Gaijin Tonic

Here’s a funny video from The Meth Minute 39, which pokes fun at the Hollywood superstars who make a quick buck by appearing in embarrassing and weird commercials in Japan (the likes of which I’ve posted before here.) Check it out!

Here’s an embarrassing collection of old Japanese ads for starring the usually great Gene Hackman, miscast as a romantic lead. These commercials are hilarious because Hackman looks tired, confused and disorientated throughout, and has to say incomprehensible things like “dry…dry.”

My path seems to be intertwined with a Japanese TV star, Hidehiko Ishizuka (otherwise known as “Ish Chan,”) a tubby funster who eats a lot, smiles so broadly that his eyes disappear, and wears only overalls in the winter.
Everywhere I go, this guy has been there before me. When I visit a restaurant or a bar, there’s a signed photo of him on the wall, posing with the staff. When I go to the over-sized shoe shop, there’s a signed picture of him, grinning down at me. When I go to the big and tall store, (the only place I can buy clothes in Japan due to my height,) Ish-Chan is the model in their brochures!

I suppose we have a lot in common. We’re both tiny-eyed, inanely-grinning gluttons, with an appreciation for food and drink. He’s my doppelganger!
The other day, a friend of mine spotted him strolling down the street, near where we live.
He’s closing in! One day I’ll wake up, look in the mirror, and it won’t be me. Ish-Chan will be staring back at me. Creepy!

That Harrison Ford is happy to unashamedly sell out will not be news to anyone who’s seen “Hollywood Homicide,” but his starring role in the cheesy Japanese 1990s ads for Kirin beer were an all-time low for Han Solo. (Solo’s sunk so low, ho ho.)
In the commercials, Harrison has been cast as an uncontrollable alcoholic, wandering the streets of Japan, asking everyone he encounters for “Kirin Lager Beer, please.” Such is the extent of his dipsomania, he’s branded as “Mr. Beer.”
Well, hell, that’s exactly how I spend my evenings, too, so who am I to judge!

Apparently the only Japanese he can say is “Kirin Lager Birru, Kudasai.” Yep, pretty much the same as me.

In the ad below, Mr movie-star pulls a prima-donna act, striding into a yakitori shop and petulantly demanding that he only be served Kirin Lager Beer. He stops short of saying “do you know who I am?”

The manager should have said “Well, excuuuuse me, your highness. And I suppose you want a bowl of M & Ms with all the green ones taken out, too.”
I like the line “everyone drinks Kirin Lager Birru.” Does that include children and recovering alcoholics?

In the next advert, Ford’s alcoholic character is so desperate for a drink, he actually starts hallucinating that he’s drinking a glass of Kirin. Oh dear, time for a trip to Alcoholics Anonymous, Harrison.

It’s inadvisable to drink beer in a sauna- you get blinding headaches from the dehydration. It’s also inadvisable to approach strange middle-aged men in Turkish baths while wearing only a towel.

Oh well, whatever you say about Harrison Ford, at least he’s got good taste in beer. He’s also got a sense of humour, judging by the clip below, from his son’s friend’s home video.

More amusing videos of Hollywood celebrities hamming it up for big bucks in Japanese television commercials can be seen at JapanAds.net

The other day I went to see one of my fave Japanese bands, Shonen Knife, perform live in Tokyo. They were in town to promote their ace new LP “Fun! Fun! Fun!”
If you’re not familiar, Shonen Knife are an all-girl punk trio from Osaka, who recently celebrated their 25th anniversary (although only singer/guitarist/songwriter Naoko remains from the original line-up.) They became quite popular in the west for a while in the early nineties, and supported Nirvana on tour in 1993.

The show was very cool, and the line up includes two cute new members on drums and bass. There were some authentically nerdy fans in suits dancing at the front, too.
The band played some great new songs, including songs about popcorn, cookies, the flu, and barnacles. Shonen Knife excel at writing songs about such inane topics. I had a chance to chat with Naoko, the singer, after the show, and asked her why shy wrote a song about a barnacle. She said “because it’s very fun,” which was good enough for me.

Here’s a good Shonen Knife fansite.

This is the first in an occasional series of tributes to noteworthy Japanese booze-hounds. There are less of these hedonistic characters in Japan than in most countries- I’ll be hard-pressed to find the Japanese equivalent of, say, Oliver Reed, (over here it’s considered deeply shameful to get shit-faced on television talk shows and take your trousers off,) but I’ll give it a shot.

One of Japan’s most notorious hell-raisers was the writer Osamu Dazai. The acclaimed author of such classic works as “The Setting Sun,” Dazai was infamous for his excessive and decadent lifestyle in the post-war years. Getting stinking drunk was his favourite pastime.

It couldn’t be said that he was a happy drunk- he was a suicidal alcoholic and made several attempts to off himself before finally succeeding in 1948, in a suicide-pact with his married mistress. Needless to say, there were no pina coladas, karaoke-jams or limbo-dancing at his parties.

Dazai was a self-destructive rebel from an early age, neglecting his studies at high-school, and blowing his allowance on booze and hookers. His wild misadventures included running away from his university with a geisha, and fathering a child out of wedlock with a fan. He sounds like a latter-day Pete Docherty.

Ironically, for a guy who drank so much, he once wrote in his book “Seascape with Figures in Gold”, that his favourite tipple was milk. “The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the only thing that gave me a certain peculiar sense of the joy in life”. Too bad he died before the invention of Kellogg’s Frosties- he could have poured the milk on them and doubled the fun.

Here are some more well-informed links about the bloke:
Wikipedia
Dazai Bio
Another Dazai Bio
Litweb

Here’s a picture of me with the popular pin-up MEGUMI, who I happened to run into in a beach-bar in Enoshima a while back. Tragically, and somewhat uncharacteristically, she wasn’t wearing a bikini at the time.