Akadot: Thank you very much for talking with us about your new book. What gave you the idea to write a book about Japanese dramas?

Jonathan Clements: I'd been fired from Manga Max magazine and I was presenting a TV show in England, and I discovered that there was a Japanese TV series about a person who gets fired from one media job and ends up fronting a news show - it was called News Woman. So I thought I would watch it for fun. I'd been watching nothing but anime for almost two years because of the Anime Encyclopedia and I wanted to see some real Japanese people, and I really enjoyed it, so I started buying some more. I remembered that there was more to Japan than anime, and that there was a whole world of live-action television out there that the anime world was ignoring. A large proportion of the shows were based on manga as well, so there was a whole world of manga that fans were missing out on. I think I'd spent about two thousand dollars on Japanese TV series, when I realised that if I was going to excuse this habit to my accountant, I'd better write a book about it. I went to Motoko Tamamuro, who had been a writer on Manga Max, and I told her that if she would fill the gaps in my knowledge and write half the book, she could have half the money.

Akadot: I saw News Woman too, this is the drama, which stars Suzuki Honami and Takizawa Hideaki, right? Very good drama!

JC: That's the one. I'm a sucker for media related dramas, especially about TV. I haven't found proof yet, but I'm convinced that the Mary Tyler Moore Show has a lot to answer for in Japan. I'm a big fan of Straight News and Female Announcers too, for similar reasons.

Akadot: You mentioned, that you watched quite a bit of anime for Anime Encyclopedia. Now that you have written the Dorama Encyclopedia and watched two thousand dollars worth of Japanese TV series (you must have quite a collection), do you have a preference now?

JC: Well, the two grand was what I blew before I started writing the book! I spent a good deal more than that once Stone Bridge gave me a contract. Do I have a preference? That's difficult to answer. I was a translator once, and my interest in things Japanese always comes from the fact that they're Japanese, not that they are, for example, animated. Anime is something I've lived and breathed for a decade, so it takes a lot to impress me, these days. Live-action drama is still fresh and interesting to me, and it has real people in it. But my main interest is in the writing, and both anime and dorama have their fair share of talents and hacks.

Akadot: Do you think there is a great interest for Japanese dramas in the western market?

JC: You bet there's an interest in it in the western market. And I know you know it, because Akadot have already covered stuff like the live-action GTO and You're Under Arrest. "Dorama" fandom in the US is where anime fandom was ten years ago, but it's doubling in size every six months - it's the next step beyond anime. I wondered what the anime world would have been like if I had written the Anime Encyclopedia ten years earlier. And I realized, with live-action TV drama, that I had the opportunity to do so. I also write the "Living Manga" column in Newtype USA, about live-action adaptations of Japanese comics, and that's read by 100,000 people every month. We've come a long way from the days when Japanese popular culture was a "cult" thing.

You know, the first time I ever heard Japanese, it was on a drama series. I was about six or seven, and I caught the end of The Water Margin when it was shown on British TV. And there was a theme song in Japanese. My brother and I used to sing along without the faintest clue about what it meant.

Akadot: Do you think you might expand and do a book about another form of Japanese entertainment, such as Japanese variety shows?

JC: Japanese variety shows, no. I'm a writer by trade, so variety shows and reality TV are anathema to me. They're the kind of things that TV channels use to fill up space in between the dramas. They're no better than the test card to me. I'm not really interested. In a decade's time, people will still be watching re-runs of Hill Street Blues and The West Wing. They won't be queuing up to see old episodes of Temptation Island or Big Brother. Actually, some people probably will watch those shows, but something tells me they're not the kind who will buy books about it.

However, there are other areas of Japanese culture that warrant an "Encyclopedia" format book. I suggested an Eiga Encyclopedia to Stone Bridge, but they already have other writers handling Japanese movies. I have costed and outlined a Manga Encyclopedia as well, 800 pages with three or four co-authors, but I'm still not sure whether I want to put myself through it. The same goes for the J-Pop Encyclopedia. It would be a nice book to read and own, but I question whether I have the energy to write it. I'm probably going to spend much of 2004 just updating the Anime Encyclopedia. I can write a movie novelization for the same money in just two weeks, and I don't have to spend thousands of dollars on getting illustrations for it!

It's a question of time. I spent 18 months on the Dorama Encyclopedia. In the year since I finished it, I have written audio dramas for Doctor Who and Judge Dredd, a movie novelization for New Line of a film called Highwaymen, a book called Pirate King about the Manchu invasion of China, and a biography of Confucius. Fiction pays a lot better. In many ways, I just did the Dorama Encyclopediax for fun. Maybe sometime in 2005 I'll get twitchy again, and decide I want to tell people something more about Japan.

Akadot: For those readers that are unaware, could you briefly define what the Japanese drama is? How is it different from westernized TV drama programs?

JC: It's Japanese TV. Japanese crime shows, cop shows, comedies and romantic weepies. Fictional television. Not your game shows and reality TV shows, but the Japanese versions of ER and NYPD Blue. The chief difference is that it's a rare show indeed that lasts more than a single season, so the average show tends to come and go in just 12 episodes, or roughly eight hours.

Akadot: How does the actors and acting compare to American drama acting? Do you see any positive or negative aspects?

JC: There can be a negative aspect, which is rooted in Japanese culture itself. There's a lot of what appears to be "bad" acting in Japanese drama. But if you look at the way Japanese people act with each other in real life, bad acting is part of everyday social interaction. If you've ever been with a bunch of Japanese people doing "overtime", you'll know what I mean. I'll be yelling at them: "You idiots! Did it not occur to you to work during the day instead of looking out the damn window! Then you could all go home on time!" But conspicuously struggling is part of the work ethic. It's not enough to get everything finished. You have to pull an all-nighter the day before so people think you've endured some kind of hardship. The same kind of attitude permeates some drama serials. People act in a false way with each other, but it's actually a realistic portrayal of the way that Japanese people can really behave.

One of my pet hates is the Japanese obsession with women who behave like children. I don't find that endearing at all. It's why I like actresses like Kyoka Suzuki, because they behave like they're old enough to vote. I'm not a fan of the whole ingenue thing.

Miho Nakayama just does it for me, though. Motoko is very disapproving, but I adore Miho Nakayama. I think it's the eyebrows.

Akadot: For this book, you have over a thousand drama listings and descriptions, how did you research all this material? Were you able to watch the dramas yourself?

JC: Some, yes. Others I had Japanese sources for - same as if you wanted to write about American TV, there are books and histories. My co-author, Motoko Tamamuro, had a mis-spent youth watching dramas in the 1980s, so if you look at our top ten shows, you'll see that we have almost completely different ideas of our favourites. Mine are mainly from the 1990s, when I was living in Japan. By then, Motoko was living in England, so she tends to remember the 1980s. I have a bizarre interest in the 1950s and 1960s, too, because Japanese TV was so young then, and Motoko was growing up in the 1970s, so she saw a lot of those serials as a kid. Between us, we have a lot of the bases covered. We've also included details of over a thousand American TV shows broadcast in Japan, from Star Trek to Hong Kong Phooey, which shines new light on what the Japanese were watching.