Peter Falk’s goofy detective Columbo is extremely popular in Japan. Emperor Hirohito himself wanted to meet the American actor, it was the first country with a Blu-ray complete box of the TV series – and there’s even a Japanese version of Columbo. It is currently being discovered by international fans on X/Twitter, who are enormously delighted by the fascinating find:
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One user comments something like: “This is brilliant! The messy hair, the raincoat and the body language are totally on point.” Many others would like subtitled versions for outside Japan, which unfortunately have not yet arrived. But where does the clip actually come from?
What the Japanese Columbo is all about
Shinano no Columbo (Columbo from Shinano) is a series of TV films based on crime novels by Yasuo Uchida. His investigator from Nagano Prefecture is named Iwao Takemura and was portrayed by various actors between 1982 and the 2020s. The character started out as a simple street cop who, after solving a particularly tricky case, is promoted to inspector, jumping several ranks. He then gets a Burberry trench coat and adopts the tricks and mannerisms of the famous US crime hero.
But wait, there was something else: Another series that is often referred to as the “Japanese Columbo” is Furuhata Ninzaburonamed after its investigating hero. The series ran from 1994 to 2004 on Fuji TV and adopted Columbo’s Howcatchem formulawhich, unlike whodunnit, is not about who committed the murder, but rather about how to catch the person responsible. As in the US model, you see the murder at the beginning of each episode and the perpetrator is often a prominent guest star.
Just one more thing: Why is Columbo so big in Japan?
Japan has had a long and deep love affair with eccentric criminal investigators. This started after the country opened up in the 1890s, when Sherlock Holmes became extremely popular and remains so today. The 2018 series Miss Sherlock or the manga hero Detective Conan (named after Sherlock author Arthur Conan Doyle) are more recent evidence of this. But Twin Peaks and its idiosyncratic FBI agent Dale Cooper were not as popular in any other country as in Japan and have left a noticeable imprint on the cultural landscape.
Of course, Japan also has no shortage of its own fictional criminologists. Literary great Edogawa Rampo, for example, created the eccentric private detective Kogoro Akechi, whose specialties are disguises and judo. And the fidgety Kosuke Kindaichi, written by Seishi Yokomizo, is the perfect link to Columbo.
And if you’d rather hear from the other side of the law…
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