<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; "><div>Ian Miller is doing a project on Ueno Zoo and had a question for me. Does anyone know anything about this guy? It's a great story!</div><div><br></div><div><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; ">I'm writing with an odd film question, and I understand if you don't have time to get to it. There was an Indian or Malaysian elephant trainer working at Ueno during the interwar years. He was hugely popular--a large, dark-skinned man with a knack for card tricks and a love for kids--but he had a breakdown after the bull elephant threw him out of the enclosure at the end of one of his shows. All of the diaries and records say that he went on to play a gangster, a fireman, and several other roles in movies. How would one go about tracking down those films? I have his general dates in Tokyo and the romanization of his name, but little else to go on.<br><br></span></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; "><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; ">His family name was Jahma or Jama. Records list his full name as バイサップ ジャマ or ジャンマ, but my guess is that バイサップ is actually a Hindi honorific, meaning Mr. Jahma.</span></blockquote></span></blockquote><br><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; ">Is this a lost cause? It's not crucial to my research, but I'm just curious enough to want to see if I can see this guy. The story is attached to one of the better zoo vignettes, an episode in which a Caucasian white Russian paints himself with brown shoe polish, playing an exotic elephant trainer to large crowds for several weeks until the police appear and take him away. Truth is stranger than fiction.</span></blockquote></div></span></body></html>