Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Apologies, for it seems that for the past week I have forgotten that I have a website.

You see, for the last week I have been really preoccupied with something. Remember a few entries ago I said that my mind is SICK with a kind of impulse disorder? Well it has happened again - and this time, it’s something that is not only crap, but has the potential to be crap and disturbing.

Because my friends, I have started writing music.

Stemming largely from the fact that I really have to knuckle down with the saving of money which means I am going to have to forgo luxuries such as, you know, leaving my house, I started to think up activities that I could undertake that would be both financially non-crippling and also have some kind of merit to it. I toyed with ideas such as a studying loads more Japanese, or starting a distance-learning MA, but finally settled with an altogether much more useless plan, that of making my own music, with a view to having a full album done by summer.

Pushing the angry chants of “I have no son!” from my father out of my head for a second, I’m going to be honest and say that so far this music-making endeavour has yielded nothing but rubbish. Music and melodies definitely seem to be my forte for now, but lyric-writing has me completely stumped and I can’t help writing things that either cross that dangerous line from ethereal/symbolic into utterly fricking meaningless, or simply just sound like the strained whinings of a 15yr old kid who dun got no woman.

I may release the songs on this site as I create them, if the fear of total societal condemnation is ever placated.

Aaaanyway, let’s direct our attention once again to my favourite stalwart pincushion of Japanese culture that I like to both love and hate - Japanese TV. I think it is entirely possible to pigeonhole any given Japanese television programme into one of these categories:

a) programmes that are stupid b) programmes that are pointless c) programmes that are about food

96% of all shows being a delicate combination of all the above. You will notice a distinct lack of categories like “entertaining” or “genuinely funny”. For some reason, almost every TV show culminates in some sort of twisted competition. These vary in content, prize money and actual relevance to the show to an absolutely massive degree. In any one hour of TV you might expect to see a veteran sushi chef pitted against a high-tech sushi-making machine and told to “make as much sushi as you can in 20 minutes GO!”, see who out of 20 sumo wrestlers, has the strongest punch according to a video game boxing machine, or see which is better out of a CAT Scanner or an X-Ray machine, to find exactly where you should cut a watermelon so that you won’t see any seeds when you slice it in half.

I just watched a show about prosthetic makeup, which fascinated itself with the challenge of making regular people look completely different - shaping their faces into those of well-known celebrities.

The ‘competition’ aspect to this was they then got 3 makeup artists to do a standoff to show their talent, which is where the fun started. Now, one of these people was clearly a professional makeup artist as his work was actually rather convincing, but the other 2 (I missed the start of the show so I didn’t see the contestants’ profiles) were either plucked from utter obscurity or just really really shit at their jobs. Admittedly, one of them was getting the short end of the stick in both rounds - having the rather difficult challenges of transforming someone (a Japanese person, naturally) into David Beckham, and changing a decidedly average looking guy into one of Japan’s most popular female idols, ‘Megumi’. Even taking into account the difficulty of these 2 however, it was clear to anyone viewing that the end product was representative of an almost perfect level of awfulness. I’m not sure what they were using for the face material, but it bore an unhealthy resemblance to papier mache, the puffy, lumpy texture of which resulted in extremely accurate representations of celebrities faces, should they have recently been in a fire, or stung in the face by thousands of bees.

Of course, the funniest part of this show was when they cornered the real stars (celebrities in Japan REALLY don’t have any privacy at all) and showed them what they came up with. They found poor old Megumi having lunch with a friend at some random restaurant and simply sidled up to ask “may we show you something?”. She agreed, and so they brought it out, rigid and shuffling under what must have been hours and hours of makeup work.

Standing almost a foot taller than her and looking something like the bastard love child of a blow-up doll and that scary dead chick from “Ring”, any normal person would be both horrified and insulted that this thing who’s face looks as though it has been not so much sculpted as it has coagulated, has basically interrupted your lunch and said “hey, this is what we think you look like! Whaddayathink?”.

And her response?

“oh wow! It looks just like me!”

After which she proceeded to grab the fake Megumi’s equally fake breast, then grab her own with her other hand and compare the two. Oh, Megumi is an attention whore by the way.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2004 at 7:21 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.