‘We Make Antiques! Osaka Dreams’: Con-men hijinks bring on laughs

Guests to Japan typically rave concerning the honesty of the locals. Laptops left on tables at Starbucks go untouched. Wallets forgotten in taxis are later discovered, money and bank cards intact.

However as Masaharu Take’s “We Make Antiques” collection entertainingly however repetitively exhibits, Japanese are simply as liable to cupidity as the remainder of humanity, if maybe in several methods. Not each nation boasts Japan’s giant urge for food for antiques or has taken faking them for revenue to such heights of painstakingly trustworthy mimicry.

For these whose acquaintance with Japanese historical past stops at samurai films and know Japanese artwork solely from T-shirts printed with Hokusai’s waves, the characters’ chatter about feudal lords and artifacts from 4 centuries in the past could also be baffling. However considered one of its protagonists — an vintage seller named Norio Koike (Kiichi Nakai) — is a kind acquainted from Hollywood films about smooth-talking con males. His reluctant confederate, a talented however professionally struggling potter named Sasuke Noda (Kuranosuke Sasaki), is a extra home kind whose real-life craftsmen counterparts are sometimes framed in documentaries as noble upholders of threatened traditions.