Stranger in a Strange Land

While doing some research yesterday, I found a great commentary by Dave Spector criticizing Japanese Olympic coverage. I’m not a huge fan of the Olympics, nor am I a huge fan of Japanese TV. If Americans think their news coverage is narrowly-focused and sensationalized, they should spend some time in front of the telly over here!

A translation:

In most countries, Olympic coverage is left up to one network only. In England the BBC, in the states one of the four major networks. Here in Japan, coverage is split between NHK and private networks, and the whole two weeks is full of a merry “Hurrah, let’s go Japan!” spirit that I find really distasteful. Instead of letting commercial networks make a big party of things, NHK should be in control of things.

Not only the Olympics, but sports coverage in general is really juvenile. It’s like they’re only trying to get people to watch. Networks use celebrities in order to get young people to watch and raise their ratings. The networks are really missing the meat of sports broadcasting. They only focus on Japanese athletes winning medals, and it’s more like an event than it is legitimate sports coverage.

When the Japanese baseball team lost their chance at the medal there were finally some voices of criticism, but there was no background information regarding things like why the US softball team is so strong or coverage of things happening in Beijing and around China. Can’t networks stop focusing only on Japanese athletes and news that’s easy to pick up, and give more coverage to a wider variety of events?

I’ve heard a few similar commentaries around the net regarding the subject, and it’s good to have someone rather high profile to make a statement about the issue. Anyone in Japan have any thoughts?

Posted on Wednesday, August 27, 2008 in Japan, News | 1 comment »

Hancock

The editor who usually does movie premiers and celebrity interviews was on holiday last week, and I was asked to take over the premier for Will Smith’s newest and yet to debut in Japan movie, Hancock. At first I was excited because I thought it meant getting to see the film for free (this unfortunately wasn’t true and I just ended up downloading it off the net–pirates!), but I also enjoy going to these events to check out the Japanese press in action.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted on Saturday, August 23, 2008 in Out on the town, Work | 3 comments »

Wining and more wining in Yamanashi

A bit behind on things… apologies!

Although I work at a business magazine I can’t really claim to be as interested in the stuff as I am in say.. food or travel. While there’s little leeway to do the former at work, however, there have been occasional opportunities to write about the latter. The catch here is that the magazine won’t provide a budget for travel articles, restricting my efforts to locations in the neighborhood or locations for which I can find a sponsor for.

For my scuba trip in May, I was fortunately enough to find a sponsor to not only get me down to the island but to also pay for the experience as well. For my next trick, I had planned to pull a plane out of my hat find someone to get me to Hokkaido. Things didn’t work out, however, and after scrambling for a Plan B, I ended up going somewhere T and I often end up: Yamanashi.

Although we go because his mother lives there, or for fruit picking, the area is actually widely known domestically for it’s burgeoning wine industry. Figuring it somewhat fit the theme of the magazine–catering to rather sophistocated business-types–I did a little planning and we were off bright an early Saturday morning, with Editor P and his friends in tow.

$Grace\'s wineyards$

Our first stop was Grace Winery, a rather small business with quite a good reputation for wine. We were taken on a tour of the vineyards in the sweltering morning heat, and I boiled on as I scrambled to interpret information about the history of wine production and the different type of grapes. The area where the wine is made was more interesting, and much cooler, as we watched the first whites of the season have their little bodies pressed and squeezed to get at their valuable insides. The cellars, while likely lacking in the atmosphere of a European winery, were nice as well, especially the deep and heavy smells of oak barrels and aged wines that wafted through them.

Although it was only around 11am, and although the roars of stomachs that had been awake since 5am yet had very little put into them echoed around the room, we were more than happy to take part in the wine tasting session. Three whites and three reds with a detailed explanation of all of them and an even more extensive Q&A; the wines weren’t bad, though the famous Koshu grape was a bit too sharp for my tastes. Grace did offer up a nice Chardonay and a terrific dessert wine, but that’s something to be expected in a country that used to flavor all their wines with sugar and honey.

We had lunch at a bistro on the top of a hill, overlooking miles of vineyards and with a waitress who looked like she was afraid we were going to bite her face off. Afterwards a massive and electric rainstorm that swept through that I tried to take photos of but failed miserably. As T struggled to stay on the road, we rushed to make the reservation of our next destination, Suntory’s Tomi no Oka Winery.

It figures that a huge beverage manufacturer is going to have enough money to throw at a really nice winery. This place was cool. Huge stone buildings housing what I’d imagine would be massive amounts of wine. The corridors were dark, and the pine trees looming around the estate gave the entire thing a really great atmosphere. Unfortunately, though, because of the rain our winery tour was cancelled, and they had graciously put us into a wine tasting seminar instead. Unfortunately the entire thing was in Japanese, and while I struggled to interpret it at first it seemed like very few of us were actually interested at all. The guys were all pretty tired, having been gallivanting around Tokyo until about 4am, and so eventually we were just content to munch on our Melba Toast and sip on Suntory’s mediocre wine until our wine teacher decided it was time to end class.

$Suntory\'s wine fields$

On the other side of the winery was a restaurant, bakery and gift shop, and an absolutely stunning view of the surrounding mountains. Here again we tried more average wine but were really too tried to do much more than just appreciate the scenery.

T was exhausted, but being the charming guy he is we drove Editor P and crew to this great little cabin in the mountains they had reserved at the very northern tip of Yamanashi. It was a bit far in the wilderness, though, and as we coasted down rolling hills after dropping the guys off, we felt kind of bad for having taken their only means of transportation away.

While I don’t know enough about wine to really judge the stuff that’s made here, it was a fun trip and Yamanashi is a beautiful country that’s really only footsteps away from Tokyo. Even if the wine is crap it was still fun to sniff and swish and pretend we knew what we were doing. This entry is probably actually better than the article I’ve written about it, but check that out too when it comes out in September!

Posted on Monday, August 18, 2008 in Japan, Travel | 3 comments »

Yasukuni Rumble

In last week’s Metropolis, there was an article about those right-wing Japanese groups that most of us are familiar with from their black truck loud speaker escapades around Shibuya and other city centers. The article itself was a bit hyped-up and was published elsewhere quite a few months before it made an appearance in Metropolis, but it was interesting all the same. Who doesn’t love reading about political fanatics?

Earlier in the week, one of the guys at the office invited me out to this year’s shindig at Yasukuni Shrine. The anti-war protesters that reportedly “clash” with the rightists were supposed to make their way to the shrine, and I figured there would be more than a few chances for some good shots. Indeed, when we arrived the rightists were out in their best form, trying to get past a police blockade down to Nishi Kanda Park, where the anti-war protesters were gathering.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted on Friday, August 15, 2008 in Japan, Out on the town | 1 comment »

A different type of animal

I was riding the train to work the other day, and there was a man sleeping in a seat near where I was standing. Not an uncommon occurrence–many people use their commuting time to catch up on the sleep they missed due to work, school, partying, etc.–but this guy was quite fitful, not slumped over like most people but tossing and turning, rearranging his limbs in the cramped space afforded him in the crowded Yamanote.

He had been holding his mobile phone, white with a strap of wooden beads, and as he rustled his arms around it fell from his hand onto the floor with quite a loud thump. The people around gave casual glances to the phone and to the man, then the train continued on without anyone giving any apparent sign that they had really noticed the incident at all. A few minutes passed, and people shuffled in and out as the train stopped at a station. The man slept on, his phone lying on the floor only inches away from the feet of other passengers. Still, no one did anything.

How silly! I thought, watching all these people pretend to ignore this restlessly sleeping man and his mobile phone. Before I got out at my stop I picked the phone up and put it on his lap, and although it probably soon made its way back onto the floor, I was once again impressed by the ability of these “busy” Tokyoites to completely ignore the people around them.

While there are many stories of kindness received from strangers, borrowed umbrellas in the rain and lost train passes returned, there’s also a massive amount of lofty indifference being passed around between the citizens of this megalopolis. I realize that perhaps it might not be natural for the Japanese to hold the door open for people coming in behind them, but when I see a mother and her two children obviously struggling to lift heavy suitcases up a flight of stairs in a busy station and no one, male or female, offering to help them with the task, I really have to wonder about the amount of humanity these “kind Japanese” possess.

Is it only the “cold” citizens of Tokyo that suffer from this modern disease, the adaptation to living in an extremely crowded environment requiring them to ignore the people around and pretend that they’re alone? Or is this universal in all large cities around the globe? I’d hate to make a generalization that it’s a “Japanese thing,” although I do believe that perhaps the culture of “saving face” and fear of embarrassment makes the Japanese more prone to this behavior than others. One of my students once told me, “Although we seem polite on the surface, always bowing in respect to the person in front of us, with that same movement we shove our rears rudely into the people standing behind us.”

Posted on Thursday, July 17, 2008 in Japan, random | 1 comment »

From the blogosphere

Japan Blogs

Expat Blogs

Other Blogs

Food

Fashion

$Expat Women�\Helping Women Living Overseas$

Recent Items

Categories

Archives

Recent Comments