Dave Spector

Early life

As a child, Dave Spector appeared in American TV commercials, including one for cereal manufacturer Kellogg Company. He says that he first became interested in things Japanese in the fifth grade at elementary school when he made friends with an immigrant classmate from Japan, Michael Sugano. As a gesture of friendship, he tried to speak Japanese to him by saying "Where is post office?" in Japanese. His friend was impressed and moved by that gesture and particularly praised Dave's Japanese pronunciation. He soon became interested in Japanese manga which his friend owned. As he desired to understand Japanese manga, he began taking Japanese lesson once a week at the Japanese school his friend attended every Sunday. He stated in his autobiography that he learned 50 new Japanese words every day, eventually becoming capable of comprehending serialized Japanese manga such as Obake no Q-tarō and Ashita no Joe. He later joined Japanese weekend classes with other Japanese children, eventually becoming the class president of the graduating class. He astonished the Japanese-American community by winning the Chicago Japanese speech contest hosted by the Chicago Japanese community, the first person of non-Japanese descent to do so. The title of his speech was "The life and suicide of Yukio Mishima". Spector studied at Sophia University in Tokyo, before returning to America a year later. After returning to Chicago, he enrolled at the Institute of Broadcast Arts.

Career

He moved to Japan in 1983 to research exotic film clips from Japanese television to be used on the American TV show Ripley's Believe It or Not!. While this work continued until Ripley's Believe It or Not! ended in 1986, Spector became well known in Japan after becoming a regular guest on Fuji TV's lunchtime TV variety show Waratte Iitomo! in 1984, alongside other foreign personalities such as Canadian Kent Derricott, American Kent Gilbert, and Guinean Ousmane Sankhon. He described his work as "[d]oing things like the lowest Bozo, circus kind of stuff. But it doesn't bother me at all. A lot of times the foreigners on TV, models and what-not, are compared to pandas. They use that term here — pandas — because they're cuddly, you can go and have fun with them, and throw a marshmallow and that's about it. And you don't get involved any more deeper than that. But...since I'm making half a million dollars a year, I'm very happy to be a panda."

However, due to his fluency in Japanese, he also developed career as a serious commentator of Anglo American culture and events. [1][2][3][4]. He is a regular and highly sought after commentator of foreign news. He also established the Tokyo-based company Spector Communications in 1988., which he used to obtain clippings or video grabs from foreign media, which he used for his commentary role. He is ranked as one of the most, and in some year the most, well regarded commentator in Japan for all age group according to oricon survey. [5][6] In reference to his success in Japan, he stated that "I set a goal early on to be different from other gaijin tarento [foreign TV personalities] by trying to compete with Japanese rather than with other foreigners."

Private life

Spector is married to Kyoko Spector (京子スペクター, Kyōko Supekutā), a native of Chiba Prefecture, whom he met in the US.

Filmography

Regular TV appearances

Books

Spector has written a number of books published in Japan, including the following.

His wife, Kyoko, wrote the following book about him.