With the new
Star Trek movie
Star Trek Into Darkness scheduled for release in the ’States in May (but not till August here in Japan), I thought it timely to flick back to a spot of “research” I did prior to the screening of J. J. Abrams’ first reboot of the franchise in 2009.
Research telling me, at least by May four years ago, that only one in seven citizens of Japan had heard of
Star Trek.
I knew this then because I finished personally quizzing 60-odd people.
The margin of error was (and still is) completely open to contention, since I interviewed people only in Tokyo, my test subjects were limited to anime production staff, students of English, techno DJs and musicians, and the ages stretched from 15 to 72.
I’ve since had arguments with a bunch of people, all foreigners, who contest the findings (well, they've argued and I've thrown up my arms in surrender), but they have yet to do similar research and I guess mine still stands up okay.
Apparently there was a
Star Trek boom in Japan in the ’70s — the evidence is there in online artwork and blogs — but either most people forgot by 2009, or I picked the wrong target audience.
The one-in-seven figure was itself a stretch, since two inclusions in the ‘yes’ category confused
Star Trek for
Star Wars. One time, when I asked the ongoing main question (“Have you heard of
Star Trek?”) my tipping-the-scales 72-year-old English student Hashimito-san declared “Of course!” — and thence proceeded to enact a spritely air-lightsaber cut-and-thrust routine.
It isn’t as if Japanese television consumption has been limited to only
jidaigeki samurai dramas, or home-grown animated sci-fi romps like
Mobile Suit Gundam.
Most of the 28 to 48 age-bracket grew up on Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s British-made futurist marionette romp,
Thunderbirds, which broadcast here from the 1970s to as recently as 2001.
When I arrived in this country twelve years ago,
Thunderbirds was still playing on NHK at primetime Sunday evenings.
The week I sneaked through Customs, it was the turn of the episode ‘
Cry Wolf’, set in Australia; for about an hour after, I had to explain to my Japanese hosts precisely why someone fresh off the boat from Melbourne didn’t sound like the outback butchers of pronunciation
Thunderbirds had portrayed.
Then there’s the George Lucas factor.
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