Friendo to HE: “When are you planning to engage with Tokyo Vice?”
HE to friendo: “I tried but couldn’t get past episode #1. I didn’t ‘dislike’ it but I found it chilly, and the characters curt and brusque. And yet I believed it. It feels authentic. It emphasizes what a grueling ordeal it is for a young American to understand and merge with Tokyo culture and gain admittance to a top-tier Tokyo newspaper in the ‘90s.
“My basic reaction was ‘yes, this is interesting and obviously exotic and the narrative is necessarily complex and labrynthian, but do I really want to be here?’ The honest answer was ‘not really.’
“I’ll keep trying with subsequent episodes but so far I’m feeling conflicted, to put it mildly.
“I thought Ansel Elgort’s performance as Jake Adelstein, the real-life reporter whose same-titled book is the basis of this limited series, was fine. I believed him, felt good about his company.
“I really liked the pretty Anglo blonde (Rachel Keller) he talks to in the bar but then he can’t afford her. But all those cold faces, those scowling and disapproving faces, that sullen feeling of gradually becoming a part of a complex, shut-off culture but at what cost? It feels like a place for suppression and stifling, almost a form of hell.
“Have you ever been to Tokyo? I spent 36 hours there in 2012, did some walking around, sampled some of the food, etc.. Absurd as this sounds, I found it boring and even numbing, certainly from an architectural perspective. Huge and sprawling and lemme-outta-here. Many different neighborhoods and districts. But destroyed during WWII and very little sense of history remains. Has the same kind of urban corporate personality as Seoul or Shanghai or Dubai or Atlanta.
