Friday, September 21, 2007

Japan in American culture/media

One of the very few big network shows I've watched diligently in recent memory is NBC's show "Heroes", actually largely due to the fact that one of the main characters is a time-traveling, badass, にほんのかいしゃいん. Apparently I'm not the only one who sees the appeal, since both the show and the particular character I'm talking about, 中村(なかむら) ひろ, are very popular. Truth be told, listening to the Japanese that's spoken in the show made me even more excited to learn the language.

So why bring this up?

There's a link on the Heroes website that leads to The Yamagato Fellowship, an apparently fictional center for the study of historical heroes (The founder is 中村かいと, Hiro's father in the show). The site is worth a look for any fans of the show, especially the message from the founder (entirely in Japanese), and the 5 documentaries (pretty sure these are fictional too) about the legendary hero Takezo Kensei, whose story is referred to several times in the first season and who appears to be a main character in the second season.

Check it out:
http://yamagatofellowship.org/index.shtml

Japan's fascination with American culture is well known, but it's awesome to see that the reverse is true as well.

More later,
じゃまった

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My friend tells me that Hiro speaks real Japanese on the show. Like, really broken Japanese, but it's actually Japanese.

He was whining because the "asian language" that Jack purported his tattoo was in on Lost was completely jibberish.

It's interesting to see.

olegzergmaster said...

Its suprising to hear that the japanese find american culture as fascinating as we find japanese culture fascinating. Its a little hard to see because there are so many people of different origins living in the States.