YouTube’s TkyoSam very kindly did an ad-hoc interview with me…unfortunately it’s in English. Fear not, I have finally acquired a camera [inherited from TkyoSam, actually], so Japanese stuff shall be forthcoming.

Um…this really was ad hoc. TkyoSam walked into my fortress of solitude while I was watching Dragon Ball Z in Cantonese, and turned his camera on. My posture, hair and make-up would make any mother weep. (To Mum: deal). Notice how the Cantonese ball kept rolling even while we used this non-Cantonese thing.

It’s funny because we’d tried making semi-scripted versions of this before, with digital effects and light sabers and Gollum, so I figured this was just us doing our umpteenth “screen test”. But the rawness of this is cool. Thank ye, Sam of Tkyo!

Anyway…yeah. Video. Me. In. Three parts.

言っとくけど、俺は白人がカナリ好き。白人居住区育ちの俺が、白人の幼稚園をはじめ、白人の小学校・白人の中学校・白人の高校・白人の大学に続々進学して参りました。大学時代聴いてた洋楽も白人向けであれば、妻も白人だ。尚且つプラス更に片方の猫ちゃんまで、毛の半分以上が真っ白な訳。そして友達全員一人残らず白人。昔は黒人友達も居ったが、敢えて連絡を取らなくなった。キャラが被って困る :)。

だから、こう言うのを人種差別として誤解されないで欲しいが・・・

俺は白人が完全にイカれてると思う。いや、思うっていうか、事実です。お前ら（白人）サァ、正気か？ヤッパリ正気じゃないナァ。正気な人種ならこう言う映画は撮れないだろう。

『マンデラの名もなき看守』って言う映画なんだけどサァ。ええっ？ちょっと待って。マンデラの看守？・マ・ン・デ・ラ・の・看・守・？マジかよ。って、有り得ない！！冗談じゃないよ！誰、この馬鹿企画を創った馬鹿が？一発、いや、二発、いや、三発殴らせろ！

基本的に平和主義な俺は何故に暴力に訴えるか、ご説明しましょう。
①私が知っている限り、これは史上初のネルソン＝マンデラの映画化。
②上記同様
③本来敵対者ていうか、悪役である筈の連中が、白人が為に主人公兼善玉にされるのは、今回で初めてじゃない。いや～皆さん、これは蔓延してる病気だ。病気な白色人種が世界中にバラ蒔いている・・・病気・・・だ。

何で？何でマンデラを虐待した浣腸野郎が美化されなきゃいけないの？

• 「ダンス・ウィズ・ウルブズ」（白人虐殺者が先住民の言語と生活習慣をプチ勉強する・・・だから？）
• 「モガディシュの戦闘」（別にソマリア人があんたらに助けなんか頼んでないぞ～）、
• 「アラモ」（テメエ等みてえな平気で他国に侵攻する奴等が死んでも、神様も哀しみましぇ～ん）、
• 「サハラに舞う羽根」（お前らナァ、そもそもスーダンにおるのはその土地の人間を奴隷にする為だろうが！）、

と全く同様、人道を逸した事ばっかりする白人男性が何故かヒーローにされちゃう訳。同胞がやってる事をチョッピリ反省して何が偉いの？何も無いでしょう？でっしょ？だから今ここで俺はこの流れに強く反対せざるを得ない。

「でも、勝元、どんな民族でも自分達を美化しガチじゃん」、とかホザく呼び捨て野郎もいらっしゃるでしょうが、それは全然違うって。つい最近、かのニッポンが、「ベクシル － 2077日本鎖国」を創り出したんじゃない？アレは日本人が、アメリカ人を主人公／善玉にし、日本人自身を悪玉にした作品なんだ。佳作とは言えないけれど、発想が新鮮そのものだ。しかも主人公が女性。やるじゃん、ニッポン。SFでも自分達を厳しい目で見れる黄色人に、白人も是非倣うべし。特にノンフィクション（実話）を扱う時にね。って、「実話」の意味が解かるか、白人共よ・・・明らかに解からないね。漢字学べ。

ていうか、何でマンデラ役が碌に南アフリカの訛りが出来ないアメリカ人なんだよ！？演技がド下手だっつーのに。好い加減アフリカ人にしろ。「黒人だから」イイって訳じゃないってば。『24』の大統領なんて知るかっ。一回だけ黒人大統領を巧く演じてからって永遠にそれとして起用されるべしって事は無い。無い。絶対無い。

以上。皆さんのご意見も聞こう。

First, let me say this: it sucks being famous and having snot-nosed kids like me who don’t know what they’re talking about make stupid comments about you. I think that almost all (if not all) the comedians on Japanese TV are funny, I just picked the ones that gave me the highest LPM (laughs per minute). Probably the main problem for those who have a low LPM is that they are in the wrong situations — Oriental Radio (オリエンタルラジオ) are amazing on stage, but don’t get the chance to shine comically in their current work as late night variety show hosts: the format just doesn’t work for them. Downtown (ダウンタウン) are funny, too — when they’re not just going through the motions out of boredom, i.e. not on their variety show but in those punishment game (罰ゲーム) specials they do, and in their skits from the 1980s and 1990s. And a lot of guys who I used to think sucked eggs are amazing once you take them off those variety shows and put them on a more personal program like Hitoshi Matsumoto Presents: Funny Stories (人志松本のすべらない話). As you can see, it sounds like I have beef with variety shows. I don’t, really, I don’t. It’s just that, when you think about it, having virtually all Japan’s comedians do variety shows is akin to having every athlete in the world play soccer, whether or not they were good at it or even like it, just because it was the only professional sport in the world. Variety shows are cheap and easy to do, and they may have been a good choice when Japan was poor and coming out of WW2, but Japan is rich now. And TV can act like it if it wants to…and get sets that don’t look like they were made by Miss Keene’s class at Pokey Oaks Kindergarten.

There’s also the interesting phenomenon of comedians who are funny in-studio or to other comedians, but not to the TV-viewing public at large. Denis Leary seems like an example of that in the anglosphere; other comedians find him funny. Downtown, when stuck on a variety show, are funny for their guests — if I were to be interviewed on TV, I’d want to be interviewed by Downtown, they seem like great fun to be around — but it just isn’t as funny for viewers.

Anyway, the list. I haven’t bothered to rank it, but there are ten of them.

• [雨上がり決死隊/Ameagari kesshitai/The Suicide Mission Squad at the End of the Rain(?)]: Ameagari Kesshitai, a duo made up of 宮迫博之 (MIYASAKO Hiroyuki) — the tanned one — and 蛍原徹 (HOTOHARA Tooru) — the round-headed one, are that very uncommon thing in comedy (at least it seems uncommon to me) — the perfect combination and execution of both slapstick and verbal comedy. And it’s not the stupid kind of slapstick, it’s the original, funny kind. The kind that you would laugh at even if it were just your friend doing it. That thing where Miyasako slaps his own face and then looks into the camera, or the two-legged flying kick of punishment for saying something wrong that sends Hotohara crashing to the ground. And then there’s the look that Miyasako gets on his face when he’s about to tell a joke [see picture], so you kind of get to laugh twice — once for the look and once for the joke.
• [JINNAI Tomonori/陣内智則]: Jinnai is a rarity in that he works alone. His skits often involve uncooperative machines — lewd passport photo-taking machines, arrogant arcade games, sassy car navigation systems. Big laughs to be had.
• [Impulse (インパルス)]: super-funny skits! Mostly revolving around portly 堤下敦/TSUTSUMISHITA Atsushi playing straightman or authority figure to slim 板倉俊之/ITAKURA Toshiyuki’s abject inappropriateness. One of their funniest recurring characters is Johann Riebelt, a young Japanese man with a bad case of alcohol poisoning and major delusions of grandeur who thinks he’s German. They’ve also done great one-shot skits like フック船長/”Captain Hook” and “Mafia Boss”.
• [Drunk Dragon/ドランクドラゴン]: Another portly-skinny duo. In that sense, they bear a shallow resemblance to Impulse. The content of their comedy is different though, often revolving tangentially around the entertainment industry itself — silly TV shows for learning English, awkward and uncalled-for displays of English “proficiency” [some middle-aged men in Japan looove to whip out the old English to impress other Japanese people…when they really should have kept it zipped up], fanboys who are waaay too overprotective of the object of their fanaticism, and cetera. And of course, it makes you laugh.
• [Garage Sale/ガレッジセール]: these guys are sketch comedians. Their best stuff is on the show One Night Rock and Roll, where Gori cross-dresses as Gorie.
• [Bobby KONDA/近田ボビー]: Nigeria in the hizzouse! Although he is actually Japanese now. And technically he’s a tarento rather than a comedian. But he’s funny as heck. I loved reading on Japanese Wikipedia about how amazing at Japanese he has to be in order to suck as much as he pretends to. Playing the fool and raking it in — genius. AFAIK, he acts under his old name, Bobby Ologun (ボビーオログン). Bobby also happens to be an example of a comedian who shines on variety shows.
• [Taka and Toshi/タカアンドトシ]: 欧米かっ！”What are you, Euro-American?!”, the signature wisecrack of this pair, frequently rolled out when too much katakana Japanese is used. I find it quite useful in my daily life…
• [Lover Girl/ラバーガール]: do really funny skits often involving one person speaking polite or otherwise euphemistic Japanese and the other person taking liberties with the literal meaning of what was said. That makes it sound really technical and it makes Japanese sound hard to understand, neither of which are true. Anyway, the point is, you’ll laugh.
• [The Laughter Problem/爆笑問題]: politics is a dish best served hilarious.
• [Untouchables/アンタッチャブル]: I’ve only ever seen one or two of their skits, but I laughed so hard that they earned a place on this list.

Honorable Mention

• [Ungirls/アンガールズ]: these guys LOOK funny…tall, lanky, gangly…awkward in a good way, just like their skits.
• [Anjush/アンジャッシュ]: have made a career of doing situational misunderstandings. Some of the skits are a bit forced, but some are pure genius.
• [Oriental Radio/オリエンタルラジオ]: rose to fame on エンタの神様/Enta no Kami Sama with their ヒップホップな武勇伝 (”our hip hop legends”) skits. Since that time they’ve been stuck on a boring variety show, so there you go.
• [Downtown/ダウンタウン]: one of the longest-running and most highly respected comedy outfits in Japanese history. They’re not always as funny as they used to be — not because they can’t be but more because they almost can’t be bothered to go trying to get laughs any more; they’re “beyond that” if you will. But, yeah, look out for their old stuff.

First off, let me share that I believe that everyone should, no MUST, follow their own personal preferences when it comes to selecting learning materials. In order for you to learn Japanese voluntarily, it has to be enjoyable, and for it to be enjoyable, you have to be able to watch, listen to and read whatever you want that is in Japanese — or, indeed, any language. So these aren’t the best Japanese shows, they’re just the ones I like best as of right now (late 2007). Having said that, if you’re just getting started with Japanese, and/or you don’t know many Japanese shows, and you don’t live in Japan, it helps to have someone who’s watched a lot of stuff give you some tips.

Take note: a lot of these shows don’t have subs, Japanese or otherwise. But that’s fine, believe me, you’ll work it out somehow — even being able to understand only small bits and pieces is fine and normal. Also, all these shows are either comedies, dramedies, or somehow funny. Now, a lot of people will go “in learning a new language comedy is the hardest thing to understand”. No. It. Isn’t. (Dewd, I don’t know who went around spreading the bad news and deciding what’s “the hardest” in the world of everything…whoever they are, they suck!). Comedy isn’t intrinsically “hard” to understand, no more than news or a children’s book is. What perhaps sets comedy apart is the necessity of prior knowledge in order for the comedy to be enjoyed. That prior knowledge may be the source of whatever reference or parody is being made (by the way, a lot of really good comedy often contains a lot of internal, self-contained references, so that abbreviates the prior knowledge requirement right there). Or it may be prior knowledge of whatever social norm/status quo is being inappropriately ignored or applied. So, if, as Stephen Colbert and others have suggested, comedy is about status change and betrayal, then you need to know what the original status is or was, in order to recognize the change and therefore (perhaps) find it funny.

Anyway, the comedy itself is not very hard. Like I said, a lot of the best comedy is actually very high in self-references. This may be because, as Jerry Seinfeld suggested in his comedy book, a comedian generally needs to be able to build some kind of semi-realistic logical baseline from which to launch her jokes. As such, a skilled comedian may build a very good baseline: so good that she re-uses it. Or not, I don’t really know. My point is that you can do it. You can enjoy comedy: a lot of it is physical, low-brow or self-referential (and therefore, more or less universal) anyway, so the bar is nowhere near as high as many people appear to contend. Furthermore, the comedy itself can serve as a place for you to learn what the social norms are, such that the next time you see a joke based on the same material, you’ll be informed, and therefore in a position to enjoy it as comedy.

Oh, and by the way, if there’s ever some comedy you don’t seem to get, it may just be the case that it simply isn’t funny. Like any country, Japan is subject to a variant of the Pareto principle, whereby maybe 90% of the consistent laughs (high LPM rate throughout the show) are produced by only maybe 10% of the comedy shows — the rest of the shows suck and aren’t funny. It’s not a bad thing and it’s not a rare thing — after all, Comedy Central is built almost entirely on Chappelle, Stewart and South Park.

Where was I? Yeah, comedy is good, and I watch a lot of it. So here is my list of the best Japanese TV shows (highly biased towards comedy), for informational purposes rather than for recommendation purposes. Do with it as you will. The list is in no particular order.

• エンタの神様 (Enta no kami sama/The kami of entertainment).
  A cross between stand-up and sketch comedy, comedians (usually in duos, sometimes alone, rarely in larger groups) perform on stage in front of a live studio audience. The Enta no kami sama people seem to work really hard to make sure that the people on the show are funny, so…highly recommended. It also has subs for the punchlines.
• トリック (Trick)
  [Season 1, vol. 1] [Season 1, vol. 2] [Season 1, vol. 3] [Season 1, vol. 4] [Season 1, vol. 5]
  トリック2 (Trick Season 2)
  トリック: troisieme partie (Trick Season 3)
  トリック：新作スペシャル (Trick: The New Special)
  トリック劇場版 (Trick: The Movie)
  トリック劇場版2 (Trick: The Movie 2)
  トリック 堤幸彦演出研究序説 (The Making of Trick, behind the scenes footage and discussion with director TSUTSUMI Yukihiko)
  I don’t know if you can tell yet, but…I love this show. The plot is basically UEDA Jirou (an arrogant, cowardly, well-endowed physics professor) and YAMADA Naoka (a modestly-chested magician who’s useless on stage and chronically strapped for cash but also something of a genius in term of investigation), go around busting a string of shady psychics, cult leaders and other pretenders to paranormal abilities. Ueda pretends to use physics to bust them while Naoko does all the real work. Hilarity ensues. So, I guess it’s a mystery-dramedy, with LOTS of laughs, and great supporting characters, and all kinds of random regional dialects. Most Japanese shows don’t run more than one season. Trick ran for not one but three seasons and had not one, but two movies released in real theaters. A show has to either (a) be backed by the Illuminati, or, (b) be really good, to get this far. The answer is (b).
• ハンドク (Handoc/half-doctors)
  NAGASE Tomoya was one of my surrogate parents for Japanese (he doesn’t know this, but…). Anyway, so this show’s about new doctors (who only have half the skill of experience doctors, therefore half-doctors), working in a top-flight whiz-bang super-elite hospital run by a chief surgeon who is as unethical as he is skilled. But it’s not like your typical American medical drama. This one is genuinely funny, has actual direction, and doesn’t try to use blood-spewing emergency room patients to push up its ratings…oh, did I say that out loud?
• ごくせん (Gokusen/Yakuza homeroom teacher)
  [Season 1, vol. 1] [Season 1, vol. 2] [Season 1, vol. 3] [Season 1, vol. 4] [Season 1 Special]
  ごくせん2 (Gokusen, Season 2)
  Usually, when a show has a formulaic plot, it’s a bad thing. But Gokusen uses that to its advantage and just takes things to a whole ‘nother level. NAKAMA Yukie plays a homeroom teacher who’s secretly a yakuza. She’ll roundhouse kick her wayward students (all boys) for going out of line, but also beat up anyone who tries to harm them. And try to keep her yakuzaness a secret from the school board. By the way, my spoken Japanese became really vulgar as a result of watching this show (テメエ、▲▲▲じゃねえぞぉ！). That’s not meant as a warning, but actually as recommendation — this show is fun. Just be sure to pretty-up your Japanese later. Gokusen has two seasons. [Edit: the name ごくせん is a portmanteau (?) of 極道 (ごくどう — the road of crime, gambling, drugs) and 先生 (せんせい — teacher), so, yakuza teacher: for some reason, I missed the part where this was made clear on the show, if there was such a part, so this is for everyone who’s wondering].
• タイガー＆ドラゴン (Tiger & Dragon)
  + Tiger & Dragon special prequel double-length episode
  This show is in terms of structure, content and characters, one of the best shows I have ever had the pleasure of seeing. I don’t mean to talk it up, but it’s an AMAZING show, and super-rewatchable. Go judge for yourself. P.S. — it has exact subs!
• ココリコミラクルタイプ (Kokoriko Miracle Type)
  Viewers send in real-life stories which become sketches which make you laugh.
• ワンナイR&R(Wannai/One Night Rock & Roll)
  Along with Kokoriko Miracle Type, part of a Wednesday night line-up called 水10 (すいじゅう/suijuu). The two shows are separate, they just run/ran back-to-back. Both are really funny. Wannai is a sketch comedy show, more fictional, but like In Living Color, having a lot of recurring characters like 轟 (Todoroki), ゴリエ (Gorie) and チョコボーイ山口 (Choco-boy Yamaguchi). The names alone will get you giggling.
• アイチテル! (Aichiteru/I rabu you)
  A roomful of foreign women from around the world (Africa, East Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and cetera) who speak fluent Japanese, and two of the guys from Wannai combine for fast-paced, talk-based and often pretty biting humor. Really funny.
• はねるのトびら (Haneru no tobira/you knock on a jumping door)
  About 6 comedy duos (most comedians in Japan run as duos and do or can do 漫才/manzai) combined to make this youth-oriented sketch comedy show. A big hit with the twentysomething crowd, and with good reason. Funny stuff. カワイイ！
• サラリーマンNEO (Salaryman Neo)
  First, this show will have you on the floor laughing. Then…you’ll break your jaw when it hits the ground when you realize that NHK, the GOVERNMENT station, made one of the funniest and most sardonic TV shows to ever hit Japanese TV screens. Who says the gubmit can never get it right!? Semi-prerequisite: have worked in a Japanese company or know what it’s like to do so.
• 池袋ウェストゲートパーク(Ikebukuro West Gate Park/IWGP)
  If you only buy one Japanese TV series, buy Tiger & Dragon. If you only by two, buy Ikebukuro West Gate Park. IWGP is one of the best TV shows ever to be produced in any language…ever. It’s no surprise that it was written by the same guy who wrote Tiger & Dragon, one 宮藤官九郎 (くどう かんくろう/KUDOU Kankurou). It also stars the same guy as T&D, namely Nagase Tomoya, in the role of Makoto.

  IWGP has lots of laughs, lots of action [a little violent at times, actually], great characters and a bumping soundtrack. It also serves as a great window on contemporary Japanese youth and street culture; Kudou has a real ear for dialogue and a sense of situational realism. I’m not going to tell you any more, you have to watch it for yourself. It’ll have you saying “面倒臭ええナァ！”…

  I can’t believe I almost didn’t add IWGP to this list. It brings the total to eleven, but whatever. Definitely an example of “last but not least”.

  By the way, if you only buy three shows, buy Trick…

You may not know this from all my writing about drive and discipline, but I am actually a really lazy and fun-oriented guy. And that laziness shows in how I learned Japanese and in how I am learning Chinese. Here’s how I watch a movie:

1. Get the Chinese version of a movie that I’ve seen before in a language that I’m already good at (generally Japanese, sometimes English)
2. Loop the movie. I’m not doing anything, just sitting back and enjoying the pretty pictures. I do this several times.
3. Start pausing, listening closely, perhaps mimicking dialogue.
4. The main event: start picking out sentences to enter into the SRS (sentence-mining). Again, the pause button receives heavy use. Sometimes I write them down to enter later. Other times I enter them directly — I find direct entry works best, since reading notebooks can be suuuper boring. By the way, I only do this for as long as my energy and concentration allow, which can be anything from hours to minutes.
5. You’re tired. Go back to step 2.
6. Rip the audio of the DVD movie to mp3. I use Xilisoft DVD Ripper for this. The effect is one of having a radio play where you already know what all is going on, and you can just focus on dialogue mechanics rather than plot or setting — this is true in general of watching or listening to a target language version of something you’ve already seen in base language (assuming your target and base are separate). Like everything on this site, it may not be the most earth-shaking idea ever, but I came up with it as a way to give myself Japanese “radio” at a time when I could neither (a) get, nor (b) meaningfully follow Japanese radio. It’s also a time-management thing: watching a film requires you to stay in one place and use both your sight and hearing; listening to audio only requires hearing.
7. Listen to the audio all day while doing other things (and maybe even at night while sleeping), loop, loop, loop.

In each of those repetitions, you will pick up something you didn’t know before. Since you’ll be doing so much repetition, it’s crucial to have fun stuff and lots of it. If you are bored, find something fun. I don’t care who you are, where you’re from, what you did — if you’re bored, do something else, just make sure it’s in the target language.

So, the Chinese Project is going really well. I made another shopping trip to my favorite Taiwanese online bookstore. These are new members of my Chinese media collection (except for 玩具總動員/Toy Story, which is an older member):

So, most of what I have are comic books and Disney/Pixar DVDs in Chinese. I also have Chinese-dubbed Powerpuff Girls, because I love that show; the dialogue is hilarious; the animation is top-notch minimalist and…and yeah. It’s a good show. McCracken and Tartakovsky are unsung geniuses; as far as I am aware, their work was the only thing in American TV animation worth watching during that dark age after both Batman: The Animated Series and Gargoyles had ended. Am I comparing Dexter’s Lab to Gargoyles? Yes.

I’ve already watched 玩具總動員/Toy Story about 10 times, I looped that “I’ll make a man of you/男子漢” song in 花木蘭/Mulan until people (Momoko) started making death threats. This is what I mean about having fun things to read and watch — you can learn a ton of words and sentences and have fun at the same time. I’ve been singing 男子漢 all night — I’ve even made up a version called 「孫小龍」 (my cat’s Chinese name…long story, but he was “hunting” and doing other manly (that’s sexist…lionesses hunt all the time…anyway) things, so it seemed more than appropriate).

Yes, that’s another personal development book at the bottom. I feel kind of embarassed buying stuff like that, like “what’s the matter, Khatzumoto — you need wittle help becwoming a bwetter pwerson?”, but…whatever, I guess. Actually, if you ever do get the chance, Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog is a really good time management book. Short, sweet, no BS, straight to the point. Speaking of BS, there are of course a lot of shady people in the PD industry. I think part of the problem is that many people treat personal development with a fervor that is essentially religious; they’re looking for a religion — they’re looking for something that is good and true all the time and that they need only believe and obey in order to be happy. The problem is that the PD industry is very much a human endeavour, so it does require you to have your brain turned on and your BS radar working at full capacity. On the other hand, I think it’s immature — literally — a sign of underdeveloped thinking to say that “the PD industry has problems, therefore we should ignore it completely” — very much a baby-and-bathwater way of doing it. Some of its good, a lot of it sucks, and you have to pick out the good — the good authors, the good parts of the good authors’ books, and stuff. I don’t know…That particular PD book in the picture, by the way, has some people in it who are full of crap, so I wouldn’t recommend to you unless you’re happy separating wheat from chaff.

Also, in the past week, I realized that my ability to create a foreign-language environment is…too powerful. I was finding myself going for long stretches of time without ever using Japanese; this had no short-term effect, but I worry that it could stunt my Japanese growth in the long term. I don’t “need” to know any more Japanese than I do now — I can function as an adult — but why not go beyond that, I think? Why not keep building a massive vocabulary? So, in the interests of maintaining and expanding use of Japanese, I am scaling back my use of monolingual Chinese dictionaries — I am going back to using the laddering method, with Japanese as a base language for Chinese. Interestingly enough, though, my sojourn with Chinese monolingual dictionaries has given me a lot of confidence in using them, and sometimes when I’m unhappy with a certain Japanese definition, I refer to a C-C dictionary.