It’s always fun to turn on late night TV in Japan and see what interesting shows I can find, like one called Woman on the Planet in which they drop a young Japanese woman into cities like New York or Barcelona for a month and film what challenges she faces while there. Another show is Mania Manual, in which famed cosplayer and otaku queen Shoko Nakagawa introduces people who have some kind of interesting “mania.” (This word means “personal obsession” as the Japanese use it, and is essentially a polite way to call someone an otaku without raising negative connotations.) The episode I saw introduced a woman who loved the incredibly detailed food replicas which are displayed in the windows of restaurants so you can see the quality of the food before you go in. She’d spent her life collecting these food replicas, filling a room of her house with them and making trips to Tokyo’s Kappa-bashi shopping district to buy more every week. The camera followed her as she made her weekly shopping trip and explained her rationale behind each purchase, which was not so different from the complex system I use to decide whether to add new a Star Wars figure to my collection or not.
A late-night show that introduces people’s obsessions.
