Ge-ge-ge | Jun Murai (Dean, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies)
2010.12.06
My town is one with several movie studios, and this year a large studio was closed. I want to believe this has nothing to do with the economy. After all, Japanese cinema is doing well around the world.
Because it's a studio town, location shoots for movies and TV shows used to happen often on various street corners back in the day. That era—to explain it to today's students—was a little before the time of "20th Century Boys" (thinking about it, it was about 10 years before that setting, which is terrifying), and a little after the movie "Always: Sunset on Third Street." Anyway, living in a town where many actors and directors reside, I was often told how enviable it was. But in reality, it wasn't very enviable. I can finally talk about the reasons why, things I couldn't say as a youth back then, so I'll write down my experiences before I forget.
The hero of justice (Note), Shonen Jet (Note), who defeats Black Devil (Note) with his Miracle Voice (Note), filmed many episodes in front of my house with his clever German Shepherd, Shane. The image of Shonen Jet is of him dashing along on his scooter with his yellow scarf fluttering (though the screen was black and white) and Shane following behind. But at the time, the film crew was based on seniority, and there were no child stars. The actor playing Jet was the youngest in the troupe. This meant that when I was home alone, the one who would come asking, "Could I have some water for the kettle?" was none other than the hero of justice, Jet of the yellow scarf. The one crouching by the ditch (Note: This is getting tedious, so from here on, for any proper nouns, classic terms, or phrases you don't recognize, please refer to the (Note) at the end of the text) and sharpening the director's red-and-blue pencil (Note) with a Bon knife (Note) was Shonen Jet, with his yellow scarf fluttering. What's more, the most imperious member of the troupe was Shane! I had come to know the reality behind the theme song, "With a bright, cheerful, and righteous heart, Shonen Jet rides on today." Not enviable.
There were also several times when *Ninja Butai Gekko* was filmed in my family's garden. In one episode, Scene 1 was them hiding in the shade of a tree. Scene 2 was them throwing shuriken to cut the rope of an enemy escaping down a manhole. I (a lower elementary school student) knew very well that there was a beehive where they were supposed to hide for Scene 1 (it was my garden, after all), but after hiding for a moment, Gekko, Gingetsu, and the rest of the ninja squad noticed it, screamed, and all ran away. The director in the dark glasses muttered, "Can't be helped," and tore off the beehive and threw it away. Timidly, the ninja squad returned to their original positions, looking a bit worried before pulling themselves together and striking a determined pose. In Scene 2, the shuriken thrown by the ninja squad all scattered and rolled onto the road. Next, the camera filmed a close-up of a crew member untwisting the rope's strands and wedging the shuriken in. Later, when I watched it on TV, the shuriken that had been thrown with a *shushushu* sound were stuck in the rope with a *kak-kak-kak*. My relationship with the show, with its line "Fool, we are the ninja squad!" was perhaps a bit different from that of other children. In short, it's not enviable when your dreams are shattered. (I have similar stories about Godzilla, Alien Baltan, Mothra, and Kanegon, but I'll save those for another time.)
As for the adult actors I'd see around town, I didn't know much about them, so it was like a wasted treasure, and this too was not enviable. At the town barbershop I went to as a child, a scary-looking man sitting next to me would often scold me in a gruff voice, "Kid, you'll never amount to anything if all you do is read manga." I hated going to the barber and running into this man, so I would peek in from outside to make sure he wasn't there before going in. Later, I heard that the scary man was a famous actor named Toshiro Mifune.
By the way, no matter how scary Mr. Mifune was, I had an important reason why I had to read manga at that barbershop. My town, which consisted of just studios and a university, had no toy stores, no cheap candy shops, and no book rental shops. However, if you went to this barbershop, there was a rotating selection of rental manga. I think they borrowed them from somewhere and kept them in the waiting room until they had to be returned. I wasn't very interested in the mature, hard-boiled manga (the beginnings of gekiga) by artists like Takao Saito and Jozoh Kagemaru, but mixed in with them were some slightly strange and eerie manga about kappa and yokai, and I loved those more than anything. I guess the good thing about being in this town was that I sometimes saw that admired author riding his bicycle with one hand.
A long time after that, just recently, as a reward for finding a book on the internet that he had been searching for for 30 years, and as a way of thanking the internet, Hiroshi Aramata took me to that admired author's home. He was born in 1922, the same year as my father. The reason I was able to have that dream-like time, where he talked for hours about everything from graveyards to battlefields, was not because of the town where I was born. No, it was because I have been pursuing what I love at SFC.
(Note) Please search for it on the internet.
(Date Published: 2010/12/06)