Cultural Differences - Interview with Junya Sakino

Written by Hayley Scanlon on 12 Mar 2014

Junya Sakino's debut feature Sake Bomb is an examination of the various culture clashes one experiences in an unfamiliar country, and also of the duality of being a member of a minority culture. We sat down with him to have chat about some of these complex issues and his career so far.  

UK Anime: Is this your first time in the UK?

Junya Sakino: I have been here twice, this is my second time.

UK Anime: Do you like it here? 

Junya Sakino: I love it, yeah, it’s great.

UK Anime: Your film Sake Bomb deals with different stereotypes and the way they’re viewed and used by different people, I just wondered if you’d experienced anything like that since moving to America?

Junya Sakino: I was born and raised in Japan so really didn’t know anything about stereotypes. Growing up in Japan you only see Japanese people, right? They didn’t really make fun of me being Asian, but when I moved to Los Angeles about thirteen years ago, where I live right now, I got to see so many different races. The ones I thought were particularly interesting were these Asian stereotypes. There are different race stereotypes and all of that but, you know, just hanging out with Asian Americans - which by the way I didn’t know anything about - if you watch only mainstream media you don’t really see them. You don’t really get to see Asians in the media, so I was really shocked to see so many Asians, at least in Los Angles. When I started hanging out with these people and, you know, they really complain about Asian stereotypes, it feels like at least to them everybody is similar in Western culture except Asians and, you know, they look like me but they are also Americans, they don’t speak their mother language. Jeff Muzushima, you know, he is Japanese-American but he doesn’t speak Japanese so I find it interesting that there is some little difference in Asian-Americans and let’s say African-Americans/Latino/Hispanic, so that was one of the subject matters I was attracted to talk about in the film. 

UK Anime: I’m not sure how familiar you are with UK culture - we obviously don’t have that ‘Asian American’ stereotype, so quite often when we say Asian we mean ‘Indian’.

Junya Sakino: Yeah I had no idea, when I was doing the Q&A screening here I’m getting all this new information about UK. I thought, we speak the same language here, right? But it’s completely different. Some of the jokes actually are really American and I found that people didn’t get it - I guess because of the language difference too. Everybody has a different preference so the language difference makes it difficult to understand some things completely, but I hope that people discover the concept.

UK Anime: We do have ‘stereotypes’ but I think they’re quite different stereotypes - Sebastian’s bad driver stereotype is often attributed to Indian men, unfairly I might add, so do you think you find that everywhere people have these stereotypes but perhaps they’re used and reflected differently by different people? 

Junya Sakino: Yes I do, anywhere you go you see a difference between people that they try to categorise, they love to categorise people and they will find similar categories and I’m pretty sure that it’s a universal thing. You are in America or UK or Asia - even within Asia they’ll make certain stereotypes so that’s a part of the thing. But particularly the stereotypes of Asian-Americans, at least in the States, I felt that’s very interesting the way that some of the stuff people say is pretty racist, but they don’t realise that it’s racist so I guess some people laugh at the jokes not realising that that’s pretty racist, so I don’t know. That’s a pretty interesting thing about US culture. 

UK Anime: Do you have similar stereotypes of foreigners in Japan; is there a stereotype of ‘the foreigner’ or are they of different cultures?

Junya Sakino: In Japan I think, we don’t really know. Let’s say if someone from America comes to Japan and they don’t speak the language, so you know, they can tell where they’re from but with, you know ‘gaijin’ that would be like a foreigner, right?  so I’m sure within that there are others but because that country is so closed within themselves I think there are still stereotypes, in Japan at least, as diverse as we’ve seen in the Western countries. I think, in Japan in comparison with America, it was really quite different and I think that was one of the reasons I was really drawn into that subject matter.

UK Anime: How about Sake Bomb 2, with Sebastian going to Japan as a Japanese guy who’s not really engaged with his own Japanese culture and doesn’t speak the language?

Junya Sakino: Yeah, I mean there is is an option - I ended the movie where you could potentially see what happened to Sebastian or what happened to Naoto from different angles. There is a chance to make a sequel but only if this movie is successful. So we’ll see.

UK Anime: We also wanted to ask a about the group in the film who are just identified as ‘the cosplayers’ - the film doesn’t really engage with that idea of Orientalism or fetishization of the East, so we wondered if Japanese people have any particular feeling about Westerners who become obsessed with one niche aspect of Japanese culture and think that gives them some kind of knowledge of Japanese culture in general? 

Junya Sakino: I can’t really speak from a 100% Japanese perspective on that because I’ve lived in the States for a long time; I have very different views from Japanese people. Like for instance, cosplay or anime or something you think of representing Japan - it’s great culture and I think it’s helping to introduce Japanese culture to the West. So I think that’s a great aspect, but at the same time it’s a very niche market right? So people are making a set-up out of it from that niche market so I don’t know, I can’t speak from a Japanese perspective but one thing I can say, being in the States, is that I see Japanese culture but that’s very different too.

For instance if you go to a sushi restaurant - the film's title actually comes the sushi restaurant where i saw people doing sake bombs and I was blown away. I’d never seen sake bombs before - never even heard of it. Then, that’s the last thing you’d imagine, putting sake into beer - that’s pretty messed up right? But that’s what they do and they really have a great time. Some people think that it’s from Japan because they do it at a sushi restaurant but no we don’t, we don’t do that. So I find that it’s really interesting to see the new culture being born and I thought that it was really interesting to tell a story from both sides - from Western and Eastern perspectives. If you put the two different cultures together you get a really interesting drink and that’s what the title refers to as two different 'Asians' - Asian West meets Asian East. That’s the idea.