Japanese television...

includes but it not limited too: shows about cats, weird commercials where half the time you're not sure what it is that they are advertising, variety shows where they make fun of people to their faces, variety shows where people, usually Idols, who are famous Japanese people who sing act and dance, compete in weird games where the prize is a plague. There was a show on the other day where two idols played the first Super Mario Brothers on a Wii in a competition in front of a live audience full of girls dressed up as Mario. Oh and all of the variety shows have live audiences,who are really excited and loud and usually filled with girls.

 You wouldn't believe some of the shit that is on these variety shows. Another thing about the variety shows is they seem to have no real time limit. Like a show will start at 7 p.m. and have no commercials for like an hour and a half and then all of a sudden at 8:47 the show just ends. When there are commercials during any program, sometimes it's hard to tell if it was a commercial or just part of the show. Back home, you usually know when a commercials coming. The show will reach a climatic or exciting part and then the screen goes black and then BAM a commercial break begins.  Here, shit goes bam, bam, bam often leaving me confused on what was the show and what was the commercial. 

They have a foreign movie channel that mainly airs American movies called Movie Plus. There's a channel called Super! Drama that airs American television shows from classics like E.R. to the newest ones like Gossip Girl and you can opt for it to be in English with Japanese subtitles or  dubbed in Japanese. Japanese voice actors are amazing. It always looks like the actor is speaking Japanese. I don't know how they line it up so well but it's amazing. I guess voice actors are huge here and they win all sorts of awards for their work, with good reason. I wish I had a videotape so I could record some TV so you can see what I am talking about it. It's going to be really weird flipping through channels when I get home and hearing English on every channel.

 The commercial breaks on Super! Drama are weird too. The show will go for 45 minutes and then when it's over they show 15 minutes of commercials, instead of showing the commercial in between. At first I welcomed this method now I hate it because the commercials they show for those 15 minutes are always the same. Like clockwork, a few minutes before the next show starts a Proactiv commercial comes on where they have someone like Jessica Simpson try and say some of her lines in Japanese. It's painful. Even though I cannot understand most of the shows here I think I might actually miss them. They are so weird and unexplainable but they provide endless hours of entertainment.