These people do exist. I knew some of them the three times I was in Japan as an exchange student. For this reason, I cringed when one of the men was disgruntled and complained about being a gaijin and having a gaikokujin registration, to be registered as an alien. I, too, had an alien registration for Japan as well as the United Kingdom. My grandparents had alien registration in the U.S. as well. Yet Saft does nothing in her documentary to mitigate the mistaken bias of this comment.

Are the Japanese really so different from the U.S. or the U.K.? Ask any Asian ethnic, one born and raised in the US, UK or Australia if they haven't been complimented on his or her English and you'll know that you don't need a card to be identified as alien and that the marvel of someone speaking the local language with a different face isn't uniquely Japanese.

While learning the ins and outs of filmmaking, Saft says she started to long for Japan. “The school had some Japanese students and I gravitated towards them.” Then she caught up with one of her headhunting associates in London. Over a night of drinks, the former colleague mentioned he would give her $5,000 to shoot something in Japan. That was enough to get the ball rolling. The colleague eventually forgot his promise, and Saft was forced to raise the small budget of £60,000 herself.

At first, she thought she’d make a film about headhunters. “But their life is this Bermuda Triangle of their flat, Roppongi, and their office because they work so hard. There’s no Tokyo. It’s not cinematic,” she says. “I didn’t want to make that movie.”

Instead, she looked at her own inability to describe her feelings on life in Tokyo as a woman for Tokyo Cowboys. “There’s a reason Westerns are about men. It’s the frontier. It’s about reinventing yourself,” she says. “I can never have the same experience they have.”

Reading Saft's blog entries is also informative. She writes,

"I'm thinking that BG is right. Maybe I should shoot something in Tokyo. Maybe something about the economic hostages. That's what we used to call ourselves--"economic hostages." How arrogant is that. But I don't know anything about documentary, really. And I have to work on my graduation film. I'll have to think about it.

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