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Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) is/was Japan’s most beloved film. Much like The Wizard of Oz in the US, the Japanese public knew the film through its annual broadcast on TV. Shown every year on the NTV television network in July when schools were on vacation, My Neighbor Totoro reliably drew a huge audience share every time it was broadcast. Its theatrical release in 1988 had been only a modest success, though critically acclaimed. But Toshio Suzuki believed that, over the years, every single household in Japan had acquired a copy of the film, which they would have recorded themselves at home off the TV broadcast.

      Miyazaki’s new film neared its theatrical release bearing the stamp of approval from Disney, a company known in Japan more for its theme park and consumer products, but also a major Hollywood studio and animated film giant of international renown. Suzuki, directing the marketing campaign for the film, went to great lengths to make sure the public was aware of Disney’s worldwide stature. The Japanese public often ignores its home-grown talent until it becomes famous abroad. Then suddenly its esteem in Japan grows exponentially.

      As part of his strategy to make the Japanese public aware that Princess Mononoke would be a huge hit not only in Japan but abroad as well, Suzuki wanted the public to know he had even hired a foreign executive (me) to handle the anticipated worldwide demand for the film. The idea was to position the film as an international hit before it had even been released. At the many press conferences held for the release of the film, I was usually called on to say a few words in Japanese about the plans for the film’s international release. There’s always more good news to deliver when you’re allowed to talk about the possible as opposed to the probable, so my part was very easy.

      As the film’s release neared, I was regularly invited to be interviewed by the press, and once or twice to do a taped interview for TV. In the 1980s and 1990s there were programs on late-night Japanese TV that featured an ensemble cast interviewing people (celebrities or non-celebrities) or simply humiliating people (housewives wrestling in a ring to win household appliances) or making surprise visits to people’s homes or workplaces. Many of the segments featured scantily clad women who were either regulars on the show or guests (an S&M model being tied up naked with heavy rope and hung upside down calmly explaining how the knots were expertly tied to cause pain, reveal the naked flesh just so, but to minimize soft-tissue damage). Many of these shows had big audiences and were taste-makers and trend-setters.

      One of the common techniques these shows would employ was to send one of their featured regulars out somewhere and have the audience vicariously experience the visit to the person or the place that was the target. Most of the places visited were restaurants or Japanese traditional inns in famous or out-of-the-way places. To my surprise, one day Suzuki informed me that I was going to be the interview guest on one of those late-night shows.

      All I was told about the interview was that one of the show’s hosts, a young woman, would be coming to our office in Shinbashi with her film crew and that she would ask me to talk about Princess Mononoke. I hadn’t watched a lot of late-night television since my student days (aiming then to improve my listening comprehension of spoken Japanese) and I didn’t have much of an idea about what kinds of shows were currently popular or who the stars were. I also didn’t look into it. I just assumed that someone would come and ask the usual questions and that would be it. But I did notice that when I mentioned to anyone in the office which show it was, the reaction was always a rapid deployment of a hand to a mouth to suppress a laugh. No one would say why it was so funny. What, I wondered, were they not telling me?

      By the appointed time of the interview no one had contacted me and I didn’t hear anything further about it. I was at my desk late one afternoon when I heard a commotion down the hall. Beams of bright light were steadily approaching the door to our office and the people in their path were leaping out of the way. The bright lights drew closer. In through the office door and bathed in a blazing halo of light came a leggy Japanese beauty dressed entirely in silver. Close behind her came a man shouldering a large TV camera. Behind the camera was another guy holding up an array of klieg lights and one more guy with a large overhead boom mike on a long pole.

      The nubile young woman was wearing a silver-metallic high-collared sleeveless jacket over a silver-metallic bra. She had on a very (very) small silver-metallic micro-mini skirt with a slit up its side. Her hair was silver and metallic. She had silver-metallic eyebrows. On one arm was a silver-metallic elbow-length fingerless glove.

      The woman in silver strode toward me on silver-metallic six-inch platform boots. Her silver chains and bangles jingled as she moved. She had a silver ring in her nose. And in one hand she held a very large silver microphone.

      The interview was beginning even before the silver lady reached my desk. She held out the mike for me to reply to a question I had not heard. The cameraman bore down on me and the lighting guy fixed me in the glare of his thousand-watt high-beams. I am unusually bad at spontaneous situations. Even if I had heard the question, I would have been too stunned to respond. My staff and a group of people from the neighboring office stood comfortably out of camera range laughing. People from other offices were poking their heads into the doorway.

      All I could think of was to ask the silver lady if she bought her clothes on this planet or on the planet she was originally from. But I decided that might antagonize the late-night TV demographic. It was very hard to not just stare at the young woman. A lot of her body parts that were not coated in silver were out and on view. She was very attractive in a way that people whom you normally encounter in day-to-day life are not. And I was getting an up-close view.

      I don’t remember anything about what the silver lady asked me or what I responded. But I do remember being too distracted to say the things I had been trained to say in an interview. I didn’t think the interview went well. But when I saw Suzuki later he seemed to think it had gone just fine. Even if that were true, I understood that I couldn’t take any credit for a good performance. 99% of being successful at doing interviews in Japan as a gaijin is about just being a gaijin and showing up. However, I suppose I did do a good job looking blown away and incapacitated by the presence of the silver lady.

      My appearance on TV and at press conferences was obviously only a very minor part of the overall marketing plan. The international aspect of the film’s release was but one of its supporting parts, like the little swirl of red syrup on the plate of a fancy dessert that’s added to give it a little color but that you don’t necessarily eat. The important parts of Suzuki’s campaign were the TV spots and theatrical trailers, and the personal visits by Hayao Miyazaki to local markets all across Japan.

      The making of the trailers and the TV spots for Princess Mononoke was like a lesson in advanced marketing. From the beginning, Suzuki faced stiff opposition to his choice of scenes to be included. Many of these were the same objections Miyazaki had faced from the film’s production partners when he announced that his next film would be Princess Mononoke.

      Miyazaki was told that if the film was set in a historical period it would fail because the Japanese were sick of period dramas. Further, if the film took place in feudal times, the Japanese public would not accept main characters who were not samurai but were shabbily dressed villagers. The film depicted heads and arms being severed. That might be OK for a live-action film, but it would be the kiss of death for an animated film. Miyazaki thanked the production partners for their input and went ahead and did what he wanted to do anyway.

      When Suzuki designed the TV spots and trailers to promote the new film, he intentionally featured all of these “faults,” to the horror of the film’s distribution partners. NTV, the film’s major production partner, hinted that they might not run the TV spots, though in the end they reluctantly did.

      Just before a new Ghibli film opened, Suzuki always made it a point to travel all over Japan with the film’s director. It was a ritual that, once their film was finally finished, both Miyazaki and Suzuki greatly enjoyed. They traveled (by train), meeting with the theater owners who would be showing the film and speaking to the local press who would be reviewing it. Miyazaki jovially took questions, drew pictures of the film’s characters, handed them out, and signed autographs. The film completed, Miyazaki was usually in a very good mood, and he relished the opportunity to talk to people

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