Gonna be in Japan for season 5

Well, it's a whole different animal there. You can't watch FOX unless you have cable or Digi satellite. Most people don't have either. And most people don't watch many foreign tv programs anyway (at least the people I knew). Most foreigners I knew would watch it though. But mostly because there isn't much English programing anyway. I got the feeling that FOX and AXN were mostly going for the small foreigner market plus any Gaijin-philes out there. The only foreign program that was talked about or seen in ads elsewhere was The Simpsons. The are the spokes-cartoon for CC Lemon, a really great lemon soda pop.

Jacob

Jacob Fruehling wrote in message news:...

Thank you for the information. That's very different from my experience with Japanese TV in the 80s and early 90s when I was living there. There were a lot of American shows then, mostly dubbed but you could get the original English if you had the right equipment. First it was a box, then a satellite dish.

A number of my Japanese friends have told me that they feel Japan is becoming more insular and nationalistic (they do not mean this in a good way) in all ways. I suspect this may be one more. Or maybe it's just the effect of cable.

himiko

I'm not sure what it was like before, but I lived there from 2000 to 2002 and it was quite nationalistic. I got the impression from people that it was always that way, but I am not sure. But to say that one is nationalistic is bad in Japan. Expressing it is ok, but labeling it isn't. That was my impression at least.

Jacob

Jacob Fruehling wrote in message news:...

What my friends mean by "nationalistic" is anything vaguely reminiscent of WWII. In this case, they mean the tendency of Japanese to be isolationist and uninterested in other cultures...except for the purpose of examining them to show how superior Japan is to them. Since I come from a country that is even worse about this sort of thing than Japan (USA), I never feel I am in a position to criticize, but this is what they are saying.

It may well be true, at least of TV. When I lived there, there was a fairly large amount of American and other western TV programming on the networks. It was mostly dubbed, but in that form, it seemed to pull a pretty good audience. Japanese programming was mostly pretty lame, except for the NHK historical dramas, a few of the home dramas and cop shows, and of course, a lot of the animation.

himiko

This is quite true. And this is how a gaijin feels after he lives there long enough. I didn't really notice it at first. I felt like they treated me as an adorable puppy. When I would do something they consider "Japanese", like eating with chopsticks, they would act like "oh, how cute, he thinks he's people".

Japanese TV is still really lame. The most popular shows are ones like "Unbelievable" which is a documentary type show where they show strange stories that really happened is strange forign lands, like USA. The funny thing is that those programs are made in Tokyo, each program has about 3 stories in it. I was on that show at least 100 times playing different characters. In fact, they use only one talent agency for that show, and therefor it's pretty much the same 20 or so actors over and over again. Sometimes I would be in the same story as up to 3 characters. They would just give me a hat, or a mustache. When I asked the director how I could be in the same scene so many time and no one noticed, he said because all foreigners look the same.

Jacob