Jahma???

[Mark Nornes]

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!

> 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.
>
>> 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.

> 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.
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