By Kit Pancoast Nagamura
(The Internationalist Fall 2012 Vol. 49)
Establishing Shot
Some people live lives that seem tailor-made for the movies. Buddy Marini (class of '82) is a perfect example. End-of-summer shadows flicker over Nishimachi International School's Matsukata House the evening I meet Japan's new Managing Director of the popular on-demand streaming video content provider, Hulu. It's sweltering out, but Buddy arrives crisp and carefree, like Italian actor Raoul Bova in Under the Tuscan Sun, with his three-year-old boy Dylan slung over his shoulder. The child is conked out from an afternoon of romping with dad, so Buddy nestles him on one of the reception room sofas before we begin. We exchange ironic glances at being seated next to the Matsukata House fireplace—thankfully not lit—and Buddy's story unravels.
Opening Credits
Buddy's full name is Henry Satoru Marini. "But I literally have never used my real English or Japanese first name," Buddy insists. Nonetheless, his full name points to the trim 45-year-old's heritage, born to a Japanese mother and Italian father in Kobe. Buddy moved to Hiroo at age two, and because his parents still live in the neighborhood, he knows it well.
Dissolve
The school's surroundings haven't changed much over four decades, Buddy says, but on second thought, several important places have disappeared. A vacant lot large where he and his friends played Little League Baseball has now been built over, and the abandoned house across from the school is also gone. "It was rumored that someone died there and that's why it was never sold," Buddy says, his voice dropping dramatically. "I don't know if that was true, but the place was definitely haunted. No one had lived in it for years. It had weeds growing out of the boards and it was missing stairs from this huge staircase. It was a very elaborate house. It's scary to think about it now," Buddy says, with a conscientious glance to where Dylan is sleeping. "There were holes in the floor where you could look far down into the basement below, and we were walking all over those broken boards. It was like something out of a movie."
Rising Action
Buddy entered Nishimachi International School's first grade in 1973, and from the sound of it, was a handful. "I got into trouble a few times," Buddy admits. "and my parents were called into school more than once." One teacher in particular, William Jensen, whom Buddy had in 6th grade, attempted to solve the issue by confining Buddy to his own desk in the back of the classroom. By the end of the week, however, five of Buddy's friends moved their desks to join him in his exile. "Jensen was this cool dude, I think he was previously an actor," Buddy recalls "but he never said that others couldn't sit back there with me."
Marini is tight-lipped about his most dramatic school escapades—"They'd be rated R, I think," he whispers—but he confesses one hair-raising stunt. "I had an assignment due that I really needed to get done on time," he explains. When he arrived early that morning to finish the assignment, the school was still locked up. To get in, he simply scaled the roof of the Matsukata House and shimmied through a back window. "My teacher got here in the morning and asked how I had "broken" in. The "break-in" incident became a very big deal, and here I was only trying to get my homework done."
Thanks to his antics Buddy had numerous opportunities to spend quality time in the office of headmistress and school founder Miss Matsukata. "But it wasn't always just me," he is quick to qualify, "it was usually a few of us." He found Tane Matsukata calm, measured, and even "nice" when it came to discipline. "She'd ask us if we thought we did the right thing, and she'd be very thoughtful about it—she had this way of making us really feel bad, that we let her down. She wasn't a terror. Some people were scared of her, but we weren't. We always had great respect for her."
Foreshadowing
Buddy attributes much of who he is today to his time at Nishimachi, which he attended through 9th grade. "The exposure to so many different kinds of people, cultures, and both English and Japanese, was important not only for what I do, but for me as a person. I think someone who speaks two languages, or is a child of two cultures, struggles to find an identity. It's easier to do that if you're exposed to more different kinds of people." In addition, the physical challenges and risk-taking that characterized the school's ski trips and time at Kazuno also were crucial life-changers. "The experiences we had then were so free, most of the counselors were students, too," he explains. "When I think of it, river-running and jumping off the wall at Emerald Lake were pretty crazy and sometimes dangerous." But was the thrill worthwhile? To Buddy the answer is a resounding "yes."
It's clear that Buddy believes a certain amount of challenge, with genuine risks, is part of growing up. He has survived a broken back while snowboarding, and blown out his knees playing basketball, but he still loves both sports. And he has brought the same gutsy approach to forays into entrepreneurship, which has been a big part of his career.
Character Arc
Buddy also learned at Nishimachi not to make hard and fast assumptions about people. "I got my first and only A+ here at Nishimachi," he tells me. "I was not a top student, and I got this grade from Mrs. Kruger, who I had a lot of difficulty with." But an A+ for a class is a major achievement, I interject. "No, it was only for one paper," Buddy laughs. "I always thought that Mrs. Kruger literally had it in for me. We were like oil and water, and I never got good grades with her. One day, though, there was a creative writing essay and I wrote a simple comedy about God from a sort of atheist point of view. It was so memorable to me because we didn't see eye to eye on just about everything, and yet she really loved that paper and gave me an A+."
Next, Buddy found himself, "mysteriously" by his own reckoning, placed in the 7th-grade advanced algebra class, along with "the nerds and the smart people." Buddy credits algebra teacher Don Weber for this vote of confidence, which in many ways altered Buddy's self-perception. "When I got to high school at ASIJ," Buddy says, "it was an even crazier time for me—playing on the roof was a lot tamer than the pranks my friends and I would pull in high school. But because of my advanced math classes at NIS, I was placed in an advanced calculus class, ahead of many of my classmates. As a result, I hung out with kids I wouldn't have hung out with normally—the really smart ones."
Buddy ended up taking and passing the AP physics exams, and then entered the competitive field of engineering at Lehigh University. "But those guys were on a whole different level of smart," Buddy says, rolling his eyes. "I wasn't able to keep up with them, so I switched to finance."
POV Shot
Buddy's career started out in finance, when he spent two years as financial analyst in New York with a Japanese investment bank. But he knew he wanted to work in the entertainment industry, and so he headed west to get his MBA in entertainment marketing. Once out of school, Buddy joined a talent agency in Hollywood. "That was the center of the industry," he says. "You have to know everybody to do that kind of work, so it's like the entertainment industry's boot camp. Have you seen the show Entourage? With agents yelling and screaming all the time? Well, my experience at the agency makes shows like Entourage look mild. It was total power harassment, and so tough on the junior guys." Buddy worked his way up from the mailroom and en route, learned how things work in LA, who holds the reins of power and what it takes to get a TV show or movie made.
Though the work was engaging, Buddy began to realize that it wasn't suited to his character. "Most people don't become agents," Buddy tells me. "To do that, you have to be really tenacious and throw away your morals."
Dutch Tilt
Instead, Buddy landed the position of development executive at Universal Pictures for several years, a job that demanded plowing through mountains of screenplays. "I was reading 30-40 scripts a week, and that was after work and on weekends, not during work hours," he recalls. "I even had to get reading glasses, which I don't need to wear anymore," he says.
Push In
Having learned the elements of a good story, Buddy decided on a new twist to his own. Noting that Sony and Matsushita had begun to buy up Hollywood studios, Buddy thought himself perfectly positioned to be a key player. "I was going to be the inside guy," he recalls, outlining how his Japanese skills and industry experience looked like the perfect combo to help these Japanese companies take creative control of Hollywood. But it never happened. "The Japanese just weren't able to break into the creative side," Buddy says with a sigh. "As a matter of fact, most companies couldn't do it. Coca Cola, Seagram's and GE all tried to come in and change things, bringing with them their corporate ideals. But the creative industry in Hollywood is this closed bubble no one can get into." Because the idea was in his head, though, Buddy turned his attention toward working for a Japanese company.
Buddy landed a job as marketing manager for an LA subsidiary of a company owned by Sega, the popular game software company. But it was "game over" for the company less than 3 months later. Buddy saw an opportunity in the company closure. "They had equipment, offices, etc. that they needed to get rid of. Me, this one other guy and Mako Hara '86, another NIS student, were basically out of a job, so we decided to start our own company. We offered to take over their stuff and pay half price on the lease." Buddy's win-win deal allowed him to set up his own company, International Digital Artists (IDA), which was meant to do for digital artists what talent agencies did for actors. There was just one problem with the business model. "When Johnny Depp gets paid 10 million dollars a movie, and the agent gets ten percent, that's a million dollars. But digital artists were getting paid ten thousand dollars for big projects, and ten percent of that was not so good. So our numbers didn't really work out."
Accordingly, Buddy simply steered the company toward producing projects focused on CG animation for games and commercials, then shifted to Internet design in the late 90s. "Within a year and half, the Internet basically became our whole business," Buddy recalls. "We did design, and also database development and back-end solutions. I started hiring programmers and working together with specialized database firms. Towards the end, we were handling end-to-end solutions for everyone from hot startups to fortune 500 companies. The timing was good."
MacGuffin
From their über-cool but nerve-wracking original site located right on the runway of the Santa Monica Airport, International Digital Artists expanded and moved into new offices in the Warehouse district in Marina del Rey. But by this time, Buddy was feeling the burn. "In that business, you basically bill by time and you're not making money unless you're working—hard! I started thinking there was something wrong with that formula. I wanted to figure out a way to make money while I was sleeping," he says. He concluded that intellectual property was the only way to go.
Rather than sell his company, and be forced to migrate along with his staff to new management, Buddy closed IDA. Soon thereafter, he was approached by one of his clients, the Avex Group, a fast-growing early 360-degree Japanese music company, who had plenty of their own IP. They were setting up an international management division, and Buddy decided to move back to Japan. "If I was going to work in Japan, I wanted to know how Japanese companies work," he says, "I knew I had the skills to work at a gaishikei (foreign-owned enterprise), but I wanted to know what it was like to work on the inside first. Then, I figured my experience would be more valuable than someone who simply is able to speak Japanese."
After four and a half years at Avex, the president told him to go run their Hong Kong subsidiary. "At first, I figured that was the perfect excuse to quit the company. But then I met people like producer Bill Kong (of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame), actors Tony Leung and Chow Yun-fat, and director John Woo. I had always idolized these guys, and I just couldn't pass up the chance to work with them.
Resolution
When Buddy heard about a position opening at Hulu, newly launched in Japan September 2011, he knew it was virtually custom-designed for his skill set. "Hulu is entertainment and technology coming together," he says, "and the people there are smart, cool, and focused, and it's hard to find all three of those things in people. You can find one or two of those qualities, like smart focused people who are jerks or cool people who aren't smart, etc., but it's nice to be able to work with people with all three qualities."
Hulu, which in Chinese means both a hollowed gourd used for storing precious things, and "interactive recording," seems like the job Buddy has been preparing for all his life. When Buddy's wife, Hitomi, arrives, we notice the hour is late. We get up and gather around Dylan, who is still asleep. Does having a child now bring new angles and concerns to Buddy's life, I ask. "I worry much more about the whole world and the direction we're going," he answers, gazing at his son. "I am more aware of things, and I want to spend more time with my family. Before, I just wanted to do what I like."
Dénouement
As a final question, I ask Buddy what he most wishes for his son. His answer reflects his early years at Nishimachi International School. "I think it's most important to be open-minded and creative and study at your own pace without a rigid structure," he says. "You have to learn to think for yourself." I mull over Buddy's words as he, Hitomi, and Dylan head off toward dinner, wondering how one secures such an education in these competitive and driven days.
Voiceover
Glancing up at the Matsukata House roof, it occurs to me that any boy who shimmied up that peak to achieve his goals will be the kind of man who will help his son attain similar heights.