American Sitcom / Japanese Commercial
A commercial for Meiji’s Galpo Chips parodies American sitcoms:
The style of filming, the super-lame canned laughter, and the bad Japanese dubbing remind viewers of imported American TV shows. There is also a wacky fight between a couple over their preference for different flavors of Galpo Chips. It finishes with an American-style happy ending.
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Categories: Foreigners in Japan, Japanese TV
Japanese Rifle Girl vs. Carnival Game
Ever wonder how much it would cost to win every prize at a pop gun carnival game? FTV summoned Mamika Tsuruoka of the Japan National Rife Team to knock down all the prizes from a game booth:
It takes about 10 shots for Tsuruoka to figure that dead center hits on the targets won’t result in wins. A price has to fall off its ledge and onto the ground, and that requires a shot aimed at the edge of boxes.
After 62 shots, she has claimed 49 of the 50 prizes. The total cost of her ammo was 2,480 yen (40 yen per cork). The total cost of the prizes won was 3,940 yen. However, the remaining prize is a large box that cannot easily be knocked down. Single shots are too weak to move the box, so she gets her friends to help her fire volleys at the target. This tactic works, and after 9 volleys it falls to the ground. Unfortunately, that used a lot of corks, so the total price of knocking over all 50 targets ends up at 5,360 yen. The actual price of the prizes totaled to 4,535 yen, so the festival booth guy made a profit of 825 yen.
The conclusion is obvious: normal people who visit festivals and play the games there should be prepared to lose some money. [Unless they are skilled marksmen who only aim at small prizes.]
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Categories: Japanese Girls, Odd / Strange
Not Paying Rent in Japan
NTV news follows around a man who works as a problem-solver for landlords that have tenants who don’t pay rent and don’t answer phone calls or knocks at their doors:
He checks out two apartments. The first is under the name of a South Korean woman who is 5 months behind in paying rent. The electricity, water, and gas have been shut off. He gets permission to obtain a key and enter the apartment. There is some furniture, but no sign that any person is living there. It seems that the tenant left the apartment without notifying anyone. Actually removing the abandoned furniture is a legal issue that will take some time and some paperwork to resolve. [Although the report does not say so, this is one of the classic reasons why many landlords in Japan say that they refuse to rent to foreigners. A real estate agent once told me it was "not rare" to have foreign tenants leave the country without properly paying final rent or cleaning out their apartments.]
The second apartment has a tenant who is two months behind in paying rent. There have been many attempts to contact the tenant by telephone and doorbell ringing, but all have failed. They also called his employer, and were told that the tenant had not been showing up for work lately. When the problem solver shows up and nobody answers the door, he calls the police. He tells them that he needs to confirm the safety of a person who may be sick or injured and unable to open the apartment door. It’s not a bluff: last month there was actually a case that ended with the discovery of a tenant’s corpse.
When the cops show up, he uses the landlord’s key to enter the room and discovers that the tenant is alive and well. He is given some lame excuse about the man getting a new phone and ignoring calls from unknown numbers. It obviously doesn’t explain why the man refused to open his door earlier, but that isn’t an issue anymore. The problem solver’s job for that day was to notify the man about his failure to pay rent and get some sort of recognition that it would be paid, and it looks like he accomplished that goal.
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- Dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
Categories: Foreigners in Japan, General Japan
Boar-riding Rodeo Monkey Triggers Cuteness Overload in Japan
A few days ago, I posted about a baby monkey that had taken to riding a young boar at a Fukuchiyama Zoo in Kyoto prefecture. Since then, TV news cameras spread images of “Rodeo” cuteness around Japan, drawing huge crowds to the zoo:
On a normal Sunday, the zoo gets about 300 visitors. Last Sunday, about 1,700 people visited the zoo. Some people traveled for hours to get there. Apparently the place is set up kind of like a petting zoo, so there are times when the monkey and boar can run around the crowds of people.
A lot of those people had video cameras and Youtube accounts:
One person who couldn’t make it to the zoo decided to make a tribute video with their dog instead
Baby monkeys are known to cling to their mother for many months after they are born, and Miwa the orphaned monkey seems to think of the boar as his mommy (even though the boar is a boy). Miwa has also taken a liking to the woman who works at the zoo’s ticket counter. When he’s not riding the boar, Miwa is usually sleeping in the woman’s lap.
Both the monkey and the wild boar are growing up fast. The rodeos will only continue until the monkey grows out of the stage at which he feels it needs to cling to a parent – or – until the the boar will no longer tolerate the presence of a monkey on his back. This super cute situation will probably last for only several months to a year.
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- Dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
Categories: Animal Videos
Japan’s Oldest People
NTV’s “Bankisha” news program sent inquiries local offices across Japan so viewers could enjoy a laugh about Japan’s oldest “living” people (on paper):
As you some of you are already know, there have been a few scandals recently involving the failure of local governments to verify the status of residents over the age of 100. In a few cases, families had been scamming the government into paying pensions to people who had died many years ago. The scandals led to a nationwide scramble to check local files on elderly residents and find out who is still alive.
In a many localities, records were found for people over the age of 120! The old hand-written documents listed birth years in the 19th century, and somewhere along the line, somebody had failed to record that the people in question had passed away. In Yokohama, there were over 1,500 records of people in their 120′s. Clerical errors by bureaucrats are to blame for some of the failures to record deaths, but the overwhelming chaos of huge disasters such as the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the firebombings of World War II also played a role. The several hundred thousand Japanese who emigrated to other countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are another problem for record-keepers: they obviously did not feel the need to submit paperwork announcing their deaths to Japanese government authorities.
Here’s a ranking of super elderly Japanese people who were found to be still alive on paper:
- 200-years-old: 1 resident of Nagasaki Prefecture (born in 1810)
- 189-years-old: 1 resident of Ehime Prefecture (born in 1821)
- 186-years-old: 1 resident of Yamaguchi Prefecture (born in 1824)
- 184-years-old: 2 residents of various localities (born in 1826)
- 182-years-old: 1 resident of Shiga Prefecture (born in 1828)
- 178-years-old: 1 resident of Tokyo (born in 1832)
- 177-years-old: 1 resident of Fukushima Prefecture (born in 1833)
- 174-years-old: 2 residents of of various localities (born in 1836)
- 173-years-old: 1 resident of Yamagata Prefecture (born in 1837)
- 170-years-old: 5 residents of various localities (born in 1840)
Just about all of these super elderly people are listed as alive on Koseki (family registry) documents. Pensions are paid based on residence registry records, which are checked on a more frequent basis, so there is little chance that the government is still paying out pensions to people born in the 1830′s.
At the end of the report, viewers are reminded that life expectancy statistics are calculated using a different system, so they don’t need to worry about Japan dropping in the global rankings.
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- Dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
Categories: Odd / Strange
Aliens Invade Sushi Restaurant
A while back, I posted about a Kappa Sushi commercial in which a customer is so excited about 90-yen sushi dishes that he completely ignores the presence of space aliens. Here’s a new commercial in the series, showing the aliens creating a clever disguise:
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Categories: Japanese Food, Odd / Strange