Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [20]
In a bookstore, I saw a book called Tsuburaya Noboru Urutoraman Wo Kataru—“Noboru Tsuburaya Talks about Ultraman”—by the president and CEO of Tsuburaya Productions, the company that made Ultraman, and the son of the late Eiji Tsuburaya who’d created the original Godzilla. Obviously, despite the fact that the book had absolutely no pictures of gigantic half-crab/half-alligator beasts walloping Tokyo Tower or huge spacemen shooting laserbeams from their fingertips, I had to buy it. In fact, it had no pictures at all save for the one of Noboru himself on the back flap (it turns out he looks like a Japanese man, by the way), and yet I was determined to read this thing, pictures or no.
And I actually did read about a third of it. And of that third I probably understood about an eighth. Still, one thing was very clear: Noboru Tsuburaya had dreams of Ultraman one day cracking the U.S. market and getting as big in America as he was in Japan. And believe you me, Ultraman is very big in Japan. His expressionless face adorns everything from key chains to golf-club covers to condoms (the packages, not the actual condoms—that would be a little weird). With virtually no sales outside of Asia, Ultraman still earned enough licensing revenue in the 1980s to make him the third top-selling licensed character in the world right behind Mickey Mouse™ and Charlie Brown.™ And who on Earth would be better to sell Ultraman to the Americans than me? Nobody, dammit. Obviously.
So I decided I’d write Noboru Tsuburaya a letter and tell him so. My girlfriend Yuka (who is now my wife) kindly fixed all the grammatical mistakes and showed me how to type it out on the Japanese word processor at my school. Off the letter went. I waited and waited (and waited) and no reply came.
So I decided to write again.
Why not? Stamps were cheap and my job was pretty boring. This time I made it more clear that I was just exactly the kind of guy he needed to help realize his dreams of “making Ultraman fly over America.” From the book, I could tell the guy was a bit of an egomaniac—so I laid the praise on with a trowel. I didn’t lie though; I really was genuinely impressed by him, and especially by his father, and their work had deeply touched me and utterly transformed my life giving me meaning where before there was none. Okay, maybe I exaggerated that last bit a little.
A while later I came home one afternoon after a day of shouting over gossiping kids to find my answering machine blinking. I pressed the button figuring it’d be one of the members of My Niece’s Foot, the expat band I’d joined in Japan, trying to schedule a rehearsal for a gig or a trip to the local bar. But no: on my answering machine was the voice of The Man Himself, Noboru Tsuburaya. Noboru Tsuburaya! On my answering machine! I peeled myself off the floor and pushed shut my slack jaw. I played that message back about thirty times to make sure I’d heard him right. Was he actually asking me to call his secretary to set up a time for a job interview? A job interview? I made Yuka come over and listen to make sure. Yep, she said. That was exactly what he was saying.
So I went to Tokyo and had the interview. I got the tour. I even got to meet Ultraman himself (or at least a guy trying on a newly repaired Ultraman costume). And it was all I had ever imagined!
Soon after I got back from the interview in Tokyo (where I actually got to walk around in that attic full of monsters I’d seen in my Ohio dreams), I got a call telling me that not only was I hired but my salary would be about 20 percent more than the already inflated (to my mind) salary I’d asked for. Furthermore, the company would pay for half my rent in whatever apartment I chose in Tokyo. Good googly-moogly! What more could any human being possibly want?
For me this was like winning the lottery after being elected emperor of the whole wide world and the