Fahsto Stagee

Running workout today. I do need to post these on the calendar, but today was a "tempo run." That means your first and last miles are easy jogs, while the middle miles, however many, are run hard. It's great for road racing, which is what my cardio workouts are still nominally oriented toward. I imagine that after Thanksgiving I'll do cardio more targeted at Ninja Warrior. Soon as I figure out what that might be.

Caught another episode of Ninja Warrior on G4 last night. I DVR them, so I've no idea when this aired, and it's obviously from like six or seven years ago. But it reminded me of an odd phenomenon you can observe throughout the series: the pervasiveness of English.

Sasuke started as a Japanese show, for a Japanese audience. The contestants, and the spectators, still are almost all Japanese, and the announcer gives his running commentary in Japansese. Yet throughout the show you see and hear English. First off, the show's logo is "Sasuke" in big letters. If they have the Japanese word for Sasuke anywhere I wouldn't recognize it, but it's sure not as prominent as the English translation. And the names for the obstacles are all in English! And bad English, or "Engrish," at that. I don't understand a word of Japanese, but I can hear them call the stages of Sasuke "Fahsto Stagee," "Secondo Stagee," and so on. Then there's the "Rowwing Rog," "Spidu WRaku," "Jumm-Pingu Bah," and so on. Even the contestants' clothes, which aren't uniforms by any sense but do have corporate logos all over them like NASCAR drivers, are in English.

Why would the Japanese use so much English in their own game show? Could it be that the Japanese are so comfortable in English that they sprinkle it in everyday life that casually? I've never been to Japan, but I'd be astounded if English were so ubiquitous as to have penetrated Japanese culture that much. What does it say about Anglo-American culture that even in Japan they're using at least a pidgin English even on their game shows? It's kind of a compliment, I guess.

It's easy to look at Ninja Warrior and say that it's a competition for stereotypically slight, skinny Asians. But when you see how much they've assimilated American culture, it gives a big gaijin like me hope that I'm not ontologically precluded from competition -- or victory.