[JAPAN] TELEVIEWS / Friday night TV lineup a mixed bag

January 31, 2008 by Dennis Amith

In a recent Televiews column for Daily Yomiuri, Wm. Penn wrote, “My plan for a nice, relaxing Friday night in front of the TV was moving along on schedule. Having just savored an episode of the witty South Korean romantic comedy Something About One Percent on satellite TV, I was feeling pretty cheerful. But then, it was time to come back down to Earth and collect some material for this column from the terrestrial Friday night lineup.”"First stop: Bakusho Mondai’s Political Talk Variety (8 p.m., NTV). Proposals to improve the archipelago are floated, discussed and voted on by an in-studio potpourri of talents, politicians and commentators. On Jan. 25, actress Chizuru Azuma discussed the widening income gap and the many pensioners who are barely surviving on 66,000 yen a month or less. She proposed those making over 20 million yen a year pay more into the pension system to support those less fortunate.”

“Several wealthy, well-dressed female panelists protested and displayed little sympathy for the “Japan on 2,000 yen a day or less” crowd. Growling at the TV, I had a great desire to divest these well-coiffed women of their designer duds and sentence them to walk a day in a pensioner’s mompe work trousers before they earned the right to an opinion.”

“My South Korean drama “high” was fading fast so I zapped over to TBS at 9 p.m. for SMAP Nakai’s Variety, where they are currently conducting a campaign to improve women’s lives. The candidate requesting help Jan. 25 was A-san. She had lived with her sister and widower dad in a small house. One day he arrived home with a surprise announcement. He had married C, 20 years his junior, and they already had a child. It was not to be a happy full house. Dad and his wife eventually moved out. A-san married, had two kids, divorced her philandering, debt-ridden husband and moved back home to discover her sister, not fond of cleaning, had turned the place into a garbage bin and Dad, who now had a lung ailment, was moving back too with C and their three kids.”