Watching Ii domo special
When you need something to brighten up your day, watch Japanese television. Today there was a show on tele called “Ii domo special”. The hosts were some guy from boy group SMAP and an older one with dark glasses who may look a bit Yakuza at first, but is quite funny. He hosts every broadcast in Japan except home shopping, news and the education channel of NHK – at least that’s my impression. Now the show was a contest of five teams which consisted of various Japanese show celebrities. I knew almost none of them, but the contests were great. The first one was to sing a popular Japanese song by only using sounds like “njanjanja”. The other team members had to guess the song and once they got it right they had to switch singers. Therefore everybody had to “sing”. If you didn’t know the song or couldn’t remember the melody you could say “Passu!” (I pass!) to switch the song and the singer. One woman used this on the song “Dear Woman” (by SMAP!!!) and you should have seen the shocked face of the SMAP singer. They seldomly used the “Passu” phrase.
Boxing was next and it was played on the Wii console which currently sells really well here. Epic fighting and the prestige duel between News and Kat-tun made this one of the highlights of the show. Another highlight was the host (not the SMAP one) who announced the contestants in a mixture of M. Buffer and a Mexican. He managed to roll the “R” quite well, though it was probably quite hard for his voice chords.
