Like most people in the West, my main knowledge of Japanese TV in the past has come from “gosh aren’t those foreigners odd”-type programmes that show clips from gameshows in which contestants have to swim through vats of rotting fish and the losing side willingly commits ritual suicide. If you think that’s all there is to Japanese TV then read on as Japanese TV is certainly quirky, but its massively lovable for those quirks.

What’s below are the notes I made while watching Japanese TV over the past two weeks while I was there. Some things are good, some are bad and some are strange…

• One of the annoying things about TV ads in the UK is not knowing what song is playing in the background, especially if it’s a really good one and the online resources for identifying ad music haven’t included it yet. There’s no need to turn to Shazam in Japan, though. Japanese ads have the name of the song they use shown briefly at the bottom of the screen. This is really useful and should be replicated around the world.

• In the west we think anime is all giant robots jumping 80 feet up in the air, or school girls with superpowers and talking cats for best friends. There’s more to it than that though. D. Gray Man, for example, features lots of interestingly-haired people sitting round a table and talking dramatically for 30 minutes. Nothing else happens! Okay, that may have just been the episode I watched (maybe it was a ‘character development’ type thing) but I certainly can’t imagine a primetime cartoon in the UK being so bold as to include no action for so long. Youtube link.

• In fact, sitting around talking seems to make up a good 75% of Japanese TV. A lot of programmes seem to consist of nothing but conversation. The master of this appears to be a presenter by the name of Akeshiya Sanma. With his big horsey grin and hoarse laugh he presents programmes like Much Ado About Love, in which Japanese women talk to him about relationships while he falls about the studio laughing. In fact, all his shows feature him falling about the studio laughing. It’s his ‘thing’. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a clip of him doing the laugh, but here he is interviewing the woman who voices Pikachu from Pokemon on his show Sanma Palace: Youtube link.

• The Japanese have an equivalent to S Club 7 called Shuuchishin. They dance, they sing and they have a TV show in which they couple the popstar life with being detectives (an obvious career combination). It’s like Miami 7 would have been if it had featured guns and dead bodies. Very odd, but not on Youtube. Bah. Shuuchishin also make up half of Aladdin, a J-pop supergroup currently flying high in the Japanese charts with this ultra-catchy monstrosity: Youtube link.

• Jump cuts seem to be a feature of many Japanese programmes. Rather than cover up edits in interviews with cutaways, they simply show the ugly cuts. There’s not a lot I can say about this other than to say how annoying it looks. As a video editor myself, I know how easy it is to cover up these cuts in no time at all. Not doing so just looks lazy.

All the above taken into account, I still miss Japanese TV now I’m back in the UK. Even though I understand very little of what’s going on in the programmes, their bright colours and lack of cynicism compared to often-drab British TV was refreshing. When’s the next flight back?