Japanese television is always interesting, and never fails to give me neta, a word which refers to the fish part of a piece of sushi, but in this case it means an idea for the J-List posts that I write. Yesterday I caught an interesting show in which a camera crew got on the Chiyoda train line in Tokyo and “randomly” went from station to station finding interesting people and businesses to introduce at each stop along the train line. These included a shop making Kyoto-style candy, a ramen shop run for over 100 years in the same location, a dance studio teaching Argentine tango and a shop making the most gorgeous Lucky Cat figures, including a service for creating realistic-looking Lucky Cat figurines of your own cat. I put the word “randomly” in quotes above because, whenever you’re watching Japanese TV, it’s a given that everything you see will have been pre-scripted and set up ahead of time. It’s called yarase and it’s a part of Japanese TV you can never get away from.
Japanese TV always provides me with random ideas for posts.
