One fun aspect of living in Japan is watching NHK, Japan’s national public broadcasting network, the channel to turn to for news, educational programming and the best samurai period dramas on TV. It’s as near a clone of Britain’s BBC as the Japanese could manage, right down to the licensing fee structure that households are asked to pay. One show I like to catch when it’s on called 世界ふれあい町歩き Sekai Fureai Machi-aruki (“walking around the towns of the world”), which has a simple format: a cameraman with a steady-cam walks through various picturesque locations so that viewers can experience the sights as if they were really there themselves. The camera stops to talk with people passing by in the street, with the people’s replies shown with subtitles so Japanese viewers can understand, while the narrator provides information on the history and culture of each area. The last episode focused on America, with we, the viewer, taking a leisurely stroll through neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Seattle and Carthage, Missouri, located along old Route 66. The camera then moved to New York, seeking out the best bagel shop in Brooklyn before walking up the street to chat with an elderly Chinese couple who run a dry-cleaning business. The show has quite a following in Japan, with fans traveling abroad to take pictures in the same filming locations from their favorite episodes.
Of course, visiting the world’s most beautiful cities vicariously through one’s television may be lots of fun, but we all know that the world is more complex than that…in fact it can be downright dangerous. This is the lesson learned by poor Haruna Yukawa, a Japanese man who was captured by extremists in Syria this week, an event that has the Japanese press buzzing nonstop. While it’s unclear what Mr. Yukawa was doing in the war-torn country, it appears that he operates a private military company in Tokyo called, er, Private Military Company, an entity which is legally registered but seems to have no employees or even a physical address. The captive has been described on the Japanese media as a “military otaku” with a fascination with survival games and paintball guns, and he may have been in Syria to engage in “war tourism” to impress his friends on Facebook. Mr. Yukawa’s is a good example of what the Japanese call 平和ぼけ heiwa boke, literally being “dulled to the point of stupidity from too much peace,” the all-too-common assumption by Japanese that the world is as peaceful and safe as their country is. We certainly hope for the safety of poor Mr. Yukawa, a man who should probably should have made some different life choices.
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