robbieinjapan.com

I haven’t posted in a while. Since I had spring break for two months, I took one of the months and went back to America. I was in Philadelphia for three weeks and then visited my friend, Mike, at his fraternity in Boston for a week. After this month, my brother and parents came with me back to Japan and we toured Tokyo as well as Kyoto and Hakone. I took some photos and my Dad took some more photos which I’ll have to get. I’ll try to put them up here shortly.

I’ve started the new semester and it’s now the third week of classes I think. Not much has changed. I took the placement test and moved up from 2G to 3G.

Right now, I turned on the TV (at around 2:55pm) and they’re showing “The Next Karate Kid” (Karate Kid 4, the one where the main character is a girl) except it’s dubbed in Japanese. This is a bit strange since part of Pat Morita’s character (the Japanese Karate master) is to speak broken English while throwing in Japanese titles like “-san”, so it’s a bit strange to hear him speaking fluently without language problems (since the character is Japanese and it’s dubbed in Japanese, it wouldn’t make sense to have him speak broken Japanese).

The other amusing thing is that much of the Karate Kid movies revolved somewhat around Pat Morita’s character being Japanese and the exoticness of Japanese culture and the East to Westerners. That is to say, the movie portrays Japanese culture as it is through a Western lens. The movie emphasizes aspects like Eastern spiritualism, Karate and so forth. It’s funny to see this movie being played in Japan since Japanese people don’t possess the cultural background that the movie intended the viewers to have. Much of the content dealing with Japan and the East is therefore non-sensical to Japanese viewers.

Also, I just realized that Pat Morita doesn’t walk like a Japanese person. It’s obvious to me that he grew up in America because he walks like an American, straight up with his shoulders back and his chest out. He also lifts his chin up so his head is tilted back a little which Japanese people never do. Japanese people tend to walk with their shoulders forward and sometimes slightly leaning forward, as well. Pat Morita walks like a cowboy.

Ha, this is the first time I’ve seen this… a commercial just came on advertising Philadelphia cream cheese. Usually when I tell people here in Japan that I’m from Philadelphia, I ask them if they’ve heard of it and they usually respond that it seems vaguely familiar. Either they then go on and say they read about Philadelphia in their textbooks in school or they tell me “oh, Philadelphia! It’s famous for cheese, right?” This is the first time, though, that I’ve actually seen it advertised here.

Anyway, I’m going to finish watching “The Next Karate Kid” on TV. I’ll write more later sometime.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 2:19 am and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.