We want you to sweat on TV

My traumas about Japanese TV programs just resurfaced due to a questionnaire sent to our university, in which students are asked various questions about their japanese skills and why they study japanese in the first place. Woot! The chance to get international contacts! Money to the student organization (= more parties)! A chance to go to TV! Insta-fame! Now we can really show those japanese that we can really excel at speaking their language and give a good image about the japanese studies of HY.

So what's the problem? On top of loving to be a spoil-sport and shooting down everyone's rosy dreams on a daily basis, I'd just like to point out a small caveat here.... Ever seen japanese TV programs? Ever noticed how laughing seems to be the main activity? Laughing at something or someone? Well, here's the news: They will be laughing at you.

No matter how well you speak, what you say, or how you say it. The whole point is to show funny foreigners speaking funny japanese, so that they can be laughed at. I'm not saying that it is wrong per se, just that if you decide to take part in a japanese TV show, you can forget any ideas of outshining wit and cleverness on your part - you will be there for only one reason. You have a role you can't escape.

I can of course speak only about my quite limited encounters with the japanese media, encounters that thankfully enough are limited to two occasions. Sweating on national TV and trying to be forced in a starry-eyed-gaijin mold in a local newspaper. I mean, being a white foreigner in a small place makes it depressingly easy to end up with your face in some kind of publication. Let's deal with the sweaty part first, since that has something to do with TV. One late night me and my friend got phone calls from some of the foreign student organizations at Waseda University, asking us if we wanted to be on TV. Well, why not, sure, but what would it be about? The guy told us that he'll pass our phone numbers to someone from the program who would call us in a minute. Note: we were chatting on skype the whole time, so that we knew all the time what the other had been told.

So, 10 minutes later my friend gets a call, and goes silent on skyoe for a moment. The next thing she writes is "say NO!" - and this from the same girl that just minutes ago had pressured me into accepting since she had already accepted too. Then I get the phone call, and there's a young woman in the other end of the line asking if I'd want to be a part of a documentary. Hmm, nothing strange yet, but what is it all about, I ask. "Oh, it won't take much time, it's only one afternoon on friday." Yes, but what's the documentary about? *insert fishy smell* "Well, you see, it's a sports program, about female marathon runners..." Now what on earth would I be doing in a marathon document? What do I need to do, what's my part? "Well, there's this test in the program, and we'd like you to pedal on a bike and show that skandinavian people sweat more than japanese do."

Now this was in beginning of July, when the temps outside were such that I sweated like a pig by only thinking hard - pedaling for a TV show would probably have ended in a heatstroke. But to come back to the program, they basically wanted us to sweat on national TV. Great. For some reason my doctor had ordered me to rest after a month-long cold and my friend had an exam on the given day, zannen nagara.

The other incident happened in March, when we were traveling with some friends in the Kansai area, and decided to go to Mt. Hiei to see a big fire ritual we saw ads about on the bus in Kyoto. There was one other gaijin in the place, and even he disappeared quite quickly, since it was an all-day ritual with repeating parts. We found it fun to just sit there, watch the people (this was also the beginning of our monk-hunt) and the rituals and drink hot amazake. Most of the "pilgrims" came in huge busloads, and watching them unfold, write their petitions on woodblock, go to see the ritual, run shopping for omiyage and the pack themselves back to the bus was like watching a huge choreographed dance. Anyways, we soon attracted some sunny grannies who brought us cups of the sweets stuff and started chatting. (always talk to grannies, it's usually worth the while) It didn't take long for the newspaperguy to get to us - apparently he'd been too afraid to get close to foreigners without japanese chaperons, but now that the nice ladies were obviously there to be made use of as translators of whatever-gaijin-language-they might-speak, he glued to our company.

The start wasn't that good, since he started to talk to the grannies over our heads in the "did you bring them here" kind of way. Now the grannies and us had been talking for some time already, of course in japanese, so they just told him to speak to us, as our japanese is really good. After this he did his second mistake - even after hearing that we had come there by ourselves and we speak good japanese, he still wanted us to be the starry-eyed gaijin who don't understand anything about what's happening around them. And here's a piece of advise for all the japanese newspaper guys from small local magazines who might be reading this blog (I know I'm pushing my luck here): all the gaijin don't want to play that game, even if we know how. And if the answers you get show that your interviewees know more about some topics than you do, thus implying that they are NOT the starry-eyed specimen you were wishing to find, either upgrade your questions or have the decency to bow out and find another target. Nothing pisses one off like having to answer questions that seem to be targeted for 3 y.o. even AFTER you've made your point that you know better what's happening around you than he does.

Both of these cases have led me to make a decision about being in the japanese media - avoid it at all costs. The sad fact is that a gaijin can rarely hope to be seen as a real person in there, no matter how well it can work out in the society itself. Then again, if that's your cup of tea, go ahed. Just be as sure as you can about the nature of the liquid you're putting your head in.