So you ve come up with a camera, named it Kiss for reasons best known to yourself and/or your marketing department, and you need a cool commercial to show the world how rocking it is.
The logical step would be to get four kids to get made up just like Kiss, have them sing a song to the tune of I Was Made For Loving You while touring stereotypical and invented Japanese scenes. And you have to conclude with the kids learning to breathe atomic death rays like Godzilla.
Wow.
A lot of people have heard of Yellow Magic Orchestra, a lot of people haven t. Me, I heard about them for the first time when in a secondhand book and CD shop, I came across Junior Vasquez s Junior s Magic Orchestra for 200 yen.
Had no idea what the hell this might be - some weird concept album? Turned out to be his remixes of 6 Yellow Magic Orchestra tracks, pretty tasty stuff.
Yellow Magic Orchestra are kind of like the Japanese Kraftwerk, in that they made music with electronics and made it popular.
They re different from Kraftwerk in my mind because they have more of a sense of fun. They formed in 1978 , hung around until 1983, and haven t really done much together since.
There is, however, a whole heap of videos at YouTube.
Here s my favourite, Cosmic Surfin :
That s my favourite track, but the best video award goes to Computer Game -
There re also videos of , and probably heaps more I never came across.
Oh, and if you re interested, I found a copy of that Junior Vasquez CD. At about 15 times the price I paid.
Oh, tis a sick sad world
The Japan Ad Council was set up 36 years ago to make everyone safer and happier via public information announcements. They have a lot of cool information ads, which can be seen over at .
Some of them are very well made - I like about manners.
And some of them cover things that are probably only relevant to Japan - like about not putting too much pressure on your kids.
If you can t read Japanese, the best way to find your way about the site is to go to either one of those links above and from there just click about in the left column, which will take you around their various campaigns, and pages of videos for each of those campaigns.
Now if I could only get that AC jingle out of my head.
I am in full head-touching-ground-salaryman-begging-for-forgiveness-mode at the moment.
This video has been on crushmonkey.com for a bit now, but honestly, I couldn t log into sushimatic as I had forgotten my password.
So, without further mucking about, we present to you :
This year saw the Japanese police really starting to clamp down on drink driving, following an incident where a drunk driver rear ended an SUV, forcing it into Kyushu Bay - and killed 3 of the 4 kids onboard. The mother and father, I believe, survived. The kids were all under 5, as I recall.
(I can t find any news source still available about this incident, so forgive me if I ve made a mistake.)
There s even an advertising campaign on TV, something I ve never seen before. The commercial I saw featured a small child sobbing his heart out, and berating his father for drink driving because all the kids at school were picking on him and his sister - a little different from , the only example I could find in digital form:
Now, if we could pause for a second, as I warn you not to watch the next video if you are easily upset.
The fact that I have to do this illuminates the point behind the post - a big difference in the nature of these ads in my home country, and the one I find myself in now.
I still remember being traumatized by the adverts in Northern Ireland, adverts that increased in volume in the run-up to Christmas. is the one I remember as being particularly harrowing -
I m not sure on the reasons behind the cultural difference here.
I had a few ideas but the more I thought about them, the less they made sense. Anyone know why Japanese commercials are not aimed at giving you nightmares ?
Incurable romantic that I am, I m spending my honeymoon in Paris.
Now, my wife is Japanese, so I was startled to learn that at least 12 Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris. ( .) Some of the reasons mentioned are the rude shop assistants, the dirty streets and the bag snatchers.
To be honest though, I imagine this syndrome isn t restricted to Japanese people or even Paris - any overly sheltered person going to pretty much any country in the world on their own and not as part of a tour group is liable to end up a little shaken. Reality versus hype. We all know which wins every time.
I m going to make sure she s fully briefed on all the cultural stereotypes, perhaps make up some new ones, and hopefully deflate the balloon a bit so she s actually chuffed when she gets there. Although she might end up being mad at me for having lied to her, so that might also ruin the trip.
Decisions, decisions.
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