JAPANESE TV SHOWS
July 15th 2009 05:33
My host family loved television. Whenever I’d wake up they’d be watching TV, whenever I’d return home they’d be watching TV, whenever we’d eat whenever I’d sleep, they’d be watching TV. It was winter, so they’d huddle under a blanket together and watch TV; sometimes they'd fall asleep next to each other, the TV still on.
They usually watched documentaries or dramas or game shows. The documentaries they watched weren’t like the type of Western documentaries I was used to. First, the documentary would start off with a panel of hosts, which would usually consist of a young trendy guy, an old guy, and an overly cute girl. These three people would laugh about something I wouldn’t understand and talk about a diagram or two. The documentary would then start to play, and in the bottom corner of that documentary would be a small screen that would display a panel member, who is also watching the documentary. It would show his or her reactions to what the hell the documentary is on about, and once in a while you’d hear them say something. Big fonts that were usually light blue or blazing pink would slam onto the screen to display more information, and my host family would stare at those words and sometimes mutter a comment.
Japanese dramas, unlike Western dramas, only usually run for a few months. Each episode ends with a to-be-continued, so you’ll be sitting there wanting to know what the hell will happen next. My favourite TV show, the one I understood the most, was “Celeb to Binbo Taro,” this romantic comedy of a TV drama about this cute celebrity who falls in love with this dirt poor guy; I mean this guy was so poor he had to share a bowl of rice with his three kids. My second favourite TV show was “Gira Gira,” a corny drama about this middle aged guy who loses his job and so has to return to his old, yet sex charged life of hosting to support his wife and kid. Great stuff.
I don’t have to tell you about Japanese game shows because you’ve probably seen your fair share of them. If not, I’ve put up a YouTube video of “Silent Library,” a popular video that has been going around online for a few years now.
There is one show that I will always remember. It was this competition for this pretty looking girl to gain as much weight as possible. All throughout her days, a camera crew would suddenly interrupt her life and feed her plates and plates of dishes. They gave her sickeningly large plates of sushi, of curry, of everything, and the plates would come in fives or tens. She’d be coming out of a cinema with friends and suddenly a camera crew would come and take her to a caravan to feed her more food. Each week they’d tally how much she’d gained, and then they’d show her face close up. There were several times when she cried, there were several times when she’d cry even more. But the food would keep on coming. By the end of the show she was incredibly plump. The camera zoomed in on her, smiling, successful. And then the show suddenly ended. I asked my host mother what the prize was. She said,
“There is no prize.”
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