Ippoippo

Today I nearly saw a Japanese chap on the train not act all Japanese.

I was lucky today because I managed to get myself near the front of the queue for the train that starts it’s journey from Matsudo. This is good, because it usually means I get a seat. Before the doors opened, I had already selected the seat I would aim to sit in, and the backup should it get occupied. So as the door opened, I calming made my way towards the seat, as the crazy mad panic and shuffled rush to get seats went on around me.
Having aquired by seat, a chap decided he would squeeze into the gap to the right that was between me and a 35(ish) year old lady.

Within minutes of leaving the station, the lady did the normal Japanese thing and started to fall asleep. Not unusual for Japan. However, she really started drifting into deep sleep, and was starting to fall to her left. Now the chappie next to me (as he had squeezed into a gap that really didn’t exist) had to lean forward. So instead of the normal, “person next to you falling asleep” routine where they gently rest on your shoulder before jolting up quickly, only to repeat the process, this lady started taking this to the extreme.

She really started slumping, with her body starting to fall into the gap between the forward leaning gentleman and the seat. As usual for Japanese women on trains, she also lost control of her legs, and saved herself from exposing herself merely because she was wearing a long skirt. Pervy looking guy opposite her was most disappointed!

This is when I started noticing the non-Japanese behaviour from the guy next to me. I could see he was becoming very agitated, which itself is quite unusual. Usually, if they become annoyed, they themselves block it all out, and pretend to sleep too. Its the whole “if I ignore it, it doesn’t exist, and therefore I’m not annoyed’ thing.
Ohh no, this continued to get more annoyed and he nearly snapped. As the train hit a bump, the woman completely fell onto him, at which point he quickly turned to and nearly when to hit her (or at least give her a good shaking). Only at the last minute did he decide better of it.

This is the bizarre thing for me. If I were to see this sequence of events in the UK, I would not be suprised at all. But to actually see it in Japan after all this time here suprised me somewhat.

Talking of Osaka, last night Hanshin Tigers won the Central League in Japanese baseball.

We sat down together and watched the last 4 innings (or whatever they are bloody called) while we chomped down our dinner (Korean style Ishi-yaki bimbimba), washed down with beer.
I can see now why Yuko likes Hanshin. Its the fans. Basically, they are so enthusiastic compared to the other teams, you get help yourself and get drawn into the whole thing. This year, in Osaka, they’ve had to take some extra precautions to stop the Bridge Jumping and Street Lighting Climbing exploits that occured when lots of crazy Osaka-jin got far to drunk when they won back in 2003

It’s been quite interesting to watch the news this morning before I came to work. The TV presenters and guests were watching footage of the Hanshin fans partying away. National Japanese TV, to be at least, seems very Tokyo orientated. So, the reaction of the TV presenters to the footage was of “what the hell are they doing, they aren’t acting very Japanese are they”.

Looks like Englishman in Osaka stumbled across the same bit of quality Japanese TV as Yuko did earlier this week.

I then proceeded to tell Yuko that this was bizarre, and I’ve never seen any other country where they have male synchronised swimmers. She asked why, and which point I seem to have lost all my political correctness and said
“Well, it is a bit gay isn’t it”. Whoops. Well, it made her laugh.

Ahhh, good old Japanese TV. For those of us who are British, how we laugh when we see clips of various old Japanese TV shows, such as “Takeshi’s Castle” and “Endurance”. Then we all wonder why the fricking hell to they put up with all the tortue.

One of the shows they seem to show quite often is where some ‘talento’ (the many people who are ‘famous’, just because they are on TV all the time) and/or comedians have to live for a month on an tiny amount of money for food, gas and electricity costs. One of the comedians who does this usually disappears off to a remote hut with his pet chicken and catches all of his food with a harpoon!

Now, sometimes I think these shows are a bit extreme. But then, while checking out some RSS feeds from The Huge Entity website, I found a site I’ve seen before, not never read fully. The actual linked page though was about this TV show which was quite shocking!!!

Denpa Shonen’s producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn’t have treated poor Nasubi the way they did. They wouldn’t have stripped him naked and shut him in an apartment, alone with no food, furniture, household goods, or entertainment. They wouldn’t have kept him there for over a year until he had won $10 000 in prizes by sending in postcards to contests. They wouldn’t have cut him off from the world and they would have told him that he was on nationwide TV.

WTF!!!
Having said that, I have a strange desire now to watch it, I feel ashamed to say.

One thing, on the TV section of that website, they say Tamori (Kazuyoshi Morita) is annoying. May have to disagree with that one. As stupid as it is, I love to see Tamori Club on Friday night.