armagebedar

The title kind of says it all: "Youは何しに日本へ?". My girlfriend loves it, but when I have watched it I've almost always found it to be rather puerile. Sometimes they are rather interesting -- they followed around a group of Taiwanese bicycling across Hokkaido. But even then, they managed to get laughs in at their expense.

I wouldn't mind NHK taking a more serious crack at this sort of thing, showing the many, varied kinds of things that foreigners (both permanent and transient) are doing in Japan (i.e. my acquaintance who does traditional woodblock printing out in Okutama).

armagebedar

And on an unrelated note, my only experience being on TV was my photo on Waratte Ii Tomo! several years ago after being interviewed while standing in line for menchi katsu in Kichijoji. Fortunately, the interview was about the menchi katsu, not my foreignness.

5khours

delete

5khours

You sound like a crusty old curmudgeon.

armagebedar

Heh, maybe I am -- but a justified one :P

acregal

I deliberately avoid these kinds of things as no rational adult overseas would consider this stuff remotely interesting. A TV show hounding foreigners in the US then acting like those idiot hosts would get all sorts of groups protesting.

There's also 「世界の日本人妻は見た」, which seems to choose the weirdest foreign husbands and idiots to comment. I watched it once and they had Billy Blanks (from Billy's Boot Camp) on and they had some foreigners commenting about food overseas - apparently Americans love to eat fried butter

I had a friend ask me to refer some people for a similar show years ago - I was told that Asians, people with fluent Japanese, people who had been in Japan a long time, and people who generally weren't happy with Japan weren't welcome.

abmj-jr

That's two of us - who admit to it, at least.

evergrn

Funniest part of the show is when one of the Bananamen does the imitation of Bobby Orogon.

joejones

I was approached by a camera crew once while waiting for the limousine bus at NRT a couple of weeks after the earthquake. They asked where I was from and I replied that I was from the US. "Oh, never mind, we already got some Americans."

Another time I was stopped on the street in Akihabara and asked if I would participate in an on-camera quiz about otaku culture.

With regard to my experiences with police interviews at NRT, see here.

jib71

Tell them you're from Bhutan next time.

armagebedar

I'll just say I'm from Djibouti. It'll be even more amusing since I'm white as a sheet :P

LapLap

NHK has just been doing a little series on just such people, my favourite was the one about a Dutch paper maker
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/engli...402200930.html

I really enjoy the shows about Venetia San also, I know a couple of Japanese ladies who are big fans.

AlwaysAisle

It is obvious that those TV shows are looking for certain type of people and responses. They are not doing scientific study to show truthful average of non-Japanese people’s view about Japan. It is Japanese variety show, you know. What if Japanese people saw reality TV shows in the U.S. and thought that is way most Americans live?!

These kinds of stuff exist in media everywhere, not just in Japan. But I agree about comedians in Japanese TV variety shows. Behaviors and comments made on such Japanese TV variety shows will not likely tolerated in the U.S. I often do think some of them are distasteful and sometime I do even get upset hearing some comments and watching some behaviors. But same time I seen some non-Japanese people look at those as difference in culture, difference in reference point, difference in point of view, etc. What if Japanese had exactly same sense of humors as Americans? That will be scary thought.

Here in the U.S. I seen on an evening news a reporter showed melon with a price tag of several hundred U.S. dollars at Senbikiya (千疋屋) at Nihonbashi. Making it sounds like that is what average Japanese have to pay if they want melon in Tokyo. They never go to a super market in suburb of Tokyo and show how much melon cost there.

SkinwalkerAudio

@msiamsia

In response to the original post, my partner and I were interviewed by the "Why Did You Come To Japan?" TV Tokyo crew, and (if it's on schedule) we're appearing on an episode tomorrow evening (Monday, June 16th - JST).

The crew came across my partner and me at the NRT airport in mid March this year (2014). We had spent the prior year living in Thailand and India, and we had just flown in from Delhi, so we were definitely a bit shabby looking. We're both really frugal *cheap* people, and within the first few minutes of chatting with us as we wandered around the airport, they said that they had an episode in mind for us with the theme, "Cheap Trip!" We agreed to film a full episode with them and scheduled a day of filming a week later.

We met in Omotesando the following week, and the film crew followed us around through Harajuku, then down to Shibuya as my partner and I window shopped, took graffiti photographs, joked around, answered questions, ate dinner consisting of ¥100 donuts from the Family Mart, and then ultimately sought out a mangakissa for our lodging for the night - something the crew had never heard of people doing as a lodging option.

The crew were super awesome and we ended up later befriending Yui, the woman who interviewed us - our episode was her final episode as the interviewer, so it was cool being able to share that fun experience with her for her last assignment in that position.

So that's a little bit about my experience with the show. I'm currently in the Pacific Northwestern US, so I won't be able to tune in to see if it airs tomorrow night. However, once the episode is available online, I'll link to it here.

Pureboy

Thanks for sharing that- would love to see the episode.