New York Times, 1992

'Twin Peaks' mania sweeps Japan

The New York Times

Tokyo - It might seems strange that people usually known for their industriousness fly across the Pacific Ocean to be photographed in plastic sheets.

But that is what Japanese fans of Twin Peaks do on group tours to Snoqualmie, Wash., the town where the defunct ABC series was shot. They pretend to be Laura Palmer, the high school homecoming queen whose body, wrapped in plastic, is found washed up on the beach when the series opens.

Long after interest in the eerie David Lynch has faded in the United States, Japan is in the midst of "Peaker" mania. Several thousand fans attended mock funerals for Laura Palmer in Tokyo and two other cities earlier this year.

Some people say there has even been an increase in the popularity of cherry pie, the food favored by one of the characters, the FBI agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan.

The new movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, has been playing here since the middle of May, although it won´t open in the United States until next month - the reverse of the usual screening pattern for an American movie.

But if all this seems strange, the strangest aspect of all might be this: Relatively few people here have actually seen the series. The show is carried only on Wowow, a pay television satellite channel with a mere 900,000 subscribers.

Since March 1991, Wowow has shown the series six times and is now on the seventh round. Late this month, it plans to show all the episodes in a 28-hour marathon. A survey taken by the station found that more than 30 percent of its subscribers joined just to be able to watch Twin Peaks.

For those who don´t subscribe to Wowow, videocassettes can be rented - there are long waits - or bought. A complete set of 14 cassettes sells for $440. About 15,000 sets have been sold, plus 7,000 sets of equally pricey laser videodisks, according to Amuse Video, distributor of the tapes and disks.

Japan has also been awash in Twin Peaks paraphernalia. Theaters showing the Twin Peaks movie are peddling Twin Peaks badges, baseball caps, T-shirts and handheld fans. Bookstores are carrying Japanese versions of books like Laura´s Diary, Cooper Speaks Out and How to Be a Peaker.

Japan Travel Bureau, the nation´s largest travel agency, has organized six group tours, with a total of 300 people, to Snoqualmie. They stay at the lodge where Cooper stayed, ear cherry pie at the diner where Cooper ate and lie on the beach where Laura´s body lay. The five-day tour is priced at $1,600 to $2,000.

Twin Peaks expressed Lynch´s vision that small-town America, sheltering the secrets of the mysteriously murdered Laura Palmer, was not as wholesome as it seemed. The new movie, also directed by Lynch, is a prequel, showing Laura´s haunted and disintegrating life in the days before her death.

With its complicated plot and quirky characters, the television show was a phenomenal hit when first broadcast in the United States in April 1990.

No one can fully explain why Twin Peaks has generated such a cultlike following here, especially since other American programs like Dallas and Dynasty, which were more successful in the United States, failed to win big audiences in Japan.

Some say Twin Peaks is popular because it is so different from mundane Japanese soap operas.

"The way it became popular was unprecedented," said Makoto Takimoto, a film critic and senior editor of Jiyujikan, a leisure magazine. "I don´t think, generally speaking, that David Lynch´s view of the world fits the Japanese feeling. That´s the point I have trouble figuring out."