Harry Potter in Japan

The new Harry Potter movie opened up last weekend in Japan, only a week after its US release. (There’s no consistency with these things though. Some movies are almost a year late by the time they get to Japan).

Because I’ve been in Japan for the past five years, I’m a bit out of touch with American junior high school students. But I can vouch that in Japan Harry Potter is huge. In every junior high school classroom there are several copies of Harry Potter scattered around (in Japanese translation of course), and often two or three students will try and read it during my lesson. I’ve also been asked by female students to proof read their English fan letters to young Daniel Radcliff.

So it was not surprising that opening night for the movie would be packed. I usually try and avoid these crowds, but my friend wanted to see the movie and so we went opening night.

I went to buy tickets while my friend got popcorn. The lady at the counter was friendly as always. “Okay,” she said, “I assume you want tickets for the subtitled version instead of the dubbed. Is it okay to sit in the front?”

“Are there any seats in the back?”

“No, it’s very crowded.”

“Well, how far in the front?” I asked.

“The seats aren’t decided,” she said. “It’s an open ticket.”

“Oh. Okay that’s all right then,” I answered.

I then found my friend and advised him that we better find a seat quickly. “I didn’t really understand what she was saying to me,” I answered. “Something about seats near the front, but then she said we could sit anywhere.”

Then we saw what she meant. The theater, even 15 minutes before the movie even started, was packed. The only seats open were in the front row directly beneath the movie screen, and even then there weren’t two of them together. “Let’s just change our tickets to a later showing,” I suggested.

So we went back to the front desk. “Hopefully this won’t be a lot of trouble,” I said.

“I don’t know,” my friend replied. “This is Japan. They’re not famous for being flexible.”

Sure enough, despite the fact that the movie hadn’t even started yet, the lady refused to change our tickets. “You can’t change your tickets after you buy them,” she said. “It’s the theater’s policy.”

In Japan, when you get an answer that you don’t want, a good policy is just to pretend you don’t understand. Sometimes they get so tired of trying to explain it to you that they just give in. So we just gave our best “stupid foreigner smile” and acted like we just couldn’t understand the concept of a non-changeable ticket, and thought the problem was all in our phrasing.

“No, you don’t understand. We’d like to change the ticket to 9:30.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Change the ticket.”

“The theater doesn’t let you do that.”

“We…want…9:30…ticket…please.”

The lady became more and more exasperated. “I asked you if it was okay to sit in the front, and you said yes,” she replied.

“Yes, but I didn’t understand what you meant. When I asked how far in the front you told me it was an open ticket.”

She checked with the manager, and he said something, and with a few punches of the keyboard she gave us two new tickets. It was as easy as that once they decided to do it.

“Well we got what we wanted,” my friend said. “But I feel bad about how much we upset that ticket lady. I wonder if there was a better way we could have handled that.”

We batted ideas back and forth about different things we could have done, but in the end I think that sometimes you just have to be a jerk to get what you want. The only reason we had gotten the tickets changed was because we just refused to accept no.

I felt a bit like the ugly American. I barely do any work at my job in Japan, I get paid through taxpayer money, and then I complain about my movie tickets. Sometimes it feels like all I do in this country is take. But on the other hand, there was no way I was going to sit through a 3 hour movie with my neck craned backwards to see the screen.

After the movie, my friend, who was English, commented on all the spoken “Britishisms" in the film, and how unusual that was for an American movie. I thought this was unusual as well, especially since the books themselves had been translated into “American” for their stateside distribution.

I know I’m not the first person to raise these issues (and several years after the first book has been released, I’m jumping on the train a little late), but I think it is absolutely appalling that these books were altered for the American audience. I’m always complaining about the ignorance of Japanese people in this blog, but we Americans have got to be the stupidest people in the world. We have to have everything tailored exactly to our American tastes or we can’t absorb it.

“The Office” had to be remade with an American cast before it could be shown on network TV.

Also Japanese horror films have become very popular recently, but all of these have to be re-made for American audiences. The most interesting example I’ve seen of this is “The Grudge”. It presents an interesting experimentation in cross-cultural horror films but, because of the decision to keep the Japanese ghosts and the Japanese setting the same, it also begs the question: Why does it need to be remade at all? Was the film not scary when it was Japanese people being killed? Do we need blonde hair and blue-eyed protagonists before we can truly enjoy the film?


Obviously I’m rambling off somewhat. This website indicates the Harry Potter translation into American English wasn’t as bad as I first thought. And I do realize their children’s books but I still think a valuable educational opportunity was lost when the books were altered.

Link of the Day
I was in Japan for Thanksgiving of course, for the fifth straight year. But my sister's blog entry indicates Thanksgiving was pretty busy at the Swagman house this year.