Roger Pulvers is an acclaimed Australian author, playwright and theatre director living in Japan. He has published more than 45 books, in English and Japanese, from novels to plays, poetry and translations. #imagine #rogerpulvers #japan #annefrank
00:00Hi, I'm Annette Sean Waugh. Welcome to the show.
00:09Author, playwright and translator Roger Pulvers has achieved the unusual feat of being the most widely published Australian writer in Japan.
00:18This has given him a unique perspective of both Australian and Japanese society.
00:22Pippa Bailey spent some time in Tokyo with Pulvers, who's currently working on an exciting collaboration with Japanese animators.
00:30I've been asking him about the best sake, and he's recommended his own sake, the one he makes himself.
00:48Most people think that sake is drunk, all the time hot, but it isn't.
00:55Sake, the best sake is drunk at room temperature.
01:03Is this an important tool of your trade?
01:06Of my trade? Why? Isn't it of any right to strain?
01:09Sake, the best sake is drunk at room temperature.
01:17Japan on the outside is a very formal, rigid society with lots of rules and conventions, of course.
01:23But on the inside, people's relationships on the private level are very free and uninhibited, just like Australia or Poland or America.
01:31And that appeals to me, that view, that kind of society where you don't have to be intimate with everybody, first name from the very beginning and so on.
01:42I like to approach personal relationships more slowly.
01:45I think in Australia, we're too informal. We have a cult of informality, as opposed to a cult of formality.
01:52This is called the bridge from which you can see Mount Fuji, and there it is in the distance, looming over the horizon.
02:08And on most days in the winter, you can see it, but obviously in the summer, when it's hazy, you can't see it.
02:13There's something about claiming that you're Australian, but you've actually lived the least time there of the three places that you've lived.
02:19That's true.
02:20So, do you have any ideas about that?
02:22Well, I don't know that one really understands one's own identity.
02:26You've caught me on the spot, and I'm sure what you say is true, but I can't answer that, really.
02:30I mean, it's like asking an actor to look at the whole play or the theme of the play.
02:35He can only look at his own part.
02:37But I really do feel at home, not in America. I wouldn't go back there for all the tea in China.
02:43But I certainly do feel at home in Japan and Australia.
02:47And I feel that in Australia, we're coming into an era, it's an era that I call post-ethnic era.
02:54I mean, I think that we're going past the era where other nationalities are considered as ethnic entities.
03:01We, the white Anglo-Celtic majority in Australia, we are the ethnics of Asia.
03:12We are a very unusual ethnic group.
03:20We Australians have maybe a better access to Japan than Americans or Europeans because we don't carry the colonial baggage on our backs.
03:28So many writers and cultural people who come and live in Japan, they've been introducing Japan for the last 150 years.
03:35I mean, you'd think Japan wouldn't need any introductions anymore.
03:38And they're introducing the vanishing Japan, the old Japan.
03:41And if Japan has been vanishing at the rate that people say it's been vanishing, it's surprising there's anything left in the place at all right now.
03:48I became a writer in this country.
03:54I felt that I wanted to express Japan to the Japanese.
03:59I wanted to tell the Japanese something about themselves and through that process find out something about myself.
04:06So I'm not really a writer who tries to explain the inscrutable ways of the Oriental to the Japanese.
04:15And my characters in my novels, for instance, the novels that are set in this country,
04:20the main characters are usually not the Westerner who's in the steamy Orient as the hero.
04:27And all of the other men and women who are there are there as sort of foils for his exploits of one sort or another.
04:34Maybe that explains for some of the difficulty I've encountered in getting my books accepted outside of Japan,
04:40because the Westerner is used to a certain pattern of fiction about Asia.
04:45According to that pattern, you view the country through the eyes of the Western hero or heroine.
04:52And that particular approach never interested me.
05:04Two and a half years ago, I was approached by a Japanese film producer whom I knew before
05:09to help him write the script for a film adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank.
05:15It's the most beloved book among young Japanese people.
05:18It's read by all Japanese girls in particular.
05:22They love The Diary of Anne Frank.
05:24It's virtually completed.
05:27It opens on the 31st of May at a theatre in Amsterdam as the world premiere.
05:32It opens all around Japan on the 19th of August of this year.
05:37And it's very beautiful, very different kind of animation from, I think, the sort of animation most people have seen.
05:43Certainly very un-Disney, non-Disney.
05:46And Michael Nyman has written the music.
05:48These are selections from the film as it is now.
05:51Different sections of the film.
05:53It's in sequence, but we're already 15 minutes into the film virtually here.
05:58When she gets The Diary, for instance, for her birthday.
06:01What scale of production are we talking about?
06:04Well, it's a huge production.
06:06There are almost 120,000 pictures.
06:09They're all hand-drawn.
06:10There's nothing done.
06:11All the colours are mixed specifically.
06:13The colour combinations, you can see, are very beautiful for the film.
06:16And some people have wondered why should the Japanese be making The Diary of Anne Frank?
06:21But why not?
06:22I mean, the war is 50 years over.
06:24She's dead.
06:25She passed away 50 years ago.
06:27And it's a work of art.
06:31That's what a writer wants, recognition.
06:33And a place for himself within a cultural milieu.
06:38And I've found that here.
06:39I'd like to think I've found it in Australia, too.
06:41But maybe Australia hasn't found me yet.
06:43So I don't blame anybody for that.
06:46Can't stand whinging.
06:47Can't stand artists and writers who say,
06:49The country doesn't appreciate me or something like that.
