Visitors to Japan often rave about the honesty of the locals. Laptops left on tables at Starbucks go untouched. Wallets forgotten in taxis are later found, cash and credit cards intact.
But as Masaharu Take’s “We Make Antiques” series entertainingly but repetitively shows, Japanese are just as prone to cupidity as the rest of humanity, if perhaps in different ways. Not every country boasts Japan’s large appetite for antiques or has taken faking them for profit to such heights of painstakingly faithful mimicry.
For those whose acquaintance with Japanese history stops at samurai movies and know Japanese art only from T-shirts printed with Hokusai’s waves, the characters’ chatter about feudal lords and artifacts from four centuries ago may be baffling. But one of its protagonists — an antique dealer named Norio Koike (Kiichi Nakai) — is a type familiar from Hollywood movies about smooth-talking con men. His reluctant accomplice, a skilled but professionally struggling potter named Sasuke Noda (Kuranosuke Sasaki), is a more domestic type whose real-life craftsmen counterparts are typically framed in documentaries as noble upholders of threatened traditions.