00:00Tonight on Imagine, we meet one of Japan's funniest performers.
00:05Good evening, Australian people.
00:09I am focusing on, do you know?
00:14Path the mother dragon, do you know?
00:18Live by the sea, do you know?
00:21Old, old song, I sing for you.
00:27Good evening.
00:30While Australian audiences are familiar with Britain's Rowan Atkinson
00:55or America's Steve Martin, very little is known about their Asian counterparts.
00:59One of Japan's greats is Ize Ogata
01:02and his fans spread right across the country.
01:05This is 89.4 FM Alpha Station coming to you from our Kitayama Studios here in Kyoto
01:10and a very sunny and beautiful day it is too.
01:13I'm Duncan Hamilton and I'll be here with you for the next little while
01:16and here is a little survey that caught my eye this morning.
01:19It's from the Japanese Frozen Food Association who asked the following question to their Japanese customers.
01:26It was what would you most like to freeze?
01:29Women said things like love, happiness, friendship and beauty.
01:35And men said beer, ramen noodles, whale meat.
01:41Duncan, you're an Irishman living in Kyoto doing the work of a Japanese comedian. Why?
01:47Well, I've been living in Japan for about nine years doing various work like this, you know, working as a DJ etc.
01:54And I became interested in Ize Ogata who's probably one of Japan's most well known comedians stroke actors.
02:05So we decided to try and make his humor more accessible to the outside world.
02:12And we began that by doing tests with foreign audiences to see if his humor would work in English.
02:18So he performed and I do the translation, the simultaneous translation in people's ears.
02:24Seemed to work very well and since then we've taken him out to, you know, New York and Paris and Berlin and places like that.
02:35Ize's brand of humor is very subtle, very dark and, you know, very unusual.
02:55So there's nobody like him in Japan.
02:57He's known in Japan as the man with 300 faces or something like that.
03:03He has hundreds of characters, salesmen, barmen.
03:09He concentrates on the horribly normal.
03:12So he picks, if possible, absolutely normal Japanese people.
03:16And he looks at the gap between how those people view themselves and how society views them.
03:23Ize's kind of a huge part of the human being.
03:30The human being is kind of a bad act.
03:33In the end, he is a bit of a bad act.
03:36He's a little bit of a bad act.
03:37He's a little bit of a bad act.
03:40The human being is kind of a bad act.
03:42He's kind of one of the things that I want to live in Japan.
03:44I'm happy to live and live.
03:46It's a movie that the viewers want to be able to give a hand to love.
03:52I'm happy to have a reply.
04:14a new scientifically proven religion from Guatemala.
04:19How did you feel when it was first suggested that Duncan perform your pieces?
04:44And I said, it's your bloody fault. I can't get an erection.
04:53So I rushed around a garden and I gathered up seven of Neville's gnomes.
04:58I don't obviously play a Japanese character when I start when I do the pieces.
05:03What I do is I change that to an English character in an English setting.
05:09The idea being that the humor anyway or the type of person is universal.
05:13And that's the reason I can stand there in such a place talking to you like this.
05:19Are comparisons made between the two?
05:22Well, I mean, Duncan says, like, you can't copy genius.
05:25And he sees Issei as a genius, so he wouldn't probably want to compare the two.
05:31But it's just fascinating for the Japanese side to see their work and their ideas put into a context.
05:37And I think Issei really shows the humanity of the Japanese
05:41as opposed to this stereotypical image they have.
05:45You've also been described to me as being a genius.
05:49How comfortable do you feel with that title?
05:51I think that I will see the future of the Japanese character in a new movie.
05:54I think I was like, you know, if I'm a genius, I wouldn't have thought of that.
05:59I'm not sure.
06:03I'm still making this movie.
06:05the thing about Issei is you know he's an actor you know in Japan he's not even
06:11referred to as a comedian these are very carefully crafted pieces of theatre
06:16in a way it's serious comedy he's so determined to be truthful bit too close
06:26to the bone for many Japanese we'll do a piece called the car park which is one
06:31of Issei's most famous pieces there's a salesman under pressure of work he's in
06:35a car park and he's waiting for a client to turn up and while he's in the car park
06:40he loses his memory
06:43have I caught amnesia why me I've struggled hard I have
06:57is my life gonna cut off here in a place like this
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