School Trippin'

Although I'm leaving Japan a couple of weeks too early to join the school trip to Nikko I did get one excursion for my money. The head offices of the NHK , the Japanese equivalent of the BBC (...but nowhere near as good), are based in the centre of Shibuya and a five minute walk away from my language school. To rake in a little more cash from the license payers half of the NHK building is given over to a huge NHK themed museum/experience/attraction which, today, I visited with my class.

NHK has two very popular mascots at the moment. The first is Doumo-kun, a big, brown, square, brick-like, big-mouthed 'thing', who's merchandise can be bought almost globally but who noone actually seems to know anything about. The second is a cream coloured squirrel with a very large, very round head about four times the size of it's body. This one I hadn't seen before, but from the cutesy look of the thing my guess is that it's only a matter of time before he starts popping up all over the world too. Replicas of these critters almost covered the NHK entrance and left me baffled. Almost as baffled as the first few exhibit rooms which told me everything I didn't really want to know about a hundred television dramas I don't really want to watch but that are very big hits. Samurai Sunset, Spirit channeling detectives and a hundred and ten soap operas that looked almost as bad as the English ones (..sorry, they're just not my thing).

The 'making of TV' demonstrations area was the highlight for me, mostly because I got to clown around in front of large crowd of people and, being the exhibitionist I am, I love doing that. My class nominated me to be one of the two participants in the 'news announcer' recording. It basically involved reading seven pages of badly translated self congratulatory NHK propaganda to a room full of forty people.

I played it as a cross between 'The Day Today' and my favorite brand of melodramatic Japanese courtroom drama, interspersing my Chris Morris accent with wildly overstated gesticulations. Understandably I don't think anyone quite knew what was going on but it went down well none the less and people from other classes came up to me afterwards to congratulate my news reading skills and suggest that I get my own show. It's getting quite late now, so I'll stop writing there and leave you with the picture I was presented at the end. A shot that sickeningly says it all.