Of course, it helped that Sayuri’s saga was made up. There may not be enough information out there to write a book about Yuki without filling in the cracks with fiction, but there can be no doubt that she led an interesting life. Morgan Oyuki created scandal and captured the headlines throughout her life and, incredibly, her presence alone may have saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb.

The Cure for a Broken Heart: 40,000 Yen

It was 1902, and George Morgan had just had his heart broken. His fiancee had split, so he took a trip to Japan to get over his feelings. George’s father was a rich man named George Morgan, and his mother was the sister of a considerably richer man, the famous banker J.P. Morgan. Yes, you may find it a bit creepy that both of his parents were born with the last name Morgan, but they were apparently unrelated. I’m skeptical.

Anyway, George was looking for something to cure his broken heart, and he found it: A Gion district geisha named Yuki Kato. He courted her for years, seeing her and asking her to marry him and visiting Kyoto as often as he could. She constantly refused, and something of a love triangle developed between her, George, and Yuki’s young lover Kawamura. The newspapers picked up on the story, and the scandal began.

Eventually, Kawamura moved away (maybe to avoid being drawn further into a scandalous story) and Yuki agreed to marry George Morgan. At this point, 40,000 yen, a tremendous amount of money back then, changed hands, and different stories give different reasons. Some say Yuki asked for the money in return for marriage, an old-school bride price situation, and others say the money was spent to release Yuki from her geisha contract. Whatever it was, George paid 40,000 yen or more to marry Yuki Kato, and this scandalous piece of news kept the Japanese newspapers talking for decades. January 20th, the anniversary of George Morgan and Yuki Kato’s marriage, is “Marry Into Money Day” to this day in Japan. It’s not a public holiday or anything, but it’s real.

With this marriage, the “Japanese Cinderella” story was born, and Yuki Kato became Morgan Oyuki. She left Japan with George, and visited America with him for a while. They found that the United States wasn’t quite ready to accept George’s young, recently geisha wife, so they left for France, where they would stay for the next decade.

In 1915, George Morgan was trying to return to France from America, as he’d done dozens of times. Due to the onset of World War I, this was no longer a simple process. To stay safe from German submarines, he took a ship to Gibraltar at the south tip of Spain, then had to travel overland the rest of the way to France. He would never make it. He died of a heart attack, and Morgan Oyuki was now a widow.

Mixed Narratives

At this point, the narratives split. Some accounts say that Oyuki left for New York, where three decades of Madame Butterfly performances had apparently now made the upper class more amenable to having a former geisha around. Wikipedia even claims that it was the Morgans who brought her there, but it cites a book that’s talking about something entirely different.

What’s wrong with that story? Oyuki hadn’t been welcome in New York about ten years earlier, and she probably knew English about as well as I know Tagalog. She learned French and spoke French so often that she was only an awkward Japanese speaker when she returned to Kyoto decades later.

Using Yuki’s letters and journals, Japanese writer Sumi Kosakai discovered what is probably the real story: Yuki stayed in France, living with a French ex-legionnaire who had been sending her love letters for some time. He would die a few decades later, and she would finally decide to return home.

Regardless of which story you believe, Oyuki returned to Kyoto in 1938, where she’d remain until her death in 1963. The Japanese media still wasn’t tired of talking about her, and every couple of years another novel or play based on her life would start the whole conversation over again. A 1947 issue of TIME Magazine details a particularly successful book about Oyuki which had been serialized over 260 installments in three different newspapers. Mademoiselle Yuki had never spoken with the author and refused to see him. The author had simply decided to fill in the cracks with fiction.

Box Office, Bombs

A movie director by the name of Masahiro Makino had a theory about Yuki. He said that it was his father, Shouzou Makino, who originally advised Yuki Kato to ask for an enormous amount of money to be wed. Makino says his father also met Yuki in France later on and tried to arrange a meeting between her and her former lover Kawamura, only to have Kawamura die along the way.

Masahiro Makino theorized that the Morgan family knew that Yuki had returned to Kyoto, and so they had the city stricken from the shortlist of potential atomic bomb targets (yes, this list definitely existed, and yes, Kyoto was originally on it).

It’s not by any means impossible that the Morgan family called off the dogs on Kyoto. If Lieutenant General Leslie Groves’ book about his experience leading the Manhattan Project is to be believed, it was Secretary of War Henry Stimson who adamantly took Kyoto off the bombing targets list. There have been a number of rumors as to why Stimson did this: Some say he thought it would be against the rules of war to bomb such a historic city. Some sources say Stimson rejected Kyoto because he had honeymooned there (embarrassingly, this may be the most well-supported story out there in historical sources).

But, if you’re willing to delve a little further into conspiracy theory, Stimson had also been a partner and close friend of J.P. Morgan’s personal attorney Elihu Root, and he was certainly well-acquainted with the surviving Morgan family. If the Morgans were aware that Oyuki was in Kyoto, which they probably were, and the Morgans still had the ear of Stimson, which they probably did, then Makino’s atomic bomb theory isn’t the wildest theory you’ll ever hear. But, to my knowledge, there’s no documentation or proof of this justification for saving Kyoto, and there’s been plenty written on the subject, even if it is a little inconclusive.

Finally, An Eyewitness Account

Despite all the scandal, the hoopla, and the “Japanese Cinderella” name tag, there is at least one source which claims Morgan Oyuki lived her last few decades simply, without the money and the drama associated with her earlier years. In a letter to TIME Magazine, a man who’d met Oyuki wrote in to protest at their typically scandal-filled report of her life:

Sir:

Your article about Mrs. George Morgan [TIME, Dec. 22] and the accompanying cut is both conceived and written in extraordinarily poor taste. Your willingness to accept the evidence of a cheap Japanese novelist is right in keeping with the tradition of yellow journalism.

At the request of her niece, Mrs. Sarah Morgan Gardner of Princeton, I located Mrs. Morgan in Kyoto in May of 1946 while serving in Japan with the Marine Corps. I found her through the St. Francis Xavier Church missionaries in that city, men who willingly testified to her devotion to the church and to the hardships she had suffered in Japan as the widow of an American. Mrs. Morgan herself, a charming elderly lady, who seemed more Occidental than Japanese, was overjoyed to hear news of her American relations, who are all devoted to her and have made every effort to see that she is taken care of. Far from being a rich woman, as intimated in your article, all her income is frozen in the United States.

Articles such as yours can do little else than make life more uncomfortable for people who are unable to answer them.

ROBERT W. LOCKE Princeton, N.J.

The TIME editor shrugged off the complaint with a bit of snark:

TIME trusts that its other readers were not equally offended by this story of Madame-Butterfly-with-a-difference. — ED.

To be fair, with the exception of suggesting that Yuki was still rich, TIME didn’t say much that wasn’t true.

Yuki Kato’s story has continued to inspire talk and rumors and novels and plays. Just last year, a new play called “Morgan O-Yuki: The Geisha of the Gilded Age” was put on at Ventfort Hall in Massachusetts, a mansion built by George Morgan’s parents. Fictionalized or not, her “Japanese Cinderella” story keeps echoing on through the decades, and who’s to say it ever has to stop?

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Sources:

• TIME Magazine, the 12/22/1947, 1/19/1948, and 5/31/1963 issues.
• Women of the Pleasure Quarters by Lesley Downer, pp. 186-192.
• The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, and Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient by Sheridan Prasso, pp. 48-9.
• Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project by Leslie Groves, pp. 275-6.
• History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II by Murray N. Rothbard, p. 422.
• “What Future For Japan?”: U.S. Wartime Planning for the Postwar Era, 1942-1945 by Rudolf V.A. Janssens, p. 317.
• http://blog.goo.ne.jp/amachan_001/e/7f27c0a4e762b5f8416f1b77310fa70d
• http://www.joho-kyoto.or.jp/~wazaden/english/hito/morgan_e.html
• http://www.yorozubp.com/2011/2011/07/post-9.html
• http://uncoveringjapan.com/2013/09/25/good-eats-gogyo-kyoto/
• http://boardingarea.com/pointsmilesandmartinis/2013/09/how-a-ho…
• http://www.kyozei.or.jp/news/93/93-3.html
• http://www.nnh.to/01/20.html

1. Braves.
2. Whoever is playing the Nationals.
3. Any player I used to watch in the Japanese league, Nippon Professional Baseball, especially if they were a Yakult Swallow.

Like a helicopter mom with no day job, I try to watch these former NPB players whenever they come to the mound or the plate. My Google Calendar last year was just a list of projected Yu Darvish starts. Thankfully for me and whoever cashes the check for my MLB.TV subscription, there are even more Japanese players in America this season, and here’s what they’ll be up to in 2014.

The Big Names

Hiroki Kuroda – The “other” Japanese starting pitcher on the Yankees is now 39 years old and still doing this baseball stuff. Because he’s expected to mentor the new arrival Masahiro Tanaka in the ways of Major League Baseball, he’s been dubbed Kuroda-senpai by The New York Times. Next time I visit Yankee Stadium, I hope he notices me.

Masahiro Tanaka – The 175 million dollar man, and yet Yankees GM Brian Cashman says he’ll be the #3 starter this year. I wrote another big article about this fella, but there’s been an update since then! Tanaka said he’s “not necessarily a fan” of his wife Mai Satoda’s music! Be right back, I have to write a 2,000-word piece for the New York Post on how this factoid could affect his game.

Koji Uehara – With a World Series ring under his belt (that’s where rings go, right?), Koji is now the Red Sox’ starting closer. I wrote about him a while back, but now he’s trying to start throwing a Mariano Rivera-style cutter.

Junichi Tazawa – Tazawa has been completely overshadowed by Uehara in the Red Sox bullpen, but he’s still there and he’s still pretty good. Interesting note: Tazawa is only the third Japanese player ever to go straight to the MLB without spending time playing professional Japanese ball. He signed after impressing with the Nippon Oil company team.

Yu Darvish – Yu Darvish came 2nd in Cy Young voting last year, but now he’ll have to defend his title as best current Japanese player against Tanaka. If that doesn’t work out for him, he can, at least, still be the best half-Iranian player.

Hisashi Iwakuma – True to the city’s character, Seattle has the coolest, most underground, “you’ve probably never even heard of him” Japanese player. In-between rainstorms and bike trips to Ballard coffee shops, Mariners fans love to tell you that Iwakuma really deserved the Cy Young last year. Unfortunately for them, Iwakuma might miss the first week or two of the season because somehow he hurt his middle finger. What a hipster.

Norichika Aoki – In one of the offseason’s hardest-to-explain trades, the Brewers traded right fielder and former Yakult Swallow Norichika Aoki to the Royals in return for some guy named Will Smith. Will Smith is expected to join the Brewers bullpen, and Aoki will be starring in Men In Black 4 next summer.

The Old Guys

Ichiro Suzuki – The Yankees went a little crazy this offseason and got Jacoby Ellsbury and Carlos Beltran, demoting future Hall of Famer Ichiro and sorta former Hiroshima Carp Alfonso Soriano (he only played nine games in Japan) to the bench. Rumors are starting to heat up that Ichiro may get traded to the Phillies. You’re too good for them, Ichi!

Tomokazu Ohka – Ohka has previously pitched for the Red Sox, Expos, Nationals, Brewers, Blue Jays, Indians, and the Yokohama BayStars, but he’s trying to make a comeback with the Blue Jays and a brand-new knuckeball. He’ll start the year in the minors. Years ago, Ohka was mentioned in The Simpsons, the joke being how obscure he was, so he has had that dubious pleasure.

Daisuke Matsuzaka – Dice-K was once a mega-famous import pitcher like Tanaka is today, but besides one great season, his career in the MLB never really satisfied expectations. He’s now aiming for a comeback with the New York Mets, and is considered a favorite to be their #5 starter when the season begins.

The Hopefuls

Munenori Kawasaki – Kawasaki, the man with the beautiful dance moves and the GIBBY award-winning “I am Japaneeeese” speech, is trying to play his way onto the Blue Jays roster. Unfortunately for him, he plays on the same team as Jose Reyes, so he’ll need some luck to get much playing time at shortstop.

Yoshinori Tateyama – A former high school teammate of Koji Uehara and NPB teammate of Yu Darvish, Tateyama is a sidearm pitcher trying to break his way into the Yankees bullpen.

Kensuke Tanaka – Kensuke Tanaka spent his whole career playing second base, so it was bittersweet when the San Francisco Giants gave him a one-day chance in the MLB last year… playing left field. He’s trying out with the Rangers this year, but looking likely to start the year in the minor leagues.

Kyuji Fujikawa – Kyuji will probably be in the Cubs bullpen this year, but he had Tommy John Surgery in May last year and won’t return until around June. Yes, his name really is 球児, meaning “ball child” or, to make it less weird-sounding, “baseball kid.” Kyuji’s father reportedly threw a no-hitter in an amateur game the day before his son was born, thus the name.

2014 Predictions

Now I don’t really have a clue how well these guys will play or what will happen this year, but I’m going to tell you anyway, because that’s how sportswriting works. Here are ten predictions for the season to come, sorted from most likely to least:

1. I will buy an Aoki Royals shirt and wear it in my Tofugu author profile picture, replacing my Aoki Brewers shirt.
2. Masahiro Tanaka will have the worst ERA among Yankees starters before the All-Star Break and the best ERA among Yankees starters after the All-Star Break.
3. Dice-K will have a bad year but still shutout the Braves twice just to annoy me.
4. The Yankees will inform Ichiro they have no more room for him on the roster, but offer him a position as batboy. He will proudly accept the role and become the greatest batboy of all time.
5. Hiroyasu Tanaka, Shuta Tanaka, and, uh, comedian Naoki Tanaka will all join the MLB, causing widespread confusion and chaos.
6. Yu Darvish will add a 15th pitch to his repertoire, a 75 MPH knuckleball.
7. Kawasaki will win another GIBBY award, this time for dancing.
8. Uehara and Tazawa will start a manzai comedy duo called Sokkusu, which American sportswriters will have to explain as being “sort of like Abbott and Costello.”
9. The Yankees will become unsatisfied with their current outfield of old guys who used to be amazing, so they’ll sign Sadaharu Oh.
10. I will conquer my nature and refrain from buying another $75 Japanese baseball video game.

The Problem

Japan is the third-largest box office market in the world, behind the shared US/Canada market and China, which only passed Japan as recently as 2012. It’s a huge market, and for years and years Japan has watched the same Hollywood movies that the United States watches. Look at the top earning movies in Japan over the past decade and it won’t look too different to the top movies in the United States: Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, and so on. Of the top ten opening weekends in Japanese cinema history, only one isn’t American-made: One Piece Film Z. The biggest Hollywood films will gross 80 to 120 million dollars in Japan, such huge jumbo numbers that it’s hard to get your head around.

But in 2012, that changed. While The Avengers was setting box office records around the world and other movies like The Dark Knight Rises and The Hunger Games, Skyfall, and the Spider-Man reboot were making hundreds of millions of dollars, Japan had no interest in any of it. Every single Hollywood movie was beaten that year by Umizaru 4, a Japanese Coast Guard drama based on the manga of the same name; Thermae Romae, another manga-inspired live action film about an ancient Roman bathhouse architect who finds a tunnel to modern Japan; the millionth Bayside Shakedown movie, a spectacularly successful Japanese police comedy-dramas; and the aforementioned One Piece Film Z. The top-earning American-made movie was Les Miserables, which earned a relatively weak $62 million. The blockbuster of the year, The Avengers, only earned $42 million in Japan, and Hollywood realized that they might be about to lose the world’s third-largest box office to the suddenly dominant Toho and Toei studios.

The Plan

So Hollywood set out to make movies that they thought would appeal to Japan. Of the Big Eight studios, four released films within the past year and a half that seemed to take on this basic goal of “doing something Japanese to recapture their market”:

Disney produced an animated film about video games called Wreck-It Ralph in most of the world, but called Sugar Rush in Japan. The basic idea for Wreck-It Ralph had been sitting on a desk at Disney since the late ‘80s, but it got picked up and quickly produced with an unprecedented amount of Japanese cooperation: Licensing deals with Nintendo, Sega, and other Japanese companies, a marketing campaign starring the Japanese geek comedy duo Yoiko, and even an AKB48 song and video with the same name as the movie.

Warner Bros. released Pacific Rim, a Guillermo del Toro tribute to kaiju films. The movie includes characters and segments about the defense of the Japanese, American, Chinese, and Russian Pacific coasts (Hey! Can you name four of the five largest box office markets?), and Pacific Rim also cast Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi as the female lead.

Fox bewildered some people when they announced they were making another Wolverine movie, only this time set in Japan and with a number of Japanese actors, including Hiroyuki Sanada. Yes, even though The Wolverine may have had a fairly weak plot justification for sending Hugh Jackman to Japan, the economic factors may have been a bit stronger.

And finally, Universal gave us 47 Ronin, an American version of a classic Japanese tale with virtually all Japanese actors besides Keanu Reeves. Fraught with re-writes and re-edits to determine exactly how Japanese the movie should be, the film was such an overt attempt to earn Japanese box office that it was a marketing disaster when 47 Ronin debuted at #5 in its opening weekend in Japan, ahead of its American release.

The Results

And the beautiful part is that all this effort, all this extra attention toward trying to bring Japan back into the Hollywood fold, resulted in a second straight year of Japanese ambivalence to American movies, with the Japanamerican movie attempts doing even worse than normal. Monsters University was Hollywood’s only clear hit in the Japanese box office, earning $90 million, followed, surprisingly, by a subtitled version of Seth MacFarlane’s wise-cracking stuffed animal bro-comedy Ted at $44 million. The rest of the Japanese box office top 10 are domestic products like Miyazaki’s latest film The Wind Rises and Lupin III vs. Conan.

Wreck-It Ralph earned a disappointing $30 million, worse than Cars 2 or Up or Tangled did in Japan in previous years, and only slightly better than Brave. Yet it was the best success of these four “Japanamerican” movies. Pacific Rim made $14.5 million. The Wolverine earned $8 million. And 47 Ronin: Only $2.8 million.

Besides 47 Ronin, the movies all made a modest profit (going by the standard rule of thumb: movies generally break even when they gross twice their production budget worldwide), but none of them did well in Japan, the place they were supposed to win back for Hollywood. If the studios’ strategy with these curiously Japan-heavy films was in fact to win back the Japanese box office, then they failed miserably. (If their objective was to get Rinko Kikuchi some more work then hey, good job.)

The plan didn’t work, and it’s not terribly hard to see why. Japan has never had a problem with non-Japanese actors and non-Japanese settings before, so giving them that is a very shallow approach to the problem. An anonymous U.S. studio marketing executive told Variety that he thought Hollywood had a tone problem and an audience problem in Japan: “What we’d like to see are more family-oriented films. Too many films coming out of Hollywood are rather dark and depressing — there’s not a lot that families can take their kids to.” And media consultant Geoffrey Bossiere attributed Japanese disinterest to the tone of violence and destruction in even the more light-hearted American blockbusters like The Avengers.

One last diagnosis: America (and many other countries) love comic book adaptations, and Japan loves to go see manga adaptations. Hollywood can’t stop making Marvel and DC superhero movies, which take in boatloads domestically and in other English-speaking countries like the United Kingdom and Australia. But with the slight exception of Spider-Man movies, superhero movies have never made much money in Japan, whether that’s a tone problem (dark, violent, and so on) or just a lack of interest in the characters.

So, although a new Godzilla movie is on the horizon, this is probably the end of this swath of American movies with Japanese actors, themes, and settings, at least if Hollywood does what it usually does, that being going where the money is.

If you’ve seen any of these films, you’ll probably intuitively understand why they didn’t do well in Japan… and in some cases America as well. And, if you haven’t heard the bad news yet… check out John’s Tofugu review of 47 Ronin. Basically, don’t spend your own money on going to see it, especially if those moneys are counted in yen.

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Bonus Wallpapers!

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Sources:

• The Wall Street Journal – China Is Now No. 2 Box Office Behind U.S.
• Motion Picture Association of America – Theatrical Market Statistics, 2012
• Box Office Mojo
• Edge – Sonic Team’s Sugar Rush
• Variety – Japan: Hollywood No Longer Dominates Box Office

Who Is Masahiro Tanaka

Tanaka is a Kansai-born, Hokkaido-bred pitching machine with what everyone is telling me is the best split-finger fastball in the world. A split-finger or splitter is a pitch that looks like a fastball then breaks sharply downward before it reaches the plate, and it’s thrown while holding the ball with the index finger on one side of the ball and the middle finger on the other end, with a large gap or “split” between your fingers at the top. Japan, for some reason, is really into the splitter. And guess what? Tanaka’s got one of the most deceptive splitters in the world, and that (combined with the Yankees’ dearth of pitching, Tanaka’s monster stats with the Rakuten Golden Eagles, the baseball TV rights money bubble, the outsized merchandising revenue earned for Japanese players, and the relatively recent in historical terms development of an international free market) is why he’s getting $155 million before he’s even shown what he can do in America.

Like most Japanese stars, Tanaka first reached the spotlight in the mega-popular Koshien high school baseball tournament, which he helped Tomakomai High School win in 2004 and 2005. It wasn’t until 2006 however that he really became a celebrity, when he dueled Jitsugyo High School and their ace Yuki Saito, “The Handkerchief Prince” (he wiped his sweat off with a handkerchief during games).

If this doesn’t sound like a baseball anime waiting to happen, I don’t know what does.

Tanaka and Saito faced each other in the Koshien final, with Tanaka coming on in relief in the third inning then going the distance, matching Saito in a 1-1 draw until the 15th inning, when rules called for an almost unheard-of Koshien finals rematch. Incredibly, Tanaka and Saito would pitch again the next day, resulting in a 4-3 victory for Saito and Jitsugyo. These two games made celebrities out of both Tanaka and Saito, and it was a huge event when, five years later, they faced each other in Nippon Professional Baseball. This time, Tanaka was the 4-1 victor, and he even expressed great disappointment that he didn’t manage to shut out Saito’s Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. The two pitchers would earn parallel nicknames: Ma-kun and Yu-chan.

Unlike Saito, Tanaka would declare himself for the NPB draft to enter the pros, and he very quickly became the ace starter for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, a team based in Miyagi Prefecture in the northeast that got started in 2005. Like all Japanese professional teams, the Eagles are named after and primarily known by their primary sponsor company’s name, in this case the Amazon-like online retailer Rakuten. With Rakuten, Tanaka has been nothing short of spectacular. He started pitching professionally for the team when he was just 18, and his career ERA is a preposterous 2.30 with a career record of 99-35 (oh come on, why didn’t he get one more win?).

People really started to speculate that Tanaka might come to America after his 2013 season, in which he went 24-0 with a 1.27 ERA, then won six more games in the postseason to give the Eagles their first Japan Series title. What’s funny is 2013 wasn’t even his best season. That would be 2011, when Tanaka again had a 1.27 ERA in 27 starts, threw sixty more strikeouts than in 2013, gave up fewer walks, pitched more innings, and yet only went 19-5. A lot of people would call those “video game numbers,” but I’ve never pitched for stats like that in any video game.

And I’m sure you’re asking “Okay, great, so he can pitch. But can he dance along with a Japanese idol group?” The answer to that is “not really.” But please watch the video below to see Ma-kun say “Pi-pi-pi-pi-pitchingu, ca-ca-ca-ca-catchingu, cha-cha-cha-cha-charmingu.”

Munenori Kawasaki definitely still reigns supreme in terms of dancing.

So, Masahiro Tanaka’s a pretty amazing guy. Let’s see how he got to the MLB (it wasn’t via dancing, I can tell you that).

How He Got Here

Japanese players who are still under contract for their NPB team are sold to MLB teams through the “posting system,” which has traditionally been designed to get as much money as possible for the team while forcing the player to accept a below market-value contract. With Yu Darvish and every other Japanese player posted before this year, MLB teams entered a blind auction, with the auction winner giving millions to the NPB team and earning the exclusive right to sign their player. That’s why Yu Darvish, despite having nearly the same credentials as Tanaka, signed a contract worth a hundred million dollars less, because once the Rangers had paid their posting fee, he had to either sign with them or stay in Japan.

This year, the posting system became much more player-friendly. The Japanese team names a posting fee (with a max of $20 million), and any MLB team willing to pay that much gets a right to negotiate a contract with the player, with only the player’s eventual team having to actually pay the fee. So Tanaka got to enjoy the attention of virtually every Major League team, as they all squabbled and fought over who could give him the biggest contract. He could even theoretically choose a smaller contract if he wanted to play for a certain team, as many people thought he might when rumors insisted that his wife Mai Satoda wanted to live on the Pacific coast. Early reports suggest that he did however choose the largest contract, as the Yankees outbid the Dodgers, Cubs, White Sox, and Astros to secure Ma-kun.

So, the money, the glory, the city, and the probable playoff games are what called Tanaka to the Yankees. What Japanese person doesn’t want to go to New York, though? The only thing that could be possibly more tempting is the Angels’ proximity to Disney Land.

What Will Tanaka Do In The MLB?

Okay, so Tanaka might have lit Japan up with his split-finger fastball, but the NPB is not the MLB. Major League Baseball dropouts Wladimir Balentien and Matt Murton have the single-season home runs and hits records in Japan, so it’s not as strong a league. Every Japanese pitcher has seen their stats drop as they come into the MLB, but how much? Tanaka could afford to drop a half-point of ERA and still be the best pitcher in the American League next year. And Tanaka is, after all, still only 25 years old, and baseball players traditionally peak in their age 27 season. How will he pitch?

One site specializes in projecting Japanese players’ stats for if they joined the MLB, and it lays out the following statline for Masahiro Tanaka: 8.8 strikeouts per 9 innings pitched, 2.9 walks/9, and a 3.59 ERA. This statline would make him ace-quality, but not anywhere near the god-quality he had in Japan, and not as good as fellow Japanese international Yu Darvish has been in the States.

Baseball stat site Fangraphs raises a few more questions about Tanaka: Will his thousands of high-stress pitches in high school wear out his arm too soon? And will his relative lack of strikeouts for a pitcher so dominant hurt him in the MLB, where what used to be ground balls in Japan may now become line drives and home runs? It remains to be seen, and now I’ll be forced to watch Yankees games to find out. Welcome to the MLB, Masahiro Tanaka. Welcome to the MLB…

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The success of these shows and others has, however, given Japan a reputation for televised cruelty. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer and the family go on a Japanese game show to win plane tickets back to America, only to have to undergo torture on camera then retrieve the tickets from a volcano.

ABC created a reality show called “I Survived a Japanese Game Show,” which put contestants through a fake physical challenge show-within-a-show. Japan had a reputation for extreme physical challenge TV, and from 1998 to 2002, a show called Susunu! Denpa Shonen (a punning follow-up to 1992-1998’s Susume! Denpa Shonen) took up that role and tried to take it just a few steps further. On the show, you could see two men try to escape from a secluded island with one of those swan paddle boats. You could see a Chinese comedian hitchhike from South Africa to Norway. And, most famously, you could see “Prize Contest Life” starring a man named Nasubi.

Life on Camera

“Prize Contest Life,” the show I want to talk about today, gathered a large roster of amateur comedians looking for a way to break into national television, and, in place of a normal audition, asked them to cast lots. A lanky Fukushima-born comedian named Nasubi (“eggplant,” after his long, oddly-shaped head) won the lottery, and was immediately taken to a car and blindfolded. When the blindfold came off, he was in a small apartment room. Behind the camera, the show producer told him to take off his clothes, all of them, and hand them over. Only then, after he is naked and stranded, is Nasubi told what the show’s premise is: “Can a man live on winning sweepstakes alone?” He laughed, and the door was shut.

Here is a complete inventory of Nasubi’s apartment at the start of the show:

• a shower
• a radio
• a telephone
• a gas burner
• a sink
• a large rack of magazines
• a giant stack of postcards
• a small table
• a single cushion.

The apartment walls were wired with cameras and a portable microphone hung around Nasubi’s neck. Besides those things, he had to win everything he needed in a prize contest, and he would be released after he had won a million yen (~$10,000 USD) worth of prizes (based on the alternate cash prize customarily offered in sweepstakes, which unfortunately means that a number of lower-value items Nasubi won were worth nothing, due to the lack of a cash alternative).

An edited summary of Nasubi’s experience would appear on Denpa Shonen for 8-10 minutes a week over the next 15 months, a dark comedy segment about a life spent writing letters (roughly 1,400 a week) and answering the door.

Every episode shows Nasubi waking up, telling the camera what day it is, writing sweepstakes letters (he quickly gives up on trying to win radio contests and instead devotes his time to magazine write-in sweepstakes), then receiving a series of delivered prize winnings which range from life-saving to worthless. The first episode shows him answer the door for a ramen delivery sent to the wrong address, a taunting moment for someone who ostensibly has no food for the first two weeks (viewers have to assume he received some food off-camera to get through this opening period). Once he finally wins a bag of rice, he realizes he has no pot to cook it in, so he experiments with eating rice raw before eventually finding a way to cook the rice over his gas burner in a packet of fiber jelly he had won the previous week.

Rice was always a welcome prize, but the show’s dark comedy comes mostly from the prizes Nasubi wins that do nothing to improve his desperate situation. Famously, in one of the first episodes he wins a bicycle, a prize that briefly excites him then throws him into a depression. What use is the bicycle for him when he has no clothes and the show may not even allow him to leave his apartment? He cycles the pedals a few times, then puts it in the corner of his room, where it will stay (and follow him, as he is moved from apartment to apartment by the production staff before fans can deduce where he lives).

In a later episode, he is extremely excited to win a television, his best prize yet. But when he plugs it in, he realizes the apartment has no antenna or cable connection, and every channel comes in as static. Months and months later, he eventually wins a VCR, and two VHS tapes, then eventually even a PlayStation One and the train simulator Densha de Go!. He plays his new game console for three days straight before realizing that it is taking too much time away from his letter writing, so he shelves it along with all his other useless prizes.

Because of the immediate shock of having his clothes taken away, one of Nasubi’s first goals was to win some clothes so he wouldn’t have to make his TV debut fully nude. He applied to win an apron in the first episode, but he did not win that particular sweepstakes and, in fact, he would never win any serious article of clothing. He wins a pair of lingerie panties early on (which are too small even for his spindly thin frame), then eventually a pair of formal shoes (which fit perfectly but don’t see an awful lot of use), then much later a pair of too-small Adidas sneakers and a belt. So he simply goes more than a year without wearing clothes, with a floating picture of an eggplant blocking his privates for the viewers at home. During a short-lived experiment at streaming Nasubi 24 hours a day to internet viewers, a large staff had to be on hand to move the censorship eggplant as he moved around. After Nasubi was finally given his clothes back on day 335, he tried them on, decided they felt weird, then took them back off.

It was on that day 335 that Nasubi won a small bag of rice which pushed him over the million yen he needed to win the challenge. The producers gave him one last surprise: he was flown to Korea then told to win his airfare to come back to Tokyo. After four more months, Nasubi was finally taken back home, where he was put into one last apartment room. As he began to get settled, the room’s walls collapsed outward, revealing him to a live audience who congratulated him on completing “Prize Contest Life.” He happily waved with one hand while holding his cushion over his genitals with the other.

Behind the Scenes

It is impossible to tell just how much might be faked in “Prize Contest Life” and all the reality show contests of Denpa Shonen. The show has complete control over what it presents as “reality” and the perception of realness is vital to enjoying the astonishing things that happen in a segment like Nasubi’s. Years before their Nasubi challenge, Denpa Shonen came under fire for reportedly flying their contestant from place to place while he was supposed to be hitchhiking across all of Eurasia (a theme they would use again when they had a man hitchhike across Africa then up to Norway). Viewers have asked “Did Nasubi really win dog food and inner tubes and four tires and lingerie without ever winning any real clothing for himself?” Nothing could have stopped the producers from sending Nasubi things he didn’t win with the delivery man, or intercepting prizes he actually earned.

It is almost certain, however, that Nasubi didn’t receive many breaks from any potential producer interference. He gets thinner, paler, hairier, and weirder as the show goes on, as his near-total isolation continued and he never took a step outside. Nasubi eventually revealed that he “thought of escaping several times,” and “was on edge, especially toward the end.” In an interview with video streaming site Hulu, the producer of Denpa Shonen said “[Nasubi] plunged into despair, but because he was naked and had no clothes, he couldn’t even run to the police for help. Aside from the five minutes that Nasubi was able to interact with a delivery person, his 24 hours were spent writing out postcards by himself in a dead-silent room. Imagine the elation that overcame him during those valuable few minutes when he would feel his only connection to the outside world through talking to the delivery person and checking the contents of the packages he would receive. It was at that moment when he would burst with jubilation and even start dancing to express his happiness. It’s in thrilling moments like these when we’re given a glimpse into the true nature of humans.” “Prize Contest Life” stands out for its especially cruel, psychologically torturous material, and there’s only so much that could have been done off-camera to make it less than it appears.

In fact, you can watch a lot of the episodes on YouTube. Just do a search for “Nasubi” and you can see for yourself. Don’t blame me if you end up losing the next couple hours of your life.

Life After “Prize Contest Life”

“Prize Contest Life” is an extreme example of the central premise of reality TV: Amateur actors (and even the occasional normal person) will undergo almost anything to become rich and famous. Nasubi gave an incredible amount for Denpa Shonen—15 continuous months of isolation—but what did he receive? Did he become rich and famous?

The answer is “sort of.” The several volumes of Nasubi’s Prize Contest Life Diary—which is constantly promoted, used, and voice acted within the show to provide an internal monologue for the solitary and therefore not always especially vocal Nasubi—reportedly sold well. He was nationally famous while his segment was running (Denpa Shonen reached 17 million viewers at its peak, with Nasubi marching at the front) but his fame faded quickly. He earned minor roles in several films and TV dramas at the national level, perhaps the most notable being his role in Kamen Rider W as Watcherman, an otaku blogger who rides a bicycle he won in a sweepstakes. But Nasubi can only really be called a celebrity in his home region of Fukushima, where he has done a number of shows and events.

Most recently, he attempted to climb Mount Everest to raise money for relief efforts after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and he has a new show called “Nasubi’s Question” which educates viewers on radiation-related topics. Denpa Shonen did not make him a fabulously successful person, but it seems to have given him enough exposure to give him a comfortable acting career and a public role in his home region.

To me, the show’s cruelty is only justified if we assume that the producers are helping Nasubi behind the camera in ways we never see. For instance, if he really went the first two weeks with no food at all, as it is presented in the show, then I think everyone would agree that is too cruel to film. The show is rife with those kinds of iffy moral situations that make it simultaneously thrilling and kind of horrible: If, as the show claims, Nasubi never knew what he was in for until it happened, then surely 15 months of filmed solitary confinement is too cruel to be entertainment. But surely he had some idea? What do you think? Is it okay to make a reality show like this? Let us know in the comments.

Sources:

• Hulu.com Blog – “A Closer Look at Denpa Shonen” Interview
• Metropolis – “Big in Japan: Nasubi”
• IMDb – Actor: Nasubi
• The Japan Times – “Those same old jokes aren’t funny any more”

“I wasn’t a fan. I didn’t watch on television or have videos or anything. I don’t watch soccer now and when I retire that won’t change. I don’t really understand why people are soccer fans. I don’t like to watch any sport so I don’t understand what makes people do that.”

Hidetoshi Nakata, the first Japanese soccer player to find success in the major European leagues, refuses to watch soccer and is not a soccer fan. So what made him decide to play in the first place? “Nakata [...] said that he read Tsubasa when he was young and that he had tried several of the skills featured in the manga, especially the overhead kick,” claimed Shisei Uchida from Weekly Shonen Jump, the longtime publisher of the world-famous soccer manga and anime Captain Tsubasa.

A Soccer Story in a Baseball Nation

In 1978, manga artist Yoichi Takahashi became a soccer fan. “In my third year of high school, I saw the FIFA World Cup in Argentina on television and discovered the excitement of the sport,” Takahashi said in an interview with Nippon.com. “At the time, soccer was semi-professional in Japan and the teams were really poor,” he commented. “I learned that in Europe, soccer was far more popular than baseball, and the number of soccer players was much greater.” As Takahashi’s interest in soccer grew, he discovered a whole culture surrounding the sport in not only Europe, but in his new favorite leagues in Brazil. Takahashi was one of the early converts in what would become (partially through his influence) a new soccer nation in Japan.

Baseball was the only nationally-popular team sport in Japan, and Takahashi’s favorite manga subject before his World Cup revelation. “During middle school I was into baseball manga, such as Dokaben and Captain, partly because I played baseball myself. Baseball was actually among the subjects I dealt with when I first started writing manga, but there were tons of baseball manga out there at the time. So I thought I might as well go with soccer, a mostly unexplored sport.” So in 1981, he created Captain Tsubasa, a story about an almost supernaturally talented young soccer player named Tsubasa Oozora who stars for his new high school, then the Brazilian leagues, then eventually for the world’s most famous soccer team, FC Barcelona. A Captain Tsubasa manga would run in the mega-popular Shonen Manga magazine Weekly Shonen Jump from 1981 to 1988, 1994-97, 2001-04, and 2010-12.

Tsubasa was not the first soccer manga—The Red-Blooded Eleven and Shinji Mizushima’s Downtown Samurai took advantage of a brief blip of national interest in soccer after the Japanese national team won a bronze medal at the 1968 Olympics—but it was the first to achieve massive mainstream popularity and inspire future soccer superstars to take up the game.

The Tsubasa Generation

It’s difficult to overstate the reach and influence of Weekly Shonen Jump. Today, in America, the Sunday New York Times has a circulation of 2.3 million. The weekend Wall Street Journal reaches 2.4 million customers. The USA Today: 1.7 million. In 1982, when Tsubasa was in its early stages, Weekly Shonen Jump had a circulation of 2.55 million, toppling today’s American newspaper giants. At its peak in 1995, while running the Captain Tsubasa: World Youth manga (and little comic called Dragon Ball), Weekly Shonen Jump had a circulation of 6.53 million. Even now in 2013, with increased competition both within the magazine industry and from more and more video games and television, Weekly Shonen Jump has a circulation of 2.78 million.

And Captain Tsubasa was one of their landmark comics. Its success spawned imitators like Offside and Whistle! and many of Japan’s first soccer success stories credited Tsubasa with their taking up the sport. Hidetoshi Nakata, the one quoted above who “doesn’t like to watch any sport” and “tried several of the skills from the Tsubasa manga” was the first Japanese soccer player to have top-tier success abroad, including winning the Italian championship with A.S. Roma in 2001 and playing in the English Premier League and UEFA Cup with the Bolton Wanderers.

The outsized influence of Captain Tsubasa on Japanese soccer has had one major drawback: Tsubasa Oozora plays in a Maradona-inspired attacking midfield position, between the pure forwards/strikers and the defenders and defensive midfielders. Following his example, Japan has become a nation of midfielders, constantly struggling to find center-backs and strikers for both the J. League and the Japanese national team. Japan’s true superstars playing abroad—Keisuke Honda at CSKA Moscow (joining the even higher-profile AC Milan in January), Shinji Kagawa at Manchester United, Makoto Hasebe at FC Nurnberg—are all midfielders. Maya Yoshida is Japan’s most successful true defender ever, currently playing in the Premier League for Southampton, yet he too was a midfielder until J. League club Nagoya Grampus converted him to defender to fit him into their lineup. And none of the Japanese national team’s forwards actually play that position for their club: Hiroshi Kiyotake, Shinji Okazaki, Yoichiro Kakitani, and Takashi Inui all naturally play in a Tsubasa-style attacking midfield position. Directly or indirectly, Japan is now full of players who try to play the Tsubasa style, to the point that it makes it difficult to find other kinds of players.

A Cup Hosted, A Cup Won, and Tsubasa’s Homecoming

By 2002, when all the Tsubasa readers had grown up, Japan had a fully professional soccer league and had won a Korea/Japan joint bid to host a World Cup. Japan had never even qualified for a World Cup until 1998, but they defeated Russia and Tunisia before being eliminated by Turkey on home turf in Miyagi. The Japanese men’s national team had made extremely rapid progress from near non-existence to global contender status in only twenty years.

The Japanese women’s national team has seen even greater success. At the 2011 Women’s World Cup in Germany, Takahashi paid the team a visit before the Cup Final. Japan went on to beat the United States and claim their first World Cup trophy, led by Homare Sawa, yet another Tsubasa-style attacking midfielder wearing his number (10) and driving the offense with creative passes and long-distance shots.

Takahashi was even called upon to support Tokyo’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games, representing the country’s soccer legitimacy against Raul for Madrid and Pele for the eventually successful Rio de Janeiro bid. He drew Tsubasa and fellow main character Wakabayashi on the Tokyo 2016 flag flying in Copenhagen, where the host city was to be chosen.

A World of Tsubasa Fans

Tsubasa successfully interested a wave of Japanese children into soccer, so perhaps it was only natural that it would become even more popular in countries that were already sold on this whole “soccer” thing. The anime was translated and broadcast all over the world, in every language from Arabic to Tagalog. In the Middle East, viewers tuned in to Captain Majed. In South America, they watched Supercampeones. North American Tsubasa fans thought they were watching a show called Flash Kicker. And in Europe, Tsubasa was renamed Oliver and the goalkeeper Wakabayashi was renamed Benji, so many Spanish and Italian soccer players grew up obsessed with a cartoon they called “Oliver and Benji.” It was this version of the show in particular which inspired many current-day stars to take up the sport.

Fernando Torres, from the 2010 FIFA World Cup-winning Spanish national team, said “I remember when I was a kid, we couldn’t find the signal really well on TV, but everyone in school was talking about this cartoon about football, from Japan.[...] I started playing football because of this.” Alessandro Del Piero, a key player for Italy during their 2006 World Cup victory, also loved the cartoon as a child and treasures a signed drawing Yoichi Takahashi gave him in 2011. “When I saw Del Piero and [FC Barcelona defender] Francesco Cocco, they told me that they had read Holly e Benji [Captain Tsubasa’s Italian title] from an early age,” Takahashi told the Daily Times, who noted that he was “visibly pleased.”

Captain Tsubasa has had an enormous influence on soccer not just within Japan but all over the world. When Takahashi Yoichi sat down with Nippon.com, they said “Last year [2011] marked the thirtieth anniversary of Captain Tsubasa. Japanese soccer has made remarkable strides in that interval, and both soccer fans and those in soccer circles admit that this progress would not have been possible without the series. What is your take on this?” Takahashi replied “I think it isn’t so much the influence of Captain Tsubasa as it is the appeal of soccer itself that has led to the wide acceptance that the sport enjoys today. But I’m grateful that people say so, and it honestly pleases me to think that I may have been able to give a boost to Japanese soccer to some degree.”

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Bonus Wallpapers

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Sources:

• The Sunday Times – “I don’t understand why people are football fans. I don’t like to watch any kind of sport.” Bolton’s Japanese midfielder Hidetoshi Nakata
• TradingEconomics.com – Historical population of Japan
• Rakuten Plaza – Downtown Samurai scans
• Comipress – The Rise and Fall of Weekly Shonen Jump
• Nippon.com – A Soccer Hero Adored Around the World
• Daily Times – Comic strip hero who inspired Nakata and Del Piero
• The Daily Mail – “Fernando Torres: I took up football because of Captain Tsubasa”
• FIFA Soccer 11 “We Are 11” – Episode 10, Captain Tsubasa
• Goal.com – “In the footsteps of Captain Tsubasa, Shinji Kagawa continues to inspire a nation”
• AlessandroDelPiero.com – “Capitan Tsubasa”
• AFP – Japanese comic superhero drawn to Tokyo Olympic bid