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.

B-Cubed Addenda

Oh my! I forgot! So here are some punchlines and additional information for the "Bikers, Beer and Bears" post that you may have enjoyed:

One of the bikers has a musical horn. It plays the theme from The Godfather. No, I'm not kidding!

At Sapporo Beer Museum we had a drink with a Canadian called Gord.

At Sapporo Fish Market you can get cans of Bear Meat. Which is... well I still don't know what to think. Apparently it's legal here... ? Which is the only place in the world or something. Hmmm.

I taught a high school girl the word "Awesome" this week. I explained it meant "really good" and she tried it out a couple of times with a strong Japanese accent. The third time she said it, it was perfect, like an American high school girl - "That's AWEsome!". I may have created a monster.

OK, now a picture of an amusingly named store that sells designer clothes and goods for dogs!

Bikers, Beer and Bears

When I say I live in Sapporo, I really mean that I live in Asabu. Sapporo is the city, like Birmingham, Asabu is the Suburb, like Moseley. Asabu is at the end of one of the subway lines, but really it only takes about fifteen minutes to get back into town. It's not that far out.

But late at night we have biker gangs tearing through the streets of Asabu causing... perhaps a little havoc? I'm not sure. I saw a couple of young hoods riding motorbikes one night while I was walking along with Tara. She described them as wannabe yakuza and was particularly scornful. They were pretty awesome in a pathetic way. Anyway I presume they were part of this big biker gang that you can hear at night, and whose main weapon is driving incredibly slowly while revving their steroid pumped engines as hard as possible. I live near the main road and it sounds, I have to admit, pretty awesome. It's only once a week, but they put on a hell of an aural display. They woke me up one night and I thought for a second that one of them had snuck his "hog" through my window and fired it up right by my head. Seriously, it can't be good for their engines, but I guess it's a hobby. I'm going to try and record it so that I can share the power, the majesty of loud Japanese motorcycles with all of you.

Tara's boyfriend Fred is here to stay for a while, and since she works on Saturday and I don't, he and I headed down to the Sapporo Beer museum (not the shopping mall this time) to be educated in the ways of beer. Like I've said, I think Sapporo is a fine, fine beer, and Fred is a healthy, broad shouldered American who likes beer so it was a pretty easy choice to make.

The museum is free too look around, you just pay to drink the beer at the end, and frankly you don't pay very much. It also tastes fantastic there, crisp and fresh, indeed as if it had just been brewed. The musem isn't very big, but the whole area is full of nice old red brick buildings, and it was fun inside for what it was so I'd say it's definitely worth a visit. If you like beer.

Probably the most surreal thing inside was the tiny Willy Wonka-esque diorama of the brewing process. It was acted out by tiny, white, cone-monkey people and each step was encased in a large perspex tank to stop people from touching it. Now I'm not a qualified brew-master, but I don't think it was all that historically accurate seeing as it started with an old man living on a cloud at the top of a beanstalk, involved a river of beer (that flowed up hill at one point) and finished with the old man basking on the fluffy head of a giant mug of glowing Sapporo. Or maybe that's how they used to do it in the olden days?

The last scene from the ridiculous Sapporo museum brewing story. "I'm the king of beer!"

More bears! These ones guard a jewelery shop in Tanuki Kouji. Grrr!

Back on the Mountain

Phew, finally got that whole password mess sorted, so let's restart this shebang with a big picture of Sapporo taken from a rose garden on a hillside over-looking the city!

Juice of Bear

Originally posted on facebook on 14th August:

In the guides I had read it sounded like Sapporo Beer had a big complex in this city where the factory museum and beer garden had sort of expanded into a shopping mall and general entertainment suplex. This is not quite the case. There are actually two different locations, the old factory which is now the Sapporo museum and beer garden (apparently great for lots of free samples and cheap beer at the end), and the new complex, called the Sapporo Factory, which is a sort of family SUPER MALL. I don’t really mind malls, but building a huge building with lots of shops is not something that ranks all that high on the scale of human achievements for me, so I could take it or leave it. Certainly the size was pretty impressive, and I got a bit turned around and lost a few times, and the shops showed a strange slant towards outdoor pursuits, and there were wind turbine things (that since they were located indoors, must’ve gobbled up electricity instead of producing it, making them slightly chilling mockeries of real wind turbines), and there was a Sapporo Beer Keller, but in the end it was just a big mall. The concession to the “factory” was a sort of mini demo brewery that I’m ashamed to say I didn’t check out except to see some guys hefting metal barrels through an open doorway. It’s not that big though, so I somehow doubt that all that beer is brewed there. It’s probably not brewed at the old factory either coz it’s a museum now… so where is it brewed? My guess: either at some massive factory in the wilds of Hokkaido that’s staffed by bears, or perhaps… Belgium? So, I didn’t visit the Sapporo Museum, I visited the Sapporo Mall. Not all that great, but that doesn’t detract in the slightest from what a great beer they make. I had a can tonight with dried squid from Hakodate whilst watching SMAPXSMAP. It RULED, except that SMAPXSMAP was a clip show and sort of sucked. The beer and squid RULED though!

But, but, but on a whim, and since the day had been all blue skies and searing heat again I headed up the JR Tower, Sapporo’s obligatory tall-building-with-observation-floor (actually Sapporo also has the TV tower, but that isn’t meant to be as good). Oh my god! So worth it! So beautiful! Sunset over the mountains, turning the sea red! You can see the sea from there! It looks so close, I estimated where I lived to the North of Sapporo and started thinking “surely I can walk to the sea from my house!” (I’m pretty sure that I can do no such thing). The neon walls of downtown, the Sapporo Factory, even that absurd Ferris Wheel on top of a building looks awesome all lit up. If you come to visit me I WILL take you up there, and I can only imagine how cool everything looks in the snow.

I also found a couple of import food deli places which stock lots of American brands and a few British ones too. Nothing to get too excited about really, then again I’m not sure if I would have got that excited about anything since I’m not really craving any products that I can’t get here. Maybe some Reece’s stuff? Anyway one of the shops was in the Sapporo Factory complex which is a little out of the way and I don’t imagine I’ll be going back soon; while the other one is in the labyrinthine tunnels beneath Sapporo Station. Above ground Sapporo is super easy to navigate around, below ground… well I may never see that place again. I have no idea where I was in relation to anywhere else when I found it, I had certainly never been there before and may never be there again. I love this place.

In other news, I bought a guitar! So probably no proper camera for a while, you'll have to make do with these shonky phone pics. They would be better too, but I can't transfer them straight onto computer via USB (probably to do with the Japanese driver) I have to resize them and email them from my phone to my gmail. Oh well.

"So first of all what we do is we lure the bear into a clearing, somwhere quiet, then we send in Big Kenichi. Big Kenichi, he hates bears somethin' awful ever since one stole his pic-er-nic basket when he was a youngling. So the bear starts all gripin' and growlin', but Big Kenichi just strolls up and punches that big ol' bear so hard that it straight up evapourates. So we suck up the bear vapour, run it through a condenser and ship it down to Sapporo. The white bear juice is a bit trickier, we have to filter that stuff but good to get all the brown out of it."

I probably should have bought some of this, I have no idea what it was. More on bears soon, they feature pretty heavily up here.

Art / Crows / Rocking in the Street

Originally posted on facebook on 12th August:

One of my colleagues has a phobia of crows. I thought, well sure, crows are a little creepy, but to be really afraid of them? Oh no, I was assured, crows in Japan are bigger than you think. Yeah, whatever...

So, of course, turns out crows in Japan are bigger than I thought. Some of them are the size of cats, they congregate in packs in all the parks, they tear up bins, they CROW to each other from all around you. They're hunched and wicked looking, and their beaks are like KNIVES of PURE EVIL. Have they been known to attack anyone? No one thinks they have, but no one would put it past them.

A quick mention for Don. Kihote (i.e. Don Quixote, but I use the phonetic spelling from the Katakana here just incase it makes a difference). Some of my training guys went to a Don. Kihote in Omiya, Tokyo a few times, but I never did, now I wish I had so I could see if it was like the one in Sapporo. The one in Sapporo is maybe six floors high, and has been organised by a lunatic. Or perhaps someone with a severe head injury. There is a lot of stuff. There is TOO MUCH stuff, and while for the most part products are grouped together (cosmetics & lingerie, food, CDs & DVD) there are plenty of crossovers and logical disconnects along single rows of shelving. The camping gear runs straight into the stupid black-light things, novelty items with breasts are all over the place, and stuffed Disney and anime characters are just EVERYWHERE. Everything is packed floor to ceiling, and there is enough room between the shelves to fit one person. Not even a very fat person at that. Whatever you need, they probably have it, but I doubt I could find it for you.

Today I went all over the place! It was hot, but there were blue skies and there was very little humidity. I was wilting certainly, but it was a good heat, not that evil heat that Primal Scream warned us all about. Not the evil heat we've been enduring since last weekend.

I went to two art galleries, the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art was really great. It was packed with people going to see the featured Dali installation that I wasn't all that interested in, but the collection galleries were very quiet. There wasn't a great deal of it, but it was very, very good. After a quiet opener (Art Nouveau glass works hmmm...) came one of the best displays of glassworks, porcelain and so on that I've ever seen! That sounds so geeky! Like I've EVER seen any glasswork or porcelain exhibitions that I found even the slightest bit interesting. Kinda like saying "It was the best Pauly Shore movie that I've ever seen!". But this? Wow! Colours and incredibly intricate shapes and all sorts of strange, beautiful craziness. Upstairs is a great "introduction to art" gallery for kids. Very accessible, colourful and fun. In the lobby they had set up a sort of touring rock-band merch table for the Dali exhibition. Made slightly more surreal by having a Chuppa Chups (the spelling AND pronunciation are up for grabs on that one) machine on the end.

But my real find was that on the way there I stumbled across a small silent, almost deserted gallery devoted to the Sapporo born artist Migishi Kotaro. He died at the age of 31, after a short productive career, full of experimentation and absorbing influences at a hell of a rate. I really, really like his work, particularly the ground it covers, and the atmosphere that almost all his works create. They're sort of creepy, in a good way.

And that was not my only find! Walking down past Odori they had closed off a huge stretch of one of the main roads (haven't been here long enough to know what it's called), for the purpose of ROCKING! That's right, I passed at least two different areas where a PA had been rigged up in the street for bands to play. No stage, no flooring at all, literally playing on the asphalt. It looked really cool, and as you would expect most people seemed utterly nonplussed. It also looked incredibly hot for the first band I saw, who were pinned in a beam of sunshine in the middle of a huge junction while everyone else hid in the shade.



Then I went to Maruyama park, because people had been mentioning it to me, and I'd hit the tourist information place this morning for maps and details. Still on my list: Mount Moiwa (involves a cable car ride, points!), The Sapporo Beer Factory (may just be a shopping mal), some other cool looking park in the north-east of the city (nearish where I live). Anyway it was a very cool place to go because Maruyama Park turns into a hike up a mountain (or at least a big hill) so you really get to see Sapporo run out and turn into forest. One particular view really got me, but I couldn't get a good picture, of the huge, wooded hillside towering at the end of a big urban road. Rurality! Also in Maruyama is the Hokkaido Shrine. Sapporo is not overly blessed with historical shrines,and temples, having been built in the latter part of the 19th century, with the help of savage, heathen Americans, but this was great. It was, like Meiji Jingu in Tokyo, incredibly quiet and peaceful and there was a ceremony going on so while I sat outside, cowering from the sun and from the crows, I could hear drums and flutes. And clapping. For some reason I really like that about Shintoism, that it involves clapping.


My vague aim to learn the Shamisen while I'm here came a step closer on Friday night when I met a guy who thinks that he works with a guy, whose brother may be learning the Shamisen. He's going to look into it, hey, it's something!

Also I may be developing something of a musical infatuation. I've been doing lots of research into J-pop already, trying out artists to find ones that I genuinely like, asking students and colleagues and so on... I'll let you know how this one pans out, but separate to that I was very excited to find out that the bassist from J-pop mainstays Dreams Come True wrote the music for Sonic The Hedgehog and Sonic The Hedgehog 2. That's a hell of a pedigree as far as I'm concerned, although I do like the Sonic 3 music EVEN MORE.

Welcome to Beer Garden

Originally posted on facebook on 5th August:

Hey, you know what else? The underground in Sapporo is awesome too! On some of the trains you can see the wheel-arches curving just above the level　of the platform, and the trains seem to run on huge rubber tyres! They are pretty quiet on their approach, but when you`re on them the noise from the open windows gets deafening. But even this isn`t so bad because there are no doors between carriages, just big stretched hexagon gaps bridged by metal panels and thick, corrugated rubber; which means that when the train is quiet you can see all the way from end of the train to the other and watch it curling away as you turn a corner. This, plus the tyres means that the tube in Sapporo is kind of like a giant bendy-bus hurtling through a tiny tunnel, deep underground.

Today I went for lunch at a macrobiotic restaurant, good work that was immediately undone by a huge ice cream and perhaps a "flagon" or "tankard" of Sapporo Black at Beer Garden.

Beer Garden is a summer festival here in Sapporo that stretches down Odori Park, a huge segmented public space that runs horizontally across the city. In the winter the Snow Festival is held here, in summer - Beer Garden! Each of Japan`s major breweries has a chunk of park the length of a block and they create huge outdoor beer gardens, in a festival that is less about different sorts of beer than it is about just drinking lots and lots of the stuff. At least in that way it`s more honest than most beer festivals. Today we went to the Sapporo Beer Garden because one of my party was captivated by what we at first thought were children cavorting onstage in cow costumes. I hope they weren`t kids because at the end of the routine the compere woman bounded to the front of the stage, tankards of Sapporo were distributed and they all swug mightily to a rousing "Kampai!" Other entertainment included some guys from a town where they grow melons giving away melons to people whos birthday it was, and a prize draw. You could buy a fish cake in the shape of Hokkaido, though I was pretty daunted by my medium sized jug of beer already, so I passed. The Kirin beer garden was the most lively, as we walked back through there a gravelly voice was booming from the tannoy, leading the crowd in a sing-a-long. Each company had a different giant pitcher thing for groups, mostly in the shape of a keg or something, but Kirin had huge, terrifying perspex towers. Asahi was packed but a bit dull looking. They did have a series of hawaiian dance acts however! And Suntory was pretty lacklustre to be honest, no-one seemed to be having any fun there.

Famillies are welcome at Beer Garden, lots and lots of kids were running around, none of them even seemed interested in sneaking beer from their folks. I think when you`re a kid beer`s pretty gross really. Also it was run with spectacular efficiency: we sat down, one girl sold us beer tickets from a huge usherette`s tray, another girl then scooped up these tickets and went to get our beers. Servings were, as you might have figured, generous.

I also had a bit of a tour of downtown Sapporo this weekend, and learnt that in the winter I can pretty much catch the train to Sapporo and do all my shopping in one of the many underground malls and complexes without ever having to brave the snow and the -10C winds except between my flat and the train station at my end.

Also I can confirm, for at least one person`s benefit, Americans do love both tacos AND freedom.