MCLEOD GANJ, India — i first heard the rumor in the fall of 1996, while I was writing a magazine article about the making of “Star Trek: First Contact.” Five or six years ago, a Paramount producer told me, a local newspaper had run a photo showing the Dalai Lama of Tibet on the set of the Starship Enterprise, standing beside the android Data.
The Dalai Lama a trekker? Astounding, I thought to myself — but possibly true. I already knew that the 63-year-old Tibetan Buddhist monk (who fled his homeland in 1959, after the Chinese occupation) takes an active interest in cosmology and particle physics. I knew he had spoken with neurosurgeons, mathematicians and astronomers, exploring the tantalizing territory where Eastern mysticism meets Western science. Most telling of all, I knew that, as a boy, the Dalai Lama had owned a telescope — which he trained on the inhabitants of Lhasa as they went about their business, far below his perch atop the Potala Palace.
I searched for the picture, but in vain. Though many people at “Star Trek” confirmed its existence, no one could remember where, or even when, it had appeared. Several maddening months went by before a sympathetic “Voyager” staffer FedExed me the original slide.
It was not quite as advertised, but it was pretty close. The snapshot had been taken in 1990 or ’91, when the Tibetan leader and his retinue had toured the western U.S. In the picture, some 20 monks from the Namgyal Monastery in Mcleod Ganj, India (to which the exiled Dalai Lama belongs), are crowded onto the starship’s transporter pad. In their midst stands the actor Brent Spiner, in full Data garb. The Dalai Lama himself is not in the scene, but many of his most important attendants are. His Holiness, I deduced, might also be a fan, even if his schedule had precluded a visit to the set.
It was a leg to stand on. I immediately faxed the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Mcleod Ganj, requesting an interview. In late January — while I was visiting Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka — a reply arrived: My audience was scheduled for Jan. 15.
Ten hours by overnight train from Delhi to Pathankot; three more by taxi to Dharamsala. From there it’s a half-hour ride to Mcleod Ganj, more than 6,000 feet above the Indian plains. The snow-capped peaks of the Dhauladhar Range rear above the town like a frozen wave. Along the muddied, cobbled streets, cows and vegetable-sellers are locked in perpetual tug-of-war; scores of shops sell incense and curios, religious texts and woolen scarves. A short walk from the main street lies Namgyal Monastery and the home of the Dalai Lama.
After much paperwork and an intimate body search, I’m ushered into the residence itself. It’s chilly. A pot-bellied stove in the waiting room radiates no heat. The walls are cluttered with medals, citations and honorary degrees. I snoop around for a peek at the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to the Dalai Lama in 1989.
Ten minutes later I’m led out onto a long patio, through French doors and into the audience room. Here it is warmer, and there are cozy couches arrayed beneath a large altar. Sitting down, I place my notebook and tape recorder on a low table. Then I rise again abruptly, for His Holiness is escorted into the room.
The Dalai Lama appears fit and very alert. His eyes are welcoming, curious and brightly amused. It’s been perhaps a week since he has last shaved his head, and the stubble on his scalp shows less gray than I would have thought. In fact, he appears ageless. Though he tends to stoop — out of humility, I suspect — he is a tall, big-boned man, born in the rough-and-tumble landscape of northern Tibet.
This, however, is only his outward appearance. Far more profound is the deeper effect of the Dalai Lama’s presence. The cynical tongue is stilled: Here is The Nicest Man in the World. His humility, wisdom and kindness illuminate the room like a rack of halogen bulbs. Offering him the traditional greeting of a kata — a white silk scarf — I nearly giggle with pleasure. It is difficult to overstate how safe I feel. If this sounds New Age-y, sue me, but to stand beside the Dalai Lama is sheer delight.
My host clearly recalls using his telescope as a boy; he remembers turning it from the byways of Lhasa toward the planets, the sun (with a proper filter, he assures me) and the moon. Many Tibetan scholars, the Dalai Lama laughs, did not believe that men had really landed on the Moon. From the appearance of the satellite’s surface in photographs, they were convinced that the astronauts had lit instead atop Mount Meru, the physical and spiritual center of Tibetan Buddhist cosmology.
Still, Buddhist scriptures speak of limitless worlds and endless galaxies. “Sentient forms of life, similar to human beings, do exist on other planets,” the Dalai Lama says. “Not necessarily in our solar system, but beyond. This, I believe.” When I ask him if he has ever encountered such a life form, he shakes his head. “So far,” he says, “I didn’t meet any person who recalls a previous life from another galaxy, or another planet.” Still, he says, they must exist, with sensory and emotional capabilities close to our own. And since all forms of life have sprung from the same causal chain that created the physical universe, all will be subject to the laws of karma and reincarnation. All will be capable of suffering, he says, and responsive to kindness.
But our first encounters with these “new neighbors,” he warns, will have to be motivated by good intentions on both sides. Otherwise, a repeat of world history — on a galactic scale — will ensue. When I ask if heading toward the stars to seek out such beings is humanity’s destiny, he raises his eyebrows.
“Maybe after taking care of all the problems here on this world,” he allows. “If no more difficulties, it will be nice to have a holiday. Then we can go outside, visit, make new friends. Why not!”
I steel myself, and ask the Dalai Lama about “Star Trek.” Has His Holiness ever watched the show?
Indeed he has, he admits, but years ago, and not often. He recalls with great amusement the “man with the big ears”: Spock.
But when I suggest that the show portrays a view of Shambala — a utopian realm that Buddhist texts predict will emerge about three centuries in the future — the Dalai Lama slyly mimes a phaser. “Even then, many weapons … So not much difference than now, I think!”
Our conversation strays to other aspects of popular science. We discuss computers, cloning, robotics. The common thread in his responses, I find, is a willingness to let the future take its course. Technological progress is neither inherently good nor bad. Everything depends upon motivation and results. Even his comments about the Internet, and what I describe as “information addiction,” surprise me.
“One aspect of Buddhahood,” The Dalai Lama states, “is omniscience. So, once again, the gathering of information is neither good nor bad. Everything depends upon intention!” He takes a similarly broad view of robotics, saying that there is no theoretical limit to artificial intelligence. If “conscious” computers are someday developed, he will give them the same consideration as sentient beings. As for the capabilities of lesser machines — and what they might be capable of — he likewise draws no limits.
“If a machine is ever created that can instantly make a good heart, a warm heart, without any need for meditation or practice, this would be very, very good,” he declares. “I would immediately call my Chinese brothers and sisters and say to them: ‘Please! You buy this!’”
By the time my questions end, we’ve spent an hour — twice our allotted time — together. It’s difficult to leave, but his attendants are restless and the next visitor is waiting in the wings. Even as I walk off, I can’t help myself. I turn around for a last glimpse.
The Dalai Lama lifts his hand and waves a final farewell, smiling broadly: a simple Buddhist monk who has shared a few moments with an oddball friend.
This is the third of four “Planet Star Trek” reports. The series will conclude next week with a visit to the Dalai Lama.
BANGALORE, India — i can’t lie to you: India was a bust, at least in terms of “Star Trek.” You can come to India looking for lakeside palaces; you can come looking for white Brahman bulls pulling ox carts loaded with satellite dishes; you can come for the hot pickles, the raita, the dal. But don’t come to India expecting to find a seething subculture of “Star Trek” addicts. I did, and boy is my face red.
The focus of my efforts was Bangalore. Unusually cool at 3,000 feet above sea level, it’s not your typical Indian city. Sacred cows do wander the streets, grazing the greenery amid the temples and beggars; but grazing as well are Oracle, Hewlett Packard and Toshiba. Despite the usual gap between the fabulously rich and the pathetically poor, Bangalore may be South India’s first truly middle-class urban center: a hard-working, tree-shaded megalopolis with its tail in an auto-rickshaw and a Pentium chip on its shoulder. Often referred to as India’s Silicon Valley, it seems an obvious place to seek out “Star Trek” fans.
Looking for an Internet connection, I’m stunned to find a full-blown Cyber Cafe featuring color monitors, Netscape Gold and serious coffee. Right down the street is NASA, a bar that resembles a funky space station, like something out of a William Gibson novel.
I spend two days running myself ragged trying to find Trekkers before an idea bulb bursts in my head. I duck into a crowded street-side CD-ROM stall and ask if they sell “Star Trek” games. The owner, Hassib, wags his head.
“Yes, yes. In fact, we have sold more than 400 in this shop alone.”
“Really?” My blood races. “To whom?”
More wagging. “Sorry, sir, we are not keeping records of such things.”
But I stick around, and after some time Hassib says: “OK, maybe you try Ashok, at double-five, seven-six, nine-two-nine, and also Prassant, you may phone him at double-six, double-one, three-two-five …”
“And Amjad,” his partner adds. “At triple five, double-naught, five six …”
Before I can whip out my pen, everyone in the shop is firing names at me. The next day I phone a dozen potential Trekkers. Only one — Amjad, a 22-year-old university student — returns my call. He shows up at my hotel late at night with his pal Naveen, a lanky computer systems engineer.
Both guys love “Star Trek,” despite, as they tell it, years of disappointment and betrayal. The fact is, “Star Trek” isn’t really on in India, not anymore. The original series began airing here in 1984, and Doordashan (the government-owned channel) is showing those tired episodes still. A single season of “The Next Generation” was broadcast on Star Plus, a satellite channel, in 1994, but the series was never renewed.
“I was heartbroken when it ended,” laments Amjad.
“If they showed all 179 ‘Next Generation’ episodes, we would watch for 179 days,” confirms Naveen. “Continuously.”
“But even if it was on television every day, the people who loved it wouldn’t start fan clubs,” Naveen adds hastily. “Indians simply don’t start fan clubs for foreign things. If it’s something Indian, we’ll be going crazy. We’re a very proud country.”
“That is why,” Amjad cautions me, “there may be loads of ‘Star Trek’ fans in India but you will find no fan clubs, conventions or magazines.”
The fact is, however, that — unlike in Pakistan, Japan or even Russia — there are not “loads” of “Star Trek” fans in the world’s largest democratic nation. And there’s a good reason why. Over the past 10 years, the Indian subcontinent has leapfrogged into the digital age. The awkward growing stage Americans went through — from punch cards and magnetic tape to Kaypros and 300-baud modems — barely happened here at all. India jumped, in a single decade, from being a country where you could hardly get your hands on a pocket calculator to a nation where many urban kids are growing up with Quake, Doom and the World Wide Web.
As a result of this infogap, “Star Trek” is basically ignored by Indian adults, who remain addicted to their cheesy soap operas and Bollywood musicals. Yet the show’s main potential audience, kids aged 12 to 20 — India’s new cyber-sophisticates — find the interminable reruns of old episodes like “Amok Time” and “Arena” hopelessly out of date.
Still, despite what Naveen and Amjad said, I’m not one to give up hope. There has to be a fan club somewhere, even if it’s a secret society, hidden behind a code name, meeting in rat-infested cellars below Bangalore’s PC-board assembly rooms.
I have one more hunch. Inside the NASA pub, images of blast-offs, space walks and the Earth from orbit gleam through illuminated portholes; the tabletops are perched on rocket-legs. “The Earth is the cradle of mankind,” a bronze plaque on the wall proclaims, “but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.” Surely whoever designed this place would know what I was after.
NASA was the brainchild, I learned, of an architect and amateur pilot named Tom Thomas. His schedule is frantic, but he agrees to meet me briefly in his office. Drawings of a huge medieval castle are spread out on his desk. They’re plans, he tells me, for a madly ostentatious new shopping center, currently under construction near Bangalore Airport.
Thomas, a bearded and distinguished-looking 53, has been building micro-light aircraft for years. His teenage dream was to become a pilot, but his older brother talked him into a more down-to-earth vocation. He still has doubts about his career choice: “When I fly,” Thomas admits ruefully, “the world becomes believable to me somehow.”
Thomas is one of the few adults here who might have become a die-hard Trekker, but he echoes the usual complaint: “The version they show here is ancient,” he remarks with disgust. “I watched it for a while and thought, hey, this is like watching Lucille Ball.”
“Listen,” he says frankly. “I’ll tell you why you’re not finding legions of ‘Star Trek’ fans in India. It’s simple: The working class people here need to come home and relax with a drama they can relate to. ‘Star Trek’ succeeds in societies that have already achieved basic levels of satisfaction. Where the food’s on the table. Where clothes are in the cupboard and the car’s outside. Then, they’re willing to watch the next step. ‘Star Trek’ is certainly the next step. Our next step is still getting that food on the table.”
“And building castles,” I remark.
Thomas rocks back in his seat. “Well, I suppose we all have our dreams,” he laughs. “Back in the 1960s, during the heyday of the space program, I was dying to be an astronaut. I was sure that, if I made a million bucks somehow, I’d be able to take a trip, fly around in a rocket ship. But those days are gone.” He grins sheepishly. “Now I have to be content with building bars like NASA — and using rocket fins as table legs.”
KATHMANDU, Nepal — Back in the dark ages — i.e. the 1980s — phoning home from Nepal was a major project. I had to stay up well past midnight, then ride my rented bicycle down to the Kathmandu Telecommunications Center. There were endless, baffling forms to fill out. A good read was essential; connecting to the U.S. via funky trunk lines could take over an hour. And after all that, half the time the payoff was a dreaded busy signal, and a long slide back to square one.
Today, the Kathmandu Valley, once the archetypal South Asian backwater, is wired to the gills. Satellite dishes yawn amid drying dung patties on the roofs of Himalayan lodges, the crown prince surfs the Net, and Radio Nepal — the Hindu Kingdom’s flagship AM station — is online in real time, on RealAudio.
But the coup de grace is coming in the next couple of weeks, when Sanjib Bhandari, founder and CEO of Mercantile Office Systems (MOS), opens Nepal’s first cyber cafe. Called K@mandu and situated just 50 meters from the high, spiked gates of the Royal Palace, K@mandu will be the first in a series of culturally hyper-conscious “Cybermatha teahouses.”
The phrase, Bhandari explains, is a play on “Sagarmatha,” the regional name for Mount Everest. “And they won’t be cyber cafes,” he notes, “because in the mountains you wouldn’t drink coffee.”
Bhandari, 37, is the dean of a new breed of Nepali techno-wizards. He has a round face, bowl haircut and easy, boyish charm. Like Bill Gates, he looks a lot younger than his age. Further comparisons between the Nepali tycoon and Microsoft’s CEO are inevitable, though, by Bhandari’s own admission, “I probably lack (Gates’) killer instinct.”
Educated by American Jesuit priests at a private school in the Kathmandu Valley, Bhandari studied accounting in Bombay before going to the U.K. for a one-year course in computer systems. “It was very, very basic,” he laughs. Still, the know-how he brought home was enough to thrust Nepal — essentially a medieval nation until the 1950s — into the information age. He founded MOS in 1985, immediately after returning to Nepal. He now has 120 employees.
Bhandari decided to open his cyber-teahouses after visiting similar venues in Singapore and Sweden. It helped that improved telecom links have recently made such an enterprise practical in Nepal. But he faced a more intractable foe than technology: government censorship.
“The Communication Act of Nepal,” Bhandari says, “flatly states that no form of communication can promote violence, sedition, treasonable acts or immorality — i.e. sex. Right now the government is creating policy for Internet businesses and they know full well that you cannot guarantee — no matter what technology you use — that forbidden things will not come in. So we’ve had the buck very conveniently passed back to us. ‘We’ll allow you to run the Internet,’ they say, ‘but you can’t do anything prohibited by the Communications Act.’”
Bhandari’s stopgap solution has been to follow Singapore’s example. He’ll set up proxy servers, block a few hundred of the Web’s most notorious sites and hope the government credits him for observing the spirit of the law. “We think that’s how it will be,” he says, grinning. “Of course, there could be one nasty guy who says, ‘Oh, I saw a nude woman on a site through your service, and I’m going to shut you down!’ That’s possible.
“Of course,” Bhandari adds rapidly. “You can dial up India, you can dial America, you can dial anywhere, any outside line, to get access to the Internet. And they’re fully aware of that, too.”
But is there a market for a cyber-teahouse in such a remote location?
“Initially,” says Bhandari, “I thought of tourists and expats — people who’ve gone trekking and have lost touch with their electronic mailboxes for two or three weeks. For a cyber buff, an unthinkable situation! But I now think such people will constitute a very small part of our clientele. I’ll tell you why: We had a computer show here in January, and we put about a dozen stations at that show. They were used from the moment the show opened until night time. All Nepalis. They downloaded Film Fare (an India-based “Bollywood” fanzine), universities, chat rooms, you name it. And the average age was less than 20: people who can’t afford an Internet link at home.”
Ever the entrepreneur, Bhandari has a number of other projects in the pipeline. One, already underway, is a “telemedical” service, a nationwide Net link that would allow doctors in far-flung health posts to communicate online with specialists at the major Kathmandu hospitals. Another — inevitable, perhaps, though bittersweet — is a plan to place VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminals) links in lodges or teahouses along the major trekking routes. Such links would provide around-the-clock connectivity to the MOS server in Kathmandu, and hence to the world at large. As Nepal gets about 50,000 trekkers a year, such a service could make a bundle.
“You could take a laptop with you on the Everest trek, or into the Annapurnas, and link up from there. It’s a straightforward set-up.” With a sigh, Bhandari adds, “The only obstacle is the governmental permission.”
And a formidable obstacle it is. Despite ever-increasing baud rates at the telecom office, Nepal’s bureaucracy creeps along at a snail’s pace. One example? About 10 years ago, when personal computers first arrived in the Kingdom, customs officials at the airport didn’t know where to list them. New customs forms have never been printed, so motherboards, modems and microchips are still being recorded right where they were in the 1980s: under “animal husbandry.”
COLOMBO, SRI LANKA –
it’s not every day you get to play Ping-Pong against someone with a belt named after him.
But that’s how it is in Sri Lanka: Every afternoon around 6, Arthur summons his red Mercedes, tucks himself into the back seat and is driven to the Otter Aquatic Club, where he demolishes, through skill and/or sarcasm, another victim.
For the four days I’m in town, that victim is me.
Arthur, of course, is Arthur C. Clarke, and the belt is the Clarke Belt, the region of outer space, 25,000 miles above our heads, where satellites placed in orbit seem to “hang” above a single point of the earth’s surface. For, aside from writing some of the century’s best science fiction (including “3001: The Final Odyssey,” coming next month), Clarke also dreamed up — in a 1945 article in Wireless World — the idea of communications satellites. That makes him, in my estimation, one of the heroes of our epoch — though it’s hard to remember that while he’s gloating over a cheap point.
I’ve known Arthur Clarke since I was 14; we first met in New York’s Chelsea Hotel in 1968. I’d written him a gushy fan letter after seeing “2001,” stuffing it with inane drawings of spaceships and two-way wrist-radios. To my breathless amazement, Clarke responded; and to my continuing astonishment, he has responded ever since.
He’s changed over the years, of course. When I first met him he was a lad of 51. Now he’s nearly 80, and post-polio syndrome has forced him to measure his pace. But his mind remains agile.
Clarke’s “technoasis” in Sri Lanka is a spacious, deliciously cool compound on Barnes Place, a 10-minute walk from the gardenia trees and machine-gun nests surrounding Prime Minister Bandaranaike’s residence. It’s my third visit to Colombo. I’m here because I want to include Clarke in “Planet Star Trek,” my current book-in-progress. The idea for the book came to me, in fact, during my last visit here in 1993. I’d asked the futurist if there had been anything about the present that he could never, ever have predicted, say, 25 years ago.
“The one thing I never imagined,” he’d pronounced with melancholy, “is that we would begin traveling to the Moon and into outer space — and then stop.”
The remark struck me with force. Surely, if there is a hidden key to the success of the “Star Trek” mythos, it lies in the fact that the show has become humanity’s “surrogate space program” — a way to pursue in fantasy a path of exploration that many people, including Clarke and me, once considered our destiny.
“I think you’re quite right,” he says when I kite this thought by him. “But in a way, I’m afraid that it may be counter-productive. Because we’re not going to find new civilizations every week in prime time when we do start the exploration of space! In fact,” he reflects, “the inner solar system has been a major disappointment. Not a trace of life anywhere, let alone Martian princesses. And the Martian ‘bacterium’ is very iffy. Exciting if it is true, but it’s still very, very iffy. Still, it’s interesting that there was so much enthusiasm when the announcement was made. It shows that people are keen.”
“Gene Roddenberry once wrote that meeting you, and reading ‘Profiles of the Future,’ were what made ‘Star Trek’ possible. Does that sort of quasi-utopian future — as shown in ‘Star Trek’ — seem a real possibility to you?”
“Well, it’s certainly possible,” Clarke muses. “Whether it will be real, of course, depends on us. And looking at the evening news, it’s hard to be very optimistic.”
“What would it take to bring that sort of global solidarity about?”
“I don’t know,” Clarke laughs. “A Martian invasion?”
Clarke has almost completely lost interest in space travel, at least by rocket-powered means. “The rocket is to space travel,” he sneers, “as the balloon was to aviation.” Instead, he’s put his money — literally — on the nascent (and also iffy) science of cold fusion.
“Not much, only mid-five-figure amounts,” Clarke admits. “And although I don’t want to, I may make a lot of money out of this. But my No. 1 concern, frankly, is to get the thing moving.”
“What’s kind of timeline are we looking at?”
“Acceptance that something is happening? I hope this year. But for practical uses much longer. Ten years for power; maybe less for small units, like houses. Space propulsion? At least 10 years. Twenty years.”
“One last ‘Star Trek’ question,” I say. “Do you recognize your own work in the show?”
“No … But there are of course common elements in almost any science fiction.” He sighs with ennui. “I’ve seen it all, really, in science-fiction movies and videos. And I’m a little bit tired of it. We always meet humans. Whatever they are, they’re humans. We know that central casting can’t come up with an intelligent blob of something or other; it wouldn’t be very exciting. So that’s a limitation of any science fiction on movie or TV. It can’t be realistic. I’m sure there’s lots of life out there, lots of intelligence, though I suspect that all the intelligence will be silicon. Probably carbon is only a brief moment in the evolution of intelligence.”
The rest of the afternoon is punctuated by Clarke’s signature hospitality: his latest jokes (“What goes clop … clop … clop … clop … BANG! Clop, clop, clop, clop, clop? Give up? An Amish hit man!!”), a pile of books and faxes he wants me to see, and a barrage of anecdotes, none more than 30 seconds long, about various celebrities he’s outwitted over the past few years. He spends a good hour showing me bits of the new “Rendezvous with Rama” CD-ROM game developed with his longtime collaborator, Gentry Lee.
Finally, as 6 o’clock draws near, he begins to power down. “Oh! Hey, listen to this.” Clarke swivels in his chair and begins closing down files. “Here’s a voice you may recognize.” He toggles the desktop’s shut-down command, and spins around to grin at me. An all-too-familiar contralto emanates from the machine’s speakers:
“My mind is going … I can feel it.”
It’s so self-referential as to be completely innocent. Who but Clarke, I wonder — a teenage septuagenarian who has inspired some of our best, most useful toys — could continue to take such gleeful pleasure from an icon (HAL from “2001″) he helped create more than three decades ago?
We drive to the Otter Club. There, the impossible happens. For the first time in 14 years, I beat Arthur at table tennis. On our way back, though, he has his revenge. Clarke switches on the Mercedes’ sound system — and grins with delight as I’m blown through the roof.
“I’ve got an 11-record jukebox I can pick from.” He punches a hand-held remote, changing our soundtrack instantly. The repertoire is pure Clarke: Jean-Michel Jarre and Gustav Mahler, “Tubular Bells” and “Blade Runner,” all at ear-pulverizing volume. Can’t tell how it sounds to my half-deaf host, but to me it’s like sitting in a phone booth equipped with THX sound.
“This is the other thing I never imagined would happen,” Clarke says as we pull into his compound. “That they could take something as sensitive as a laser beam, and build around it a sound system that could be put into a car. Absolutely incredible. Two years, and I’ve never heard it skip.”
TOKYO —
after 30-plus years as a flagship of American pop culture, the voyages of the Starship Enterprise are now beamed to some 150 countries worldwide — which means that the ship may be the best-known vehicle, real or imaginary, ever created by human beings. According to Joe Okubo, who directs the “Star Trek: Voyager” Web site on Niftyserve, there are about 5 million Trek fans in Japan alone.
I arrived here at the start of a two-month pan-Asian research trip for a new book about why “Star Trek” has become a global myth. The Japanese passion for cultural imports — from Buddhism to baseball, from vintage jazz to jelly donuts — is easy to understand, and my contacts at Paramount insisted that the interest in “Star Trek” was just as obvious.
“It’s the technology,” they insisted. “The Japanese are obsessed with it. Phasers, tricorders, warp drive — it drives them wild.”
It made sense to me, too. The Japanese have an amazing addiction to techno-toys, and they sure do love speed: The Enterprise is to the space shuttle what the beloved shinkansen (“bullet train”) is to Amtrak.
But after zooming on the shinkansen more than 1,000 miles across Japan — from the shrines of Kyoto to the frosted volcano cones of Hokkaido — I learned something totally unexpected: The Japanese love “Star Trek” because it’s full of metaphors for modern Japan.
On the shinkansen platform I’d caught sight of a poignant sign — one of those bizarre uses of English that you see everywhere in Japan, from the nonsense phrases emblazoned on storefronts (“Eat at Pretty”) to the prim and proper schoolgirls carrying day packs emblazoned with the word “Bitch.”
This one was an ad for a college in Kyoto called, simply, “Human University.” The sign reflected the earnest wish of the Japanese — more theoretical than practical — to be far more diverse and pluralistic than they actually are. In reality, Japan is scarily homogenous. Wherever you turn, whichever direction you look, all you see are Japanese. That only makes the profusion of cultural imports more disconcerting.
“Star Trek: The Next Generation” (known to fans as TNG), which ended its seven-year run on American TV three years ago, is in its fourth season here in Japan, and the ratings are growing steadily. But it is not Patrick Stewart’s meditative Captain Picard, nor the samurai-inspired Worf, nor the manga-babe Troi whom the Japanese adore. It’s not even the Enterprise itself, despite the ship’s vast appeal in a country that likes its environments well-swept, brightly lit and highly plasticized. No, the vast majority of trekkers I interviewed — and I met with fans, Web-heads and Japan scholars in Tokyo, Sapporo, Yokohama and Kyoto — are madly in love with Data.
For those unfamiliar with TNG, Data is a prodigious, white-skinned android with a single tragic wish: He wants to be human. In pursuit of this dream he studies painting, recites poetry, even tries his hand (dismally) at stand-up comedy. No matter how high the level of expertise he reaches, though, the essence of humanity remains beyond his reach.
Riko Kushida, a startlingly lovely journalist, quiz-show personality and Formula One race car driver, is also a huge fan of “Star Trek.” We sat together in a sushi bar and struggled valiantly with the language gap as she tried to explain her fascination with the android.
“He’s different from the other people around him,” she said, “and he knows it. We Japanese know we are different, too. We’re like Asians, but we are not really like other Asians. We try to follow Western ways, but we are not Western. So we are isolated. Different from both.”
She took out a pen, drew a square within a square, and pushed it across to me. “That middle square is our core, what makes the Japanese what we are. Everything else” — she indicated the outer square — “is soft. Elastic. It’s a dilemma. We want to imitate others, but we can’t change our identity.”
Shintaro Inoshita, a 21-year-old Sapporo programmer with wild, Harpo Marx hair, took Riko’s thought and ran it into the economic domain. “In the 17th and 18th century,” he said, “Japan cut off all communication with the outside world. And in terms of business, the Japanese are still very old-fashioned. Each company has its own way, and they have a very hard time taking chances with capital ventures. In the future, though, Japanese companies will have to experiment, to give up their mechanistic approach and try new things. Data symbolizes the way the Japanese people have to be willing to change in order to succeed.”
Among the older generation, the Japanese attraction to “Star Trek” cuts deeper than Data. Sigenobu Ito, a 41-year-old Hokkaido detective who’s been watching the show here for 20 years (the original series first made it to Japanese TV in 1973), pointed out that the ultra-convivial atmosphere that prevails aboard the Enterprise embodies the ancient Japanese concept of wa: harmony. The balancing forces of nature, he explained — sei (action) and dou (stability) — are embodied by the principle characters. In the original series it was Kirk and Spock; in TNG, it’s Picard (dou) and Riker (sei).
My own opinion is that part of “Star Trek’s” appeal to the Japanese is its archetypal menagerie of characters. One of the weirdest pleasures I’ve experienced in Japan, in fact, has been watching the show dubbed into Japanese. Like most Western television programs shown in Japan, “Star Trek” is available in bilingual broadcast. You flip a switch to decide which version you want to hear.
After watching two or three episodes, I had to admit: The dubbed voices are eerily excellent. They’re so good that I could actually tell which character was speaking even without looking at the screen. That’s a stunning achievement. The Japanese Picard has exactly the right blend of reserve and command; Dr. Crusher’s Japanese voice is competent yet somehow playful. Riker is suitably rakish, Troi sultry, Worf the perfect samurai. Data’s stand-in can’t quite match the inimitable Brent Spiner, but he’s a convincing enough Japanese ‘droid.
The truth is, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Centuries of Kabuki and Noh theater have given the Japanese an awesome capacity for conveying the most subtle turns of character and nuance through voice alone. Of all the stars, only LeVar Burton’s dubbed voice was annoyingly generic.
But the Japanese inability to convey the vocal shadings of black English is hardly a surprise; during my 10 days here in this “human university,” I’ve seen a grand total of two Africans.
