A Sales Pitch Made to Order for Japanese

The man who is selling California to the Japanese can be found in Van Nuys. His name is Jeffrey Goddard and he works, for the time being, out of a dusty ranchette deep in the Valley.

Goddard’s neighborhood is not a place you would normally associate with real estate on a geopolitical scale. Big dogs snooze beneath RVs. Orange trees drop their fruit unnoticed, the owners long bored with the novelty of citrus in the front yard. This is old Valley, the smokey flats that never grew into Encino.

But for the past several months, any number of real estate tycoons have found themselves making the trek to Goddard’s door. If ever a person found himself in the right place at the right time, Goddard is the man.

He is 29 years old, a blond and sunny self-starter who operates the only video production company in California with a staff fluent in Japanese. Goddard himself spent five years in Tokyo learning the crucial difference between the American sell and the Japanese sell.

So the tycoons have lined up in Van Nuys, all wanting the same thing. They want Goddard to make videos that will sell chunks of Pacific Palisades, Irvine and Marin to our most valued Asian friends.

Already the likes of Jon Douglas and Grubb & Ellis have made deals to carry their message to the Ginza. The idea is to create videos that will convince the middle-class Japanese their yen are more wisely spent on California real estate than anywhere else in the world.

“A rabbit hutch in Tokyo, maybe the size of a nice motel room, now goes for $1 million,” Goddard says. “We’re taking advantage of that. We’re talking to the mid-level Sony executive, telling him maybe you are locked out in Tokyo. But look what you can get in California. It’s not too late to participate in the boom here.”

These are not the mega-sales, the Bel-Air Hotels that make the newspapers. Goddard wants to sell average homes to your average Japanese businessman, homes by the trolley car load. Homes that will seem too cheap for the Japanese to refuse. Something nice in the Palisades for, say, $850,000.

On a huge Mitsubishi television mounted against his den wall, Goddard punched in a cassette of his latest video. This particular work serves to prep Japanese buyers even as they come hauling across the Pacific in their wide-bodies. It introduces them to California, the turf they must want for their own by the time they hit the tarmac at LAX.

An interesting place, this California. Mostly there is unoccupied space, as if the state has remained a series of wilderness areas. Enough room here to satisfy every Japanese fantasy of the Occident, every deep wish to escape the Tokyo crush.

Along the coast the white beaches are empty, with lonely strollers on the sand. Inland, the deserts have been thoughtfully converted to golf courses, dozens of them, so many you could putt your way from the Salton Sea to Napa.

Suddenly, in the midst of the soundtrack, the Japanese narrator begins peppering his talk with English phrases. “Golden Land-ah,” he says at one point, and Goddard explains.

“Japanese is becoming Anglicized, like a lot of other languages,” he says. “The word for computer in Japanese, for example, is ‘comput-ah.’ We wanted to make use of this, so the customers would feel they had already begun the cultural change.”

On and on the video goes, showing a strange land where every woman is tall and blond, every man a polo player. The cities are as homogenous as Japan’s, without blacks or Latinos or even Japanese. Everyone moves magically about a landscape that is absent freeways. We see only mute, beautiful wanderers, or white-robed technicians dreaming of cancer cures at UCLA.

A century ago, another generation of salesman sold Southern California with much the same spiel. The Southern Pacific railroad and the Santa Fe sent their agents throughout the Midwest telling farmers of a paradisal land where the climate cured disease, where ripe fruit hung from every tree and hunger did not exist.

The spiel worked then, and it may work now. It is the peculiar quality of California that it can sustain dreams, however ludicrous. Reviewing his own film, Goddard says he does not think the Japanese will be disappointed once they arrive. They will only realize that the film presents a version of California that is “distilled.”

As Goddard speaks, the video flashes to a seaside development somewhere in Orange County. Finally, we are seeing the product to be sold. Languid inhabitants stroll past the pool into their white domiciles. The narrator rattles through a few sentences in Japanese and then utters the essential word.

“Condominee-oh,” he says.