Friday, September 8, 2017

Scary Thing Pigeons in the Temple Are Afraid Of


 In the beginning of the 1990s, I was a university student with a part-time job as an actor. The private universities in Nagoya produced a promotional video to attract high school students from other regions. The story of the video was based on the novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. A high school girl named Alice happened to visit Nagoya and had an adventure. I played the role of the Cheshire Cat, who introduced to Alice the beautiful places in Nagoya. The title of the story was Alice’s Adventures in Wonder Nagoya.
While we were filming in Osu Kannon, a famous temple, the director said, “I want to film a scene in which all the pigeons start flying away.”
Many pigeons were roaming around the temple. I tried to make them fly by yelling and chasing them, but they just ran away from me. The pigeons in the temple were tame, and people could feed them with food sold there.
The cameraman had an idea. We asked some grade-school boys to run to a flock of pigeons. It worked very well. The pigeons that had ignored me flew away together. The director was finally able to take the scene that he wanted.
Why were the pigeons scared of the little boys but not of me? Maybe they knew how cruel children could be. They know human behavior very well.
In the original story, Alice was a very delicate child, but not all children liked her.
 

Picture by osame

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