Japan is weird part 2304

It has always been suspected that the Japanese are, by human standards, highly unusual.

These suspicions have only been confirmed by the sudden ubiquity of video-sharing websites: Now we are all just a click away from witnessing the latest Japanese insanity concerning things such as competitive farting and air sex.

But has this all left us gullible to falling for exaggerations and misinterpretations of Japan's national bizarreness? I can't help thinking that might be the case when I read this article in The New York Times about Japan's new trend in wearable hiding places.

Here is an excerpt:

Ms. Tsukioka, a 29-year-old experimental fashion designer, lifted a flap on her skirt to reveal a large sheet of cloth printed in bright red with a soft drink logo partly visible. By holding the sheet open and stepping to the side of the road, she showed how a woman walking alone could elude pursuers — by disguising herself as a vending machine.

As if. The simple laws of physics prevent any item of woman's clothing from quickly morphing into a credible looking vending machine. The only chance such a disguise could possibly have of being successful is if the pursuant had poor vision, and the pursued found herself chased into an area containing vending machines that, for some reason, look like sheets painted to look like a vending machine. Given there is barely any street crime in Japan to begin with, this isn't a likely enough scenario for the article to make any sense.

Which is not to say I think the story was completely cooked up. I'm sure wearable hiding places are gaining popularity in Japan. Just not for personal safety. More likely there is a new craze in Japan in which people dress up like vending machines and simulate sex with each other. Or something else which would crack us up in a short Youtube clip, and allow us to ruminate upon how darn strange the Japanese are.

Japan is weird part 760,825

My the chickens are coming home to roast: After years of me making fun of the Japanese for their weirdness, the very essence of what makes them so mockable -- their wacky and humiliating TV game shows -- are coming to the United States.

Now it is Americans who will be forced to negotiate obstacles courses dressed as bugs, attempt to eat marshmallows dangled from fishing lines as their face is forcibly restrained by bungee chords, and subject themselves to a "ball slapping machine" -- which does exactly what it sounds like it would do

Of course there will also be farting -- sometimes competitively -- and a fair share of indeterminate goo. If the Americanized versions can also replicate the samurai-like war cries of the host, and the spastic high-pitched squeals of the studio audience I will be very impressed indeed.

Two Japanese-style game shows are premiering on ABC tonight, and a third is scheduled for this fall.

Stuart Krasnow, a producer of one the new shows, believes the motivations are different for American and Japanese contestants.

Americans, Krasnow says, "are in it for the cash and prizes" while for the Japanese it's "true escapism."

In others words Americans will let you pummel their balls with a springy mechanical arm as long as you pay them enough, but the Japanese do it just because it feels right.

A-ha, I knew it! Japan is still weird.

Japan is weird part 1,987,592

The great number of posts I've done on how weird the Japaneses are sometimes gives me pause because I've never been to Japan or had a conversation with a full-blooded Japanese person -- so maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge their national weirdness on these pages. I also worry that I could be unnaturally obsessed with Nipponese kookiness and that, perhaps, this obsession says more about me than having air sex contests or engaging in creative farting says about those peculiar Japs.

Then I see this on the website of the International Herald Tribune:
If you want to read the article, here it is. Suffice to say it is all about Japanese men being rexy and wearing girly clothes, while the chicks of Japan wear utilitarian outfits, drink a lot of beer and slap the scrawny men around if that's what it comes to. The article is authored by someone with a Japanese name, so it may even be true.

Thanks to the emailing readers of the IHT, I feel a whole lot better about singling out the Japanese for the unending source of inexplicable oddity that they continue to be.

Japan is weird part 798,201

In America, reality television usually features super good looking people with perfectly constructed hair who complain of imaginary problems and are often made to eat worms. For their "unscripted" fix, Japanese television audiences seem to prefer watching games of "binocular soccer," which are contested by everyman types in multi-colored horizontally striped jump suits. The match referee is a man in a giant rabbit suit, of course.

I really have little to say about which format is better, or more "realistic", as it were. But it is clear that binocular soccer is extraordinarily difficult. And, I'm sure, if the clip continued we'd learn the losing team was forced to eat worms.

Japan is weird part 739

In Japan air sex is the new air guitar. At least that's what the English show Japanorama claims. Since I don't understand Japanese I can't be entirely sure there isn't some sort of tomfoolery going on in the translation.

But I can't really think of any other plausible explanation for the very clear and disturbing visuals presented. And the taunting claim that many of these air sex hobbyists have never had proper intercourse seems to be confirmed, again, by the visuals.

I will put my foot down and vehemently disagree with the Japanese fellow who declares air sex to be the happy medium between not having sex and having sex with an actual woman. No, that happy medium would be the anatomically-correct life-sized silicon sex doll. Which I hear are also quite popular in Japan.

Idle threat of the week

Most of the panel of judges who decide Idle Threat of the Week were pretty mad about the way the Sopranos ended. A few of them even blamed my television for the sudden black screen. I tried to explain to them existentialism, and impress upon them that The Sopranos has always stressed existence over meaning, and that the ending was in perfect concert with that philosophy. But the panel, which is culled from a cross-section of society, found my explanation unsatisfactory and began throwing things at me.

Although largely angry and distracted, the panel was still able to agree on an idle threat that inspired the same unity as our collective hatred of AJ Soprano. (How much did it suck that a lasting image of AJ, the most pathetic character in the history of moving pictures, is him in a new BMW with a leggy model girlfriend and a budding career in film production?)

Apparently scientists in Japan have created a robot that sort of looks and acts like a three year old child.

During the 20th century humanoid robots, like flying cars, were a linchpin of the promised future. Now, un the 21st century, we have come into the technology that could mainstream life-like androids, yet the appearance of upright, walking, talking robots is still worthy of a press release and wonderment -- just like a step towards the flying car would be.

This may be because an android that looks like a person isn't actually a very good idea. (And flying cars would be neat, until they start crashing into each other, dropping flaming pieces of metal from the sky.)

Really, what's the point of making a robot look human? The human form isn't optimally engineered for work on a assembly line or to clean house or for any of the tasks a robot would be useful for. Meaning humanoid machines would only act to encourage social isolation and sexual deviance. Both perfectly fine traits in small doses and population subsets, but no direction for society as a whole to go in.

Luckily the desire for robots which look like humans doesn't seem to stretch far beyond the island of Japan. And, anyway, those wacky Japanese are always coming up with weird, highly fetishized fads that nobody else understands, and only last until the next incarnation of something Pokemon related is released.

Maybe this is because, like the panel, the rest of the world has considered and rejected the creepy implications of robots walking among us. Or it could be because most just don't care enough to put a lot of resources into android development. Either way, the century old threat of having life-like robot inferiors, which would eventually become our be equals, before reigning as our mechanical overlords, is, in the clarity of the present day, the idle threat of the week for June 4 to 10.

Japan is weird part 1148

Whether this would be considered a pageant or a sport I couldn't tell you, as my lack of Japanese language skills prove a hindrance to full comprehension.

But the gist is about as universal as can be.

I sometimes wonder if Japanese people find American television as bizarre as American people find Japanese television. Then when I consider that I have just spent three minutes watching contestants display well-choreographed techniques for manipulating the path of their own fart I realize they couldn't possibly.

Japan is weird part 6721

About six months ago a video of 1500 Filipino prison inmates rehearsing their interpretation of what would be the Broadway version of Michael Jackson's Thriller video was a huge YouTube hit.

It wouldn't be like Japan to sit tight and allow another Asian nation to dominate 80's musical kitsch without a rebuttal.

In the clip above the karaoke-mad Japanese have recreated the video for the charity single "We Are The World" right down to the last Springsteen grimace. As you can see, modern make up techniques can make an Asian person look vaguely like Cyndia Lauper, Tina Turner or Lionel Richie -- and a lot like Michael Jackson.

Bonus points for the Japaneses for cramming this -- like they do everything else -- into game show format.