JAPANEXILE

With Toya hosting the G8 summit next summer it seems to have garnered a lot of media attention. But in the end what can you write about a small lakeside town months before the event? What could possibly be interesting here? Why, us of course!

So far we’ve managed, one regional and one national paper, the Muroran Shinbun and another Tokyo based one I can’t read the name of. I also managed to make an appearance in another local paper due to my presence at a recent wine festival. The article isn’t about me, but even so, its more coverage, and one step closer to the coveted Project Trust ‘most media coverage’ award. The questions are pretty standard fair, how do feel about Japan, Toya, Japanese. Why did you come to Japan? What do you hope to accomplish whilst you’re here etc. The language barrier was as usual a problem, but Taiki did a great job of translating so we managed to get through. He never gets a mention in the articles tho, I feel kinda bad for him…

Last week out media coverage took a big leap forward, as we now have an entire 25minutes devoted to us in “Hokkaido chu hiza kurige!” Which I’m told is an old and still very popular program up here. Being shown on NHK on November 9th. NHK pretty much being the equivalent of the BBC. The director of the show, Satoshi Takashima, came down from Sapporo to speak to us before the filming started, mainly to give us a run down of what was going to happen. The scene by scene description of the show he gave us had me in histerics at times, partly due to the translations they had come up with, partly due to the story line.  Scene 1 “The Encounter” being one of my favourites. The story line goes as so….

The plucky presenter had come down to Toya to watch autumn in all its splendor, on the bus on the way in, he spies two young gaijin playing with the Nursery school kids on the beach. At which point he feels the overwhelming desire to come talk to us, to hear our story. We of course get on like gravy and yorkshire pudding and soon invite him back to our humble abode. He spies a beaten up old file on the bookshelf, which we inform him contains letters from all the previous volunteers. He has a paw through and comes across a torn old map of the town. At which point in a very Blue Peter “here’s one we made earlier” style Craig and I inform him we are in the process of making a new map, and whip out our nicely drawn map of the roads in town, no landmarks on there yet however. So of we go to make the map together, meeting many an interesting person along the way, all of whom had an interesting story or two to say about the volunteers pat and present. (The last part being the only nonscipted part to the show)

The crew filmed us around the house, cleaning, playing Xbox, eating, anything really. They did some filming of us playing with the nursery kids, on the beach, wandering around town in the rain, down at the Mizu no Eki, doing the Adult conversation class. The latter being quite disruptive, its really hard to concentrate and not look at the camera when its only a foot away from your face and you’re trying to write on the board. There were lots of interviews, quite difficult interviews actually, they asked some quite pressing questions, things I hadn’t really thought about myself before.

Overall, as tiring as it was, quite enjoyed the whole filming process. Some very funny moments, one of the best one being when we being filmed eating Udon noodles, they egged me on the slurp them up (as you as supposed to in Japan), so I obliged, flicked myself in the eye with the noodle, and splattered myself and Craig with soup. All caught in High Definition. Brilliant. I’m really interested to see what the edited version is like, hopefully they cut out the worse parts. But I’ll have to wait until the air date to find out. They’re sending me a DVD of it, so I’ll put it up on Youtube or something so anyone who wants to can watch. Though of course it’ll be in Japanese. And finally for this post. With this update in mind I managed to snap a few picts whilst they were filming.  Rest of them in  the photography section.