SACRAMENTO — The insatiable appetite for news of Arnold Schwarzenegger surprised him.
"It's not just that he is famous," said Akira Maki, the Los Angeles bureau chief of TBS, the Tokyo Broadcasting System. "To the Japanese people this is bigger than even if a movie star like Harrison Ford ran for governor."
Shuwa-chan, as Schwarzenegger is affectionately known in Japan, was in a ramen commercial dancing with kettles, cameraman Hiroki Takeguchi threw in.
"We knew he was an action hero, but then we knew he was jolly too," said Maki. "The Japanese people feel they really know his character."
Maki and his news crew had been following Schwarzenegger since the premiere of "Terminator 3" in June, knowing that if he ran for governor, it was going to be big. Maki had been filing stories every day since the recall started, sometimes multiple stories. The ratings wars are fierce in Japan, and anything that is not popular is instantly yanked. But still his editors kept asking for more, more, more!
"Even the presidential campaign won't get this much coverage in Japan," said Maki's news assistant, Matt Sheldon.
The demand for Schwarzenegger stories swelled to a mighty tsunami that peaked with the election. In the days leading up to the swearing-in, Maki struggled to come up with new angles that would interest the Japanese, who wouldn't care if Schwarzenegger rolled back the car tax or balanced the budget.
Last week he homed in on the search for an Arnold impersonator. The Sacramento Convention and Visitors Bureau has said it's looking for a fake Arnold, who can travel the world selling Sacramento as a vacation destination. On Friday, Maki and his crew headed to Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood to interview the street-trolling Supermans, SpongeBobs, Rambos and Batmans about what it would take to impersonate the Terminator. (A lot of muscles and a really bad Austrian accent, they were told.) They shot some footage of the three Arnolds in the Hollywood Wax Museum (Gov. Arnold, Terminator Arnold and Arnold the Barbarian) and the massive billboard advertising "Terminator 3" on the Hollywood Freeway by the Cahuenga Pass.
On Sunday they visited the old Victorian governor's mansion in Sacramento and pondered anew whether Schwarzenegger would be "Homeless in Sacramento," as a San Francisco Chronicle headline declared.
