Television
When Sue Perkins joins middle-aged Japanese men at a girlband gig, core values – not sleaze – are on show.
Russell Brown, Fiona Rae
In just a few short months, Japan will be hosting its second major sporting tournament in two years – after the 2019 Rugby World Cup, the 2020 Summer Olympics begin in Tokyo on July 24.
Little wonder that there are a ton of shows about Japan on Netflix, or that travel-tarians such as Joanna Lumley have made their way to the Land of the Rising Sun.
But whereas Lumley enjoyed the sake and the scenery, the aim of Japan with Sue Perkins (Living,
Sky 017, Sunday, 8.30pm) is to dig deeper into aspects of Japanese life that seem unusual to Western eyes.
Perkins begins at Tokyo’s famous Shibuya crossing, where everything is “so alien, so other”. She has always found Japan “something of an enigma” and, in a mere three weeks, she is on a search for “the soul of Japan, a culture caught between the beliefs of the past and the challenges of a strange new future”.
In the first episode, there is sumo wrestling, a robot hotel and a boot camp for businessmen. She visits a family who live with robots and goes to a girl-band concert.
That sounds like a tourist cliché, but Perkins finds
the fringes and is constantly trying to understand what makes people tick. Rather than quizzing already established sumo wrestlers, she meets with a group of young women who are training to be wrestlers, despite the fact that they can’t turn professional and are banned from the sacred space of the sumo ring.
Training with them is instructional in more ways than one. The mawashi, the sumo loincloth, “certainly reconnected me with my genitals”, she quips, but she also begins to see the finesse
and subtlety of the sport.
Perhaps most odd of all is the cult of kawaii, or cuteness, especially as it applies to young women. Images of girl bands are everywhere and the shops in the Harajuku district are full of cutesy tat. “I think about Japanese girls and how much pressure must be on them all the time to be sweet and submissive and pink and cute and how someone like me at nine or 10 would have been so lost.”
But still, Perkins finds something to like about the audience of middle-aged men who are at a gig by girl band Tornado. “My immediate thought was, ‘You dirty old men,’ but they’re simply expressing Japanese core values – everyone spoke of loyalty.”