Live from Japan!

As I mentioned in the throwing out the TV post, recently we received a new (old) TV from my supervisor. This TV has the ability to play the english language audio tracks on shows that are simultaneously broadcast in both japanese and english. This means that we can now watch the news and hollywood movies, when they are played on broadcast TV. (I caught The Bourne Identity which we own on DVD but it was novel to watch on tv in japan.)

Since coming here I have only watched a small amount of TV. Some of the shows have been fairly normal. I also watched the last two games of the nippon series Japans equivalent of the world series (Chunichi dragons came out on top, Gambate doragonsu!). Probably everyone has heard about the crazy TV shows that make it onto the air here in japan. Some of them are just plain crazy, but uninterestingly so, if you really want a burst of japanese craziness you are better off watching some commercials and calling it good. However, I have seen a few real gems on the TV as well.

For example, I caught a show that was a competition between three movie makeup artists to create the best monster makeup. It was quite interesting, and the makeup was crazy good. They sent almost an entire day working on the makeup application, and god only knows how much time preparing it beforehand. They ended up with three different costume creatures. A Insecty man, and sea creature man, and our favorite, the melon panda. Although danielle and I disagreed with the person who was eliminated the show was very interesting to watch to see how they applied the makeup.

Our other favorite show, which seems to run all the time, is a kind of quiz show with a line up of guests (seemingly celebrities, although I don’t know enough japanese celebrities yet to be sure.) Danielle’s favorite part of this program is the game where the guests have to get the correct pronunciation for a word written in kanji. She loves nothing more that shouting about how crazy this language is that this could be a category. (We will say nothing of the fact that I could easily see an american show having a spelling challenge.)

However, now I am watching what I believe to be my favorite show I have seen yet. It appears to be a game of Televised Hide and Go Seek. A family has basically torn up their entire house and created all sorts of ingenious hiding spots for their extended family. Then there is a series of (probably) celebrities brought in to find them. In addition to having real hiding people, the family created a series of booby traps to surprise and startle the searching team. Each of the hiding family members has a heart rate monitor and a night vision camera, so that we can see their expressions as the people search. Crazy crazy crazy japanese TV.

I leave you with a picture of the face of Mama. The last family member to be found just 3 minutes before the family would have won a fabulous cash prize.