I went spastic when I learned that the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be on the shelves of my local Tsutaya (not all of us have landlords that allow cable). I've already seen every episode of the show, even the much maligned 'unaired pilot,' where Willow is played by a mopey fat girl, and the vampires dissolve in time-lapsed shots of dissipating talcum powder. At last, I would be able to relive a television series that returned me to the Star Wars scale giddiness of my childhood from the fresh vantage point of a different language.

I know it's incredibly dweeby to want to see your favorite show dubbed, but in many cases, Japan does this much better than other countries. The words match the lip movements precisely, the proper expressions are found, and with a little suspension of disbelief it's not so hard to accept Fox Mulder's name being pronounced "Murder" and his partner, "Scary." I was dying to see how some of the sharpest dialogue in television history would be transformed after passing through a cultural worm hole. Would the translators settle for getting the meaning across, or would they use the growing supply of Japanese slang to give Xander's one-liners, Giles' prim English crypto-speak, and Willow's spacey, non-committal stammering a multi-cultural version of the academically vaunted "Slayer-speak"(now a hot topic in cultural studies departments in Britain and the United States)? "Spank your inner moppet" and "Evita-like", would be well matched by the Epstein-Barr inspired vernacular of the Japanese adolescent, with their "watashiteki"(asformyself-ish) or "upset-kei" (upsetese, to refer to high-strung people). Having taught at a Japanese high school, I could also see how the 'high school as Hell' metaphor could transcend all cultural barriers: the pod- like conformity, the bullying, the military style hierarchies would make a Japanese language version of Buffy more than doable.

With the exception of animation, it is also true that for the most part strong female characters have been sorely absent from the Japanese television screen. The heroines in TV dramas tend to range from one socially sanctioned stereotype to another. Just turn on your TV day or night and you're sure to find a young wife valiantly struggling to conceive, a bitter but attractive career woman who just needs a man, or an elderly matron whose sole concern is making sure her daughter in law is breast feeding correctly. Many of the Western television series that have successfully crossed the Pacific , like Friends or Ally Mcbeal also revolve around the same old gender formulas. Ally Mcbeal, in particular, was the perfect American version of the televised Japanese heroine, kawaii (cute), grotesquely thin, and obsessed, not with a career, but men and that oh so tired biological clock. I was furious with a translation in the X-Men sequel that arrived in Tokyo theaters last May. While the film was applauded for its mutant metaphors for otherness, more specifically, queerness, particularly a scene in which Nightcrawler asks Mystique why, if she can look like anyone, she does not make herself look normal; the Japanese translation of her reaction once again destroyed what was essentially the entire point of the film. In the original version, Mystique retorts,"Because I shouldn't have to!" and storms off. We begin to sympathize more with her character as we come to admire her principles, even if she abandons them a few minutes later. The Japanese version removes the social statement. The line becomes a ditzy "sonna hitsuyo nai wa!"(Oh...I don't need to do that). This change seemed to imply that for all women, even if you're a mutant, that it's all about getting a man.

So I picked up a copy of the Buffy DVD, sat down in front of the set, and listened in horror as Buffy's voice was dubbed in a squeaky submissive tremble that makes Yeardley Smith sound butch comparison. Her every "ehhh" and frightened gasp increased in porno-pitch with each supernatural skirmish. Willow and Xander sounded fine, except that Willow's sarcasm was taken at face value, and Angel? Enrique Iglesias in Japanese. The most suspect detail however, was not the voices of the actors, but a particularly spooky omission during an exchange in the pilot episode. In this scene, Buffy is introduced to Principal Flutie, a well-meaning, and appropriately clueless high school Principal, who will later be eaten by his students.

Buffy: I know my transcripts are a little... colorful.
Mr. Flutie: Heeey... We're not caring about that. Do you think, uh, 'colorful' is the word? Not,uh,dismal'?
Buffy: Wasn't THAT bad!
Mr. Flutie: You burned down the gym.
Buffy: I did, I really did, but... You're not seeing the big picture here, I mean, that gym was full of vampi... asbestos.

In Japanese this exchange was translated perfectly with the exception of the one word that made it funny, and uh... relevant.

Mr. Flutie: You burned down the gym.
Buffy: I did, I really did, but... You're not seeing the big picture here, I mean, that gym was full of vampi...it was an accident.

Thus, a funny line is translated into a pathetic badabumpish piece of verbal flatulence. And why? Did the translators assume that a reference to what has been officially named a "proven carcinogen" by the World Health Organization would be lost on the audience? Or, did they just not want to bring it up for fear of giving the hundreds of thousands of people who are living in homes that are coated with the stuff a bigger scare than they'd anticipated?

Brown and blue asbestos were banned in Japan in 1995. White chrisotile asbestos, however, which is known to cause a particularly feisty form of cancer in the membranes surrounding the lungs is still being imported for use (almost 100,000 tons last year alone), and will continue to be until October 11th, 2004, according to the Indian News Network.

Most of this substance is processed into materials for housing:shingles, siding, and boards used on the inside and exteriors of private homes. Japan's Ministry of Health and Welfare has been predictably dragging its feet on the issue of safety regulations, claiming that the ones that they've implemented have essentially taken care of the problem. That only short term exposure to white asbestos is enough to cause cancer (sometimes as late as 25 years down the road), and that it is easily inhaled while doing simple household repairs like drilling holes, or cutting pipes, show that Japan's Ministry claims of "safety" are to be taken about as seriously as the American nutritional pyramid. ("Butter's our friend.") Moreover, such "regulations" only stipulate safety measures during demolition and construction, but say nothing about what to do when you're just puttering around the house trying to repair a hole in the cheap siding for which you've indebted yourself for life to some Yakuzza owned real estate company. Not just construction workers, but also younger homeowners, who are rightly rejecting the disposable housing mentality of their elders and choosing to remodel, face a potentially enormous health risk.

And what about those demolition regulations? While the Air Pollution Control Law states that any planned demolition or renovation involving the removal of sprayed asbestos must be reported in advance to prefectural authorities, such notification is not necessary unless a building's "total floor area exceeds 500 sq. meters." Repeat! "500 sq. meters!" (Insert laughter. Then buy face mask).

Construction is so ubiquitous in Japan that the risks to people on the street are about as high as they are to the poor schmoes in the hard hats. Just in the last year, three houses on my block have been torn down and rebuilt. My partner had to move out of perfectly good studio a few years back to watch it rebuilt into an ugly black apartment building with no windows. My veterinarian's office, a mere ten feet away just had the entire front entrance torn off and replaced, and just last week, an apartment building, two houses down was destroyed in a day, the two men wreaking the havoc were not wearing masks. Levels of atmospheric asbestos from discharge spread by dismantling and demolishing buildings are expected to grow from 1,500 -2,000 tons per year to 3,000 to 4,000 tons. A recent study has also predicted that the mortality rates from "pleural malignant mesothelioma among males in Japan will rise from 58,800 during next 30 years, to 103,000 during next 40 years." This figure does not include female mortality rates, and deaths from other types of asbestos related lung cancer.

On Buffy, there's a running joke about how no one seems particularly freaked about the constant stretcher traffic between Sunnydale High School and the funeral home. Body after body is carried out of a fictional California high school, while in Japan, house after building after restaurant is torn down and replaced, with barely a blink of surprise or even acknowledgement. Buffy's monster spewing Hellmouth has again provided a perfect metaphor in an unexpected place. Girl stakes vampires who turn into seemingly harmless piles of white dust, that we breath at our own risk.

Welcome to the Hellmouth.

Next issue: Translation The Other Way Around, or, How the social commentary in the English language version of Tetsuwan Atomu, known abroad as Astro Boy, was also diluted by American distributors who argued that young viewers would be traumatized by the violence on the show. Thus harsh and very realistic lessons about death and militarism were destroyed when murdered characters were said to be merely "unconscious." A lot of good it did.