I am shaking hands with one of the five most famous people in Japan. His name is Takuya Kimura.
No, me neither.
Close by, in the same TV studio, designed in a kind of Disney-baronial style with fake stone walls, pastel colors, extravagant floral displays, and stained-glass windows, are the four other most famous people in Japan, known to every schoolchild, parent, and grandparent from Hokkaido to Okinawa. Their names are Masahiro Nakai, Goro Inagaki, Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, and Shingo Katori. Ring any bells?
This was the day after the sumo championship. To a Japanese contact with connections in the TV world I had expressed a vague interest in trying to get to the bottom of the Japanese food show obsession, which—to judge by the sheer volume of programs about food, cooking, restaurants, or food producers—surpasses even that of the British and Americans. According to some estimations, over 40 percent of all Japanese television output can be categorized as “food TV”—whether it is serious programs in search of obscure artisanal producers or the crazy campiness of the world-famous cook-off Iron Chef (sadly no longer in production but still replayed). Certainly, my own empirical research during our first few days in Japan had confirmed that, if you turn on the TV, you will come across something to do with food within two or three clicks of the remote.
My friend had arranged for me to sneak into the studio during the recording of Japan’s most popular TV show of the last decade. I had heard neither of SMAP—for “Sport, Music, Assemble, People”—nor its constituent elements: five former boy band singers, now in their early thirties, turned TV interviewers, cooking show hosts, and actors, but they are, without rival, the biggest TV stars in Japan. Over the last dozen years, these five young men have conquered every entertainment sphere, whether it was J-Pop (Japanese pop music aimed at teenage girls), TV, or, latterly, individual film careers. Along the way, they have amassed unfathomable fortunes; millions of devoted, obsessive fans; and a level of fame that exceeds even that of the Hollywood stars who make sure Bistro SMAP, as their food show is called, is the first stop on their Japanese publicity junkets (recent guests had included Matt Damon, Madonna, Cameron Diaz, and Nicolas Cage). Bistro SMAP is not just the number one food program in Japan; as a segment of the band’s main variety show, SMAP × SMAP, it is the number one TV show in Japan, period, with up to thirty million viewers tuning in most weeks—a position it has held on and off for over ten years. We had already seen the band’s faces around Tokyo promoting the unappealingly named “sports” drink Pocari Sweat on the metro; Japan Airlines, on a four-story billboard beside the Mori Tower; and their latest movies and TV series just about everywhere.
I always think that domestic-only stars reveal far more about a country’s tastes and aspirations than those who go global—like Johnny Hallyday in France or Andrew Dice Clay. So what does SMAP tell us about the Japanese? Most obviously that they like pretty, polite, and apparently wholesome young men who conform to just about every boy band stereotype, right down to their hurt-puppy faces during ballads and Bronx-pimp moves in the rap bits. But SMAP have done more than just polish their Backstreet Boys moves in their bedroom mirrors. Through Bistro SMAP they have done nothing less than overturn centuries-old conventions about who wears the aprons in Japanese households. Thanks to this show and its seven spin-off cookbooks—which, I should add, are the bestselling celebrity cookbooks in the world—these five performers have managed to convince the Japanese male that it is OK to cook at home, that there is no shame in a man frying noodles or taking time to slice sashimi and present it just so on a bed of grated daikon. Today more Japanese men than ever cook at home, and the boys from SMAP are one of the main reasons. Indeed, you could argue that they are the most influential people in contemporary Japanese food culture.
So what is the televisual magic that has almost a quarter of the Japanese population glued to their TVs every Monday night at ten? I was about to find out.
Band member Masahiro, the “maître’d” of Bistro SMAP, enters through the upper floor of the horseshoe-shaped, two-story, faux bistro set, dressed in black waistcoat, white shirt, and black trousers. The rest of the band, wearing Western-style chef’s uniforms and toques, take their places in the kitchens below, two per team. I take a step backward behind the central camera and trip over some cables, prompting a look from the stage manager. Shingo, the “funny one,” waiting in the wings, shoots me a quizzical glance—I am the only Westerner in the studio—but then winks and waves as the stage manager starts his countdown. I smile back. Even though I had no idea who he was until fifteen minutes earlier, celeb whore that I am, this contact with Japanese light entertainment royalty makes me unaccountably happy.
Masahiro introduces this week’s guests, a Japanese husband-and-wife actor couple, who enter through the upstairs door and are shown to their table. Masahiro’s opening remarks prompt exaggeratedly loud laughter from the crew. (There is a man standing next to me whose job, it seems, is to laugh as loudly as he can at every comment or gesture.) It turns out that the host is friends with the couple and has visited their house. “I remember when we were just getting famous,” he says, “and we came round your house to watch porn!” Everyone laughs; the wife giggles coquettishly. Following the same routine as every week, Masahiro asks the guests what they want to eat. “We have no menu, so you can order anything you like!” They order “Chinese food with lots of vegetables.” All the ingredients have already been prepared and set out in the kitchens below for the other four SMAP members to cook.
More hard-hitting questions—“Do you love your wife?”—are interspersed with shots of the boys cooking. Offstage professional chefs prompt them from time to time, but I can exclusively reveal that the SMAP boys really do cook the food and with impressive confidence and skill.
“Well, they have made over 6,500 dishes over the last twelve years,” the show’s producer tells me as we chat in the studio canteen after recording has finished, adding that the band members themselves create the menus.
“What do the American and English guests make of it?” I ask (the show is very much in the tradition of wacky Japanese TV).
“They love it. Nicolas Cage said the food was better than Wolfgang Puck’s. Cameron Diaz has been on twice; she was singing and dancing! Madonna loved Shingo’s shabu-shabu. When we started, none of them could cook, but they wanted to challenge themselves. They’d done singing and dancing; now they wanted to do cooking. At the beginning, they just learned how to wash the rice and cut the cabbage. They weren’t trying to impress anyone; they just wanted a challenge. But now they are really involved in creating the menus; they love to make new dishes. They have shown the same type of creativity they did with their music. We didn’t know it at the time, but this was the beginning of a whole new trend of getting boys to cook. There used to be a Japanese proverb about how a man should never enter a kitchen. SMAP changed all that.”
So what is the secret of their success?
“First, they are like the Beatles. They each have distinct characters that everyone can relate to [the boy next door, the class clown, the older brother, the rebel, and the pretty one]. The second and most important thing as far as the show is concerned is the energy of hospitality they show to the guests in the studio. They really want the guests to enjoy it, and the audience can sense that. This is the real secret of the program. SMAP communicates though food, and that is becoming a bigger and bigger way of communicating around the world.”
Back in the studio, Masahiro, the host, takes the guests on a walkabout downstairs in the kitchens, where the other four are busy cooking. More anodyne banter ensues. Returning upstairs, the food—a cream lobster chow mein with pork-bone broth from the Red Team, and fried rice with tofu, beef tongue, shark fin, onion sauce, spinach, and lettuce from the Yellow Team—is brought up for the guests to judge. Everything is pronounced oishii (delicious), but the Yellows are this week’s winners.
Suddenly, Shingo appears in drag, wearing a short tartan skirt and long wig and singing a song that, apparently, the wife once sang in her days as a young pop star. Everyone laughs hysterically, and I must admit, he is funny, even though I understand nothing of what he is saying. He has touches of Buster Keaton about him, a great face-puller. Masahiro is also charismatic, a wiry ball of energy who reminds me of a young Billy Crystal, but as for the other three’s talents, they seem limited to either smoldering, scowling, or looking blank.
As usual with TV cookery shows, the minute the cameras stop, the crew descend on the leftovers, and the talent leaves as quickly as possible. All except Tsuyoshi, the boy next door, who sits quietly in a corner finishing a bowl of rice as the crew begin to clean up around him. I approach and introduce myself, and he smiles warmly. “Great show,” I say. He smiles again. I am not sure he understands English and, anyway, I feel guilty about interrupting his meal, so I leave him be. (A few months later, Tsuyoshi will be arrested for being drunk and naked in a Tokyo park; always the quiet ones you’ve got to watch, isn’t it?)
I squeeze through the hundred or so fans waiting outside the Fuji TV studios that evening and make my way back to the apartment. Lissen, Asger, and Emil, who have spent the afternoon playing in Yoyogi Park and visiting temples, are underwhelmed by my new celebrity name-drops, but I can’t help thinking Japan could have worse teen idols than these. Can Justin Bieber make shabu-shabu? I very much doubt it.