Tokyo Notebook: Gorby is grilled along with the eels
Click to viewSummary clip of the appearance. Don't watch it if you don't want to know who won.
Twisted I know, but it has always been a fantasy of mine to watch Mikhail Gorbachev being fed grilled eels by a tone-deaf boy band. Last night my dream came true.
In a long history of impenetrable lunacy, yesterday was Fuji TV’s finest hour, a day when it took Japan only 54 minutes (including ad breaks) to lose its last remaining shred of credibility.
Bistro Smap is an unholy merger of celebrity cook-off and simpering chat show, but more vapid than both. Each week a celebrity guest is entertained by SMAP - a fraying boy band so overexposed that at least one of them is clearly insane. The lads split into pairs and cook two rival dinners, and the fifth member interrogates the guest while his colleagues are clanging about in the kitchen. The interviewee must eventually decide which meal he prefers.
Japan has precious little in the way of confrontational journalism. Bistro Smap, God help us, is the closest it gets to Paxman. Shows like this, with their tenacious pandering to celebrity appetites, are why Toyota’s boss will be so comprehensively mauled by the US congressional investigation later today. Cross-examination in Japan tends to involve soufflé.
Acknowledging that Mr Gorbachev was more heavyweight and humourless than the usual guests, the SMAP boys were given an on-screen crash course in Cold War politics before donning their aprons. “Wow,” dribbled the lead singer as a wavy-haired historian described the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Stasi, “did that mean people stopped writing spy novels?”
By the time they finally got to the interview, the boys were on fire. The repartee sizzled as prancing Japan and monosyllabic Russia discussed the Great Game. The most deranged SMAP member had hidden a small matryoshka doll in his mouth and regurgitated it for the father of Glasnost. “That is not food,” groaned Gorby, visibly regretting that he no longer has nuclear missiles and KGB assassins on the other end of a phone.
“But this eel ... is very good,” he conceded.
Vein effort
A new addition to the family set me on a quest for good schools and I’ve found the perfect place. Nestled in the suburbs of Saitama (think of Braintree with noodles) is the Oi Hoikuen - an establishment that blends the stern discipline of traditional Japanese education with the sinister experimentalism of Dr Moreau’s island. The children, you see, are not divided by gender, ability or even religion, but by blood group.
The school is an attempt to supply some desperately needed science to one of the most common beliefs in Japan - that personal character and day-to-day experiences are determined by a person’s blood corpuscles. It is splendid nonsense. Books on blood-group fortune-telling sell in the tens of millions. Leading TV stations provide daily prognoses for the different groups. Yesterday, by the way, was a shocker for type Os Foreigners tend to scoff at this obsession, partly because it is such manifest cobblers, but also because its chief proponents are such monstrous charlatans. Who drive Ferraris. But Oi Hoikuen is determined to silence the scepticism and claims that its experiment represents the only serious attempt to prove the theory one way or another. Segregated into blood groups, children are left to study and play normally while a faintly maniacal professor with a clipboard takes notes on their behaviour. I’m not absolutely convinced.
“Ah,” nods the prof knowingly, “classic rejection pattern of a B-type. You are B-type aren’t you?”
“No.”
The eyes have it
I spent a good part of the morning practising what it will be like when my MP3 player is controlled by ocular motion. Not encouraging. An old crone, brimming with pity for the demented, gave up her seat when she saw my pupils dancing around like marbles in a Magimix.
The device, which has been dreamt up by NTT DoCoMo, takes advantage of a tiny difference in electrical charges on either side of your eye-socket. Rather than going down the obvious route and exploiting the phenomenon to perfect a sight-sensitive disintegrator rifle, Japanese electronics-makers are using it to gain a minute advantage in the battle to defeat Apple.
The eye-controlled MP3 player uses a tiny sensor built into the headphones to register which way your pupils are gazing. A small glance to the right makes it play; big movements to either flank make it skip or replay a track. I foresee snags. Flicking through a bad album - for some reason I was thinking of the irredeemably feeble Love Punch by Otsuka Ai - makes you look like a psychotic pervert. Restarting the playlist looks like a pantomime double-take. Staring straight forward for four minutes to hear a song right through gives you the vacant glare of a North Korean border guard.
Source: Times Online
Say what you will about blood-type personality, Mr. Lewis, but STFU about SMAP. They must be doing something right if they can get Mikhail Gorbachev on their show.