March 27, 2024
That's Edutainment!
"Is Japanese Television a Tool for Establishing Social Order?" asks Erik Luebs. Yes, but he mostly avoids the sort of academic navel-gazing you'd expect from a thesis question like that (until the last paragraph), and instead wonders aloud what can be read into the television habits of the average Japanese.
Japanese and Americans watch about the same amount of television. Except the slow penetration of cable in Japan means that for half of the population, their viewing choices are confined to a handful of networks. Japan's "Golden Age" of television hasn't ended, which makes those habit easier to generalize.
Luebs compares at the top-rated television shows in the United States and Japan for the week of May 4, 2015 (the article was published on June 11, 2015).
Despite the data being almost a decade old, NCIS is still on the air, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, as of December 2023, "only 44 percent of households in Japan have at least one subscription video service," compared to 86 percent in the United States. So I think the comparison is still relevant.
To clarify: Shoten resembles a haiku version of the original Whose Line Is It Anyway? The host sets up a scenario and feeds lines to the (seated) panelists, who improvise responses with an emphasis on verbal wordplay. It's a clever and entertaining show, and has been on the air since 1966.
Neither is the variety/talk show strictly analogous to its American counterpart. There are celebrity-of-the-day chat shows (NHK's Studio Park, for example), but these are not that. They are "talk" shows in that people talk, and "variety" shows in that a variety of topics are discussed. But the topics take precedence.
Despite the reputation Japanese reality shows have earned overseas for being weird, wacky, and dumb, these programs can get pretty brainy on the edutainment scale. I think Luebs is onto something when he observes that the reality television format popular in North America is far more fictional.
The Hollywood version of reality television has been increasingly infiltrating the airwaves in Japan (thanks in no small part to Netflix), but the well-nigh ubiquitous home grown version still follows the formula described above, with experts educating the tarento, who function as stand-ins for the viewer.
A tarento ("talent") is a professional TV personality. To be sure, a tarento may be an actor or singer or Nobel laureate but is a tarento when acting as such. His job is to always have something witty or insightful to say, regardless of the subject. For the viewer, explains Luebs, they become real-life Walter Mittys:
My only caveat here is that I read "social order" in the most benign sense: lessons on how to play the game of life (specifically ordinary Japanese life).
Still, Luebs can't help slewing back to the comfortable confines of scholarly cant. No, he concludes, it's not "indoctrination," but "without the cultural synergy created by diversity, homogeneous cultural ideas are refined and concentrated, and the TV is the medium that projects these values onto the individual."
As if these cultural ideas didn't exist before television, and only sprang into being around 1950 in the smoke-filled room of a producer's office.
I think it more likely that this hallowed "diversity" in mass media instead reinforces our individual silos: with cable and streaming, we only have to watch what we want to see. But old-school Japanese broadcasters must attract the largest audience possible. They do that by giving the audience what it wants.
Or at least by not broadcasting what the audience doesn't want to see.
If anything is being projected onto the individual, well, the individual is holding up a mirror reflecting it right back at the set. This is readily apparent to somebody who prefers the Japanese approach to "reality" to the American brand.
An awful lot of travel shows on Japanese television focus on traveling in Japan. And then there are the travel shows about going to foreign countries in order to find a Japanese person living there, an ongoing attempt to address the mystery of why any Japanese would choose to live anywhere but in Japan.
But note that the host and audience are always impressed, even awed, by these daring explorers of the World Outside Japan. They serve as proxies for the audience, not cautionary tales. It's not that complicated. All you have to do is stipulate a more introverted and nerdier population and it all makes sense.
They're doing it so we don't have to. For that, I thank them very much.
Japanese and Americans watch about the same amount of television. Except the slow penetration of cable in Japan means that for half of the population, their viewing choices are confined to a handful of networks. Japan's "Golden Age" of television hasn't ended, which makes those habit easier to generalize.
Luebs compares at the top-rated television shows in the United States and Japan for the week of May 4, 2015 (the article was published on June 11, 2015).
Despite the data being almost a decade old, NCIS is still on the air, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, as of December 2023, "only 44 percent of households in Japan have at least one subscription video service," compared to 86 percent in the United States. So I think the comparison is still relevant.
• NCIS (crime drama)
• The Big Bang Theory (sitcom)
• NCIS: New Orleans (crime drama)
• Dancing with the Stars (contest/dancing)
• The Voice (contest/singing)
• Mare (family drama about cooking),
• Shoten (sketch comedy)
• Pittan Kokan (variety/talk show)
• Jinsei ga Kawaru (variety/talk show)
• Himitsu no Kenmin (variety/talk show)
To clarify: Shoten resembles a haiku version of the original Whose Line Is It Anyway? The host sets up a scenario and feeds lines to the (seated) panelists, who improvise responses with an emphasis on verbal wordplay. It's a clever and entertaining show, and has been on the air since 1966.
Neither is the variety/talk show strictly analogous to its American counterpart. There are celebrity-of-the-day chat shows (NHK's Studio Park, for example), but these are not that. They are "talk" shows in that people talk, and "variety" shows in that a variety of topics are discussed. But the topics take precedence.
These celebrity panels chat and share anecdotes about various topics—tear-jerking stories about family reconciliation, first loves, travel, and maybe the most popular topic: food. Their chats are interspersed with short documentaries and dramatizations, in which the viewer can watch each celebrity's emotional reaction to the content through a "picture in picture" embedded at the side of the screen.
Despite the reputation Japanese reality shows have earned overseas for being weird, wacky, and dumb, these programs can get pretty brainy on the edutainment scale. I think Luebs is onto something when he observes that the reality television format popular in North America is far more fictional.
These [Hollywood productions] are not concerned with attempting to directly address the identities and concerns of the viewer. Rather, they are a playful engagement of thoughts and ideas in which we, the viewer, interact within a fictional world. They are a form of escapism.
The Hollywood version of reality television has been increasingly infiltrating the airwaves in Japan (thanks in no small part to Netflix), but the well-nigh ubiquitous home grown version still follows the formula described above, with experts educating the tarento, who function as stand-ins for the viewer.
A tarento ("talent") is a professional TV personality. To be sure, a tarento may be an actor or singer or Nobel laureate but is a tarento when acting as such. His job is to always have something witty or insightful to say, regardless of the subject. For the viewer, explains Luebs, they become real-life Walter Mittys:
Popular Japanese television looks inwards, into its own society. The variety TV show concept is based on the viewer personally relating to specific individuals who represent various tropes of Japanese-ness. Whether intentional or not, watching these celebrities chat with one another serves as an instructional guide for what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior in society. They give the viewer a clue into how to participate in any number of conversations, and how to react in any number of situations. These programs are just as much a form of entertainment as they are a framework for establishing social order.
My only caveat here is that I read "social order" in the most benign sense: lessons on how to play the game of life (specifically ordinary Japanese life).
Still, Luebs can't help slewing back to the comfortable confines of scholarly cant. No, he concludes, it's not "indoctrination," but "without the cultural synergy created by diversity, homogeneous cultural ideas are refined and concentrated, and the TV is the medium that projects these values onto the individual."
As if these cultural ideas didn't exist before television, and only sprang into being around 1950 in the smoke-filled room of a producer's office.
I think it more likely that this hallowed "diversity" in mass media instead reinforces our individual silos: with cable and streaming, we only have to watch what we want to see. But old-school Japanese broadcasters must attract the largest audience possible. They do that by giving the audience what it wants.
Or at least by not broadcasting what the audience doesn't want to see.
If anything is being projected onto the individual, well, the individual is holding up a mirror reflecting it right back at the set. This is readily apparent to somebody who prefers the Japanese approach to "reality" to the American brand.
An awful lot of travel shows on Japanese television focus on traveling in Japan. And then there are the travel shows about going to foreign countries in order to find a Japanese person living there, an ongoing attempt to address the mystery of why any Japanese would choose to live anywhere but in Japan.
But note that the host and audience are always impressed, even awed, by these daring explorers of the World Outside Japan. They serve as proxies for the audience, not cautionary tales. It's not that complicated. All you have to do is stipulate a more introverted and nerdier population and it all makes sense.
They're doing it so we don't have to. For that, I thank them very much.
Labels: cooking shows, education, food, japanese culture, japanese tv, nhk, pop culture, social studies, television
September 27, 2018
The drama of the single dad
The "single dad" is a melodrama and sitcom character that defines its own genre. Plenty of single moms inhabit television as well. But a single mom is expected to already grasp the basics of child rearing, and that pushes the conflict in a different direction.
By contrast, regardless of his competence in every other aspect of his life, the single dad is presumed to have a built-in learning curve. Hence the "dumb dad" premise. This plot device has seen an upsurge on Japanese television, in live-action dramas, manga, and anime.
Sweetness & Lightning tackles three genres at once: the single dad, the teacher-student romance, and the cooking show.
Recently widowed high school teacher Kohei Inuzuka never learned to cook, so he and Tsumugi, his spirited five-year-old daughter, eat takeout almost every meal. Until Kotori Iida, one of his students, hands him a flyer for her family's restaurant.
Kotori's (divorced) celebrity chef mom no longer has the time to run it, but Kotori wants a reason to keep the lights on. Realizing that his daughter hasn't eaten a decent home-cooked meal in ages, Kohei takes Kotori up on the offer.
The problem is, Kotori doesn't know how to cook either. But with her mother's recipes, the help of Kotori's classmate (whose family runs the local vegetable stand) and Kohei's college friend (a cook), they tackle a new recipe every week.
The relationship between Kohei and Kotori is handled so subtly that it can be read as romantic or platonic or something in-between. These dinners quickly become the highlight of the week for all three.
The anime is available on Crunchyroll. The English-language manga is published by Kodansha Comics.
Yotsuba&! [sic] is a manga series by Kiyohiko Azuma, now in its twelfth year. Mr. Koiwai adopted Yotsuba abroad (the details are scant). The stories focus around her daily adventures in Japan. Think of Yotsuba as a kindred spirit of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.
An English translation of the manga is available from Yen Press.
Marumo's Rules is a 2011 Fuji TV series. Mamoru Takagi adopts the twin children of his best friend when he suddenly dies of cancer. The plot description in Wikipedia sums up the whole genre:
A cute narrative device is that when Marumo discusses his problems with the family dog, the dog talks back.
(No English versions available.)
Hinamatsuri is based on the manga series by Masao Otake.
One day, Hina drops into the condo of yakuza Yoshifumi Nitta through an interdimensional portal. Some sort of bio-engineered child assassin with telekinetic powers, Hina doesn't know what what she's doing there. She assumes she's on a mission and Nitta is her handler.
This mistaken assumption comes in handy when Nitta has her literally defenestrate an entire rival gang in one fell swoop. But after that, Nitta is stuck with her. So he tells people that Hina is his long-lost daughter, and before long they have assumed their respective roles.
As a brand-new dad, Nitta finds himself with the responsibility of turning this tiny version of Robert Patrick from Terminator 2 into a functioning member of society.
The anime is available on Crunchyroll. The English-language manga is published by One Peace Books.
My Girl is a manga series by Sahara Mizu, made into a TV Asahi series in 2009 starring Masaki Aiba of the mega-boy band Arashi. (As far as I can tell, the members of Arashi are much better actors than they are singers, and they're not terrible singers either.)
Attending the funeral of his ex-girlfriend (who'd been living abroad), Masamune Kazama discovers that not only did she have a child, but she had his child, who now really is his child. What follows is a how-to/day-in-the-life melodrama that defines the next series too.
(No English versions available.)
Bunny Drop is a manga series by Yumi Unita, an anime series by Production I.G, and a 2011 feature film.
Daikichi's grandfather had a child with his live-in maid. Daikichi only finds this out at his grandfather's funeral. "If the old man was still alive," he grumbles, "I'd give him a high five." He points out to his mother, "That'd make her your sister." She retorts, "And your aunt."
Nobody wants to take responsibility for Rin, the five-year-old girl. Finally (if only out of disgust with the rest of them) Daikichi takes her home. He soon decides to make the arrangement permanent.
Bunny Drop is a sweet, unadorned drama that avoids most of the stereotypical melodramatic devices. Like My Girl, it succeeds by making a virtue of ordinariness and by featuring protagonists who are believably decent human beings striving to do the right thing.
However clueless Daikichi may be at first, he doesn't stay dumb, and grows quite insightful into the strange, topsy-turvy life Rin has led, while cheerfully saying goodbye to his "me-time" and his climb up the corporate ladder.
The anime (based on the first three volumes of the manga; English translation available from Yen Press) is drawn in a pencil-on-watercolor style that gives it a subdued picture book quality. I found it quite pleasant and entirely appropriate to the subject matter.
The anime is available on Crunchyroll and Tubi.
The Japanese government actually has a "Minister of State for Measures for the Declining Birthrate." If government agencies were ever that creative, I could imagine them commissioning television series like these to encourage young men to take up the reins of fatherhood.
Unfortunately, regardless of the good intentions in the regard, it doesn't seem to be working (in Japan and every other country with the same problem).
By contrast, regardless of his competence in every other aspect of his life, the single dad is presumed to have a built-in learning curve. Hence the "dumb dad" premise. This plot device has seen an upsurge on Japanese television, in live-action dramas, manga, and anime.
Sweetness & Lightning tackles three genres at once: the single dad, the teacher-student romance, and the cooking show.
Recently widowed high school teacher Kohei Inuzuka never learned to cook, so he and Tsumugi, his spirited five-year-old daughter, eat takeout almost every meal. Until Kotori Iida, one of his students, hands him a flyer for her family's restaurant.
Kotori's (divorced) celebrity chef mom no longer has the time to run it, but Kotori wants a reason to keep the lights on. Realizing that his daughter hasn't eaten a decent home-cooked meal in ages, Kohei takes Kotori up on the offer.
The problem is, Kotori doesn't know how to cook either. But with her mother's recipes, the help of Kotori's classmate (whose family runs the local vegetable stand) and Kohei's college friend (a cook), they tackle a new recipe every week.
The relationship between Kohei and Kotori is handled so subtly that it can be read as romantic or platonic or something in-between. These dinners quickly become the highlight of the week for all three.
The anime is available on Crunchyroll. The English-language manga is published by Kodansha Comics.
Yotsuba&! [sic] is a manga series by Kiyohiko Azuma, now in its twelfth year. Mr. Koiwai adopted Yotsuba abroad (the details are scant). The stories focus around her daily adventures in Japan. Think of Yotsuba as a kindred spirit of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.An English translation of the manga is available from Yen Press.
Marumo's Rules is a 2011 Fuji TV series. Mamoru Takagi adopts the twin children of his best friend when he suddenly dies of cancer. The plot description in Wikipedia sums up the whole genre:
Together with the help of his landlord and the landlord's daughter, Mamoru [nicknamed "Marumo"] manages to take care of the twins. They face many challenges, with Marumo struggling to balance his time between his work and parental responsibilities.
A cute narrative device is that when Marumo discusses his problems with the family dog, the dog talks back.
(No English versions available.)
Hinamatsuri is based on the manga series by Masao Otake.
One day, Hina drops into the condo of yakuza Yoshifumi Nitta through an interdimensional portal. Some sort of bio-engineered child assassin with telekinetic powers, Hina doesn't know what what she's doing there. She assumes she's on a mission and Nitta is her handler.
This mistaken assumption comes in handy when Nitta has her literally defenestrate an entire rival gang in one fell swoop. But after that, Nitta is stuck with her. So he tells people that Hina is his long-lost daughter, and before long they have assumed their respective roles.
As a brand-new dad, Nitta finds himself with the responsibility of turning this tiny version of Robert Patrick from Terminator 2 into a functioning member of society.
The anime is available on Crunchyroll. The English-language manga is published by One Peace Books.
My Girl is a manga series by Sahara Mizu, made into a TV Asahi series in 2009 starring Masaki Aiba of the mega-boy band Arashi. (As far as I can tell, the members of Arashi are much better actors than they are singers, and they're not terrible singers either.)
Attending the funeral of his ex-girlfriend (who'd been living abroad), Masamune Kazama discovers that not only did she have a child, but she had his child, who now really is his child. What follows is a how-to/day-in-the-life melodrama that defines the next series too.
(No English versions available.)
Bunny Drop is a manga series by Yumi Unita, an anime series by Production I.G, and a 2011 feature film.Daikichi's grandfather had a child with his live-in maid. Daikichi only finds this out at his grandfather's funeral. "If the old man was still alive," he grumbles, "I'd give him a high five." He points out to his mother, "That'd make her your sister." She retorts, "And your aunt."
Nobody wants to take responsibility for Rin, the five-year-old girl. Finally (if only out of disgust with the rest of them) Daikichi takes her home. He soon decides to make the arrangement permanent.
Bunny Drop is a sweet, unadorned drama that avoids most of the stereotypical melodramatic devices. Like My Girl, it succeeds by making a virtue of ordinariness and by featuring protagonists who are believably decent human beings striving to do the right thing.
However clueless Daikichi may be at first, he doesn't stay dumb, and grows quite insightful into the strange, topsy-turvy life Rin has led, while cheerfully saying goodbye to his "me-time" and his climb up the corporate ladder.
The anime (based on the first three volumes of the manga; English translation available from Yen Press) is drawn in a pencil-on-watercolor style that gives it a subdued picture book quality. I found it quite pleasant and entirely appropriate to the subject matter.
The anime is available on Crunchyroll and Tubi.
The Japanese government actually has a "Minister of State for Measures for the Declining Birthrate." If government agencies were ever that creative, I could imagine them commissioning television series like these to encourage young men to take up the reins of fatherhood.
Unfortunately, regardless of the good intentions in the regard, it doesn't seem to be working (in Japan and every other country with the same problem).
Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, cooking shows, demographics, food, japanese culture, japanese tv, manga, personal favs, social studies
January 26, 2017
The toast of Japan
Ah, the heroine in a hurry running out of the house with a piece of toast in her mouth. One of anime's tried and true tropes. Modern, fast, and tasty, toast is the ideal breakfast substitute for a girl on the go.
The category of "breakfast cereal" never took hold in Japan. A supermarket may stock a few boxes but not an entire aisle. The whole idea of a "sweet" breakfast is recent too. A "traditional" breakfast might include fish and rice and miso soup and natto (the grossest food ever).
On the culinary cultural spectrum, natto is at the opposite end of the scale as toast. A good many Japanese can't stand the stuff either. I would hazard that you see more natto eaten in television dramas than in real life because it just screams "old school" and fairly eccentric to boot.
French toast, on the other hand, is a dessert. As are pancakes. Both are somewhat exotic and yet easy to make. And so can be endlessly modified without much fear of failure. And, yes, there are countless French toast and pancake connoisseurs in Tokyo.
The daily melodrama series Toto Nee-chan devoted a week's worth of episodes on the magazine staff figuring out how to explain pancake-making to their readers in the late 1940s. In the end, a recipe wasn't enough. They had to use photographs, a real innovation at the time.
There is a simple and pragmatic reason for the popularity of French toast and pancakes. Few homes in Japan are equipped with the kind of kitchens that grace even the average apartment in the U.S. A full-sized oven is rare, counter space limited. Refrigerators are still small by comparison.
If they wanted, most Americans could make the dishes shown on America's Test Kitchen. Far fewer Japanese have the room for the basic equipment. A bakery is the only place where an enthusiastic baker can bake. And enthusiastic bakers are enthused over, as in Midnight Bakery.
And Ma're.
The typical cooking shows concentrate on the rice cooker, frying pan, sauce pan, microwave, and toaster oven. Somebody baking at home is probably using a countertop convection oven.
Here we get back to French toast (and pancakes): anybody can make it with the utensils and ingredients on hand.
The same goes for curry over rice (karee raisu), another visitor that's gone native. Curry rice is a 19th century import that seems older. The Japanese navy likely got the idea from the British navy (who got it from India), and universal conscription made it the national dish.
House Foods sold the first curry roux in 1926 and currently has a 60 percent market share. Their big seller going back to 1963 is "Vermont Curry." It is sweetened with apple paste, and apparently apples were associated with Vermont even in 1963.
Again, anybody can make curry anywhere with practically anything, as on all those anime school field trips.
The category of "breakfast cereal" never took hold in Japan. A supermarket may stock a few boxes but not an entire aisle. The whole idea of a "sweet" breakfast is recent too. A "traditional" breakfast might include fish and rice and miso soup and natto (the grossest food ever).
On the culinary cultural spectrum, natto is at the opposite end of the scale as toast. A good many Japanese can't stand the stuff either. I would hazard that you see more natto eaten in television dramas than in real life because it just screams "old school" and fairly eccentric to boot.
French toast, on the other hand, is a dessert. As are pancakes. Both are somewhat exotic and yet easy to make. And so can be endlessly modified without much fear of failure. And, yes, there are countless French toast and pancake connoisseurs in Tokyo.
The daily melodrama series Toto Nee-chan devoted a week's worth of episodes on the magazine staff figuring out how to explain pancake-making to their readers in the late 1940s. In the end, a recipe wasn't enough. They had to use photographs, a real innovation at the time.
There is a simple and pragmatic reason for the popularity of French toast and pancakes. Few homes in Japan are equipped with the kind of kitchens that grace even the average apartment in the U.S. A full-sized oven is rare, counter space limited. Refrigerators are still small by comparison.
If they wanted, most Americans could make the dishes shown on America's Test Kitchen. Far fewer Japanese have the room for the basic equipment. A bakery is the only place where an enthusiastic baker can bake. And enthusiastic bakers are enthused over, as in Midnight Bakery.
And Ma're.
The typical cooking shows concentrate on the rice cooker, frying pan, sauce pan, microwave, and toaster oven. Somebody baking at home is probably using a countertop convection oven.
Here we get back to French toast (and pancakes): anybody can make it with the utensils and ingredients on hand.
The same goes for curry over rice (karee raisu), another visitor that's gone native. Curry rice is a 19th century import that seems older. The Japanese navy likely got the idea from the British navy (who got it from India), and universal conscription made it the national dish.
House Foods sold the first curry roux in 1926 and currently has a 60 percent market share. Their big seller going back to 1963 is "Vermont Curry." It is sweetened with apple paste, and apparently apples were associated with Vermont even in 1963.
Again, anybody can make curry anywhere with practically anything, as on all those anime school field trips.
Labels: anime, cooking shows, economics, food, japan, japanese culture
October 08, 2015
Eat, drink, and be merry
To be sure, this television species belongs to the entertainment genus of "watching other people having a good time" and "people doing interesting stuff so I don't have to." The particular advantage of the eating show is that this is an activity that everybody can participate in.
Now, unlike Phil Rosenthal in PBS's I'll Have What Phil's Having, everybody can't go flying around the world in order to sample the best and the most exotic (without a reservation or worrying about the bill). But decent approximations are not out of reach, nor is international travel these days.
A Few Great Bakeries, also from PBS, stays closer to home and well within the budget of the average viewer. PBS has a whole suite of shows along the same lines. But getting back to Phil Rosenthal, the first episode in Tokyo struck me as pretty much identical to the Japanese version of the same genre.
Rosenthal does visit two exclusive restaurants that would have the rest of us waiting for weeks on waiting lists and then forking over most of a paycheck to cover the bill. But the rest were open to anybody who knew where to go to find them and could squeeze in at the counter.
I don't drink or go to bars but one of my favorite shows on NHK is The World's Most Inaccessible Bars. In this case, "inaccessible" doesn't mean a rope line and a burly bouncer only letting the "right" people in. Rather, these are pubs and diners off the beaten path, down an alley and around the back.
Solidly working and middle class establishments, one of the attractions of the show is virtually hanging out with the regulars. The food and drink is only part of what keeps them coming back.
The World's Most Inaccessible Bars employs the same narrative approach as Somewhere Street, with no presenter, only a pair of narrators/commentators and a first-person camera (with plenty of cutaways).
However, most eating shows on Japanese television belong to the closely-related entertainment genus, "Watching B-list celebrities do interesting things." And some of them can be pretty dang interesting.
The typical focus of attention are food, hot springs (the onsen is a positive obsession), temples and historical sites, often tied together with a train ride on some quaint old line from point A to point B. This program description does a good job of describing the entirety of the genre:
Actress Sayaka Isoyama is starring in a new travel program coming soon to LaLa TV. Sayaka Isoyama's One Cup of Bliss Women's Journey will feature Isoyama visiting various locations in Japan and enjoying their local cuisine and specialty alcohol.
Of course, it's no surprise to find anime venturing into the same thematic territory. Wakakozake gives us Murasaki Wakako, a 26-year-old OL whose "favorite thing to do for relaxation is to go off by herself after work and go to various places to eat and drink, even if she's never been there before."
In live-action drama, Hanasaki Mai Speaks Out is a clever police procedural about two bank examiners with a knack for uncovering financial improprieties and bringing down the high and mighty. (Hanasaki's inability to bite her tongue when confronting greedy ne'er-do-wells explains the title).
Since their jobs have them traveling to banks hither and yon, she and her fellow accountant always have a restaurant guide in hand. Once the call of justice has been answered, they're on the prowl for new places to eat. That is, when they're not hanging out at the pub Hanasaki's father runs.
They may have to audit to live but they definitely live to eat.
Labels: anime, cooking shows, food, japanese culture, japanese tv, nhk, television
October 01, 2015
Hungry for entertainment
Cooking shows have been a staple of "edutainment" programming since the television was invented. They anchor PBS weekends (I'm partial to America's Test Kitchen). During the week, it can seem at times that Chef Gordon Ramsay is responsible for half of Fox's prime time lineup.
On cable in particular, the cooking competition reality show traces back to the gonzo Japanese cooking sensation, Iron Chef. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. NHK loads up their weekday daytime broadcast schedule with cooking and handicraft shows, not just the weekends.
Impressively, all this cooking is done with pots, woks, and frying pans. Plus a computer-controlled rice cooker and a supercharged toaster oven. Few Japanese can afford the kitchen that comes even with an average apartment in the U.S. It's not the money, it's the power and space.
(The above article about rice cookers points out that while traditional Japanese electronics firms like Sony have ceded ground to their Korean and Chinese counterparts, makers of "white goods" appliances are booming.)
The kitchen counter in a typical Japanese apartment is designed to accommodate a compact cook-top, not an oven. With smaller cupboards and refrigerators too, daily shopping remains the common custom.
The "traditional" housewife role is still popular and accepted in Japan, meaning there's a mid-day audience. And an audience for NHK's family-oriented morning soap opera, the perennially popular Asadora melodrama. Five out of the last ten were about food.
Japan has a thriving food culture. Note how food figures into the plot of Spirited Away, as Chihiro watches her gluttonous parents turn into pigs. But there are anime series that are all about food and practically nothing else.
Here is a very small sampling of food-related anime series.
In Gourmet Girl Graffiti, her grandmother's passing leaves Ryo Machiko not only living alone but without an appetite. This quickly changes when her cousin Kirin moves to town, giving her somebody to cook for, which she does with a passion.
Gourmet Girl Graffiti is about as porny as food porn gets. Unlike Tampopo (1985), Juzo Itami's classic food flick comedy, there's no sex or nudity. Gourmet Girl Graffiti just makes eating good food look hilariously indecent.
Kiyo of Kiyo in Kyoto is the live-in cook at the Maiko House and her childhood friend Sumire is an aspiring maiko, an apprentice geiko (more commonly known in Tokyo as geisha).
With the family diner shutting its doors, Souma's dad enrolls him in a cut-throat (almost literally) culinary school. The food/sex nexus in Food Wars! makes Gourmet Girl Graffiti appear downright subtle. The dumb jokes and gratuitous everything make it the food version of Animal House.
At first, attending Oezo Agricultural High School was a good excuse for Yugo Hachiken to run away the stifling academic pressures at his preparatory school back in Sapporo. But now, like it or not, he's going to discover where food really comes from ("Don't eat the eggs!").
Along with all the farming and agricultural material, Silver Spoon provides nice lesson here about the difference between real-world "knowledge" and a book-acquired "education."
Reaching for a half-priced bento at the supermarket, Yo Sato finds himself in the middle of a full-blown brawl. As it turns out, the only way to get a decent cheap bento in this town is to fight for it. To keep himself fed, Yo joins the "Half-Priced Food Lovers Club."
A bento is a traditional box lunch, a source of often exquisite fare at bargain prices. A home-made bento (in a lacquerware box) is a sure sign of motherly love or an attentive girlfriend.
Ben-to combines the food genre with the "flight club" genre (the -to is a play on the kanji for "combat"). In the fight club genre, the wildest reasons imaginable are concocted for kids to beat the snot out of each other.
Ben-To takes a Looney Tunes approach to the violence, in which everybody gets better by next week. The shows are pretty samey as far as the threadbare plots go, but each episode features a different premium bento as the ultimate objective.
In Anpanman, a long-running kid's cartoon, all the characters are food and the superhero is literally an edible jelly doughnut (anpan). Yes, you can eat him in an emergency. The anime has been on the air since 1988 (Nippon TV) and is now at over 1300 episodes.
Anpanman's arch-enemy is Baikinman ("Bacteria-man"), which I've always thought is a bit ironic since the fungus koji (Aspergillus oryzae) is such an important part of Japanese cuisine. Whenever he gets predictably beaten, he shouts, "Bye-baikin!"
In prime time, it can seem at times that half of the non-fiction programs on NHK are about food, from the science-oriented Tameshite Gatten, to the business-oriented The Professionals, to Lunch On, a slice-of-life reportorial series about what the typical working man and woman eats for lunch, to the travel-oriented Kitchen Car.
There's no shortage of live-action gourmet TV dramas: The Emperor's Cook, Akko's Lunches, Samurai Gourmet and Midnight Diner (on Netflix), Midnight Bakery, Wakakozake, and Isekai Izakaya Nobu, to name a few recent offerings.
So it comes as no surprise that in 2014, Tokyo could again boast having the most Michelin-starred restaurants in the world.
On cable in particular, the cooking competition reality show traces back to the gonzo Japanese cooking sensation, Iron Chef. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. NHK loads up their weekday daytime broadcast schedule with cooking and handicraft shows, not just the weekends.
Impressively, all this cooking is done with pots, woks, and frying pans. Plus a computer-controlled rice cooker and a supercharged toaster oven. Few Japanese can afford the kitchen that comes even with an average apartment in the U.S. It's not the money, it's the power and space.
(The above article about rice cookers points out that while traditional Japanese electronics firms like Sony have ceded ground to their Korean and Chinese counterparts, makers of "white goods" appliances are booming.)
The kitchen counter in a typical Japanese apartment is designed to accommodate a compact cook-top, not an oven. With smaller cupboards and refrigerators too, daily shopping remains the common custom.
The "traditional" housewife role is still popular and accepted in Japan, meaning there's a mid-day audience. And an audience for NHK's family-oriented morning soap opera, the perennially popular Asadora melodrama. Five out of the last ten were about food.
| Teppan | The heroine revives her grandmother's okonomiyaki restaurant. |
| Ohisama | The heroine marries into a family that runs a soba restaurant. |
| Gochiso-san | The heroine masters traditional Japanese cooking in the tumultuous 1930s and 1940s. |
| Massan | The hero and heroine found Japan's first whiskey distillery. |
| Mare | The heroine (from the sticks) becomes a pâtissier. |
Japan has a thriving food culture. Note how food figures into the plot of Spirited Away, as Chihiro watches her gluttonous parents turn into pigs. But there are anime series that are all about food and practically nothing else.
Here is a very small sampling of food-related anime series.
In Gourmet Girl Graffiti, her grandmother's passing leaves Ryo Machiko not only living alone but without an appetite. This quickly changes when her cousin Kirin moves to town, giving her somebody to cook for, which she does with a passion.
Gourmet Girl Graffiti is about as porny as food porn gets. Unlike Tampopo (1985), Juzo Itami's classic food flick comedy, there's no sex or nudity. Gourmet Girl Graffiti just makes eating good food look hilariously indecent.Kiyo of Kiyo in Kyoto is the live-in cook at the Maiko House and her childhood friend Sumire is an aspiring maiko, an apprentice geiko (more commonly known in Tokyo as geisha).
With the family diner shutting its doors, Souma's dad enrolls him in a cut-throat (almost literally) culinary school. The food/sex nexus in Food Wars! makes Gourmet Girl Graffiti appear downright subtle. The dumb jokes and gratuitous everything make it the food version of Animal House.
At first, attending Oezo Agricultural High School was a good excuse for Yugo Hachiken to run away the stifling academic pressures at his preparatory school back in Sapporo. But now, like it or not, he's going to discover where food really comes from ("Don't eat the eggs!").
Along with all the farming and agricultural material, Silver Spoon provides nice lesson here about the difference between real-world "knowledge" and a book-acquired "education."
Reaching for a half-priced bento at the supermarket, Yo Sato finds himself in the middle of a full-blown brawl. As it turns out, the only way to get a decent cheap bento in this town is to fight for it. To keep himself fed, Yo joins the "Half-Priced Food Lovers Club."
A bento is a traditional box lunch, a source of often exquisite fare at bargain prices. A home-made bento (in a lacquerware box) is a sure sign of motherly love or an attentive girlfriend.
Ben-to combines the food genre with the "flight club" genre (the -to is a play on the kanji for "combat"). In the fight club genre, the wildest reasons imaginable are concocted for kids to beat the snot out of each other.
Ben-To takes a Looney Tunes approach to the violence, in which everybody gets better by next week. The shows are pretty samey as far as the threadbare plots go, but each episode features a different premium bento as the ultimate objective.
In Anpanman, a long-running kid's cartoon, all the characters are food and the superhero is literally an edible jelly doughnut (anpan). Yes, you can eat him in an emergency. The anime has been on the air since 1988 (Nippon TV) and is now at over 1300 episodes.Anpanman's arch-enemy is Baikinman ("Bacteria-man"), which I've always thought is a bit ironic since the fungus koji (Aspergillus oryzae) is such an important part of Japanese cuisine. Whenever he gets predictably beaten, he shouts, "Bye-baikin!"
In prime time, it can seem at times that half of the non-fiction programs on NHK are about food, from the science-oriented Tameshite Gatten, to the business-oriented The Professionals, to Lunch On, a slice-of-life reportorial series about what the typical working man and woman eats for lunch, to the travel-oriented Kitchen Car.
There's no shortage of live-action gourmet TV dramas: The Emperor's Cook, Akko's Lunches, Samurai Gourmet and Midnight Diner (on Netflix), Midnight Bakery, Wakakozake, and Isekai Izakaya Nobu, to name a few recent offerings.
So it comes as no surprise that in 2014, Tokyo could again boast having the most Michelin-starred restaurants in the world.
Related posts
Eat, drink, and be merry
The toast of Japan
Carnivorous vegetarians
Kitchen Car
Labels: anime, anime lists, cooking shows, food, japan, japanese culture, japanese tv, nhk, television
August 06, 2012
Kitchen Car
Each week, the host (Taiyo Sugiura) teams up with a guest chef and they trundle off to some quaint part of Japan in a kitchen-on-wheels. There they visit the local farms and fisheries, sample the flora and fauna, and collect the ingredient to cook up a banquet for the townspeople.
It's a cute and creative show, though one that inadvertently shines a light on a far darker reality.
You can't help but be struck by how awfully convenient it is to have so many tiny truck farms scattered across the countryside. I'm sure that's in large part due to work of the advance team. But what you see on screen isn't too far from the reality.
Unfortunately, all this "localvore" goodness is killing Japan's economy.
The revolutionary land reform measures enacted in 1947 during the American Occupation successfully turned hundreds of thousands of tenant farmers into land owners and small businessmen (and anti-communist conservatives).
Half a century later, the political power bought with decades of increasingly generous government subsidies (far exceeding those in the U.S.) have kept politicians of all stripes from touching that third rail and changing laws that encourage monstrous inefficiencies across the board.
Aurelia George Mulgan (professor of politics at the University of New South Wales) sums up the downward spiral that has resulted.
Keeping small-scale farms in production blocks the scale expansion of farming by discouraging the transfer of agricultural land to full-time professional farmers. It thus traps the sector in a cycle of low productivity, low profitability, and subsidy dependence.
The Japanese consumer not only pays the taxes that go to these absurdly rich subsidies, but also forks out more than twice the world market prices for staples such as rice. All to support many "farmers" who would barely qualify as backyard gardeners in the U.S.
Mulgan concludes, "The direst prediction is that if the current situation continues, there will probably be no farmers left in Japan after ten years and [home-grown] food production will stop."
This pretty much sums up my bad news/good news view on the world economic meltdown. The same way municipalities in California can't adopt reasonable budgets until they plumb run out of money, Japan won't adopt reasonable farming policies until it plumb runs out of farmers.
The good news is that the way things are going, it's going to happen sooner than later. They won't have to wait long.
Labels: cooking shows, food, japanese tv, japanese tv reviews, politics, taxes, television reviews
May 23, 2011
Tameshite Gatten
I'm a big fan of slick NOVA and Nature productions, but there's a lot to be said for the laid-back simplicity of NHK's Tameshite Gatten approach. Roughly translated as "put it to the test and understand," it takes the more mundane aspects of everyday life and geeks out on them.
The closest examples that come to mind are Mythbusters and Scientific American Frontiers with Alan Alda. I really miss the latter, in which Alda stood in for the viewer as the smart everyman who could digest scientific explanations that weren't overly dumbed down.
David Pogue's Making Stuff series had the right idea, but I felt like he was trying too hard to be hip and, hey, you're hip too for hanging out with a hip guy like me doing all this cool stuff! Ain't science neat? Neato cool. Watch me doing all the cool stuff you wish you were doing!
Neil deGrasse Tyson is better, but Nova Science Now still spends too much time and effort selling the concept and grooving up the presentations, while assuring you that you're not a nerd for tuning in.
Tameshite Gatten hosts Shinosuke Tatekawa and Fuemi Ono (like Alda, smart professional entertainers, not scientists or wannabees) are confident enough about what they are doing to dare being totally uncool and unhip--to the point of outright corniness--and yet very educational.
They make it work by turning the show into the equivalent of a Lisa Simpson science fair project, explaining the topic of the week to a panel of three B-list celebrities. The result is a surprisingly demanding Socratic dialogue. (The celebrities do have to be reasonably bright.)
The presentations have a deceptively low-tech gloss. They must have a dedicated staff slaving away all week with sewing machines and cardboard boxes and Elmer's glue, creating oversized models and goofy costumes. Not to mention the staff members deployed as guinea pigs.
(When the producer announces to the crew that next week's show is about colonoscopies, who exactly volunteers? I suspect it's one of those jobs given to the "new guy.")
At the same time, they don't shrink from the hard stuff, the physics and biochemistry, while focusing like a laser on relevancy. And at the end of the show, an expert in the field will come out to sum everything up. Or conduct a short cooking class.
The shows are about 40 percent health and medical topics, 40 percent food and cooking, and 20 percent "home economics." With the first, I have to wonder if there's a "Tameshite Gatten syndrome," people flooding the doctor's office with the symptoms covered in that week's show.
On the other hand, though I rarely watch cooking shows on PBS (I will channel surf over to Kitchen Nightmares, a show more about running a small business), Tameshite Gatten takes a very left-brained approach and makes cooking look geekily interesting.
One program was about the perfect onigiri (flavored rice balls). Along with CAT-scanning onigiri, they selected a panel of best and worst onigiri makers, had them wear pressure-sensitive gloves wired to a computer, and then analyzed the results. That's my idea of cooking.
The closest examples that come to mind are Mythbusters and Scientific American Frontiers with Alan Alda. I really miss the latter, in which Alda stood in for the viewer as the smart everyman who could digest scientific explanations that weren't overly dumbed down.
David Pogue's Making Stuff series had the right idea, but I felt like he was trying too hard to be hip and, hey, you're hip too for hanging out with a hip guy like me doing all this cool stuff! Ain't science neat? Neato cool. Watch me doing all the cool stuff you wish you were doing!
Neil deGrasse Tyson is better, but Nova Science Now still spends too much time and effort selling the concept and grooving up the presentations, while assuring you that you're not a nerd for tuning in.
Tameshite Gatten hosts Shinosuke Tatekawa and Fuemi Ono (like Alda, smart professional entertainers, not scientists or wannabees) are confident enough about what they are doing to dare being totally uncool and unhip--to the point of outright corniness--and yet very educational.
They make it work by turning the show into the equivalent of a Lisa Simpson science fair project, explaining the topic of the week to a panel of three B-list celebrities. The result is a surprisingly demanding Socratic dialogue. (The celebrities do have to be reasonably bright.)
The presentations have a deceptively low-tech gloss. They must have a dedicated staff slaving away all week with sewing machines and cardboard boxes and Elmer's glue, creating oversized models and goofy costumes. Not to mention the staff members deployed as guinea pigs.
(When the producer announces to the crew that next week's show is about colonoscopies, who exactly volunteers? I suspect it's one of those jobs given to the "new guy.")
At the same time, they don't shrink from the hard stuff, the physics and biochemistry, while focusing like a laser on relevancy. And at the end of the show, an expert in the field will come out to sum everything up. Or conduct a short cooking class.
The shows are about 40 percent health and medical topics, 40 percent food and cooking, and 20 percent "home economics." With the first, I have to wonder if there's a "Tameshite Gatten syndrome," people flooding the doctor's office with the symptoms covered in that week's show.
On the other hand, though I rarely watch cooking shows on PBS (I will channel surf over to Kitchen Nightmares, a show more about running a small business), Tameshite Gatten takes a very left-brained approach and makes cooking look geekily interesting.
One program was about the perfect onigiri (flavored rice balls). Along with CAT-scanning onigiri, they selected a panel of best and worst onigiri makers, had them wear pressure-sensitive gloves wired to a computer, and then analyzed the results. That's my idea of cooking.
Related posts
My kind of fanaticism
Labels: cooking shows, education, food, japanese tv, pop culture, science, technology, television
January 15, 2009
The rice diet
Gary Taubes addresses the question: "How do Asians living a seemingly high-carb existence manage to escape the consequences?" Here are a few more variables I came up with worth considering:
Taubes believe that the total consumption of sugar is the most important variable. Along with total caloric intake, I think he's right.
Also, having watched a lot of Japanese cooking shows, I don't believe "low fat" is an entirely accurate adjective. It seems that every other recipe is deep-fried this or bacon-wrapped that or smothered in olive oil. High-fat maguro tuna is preferred for sushi. And there's no better "fast food" meal than a deep-fried chicken or pork cutlet donburi.
1. Cooking medium-grain rice isn't like popping bread into a toaster. Japanese rice cooker technology is amazing. But you've got to scoop the rice out of the bag, rinse it (a long-ingrained habit), and wait for it to cook. And then wash the cooker before using it again.
2. As a side-dish, white rice is not flavored. Try chowing down on a big bowl of mashed potatoes with no salt, pepper, butter, milk. Or a loaf of bread made without salt.
3. Because of government price-support policies, white rice in Japan is expensive. Price signals work not only in terms of demand, but affect a food's social status, and its "culture of consumption." There is such a thing as "luxury" rice that costs even more.
4. You eat the whole rice grain--that when cooked expands considerably in volume--not a ground flour made from the rice. The rice grain itself has a unique and "mouth feel" that is "filling" all by itself.
5. There's no equivalent of gluten intolerance with rice. I suspect that the human body reacts much differently to refined rice carbohydrates and starches than to refined wheat carbohydrates and starches.
6. Chopsticks. Seriously. Chopstick users don't actually eat delicately with chopsticks the way non-chopstick users think they do, but the "shovel" factor is still less than using a spoon.
Taubes believe that the total consumption of sugar is the most important variable. Along with total caloric intake, I think he's right.
Also, having watched a lot of Japanese cooking shows, I don't believe "low fat" is an entirely accurate adjective. It seems that every other recipe is deep-fried this or bacon-wrapped that or smothered in olive oil. High-fat maguro tuna is preferred for sushi. And there's no better "fast food" meal than a deep-fried chicken or pork cutlet donburi.
Labels: cooking shows, food, japan, science