Popping Up on Japanese TV
by Sue Corbett, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 5/31/2007
From prehistoric mega-beasts to a forthcoming galactic guide to Star Wars, paper engineers extraordinaire Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart keep popping up everywhere. Now, they're even on TV—reality TV, that is. In Japan.
Japanese actor Shunsuke Daito spent a week in late May living and working with Sabuda and Reinhart for an episode of Ururun, a Japanese television show that sends neophytes to work with master craftsmen around the globe.
Sabuda and Reinhart helped Daito create a pop-up edition of "Peach Boy," a retelling from Japanese folklore about a childless couple who adopt a baby they find floating down the river inside a peach.
"When he first got here, we showed him the things we are working on, these elaborate pop-ups that are just enormous," Sabuda said. "Then we showed him some much, much simpler pop-ups so he'd have a more realistic view of what he could accomplish."
In 1994, Sabuda's first-ever foreign sale was a Japanese edition of The Christmas Alphabet. His and Reinhart's subsequent books (published by Dainippon Kaiga) have hit it big with Japanese audiences. Japanese public television made a documentary in 2006 featuring their work, which led to an exhibit of pop-up art that toured Japanese museums.
The producers of Ururun, which each week sends a Japanese "visitor" (usually an actor) to learn a skilled trade somewhere around the world, saw the exhibit and pitched the idea of placing an apprentice in Sabuda and Reinhart's Manhattan studio.
"If it gives some insight into our world, or New York, or what we do, I think it's well worth it," Sabuda said. Daito, whose credits are mostly small roles on Japanese sitcoms, had never been to New York before. Sabuda and Reinhart took him to the Empire State building, on a helicopter tour of Manhattan, and to their home in New Paltz for the weekend. ("I think what he's most astonished by is how much we eat," Sabuda said.)
 Shunsuke Daito shows off the pop-up he created, with the help of Matthew Reinhart and Robert Sabuda, for a Japanese reality show. |
Determined not to let that happen to Daito, Sabuda and Reinhart have been solidly encouraging, and committed to ensuring he had something to show at a wrap-up party hosted by Scholastic at week's end. (The episode is scheduled to air at 10 p.m. June 24 on TBS Japan.)
"He has a real sense of wanting to accomplish something," Sabuda said. "I know the time change is part of this, but he was up until 2 a.m. the other night finishing something."
One complication is that Daito, 21, does not speak English and neither Sabuda nor Reinhart speak Japanese. The film crew had an interpreter on staff but Sabuda believes that sometimes the best method is to show, not tell. "The great thing about being an artist is everything doesn't have to be verbal," Sabuda said. "I can demonstrate something and he gets it."
