| I miss Nippon.
One of the strangest things about Japan is the appearance in tacky adverts of major Hollywood names. It goes like this, major megastar is between films and needs a million dollars or so to buy a new pet unicorn. A Japanese company comes beaming up to them offering a million dollars if they'll advertise their coffee-based sugar drink or their new Pachinko machine over in Japan. The adverts will never be shown in the west, so the superstar is quite happy to oblige, thinking the Japanese a simple, bizarre race, safe in the knowledge that their credibility won't take a tumble if the only people who see them shilling are weirdo foreigners, while everyone back home still thinks them the cornerstone of integrity and wonderfulness.
So, as a result, I saw Kiefer Sutherland selling a tasty chocolate bar in a 24-themed advert that involved Jack Bauer defusing a bomb, only to be interrupted by a Japanese man giving him a tasty chocolate bar to eat while he's working, Tommy Lee-Jones selling a coffee-based sugar drink called Boss, where he not only appeared in an advert as a delivery man, but also had huge billboards all over Tokyo which simply featured his gigantic face and the word BOSS and, super-ironically, Scarlett Johansson selling a coffee-based cool milkshake in an advert that had her just saying the name of the product and sipping it from a straw with her gigantic Leslie Ash lips, all the while wearing an elegant ballgown while lying down on what looked like a Metro platform, but could have been down in a sewer tunnel.
What's brilliant is that the big names think they're being clever and exploiting the silly foreigns for some quick, simple cash that they'll never suffer repercussions for, while the Japanese companies are actually exploiting the simple fact that these people are big famous stars, exhibiting the white, English-speaking foreign stars like ornaments, having them do nothing more complicated than smile dumbly at the camera, say some bizzare line, sing a ridiculous song and generally not know what the Hell is going on.
The key reason being that none of the westerners can be fucked to learn more than one language. |
