A foreigners point of view?
 

I thought this was just a little bit cheeky. Tell me what you think?

Japan - The Strange Country (Japanese ver.) on Vimeo

English version - YouTube - Japan - The Strange Country (English)

just to add on point of strangeness :)

sometimes there goes a japanese video or other material around a local forums. and they might show anything, like tv-programme, a music shot, etc. usually it was created to make people laugh or just have fun

but from our point of view we are considering it nonsense and therefore funny so we are not actually laughing at the content which was made to be funny, but we are laughing because we don't understand how could someone do something like this and consider it funny (or interesting, or worth to do) at first place :D

like one day i have seen, i think that was a short-cut of concert of a pop group of 5 boys. it was something similar to backstreet boys, sort of, but japanese, and they were singing dressed in something like baby-pants and they had an oak-leave in front of the... you know :) the intimity parts. and that was all they had dressed, so you would normally think why would anyone ever would want to look like that. still they had this huge audience and, i think best pop group from hereby would never had such amount of fans :) but music was so average, like you know, common radio stuff, i would not bother. but their audience was boiling, everyone singing, jumping, doing everything, my god :) and the final point was, when camera stopped at a couple of like 80years old grand-ma and grand-pa who were singing with those heavy smiley faces, and i thought - this is the end of world :)

i don't know, was that real? you know, the fact is, sometimes you even don't believe that it was real, maybe it was fake :)

Pretty amusing. If you can be unbiased about it all, it's fun to watch.

Most of its information sounded valid. Though, I do find number-per-minute calculations to be misleading. It isn't necessarily every 4 seconds that a person dies from starvation or every 16 minutes that a Japanese person commits suicide; it's averaged out.

I think a lot of our diehard Japanese fans should watch things like this.
I can't tell you how much "I am L from Deathnote" acts irritate me. It butchers much of what should be appreciated about Japan.

No offense?

If I am not mistaken, this was made in Japan originally then dubbed in English.

Correct. By some Japanese student.

Whoa, definetly a good watch!I wonder what people say about America now XD

So, a Japanese student just accused me of making his/her country strange?

Cheeky? I think it was really harsh. Its strange for someone to wanna beat up on their own country like that.

No, it was originally directed at Japanese people and produced in Japanese - so it`s referring to citizens at the end.

I thought the production was really nice, but the information given is incredibly misleading. There are reasons for most of those things that could have been introduced in order to bring attention to them - but instead it was just a bunch of facts and figures. The tone was of an infomercial, and I think the message itself wasn`t horrible... It just reminded me of those commercials selling anti-bacterial hand soaps. "Every year more and more bacteria are too strong to be fought by regular anti-bacterial soaps! So use our extra-strength version!" All the while neglecting to mention one of the reasons they are getting stronger is due to the over use of such soaps.

The reason all those disposable chopsticks come from China is that there have been a bunch of "environmental protection" movements to stop their production in Japan... The thing is, when they were produced in Japan, they were made from wood culled from managed forests to stimulate growth and to prevent overcrowding. Without being able to cull wood from the managed areas, more trees end up dying and being wasted - which is why it`s so common now to find areas in planted forests that have completely died. "Protecting" the Japanese forests has actually had the opposite effect.

The large amount of food thrown out in Japan actually has little to do with normal people and their consumption. 80% of it is food disposed of prior to sale or processing... And of that 80% I believe most of it is government action to raise the value of food. A few years back there was too much cabbage produced so to keep the market from being flooded more than two thirds of the cabbage produced was bought by the government and left to rot. You can`t try to fix a problem without having the roots and reasons brought to attention.

I don`t know. I guess I just think that a lot of these figures are brought up to make people feel responsible and change their habits... Even though those habits are a very very tiny part of the issue and there would be much more effective ways to change things.
It`s like telling someone their humming is noise pollution so they should keep it down... Even though it would be much more effective to get them to come with you to ask a neighbor to turn down the 100 speakers he has pointed at the street.

Ah, of course. I got that part mixed up. Thanks for clarifying.