Archive for February, 2006
If you’ve watched Japanese TV quite a big in the last 6 months, you are probably familiar with the “No Border” commercials that Cup Noodle put out. I must admit, I enjoy the commercials, perhaps because of the song that plays in them and the peaceful images displayed in them. However, when the commercial finally announces itself as a Cup Noodle commercial, I can’t help but this “WTF does this have to do with instant noodles?”
This Commercial is one of the first “No Border” commercials I saw. When I finished watching it, I couldn’t help but think “What do smiling muslim children have to do with cup noodle?”
I can see more of a link to Instant noodles in this one. It appears that this cosmonaut is eating them on a space station.(Edit: Nissin paid a great deal to the Russian space agency for this commercial to be filmed on the ISS) Same song, and its pretty cool , I guess.(You can also watch it here)
Here are the older, original “No Border” Commercials:
1. Red Square Commercial: they didn’t want freedom, they just wanted instant noodle cups.
2. No Border No. 3 : Cups of instant noodles are used as barriers between peopel in war-torn european countries.
3. No Border No.4 : No Instant Noodles, just a burned out tank.
The commercials have little or nothing to do with instant noodles. Yet they burn themselves into my mind. Help.
It appears that a few guys in the UK have decided to copy Japanese comedian Hard Gay and do their own version of his act. Too bad it totally sucks.
The act is nothing without the proper costume and correct humping technique. Or maybe the joke doesn’t translate at all. It works so much when the Japanese Razor Ramone HG harasses uptight-looking people on the streets of major Japanese cities.
These guys aren’t gay, but the canned laughter that they play in their video is.
One Japanese man + One 15-PET bottle jetpack = Awesomely Stupid (Click for Video).
As I am writing a Japanese TV show in which situations are presented (dramatically acted out, of course) and a panel of legal experts decides whether certain courses of action are legal or not. The results are often shocking.
One of today’s skits featured a woman whose husband kept asking her about her past boyfriends/sexual partners. He wanted to know how many men, what they were like, what she liked about them, why they broke up, etc. The woman was shocked by these questions are absolutely refused to answer them. Her husband would pester her constantly with the same questions, and she continued to her refusal to answer them.
What did the husband do? He hired a private investigator to discover her dating/sexual past. After he found out who her past boyfriends were, he tried to approach them all and interview them about the details of their relations with his wife. Eventually his wife discovered photos of her ex-boyfriends in her husband’s stuff and confronted him about it. He told her what he had done and explained he had only done it because he cared about her so much that he wanted to know everything about her. Since she wouldn’t answer his questions, he had to find out the answers himself. Her response: Divorce!!!
Would the following situation provide legal grounds for a divorce? Only half the panel of legal experts thought it would. The other half thought that since the husband had the good intention of wanting to know more about her, it would be unreasonable to divorce him for just going a little too far. It was clearly her fault for not answering her husband’s questions. After all, she could have just given him a fake answer to the question. The final conclusion of the show: it would be legally difficult for her to divorce her husband using the above situation as the reason.
I assume that she would still be able to divorce him, but she wouldn’t be allowed to provide the above situation as some sort of legal proof that the divorce was her husband’s fault. At least I hope so. Either way, its fucked up.
P.S. I still love you, Japan.
In October of 1992, a 16 year old Japanese exchange student named Yoshihiro Hattori was shot and killed in Baton Rouge Louisiana. Why? Apparently because he didn’t know what “freeze” meant.
Hattori and his friend were supposed to go to a Halloween party on October 16, 1992. Instead, they got lost and went to the wrong house. They ended up knocking on the door of the Peairis residence. It turned out that the Peairis’ were a bunch of all-American gun-totting hicks, who didn’t take very kindly to strangers a-trespassin’ on their property. Upon seeing a couple of strange people walking towards her door, Bonnie Peairis called for her husband to “git the gun.”
When the door was opened, Yoshihiro said something in broken English to the Peairis’, and upon realizing that he had arrived at the wrong house, started to walk away. Mr. Peairis shouted “FREEZE” at Hattori. Sadly, Hattori didn’t understand the meaning of “freeze”, so he turned around. He ended up getting shot to death with a 44 magnum.
The incident caused an uproar in Japan, especially when Mr. Peairis was cleared of any wrongdoing in the killing. To the Japanese it appeared that Hattori had been brutally murdered. It reinforced the Japanese impression that America is an extremely dangerous country.
Hattori’s death taught the Japanese the meaning of “FREEZE”. Most Japanese adults are aware of the meaning of this English word, and if they hear it they know they should remain absolutely still and do nothing. Otherwise they will get brutally murdered by an American.
Thanks to my ALT friend who was warned not to use the word “freeze” in her English lessons. You allowed me to discover this strange story.
Dear McDonald’s Corporation of Japan,
Please stop using the slogan “Let’s Olympic” in your Japanese ads. McDonald’s is an American company and it is shameful for it to use crappy Engrish in its commercials and promotions. If you want to make a slogan for your special Italian-themed menu items, please use actual English or Japanese.
Sincerely,
Japan Probe dot com
P.S. Writing “Let’s Olympic” in Katakana(Retsu Orinpikku) doesn’t make the slogan correct English or Japanese. It just makes it worse.
