Barry - Dave Barry Does Japan

INTRODUCTION
The Background of This Book:
TV Violence

1FAILING TO LEARN JAPANESE IN
ONLY FIVE MINUTES
Or: Very Much Good Morning, Sir!

2ADAPTING TO AN EXOTIC AND
SOPHISTICATED CULTURE
Or: Bowing, Farting, etc.

3LOST IN TOKYO
Or: Looking for Plastic Squid

4THE TRADITIONAL JAPANESE ARTS
Or: How I Married a Grandmother

5SECRETS OF JAPANESE INDUSTRY
I Probably Should Have Written Them Down

6ROCK MUSIC IN JAPAN
Hep Cats Getting Funky in Unison

7HUMOR IN JAPAN
Take My Tofu! Please!

8SPORTS IN JAPAN
Yo, Batter! Loudly Make It Fly!

9STAYING AT A JAPANESE INN
Peace, Tranquillity, Insects

10

11IN THE COUNTRYSIDE
Tourists in HellMake That Eight Hells

12CLIMBING MOUNT FUJI
(Partway) (In a Bus)
(At Least We Think That Was Mount Fuji)

M y first impressions of the Japanese came from watching them act like raving homicidal maniacs on television. This was in 1953, when I was six, and we got our first TV set, one of those comical old models with a teensy screen embedded in a wooden cabinet roughly the size of the house where Lincoln was born. Many of the programs The western shows, for example, were infested with bad men who did nothing but grow chin stubble and ride around shooting people. Your average hero cowboy, such as Gene Autry or the Cisco Kid, could not ride his horse twenty feet without getting ambushed by bad guys packing six-guns that could shoot 17 million bullets without reloading.

Fortunately the bad guys had the tactical intelligence of a waffle iron, so the hero was able to outsmart them by ducking behind some rocks, then putting his hat on a stick and holding it up. The bad guyswho never learned, no matter how many times this trick was played on themwere fooled into thinking that the hat contained the good guys actual head, so theyd shoot all 17 million bullets, each of which would ricochet off the rocks with a loud chinngggg. (Forget erosion: The main reason why the western landscape is so rugged is that bad guys ricocheted so many bullets off it.)

Even outer space had maniacs. I learned this from a show called Captain Video, featuring a man named, oddly, Captain Video, a space pioneer in charge of an extremely low-budget spaceship that appeared to be made from materials that you might find around a TV studio. For example, the device he used for communicating back to the Earth was obviously a regular telephone; Captain Video held the handset as though it were a microphone and talked into the listening end.

While pioneering around the universe, Captain Video kept running into homicidal space aliens with Russian accents. In my favorite episode, an alien invented a robot namedget ready for a clever robot nameTobor, who looked a lot like a man wearing cardboard boxes covered with Reynolds Wrap. In the dramatic final scene, the villain orders Tobor to get Captain Video.

Attack, Tobor! says the villain, and Tobor lumbers toward Captain Video. Things look very bad, but suddenly, at the last instant, with Tobor only inches away, Captain Video has an ideaa crazy idea, but one that just might work.

Go back, Tobor! he says.

And Tobor, who clearly was not in the gifted program at robot school, turns around and starts lumbering toward the villain.

Attack, Tobor! says the villain, and Tobor once again goes into reverse lumber.

Go back, Tobor! says the captain, who was probably up all night memorizing his lines.

For most of the episode Tobor goes back and forth until finally he breaks down, thus ending the threat, because you know how difficult it is to get a robot serviced in space.

But the most maniacal of all the maniacs I watched on TV were the Japanese soldiers in the World War II movies. The German soldiers were also homicidal, but they werent crazy. Whereas the Japanesealways sensitively referred to as Japswere completely out of their minds. Theyd crash their planes on you and leap out of palm trees on your head and just generally swarm at you like some species of giant suicidal shrieking, sword-waving, spittle-emitting insect. Total wackmobiles.