Tokyo Vice is back with its highly anticipated season two. Not only are fans and critics describing the second venture as highly addictive and better than its first season. Yet apart from its entertaining and intriguing dive into the Japanese Yakuza culture, the crime show has been hailed for shooting the mixed language show in the land of the Rising Sun itself.
While many shows or movies would avoid filming in the country, using soundstages instead, the Ansel Elgort-starrer series is receiving praise for showing and covering the real Tokyo. But doing so was a mammoth of a task, yet even more difficult was shooting one real-life element that became absolutely crucial for the HBO show.
Tokyo Vice and How It Successfully Shot One Dangerous Real-Life Element of Japan
Based on the memoir written by journalist Jake Adelstein, Tokyo Vice covers extensively the Japanese culture and its crime syndicate culture of Yakuza. Divulging even deeper into the tale is it’s season two, which features even more of the Big Mikan, which until now was seen as nothing short of an impossible dream to achieve.
Considered by filmmakers as one of the hardest metropolises to capture, even harder was to capture the real-life element of Tokyo’s nightlife and bar culture, which is also deeply intertwined with the Yakuza. And so, to shoot a graphic shootout on the streets of Akasaka was a real challenge, something that no Japanese or foreign production had ever done.
Helmed by Masanori Aikawa, the show’s godsend location manager, the production’s endeavor to get permission to shoot in Akasaka Esplanade alone deserves to be made into a miniseries. The production and Aikawa’s crew had to get permission from the local police 6 months in advance, who instead made them get permission from every single 300 or so businesses in the area.
While that was a legendary feat of its own, they had to hire many former Japanese police detectives as well. This was done to avoid running accidentally into the local Yakuza offices in the places they were about to shoot and possibly prevent any disruption if the local Yakuza members disturbed the filming. Had they not done so, one can only imagine how catastrophic that would have turned out (via The Hollywood Reporter).
Tokyo Vice’s Shoot in Japan Was Total Gamble
A show based on Yakuza (a taboo subject in Japanese society), set and shot in places the Yakuza allegedly call home, and based on a book that is not even published there, Tokyo Vice’s production was a big gamble, not to mention that it was a white TV show being shot in the streets of Japan.
Yet the show being shot in the country is the main selling point of the show, as Sarah Aubrey (Max’s head of original content) described to The Hollywood Reporter.
“There was never a question about whether we were going to shoot Tokyo Vice entirely in Japan. This wasn’t going to be a story set in the American embassy with few excursions out into the rest of Tokyo. It’s an immersion into Japanese culture through that city’s crime world — and that was the main selling point for me and the network.”
Even though there were several logistical challenges to shooting the entire TV show in Japan, the production’s efforts to make the writer’s vision a reality are what sets Tokyo Vice apart from the rest.
Tokyo Vice is streaming on Max now.
