As a follow-up to my post about gorgeous gals I’d like to go out with if only Mrs M would let me, and as promised, it’s time for a counter-list of studly Japanese fellas.
Except it’s not. I asked Mrs M to tell me which of her countrymen she’d most like to be wined and dined by, and she said that, to be honest, there were barely enough to count on the fingers of, er, one finger. So instead, I have decided to disregard looks (almost) altogether, and give you a list of chaps who while they aren’t necessarily handsome, may be attractive to the opposite sex for other reasons – for example, they’re good at sport, or they’re funny, or they have managed to become famous despite the rather obvious handicap of coming from Ibaraki.
So without further ado:
1) Takashi Okamura
Okamura is one of the four or five most famous comedians – in fact, possibly one of the four or five most famous people – in Japan, and turned his diminutive stature (he is just 156cm / 5’1″ tall) to his advantage by playing the boké (fall guy) to his sidekick Hiroyuki Yabé’s tsukkomi (straight man). As Ninety-Nine (it is an unwritten rule for Japanese comedy duos to have an English name, other examples being Downtown, Black Mayonnaise, Peace and Un-Girls), the two began fronting a phenomenally successful show called Mecha x 2 Iketeru in the the mid-90s, which specialises in crazy stunts and Candid Camera-style pranks.
As well as a physical toll – at one point Okamura broke his shoulder during filming – the pressures of fame took a mental one, too, and in 2010 Okamura was admitted to hospital suffering from nervous exhaustion. In the cut-throat world of Japanese TV, if a celebrity disappears from view there is a very good chance they will never reappear, but Okamura is so well loved that after five months off he was welcomed back into the TV fold with open arms.
My current favourite show of his is the Omiai Daisakusen spin-off from Moté Moté 99, which isn’t really comedy at all, and involves a group of single women travelling to some far-flung corner of the Japanese archipelago to meet a group of single men and hopefully find their soulmates (rather like Blind Date back in the day, Moté Moté recently witnessed its first marriage). The ironic thing is that despite presiding over so much matchmaking, Okamura himself is, famously, still single, and recently backed out of a relationship with a woman he had been fixed up with in a different segment of the same show.
2) Yuki Ohtsu
Like most footballers, Yuki Ohtsu appears to spend more time perfecting his hairstyle than he does perfecting his ball skills (although having said that, he uses nowhere near as much peroxide as his more renowned countryman Keisuké Honda, pictured here).
Ohtsu’s nickname is charao, which means ‘flash guy’, but gets an inclusion on this list because a) he comes from Mito, and b) while representing his country at the London Olympics, he scored three goals, including a spectacular long-range effort against Mexico, and a less spectacular but more important short-range effort against Spain.
3) Watanabé ‘Helmut’ Naomichi
Watanabé was working as a director for TBS Television when he was chosen to take part in a reality-style segment of the otherwise unremarkable show Nakai Masahiro No Kinyohbi No Suma-Tachi (or Kinsuma for short). After four summers trying to turn a profit in a beach-front café (a feat that he eventually managed in 2006), Watanabé – possibly voluntarily, possibly against his will – moved to the wilds of Ibaraki to try his hand at being a farmer. He was so well suited to the task that five and a half years later he is still there, and currently putting the finishing touches to a new house, into which his parents will soon be moving from their present home in Amami Ohshima, an island off the south-west coast of Kyushu.
Obviously Watanabé is being paid by TBS for his Hitori-Noh-gyo (ひとり農業 / One-man Farming) spot on Kinsuma, and lives with a small production team on the farm, but his softly spoken, undemonstrative manner is quite unlike that of the celebrity types who occasionally drop by to help out with rice planting, crop picking and so on.
(He’s the one on the right in this photo, by the way.)
Particularly in an era when the pervading trend is to move away from the countryside (for the first time in human history, over half of the world’s population now lives in cities), Watanabé is setting an admirable example of how to live a life of comparative self-sufficiency. While he is always trying his hand at new tasks – beekeeping, solar power, making charcoal etc – at forty years old, and particularly now that he is settled in Ibaraki, what the viewing public really wants is for Watanabé to find romance…
4) Kohei Uchimura
Forget personality, muscles are where it’s at, and no one in Japan has better defined pecs than Kohei Uchimura, who won the combined gymnastics gold medal at London 2012.
Uchimura’s parents run a gymnastics school, and while they did of course encourage their son to become a gymnast pretty much from the moment he could stand up, he turned out to have a unique and instinctive talent for the sport.
For an NHK documentary broadcast just before the Olympics, Uchimura’s abilities were tested in various different ways and compared to other top gymnasts: for example, when blindfolded, he can tell to within a degree or two how far his body is from vertical, and even as he is performing multiple, spinning somersaults above the floor or the wooden horse, his eyes are open and he is aware of exactly where he is in relation to his surroundings – the spectators, the lights on the ceiling of the hall, and the apparatus itself.
Don’t get your hopes up, though, because as I was writing this blog post, Uchimura announced in quick succession that he a) had got married and b) is to become a father, a coincidence that is known in Japanese as dekichatta kekkon (出来ちゃった結婚 / a shotgun wedding).
5) Sanma Akashiya
Sanma – real name Takafumi Sugimoto – is one of those people born with two or three times the energy and enthusiasm of an ordinary mortal. If he ever sleeps, I can’t imagine it is for that long, and his waking hours are a whirl of presenting, socialising, joking and laughing (particularly the latter).
When I first started watching Sanma, I thought that maybe he was just playing up for the camera, but his enthusiasm is infectious, and more importantly, it is underpinned with genuine comic talent.
As the host of numerous TV shows, he invariably manages to be the funniest person in the studio, and many is the time his co-stars will applaud a well-placed one-liner. More importantly, he manages to avoid being self-righteous or sentimental, a trap into which many of his contemporaries fall all too easily, and the main reason I like his show Honma Dekka is that if there is even the slightest hint of someone taking themselves seriously, Sanma will immediately step in with a put-down or comic aside.
6) Yuki Saito
I am still largely ignorant of baseball, but one player who is worth mentioning for his clean-cut good looks and gentlemanly behaviour is Yuki Saito, who broke numerous records as a star pitcher for Waséda High School and Waséda University.
Even while pitching his way through a sweltering summer’s afternoon, rather than using his sleeve, Saito would mop his brow with a blue handkerchief, a habit that earned him the nickname hankachi ohshi – the handkerchief prince – and which caused sales of blue handkerchiefs to sky-rocket.
Another incident that has entered baseball folklore occurred at the end of a press conference, when Saito not only tidied his own chair beneath the table, but that of his coach as well. Not something you will see John Terry or Ashley Cole do, for example, and while Saito’s record since turning professional has thus far failed to live up to expectations, his status as a housewives’ favourite comes with a lifetime guarantee.
7) Kenta Nishimura
If you’re after honesty in a man, look no further than writer Kenta Nishimura, winner of the 2010 Akutagawa Prize for his novel Kuéki Ressha (苦役列車 / literally, Hard Toil, Ordinary Train).
At a press conference after the announcement, Nishimura turned up in a check shirt and shorts, and proceeded to charm the assembled journalists with his unpretentious manner. When asked what he was doing when he heard about the prize, he said that he was at home and had been thinking of going to a brothel.
‘Lucky I didn’t, isn’t it?’ he said, and went on to describe his utterly unglamorous lifestyle, confessing that he doesn’t have any friends and doesn’t even talk to anyone on a regular basis. Nishimura never went to high school, managed to acquire a criminal record between various dead-end jobs, and while he certainly doesn’t have Saito’s looks or Okamura’s earning power, anyone this self-effacing deserves a fighting chance with the opposite sex (conversely, I wonder whether he hasn’t been flooded with offers of marriage since finding fame).
8) Akihiro Yamaguchi
I was going to include four-time Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer Kohsuké Kitajima on this list, in particular for his post-race interview after the 100m breaststroke final at Athens 2004, during which he said words to the effect of ‘That was really wicked. I’ve properly got goosebumps.’ (ちょう気持ちいい。鳥肌ものです。). In terms of Japanese swimming, though, the future lies with Akihiro Yamaguchi.
Yamaguchi failed to make the Japanese team for London 2012, but not long after it was over he set a new world record in Kitajima’s other specialist event, the 200m breaststroke. Not only was the record set at a minor swimming meeting in an outdoor pool, but Yamaguchi is still a high school student, and at the time had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday.
Look out for Yamaguchi at Rio 2016, and in the meantime, here is a picture of him in his swimming trunks.
9) Takeshi Kitano
Kitano is one of the most famous comedian-stroke-presenters in Japan, and like Sanma, can be seen on prime-time TV several times a week. The really unique thing about him, though, is his ability as a film director.
Not many people in Japan have even seen them, but films like Sonatine (ソナチネ in Japanese), Zatoichi, Hana-bi, Brother and Kikujiro are almost in a genre of their own. You might describe them as philosophical gangster comedies, in that they combine dead-pan humour with extreme violence and occasional meditations on the meaning of life, and you can clearly see their influence in the early work of Quentin Tarantino – ie. two parts gangsters-in-suits-hanging-out-and-telling-jokes to one part graphically bloody violence.
In fact, Kitano was once involved in a life-imitating-art gangster-style kerfuffle, which became known as ‘The Friday Incident’. When a journalist tried to buttonhole Kitano’s university student girlfriend (he was already married at the time, and has allegedly fathered at least one secret love child), he got a gang of buddies together and drove over to the offices of the newspaper where the journalist worked. As well as trashing the place with umbrellas and fire extinguishers, the group beat up several members of staff, and at one point, Kitano was quoted as uttering the immortal words Bucchi-korosu kono yaro! (ぶち殺すぞこのやろう！/ I’ll fucking kill you, you arsehole!).
10) Takahiro Tasaki
It is not unreasonable to suggest that high school girls are the most culturally influential minority in Japan, and when questioned in a recent TV programme – presented, predictably enough, by Sanma – about who is the fittest bloke in Japan, the most popular choice by some distance was Takahiro Tasaki of the R&B vocal / dance group Exile. In fact, one of the girls interviewed for the programme found Takahiro so attractive that the mere thought of him caused her to burst into tears.
It may not surprise you to learn that before winning a ‘vocal battle audition’ to become a member of Exile, Takahiro trained and worked as a hairdresser, and for those of you who are interested in that kind of thing, his vital statistics are as follows:
Birthday: 8th December
Star sign: Sagittarius
Height: 180cm (5’10”)
Blood group: O
Hobbies: karaté, calligraphy
Be warned, however, as Takahiro was born in 1984, which by the Chinese calendar makes him a rat. Hmm…
So that’s it. As always, any suggestions for additions to this top ten of totty will be most welcome, and in the interests of balance, next time round I suppose I should compile a gay and transgender one…