FEATURE: My Dinner with Tamba (and Takashi Miike)
FEATURE: My Dinner with Tamba (and Takashi Miike)
Recalling a night out with two legends of Japanese cinema
Excerpt from the upcoming book Mondo Tokyo: Dispatches from a Secret Japan by Patrick Macias
2002…
It’s early evening somewhere out west in Tokyo. I am walking through a supermarket with Takashi Miike. The prolific director of wild cult classic movies like Dead or Alive and Audition is wearing sunglasses at night and making a path through old women puttering about with bags of produce. We are on a mission to visit an iconic movie star—Tetsuro Tamba, the self-declared “Prince of the East”— at his home nearby. Miike knows the way and says that the best shortcut is through the aisles of spritely seniors.
Tetsuro Tamba was one of Japan’s most legendary and notorious actors, having appeared in anywhere from 200 to 350 films (no one can seem to remember). He is best known in the West for essaying the role of Tiger Tanaka in the James Bond-in-Japan classic You Only Live Twice (1967), which was one of ten “foreign” films he starred in.
Tamba often played authority figures: G-Men, scientists, professors, cops, army officers, men in suits. But as someone who didn’t seem to ever turn down a role, he would just as easily pop up in sexploitation and karate films as much as prestige pictures like Harakiri (1962) and Kwaidan (1965). If you’ve watched enough Japanese films – good, bad, and ugly – you’ve most definitely glimpsed Tetsuro Tamba and heard his deep baritone voice before.
Tamba was a rich kid from a prestigious family; a troublemaker who stumbled into acting in the early 1950s. Five decades later, Tamba was still working as an actor and had recently appeared in several of Takashi Miike’s movies, including The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) and Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (2002).
Tamba spent so much time on screen that it was hard to believe he was a real flesh and blood person. His off-screen life was strange and mythic. In the 1980s, Tamba fronted a quasi-religion called Daireikai (The Great Spirit World) which sought—through a series of best-selling books and bizarre films—to prove the existence of life after death.
Miike and I wandered through an upscale neighborhood in search of Tamba’s house. We were accompanied by the writer/editor Tomo Machiyama. Tomo’s sister actually worked with Tamba on a short-lived TV show called Tamba Club, where the master of chaos himself held court in a room full of bikini girls. Apparently, he would sometimes wander around the set asking people: “I’m sorry but…did I fuck you before?”
We could only imagine what he would say to us.
We finally found ourselves in front of a big white mansion surrounded by a fence with a sign that said, “Afterlife Study Group.” Tomo made a Dr. Frankenstein joke. Miike assured us this was it.
Inside, the entranceway was dominated by a life-size picture of Tamba in his prime: a black and white photo from an old ninkyo yakuza movie, where Tamba was clad in a yukata robe, clutching a deadly dosu knife, presumably about to kill someone.
“HELLO!” a booming voice shouted at me in English. Tamba sprung into the doorway, nearly knocking us over like bowling pins. Given his age (80 at the time), I was expecting tired old man energy, but Tamba is real GENKI!—still the same wild playboy that he always was!
The house was huge and we sat in Tamba’s living room, which was done up in the “frozen in the 1980s” Western style that you’d expect of a Japanese movie star.
The day before this meeting, I made a strangely synchronistic find: I unearthed an old publicity photo of Tamba for sale in the Jimbocho district, an area of Tokyo where the streets are literally filled with movie memorabilia. It was a portrait of a stern-looking Tamba in an Imperial Navy uniform from one of the many war pictures he had appeared in. I asked him if he remembered the movie that it was from.
“I don’t remember...I don’t watch any of the films I appear in,” Tamba said proudly. “I don’t even read the scripts!”
During the getting-to-know you phase, I told Tamba that he starred in my favorite Japanese movie: Kinji Fukasaku’s sci-fi epic Message from Space (1978), in which he played the President of the Earth Federation (pretty much the President of Space). But despite sharing screen time with the late, great Vic Morrow, Tamba didn’t remember much about that movie either.
Time to pick a bigger target. I asked him what it was like when he first met Sean Connery, 007 himself, when You Only Live Twice was filming in Japan.
Now that was something Tamba remembered quite clearly: “I was in my hotel room having sex at the time.”
Miike, Tomo, and I audibly gasped.
“There was a knock on the door. I went to answer it and Sean Connery was there. He had locked himself out of his room and wanted to use the phone to call the front desk, so I let him in.”
During the swinging sixties, Tamba travelled to Europe for business and pleasure. He told us, “I learned English and French in bed. In England, I was sleeping with a maid. In France, I was sleeping with an actress named Capucine.”
Tomo was the founding editor of Movie Treasures magazine and the name Capucine set off alarm bells for him. Capucine had starred in The Pink Panther (1963) and What’s New Pussycat (1965), had dated actor William Holden, and was once rumored (only rumored) to be a transgender person. Had Tamba heard that before?
“I…didn’t know that,” Tamba intoned somberly. “I’m hungry!” he shouted, quickly changing the subject. “Let’s get something to eat!”
Tamba led us to a yakiniku barbeque restaurant nearby. People on the street stopped in their tracks and practically bowed when they saw the legend in their midst pass by.
Inside, the restaurant staff helped Tamba put on his bib—traditional accoutrement for cooking and eating yakiniku—and Tamba made a loud wailing sound, crying like a baby as a joke.
Miike stared and looked genuinely spooked. It must take a lot to freak out a guy who has directed some of the most extreme movies ever made. Miike’s movies have scenes of people being slowly cut to pieces and worse. But maybe an old man crying like an infant was just a bridge too far.
After dinner, I asked Tamba if he had a message for his fans around the world (I knew I would write about this evening someday and that I’d need an ending). Tamba wasted no time in rising to the occasion. “I was known as the Prince of the East! I’ve been with many different kinds of woman…English, French, Spanish girls. And every day, around 6pm, I would have a massage.”
I meant message, Tamba-sensei, not massage! Though if Tamba had starred in a movie called Massage from Space it would not have surprised me one bit – he was that kind of guy.
After our goodbyes, Tomo, Miike, and I walked away stunned, totally dumbfounded. Being in the presence of Tetsuro Tamba was actually even wilder than watching one of his movies.
Four years later, in 2006, Tetsuro Tamba died at the age of 84. According to the rumors (and there were always rumors), a beautiful girl was trimming his locks at a hair salon when he departed once and for all for the Great Spirit World.
At his funeral, opera singer and spiritualist Hiroyuki Ehara claimed he saw Tamba’s spirit sitting on his casket, looking at the hundreds of gathered attendees with a benevolent smile.
I truly do so much, want to believe that it was all true. Every bit of it.
