Japanese Television
[ Back ] [ Home ] [ Up ] [ Next ]

We watched a lot of television wherever we stayed.  I was surprised that even in our room at the Minshuku in Hagi there was a set (although in retrospect this seems to be something I should have expected in Japan).  In the western-style hotels where we stayed in Kyoto, Hiroshima, Shizuoka, and Tokyo we had CNN International.  As a result we got hourly reports about peace negotiations in Northern Ireland, and other repetitious news items in English.  On our last weekend in Tokyo, at the end of the trip, CNN switched to 24-hour coverage of the search for JFK Junior's plane.  

Tony (and I) enjoyed watching children's television in Japanese.  There were a number of shows that we looked forward to seeing each day, even though we didn't really know what they were called or what they were talking about.  One featured a small boy about the age of 6 who would receive cooking instructions from a slightly older girl and demonstrate how to cook something different every day.  I recall him making cakes and some kind of pudding, dressed in a chef's outfit.

Another show we enjoyed immensely was apparently called "Bad Girls" (in English).  It was something about two teenage girls who would roll an enormous die at the entrance to a shopping arcade, and then depending on what number came up would (apparently) go to that numbered shop down the hall and have some kind of amusing interaction with the shopkeeper.  We had no idea what was so funny but it was fun to watch these two Japanese teenage girls laugh, covering their mouths in the Japanese way of laughing.

Every evening it seemed there were at least two baseball games on.  Often the same game would be broadcast on two different channels apparently with announcers from the two opposing teams.  My impression of Japanese baseball coverage is that one man talks about the game while the other sits and says continuously "soo desu nee!"  ("that's right isn't it!")

In fact we heard "so desu nee!" a lot on Japanese talk shows.  One show we saw, which we probably watched because we heard English while we were channel surfing, had a Thai woman on who spoke English while she demonstrated her food sculpture technique.  One man would translate into Japanese and three women would sit and say pretty much nothing except "hmmmm hmmmmm so desu nee...." over and over again.

We watched quite a few Sumo matches, to the point that when we got to Shizuoka my friend Richard could explain to us something about the wrestlers we had been watching and what their backgrounds were, and it meant something to us.

There were a lot of television shows devoted to profiles of local restaurants and cooking specialties.  One restaurant that we saw profiled appeared to specialize in grilled snake.  In another demonstration we saw how the Japanese like to eat lobster: grab a live lobster, rip off its tail, tear out the tail meat, mix it in cognac (I think), and eat it, all in about 10 seconds (in other words the lobster is probably still alive by the time you have finished devouring its tail).

I shot quite a bit of Japanese television on my video camera (which unfortunately was not digital so I can't show it on this website).  In Hiroshima we were fortunate to see an episode of Little House on the Prairie dubbed into Japanese.