Saturday 1 September 2007

Japanese TV Digest No. 1

Wow, so here's the internet! Please, take a moment, look around and see what people think about Japanese TV! Go ahead! The things that seemed to stand out to me from posts on Japanese TV from foreigners living in Japan, is that Japanese TV sucks. It's nothing but terrible variety shows and bad comedy and news that you can't understand and sports and whatever. People over here have told me this as well, so I want to put this in the politest way I can...


Dear Idiots,

TV sucks ALL OVER THE WORLD.

Regards,

Alex


Come on! Like I can honestly defend 90% of British Television. Like any American really believes that HBO and those other big budget shows aren't the exception to the rule. Most Japanese TV sucks, and so does most TV from the UK and most TV from America, probably most TV from the Phillipines and perhaps even most TV from North Korea. Who knows? What I know is that I've found several shows that I really enjoy watching, even though I barely understand them. And of course, you're living this with me you vicarious SOBs so here's the first one for you.

I watched My Boss My Hero because it was being repeated weekdays before I went to work. It was a popular drama in the evenings that was being re-run in the daytime I think. Watch the video that I've posted somewhere here, and I hardly need to say any more. When I did some research I realised that the main guy is the singer in J-Pop band Tokio, and that the plot has him playing the dimwit son of a Yakuza boss who gets sent back to high school to smarten up. Although I didn't see it all, and didn't find out how the series ended, it impressed me with the way that a grown man could develop a puppy-love crush on one of his high school classmates without it seeming very, very creepy. He plays a sort of moron, man-child throughout, that probably helps.



His face, the gurning, the insane reaction shots, the way he sometimes flashes back to gang fights in class or has an internal monologue delivered in a psychotic way... I desperately want to get this on DVD, but the only place I've seen it was charging around 100 pounds so I'll have to leave it for now. I tried to find a clip on you tube where he's practicing drumming, contorting his face grotesquely, horribly out of time while his henchmen crowd around trying to clap to the same beat as him and his sinister brother looks on from their mansion, but I couldn't. I laughed out loud, to myself, in my flat.

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