What film got you hooked?

A continuing feature that asks prominent cinephiles "What film got you hooked on Japanese cinema?"


Shall We Dance? by Jasper Sharp

I was at a bit of loss when Chris asked me to select the one title that turned me into a fully fledged convert of Japanese film fandom, but after giving it a bit more thought it became immediately obvious. I’d seen a lot of Japanese films during my teenage years on video and TV – stuff like Shindo’s Onibaba, Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, Fukasaku’s Samurai Reincarnation. I remember a particularly memorable double bill at London’s legendary Scala Cinema of Wakamatsu’s Violated Angels and Imamura’s Ballad of Narayama when I first moved up to London in 1989. But at this stage I was just a fan of anything slightly fringe and non-mainstream, so during the 90s my interest in Japan ran parallel with that of other countries’s cinema, particular France. The films of Kitano, Sogo Ishii, Ryosuke Hashiguchi and Shinya Tsukamoto dazzled me with their technical finesse and visual inventiveness, but still to me Japan seemed a distant and alien land that it looked like I’d never get a handle on.

And then I saw Masayuki Suo’s Shall We Dance? It was the first film that made me realise that Japanese people weren’t quite as different and strange as I’d imagined, a film that made me laugh, made me wince with recognition and ultimately sent me scuttling out of the cinema feeling uplifted with a huge grin on my face and a desire to witness this distant culture firsthand.

It’s not a title that many people talk about nowadays, but ten years ago it was a surprise hit in North America, rapidly becoming the top-grossing Asian title of all time. By the time it reached London, there was already talk of a remake, and it went out on a very limited run. Despite my continuing gushing praise, none of my friends took my advice to go and see it. Like its central character played by Koji Yakusho, I’d just discovered a whole new world, and I had it all to myself.

In retrospect it’s quite clear why the story of a bored salaryman in a dead end job who finds release in the clandestine world of competitive ballroom dancing had such a resonance for me. I was then working in the world of IT, stuck in the cultural dead zone of the financial heart of London. I despaired at my lengthy commute into work to sit in an air-conditioned office, only to be subjected to my colleague Roger’s evangelising about the joys of Linux and the two Romford trainees Baz and Daz talking about football and leering at the bare-breasted 16 year olds displaying their wares on page 3 of the Sun newspaper every day – and all for a salary that left me little leftover after paying the bills and the rent. Working in an office was a miserable existence as far as I was concerned. I dreamed of becoming a writer, but I couldn’t think of anything in my daily life that was worth writing about. I joined a video-making course in the evening at the local council-run adult education college, naively thinking that a film director might be a decent alternate career for me, but I could never find time outside office hours to realise my ambitious projects. It would be several years before I’d find myself swapping a commuter train platform in South London for one in South Tokyo, and I still had an exasperating 2-year stint in Amsterdam to get through first. But Shall We Dance? was the title that made me bite the bullet and get off my arse to go and do something more interesting with my life, regardless of what my peers thought. It was truly an inspiration, and a great deal of fun to boot.

Jasper Sharp is the co-founder, along with Tom Mes, of Midnighteye.com, the premier website for news and information on Japanese cinema. Along with his duties at Midnight Eye he is the curator of the Japanese programme at the Raindance Film Festival in the United Kingdom and an author whose books include The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film (co-authored with Tom Mes) and an upcoming book “Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema” to be published by Fab Press this June.