hello

So I'm watching one of the many 'Wow, look how strange this animal is!' shows on TV, and various animals are being explained, e.g. a tiny little frog that was really cute, as well as some elephants recorded using a special 'bouldercam' that rolled around. One moment in the elephant part was entertaining: two of the male elephants were fighting, and one lost. He walked away towards the bouldercam, looked at it for minute, then kicked it and walked away. He had excellent comedic timing.

Following the elephants, the show focused on tornadoes and storm chasers. They showed a video of some tornadoes that occur over water in Malawi (what's up kevin) then cut to commercial. After the commercial break, they revealed that the tornadoes aren't actual tornadoes but are really enormous clouds of insects! They sent a reporter to Malawi to investigate. The reporter talked to one of the local villagers and he said that if you go into one of the clouds of bugs, you will die. So the TV producer decided it would be a good idea to send him into one of the enormous clouds of insects. It took them a couple of days to get a good cloud of bugs, so in the meantime he called his family back at home. When he asked his wife how life was with him not home, she said she was thoroughly enjoying it. When he asked his son how life was with dad not home, he said it wasn't much different. When he asked him what he thought of his dad going into a bug tornado, he thought it was a stupid idea, but that it wouldn't be good if his dad died. So the next day a bug tornado was spotted, and they set out in a boat. Before they reached the tornado, they cut to commercial and changed the subject of the show. I'm not sure if they're saving the tornado encounter for another show or if they're saving it for the end of tonight's show. Now they're talking about The Touch, a pair of very famous comedy twins.

I love SMAP but I'm not sure if it's for the right reasons

Tonight is everyone's favorite night, SMAPxSMAP night! I think I explained the phenomenon that is SMAP in an earlier post, if not, use wikipedia. SMAPxSMAP (pronounced 'smasma') is SMAP's weekly TV show where they have various famous people on the show, talk about stuff, do comedy sketches and finish the show off by doing a performance with another famous musician. One time they had Stevie Wonder on the show and they sang a group duet with him. Stevie played the keyboards and SMAP danced. Stevie couldn't see them, which I guess was for the better. SMAP are getting kind of old so they're like 35 year olds dancing around like teenage N'Sync kids. They also have pretty terrible Japanese accents when singing so it was kind of painful hearing them trade verses with Stevie, who can push the limits in his own right ('Isn't She Lovely' is a marathon sanity check). Tonight they performed with some dance troupe and it was kind of weird.

Coming up next is Ainori! Hooray!
So, this week's Ainori is about the group's activities in the Dominican Republic. The big theme of the show is Bambi's 'Water Diet' that she's following in an attempt to get skinny and get over her unfounded hatred of herself and her body. Mind you she's perfectly normal sized, but somehow got it into her head that she's hideous and needs to lose weight. So everyone's in the DR, and the food is really good, but Bambi is trying to restrain herself at each meal by only drinking water. Some kind of drama goes down bc DR tap water isn't safe to drink so Bambi would have to buy all of her water, which would be kind of expensive. So Bambi ends up giving in and by general consensus pigs out at the next couple of meals. The group gets together and has an intervention with Bambi, and she comes forward with her problems to the group, and one of the guys says something that makes Bambi get all emotional, causing her to hyperventilate and die on camera. Well she didn't die, I was lying, but you can imagine how uncomfortable that would have been. Anyway, not much happens with the Sanchan-Bambi connection, but I think the new guy Oga, through his genuinely nice personality and demeanor, is inadvertently pushing Sanchan out of the picture. Bambi was super-impressed when he picked up a fly and through it out of the Love Van, and was an all-around giggly flirty ditzy girl the rest of the time they were together. Luckily for Sanchan, Oga doesn't really seem to have an overt interest in Bambi, so maybe she'll have to settle for Sanchan. We shall see next week!

It's that time again

Tonight's show is the one led by Mr. Masahiro Nakai, member of the ubiquitous pop group SMAP (which means Sports Music Assemble People, for obvious reasons), that focuses on women. Let me start off by saying that I think Nakai is a creepy guy who has a Mao-like grip of terror on Japanese TV. He's on at least 4 or 5 primetime shows a week regardless of the fact that he is severely lacking any sort of entertaining personality or marketable skills (each of the current five SMAP members has a singular feature that defines them: the cute one, the romantic one, the crazy one; Nakai is known as the one who isn't very good at singing). Why this guy is on so many shows is beyond me. He's not funny, he's not particularly attractive, and he's pretty dumb from what I gather. Yet he's one of the highest paid entertainers in Japan. I don't get it.

Anyway, back to TV. So Nakai hosts this weekly show called 'KinSma,' meaning Gold SMAP, again for obvious reasons. For what I understand the show has two recurring features. The show is set up with a couple celebrities on stage, surrounded by an audience of 20 something ladies all wearing red pantsuits. Nakai is wearing a weird, over-the-top Napoleon style uniform. The first feature involves telling the scandalous story of some random young Japanese lady that does something weird. One episode I saw was about a lady that really enjoyed getting making other people angry, so she got hired and fired at a rather rapid pace and ran through boyfriends quickly. This week's feature is showing the lives of a couple really really old ladies who are bedridden. It's accompanied by the ever present picture-in-picture showing the faces of the various celebrities as they are watching the feature. It's not interesting, and it seems the celebrities agree with me.

Finally, the show closes out with the ever popular 'Find the Hottest Mom in a Certain Area of Japan' game. The show sends a camera crew to some random area in Japan, and they ask around for some hot middle-aged women. They find three and bring them back to the studio where they get all dressed up. They are then presented to the celebrities, usually accompanied with a home cooked specialty, and one of the mom's is chosen as the hottest of the three by Mr. Nakai. They win a prize or something and the show ends. It's as creepy as it sounds.

On a separate note, QVC is selling these. It rocks back and forth and, even though they seem to be the next big thing in Japan, every woman that gives it a ride looks very embarrassed.

Jump Rope

Part of some weird kids show led by popular and strange comedic trio Yasuda Dai Circus (please look them up on wikipedia). Some of the kids on the show were brought to a jump rope demonstration by some pro jump ropers, and they were very impressed. The jump ropers then said they'd teach the kids and get them good enough to join the school double dutch team. A couple of the kids were visibly distressed bc they hadn't jumped rope before. So each kid gave it a try, and the coach singled out the three kids that couldn't do it so they could work separate from the 7 or so other kids that could jump rope. The littlest of the can't jump rope group was having a rough time and was getting visibly frustrated, so they shoved a camera in his face. He excused himself from the room and had himself a good cry, again with camera shoved in face. He was very cute. Ganbare!

Ainori

"Ainori" is kind of Japan's answer to Real World and maybe Road Rules plus a little bit of Japanese strangeness. The name is a play on words, normally meaning something like 'carpool', but also can mean 'love ride'. The premise of the show is a mix of 7 guys and girls ride on a bus together all around the world. The catch is that the object of the show is to make couples. All the members are single and they are looking for love. When one member thinks they have a shot with one of the other members, they ask them if they would like to return to Japan together. If the person says yes, the new couple gets a pair of return tickets to Japan. If they say no, the person that got shot down returns to Japan by themselves. The other catch is that the members are not allowed to talk about their feelings about one another to anyone else. They keep video diaries so that the viewers know what's up, but they can't talk with anyone else on the bus. The show is fairly proud of its past successes, which have resulted in 7 marriages and 2 babies. They also had a problem when one of the members fell in love with one of the cameramen.

Last week, a successful couple was made and they headed back to Japan. This week saw two new arrivals, but I think the main focus of the show is on San-chan and his hot crush Bambi. San-chan is about the goofiest looking guy, scrawny with an overbite and a pretty annoying voice, but he's really awkward and affectionate and kind of cute. Bambi is a pretty normal young lady, but I think she gets the vibe that San-chan has the hots for her and she thinks he's sweet and very naive in the ways of love. The way things are going now, I doubt San-chan will have the guts to pop the question, so I'm guessing it will be a couple more weeks til Bambi makes his dreams come true. Let's watch and see...

Quick update!: One of the new guys, named Oga, is evidently pretty cool and is moving in on Bambi! They showed a shot of San-chan counting money for some reason while the announcer wondered what the future of San-chan and Bambi might be. Next week's teaser showed the cast in a club and the girls being reduced to tears after being forced to grind on the dance floor with some gross random dudes. Men: going where no woman wants them to. What shall happen next week?

Tonight on Japanese TV:

Welcome, welcome, whoever reads my profile! I have moved my oft updated "Tonight on Japanese TV" feature here bc AIM places a limit on the size of one's profile and I fear I will run over one of the days. Ok, so on with the TV:

Tonight's TV show seems like a one-off kind of affair. I started watching when there were 6 well known comedians sitting around in a hostess bar, each sitting next to their own personal hostess. The comedians were wearing sumo wrestler diapers while the hostesses were wearing bikinis. They were talking and flirting and drinking, and after a short while the girls all stood in the middle of the room in a line, spread their legs, and had the guys crawl between them. The guys enjoyed this, and it was at this point that I noticed one of the comedians was being focused on more than the others. Next, the focused-on comedian and another of the comedians were taken into the 'VIP' room by two of the hostesses. They were then laid out on two separate beds, and strapped down by their hands and feet. After agreeing between themselves that this truly was heaven, the non-focused-on comedian undid his straps and got up. The focused on comedian noticed that he couldn't undo his own straps and looked very confused. At that point, the walls of the VIP room fell down and the comedian realized he was outside, strapped to a bed, and that there were about 20 people waiting to carry him around. So they picked him up and carted him around downtown Tokyo while he was strapped down wearing a diaper. After a while they dumped him onto a stage in front of a large number of young women. He then told a joke but none of the people laughed.