Igniting A Fervor For Fitness In Japan
American Becomes Household Name
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Saturday, September 29, 2007; Page A13
YOKOHAMA, Japan -- Looking buff, sounding bossy and wearing Army boots, a fitness guru from Southern California has become a pop-culture icon in Japan.
Billy Blanks did it the old-fashioned American way -- with infomercials.
Besides sudden fame, Blanks has sudden fortune in Japan, selling merchandise worth more than $130 million.
Over the past nine months on late-night television, Billy Taicho (Commander Billy) has been shouting at the Japanese to get off the couch and "squeeze the fat" out of bellies that, by American standards, are not all that fat.
"Feel the power!" commands Blanks, who first felt the power of infomercials in the 1990s, when TV spots for his "Tae Bo total body fitness system" made him gobs of money and helped him land appearances on "ER" and "The Oprah Winfrey Show."
Blanks has made himself into a household name here by tapping into two lucrative streams that flow from the modern Japanese psyche: an unselfconscious passion for fads and a self-conscious concern about being overweight.
His campy drill-sergeant routine has enabled Blanks to sell more than a million copies of his "Billy's BootCamp" video series, which includes four DVDs and costs $132.
Polls here show that 70 percent of Japan's 127 million people now know who Billy is and what he does at his imaginary boot camp.
For the second time in less than six months, Blanks is cashing in on his phenomenal notoriety, touring Japan and packing thousands of former couch potatoes into arenas across the country.
They happily spend $60 for a BootCamp T-shirt and the chance to kick, punch and march themselves into exhaustion while being barked at by the man they call "Bee-Lee."
"At my age, nobody but Bee-Lee bosses me around, and that to me is part of the attraction," said Masaru Mochizuki, 39, a systems engineer for Unisys here in the port city of Yokohama. "Plus, my tummy has really gone back to what it was like when I was in high school."
Blanks led 600 or so of his disciples through an hour of sweat-soaked delirium in a harbor-side convention hall here and afterward met briefly with the media.
