11th March in Japan

Thursday I get a call. It was the other Japanese TV company I applied to work for last autumn. The big time, central London one.

Things aren't working out with the guy they hired. They're looking for someone, again. They don't want to go through the recruitment process again. Did I want to put myself back in contention for the job? A whole new direction opens up, but I have plans til September, and then I'll be training to be a teacher. It's a done deal. I've handed in my notice at my current, less impressive Japanese TV job, and I'll finally be shaking Japan out of my system- nearly 2 years after I left, and a lot longer after most of my foreign friends in Japan have come back and moved on.

Back in the interview for the big time time job, they caught me out with a yorker in the general knowledge quiz. Who's the Prime Minister of Japan? I didn't know. 'There have been so many changes recently, I've lost track', I answered. 6 months on and I think everyone is aware who Naoto Kan is. Some footage has surfaced very recently of the Japanese Prime Minister in a Parliament session the moment the earthquake hit on Friday:



What's terrifying about this footage is that he does nothing. Of course, there is nothing he could do, except look around and hope it ended soon.

Friday morning I woke up and saw a friend in Yamagata had posted on Facebook, 'Was that one big enough for you'. Minutes later the news starts filtering through and the Today Programme picks it up. The disasters unfold threefold and we have the news streaming on BBC and NHK at work. The British newscasters stumble through unwieldy Miyagi ken and Iwate ken town names. Images of black waves and boats shoring in combeenee parking lots surface. Another friend wearily announces the 200th aftershock in the Kantou area. One lady ambles around a place she once knew and no longer recognises and pronounces blankly, 言葉が出ない- Words fail me. I think of Matsushima's tiny pine islands on the coast near Sendai and wonder if it is still there.




Friends in Tokyo and Yamagata seem fine. Each of them has friends with bad stories though. The more I think about it, the more people I think to contact and check on. People I knew in Sendai, even Ishinomaki. I think of friends to be concerned about, and that prompts more friends to think about and contact. Just when I thought I had shaken Japan from my system and taken a step away, I realised in a pathetically individual way that I am bound to that weird little archipelago in more ways, and through more people, than I knew.

'...He was quite impressed by the fact they understood him..'

Top 5

This time of year, everyone has a top 5 or a top 10 or some kind of round-up, so I thought I'd get in on the act. I've been researching weird things for Japanese TV for over a year now. Recently a broadcaster we contact often suggested I try adding the word 'wacky' to any searches in their online archives for finding topics we'd been charged with digging up. That's the kind of research work I do.

At the beginning, I tried to note down what I was researching with the intention of writing about them all here. Soon enough, I realised it would be pretty much every topic we research. The list grew longer and longer until it was entirely unwieldy. Top 5 makes sense.

In no particular order:

- Jim Le Fevre



This man is a hero. Jim Le Fevre uses record players and revolutions per minute to make smart animations. He dubs his creation the Phonotrope (formerly the Phonographantasmascope), itself modelled on a Zoetrope.

His website is packed with wonderful things too.


- Cat Gets Stuck in Window



From the wildly imaginative and inspirational, to the wacky, the most lowly of low-brow entertainment available (that no one else in Japan has broadcast yet). That's how my job rolls.

Pretty funny though.


- And one giant mirror



Viganella: a small town in Northern Italy with no sunlight for three months every year, due to it's location nestled at the bottom of a valley. The mayor instals one giant mirror to rectify this.

The Japanese featured in the trailer had nothing to do with us and I don't think the people in Japan we were working for even used the footage in the end. Didn't stop me burning a copy of the entire documentary to take home and watch (it's office policy - eurgh what a phrase!- to burn copies of everything that comes in anyway).

The array of characters is the most compelling thing in the documentary. The guy playing a caisa (the instrument you can hear at the beginning) plays all kinds of instruments throughout but never utters a word. There's a brooding, quiet type who lives at the top of the hill near where they instal the mirror. And the mayor is delightful and gregarious and determined throughout. I love how he gets nearly blown backwards by the helicopter down-thrust, as he tries to take pictures with a pocket camera of the mirror dangling. Landscape then portrait, then back to landscape.

- Solar Impulse



A solar plane that can fly at night.

I spoke with the PR who was lovely but who told me there was no footage of the plane flying. They hadn't got it off the ground yet. Two months later it hits the national press with the maiden flight. Now it seems it's flown at night too.

- World's Deepest Bin



I love this.