Japanese TV
Japanese TV is utter bollocks. I swear there is nothing ever on TV. 90% of Japanese TV is made up of gameshows - ones that aren’t particularly interesting, at that. A typical channel schedule will be something like this - News, gameshow, gameshow, news, gameshow, soap, news. The Japanese version of “who wants to be a millionaire” is fun to watch though, even if I cant understand what the questions are. Interestingly, the prize money is only1′000′000′000 yen - about £524′000. The guy who does the show must be Chris Tarrant’s evil Japanese half-brother. He is just as irritating and he does far too many other shows. He is marginally more annoying though as the trademark ‘pause’ before telling the contestant whether he or she is correct or not lasts about 10 minutes in Japan. Japanese TV has a couple of saving graces. For one, the Japanese sense of humour is a bit warped. There is a gameshow (or just ’show’) where a perpetually-grinning kid dressed up like a doctor goes into peoples houses and wakes them up by lightly brushing their eyelids. The point of the show (from what I can gather) is to see the funny things that people do in the transition from being asleep to being awake. This ranges from incomprehensible grumbling to saying “shit don’t film me, my hair is crap” to turning over and hitting their heads on walls. The great thing about this show (and Japanese TV in general) is that celebrities and normal people are treated the same - on TV you can see celebrities being hit on the head and indeed, being victims of the waking-up-doctor person. Japanese TV’s other saving grace is the adverts, which are often bizarre (geisha’s eating crockery?) and sometimes have excellently catchy jingles or slogans (bottle coffee blendy!).
Japanese people are eager to talk to gaijin, regardless of our ability with Japanese and theirs with English. Hence, you find that conversations are simply made up of a series of non sequiturs - each party trying to keep the conversation alive at the cost of sensical interchange, eg.
“Today is hot” “Yes, very hot. Do you play video games?” “Yes I play. I am from England.” “Ah England. Bekkamu! (David Beckham)” “Yes Beckham. Beckham is from England.” “Can you use chopsticks?” “Yes I can. I play Kendo. I don’t like Natto.” “Kendo! Jozu! Today is hot.”
And so on. This brings me neatly to my next point. To many Japanese, England is synonymous with David Beckham - he is an absolute god here. I already knew that since the World Cup he acquired a large Japanese fan base, but I wasn’t really aware of the sheer horrifying scale of it all. There is actually a magazine called ‘Beckham’ devoted to him and he is constantly featured on TV. Saying you are from ‘igirisu’ (England) to a Japanese will almost always be met with shrieks of “ah Beckham! So desu!” - my haircut is even ‘Beckham Hair’ in Japan. So, because of my obvious links with such a great footballer (i.e. coming from the same country as him) I have been asked if I want to be the Junior High School football coach, who I am told, are ‘very successful’. To them, the fact that I don’t play football is irrelevant. As long as the kids are cool with failure and general dishonour, Im up for the challenge.
Rumour has it David Beckham could be signing a £1.1 million deal with Calvin Klein. Apparently Beckham, AKA Golden Balls, spends a grand each month on Calvin Klein Boxers or to be more precise Calvin Klein Pro Stretch Boxers and allegedly he wants an opportunity to show off his tackle - wink, wink!
Surely this is a genuine match made in heaven (unlike his marriage - only joking!); Golden Balls is indisputably the ultimate metrosexual and gay icon and Calvin Klein produce arguably the ultimate boxer shorts so on the face of it this is a sure-fire winning combination (unlike his team - not joking!). Perhaps the question on most peoples’ minds, even if they don’t want to admit it, is does David Beckham need any props to pose in a pair of CK boxers? Calvin Klein boxer short models have a certain reputation and Golden Balls will not want to let down the side, so perhaps a strategically positioned pair of rolled up Real Madrid socks will give Becks the necessary swerve.
Whatever the result, Calvin Klein will surely not pass up this once in a blue moon opportunity to expose their CK boxers to Golden Balls’ global fan base…. and there are undoubtedly a few guys in San Francisco, Brighton and Barcelona hoping Becks will expose his Golden Balls to Calvin Klein’s global fan base too!