Error #1

Avoid anyplace with sidewalks.

How can I put this delicately? Japan is not the most... dramatic of countries. Step out of a Bedouin tent and you’ll run smack into something utterly exotic and sometimes dangerous and always filmable. Step out of your door in Japan and you see… sidewalks. Nicely dressed people all waiting patiently for the light to change before crossing the street. Literally hundreds of books have been written about the Japanese tea ceremony –every gesture, every glance, every silence is steeped in meaning and history and spirituality. But a three-hour event whose dramatic highlight is remembering to rotate the tea bowl that extra quarter turn before drinking just isn’t very filmable. Finding drama in Japan is like trying to recapture your neighbor’s pet ferret in the back streets of Boston. You ask a lot of people, get plenty of well-meant and horrendously wrong advice, get close enough to grab a few tail hairs once or twice, and end up in some dead end, lost and out of batteries. I got so desperate that I started chatting up any guy that was missing a finger, or had a tattoo peeping out under his shirt collar. I spent days hunting down the Japanese sea gypsies (no, they really DON’T exist anymore) and thought hard about smuggling myself onto a Japanese whaling boat. Japan is the safest country in the world. It’s enough to drive an adventure filmmaker nuts.

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