Japanese TV: Travel shows

Right now it is Golden Week in Japan and lots of people are going on holidays, so travel shows are perhaps more common than they are ordinarily. Some observations about travel shows:

• As with all other Japanese television, travel shows seem to be 85% about food. The remaining 15% is about buying souvenirs (most of which are edible).
• The way they exhibit this food is pretty weird. They typically go to a hotel or restaurant, and have a table laden with an absurd number of dishes, and then the presenter will speak to the chef/server briefly (presumably about the meal). Then they will show some close-ups of the food. I feel like this is where an Australian broadcast would end, and they would just tell you how to go there and how much it costs etc. But in Japan they then show the presenter eating the food for a minute or two and then expressing how delicious the food is, all the while the chef is just standing over her shoulder watching her eat. I can't tell if this is a trope of television or just what happens at very fancy eating places. As such I am pretty scared to go to one!
• The closeups of food are also pretty weird. They typically have a portion of meat on a fork or in chopsticks and do a closeup of it, but then for some reason they jiggle the fork slightly so that it is quivering in the closeup. I'm not sure if this is meant to make the meat look more appetising but it is the creepiest thing.
• The other night we watched a variety show that had a segment about travelling to New Zealand. Here are the quintessential New Zealand things they did:
• Bungeed off the Sky Tower
• Went luging in Rotorua
• Took a mud spa at Hells Gate which consisted of them shovelling mud down one another's pants
• Dressed up as Maori warriors and learned how to do the haka (this segment seemed a little culturally insensitive but who am I to point fingers, this blog is about making superficial observations of cultures I don't understand on the basis of a cursory visit)
• Attempted to catch a rugby ball which had been kicked by some random New Zealander on some random high school field
• Ate worms

In conclusion Japanese travel shows are super great.

An example of Japanese TV

Things about Japanese TV

I believe there is a lot that can be learned by watching a country's television shows. Here are some things I have observed about TV in Japan:

• There is writing all over the place. Hardly anyone says anything that isn't accompanied by some sort of writing on the bottom of the screen. Or the side. Or in the middle.
• Everyone says "ehhhhhhhhhh~" a lot. A LOT.
• There is an ad with some some dude just making a mii on his Wii. It goes for like 30 seconds, and has been repeated several times. The Wii was released four years ago.
• There is a show where people (I assume celebrities?) do karaoke to the themes of famous animes.
  
• Almost all ads in Japan feature women. Most have both men and women in them, but there are almost no ads with only men in them. Many beer ads do not have men in them, which is totally weird coming from Australia. There is an ad for whisky which has a woman being all "whisky~!" and drinking it up, which surprised me quite a lot.
  
• Japanese people love watching shows about food. They seem to be far more interested in watching people eat food rather than cook food, too.
• News and current affairs shows here seem to rarely show graphics. If they want to show a graph or something, they print it out on a bit of paper, and then point at it with a stick. This is one of the weirdest things.
  
• Japanese TV has the worst production values I have ever seen. All TV shows fit into one of the following categories: shows where people make food, shows where celebrities eat food and other celebrities watch them; shows where one celebrity goes somewhere in Japan or somewhere else in the world and does something ridiculous, while other celebrities watch; soaps about samurai that look like they were made by a cable access channel; news and current affairs shows that point at charts with sticks; shows about animals; anime. For this reason I posit that Japanese TV networks are the most profitable companies on the face of the planet.
• In Japan they show advertisements for elevators in primetime television.

Classic Japan

They are pretty excited about the world cup in Japan. They have a clay jar that you can speak messages into and then I guess the players receive those messages? There is also a camera at the bottom of the jar so we got to see many people's upside down faces. I hope they didn't tell the Japanese soccer team all their secrets because now we know them too! Anyway the reason why your country was eliminated from the world cup is that you did not send the team your support via an earthenware jar and also they are not very good at football.

IMPORTANT

Hi there was an ad just on with a disembodied head floating above the Hudson River. Dialogue was as follows:
"I am a boiler!" *spurts steam out of nose*
"Miura boiler!" *more steam*
"Please don't forget!"
"I am a boiler!" *a lot of steam*
"Miura boiler!"
"Have a nice day!"
Ad ends. This was preceded by an advertisement featuring a fish with a man's head, a la seminal Dreamcast game Seaman.

japan

In Japan they show the weather updates with Van Helsing playing in the background for some reason.

Day 1: Tokyo

Hello and welcome to the first blog entry of our trip! You excited? We began last night flying out from Sydney to Tokyo at 10pm, arriving at like 6am. It was the worst flight! We flew Qantas which was pretty good but I can never sleep on planes. I was too uncomfortable to be able to get any sleep. I got a little drunk and had some phanergan but all that did was make me too drowsy to do anything, so I just spent nine or so hours with my eyes closed half listening to podcasts. Shara and Lyndal both foolishly became ill before leaving on the trip so I don't think their trip was much happier.

As soon as we got to Tokyo airport all of the escallators started talking at us which is always exciting. We took a train to the place in Tokyo we were staying which was maybe a bad idea because it seemed to take like 2 hours and cost 3,000 yen each ($45). We were too tired to figure out a better way though. We got to our hotel at about 9am, and were told that we couldn't check in until 2pm. They took our bags and we sort of walked around for a bit. We found many great things in the department store next to our hotel but most of them were two million dollars. At some dude at our hotel's recommendation we went up to the top four levels of the department store, each of which was filled with about 10 restaurants. It was a kind of weird thing, where all of the restaurants were pretending to be outside and had all of these faux-outdoor fittings like brick walls and lanterns, even though we were inside on the 12th floor of a massive building. Japan is weird. We walked around looking at all of the restaurants' plastic food (restaurants in Japan often advertise their food by putting plastic versions of their dishes in the front window), and then picked the weirdest restaurant and went in for lunch to kill some time. Shara and Lyndal got some real weird things (reviews pending), but I was not hungry.

After this we walked all around Ikebukuro, and went into all of the convenience stores we saw while we waited until we could check in. Finally at 2 we were able to get into our room. We stayed there and watched Japanese game shows for a bit. In between rounds they play Organ Donor by DJ Shadow which is p. weird. Lyndal took some shampoo in her bag and it exploded. She kept it in a plastic bag though and on the bright side now all of her stuff smells like shampoo.

Now everyone else is sleeping (Shara is snoring and it sounds like "shhhhhhh... pshhhhhh") and I am megatired too so I am also going to take a nap. Sorry this wasn't a very exciting entry but we will hopefully do more interesting stuff when we don't feel like wanting to die!

Hun-day

All television ads in America fit into one of these categories:
1. Prescription medication
2. Fast food
3. Movies
4. Cars