Artistic license – the freedom to alter facts, embellish the truth, and use hyperbole liberally in order to make your work appeal more to your target audience.

As I mentioned previously, I had an interview with a magazine last week. I had been told by the editor that the interview would mainly be about my impressions and experiences as a Canadian climbing and photographing mountains in Japan and what were some differences between Canadian and Japanese mountains and mountaineering culture. I was also hoping for the opportunity to promote myself as a photographer and spent the days preceding the interview thinking very hard about what to say and what to prepare. Because I knew it would be difficult to explain everything in Japanese, I brought with me some things to show the interviewer – my two self-published photography books, some magazines with my articles and photographs, my short piece about my experiences climbing Mt. Tsubakuro, written in Japanese and printed in a newsletter of the All Japan Alpine Photographers Association, and my profile piece, also in Japanese, printed in a members magazine of the Society for Scientific Photography. I thought the Japanese articles would really help as the interviewer could borrow them for reference materials. I also brought a book of photographs of the Coast Mountains of British Columbia (not my photos) to show what kind of mountains we have in B.C.

As it turned out, the interview was mostly about my life – why I came to Japan, when I first became interested in photography, and my history of climbing mountains. The interview was fun, though I often had difficulty explaining things. Later that day I sent two text messages to the interviewer explaining, hopefully more clearly, some points we had discussed during the interview. Then I was to wait several days until he had prepared a draft of the interview for me to check over. The draft came on Wednesday night and as I expected there were a number of corrections. Some points were minor and due to the fact that the details were not discussed at length or mentioned at all. For example, he wrote that my family of three went to Mt. Baker in Washington. As siblings had not been discussed he couldn’t have known that I had a younger sister who was there as well. Or when he asked me about mountains I like in Japan I replied, “I like Mt. Hotaka, Mt. Tsubakuro, and Mt. Tsurugi. But I haven’t climbed Tsurugi yet. I also like Mt. Kaikoma.” The draft of the interview says, “He likes Mt. Hotaka and Mt. Tsubakuro and he wants to climb Mt. Tsurugi and Mt. Kaikoma.” It was not clear in the interview that I had already climbed Mt. Kaikoma.

But aside from such minor details there were a few astonishing details that were altered or embellished. Here are the most remarkable ones.

My ex-girlfriend became a man

When asked why I came to Japan I could not hide the biggest reason, which was that I had a Japanese girlfriend and I really wanted to try to live in Japan to be with her. However, out of consideration for my wife’s feelings I said to the interviewer it would be nice if he didn’t write much about that and played that fact down. He said he understood. The draft reads, “In 1996 Hotaka met an exchange student from Japan. He talked a lot about Japan and the things Hotaka didn’t understand he looked up in the library.”

He?

My ex-girlfriend became a man? I wrote in my corrections that it was OK to write that my friend was a “she”. My wife knows the basic story and will not be angry about it. My ex-girlfriend didn’t actually speak so much about Japan unless I asked her, so the second part of the sentence is backwards. I read many books about Japan and things I wanted to verify I asked my Japanese friends about.

My good friend went to Japan

In 1995 a friend of a friend left for Japan to teach English. This was the first time that I heard it was possible to do so and I thought it sounded exciting but there was no way in my life that I could go, or so I believed at the time. I recalled this moment after the interview and sent a text message to the interviewer explaining this important step in my coming to Japan. Here’s what appears in the draft:

“In 1995, Hotaka’s good friend came back from teaching in Japan. ‘Japan has beautiful mountains, green forests, and crystal clear streams,’ his friend told him.

Obviously this conversation did not take place because my friend’s friend had not yet been to Japan. Furthermore, it makes little sense for a British Columbian to try to sell Japan to another British Columbian by using the sales pitch of “beautiful mountains, green forests, and crystal clear streams” because we already have all that in greater quantity plus other natural wonders that Japan doesn’t have. It’s like the salesman trying to sell refrigerators to the Inuit.

All of Canada’s mountains are technical climbs

During my twenties I enjoyed hiking but rarely considered climbing to the summit of a mountain. My impression was that reaching the summit required great skill and lots of expensive equipment. I thought most climbs in western Canada were technical climbs, and not walk-ups or scrambles, thus I only ever reached the summit of a few peaks, fairly easy ones. I explained this to my interviewer, showed him the book of the Coast Mountains, and explained the point further in a text message. I wrote that I held the impression that most climbs were technical ones but that there were, of course, many walk-ups and scrambles. The article draft said “all mountains in Canada are technical climbs”. As a native Canadian, I feel it’s very embarrassing to be quoted as saying such if Japanese who have walked up to the summits around Vancouver or around eastern Canada, or scrambled some of the famous routes in the Rockies read those words.

My buddy who’s as good as a childhood friend

This is an example of how the interviewer embellishes the truth. While still in Canada I began exchanging letters with a man who lives in Gunma Prefecture in Japan. One day he sent me a magazine of Japanese nature and landscape photography. This magazine made a great impression on me as I felt that not only was the Japanese landscape very different from the Canadian one but the approach to outdoor photography was also somehow different. I explained this to the interviewer. In the draft he wrote:

“Hotaka began corresponding with a man in Gunma and before long they had become as close as childhood friends. One day, the man in Gunma sent Hotaka a magazine of Japanese nature photography. Turning the pages, Hotaka realized that Japan had folded mountain ranges, gorges of metamorphic rock, and sandstone coastlines. This gave him a push on the back and made him think, ‘I have to go to Japan!’”

My oh-so-dear friend and I had no correspondence for several years until he sent me a message last summer. I wonder what he will think when I tell him of this interview and he reads it. The other part about all the wonderful things I discovered in Japan was taken verbatim from my profile in the Society of Scientific Photography newsletter, but the observations of Japanese geography were ones I made after having come to Japan. But I decided these erroneously reported details are not so bad and I did not mention them among my recommended corrections.

The first mountain I climbed in Japan was in November 2006

You’d think a piece of writing in Japanese that he could hold in his hand would not lead to a fabricated story. My short piece about Mt. Tsubakuro in the All Japan Alpine Photographers Association newsletter describes my two trips to the mountain. When I first came to Japan in 1999 I searched the photo books in the store and found many beautiful mountains but didn’t know what they were called or how to get there. So I bought a guide book and discovered the fascinating rock formations on Mt. Tsubakuro. I went there in August of 2000 and climbed the mountain with my girlfriend, who is now my wife. A few years later I decided to return in November and climbed up through snow and a bone-chilling wind. Though it was cold on the mountain I enjoyed photographing the scenery until dusk. So my account reads. The interviewer wrote a different version.

“The first mountain Hotaka climbed was Mt. Tsubakuro. He saw a photo in a book and wondered what mountain it was and how to get there. He bought a guidebook and in November 2006 he climbed the mountain. In the bone-chilling wind, he rubbed his cold hands together as he enjoyed photographing the mountain scenery.”

If I came to Japan in 1999 and loved photographing mountains and hiking, why would I wait 7 years before climbing my first mountain and why would I do it in November? Why not start climbing the first summer or at least the second one? And I only have one memory of my hands being so cold, and it was not on Tsubakuro. Cold hands are normal when photographing on windy mountain ridges in winter so I wouldn’t have mentioned it. Again the interviewer is trying to make the story sound more interesting by painting these scenes.

I sent off the corrections to him and now I have to wait and see if he will send the revised draft to me for approval or if it will just be published with his version of the corrections. I feel it will be hard to tell people to read my life story if there are going to be so many amendments and inaccurate details. It makes me wonder just whose life is it anyway that he’s writing about.