The clip NHK doesn’t want you to see..

Riding Sun picked up on something I didn’t notice when I mentioned YouTube’s popularity in Japan earlier this week:

The Japanese media, sensing its proprietary material is being illegally reproduced, appears to be swiftly abandoning its heretofore hands-off position toward YouTube. N-H-K recently contacted the site’s operators to demand that a video clip of the children’s song “Supu no Ekaki Uta” that had been broadcast on May 30 installment of the “Okasan to Issho” TV show, be removed.

Indeed, a perusal of YouTube now displays the words “This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner Japan Broadcasting Corporation because its content was used without permission” in red letters, enclosed within a red border.

I guess the joke is that the girl’s drawing of Spoo is so horrible that the guy can’t stop laughing, especially when he has to tell her how good her drawing is. It seems that such a blooper clip is kind of embarassing to N-H-K, who would prefer that mistakes that occur on their shows be buried forever. Here is what the Riding Sun post said:

Via 3yen, Mari at Watashi to Tokyo gives us the inside scoop on Spoo. The original clip (it’s back online!) from the “Okasan to Issho” show featured two people drawing pictures of Spoo. But as fate would have it, this rather poor likeness, drawn by performer Shoko Haida, quickly caught on as an ironic reference with the snarky hipsters on 2channel, a popular Japanese Internet forum, and the web parodies began. The Spoo sketch seems to have become the Japanese equivalent of Western net phenomena like the Star Wars Kid or the Numa Numa guy.

N-H-K may be upset about teens and young adults mocking part of its kiddie show. But pulling down the original video won’t solve that problem: the parodies, which of course are not N-H-K’s copyrighted content, are still online. Here’s a few: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. N-H-K’s hostile response, therefore, can be due to nothing other than sheer spite.

It’s pretty amusing, but I’ve seen far more interesting clips of mistakes from Japanese TV shows.  For example, this happy little clip of a reporter testing out an emergeny evacuation device and accidentally falling 5 stories and breaking her hip!