Japanese TV

Japanese TV is fascinating. Between 5 PM and 6 PM on weeknights there is the usual news, weather and sports thing, but after that, prime time takes off.

Commercials are fast paced and the vast majority last only 15 seconds. Usually, you’ll get the main message and then the last second or two, a voice (Usually female) will say the parent company name or the name of the product. Commercials run the gamut of what you would expect to see in the US except that they don’t always appear to be targeting a specific demographic. By that I mean, in the space of a two minute break, you’ll get a whole range of products thrown at you.

The programs themselves seem to be either game or panel type shows with the odd drama or special thrown in. They throw a lot of graphics on the screen and a lot of the dialog is flashed and I don’t think it has anything to do with the hearing impaired. One of the weirdest programs ever has to be a show I watched last night about weird diseases. It was half serious and half comedic. It was called Medical Horror Check Show. It appeared to show symptoms of several diseases and the panel of people had to guess and then it seemed that they checked the panel to see if they were at risk. I’m not sure, I don’t speak Japanese. I believe the disease last night was Bell’s palsy and shingles which are related. The show’s hosts wear a smock with a black colored cross rather that the red you would expect. Day Time seems to have Soap Operas and cooking shows. I haven’t had a lot of time to watch daytime, but that is what caught my eye.

I saw what appeared to be a reality type show like Cops. It showed police arresting or ticketing various people in Tokyo and delivering one person home who’d had a bit too much to drink. He wasn’t driving. He was causing a bit of minor trouble in a bar.

I don’t see any US shows with Japanese overdubs.

Japanese cooking shows are interesting in that you have no idea what in hell they are using for most ingredients!  I watched one today where they started with eggs.  They added some things to it and cooked it up omelet style in a wok.  They stir fried what might have been large spinach leaves and put them in a glass pie pan.  Laid the omelet thing on top of that and then fried up a ton of garlic, mixed with ketchup (I heard them say it as they were adding it and mixing it.) and what appeared to be some kind of red pepper sauce.  They then poured that entire mixture on top of the eggs.  Now I like garlic, but that looked absolutely disgusting.

Speaking of disgusting is a TV comedian who calls himself Razor Ramon HG and the HG stands for "Hard Gay".  HG wears a shiny leather suit that is sleeveless and may as well be legless with metal studs all over it.  HG is on hi black visor cap and on his back.  He looks ridiculous, but I guess it's a good enough shtick to keep him employed on TV shows.  I'm not sure how gay culture works over here, but my guess is that it's usually kept deep in the closet.  HG is a comedic anomaly.

One last thing.  There is a commercial.  It appears to be advertising traditional kimonos and gifts.  I'm not sure, I'm just going by what I see.  In the background is a traditional sounding Japanese stringed instrument playing what appears to be on the surface, some sort of traditional Japanese melody.  It isn't.  It is Russian.  It is from the "Gates of Kiev" from Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition".  Mussorgsky was one of the "Mighty Handful" or "MIghty Five" as they are sometimes called.  They were a group of  five Russian Nationalist composers which also incuded Mily Balakirev , Cesar Cui,  Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. 

I'll be leaving Japan in a few days for Hawaii.

I'll get back to politics soon.

VW

Comments

[thirdee]

VW,

Heading to Hawaii next? Boy, I'll tell ya! Some people are just on a permanent vacation ;)

Good stuff VW. It's interesting hearing about Japan. My mom was born there-Air Force brat.

[wordsmith]

One of my favorite shows is a period piece...I forget the Japanese word for this...called Hissatsu Shigotonin. They went through several series of these over many years. My favorite cast, being in the later years, when it was on its popularity wane. I'm not a fan of the movies they came out with.

Basically, from what I could gather, there is a kind of underground trade: Avengers. Hired assassins who do hits for revenge.

The series focused on Nakamura Mondo, a bumbling police constable. His effeminate boss with his high pitched voice would constantly berate him, thinking Mondo to be an incompetent. He lived with his battleax mother-in-law and wife, both of whom constantly nagged him for money and to produce a son for them. In secret, Mondo was an expert swordsman, and moonlighted as an Avenger, and the leader of a group of them. Each of them had a regular trade during the day; and the manner in which they would kill people, was related to their skill in their trade. They didn't use your standard weapons.
One of their members was a university kid who needed to moonlight in order to pay his college tuition. They had some teen-heart-throb type actor for this. And they had this formulaic gimmick, where every week, he'd happen to accidentally bump into this gay man who was attracted to him.

The show was very formulaic and predictable in its plot set up. Persons of the week are being oppressed by corrupt samurai or business merchants, they are murdered, someone wants revenge, and sometimes the avengers would get emotionally involved and will work for pennies. (I believe their code was such that they wouldn't work unless they received payment of some sort).

The avengers would carry out their hit in the final 10 minutes. Mondo would be the last one to kill, and he'd usually make some sort of humorous laconic understatement as he executed his mark. I liked the music and the stylistics. It was chock full of anachronisms and sometimes some cheesiness; the drama was often maudlin, but cool as well.

Anyway, it's now an old series. I didn't realize I'd talk so much about it, but you got me reminescing.

Some of the game shows were hilarious.

I remember watching primetime cartoons where people would fart, or have a bit of nudity or something we'd deem inappropriate here. In Japan, it just seemed to work, without perverting its citizenry into moral depravity.

I remember watching all sorts of American movies and tv shows there, btw. And my uncle had a big poster of Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name in the Spaghetti westerns.