"Tokyo Cowboy" is a JapanAmerican winner: Japan Times column
‘Tokyo Cowboy’ strikes balance between cross-cultural comedy and fish-out-of-water tale
Thirty-six years ago, American director Marc Marriott lived in Japan as a missionary and worked as a filmmaking apprentice to Yoji Yamada, the legendary director of the “Tora-san” film series. When Mariott returned to the U.S., he came across an article in an American magazine that stirred his imagination.
During the late 1980s, the height of Japan’s bubble-era economy, a Japanese beef company purchased a cattle ranch in Montana to expand its operations and better serve a meat-mad Japanese consumer base. To educate its staff in the ways of American cattle farming and teach Americans about the Japanese palate, the company sent a handful of salarymen to live and work on the ranch.
“That idea of this clash of cultures, Japanese cowboys on an American ranch,” Marriott tells me. “I just thought: There’s a movie in there, a great story.”
At a company meeting, Hideki proposes his plan to revive the fortunes of a Montana cattle ranch acquired by his firm as part of its buyout of a domestic chocolate maker. His idea is to raise bespoke cattle for the more profitable Japanese wagyu instead.
Within the film’s first 15 minutes, set in and around the skyscrapers of Shinjuku’s west side, it’s clear that the idea is a non-starter. Veteran Kobe beef farmer Naohiro Wada (a dryly funny Jun Kimura) tells Hideki as much at an izakaya (traditional Japanese pub), adding that although wagyu from outside Japan can never be the real thing and is in fact illegal, he’s still game to get paid for the scam.
The U.S. domestic carrier connecting the duo from San Francisco to a local airport unapologetically loses Hideki’s suitcase. An airline staffer, making no concessions to her customers’ native tongue, asks Hideki for his Montana lodge address in rapid-fire colloquialisms that even a U.S. native might need repeating. The lodge itself has spotty Wi-Fi and a broken laundromat, and its concierge is a young female anime fan practicing pidgin Japanese via Duolingo. Every store in the vicinity closes by sundown.
Welcome to America.
Kimura’s Wada is the more fluent of the two, but he’s soon hospitalized after falling from a mechanical bull in the local saloon, leaving Hideki to sputter alone in broken English. His linguistic foibles are sometimes unintentionally comical (a PowerPoint presentation he made for the ranchers opens with, “Let’s Eat Everyone!”) without being jokey or obscene, and anyone who has struggled to test-run an acquired language in its native land will nod in empathy.
Turns out it wasn’t such a leap for actor Iura.
“Oh, it was totally real,” says Fujitani, who was raised bilingually in Japan and the U.S. and now lives in Portland, Oregon. She was both Iura’s onscreen partner and his on-set interpreter. “Sometimes he was okay, but other times I’d have to say, ‘No, you have to hit your ‘Ls’ hard, like this, otherwise no one will understand you.’ He would say, ‘But I don’t want to practice too much or I won’t sound like Hideki.’ And I told him, ‘Don’t worry about that.’”
Unsurprisingly, Hideki faces headwinds from all directions of the 70,000-acre Lazy River Ranch. One of the grizzled male ranch hands reminds him that corn, a staple of the wagyu cow diet, can’t be grown in the local soil. He slides off the first horse he tries to ride, falling face-first into the mud and ruining his only suit as he awaits his missing luggage, which never arrives. His two-wheel drive rental car is shat upon by a flock of chickens and marooned on a rock-studded dirt road. The Wi-Fi signal in his room keeps flickering out, causing Keiko to freeze mid-sentence during a Skype call from Tokyo.
All of this is delivered without the mean-spiritedness of ridicule for easy laughs. Even when Hideki’s predicament is harsh, the film’s humor is gentle, and the cultural differences between the U.S. and Japan are balanced and knowingly revealed. As Hideki refuels his sedan at a Montana gas station and pops into its convenience store for a quick meal, he is aghast at the enormous plastic soda cup labeled “small drink,” his face blanching as he raises a spoon from a vat of gooey processed cheese and tucks into an anemic hot dog.
Hideki’s friendship with Mexican ranch hand Javier (the quietly magnetic Goya Robles) enlarges his world, creating an alliance of outsiders in the otherwise strictly Caucasian cowboy universe, but also forcing him in the film’s moving denouement to confront the question faced by every cross-cultural sojourner: Are you really running toward something or just running away?
Roland Kelts is a visiting professor at Waseda University and the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S.” and “The Art of Blade Runner: Black Lotus.”
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