Despite the big budget, Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle struggles to build a credible-looking Pacific States of America, turning in a pilot episode riddled with rookie mistakes. From Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Mad Men, why is Hollywood so bad at going Japanese?

There it is—San Francisco under Japanese occupation, circa 1962. The camera drifts down a reimagined Mission Street. Japanese signage hangs like icicles from the shabby buildings, uniformly and ostentatiously vertical. A little unnatural, but I can live with that—maybe the Nazis got all the graphic designers as a part of the partition deal. The typefaces look a little clumsy, but that too I can look past—I’m just relieved that things seem to be picking up after the ugly and inexplicable scrolls (“Respect,” “Viper Pharmacy”) hanging in the aikido dojo. Tea shop…travel agency…tea shop…tea shop…grocery store…Chinese apothecary…typewriters…tea shop. Clearly, caffeine abhors vacuum in every timeline. Izakaya…Chinese restaurant…rickshaw depot…another of those non-sequitur “Respect” signs…Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Wait, what?

Language Is Shaped by Winners, So Who Won Here?

I first read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle around 1988, in Japanese translation. The translator knew his business. I’d go so far as to say the book sometimes works better in Japanese; there is fascination and pathos in Robert Childan’s desire to please, even become, his occupiers that come through more strongly when portrayed in the language of those very same (albeit fictional) conquerors. The exoticism is subsumed, and only the heady strangeness of the topsy-turvy world order remains.

Dick wrote the book over 50 years ago, without having visited Japan and possessing very few means to reality-check the language or customs. He manages to build a compelling world nevertheless, mostly by strictly rationing the ecological details of this alternate reality. Dick is unusual among sci-fi writers in his general lack of interest in visuals, and that very spareness means The Man in the High Castle doesn't make too many missteps in fleshing out the Japanese facets of the Pacific States. (Most of those are fairly trivial, like Mrs. Kasoura wearing a down-do with her kimono.) His approach to dialogue is similarly adroit. The Japanese ruling class as well as their American contacts speak in a slightly stylized English that serves as a lingua franca; language is reshaped by the winners, and the conquered twist tongues and acculturate. Throughout the novel, the overly formal diction adopted by Childan and others remind the readers that Americans are the disenfranchised, insecure minority in this reality.

The TV pilot, however, jettisons all that in favor of a Hollywood convention: The Americans talk normal, everybody else speaks ESL. The trouble is, this convention was born out of American cultural hegemony, which never came to pass in High Castle’s fictional timeline. Despite that, the conquered Americans of High Castle speak in the dialect of victors—showing no adaptation in expression, accent or even speed. Listen to the scene (10:59–11:29) of Juliana being hit on by a young Japanese man, and what you hear is an immigrant kid humbly asking out a white lady who lets him down easy with all the self-possession of the privileged class. Instead of giving us an unsettling look at an inverted racial dynamic—and with it, the devil’s bargain that women under occupation routinely face—the scene simply gives us back a slice of our own reality.

The adherence to language cliché doesn’t end with accents, however. The show also does that thing where it puts some Japanese lines in the characters’ mouths. You know, for authenticity. In a moment of pure facepalm, an inspector from the secret police tosses Frank Frink’s apartment, threatens him, then tells his goon squad, "行きましょう！"* Yes, let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky. Ta, my good suspect! This is what happens when a screenwriter thinks all you need is Google Translate and easy peasy, Japanesey. Kudos to Joel de la Fuente for delivering this nutty line as well as anyone can—and without a hint of an accent. Thank you for having a better ear than Sean Connery or those guys that played Honda executives in Mad Men.

Speculative Fiction? Let’s Try for Articulate First

When I was in high school, I made a campus visit to the college that the sensible half of my family goes to. No doubt to their despair, my most memorable moment of that visit was realizing that on Japanese college campuses, buildings were far more likely to be numbered than given proper-noun names. It was a small thing, but it’s stayed with me that nomenclature is about “how” not “what.”

In Amazon’s High Castle, the San Francisco International Airport has been renamed Hirohito Airport. (It’s worth noting that in the book, Philip K. Dick keeps it simple by calling it “San Francisco airport.”)

Hirohito, of course, was the given name of the wartime Emperor of Japan. As an airport name? No way, no how. Find me one piece of major Japanese infrastructure named after a person. You’ll be looking a while, because that’s just not how it’s done in Japan. Nor do we bandy about given names, particularly for members of the imperial family. The writers of High Castle named this fictional location the way an American or a European would (ex. John Wayne Field, Charles de Gaulle Airport, Adenauer Airport), then applied skin-deep localization to the result. They ignored the “how” and the result is something that instantly lets the air out of the show's expensively-built world. It doesn’t help that they compound the mistake by using katakana instead of kanji.

In comparison to the interminable airport sequence, the train station misfire is visible for a mercifully brief time. In what I suspect is a crib from travel guides, the station was dubbed Teikoku (“Imperial”), same as the famed Tokyo hotel. But just because the name is real doesn’t make it realistic. A 19th-century luxury hotel and a 20th-century mass-transit station are children of very different zeitgeists, not to mention the oddness of dubbing something in a colonial outpost “imperial.” This too is an instance of victor’s dialect, of the show’s refusal to acknowledge the query at the heart of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian masterpiece: What happens to America—and Americans—when it ceases to be the seat of an empire? But the book about losers has been turned into a show about winners, and the question seems unlikely to ever be asked.

Don’t Be Afraid of Heights

Three billion people worldwide now have Internet access; it’s never been easier to achieve realism in portraying a foreign culture. The onus should therefore be on storytellers to explain why they didn’t bother to aim high. Retaining Japanese production design partners, localization suport for screenplay and direction, and dialect coaches for the performers should be, should have been, the norm for a project of this scale. For half a century and for all its imperfections, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle has frightened and fascinated as the ultimate “what if.” Look out through our billion glowing windows, and we can see that dystopia is here, now. An aging and increasingly divided empire presides over a war-torn world; the grasshopper lies heavy and we fear the heights. The producers of High Castle have an opportunity to seek a more perfect disunion, a hyper-realistic update to shake us out of our stupor, to do what PKD did: Make us question. Rattle our cage, take us higher. It’s not too late.

UPDATE: Because of the interest generated by this post, David M. Perry contacted me for his review of "The Man in the High Castle" for VICE. The piece can be found here. David has also written extensively about the role of the disabled in society.

* Put 行きましょう (ikimasho) into machine translation and you'll get "Let's go." Unfortunately, quite a lot of other things—行こう (ikou), 行くぞ (ikuzo)、行くぜ (ikuze) among them—will give you the same result. Nuance is everything, and the polite and friendly nuance of "ikimasho" clashes thoroughly with the tone (authoritarian and angry), context (police raid), and character (ruthless agent of the state).