INTERVIEW The samurai
returns Actor Ken
Watanabe By David McNeill
Ken
Watanabe is back from a year of self-imposed
retirement after his acclaimed roles in Last
Samurai and Letters from Iwo Jima. He
talks about his new movie project, his life out of
the limelight and the dangers of Asian
stereotypes.
Watanabe's latest film
project opens with an image of an Arctic bear
resurfacing into the brilliant spring sunlight
after months living underground. It's tempting to
see the scene as a metaphor for a career that has
alternated between stretches of intense, highly
acclaimed work and long periods of hibernation.
The 48-year-old was famously forced
into semi-retirement by a leukemia diagnosis in
1989 just two years after the NHK samurai series
Dokuganryu Masamune launched him into the acting
firmament. He fought the
disease into remission but it returned in 1994,
leaving a gaping, five-year hole in his resume.
He is now reemerging,
blinking in the media spotlight after another year
away from the cameras - this time self-imposed -
following a
string of high-profile Hollywood performances that
have made him perhaps the best known, most
respected Asian actor on the planet.
In
The Last Samurai (2003), Memoirs of a
Geisha (2005) and Letters from Iwo Jima
(2006), Watanabe brought charisma and depth to
roles that in less capable hands were ripe for
stereotype: a recalcitrant Meiji-era warrior, a
middle-aged businessman and the doomed World War
II general Tadamichi Kuribayashi.
His
rich, soulful turn in Edward Zwick's Bushido
sword-fest outshone Hollywood's brightest star,
Tom Cruise, and earned him an Oscar nomination for
best supporting actor. He is the heart and soul of
Letters, a movie widely dubbed a
masterpiece. Even his phoned-in performance in the
exquisitely packaged but slight Memoirs,
and a cameo in Batman Returns were noted by
critics.
All of which made his next career
move appear odd. Watanabe returned to Japan to
make Memories of Tomorrow, a grueling,
distinctly un-Hollywood drama about a salary-man's
descent into Alzheimer's disease. He briefly made
the headlines again when he married actress Kaho
Minami. But since then, public sightings have been
as rare as that Arctic bear. Where has he been?
"How can I explain this?" says the
48-year-old Niigata native as he struggles for
words. "With Letters, then Memories,
I reached a sort of turning point in my acting. I
had poured so much of myself into those movies and
I really had no idea where to go from there. I was
of course offered scripts but nothing that moved
me at all in the same way. A lot of people advised
me to go ahead and make a movie anyway. But in the
end I didn't make one for nearly a year."
Tanned, fit and impeccably turned out in a
tailored Italian suit for our interview in a
central Tokyo hotel, the time off seems to have
done him the world of good. "I said to my wife,
'I've haven't done anything in a year, I wonder if
it's okay'," he recalls, smiling. "But she said
'What are you talking about, you're living your
life'. And it was a kind of relief to realize that
this is what life is: spending time with your
family and other normal things."
The
project that brings him back from hibernation is
Planet Earth by BBC documentary maker
Alastair Fothergill, the creative force behind the
huge worldwide hit Deep Blue. A filmic plea
to rescue the dying planet from environmental
destruction, Earth opens with a haunting
shot of that polar bear searching for footing on
melting ice. Watanabe, who narrates the movie,
recalls what he saw when he spent a month in the
Arctic.
"The first dawn after winter up
there is supposed to be mid-February but the sun
appeared to rise two weeks earlier. When I asked
local people about it they said 'there have been
huge changes here in the last few years'. The
weather is changing here too. So when I was asked
to do the narration and I thought I've got to do
this. It's so important."
"I mean, mankind
has lived for such a short time on the planet, and
maybe we don't have much longer to go. But we can
still help by doing even small things. Use water
and electricity carefully, for example."
It's a long way from the Hollywood
coalface, but Watanabe thinks the older he gets
the more inclined he is to seek out work that
"says something" to the audience. He denies,
though, that stardom has turned him against the
lure of Big Movies. "Not at all," he says. "It
depends on the production. If the script is good,
cast and director is good, I'll go anywhere.
"You have to ask, what is Hollywood today
anyway? I mean, there is a physical place by that
name and a different aesthetic and scale, but
movies are no longer made there. There is so much
collaboration now. The money can come from Japan,
the movie might have a Korean director and be made
in the US; it is not about where you make the
movie anymore."
The big difference he says
is how much waste there is on a US set. "They
shoot a lot more and then select the best
material. But once you get to the set there's not
much difference between a Japanese or foreign
movie. There are directors who like to do a lot of
takes and others like [Clint] Eastwood [director
of Letters from Iwo Jima] who usually says
'one will do'."
A smart, erudite man,
Watanabe is acutely aware of the dangers of
cultural typecasting inside the Hollywood machine.
In the DVD voiceover for The Last Samurai,
director Zwick explains that his star worked so
hard because he "knew in some fundamental way"
that the images of Japanese actors for decades
were "two-dimensional at best and often
caricatured".
As great an actor as he is,
he has made his name playing roles within the very
restricted Hollywood template for Asian men:
warriors, generals, businessmen and sinister
Oriental bad-guys. Is it possible to break out of
this template?
"Well, I'd like to play
ordinary people too and we're always developing
such scripts." But he acknowledges it is difficult
to find roles that don't condescend. "About half
the scripts sent to me feature characters I just
can't identify with, particularly one-dimensional
businessmen, or if it's a comedy some absurd
10-year-old Japanese stereotype. There's no point
in getting mad about it; it's just the way things
are. But I want to positively challenge such
stereotypes."
That sometimes means
challenging the director and the script, he
explains, even after accepting a role. "Oh yes,
there are things in scripts that you cannot let go
by. In Letters, there were times when I
told Eastwood 'this is just not believable'," he
says, adding that he made daily suggestions and
asked the director to make sure that costumes,
props and sets were accurate. "The story had to be
true, but Eastwood is not someone I had to fight
with because he always listened carefully and
respected my opinions, right up to the end of the
movie."
He says the most serious script
dispute on Letters was the death scene. "We
discussed it for weeks and I disagreed with the
original version. Some people felt he should have
committed seppuku, but I felt that
beautified his death. Being the man he was, having
asked so much of his men, he would have fought
until he had erased himself. When nothing was
left, he would have accepted death. I felt that
very strongly."
Watanabe always chooses
scripts "on instinct" and claims it has rarely let
him down. He says he immediately knew Iwo
Jima and Memories were special, but
once he accepted the parts had to dig deep into
himself, a process he found exhausting. "I can't
become another person, no matter how much make-up
I wear. Something of your own past, your
experiences and personality always comes out in
the role and that makes acting very risky. You're
exposed. You always wonder if you can pull it
off."
His job outside Japan is made harder
by the language barrier. Watanabe studied English
intensely for Last Samurai and
Memoirs. "Dialogue itself is not so
difficult, but understanding the meaning behind
the words and what the director and the
scriptwriter wants is a challenge."
The
burden of playing Kuribayashi after Katsumoto in
Last Samurai, two signature roles loaded
with historical and political freight and
scrutinized in Japan like few films before or
since, added to his exhaustion last year. Watanabe
has admitted that he was "nervous" about making
Iwo Jima, "a film that was so important to
my culture". That the movie garnered such praise
is testament to his hard work, though some critics
didn't appreciate it. "Doesn't have much to say,
except that Japanese are human beings too," wrote
one, ignoring what an achievement that was after
decades of hoary cinematic cliches and
banzai-screaming generals.
Watanabe rarely
discusses his illness, though those who know him
say his on-screen intensity and stillness is
partly a product of being so close to death, and
knowing it could come calling again. He admits to
mining his memories of fighting leukemia when
filming Memories of Tomorrow. "I don't
think you should show those experiences on screen
because they'll take over the character you're
playing. But when I was making the movie, I began
to remember.
"When you're sick, you're not
thinking 24 hours a day about your suffering,
about dying. You want to talk and laugh and think
about other things. In the midst of trying to live
your life normally, the fear and dread, the
realization that it might all end, rises up inside
of you. That's what I brought to that movie,
although I didn't intend to at the start. The
director was good enough to listen to me and we
changed some scenes."
The actor who blurs
the boundary between screen roles and the guy in
the shaving mirror is of course something of a
cinematic cliche. Watanabe, who has built a career
playing proud, honorable and fatalistic men, seems
closer than most to his cinematic persona. He is
reputed to lead a frugal, strict life, and has a
reputation for being scrupulously careful and
honest. There is something almost Buddha-like in
his stillness and thoughtful, considered replies.
Is he, as some of his cuttings suggest, a
modern-day samurai?
"Well, I'd like to
live like a simple samurai's life, with few
possessions," he laughs. But in reality you start
to accumulate things in your life. I try to
differentiate between what I need and don't need.
I talk to my wife and children before buying
things. But I think the samurai sensibility goes
deeper: respect for others; using your time
carefully; keeping promises. I think those are
qualities that Japan used to have but which it is
somehow forgetting. They're important to me."
Watanabe's essential seriousness is
perhaps one reason why he dismisses the idea that
he might be a sex symbol. "I never understood that
tag," he says laughing. I have no sense of myself
as a sex symbol at all. But the meaning of sex
symbol might be a little different in Japan and
elsewhere. The Japanese version seems to come with
a stronger emphasis on a sort of grown-up or
mature male charm. And if that's the case, then I
guess I'm happy to hear it."
Where will he
go next? He says he rules nothing out, even a
return to NHK. "I've worked in TV, theater and
movies so I don't mind as long as it is a good
project with a wonderful director and staff.
That's what makes it worthwhile getting involved
in any project."
David McNeill
writes regularly for a number of publications
including the Irish Times and the Chronicle of
Higher Education. He is a Japan Focus
coordinator.
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string of high-profile Hollywood performances that
have made him perhaps the best known, most
respected Asian actor on the planet. 
