`Shall We Dance?' Kicks Off Ballroom Boom In Japan

In the opening credits for Masayuki Suo's latest movie, the title is presented as a mixture of west and east: "Shall We" is spelled out in English, but "Dance?" is in Japanese and comes with an English subtitle for American audiences.

The rest of the picture is a similar mixture of cultures: the story of Shohei Sugiyama, a bored, 42-year-old Japanese businessman who defies tradition and secretly takes up ballroom dancing (his wife thinks he's having an affair), often to the tune of familiar American pop songs.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Shall We Dance?" not only provides the title. With the full cooperation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate, it is prominently featured on the soundtrack. So is "Save the Last Dance For Me," although the rights for that one were harder to come by.

"The title didn't come easy," said Suo during a Seattle visit. "It was there only after the third rewrite of the script, but then it felt so right. It entices the audience, invites them in."

Speaking through a translator, Suo said that the movie, which won 13 Japanese Academy Awards (it scored in every category except for best foreign film), has had a significant impact on ballroom dancing in Japan since it opened there in January 1996. But there's still a stigma attached to dancing, which requires more physical contact than many Japanese people are used to.

"There's not a lot of kissing or even shaking hands, so dancing has a sexual connotation," he said. "It's almost like prostitution. The dance industry is trying to shake that image.

"The dance studios all have big windows, so that everything can be seen by the public. They also hold dance competitions to make it seem more legitimate. I don't agree with that view of dancing as sport. I think just by bringing two people together, that's what's wonderful."

As in the movie, spouses don't always tell their partners they're taking lessons: "That's very common, though the wife taking lessons in secret would be the more usual thing."

To convey the exhilaration of the characters, Suo got personally involved: "I was taking lessons as I was filming. I wanted to capture that joy of dancing, which you can't see when you're just watching other people do it, so we put the camera on this twirling platform that moves with the dancers on the dance floor."

According to Suo, the international success of the 1992 Australian movie, "Strictly Ballroom," had little impact on his approach: "It was not such a big hit in Japan, and the two films don't have much to do with each other. Even if a foreign film is a success in Japan, it's not likely to have an influence. Most often what gets filmed is a popular novel.

"The biggest contribution to getting `Shall We Dance?' made was the success of `Sumo Do, Sumo Don't' (his popular 1992 movie about skinny sumo wrestlers). Even then, people were skeptical that a film about social dancing could be a hit."

With "Sumo," he wrote the novel, then the script. With "Shall We Dance?," the process was reversed.

"I just didn't have the confidence to capture the music and dancing in prose," he said. "Then I realized that I could do it by going inside the character of Shohei in the novel. It's easier on film to capture the feeling of dancing. It's easier in the novel to understand what's going on inside his head."

Suo got his start as a professional filmmaker with a low-budget 1984 movie, "My Brother's Wife," which he shot in the style of his idol, the late Yasujiro Ozu.

"It was an homage," he said. "When I was working as an assistant director, I was thinking of my first film, thinking, `I'm going to make a film about what I like.' I thought of it as a kind of sequel to Ozu's `Late Spring.' I didn't want to just imitate his style, but I wanted the same sense of gentle humor."

Suo's films aren't the only Ozu homage: "I went to the Mariners game yesterday. Ozu, too, was a great baseball fan. I read his diaries."

In the late 1980s, Suo worked on video documentaries about Juzo Itami's "Taxing Woman" and its sequel. Koji Yakusho, the actor who plays Shohei, was fifth-billed in Itami's "Tampopo." But he says there's no connection.

"He was chosen out of many auditions," he said. "But career-wise those documentaries were very important to me. I had been involved in low-budget independent productions, but by Japanese standards `A Taxing Woman' was much bigger.

"We had only a staff of 10 on `My Best Friend's Wife,' 15 with actors. There were 10 times that many on `A Taxing Woman.' You learn how a director communicates with all those people. That's important, though it doesn't change the essentials of filming, which are the same for any film."

After the shooting of "Shall We Dance?" was completed, Suo married his leading lady, Tamiyo Kusakari, a dancer making her screen debut in the role of Shohei's instructor and friend.

"I didn't think there were any actresses in Japan who could fill this role," said Suo. "I was looking for an actress who could tell you just by her looks that she was not part of the 9-to-5 life. Most popular Japanese actresses have familiar faces, approachable faces. I wanted to convey a sense of distance.

"I looked at professional dancers because most popular Japanese actresses don't have the time to train for dancing. When I first met her, I was impressed just by the way she held herself."

For the other actors, anywhere from 50 to 100 hours of dance training was necessary. Suo said that in most cases the training didn't take. Unlike the characters they play, the actors haven't continued to dance.