ganbaru-zo!

Hooray! My first rejection letter for 2020! And on day one! (He cheers, as a single tear falls from his face to the floor.)


Certainly not my first rejection letter. Over the decades I have applied for grants and scholarships for my writing, my painting and my films. You gotta be in it to win it was the mantra. I never won it, though. It’s a bit like the lottery. What you are offering needs to not only satisfy the criteria, it needs to be the flavour of the times, needs to tick the boxes for the judges.


It reminds me of when me and two friends took it upon ourselves to make a pilot TV show called Coo-ee Australia for the Japanese market in 1990. It was magazine style, fast cuts with fun titles and zany animations. I hosted with two attractive bilingual Aussie girls, all in Japanese. We spent close to a year shooting and editing it. Luckily, we had a deal with the editing house who let us use their facilities in exchange for a future share of any success. The rough cuts were all done by us on 3/4 inch U-matic machines, chunky professional cousins to Sony Betamax.


Excitingly, I was also able to have access in the evenings to their (at that time super high end) computer graphics workstation Quantel (worth $350,000 in today’s terms). I learnt by sitting in with the graphics guys in my spare time and studying their actions. (Young people: think YouTube instruction video but you are actually there.) Eventually, they felt I was good enough to leave me on my own. It was housed in a fancy, dark, air conditioned suite. I loved going in there and letting time drift. One time the general manager came in and was shocked to see me on his most expensive tech. He was hesitant at first but eventually allowed my continued access. I was able to do the intro and closing titles and a supply of animated inserts. (Interestingly, similar to what I have been doing over the last few months with my music videos on Final Cut Pro.)


Anyway, once the project was complete we held a premiere showing at Kinselas club in Sydney with a Q&A after the screening. Three hundred people attended and we thought we had a sure winner. We took it to Japan and endeavoured to find a TV station willing to commission the series. There were two problems. One: format wise it was slightly ahead of it’s time. Two or three years later there was a flood of similar style, youthful and fun magazine style shows - but at the time it was seen as a risk. The other problem (apparent in retrospect) was that we did not have a business manager to do our negotiations and handle the meetings for us. I was the only Japanese speaker in our group - so after watching half and hour of me cavorting around, acting wacky in various Australian locations, the TV execs were then required to take me seriously in the deal making ends of the meetings. Not surprised that it didn’t happen.


Anyway, back to the present. Things are different now. (Some things.) Thirty years of experience in the creative industry has brought some wisdom. And this project, this book, is something that I believe in 100%. I believe that it will find it’s place eventually and be published in Japan. For now, I have been sending out submissions to various agents and publishing houses (in Australia and Japan) myself, but I feel that the best route for me to take is to find an agent/manager/representative in Tokyo who has successful experience in the field already and is able to partner up. I will follow the path ahead of me, prepared for let downs and rejections along the way, but am determined to carry on till a resolution that is aligned with my aspirations and have the book published and distributed throughout Japan.


So, yeah, one rejection down, more to come. Tuttle would have been ideal and I had a bit of an emotional connection with them. I used to buy their books when living in Tokyo, as long ago as the early seventies. So, would’ve been poetic if they has swerved the other way. But as they say in Japanese: ‘Ganbaru-zo!’ (Gonna keep trying!)


The journey continues. Turns out the actual writing of the book was the easy part!