Japan: A Story of Love and Hate

BBC Four's Japanese season is proving that there are right and wrong ways to scrutinise a thus supposedly inscrutable nation. Two weeks ago Marcel Theroux showed us the wrong way, bouncing off in wide-eyed search of the spiritual concept of Wabi Sabi and coming back with the news that it was all very Japanese and unknowable.

And last night Sean McAllister showed us the right way in Japan: A Story of Love and Hate. After, he said, two years trying and failing to prise open Japan's “sliding door”, he gave up on Tokyo and moved to a small town 300 miles north. There he came across an eccentric called Naoki Sato. There is, we were told, a local saying that “the nail that stands out most must be hammered down”. Naoki Sato, a part- time post office worker with a Beatles haircut, was that outstanding nail, and how he had been hammered! A former Maoist revolutionary, he had enthusiastically taken up capitalism in his thirties and owned two companies, a bar and a BMW. In 1992, however, the economy crashed and Naoki became one of Japan's “new” or, as he put it, “usual” poor. Now 56, he lived in a tiny windowless room, his only break from the housework the seven hours a day that he spent collecting insurance premiums for the post office.

To add to Naoki's problems, he was three-times divorced, had rowed terminally with his family, and was now living with Yoshie, a much younger woman, whose night job was to talk to lonely businessmen who did not know how to converse. I suppose you could say that Yoshie sold oral sex. But she and Naoki no longer talked themselves.All you could guess from her tabula rasa face was that she despised him (and you would guess wrong).

What was splendid about Naoki was that this instinctive dissident in a congenitally conformist society had an albeit mordant sense of humour. Everywhere he took us, tragedy and comedy jostled for the foreground. In his office, daily workouts were complemented by comical ritual bollockings and communal chanting (“slow driving, slow driving, don't hit pedestrians”) - but his sleepy-eyed colleague in the pullover was so full of narcotics, Naoki explained, that some days he did not wake up in the morning. Naoki had a friend called Mr Mushroom Man because he obsessively picked wild mushrooms. But Mushroom Man also had his tale. His brother, crushed by a business culture of bullying, was among the 30,000 Japanese who kill themselves each year.

This microcosm of a repressed, over-medicated, economically blasted society was unexpectedly relieved by the film-maker himself, when McAllister cajoled Naoki to visit his girlfriend's father, something he had been ashamed to do because they were exactly the same age. McAllister, however, had had intimate conversations with both men and saw a chance for them to connect over a shared gift of Viagra. At first this peace offering looked like a shocking breach of etiquette, but the gesture opened things no end. Yoshie's father turned out to be as much a believer in openness as his daughter's impotent boyfriend. Suddenly Naoki had a family again. The film produced a true and unexpected insight. Instead of going to Japan to look for answers, the West might credit itself with having worked out, in the past few decades, some of its own.

The Wire

You really don't want to get me started yet again on the excellence of The Wire which, seven years after it began on HBO in America, last night turned up on BBC Two in the post-Newsnight slot (well not so much a slot as a burial place). And yet here I go.

Rewatching the first episode, I marvelled at how cleverly its themes were adumbrated from the start. There was the initial conversation between the cop McNulty (below) and his contact before the corpse of a minor thief indelibly called Snotboogie: in the Baltimore projects one misdemeanour, even if it is a running nose, defines you for life. Then came the twin reassignments imposed on McNulty and the young gangster Dee: within any prevailing power system, it is the lack of individual agency that breeds despair. But most conspicuous of all was the insistence that although the Barksdale gang were killing at the rate of one a month, no one in the police cared - or even knew - because the murders happened on the wrong side of town. McNulty, unsure of his motives, decides he will make his superiors care. Surer of his own, The Wire's creator David Simon ensures that by brilliant characterisation, coruscating dialogue and a fidelity to what he sees as the truth, his audience does too.

Lord Reith, who would have hated it, might have coined his phrase “inform, educate and entertain” for The Wire.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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