We are regular followers of the trends happening in Twitter because it gives us a glance of many things happening around the world which we would have never known. “We” are Sandy and Chaitu, the hosts of your favourite Telugu podcast “The Tollywood Project”. From the start of this year 2018, we were quite intrigued by the way Japanese people were tweeting about Baahubali movie. It just didn’t stop there, they have started sharing pictures of their special screenings called “Screaming Screening” which is a literal translation of the Japanese word called “ZEKKYO JYOEI”. The cinema auditoriums filled with all Japanese people cheering and screaming for every scene in Baahubali. It again didn’t stop there, as days passed people were tweeting about the pictures of the Manga comics they made for Baahubali characters. We were simply blown away by the reception this movie was getting from the land of rising sun. The question that was pondering us was why are they so madly in love with this movie. It was definitely not the first fantasy movie they must have watched because they are exposed to lot of Chinese and Hollywood movies which are technically more superior than our Indian superhero movie. After starting our own podcast in August this year, we had this amazing idea of how about we get the answers for all our questions directly from our Japanese fans of Baahubali. Then we happened to tweet this:
We are looking for someone from Japan who can speak in English(basic speaking is enough) who can talk about #Baahubali craze in Japan. We would be interested to know about #Prabhas @RanaDaggubati @actorsubbaraju craze over there. It would be a special episode.
This tweet got exploded with retweets and likes from the Japanese fans and they were so kind to give us a shout out to their followers that if someone would be interested to talk with us in English about the movie craze. The tweet reached Mr. Shobu Yarlagadda the producer of Baahubali series. He too retweeted our tweet which garnered more attention. People started pouring emails with their interest to talk with us. We were now confused with whom to bring onto our show. We didn’t want to make it a discussion with many people on the show. So we decided upon bringing two out of them on the show. One was Mr. Yamada Tapas who was so kind to send us a long email about who he is and what are the reasons he thinks that Baahubali could get such mad love from Japan. We absolutely wanted him on the show reading that email. The next question was who should be the second guest. For a balance sake we wanted a female guest speaker and chose Ms. Marina Uesugi who posted many pictures of her screenings of Baahubali in Japan. We were amazed by the excitement she was showing. We wrote an email to them about all the logistics needed for the recording of our episode and to agree on a time when we can do that. Doing a remote podcast recording is very complicated because of the fact that Sandy is in Central European timezone, Chaitu is in Pacific timezone and our two guests are from Japan standard timezone. Finally we agreed on a time slot for one hour. That was on October 7th. We prepared a show script to keep the conversation engaging and to be honest we were quite skeptical if the output will be satisfactory. We were right into the conversation from the first minute at the way Tapas and Marina started talking with us. We knew that this will not sound like an interview but will be a great conversation. We had so much fun laughing, singing along with them and getting to know the crux of our story on why Baahubali is such a great phenomenon in Japan. We were completely blown away by the love they have towards our Telugu language. They embrace our language so much that they were making efforts to learn the language by buying books on Amazon. It seems at a point the Telugu learning book was completely sold out in Amazon Japan. They had great words to talk about the director of Baahubali – S S Rajamouli. Tapas had also mentioned that he loved Yamadonga movie and watched Rajamouli’s other movies like Eega, Magadheera, Maryada Ramanna. Tapas being a huge Sridevi fan he expressed his sadness that she passed away. He was introduced to Indian cinema in 1987 when Mr.India movie released. From then he was an ardent follower of Indian movies. It seems there are around 40 telugu movies available in DVDs with Japanese subtitles and that is how they were keeping a tab on telugu movies which he says its quite disappointing to have only forty movies with Japanese subtitles. Marina watched Baahubali five times in the cinemas and also it seems she enacted Katappa killing Baahubali scene on the stage. She also shared a heart touching story about a Japanese woman who was facing lot of stress in her life and was in a verge of killing herself. But after she watched Baahubali, she drew inspiration from the character of Amarendra Baahubali and she recuperated strength to lead the life again with confidence. Tapas and Marina share that Baahubali has been a magic in many of the lives of Japanese people. There is a huge craze for Prabhas, Rana, Tammanah, Anushka and also SubbaRaju in Japan. Infact SubbaRaju was invited by the fans of Baahubali to Japan where he attended few screenings of the movie there. People have gone crazy to see him in live there. He became a huge star there. Tapas explains how they relate Subbaraju’s character in the movie Kumar verma to their reality. They related him to be a common man with a hidden strength. The conversation which was originally planned for one hour got extended to another thirty minutes more.
We have enjoyed the conversation wholeheartedly with our Japanese guests. You can also join us in listening to our conversation in the following links. Do not forget to subscribe our podcast channel in whatever application you listen to it.
Android- https://castbox.fm/episode/007-SPECIAL-Baahubali-by-Japanese-id1398837-id95149680
The Tollywood Project 