When Jake Adelstein got hired in the early 1990s by the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan¡¯s biggest daily, he was thought to be the first American to pass the newspaper¡¯s rigorous entrance exam. It took him five years of concentrated language study to get that far; even then, it was a prodigious achievement.
Ansel Elgort, who plays the journalist in the HBO Max series ¡°Tokyo Vice,¡± which is loosely based on Adelstein¡¯s 2009 memoir of the same name, had to make do with four weeks of intensive Japanese classes. That¡¯s presumably four more than Sean Connery spent preparing to play a Japanese expert in ¡°Rising Sun¡± in 1993.
Still, faking it in a foreign language is a tricky business.
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