Television Finally Noticed the Man with the Tripod

There is a man with an orange flag and a tripod outside my local konbini most mornings, and I have walked past him for three years without once wondering what he actually does. NHK, it turns out, has been wondering for both of us.

On the eighteenth, in the 'Road to a Regular Programme' slot, they are airing Hakarimasu!, a one-off drama about a surveyor, shot in the house style of the morning serial — that warm, unhurried camera the whole country associates with first jobs and small-town streets borrowed, for one night, to dignify a profession most of us walk straight through.

This is exactly the move genre cinema makes when it is working: take a form the audience already trusts — the asadora's gentleness, the procedural's patience, the monster movie's dread — and point it at something nobody thought deserved the attention. Horror does it for grief. Heist films do it for class. A single episode about the man who decides where your building's corners actually go does it for the invisible labour holding up every street you've ever filmed on.

I don't know yet whether Hakarimasu! earns its borrowed warmth, and a pilot inside a strand built to test unknown jobs for a future series is, by design, an experiment rather than a statement — closer to a festival short screened to gauge a room than to a film already sure of itself. But the instinct behind it is the one I keep coming back to after fifteen years on this circuit, from midnight genre slots to restoration premieres: the camera doesn't need a rare subject to be worth pointing. It needs a form confident enough to make an ordinary one feel found rather than filmed.

Casting Yamanouchi Suzu, Oshinari Shugo and Terajima Susumu against a man in a hard hat with a theodolite is, in its own small way, a vote of confidence — in the surveyor, and in the audience's patience for him.

I keep thinking about the tripod outside the konbini, and the fact that I now know, because a broadcaster decided a flag and a measuring stick were worth a camera, that someone is deciding exactly where the building behind him begins.