Japan’s Ogata Walks on the Cutting Edge of Comedy

Issey Ogata, a Japanese comedian, is one-of-a-kind.

In Japan, it’s OK to make fun of yourself. And it’s OK to make clever word plays in the traditional rakugo, or punning, style.

But in a rigidly hierarchical society, whose social grooves are greased with exchanges that drip with polite deference, to make fun of those around you runs the risk of deeply offending.

Which is why the subtly subversive, wackily irreverent one-man comedy show of Issey Ogata has caused such a sensation here.

Often likened to performance artist Eric Bogosian and comedy legend Woody Allen, Ogata alone dares to poke fun at the Japanese and the institutions they take so seriously--vacuous babbling politicians; the miserable, pressure-cooker lives of salarymen (corporate white-collar workers); the difficulty of living as a family in insanely cramped quarters.

“I think there are other people who would like to do what I do,” the mischievous Ogata says, “but they are scared.”

Tonight, Angelenos can see Ogata perform his one-man show, “A Catalogue of City Life,” at the Japan America Theatre, his first stop in a tour of five American cities. With his wide malleable face, rubbery features and a spiky mop of black hair sprouting from his head like a radioactive weed, Ogata and his parodies of the Japanese everyman prod people to examine their own lives and values.

Ogata, 44, was born in Fukuoka, on the southern island of Kyushu, in 1952. His father’s work forced the family to move often. Always an outsider, he survived with humor. When he moved to a new school, the bullies would surround the new kid but he would reduce his tormentors to fits of laughter.

He flunked his university exam, and, on a whim, joined an acting school. There he met Yuzo Morita, his producer of 24 years. They started working with a small troupe, but eventually the other actors fell away, leaving only Morita and Ogata.

Ogata performs his monologues with no props, shedding clothes in a frenzy on stage between skits. With the flourish of a pen or the swipe of a comb, he can alter himself completely.

Most of his characters--he has a repertoire of more than 200--are neurotic, emotionally stunted city dwellers who have been beaten into submission by a suffocating, all-demanding work ethic.

Ogata also mimics with side-splitting accuracy the idiosyncrasies of Japanese celebrities. In a relaxed moment during an interview, he molded his face, curling his upper lip, into an uncanny resemblance of Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto. He pulled his face in a different direction. Shazam! He became one of Japan’s best-known newscasters, speaking intimately into an imaginary camera.

But he sticks to the everyman because humor here still carries taboos. Television stations will not air jokes about the imperial family. The emperor cannot laugh. Imitations of politicians were outlawed in wartime, leaving a lingering fear of broaching political subjects.

Ogata himself has been warned that some of his performances are “dangerous.”

Many of his pieces feature a brow-beaten guy trying to make the most of a truly awful situation.

Take the hero of “Moving Day.” He moves his family into a claustrophobic apartment, and with a plastic smile of optimism, makes his study in the closet and forces his wife to sleep with her head on the pedals of the piano.

Ogata makes fun of characters like these and what he sees as their senseless cheerfulness.

After overwhelming success domestically, he went international in 1993, with a performance in New York. He has since performed in France, Germany and England.

Reviews of his shows overseas have been mixed. Playing largely on stereotypes the Japanese have about themselves, some skits are too culturally bound for foreign audiences to understand. Because they are performed in Japanese with simultaneous translation, foreign audiences miss his flawless rendering of the conversational rhythms of an average guy.

Still, he says he is happy with the foreign response he has gotten and hopes to get the chance to perform in an American comedy club.

Ogata says his travels showed him how universal his themes are. “I thought only Japan was full of men who can’t get married,” says Ogata, referring to one sketch about a pompous musician who can’t get a date. “But America is full of guys like that. And in Germany it’s a national problem.”

* Issey Ogata performs at 8 tonight at the Japan American Theatre, 244 S. San Pedro St., in Little Tokyo. Tickets $22-$24. (213) 680-3700.