to be made in the first place? Points for using a Cyndi Lauper song in a 2009 trailer though.

But now turning to a demographic of which I am most definitely a part, there is also a large amount of television that has been remade for Japan. To no ones particular surprise, cartoons especially were constantly remade for Japanese kids. But what was surprising was how much Animation studios here clearly wanted to stomp across my own childhood.

I spent a large part of the early 90s in front of the television watching Saturday morning cartoons with my brothers. They were mostly of the Superhero variety, and both my siblings and I still love these old cartoons. Japan took it upon themselves to blacken those fond memories with these monstrosities, like this Japanese remake of X-Men.

I want to Cry for this Damn Intro. Between the bad heavy metal and the constant barrage of punches, lighting, and flashing blue action lines, I got a headache just watching a minute and a half. I wonder what sitting through the show was like. And mind you, my entire knowledge of X-Men comes from a Saturday morning animation like 18 years ago, but I don't ever recall them fighting what appear to be Mutant Dragon Ground Worms and Space Robots. Didn't they just, like, fight Magneto and Mystique and occasionally evil Military operations? Perhaps I was just misinformed. All I can tell you is that I still hate Jubilee, whatever her incarnation.

Speaking of the woefully misinformed, I have no idea where the plot line for this next one came from. And because I was 6 years old in 1991, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a large part of my childhood at that time. Here is its bizarro twin, courtesy of Japan.

Because mutated turtles trained in the way of the ninja was clearly not a cool enough concept for Japan as is, they had to power up the turtles not once, but twice. Unfortunately, they look less like turtles when they super mutate or whatever and more like robotic body builders.

I was also surprised to see the gratuitous shots of Mt. Fuji since, you know, they live underground in the sewers and all. Perhaps there was a fun camping episode? At least the scene of them running from a subway gives me hope they spent some time underground. I also bet there are less pizza parties. I did, however, enjoy the cameo from Nagoya castle.

But moving on to something made in the last ten years, this next example proves that a show doesn't even need to be animated to get the animated treatment when it arrives in Japan. Supernatural, a CW show with which I am only vaguely familiar, is being remade in a series of DVDs that apparently is coming out very soon.

I remember Jared Padalecki from Gilmore Girls, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I enjoy seeing him androgynously animated. But all in all, I think the Japanese Kansas cover speaks for itself.

In all fairness, a show about two brothers fighting monsters and demons is tailor-made for Japanese television. It could even work as a live action drama here, as it does in the states. But one could also think this of our next title, but somehow, something got lost in translation.

I heard of this show when I first came to Japan, and have heard much of it since from people back home. I am of course referring to the infamous 1978 Japanese television show, Spiderman.

Yea, Yea, Yea, Wow, indeed. Apparently this Spiderman inexplicably had a giant transforming robot, because hey, why not? But what I gleamed from the internet, and between the bursts of hysterical laughter by people here, this Spiderman may look like the Marvel character, but gets his powers from an alien. Or as Wikipedia tells me:

Young motorcycle racer Takuya Yamashiro sees a UFO falling to earth, in fact a space warship named the "Marveller" from the planet "Spider." Takuya's father Dr. Hiroshi Yamashiro, a space archeologist, investigates the case but is killed upon finding the spaceship. The incident also brings the attention of Professor Monster and his evil Iron Cross Army, an alien group that plans to rule the universe.

His father is a "space archeologist," he is supposedly a tough motorcycle racer, and his nemesis is called Professor Monster. Need I say more?

But I must finish this trifecta of Japanese entertainment with a reference to music. Music, of course, is a tough subject for remakes since such a thing as covers exist. These are not covers. These are what I like to call "shameless ripoffs." The melody is the same, but the songs are completely different. For example, does this first one sound familiar?

If you said, that sounds like something Janet Jackson sang once, you would be absolutely correct. Re-dubbed "Papillon" and sung by Shimatani Hitomi, it was apparently a big hit here in Japan when it came out. But do not be fooled by her sweet hair streaks and bitchin 90s pleather jacket; this video was made in 2001.

Ah but we have not left the turn of the millennium pop scene yet. I believe this one is hauntingly familiar.

It's "Larger than Life" by the Backstreet Boys, renamed barairo no hibi, or rose-colored days. I enjoy the twist that a girl group called MAX sang it instead of four guys, but beyond that I have very little to say about this video. They kind of just prance around an empty hotel lobby in their awesome pearl and velour jumpsuit combination. At least the sepia tone still shots of roses let us now this is a heartfelt and serious song. I believe the original Backstreet Boy video had a spaceship.

But this last one is probably the best of the whole bunch, if not of this entire post. It's why I saved it for last, because this is a song that needs to be truly savoured. It's both insane and amazing. This song, when it was released, turned the singer into the Japanese Ricky Martin. These lyrics, though, need to be seen to be believed. I bring you Hiromi Go's horrific "Goldfinger 99."

Ouch, it's hot, did you feel it? That was...well, I'm not saying "Livin' La Vida Loca" was Shakespeare or anything, but if the translation is to be trusted on this one, then, wow.

I feel like you could play a game with this song; pick your favorite insane lyric. I mean, between the evil feelings dancing in the sun and loins in sticky summer and violent feelings in his heart (which is apparently cocoa colored), I have no idea what the hell is going on in this song. And then he turns her into a mermaid? I mean, what the what what? It's like someone wrote this song using poetry refrigerator magnets. I've also yet to decipher what the Goldfinger is, or why there are 99 of them.

Oh, Japan. Shine on you crazy diamond.

Happy New Year, Sort Of

The year of the rabbit has finally hopped along. Of course, as the consummate procrastinator, I have not chosen to mark this occasion till about the 19th of January. This is due in part to the fact that I'm still in slight disbelief that it is, in truth, 2011. It also has to do with the realization that I am just about coming up to my two year anniversary in Japan. So it was with a smirk of doubt and a bit befuddlement that I greeted 2011.

Japan, of course, is celebrating with strawberries. I wish I could tell you definitively why. I always connect strawberries with summer, but then again, we don't grow them in hothouses in the States. But Japan has been whipped into January strawberry fervor, and the ichigo has been popping up everywhere. In desserts and baked items, or as the flavoring for snacks of candies. Even all by their lonesome in the produce aisle in nice, compact 800 yen packages.

I have chosen not to celebrate the new year with overpriced fragaria, but by working six days a week.

The inactivity of this blog the past few months was due to work of a furious nature on graduate school applications. I did this all while working full time, and just when I was about to pull my hair out in frustration, the applications were due and I headed off for a much needed week long winter vacation in Hokkaido.

But applications and trips through the wintry wonderland that is Northern Japan are expensive. So I will be making up the difference by picking up some extremely lucrative overtime work.

This means I will only have one day off for a bit of time. But it also means that I am no longer writing essays and writing samples and will, finally, have time to write for myself. I also will not be frantic and stressed and waking in the middle of the night remembering one more thing I have to do And when the next few weeks are over, debts will be payed and I will even have a nice bit of extra cash in my pockets.

I have always been a generally positive person, and so it is with this attitude that I go into this new year. And though this week was long and exhausting, I still found time to find joy in a few simple things. Here is what I loved this week:

1. Cheap Mikan More commonly known as satsuma in the west, and unlike the strawberries, were super cheap this week. I saw three separate sales at three separate grocery stores for mikan, and I took full advantage each time. My fridge is now packed with the orange fruit, and just like the strawberries, I have no idea why the drastic change in price occurred. But unlike the strawberries, I have no desire to question why. Cheap fruit is so rare here, I worry any investigation will cause it to disappear like a beautiful fever dream.

2. Udo Kier's interview with The A.V. Club Who, you ask, is Udo Kier? Up until this week, I had no idea. Well, I did, but I only knew him as "that German guy in every movie." Take a moment to think of him. Picture his face? That's Udo Kier.

Well he gave an interview this week to the A.V. Club about his long and interesting career, and it is about as delightfully insane as I would expect it to be. I actually laughed out loud when reading through his answers. I nearly lost it completely when he compared auditioning to cleaning furniture in a department store, an analogy I still don't understand. It is just so amazingly bizarre it transcends the print. I would pay good money to have heard the audio. Just read it for yourself.

3. Angela Carter Specifically, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. I reread the collection of short stories this week, and ugh, my heart. I will cop immediately to loving fairy tales. I loved the sanitized versions as a tyke, and as a teenager, I discovered the originals in very large tomes hidden in random shelves at my local library. The ones with all the murder, incest, pecked out eyes and lopped off toes; every last dark psychological undertone and subconscious archetype left intact.

To call Carter's writing "adult fairy tales" diminishes what they truly are. It as if she stripped the stories to the core, extracted what makes them both scary and unfailingly relatable, and reworked them.

And on top of that, her prose is just achingly beautiful in places. It is the kind of writing that makes me both insanely jealous and weak in the knees. My favorite in the collection was probably The Company of Wolves, her retelling of Little Red Riding Hood (for if there was ever a tale ripe for Jungian analysis and feminist critique, it's the story of Red.) When Carter describes the Red Riding Hood character:

She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.

And when she writes of the wolves themselves:

That long-drawn, wavering howl has, for all its fearful resonance, some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition. There is a vast melancholy in the canticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the forest, endless as these long nights of winter and yet that ghastly sadness, that mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, can never move the heart for not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not come to the wolf from its own despair, only through some external mediator, so that, sometimes, the beast will look as if he half welcomes the knife that despatches him.

Like I said, my heart. The collection is far from perfect, but truly fantastic. Highly recommended, of course.

And that is what is making me happy in the new year. Simple joys in January to ring 2011 in right. Here's to hoping everyone out there has a fantastic 2011 as well.

English is Bizarre, Part III

Hello again. Been awhile since I sent one of these out. Last part, so why delay?

Where we left off last time: We learned that, despite what we saw in Robin Hood, Richard the Lionheart spoke French, spoke at length about meats, and discovered that the church is the reason you hated biology class (and not in the way you expected).

Part 3: Webster was a Workaholic

in which a bloodless linguistic revolution occurs, or an exercise in historical name dropping

This section is probably the most important for this is one that is not yet complete. This is English in its modern form, a language first used by Shakespeare and Marlowe and Donne and every great writer who came in the centuries to follow. The beginning of the tongue you and I speak; the emergence of the language I am composing this ever-increasingly long essay in.

Modern English was brought about by the Great Vowel Shift of the 15th century, which sounds more like a revolution than a linguistic change. But the effects were no less significant than any coup.

The death toll was devastating.

Long vowel sounds are the main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English and the Modern form. Until the 15th century, vowels in English were pronounced more like Continental European languages. But in 1450, the English began elongating the vowels of many of their words. Not the first nor the last time the Brits wished to distinguish themselves from the rest of the European continent, English speakers in the 15th century began changing their pronunciation. They continued to do so for the next three centuries.

Why, you ask? We have no freaking idea.

There were no invading hordes or power struggle between dynasties. The language just changed, and we don't really know why. Oh, there are numerous theories of course, and each is just as plausible as the next, but none are definitively true.

One reason put forth is the mass migration to Southern England of all its people after the Black Death devastated a large amount of the population. With people from all over the country forcibly living together in close quarters, everyone adjusted their voices to produce a more standard pronunciation.

Another possibility is connected to the nobility. In the early 15th century, the ruling class was finally speaking English. Perhaps unappreciative of the statement better late than never, though they were now speaking the same language of the peasantry, the hierarchy still needed to distinguish themselves as such. So they began shifting their words to create a prestige accent in English. They elongated their vowels to make them sound more French, or what they perceived as more English. Which is, in fact, two completely opposite scenarios, and yet for some reason no scholar can agree upon either.

A third possibility is the aforementioned political and social upheavals of the 15th century. With many people dying of the plague, people of lower birth, and therefore regional accents, were elevated to higher positions of society. As with most cases, language changed along with those in charge.

But whatever the reason, the shift did occur. And in the 15th and 16th century, English became a standardized language which a modern speaker can both read and understand, if not requiring the assistance of annotations.

Now if only someone could explain this whole hawk and handsaw thing.

But how, you ask, did it standardize? This I can answer.

For the very same reason all of language standardized during that time. It all had to do with a man living in Strasbourg by the name of Johannes Gutenberg.

Anyone who paid even the slightest attention in history class has heard the name Gutenberg. Even if we do not know exactly why, we vaguely remember he was really important to history. But it was not so much the man, but his invention that literally changed the world. For in 1440, Gutenberg invented the printing press.

You don't need a history degree to appreciate how big a deal the printing press is, but I will further hammer into your head why. Gutenberg's invention modernized learning, thought, and language in ways never before seen in the whole record of human history. He ensured that knowledge, and the sharing of ideas, was easier and more accessible than ever before. There is a very real reason that the time of enlightenment and the Age of Reason corresponded with the invention of the printing press.

Again, why? Because until the miracle of movable type, every book had to be made by hand. Most likely by monks, and most likely in Latin. This meant that books were not only extremely expensive, but also written in Latin. Very few could afford them, and even less could read them.

A printing press was revolutionary because it meant that anyone could publish anything, and in their native tongue.

Putting aside the intellectual ramifications for a moment, the printing press also had an understandably massive effect on language. With written works becoming affordable, and composed and printed in native vernacular, the widespread distribution of English texts created for the first time in history a cohesive English language.

With the printings of plays and books and treatises, the English people finally had an accessible, written record of their language. English practically exploded in the 16th cenury with new vocabulary and wordage, as people from all over the country were exposed to words they never before knew existed.

In fact, the first true English dictionary was put together in 1604 by a school teacher named Robert Cawdry.

Who no one has ever heard of, thanks to Samuel Johnson.

He was worried, quite kindly so, about people's confusion over all these new words. A justifiably understandable concern, as scholars say that during this period that Shakespeare invented anywhere from 700 to 1500 words.

It's a tricky concept, inventing words. For proof, look back to the beginning of this essay, and the kerfuffle over beamish. To this day, there's a scholarly debate over who "invented" words in his work. Some people want to attribute such words as eyeball and epileptic to him, while others want to say he just coined or reproduced them.

Whichever the case, the simple fact remains that he was definitely the first to put them down on paper. Modern English would not be the language it now is without Shakespeare, searing new words into the language with ink and parchment.

So the only question left is, what did they call it before?

So in terms of language, whether he was the true progenitor of these words are, to me, unimportant. He accomplished the much more difficult task of putting them into distribution.

Shakespeare was popular. His plays and sonnets were read by many. They were performed, printed, and passed around, and people heard the words. Whatever the true source, Shakespeare is the reason they went into common usage. And that is what's truly important.

Equally important during this time was the development of American English. As America as a nation was founded, and flourished, Modern English developed into two distinct forms, American and British.

American English, just like the language from which it deviates, borrowed many words from the Native people and their Spanish speaking neighbors. But the divergence between the American and British dialects goes beyond pronunciation and new vocabulary. The real difference is in the very spelling of our words, the largest departure from the original language.

We have Noah Webster to thank for that.

Webster, bascially, saw himself as the ultimate patriot. A young man when the American Revolution took place, he dedicated his life to releasing America from the "cultural thralldom" of Britain.

The last stranglehold of our oppressors.

Webster thought an intellectual foundation was essential to independent American thought. Though he began his greatest work as a Blue Back Speller to be used in schoolhouses, the book of words he produced became the first of many editions of Webster's dictionary.

In writing these volumes, Webster was attempting to rescue our language from the corruption of the British aristocracy. He saw America's imitation of the British system of studying foreign languages to learn English as ridiculous and pedantic. He once wrote that "...the whispers of common sense in favour of our native tongue, have been silenced amidst the clamour of pedantry in favour of the Greek and Latin."

So how did he fight our British subjugators? By eliminating all those superfluous u's that he himself used three times in that little excerpt of writing. With his dictionary, the American people would no longer be shackled by the u in neighbour, honour, and colour. Our center will not weigh under the oddly French looking centre. And by god, nothing says America like spelling defense, not defence.

Let Freedom Ring!

But all joking aside, Webster had a solid point. It made little sense to learn Latin to study English grammar. He spent 27 years working on his dictionary, "americanizing" words and creating a cohesive spelling system. Essentially, he standardized American speech, adding words that did not appear in British dictionaries like skunk and squash. He helped shape a uniquely American dialect.

And clearly ignoring his own advice, Webster also learned 26 languages just to fairly evalute the etymology of words, including Old English, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit. In 1828, the culmination of years of hard work come to fruition when he published the first edition of Webster's American Dictionary.

So in the hands of the British and the Americans, English was then attached to a people who went on to dominate most of the world. As the importance of the English speaking countries of North America developed, and the British empire expanded across the globe, by the dawn of the 20th century English had become the lingua franca of the modern world.

There of course have been little additions along the way. Each age brings new vocabulary, and things that were once nonce or nonsense words have been incorporated into our normal vernacular. Chortle is not just a portmanteau of chuckle and snort, but an actual word in our lexicon. Quark is no longer just a nonce words used by James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, but now a subatomic particle. And as new technology and the age of the internet has developed rapidly, words like tweet and friend have become verbs used in their own right.

Ones I staunchly refuse to use.

No one can claim that our tapestry is not growing. English is still evolving, flourishing with the times and its people. And though we move forward, adding new ribbons of cloth and color, we still can see the connection to our past. Our modern tongue, no matter how much it changes, will always be directly affected by that which came before it.

An unbroken whole composed of disparate parts, made all the more beautiful for it.