I think I'm gonna need some terebi

Let's talk Japanese TV (terebi is Japanese for television - they don't have 'v's). I don't watch a whole lot of it because, well, it's in Japanese. Considering that I have an internet connection and not too many scruples about copyright law, I have access to all the English-language entertainment I could ever want. Paradoxically, it's more difficult for me to watch Japanese movies or shows here than it was at home; piracy really is my only option if I want to have English subtitles.

So, I think whole months may have gone by when I never took my TV off HDMI mode (for the Playstation). Kanji flashcard-covered toilet notwithstanding, I see my home as something of a sanctuary from the Japanese language, so I don't often feel like inviting a tsunami of morale-crushing linguistic confusion into it. However, I am paying a licence fee to NHK, so I occasionally feel that I should turn it on and get my money's worth. I did that just now.

There are a few things one notices straight away about Japanese TV. Firstly, they love captions. There's always some sort of graphical nonsense scrawled across the screen. Frequently, what people are saying is subtitled for no discernible reason whatsoever; even if they are speaking loud and clear their every utterance will be transcribed into garish neon symbols. The only theory I can offer as to why they might do this is to overcome the substantial variations in local dialect across the country.

Their penchant for subtitling is actually quite useful for me. Since Japanese writing is largely non-phonetic, the visual and auditory information streams are fairly uncorrelated, in the information theory sense. As such, they present a handy educational opportunity. Interestingly, this works both ways. Sometimes the sound will help to jog my memory for kanji that are right on the periphery of my knowledge, while other times seeing the meaning distilled out into symbols that I can read at my leisure can give me enough of a foothold to make sense of the rapid-fire barrage of syllables reaching my ears. These days, given perfect conditions of mental alertness and straightforward subject matter, I can figure out maybe 30% of what's going on.

The second thing you notice is how crappy Japanese TV generally looks. NHK fleece me for an amount comparable to the BBC, but their shows certainly have the appearance of operating on a much lower budget. Actually, I just had a look on Wikipedia, and apparently fee-dodging is rife, as there is no real penalty for not paying it. Boy, do I feel like a chump now. A lot of the programming seems to be very local - Yamagata prefecture has its own news and weather - so maybe that also explains why it all looks a bit low-rent. The dramas are the worst though, with the kind of acting and camerawork one would expect from media studies assignments. The samurai dramas with their obvious bald-caps are a particular low/highlight.

Their is a noticeable surge in production values during every ad break. Just like my man H.M., I often enjoy adverts more than the shows they interrupt. To try to convince you to part with your hard-earned yen, the advertisers ramp up the cuteness and surrealistic quirkiness to intoxicating levels. My all-time favourite ad was a three minute saga that I think was advertising a type of nori, the dried seaweed used to make sushi rolls, amongst other things. It told the story of a girl who was sent to the shop by her grandmother to buy some nori, and finding that it was sold out, embarked upon an epic quest involving some kind of Mr Miyagi-style sensei on a beach. The best part was when she finally returned home and was distraught to find a skeleton on the futon where her grandmother had been, then the camera panned to reveal the old lady patiently lying right beside it. Though the whole thing was live action, it was done in the style of anime, with lots of jump cuts, crash zooms and sped-up footage. It left me slack-jawed and blinking, wondering whether I had just imagined the whole thing.

The third weird thing about Japanese TV is that it seems strangely educational. Light, fluffy magazine-style shows are very popular, but even these are usually imparting some kind of knowledge. For instance, I once saw a 45 minute show all about persimmons (which is not actually as esoteric as it sounds - they are a popular fruit in Japan), which covered the little orange fruits from every conceivable angle: interviews with persimmon farmers, discussion of different methods of preserving them, taste-testing in the studio, and a man in a persimmon suit prancing around to demonstrate... something.

This leads me to another strange feature of Japanese TV. It's very much focused on people reacting to things. They will never just show you something; they'll always show you something and then show you an assortment of super-genki presenters reacting to it. In the aforementioned persimmon show, the information was presented not only to the viewer, but to a panel of three celebrity guests. (Typically these will be: hot young woman, strange camp man, and slightly intimidating-looking older man.) During the video packages, a box would appear in the corner of the screen showing the guests pulling facial expressions in response to what they saw, usually lingering longest on the hot woman. At the risk of reading too much into this, I think it perhaps illustrates something about the collectivist Japanese mindset that their TV shows are so socially-oriented.

My favourite programme is a travel show filmed from the first-person perspective of someone walking around a different place every week, voiced over by someone who clearly wasn't there at the time. While I'm sure a certain amount of stage-management goes on, it's done in the style of a random sightseeing stroll, chatting to whomever the protagonist comes across. One week they were in a little town in Germany, so I got a rare opportunity to struggle to understand two languages at once. I often watch this show with Marie and her husband, who of course made sure to record the episode where they went to Edinburgh. I delighted them by assessing the social status of each speaker; while Marie can speak fluent English she can't extract metalinguistic information such as the level of pretentiousness indicated by someone's vowels. Probably the highlight was them coming across an über-Scottish old guy in a kilt on the Royal Mile. Maybe it was set up, but I don't know, you do actually see a lot of men like that, particularly around Sandy Bell's.