Haha...

You know being European and everything you get lots of people posting links on the internet on how silly Japanese television is. You can do all sorts of ridiculous things on German TV and it's apparently just directed at an uneducated minority they say, but as soon as the silly stuff is on Japanese television, it has to be THE Japanese who watch and produce it. All of them. It's part of their mentality after all, isn't it?

Anyway,I just found out that this also seems to work the other way around. I switched on the television and there was a sort of ooops-show showing scenes of foreigners voluntarily hurting themselves in awkward ways. We have more than one equivalent in Europe obviously. One of those scenes was taken from the popular German show "Wetten dass..." where people have to do unusual and/or stupid stuff in order to win a bet. In the clip the Japanese channel picked there was a guy who sang a song from an opera while having a bunch of cars running over his stomach. They'd replaced the German comments with an unamusing Japanese commentary (in the vein of "haha, what an idiot"). He really WAS an idiot though. Well anyway, what we can all learn from this is that we probably shouldn't judge a society's mentality by its Johnny Knoxvilles.

I'm one to talk though; I've been here for three days and have no idea yet about the nature of Japanese television, basically. What else I've been up to these past three days? I'll tell you later; am too tired to form a coherent thought.