Tokyo Vice follows the story of journalist Jake Adelstein, who, after studying in Japan and spending much free time mastering Japanese, became so proficient he was the first non-Japanese staff writer at a prominent Japanese newspaper. That means Ansel Elgort, who plays Jake, had a lot of work ahead of him to prepare.
Living and working in Japan as a foreigner can come with a variety of challenges—I know, I am one. One of the biggest is the language. For native-English speakers, Japanese is one of the hardest languages to learn given that its grammatical structure is so different from English and there is not one, not two, but three alphabets. For many, unless you take classes and dedicate large chunks of their time to learning Japanese, or are just naturally gifted at languages (do I envy those people), learning Japanese can be a long and grueling process.
Taking on a role that demands a high proficiency in Japanese is extremely tough, but that’s exactly what Elgort did. To prepare for the high demands of communicating in Japanese with his Japanese co-stars such as Ken Watanabe, Hideaki Itō, and Shô Kasamatsu, Elgort reportedly studied Japanese four hours a day every day for four weeks.
Speaking to Malay Mail, Elgort stated, “I wanted to get to the point where I felt comfortable being able to improvise in Japanese because it’s freeing.” Simply learning how to say the words was not enough. Elgort added, “Initially when I was just learning the lines phonetically, you felt kind of like okay well, I can only say them one way now? Are we going to do one take or something? Where’s the range going to come from?”
It isn’t just learning the words, the Japanese language is also about how you say them, with intonation often being very important. Elgort worked hard to make sure he understood the language so that the audience too could believe his performance. As an executive producer on the series, Elgort sometimes pushed to do certain scenes entirely in Japanese. In the end, some scenes were shot in Japanese and English and then spliced together in editing.
Co-star and fellow executive producer Ken Watanabe also wanted to ensure that the Japanese felt authentic and faithful, even if it meant not using it at all and reverting to English. Watanabe told Malay Mail that in some scenes, “Ansel tried speaking Japanese but I couldn’t hear it and we tried going back to English. It was an honest relationship but he’s so hardworking.”
Tokyo Vice is a beautiful show that works to portray an accurate image of what it was like to live and work in Japan during that time. Getting the language down is a huge part of that and the fact that Elgort committed himself to it shows true dedication. I now get to watch and feel guilty that my own Japanese isn’t as fluent, though if someone paid me to sit four hours a day for weeks on end I can only hope I’d improve!
(featured image: HBO Max)
