Being an Extra in Japan

Being an extra in Japan

Imagine you were living in Japan and had to wake up at 3:00 a.m. and headed to Togetsukyo Bridge in Arashiyama for a commercial shoot. You may have been told it was for a "TV commercial". This would be drastically incomplete information in any other workplace, but for these kind of jobs it is significantly more information than you usually get. 

When you arrive the sky is probably dark and you'll have to wait with the other extras, two of you western, another eight Japanese, for around three hours or so while the crew set up a shot of a girl on the bridge. She is holding a phone in a prominent position, but it's an older clamshell phone of the type that was popular in Japan until the iPhone came along and dragged the country kicking and katana-slashing into the 21st century. It's a cold morning and the girl is being made to stand there for hours. 

She's tall, but she doesn't have the kind of look that is typical on Japanese TV commercials. Sure, you reason, if this girl was the star of the commercial, she wouldn't be made to stand there for that long. Actors and actresses are an extremely pampered breed in Japan. This girl's taking it in her stride. No, this doesn't add up. You'll need to do some sleuthing.

Clearly, the girl on the bridge is a stand-in. It is reasonable, therefore, to assume that the phone is too, and that this commercial was probably for a smartphone. There are a seemingly infinite flood of iPhone wannabes coming from NTT Docomo, a service provider that is well-known in Japan. They usually get the look of the phone right, but still haven't figured out that its the Apple app/iCloud ecosystem that's the key, not the handset. You are Sherlocking your way closer to an answer as to what it is you are doing and why.

This is the only way to get any information on a film set in Japan. To use an already overused Japanese marketing cliche, you've got to be "Robert Downey Jr X Benedict Cumberbatch".

A crew member walks by with a shot list in his hand on which you can barely make out the letters NTT. A tall actress carrying a smartphone appears and replaces her stand-in on the bridge. Elementary, dear gaijin.

After conducting some conspiratorial interviews with some of the crew members you might pick up some extra info. The star of the commercial is tall and striking, quite young, but not yet famous. She is, you may learn, up and coming. In Japanese these girl are called "tamago" or "eggs". The idea is that they will one day hatch into fully-fledged actresses.

Girls like this are groomed by agencies from a young age. Fame in Japan is a conveyer belt in Japan. A belt you need to climb onto at a young age. If you're willing to let yourself be carried through life on that belt, you'll be fine. A cursory glance at the celebrity news, however, will tell you that you need to remember you're the product, not the producer, if you want to avoid acrimony and lawsuits.

You feel sorry for the girl. She's already being treated like a princess. When everyone on the crew is here to light, powder, shoot and support you, it's easy to start to believe you are something special. I shot a commercial in Australia last year. The shoot lasted two weeks, throughout which time I was put up in a palatial apartment in Sydney and treated like a pampered, Persian prince. I got used to it all too quickly. Dangerously quickly. 

The girl in this NTT commercial lives her life like that. Its inevitable that she'll start to see herself, if she hasn't already, as the center of the known universe. High maintenance does not sufficiently describe a person who has stepped through to that side of the looking glass. This girl's boyfriend is going to have to outdo a team full of production assistants and runners to keep this girl in the manner to which she is accustomed. If anything is ever less that perfect in this girl's life, a flood of "first world pain" tweets is likely to pour forth from her glossy mouth. It's probably going to be a few years before she starts getting some perspective and remembers that most people who have ever lived probably spent much of their lives hungry and desperate.

By the time the sun comes up and 7:00 a.m. has rolled around the shot is done and the crew are packing up. You are told to get the bus back to central Kyoto. It turns out we aren't needed in Arashiyama and you'll be getting a bus back to your apartment. 

Sometimes life has you leave your house at 3:30 a.m. and makes you get a taxi at a cost of ¥2500 to Arashiyama, where you spend hours in the cold for absolutely no reason before returning back to where you came from a shoot that will eventually take place 6 hours after you woke up. At those times you just have to repeat this mantra: #firstworldpain

If being paid to go to Arashiyama and watch the sun rise is the worst of your problems, your life is probably better than most humans who ever moonwalked the face of this tiny ball of rock.

You are asked to meet back at the small park on Pontocho at 8:00 a.m. When the tiredness kicks in you may feel that elemental, visceral voice deep within your soul that calls for Starbucks. You head to the Bux near Yasaka Jinja on Shijo Street and find that it's shut until 8:00 a.m. Oh hashtag first world pain! Why have you forsaken me!

You head back to a Doutour near Pontocho. iPhone is to Starbucks as NTT Docomo phones are to Doutour. You don't mind the walk because Kyoto's a beautiful city at this hour. On the way you may be lucky enough to pass a blue heron on the river, a hawk circling the rooftops or a bum, with his pants around his ankles, being asked by a policeman not to shit in front of the Minamiza Theatre. 

You down your coffee and head to Pontocho to rejoin the rest of the crew. When you get there they are still setting up the shot. Experience tells you they'll be doing so for another hour or so. Like clockwork at 9:00 a.m. you are called to the alley to take up positions. The director likes the cut of your jib and asks you to take up a position near the camera. The star of the commercial is to walk out of focus, you are told, and you are to walk into it. This takes you by surprise somewhat. The look on Little Miss Black Hole's face? You know, that look as if you'd just put soy sauce on rice or walked onto tatami flooring wearing your boots? Well that look says she's as surprised as you are. 

Most of the other extras are asked to walk away from the camera. In some countries the shame of only being shot from behind might lead to some bitching, but in Japan extras tend to take it on the chin. Gaijin usually pull focus because of their novelty. Their Japanese counterparts are either extremely understanding of this fact of life and take it with grace, or they keep their complaints very quiet. Your agent tells you foreigners tend to get paid more too. There are parts of society that deliberately exclude non-Japanese people, but of course there are perks too.

Shooting in areas with a lot of foot traffic like Togetsukyo and Pontocho gets progressively more difficult as time goes on. By the time you finally start shooting the foot traffic is getting dense, delivery men are going in and out of restaurants and bars, beer kegs are being wheeled up and down the road. 

Being a straight alley it takes a good minute for a man pushing a trolley to get out of shot (first world pain) but patience and perseverance pays off. You are asked to walk a little down the alley, take a photo of a lantern and then walk into focus. When you check your camera later you find 27 photos of that lantern on your camera. It's possible that you know that lantern better than you know any other corner of this magical city.

Another idiosyncrasy of doing TV work in Japan, as well as not being told what you are doing in general, is that you are seldom told what you are to do in detail either. Before each shot the assistant director shouts "honban" ("the real thing", "not a rehearsal") and everyone springs into action. The director invariably doesn't like the take much and wants to do it again, but he won't tell anyone why. He's like Steve Jobs: he'll know it when he sees it.

So you do it again and again and eventually all the extras and the princess do their thang in a way that tickles the director's fancy, so he calls it a wrap. It's 10:00 a.m. and your first job is done. If you can resist the call of your futon for the time it takes you to get through today's remaining five jobs, you can put this day in the win column.