The story of how Ken Watanabe landed the role of police detective Hiroto Katagiri in the new HBO Max series “Tokyo Vice” isn’t what you’d expect. The Oscar nominee for “The Last Samurai” met the series’ showrunner, J.T. Rogers, after playing the lead role in “The King and I” on Broadway in 2015 (a performance that earned him a Tony Award nomination). That connection led to the part in ‘Vice’ less than five years later, but Watanabe admits he initially thought the concept of “cops versus gangs” was sort of boring.
“But it’s a good point of view,” Watanabe says. “Young newspaper writer from the United States getting underground to meet the gangs and the cops. Oh, it’s good. And then one more thing about the 1990 era was great. Big change of [Japanese] society feelings, and a change of our feeling of people, and analog to digital. And it’s like chaos.”
READ MORE: Japan and no iPhones? Ansel Elgort on what drew him to “Tokyo Vice” [Interview]
Watanabe adds, “And then J.T. Rogers has a great script. Each character has a great, deep background. And then size is like a TV show but the scale is like a movie.”
As Hiroto, Watanabe is a detective with connections to the Yakuza, Japan’s criminal mafia. It’s when an inexperienced American reporter Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) comes on the scene that he realizes he might have found a potential ally in taking the influential gangs.
“At the beginning [my character] didn’t trust him because who are you? What am I doing? And then episode by episode, story by story, taking the time, [I get a] little closer to him and I will teach about the underground,” Watanabe explains. “And how scary about the gangs or some in Japan [can be]. It’s so interesting, the dynamic and relationship with Jake.”
Both Elgort and co-star Rachel Keller, who portrays working hostess Samantha Porter, spent weeks learning Japanese to be able to speak the language fluently in the show. At times, the Japanese characters will speak English while Elgort and Keller communicate in Japanese with English subtitles. Their proficiency was particularly important to one of the show’s executive producers, Alan Poul, who speaks the language and has been visiting the country for almost 50 years.
“I’ve seen a lot of movies where, from our point of view, it looks like the actor is speaking Japanese, but they’re not really doing a good job of it,” Poul notes. “So, Ansel started studying. I got him a teacher in New York and then a brilliant teacher in Tokyo once we relocated. And there is a case where the shutdown for the pandemic really helped because Ansel kept studying. All the time we were shut down, he kept up his Japanese. And so it’s astonishing to hear him speak Japanese, and it’s really good. And when the Japanese people watch him on screen, they can’t believe how good his Japanese sounds.”
Keeping that authenticity wasn’t just limited to shooting on location in Japan. Some of the writers and directors on the show are Japanese or Japanese-American, but specific consultants were also recruited where needed.
“Basically, in the show, there are four worlds that collide, and that’s what makes the show interesting,” Poul says. “There’s the world of the Yakuza, the criminal world, the world of the police, the world of journalism, and then the world of nightlife and the clubs and the hostesses, which is a world that in Japanese, they call Mizu shōbai which we use the Japanese word a lot in the series, which literally means ‘water business’. But it’s similar to that underworld of bars and clubs and where things are not quite on the level. And so we worked very closely with experts in all four of those worlds to make sure that the depiction of each was correct down to the letter, down to the right piece of silverware or a woman picking up a glass the right way to wipe it for the man who she was serving drinks to.”
For Watanabe, the best part of “Vice” isn’t just that it has also been released on a prominent network in Japan, but that he was able to work with Michael Mann. The legendary filmmaker, best known for “Heat” and “Collateral,” directed the pilot episode, establishing the aesthetic tone of the series.
“Best thing in this project is like Michael Mann,” Watanabe says. “Michael Mann wants to try a real, real world. Realism on the set, on camera, acting, wardrobe, props, and the art direction, everything needs to be realistic. Then every part, every department work so hard and a tough work we need. But the first episode has a style, a realism, and then next and next and next is to continue the realistic world in [future] episodes.”
Even with Mann laying a foundation, Poul, Rogers, and the show’s other active producers had a challenge on their hands.
“Part of it is we were shooting during a pandemic. So that ups the level of difficulty for anything,” Poul admits. “And then also the fact that our mission was to create as authentic a picture of late ’90s Japan as possible. And that if the Japanese audience didn’t buy it, if they didn’t think it was authentic, we would feel that we had failed at our jobs. And that just increases the level of difficulty, because you have to be very mindful to a lot of details that might not be immediately apparent to the American viewer. But in the end, I think because we strove so hard for that authenticity, you can feel it in the result. You can feel that it’s real.”
“Tokyo Vice” releases new episodes every Thursday on HBO Max.
