The idiocies of a damena yatsu in Salariman Island: TV

Suntory CM vs Japan Bashing

Wed, 07 May 2008 14:45:33 GMT

Before being labelled as another gaijin (外人) Japan basher, I will take this opportunity to write my first words of praise that appear in this blog about this wonderful country. But the temptation to add a word of criticism is just too excruciating, so here it goes. Japan bashing (日本バッシング) is an extremely convenient multi-purpose word used by those, especially of the political right, to shy away from any criticism made towards their own country. A bigoted people? Not quite, but Japanese politicians are members of the media certainly are.

And now for something completely different.
As I have written somewhere else Japanese tarento-loaded TV commercials are a far cry from originality and brainwork. Fortunately, from this pile of daft tarentos smacking their lips after drinking a beer, emerged the latest TV ads by drink giant Suntory, which have proved to be some of best of the last two years. The two ads here discussed feature actors Jun Kunimura (國村隼) and Ayumi Itou (伊藤歩) in the roles of father and daughter respectively, and who, by the end of the TV spot, share a glass of Suntory old (オールド) whisky.

父の上京篇 (Dad goes to Tokyo) is already a classic. The daughter suddenly gets a phone call from his father who has arrived in Tokyo with the excuse of a fake business trip, but really to check if she is all right. Her daughter tells him that she is doing just fine (順調、順調、junchou, junchou), a lie she later confesses. However she also knows that her father has lied too. On his way back by train, the father admits how his little trick has been discovered (バレたか, bareta ka). Marvellous.

In 父の誕生日 (Dad's birthday) the daughter, this time, phones her father asking him what kind of present he would like for his birthday. His father replies that he has none in mind and that at his age there is nothing to celebrate. While looking at pictures drawn by her daughter when she was a child he remembers how cute she was. At that very same moment the doorbell rings and the voice of her daughter is heard saying お届け物、娘さんから　(otodokemono desu, musume san-karu/delivery from your daughter). Delightful.

The combination of high-quality TV drama and masterful touches of indie cinema brought to life by the absolutely charming and convincing performance of the actors, elevates these two adverts to the realms of art. Parents and children hidden true feelings and thoughts, a staple of the classic Japanese TV drama, also immortalized in films by directors such as Ozu, are revealed by the actors speaking off-camera, blurring the line between fiction and documentary, TV commercial and film. The captivating music written and sung by Asei Kobayashi (小林亜星) that accompany these adverts has been used by Suntory old (オールド) whisky TV spots for more than 40 years.
Two gems from the Japanese stupid box.

For more information see these sites:
Dad goes to Tokyo
Dad's birthday

Ideas for a Japanese wide show programme

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:36:44 GMT

Looking for ideas to fill in 30 minutes of screening time for a Japanese wide show (ワイドショウ) programme? Not to worry. Get the rights to broadcast a 1 month old wide show programme from a neighbouring country, let's say Taiwan, reporting on a sex scandal, for example the Edison Chen photo scandal, and then hire a translator to do the subtitles and a narrator to emphasize what it's obvious to everyone.
On the top of this, send on economic class a reporter with a camera crew to try to buy in the street, according to this reporter looking like Tokyo's Ueno, a pack of naughty photos of Edison Chen and famous Taiwanese female idols and you've got it! 30 minutes of inexpensive TV trash of the highest level!
And this is what Nihon TV have just done in its morning programme Sukkiri hosted by Koji Kato (加藤浩次), Terri Ito (テリー伊藤) and Helene　Hayama　(葉山エレーヌ) to raise the standards of Japanese TV.

Sportswomen Fetish/スポーウーマンのフェチ

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 04:34:31 GMT

Japan has a fetish, among innumerable others, for its sportswomen. You name the sport and you'll get them: golfers (Ai Miyazato, 宮里藍 Sakura Yokomine, 横峯さくら), figure skaters (Miki Ando, : 安藤美姫), skiers (Aiko Uemura, 上村愛子), snowboarders (Mero Imai, 今井メロ), volleyball players (Kaoru Sugayama, 菅山かおる, but really the whole team had be to included, for example Megumi Kurihara, 栗原恵, Sachiko Sugiyama, 杉山祥子, Saori Kimura, 木村沙織 ) and so on. Nevertheless, the prize for the most desired sportswomen has to go to beach volleyball player Miwa Asao (浅尾美和) and "Ogushio" (オグシオ), the nickname given to the doubles badminton team, Kumiko Ogura (Ogu, 小椋　久美子) and Reiko Shiota (Shio, 潮田玲子 ).

Fuji TV, that bastion of lowbrow entertainment, has become the number one sponsor of these sports queens, through programmes like "Junk Sports"(ジャンクSPORTS) hosted by Downtown member Masatoshi Hamada (浜田雅功) or their hijack of last year's Volleyball World Cup and the year before World Championship hosted by Japan. In a shameless display of chauvinism, Fuji TV almost never showed a replay of a point scored by the rival team, concentrating only on the movements of their national idols cheered by a mass of patriotic Japanese supporters, the ubiquitous bunch of talento parasites an upcoming boy band that the channel is trying to promote (This use of boy and girl bands to "liven up" volleyball games is a constant in Japan TV practices to promote them. Just an example, in 1999, Arashi's debut single, simply titled "A・RA・SHI", became the theme song for the 8th World Cup of Volleyball hosted by Japan in that year.

Recently, the morning programme preferred by Japanese teenagers, Mezamashi Terebi (めざましテレビ), presented a new female sports idol, the car racer Mika Kagoshima (神子島みか), who happens to be also a model with gigantic eyes. The type of girls chosen by current fashion magazines to illustrate their front pages. This ocular feature is emphasized so much that the girls really look like they have been through a session of Ludovico Technique. One can imagine those Ero Jiji at Fuji TV board of directors, headed by chairman Hisashi Hieda （日枝久) grinning their teeth at the prospect of a new sports idol generating loads of free publicity and higher viewing rates for their own channel.

What about the whales?/ 日本テレビは偽善的だ！

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:22:34 GMT

Sekai-ichi Uketai Jugyo (, 世界一受けたい授業 ,The Most Wanted Lessons in the World, Nihon TV, Sat., 7:57 p.m.), hosted by comic duo "Cream Stew" (くりぃむしちゅー), features an array of sensei in different fields lecturing the usual bunch of talento parasites.

The two nights ago programme had wildlife photographer Mitsuaki Iwago　（岩合光昭) talking about animals facing extinction. First, he reminded the audience of the loss of such creatures as the Tasmanian Tiger or the Yangtze River Dolphin. Then, he went through a pretty desolating picture of animals on the brink of extinction and their remaining numbers such as the Kakapo bird in New Zealand, the Polar Bear, the Southern Asian Rhinos among others. There was a mention to the EU measures to protect bluefin tuna and eels from overfishing to which human food disposal Gyaru Sone (ギャル曽根) cried "But eels are so tasty".

All the parasites in the studio, as usual and only momentarily, did their best to look concern about this global problem. But the question was where the bloody whales were. It must have been a very delicate subject to talk about as there was not mention of them at all. Or maybe whales were mentioned but that part was censored from the original programme, with also the part where Gyaru Sone (ギャル曽根) goes again "But whales are so tasty", following the recent confrontation between the Japanese Whaling Vessel Yushin Maru No. 2 and activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation. Society.

Tabe Sugi: Burst Open!

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 07:55:49 GMT

It is a fact that the so-called Japanese TV talentos are the exact opposite of what their job implies, people without a single hint of talent. TV programmes from the major channels such as Fuji TV and TBS can be seen as pig farms where these social parasites are shown being continuously fed with the best food you can find in Japan until slaughter time comes, that is when their popularity stars to fade and before you know it, they have evaporated from the small screen.

And this takes us to this message topic "overeating", or in Japanese tabe sugi, because this is Gyaru Sone's main talent. This gluttonous queen has appeared in various programmes quite recently. In one of these programmes Sone (1,62m and 43kg) is taken to a sushi restaurant and gobbled down 120 pieces of sushi. Later, at a clinic, she is put in a multislice TC scanner, and it is revealed that her stomach has expanded 15 times its size. A doctor explains us how Sone has trained her stomach to be able to expand to such a size, just like athletes trained their bodies, oh really?

So how can she keep herself so slim? Through a thermal video we see how Sone is able to increase her body temperature by 1.5 centigrades in a matter of 7 minutes, which means she is able to burn calories as she gulps down her food. That and the massive elephant-size dumps she takes the next morning helps her to keep her figure. So no help from two little fingers down the throat is needed, then. But of course, eating such a massive amount of food can't be very healthy, can it? Not really, says a doctor. Future health problems that this disproportionate eating habits could cause, nevertheless don't prevent the TV programme from asking Sone to compete in the studio with other talento parasites. How is that for moral responsibility? And how is that for one of lowest form of entertainment you can find in salariman island?

Gyaru Sone is just one of those tragic figures in modern TV culture with a popularity-seeking disorder. The best thing it could happen to her to enter into the annals of history is to have a last grand bouffe and burst open to death.

We don't really need the case of Africa to highlight the enormous waste of food and lack of ethics of this kind of entertainment. Living in the second largest economy in the world and seeing a woman with a weight of 43 kilos unnecessarily shovelling 120 pieces of sushi for free without tasting a single piece whereas some children in Japanese state schools get by with a couple of onigiri or a melonpan as the only the food they have until dinner is similarly disgusting.

NHK newsreaders are humans!

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 05:45:29 GMT

So NHK newsreaders are humans after all. Quite recently, and possibly copying the format of other news channels, the newsreaders of NHK news programme Ohayo Nippon, Matsuo Tsuyoshi and Nachiko Shudo, have started the news with some vacuous, and well-rehearsed, small talk to enliven the rest of the programme. Something on the lines of how cheap the sanma (mackerel pike) is this year because fishermen don’t have to sail too far to catch it, saving in fuel and so on.

The only trait of humanness they have shown so far has been when the programme switches to the weather report or sports news. At this point, NHK newsreaders show they can truly produce improvise commentaries and questions and can delight the audience with an amazing range of facial expressions and vocal tonalities.

Nevertheless, when the tiny Nachiko Shudo, literally descends from her stand (not lying, check this photo) to join Yasutaka Tamura, he does really like a Japanese teacher and what an awful sense of fashion he has, to present (machikado) is time to switch to the competitors.

NHK newsreaders are famous for their normative Japanese pitch accident, no doubt about that. Their accent is clear, crisp and beautifully flat. But some seem to concentrate so much on the right articulation of words that forget that, after all, they are reporting news. Watching NHK news can have the same effects of a Zelpodim overdose.

Things you will never see on Japanese TV

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 08:15:41 GMT

There are a few things you'll never see on Japanese TV. One of them is representatives of the police forces appearing in news and given details about cases. It's very weird. The police basically hand in written reports to the TV channels and these just read them as if they were written in stone. Thus, TV channels become mouthpieces for the police, another case of Japanese being afraid of challenging authority, unless the police really screw it up, as when 13 men and women, ranging in age from their early 50s to mid-70s, were wrongly arrested and indicted with buying votes with liquor, cash and catered parties (see Japan Times).

Another thing you will never see on Japanese TV is a day without news about North Korea. Japanese news have an obsession with the communist country bordering on the pathological. Anything really goes to keep the Japanese population scared of the red peril and, at the same time, interested in the case of the Japanese civilians kidnapped and still some accounted for by North Korea, with the effect of mitigating cries of several human rights groups calling the Japanese government to admit that the Japanese Army had forced women into prostitution along with other war wrongdoings.
Soon will have reports of a North Korean plot to poison expensive matsutake mushrooms, an Autumn delicacy in Japan, that are shipped to Japan.

"Nice backside, Ms Campbell", says Yuji ODA

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 01:48:43 GMT

TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System) has done a fantastic job in its coverage of the Athletics World Championships in Osaka by focusing, almost exclusively, in the top stars and the Japanese athletes and ignoring everyone else. Two examples are the voyeuristic, stalking like, camera licking manner of reporting pole vaulting champion Yelena Isinbayeva, which comes as no surprise knowing the acute fetish that the Japanese media has for sportswomen. And of course, the sickening and grinding repetition of the 4x100-metre relay semifinal in which the samurai-tachi (the samurai group) finished 3rd managing to qualify for the final.

And let's not talk about the professionalism of some of TBS commentators. What is a bad singer like Beni Arashiro doing reporting a World Athletics Championship? And are announcers Sonoko Yamagata and Mai Demizu able to think of other questions apart from "How do you feel (after the event)?" or make other comments except "many people are waiting for a world record...").

However, no one could top Yuji Oda for his sagacity. If you didn't hate him enough for his bad singing and acting, then his loud, vacuous, repetitive growls should have done the job. But the cherry on this amazing reporting cake was when he had the brilliant idea of commenting on Veronica Campbell as having a nice backside. I am really sure that many at home, whether men or women, have the same kind of thoughts when looking at the fantastic body proportions of many athletes. But is it really OK to say that on live TV?

With only 4-5 minutes of continuous live broadcast between never-ending commercial breaks, the emission was a complete success in missing exciting moments that the editor then had to hurriedly chopped up and present in a messy, ultra-fast collage of highlights.

And again, with the exception of the opening day and Saturday 1st August (probably due to the systematic bombardment of images from Friday's 4x100-metre relay semifinal, which gave then a mythologising effect and artificially inflated the hype for Saturday's final) the stadium has looked day and night pretty empty. Could have been the 7,000 yen that the cheapest ticket cost a deterrent? Or the fact that Japanese (pretend to) work until so late that couldn't even make it for the last event of the day? Or the asphyxiating heat and humidity?

Still, I wouldn't go as far as El Mundo "sports journalist" Eduardo J. Castelao in ridiculing the underperformance of the Japanese athletic team as one of the reasons for explaining the failure of the games. His patronizing words clearly blinds him from seeing objectively the performance of his own country's team, only able, with some exceptions, to secure medals in the unglamorous sport of 20 km walk. Or the fact that Spain has recently achieved unprecedented success in events such as women's 400 metres, 60/100 metres hurdles and long jump or men's 110 metres hurdles thanks to the naturalization of a foreign legion of athletes such as Sandra Myers born in USA, Niurka Montalvo and Joan Lino Martinez born in Cuba, Glory Alozie born in Nigeria, and more recently Jackson Quiñonez born in Ecuador, who has become the first Spanish 110 metres hurdles finalist of the games. Other naturalised athletes are Alicia Matejkova, Yusef El Masri, Kamel Ziani, Yesenia Centeno, Cora Olivero and Aliuska Lopez.

Related links:
TBS sport experts
Quiñónez, el activo más importante en la amplia lista de España