Hollywood Story:
One Filmmaker's Journey from NHK to the Silver Screen

- Is it true that you wanted to grow up to be a professional baseball player as a child?

Yes, I can trace my dreams of becoming a baseball player back to the retirement ceremony of Shigeo Nagashima, the Tokyo Giants' superstar third-baseman. I remember when he turned to the fans and said those famous words: "The Giants are forever!" I thought he was the coolest person on earth. I decided that I just had to play baseball, so I joined a local youth team and became obsessed. I never missed a beat running five kilometers every morning.

But when I reached junior high school, I realized that I didn't have the talent to go pro [laughs], and I eventually had to give up baseball in high school due to a knee injury caused by all the intense training I did. I lived alone in Morioka during high school after my father was transferred for work, but I couldn't focus on my studies, so to pass the time, I would go to the local movie theater district in Morioka and watch European films. So, of course, my grades plummeted. While in high school, I took the entrance exam for a national university but failed miserably on the mathematics and classical Japanese portions. Even now, when I'm stuck on something at work, I have nightmares about not being able to solve problems on a math exam. [laughs]

- So, after failing the entrance exam and studying for another year, you got into the Faculty of Law at Keio University.

I became interested in different social issues in junior high, so I wanted to become a lawyer to fight for social justice. In fact, my first choice was Waseda University because I admired its rough-and-tumble image. But I decided to go to Keio after I was late for my admissions interview, which might not make much sense. On the day of the interview, I overslept and arrived at Mita Campus just in time to find out that the interview was actually at Hiyoshi. [laughs] Frantic and dreadfully late, I hurried to Hiyoshi, wherethey let me into the interview. I thought to myself, "The folks at Keio sure are generous." [laughs] Of course, at the time, I assumed I had failed miserably, only to find out later that I had passed. When I talked to my father about it, he told me that I seemed to have better luck with Keio than with Waseda. I agreed and decided to enroll.

At university, I started preparing for the bar exam. It was the height of the bubble economy, so all of the students, myself included, were going to campus dressed up in the street fashions of the "DC brands" boom. Eventually, my studying for the bar exam came to a standstill. In the precedents we were reading, the names of the parties to the case were all replaced by arbitrary letters like "A, B, C." There was nothing human there. Without the name or age of the person, like "Otomo, Age 55," for instance, it's hard to imagine the context around the case. That's when I realized that I'm an irrational person and probably shouldn't be a lawyer, so I gave up on the bar exam once and for all and went back to watching movies. At the Faculty of Law, I settled on "International Law" as my seminar. Specifically, I researched the international rules on space debris like satellites, which was interesting as a contemporary issue with progressive space exploration. I also enjoyed the fact that there was no easy, cut-and-dried solution. I guess I was never cut out to be a lawyer. [laughs]

- How did you go about finding a job?

Actually, I thought about going back to school at the Faculty of Letters in my senior year. I would have been allowed to start as a third-year student since I already had my bachelor's degree. I wanted to go on to graduate school and become a literary researcher. But when all of my peers started job hunting, I got caught up in the momentum and began visiting companies for some reason. I suppose it was fascinating to hear the stories of Keio alumni in various industries, and I ended up calling on more than 50 companies. Among them, I was particularly interested in the media and advertising industry, so I figured I would take the NHK entrance exam as practice. I was still going to graduate school, after all. In the interview, I talked about my love for Kumagusu Minakata and Leonardo da Vinci, as well as my thoughts on the role of the "senses" in the visual age. I remember talking about an NHK special I had seen on the phenomenon of "phantom limbs," in which soldiers who have lost their legs on the battlefield feel an itch in their nonexistent toe. The interviewer was very interested in what I had to say, and we hit it off. It was there that I felt a connection with the company, and it solidified my desire to work at NHK.

Keishi Otomo
Film Director

Otomo graduated from Keio University's Department of Law in the Faculty of Law in 1990. The same year, he joined NHK and was posted to the Akita Broadcasting Station, where he was in charge of news, sports, entertainment, and documentary programs. He transferred to the NHK Drama Programs Division in 1994. In 1997, he went to Hollywood, where he spent two years learning the latest film techniques. Upon returning to Japan, he directed the NHK TV series Churasan, The Vulture, Shirasu Jiro, and the historical drama Ryomaden before going independent in 2011. As a film director, he has produced several acclaimed works, including the Rurouni Kenshin series, Platinum Data, March Comes in Like a Lion, and Eiri, set in his hometown of Iwate.