Japan with Sue Perkins, review: a whip-smart guide into this complex world of solo brides and robot dogs
Japan. It’s complicated. Young women dress as tweens in infantilising pigtails and itsy-bitsy skirts. Young men attend management boot camp where they scream self-abusive mantras and weep with shame. Human bots check you into your hotel, canine bots hump your leg.
In Japan with Sue Perkins (BBC One), the comedian and presenter travels where many have been before in search of truths about an alien and unreadable culture. Clive James, feasting on masochistic game shows, started the trend. Perkins is perfectly capable of sniggering at her hosts’ expense, but she is determined to journey with an open mind as she confronts the sheer otherness of the place.
Take that robot pooch. You’d expect her to rip it to shreds, but she found stroking it weirdly soothing and offered not even the merest wink to the camera. (The family’s real dogs wore nappies.)
This travelogue arrives in the week the Rugby World Cup kicks off. The subject doesn’t pass her lips, but she did drop in on a training session for aspiring female sumo wrestlers. The experience made her newly aware of various private parts. “Gosh, that’s certainly reconnected me with my genitals,” she said as she was snugly wedged into a sumo jock strap.
As you would expect of Perkins, in between the whip-smart quips, a lot of this was an interrogation of the roles a traditional society has assigned to the genders. Perhaps she wasn’t looking in the right places, but try as she might she found nothing sinister in midlife salarymen wigging out in clubs to teenage girl groups. Weirder was the woman dolling herself up for a bridal insta-shoot with no sign of a fiancé. It’ll be interesting to see if she can get to the bottom of Japan’s mass sexual abstention in what she admitted was a fleeting visit of three weeks.
Her Schama-esque editorials to camera were first impressions, they were driven by a yearning to understand. But Perkins was a sniggersome ad-libber when she could get away with it. “I don’t know whether you’re human or robots,” she said to two immaculate women at a greeting desk. While eager to bridge it, sometimes that gulf in understanding worked to her advantage.
