My friend Geoff Ries sent me these photos of a Christmas tree he made with Heartland beer bottles. A good way to recycle beer bottles and a good way to celebrate the festive season! 10 out of 10 for creativity.

4 Japanese Beer TV Ads Featuring Harrison Ford

After the global success of The Fugitive in 1993, Harrison Ford went on to make a series of beer commercials in Japan the following year. At the time still the biggest thing since sliced bread, he was the perfect frontman for Kirin’s ‘Mr Beer’ campaign, which showed him drinking beer with Japanese people in assorted Japanese settings:

Drinking in a Yakitori-ya

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Anyone who was living in Japan in 2006/2007 will no doubt be familiar with the tarako commercials, which I wrote about in this article. The Kyūpii advertising campaign was one of the most memorable in recent years, and the tarako craze is still going strong. Here’s an inflatable tarako I found in Kyōbashi shōtengai.

While watching Japanese TV I’ve noticed that it’s extremely difficult to distinguish one channel from another. OK, so it’s easy enough to spot public broadcaster NHK’s two channels from their programming (boring!), but the commercial networks all seem the same to me. For one thing, they all offer the same mix of light entertainment programmes (mostly wide shows=variety shows) featuring the same TV stars on every channel. More significantly though, Japanese TV channels rarely feature any previews/trailers of forthcoming programmes, schedules telling you what’s going to be on the channel later that night, or information about which channel you’re watching. (more…)

The best things I’ve found on other people’s blogs recently:

An amusing piece called ‘Japanese Ebonics’ appeared on Becky’s T-Blog a while back. The post focuses on a book called ‘Off The Hook’ by Randall C. Miller Jr that attempts to educate the Japanese reader in the nuances of African American slang. With phrases like “gimme some dap”, “did you wear a raincoat?”, “I ain’t no playa hater” and “you startin’ to sound like a biotch”(?!) it’s certainly more entertaining than most of the textbooks I’ve been forced to teach in the past. On the other hand, I’m not too sure when Japanese students would be in a situation that would require such vocabulary. Apart from attempting to blend in while on a homestay in South Central or Harlem that is.

The screenshots above are from a video I saw repeated endlessly on jumbo TV screens in Namba and Shinjuku a couple of years ago. Using computer animation effectively, I thought the video was pretty cool (in the kind of sickly-sweet kawaii way you get used to when you’re living in Japan) but was unable to figure out why it was being displayed on screens used exclusively for commercials when it wasn’t advertising anything. Unless, that is, it was being used to advertise some product related to a dancing poodle?

As usual my curiosity got the better of me and I had to Google it. Surprisingly though, I could find no reference to the video I saw on any English- or Japanese-language sites. I did, however, uncover this odd aerobics video which has plenty of dancing poodles - but not the one I was looking for.