Japan has this amazing talent for getting away with being cute.

I wish you could all just watch a 10 minute sample of randomly selected Japanese commercials, and you'd probably get a sense of how many jingles and talking objects I'm exposed to. I've been noticing the pattern of the ad campaigns, too. Usually it will just be a handful of commercials you see all the time for a few weeks, then some campaigns stop after that short period of time, new ones start, and some get different versions of their commercials aired. I'm relieved I haven't heard the "kabocha wa ne--" jingle for a while, and hopefully I've heard the last of "onaka hali hali", but I do kind of miss the "kaku gaku shika jika shikaku i mu-bu".

We don't have that many channels; I think it's just NHK and local channels and stuff (although NHK owns I don't know how many channels). You can usually find news on all the time, and usually a very brightly colored game show with tons of the same famous people as participants over and over. Some famous faces, or groups of them, can be seen in plenty of different game shows. I'm a little partial to the trio of overweight women and the couple of guys with the fancy clothes and large glasses of wine in their hands all the time (all comedians I can't remember the names of). Sometimes the gameshows have normal people, too, but not often. They'll usually be trivia, small stunt and zany decor based, but sometimes there are bigger stunt ones. There are also lots of "guess which of these is true and which is fake" shows.

There are documentaries, but they usually involve a group of famous people sitting in some kind of bright and zany set to discuss the documentaries and what surprises them about the stories. If they're about special people or something, they usually have very dramatic reenactments. I've seen quite a few about foreigners (some of whom I've seen documentaries about on American TV), so it's funny to have them choose very dramatic foreign actors and then have the Japanese lip-sycning be just as dramatic.

As for the news, my host family usually watches the news at 6:30 every night to see the news. Before doing the basic weather report, there is a little roulette scene with a cut-out of the newscaster and images of weather behind him, and a falsetto woman's voice (which is normal) saying something like "so, which one will it be??" and then the roulette stops on one and the cut-out of the newscaster plainly says "sunny". Then they go to the weather map they stand in front of and explain about the same things you'd expect to hear on a normal weather report.

In the morning, though, there's another weather report, and the news anchor for that is an attractive woman like you'd expect to see on the news, but next to her is always someone dressed in a giant rabbit costume, complete with eyes that blink. It looks like an Easter Bunny, and it's always there, but it just nods and never says anything. Even though it stands right beside the woman, they don't really interact. But the kicker is that this kind of thing is normal.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the background music on a lot of the news stories and varieties shows and even a few of the game shows. They blantantly take background music from anime. Digimon, Escaflowne, Kare Kano... I have those extract tracks on my CDs! I've also heard a couple snippets from American shows, including the Simpsons' opening theme and the X-files theme. I don't know if background music is free game for everyone, but at least in the commercials when they use songs that are currently popular they always have a little blurb of text in the corner saying who the performer is. Not so in the case of all the borrowed music on the shows.

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I mentioned while I was in Aichi that there was a clock which sounded like an ice cream truck on steroids and then aired a message to tell the elementary school students that it was past curfew. I had also heard this kind of clock ringing through the neighborhood in Gifu. My neighborhood also has once of these clocks, and it's attached to the barbar shop right at the corner of my little street, so I hear it very well from inside the house. It doesn't have any recorded messages (although sometimes cars will drive through the neighborhood with loud speakers to announce things or advertise things). At 9am it plays "Home Home on the Range", at 7pm it plays "Greensleeves", and at 8pm it plays "Fur Elise". I don't know why.

On my way home from Kuzuha station I usually check the time as soon as I walk out of the station on a clock nearby, and then pick a time to get home by. There's a shoe shop I pass by that the people working there sometimes greet me as I walk by, so that's nice, and if I ever need to buy shoes here I know where I'm going. On the way I also pass by a music store where, in the evening, I can hear people practicing music from the upstairs studios. The instrument and style always vary, but I always enjoy that. There is also a house I pass by that has a tsubaki bush I like, and I always check to see if any of the flowers are open. By the time I get to my street, I play this game to see if I beat the time I chose or not as I pass by the barber shop. I usually win.

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Yes, I've been doing things for Halloween. I'm doing things for the Gaidaisai (Kansai Gaidai School Festival) today and tomorrow, and will hopefully have a post with pictures about that all in a couple days. Monday I've got another trip planned and hopefully will have a seperate entry for it.