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September 27, 2005
The Waterboys
Oh. My. God. I wish I had a blank video tape free... you guys have no idea what you're missing here.
It's amazing just what makes it onto TV here in Japan, sometimes. For example, right now I appear to be watching the Japanese National High School Synchronised Swimming Championships... which would be weird enough, only it's the Boys' championships. You know... for boys. Not girls. Boys. Doing synchronised swimming. Seriously, we have a team of about twenty 12-to-15-yr-old schoolboys in matching speedos, doing the most outrageously fey aquatic dance routine you've ever seen. It's terrible. Just terrible.
So many things make it much much worse than you might imagine... the trance soundtrack, the Busby-Berkeley-50's-musical-style diving into the swimming pool in perfect synchronisation, the matching speedos and bathing caps, the absolutely menacing fixed grimaces - make them stop, please, just stop f**king smiling like that, you look like your face is about to snap in half - the prancing, the more prancing, the (male) presenter sporting a pink boa... it's the Perfect Storm of camp.
Amazingly, I have not had to make any of this up. Oh - the music's just changed. It's Radiohead's Idioteque. That's too good to be true - doesn't it have a line in it, something like "I'm not scaremongering, this is really happening"? And now the Star Wars theme.
And all this is taking place in an apparently specially-constructed swimming pool, with light show, fireworks, and even a rising-out-of-the-floor golden bauble thing to bear the enthusiastically posing teens to poolside. We're talking scarred for life, here. Oh god - the male coach of the team is, by the end of their routine, in tears. Fabulous, darling, just fabulous.
I think I'm going to turn the TV off now, and just sit in silent horror for the rest of the evening. Goodnight.
Posted by chris at September 27, 2005 10:04 PM | Permalink
Comments
You may want to try out Englishman in Osaka for another hilarious post about this :)
Posted by: quaisi at October 2, 2005 05:02 PM
Sorry, quaisi, your html appears to have gotten stripped there. Bad Movable Type - go to your kennel. I'll see if I can sort that out.
Meanwhile, thanks for the link. Here's that URL in full plain-text glory for everyone's copying-and-pasting pleasure:
http://anenglishmaninosaka.blogspot.com/2005/09/synchronised-mincing.html
Update: HTML tags now allowed in comments. Get hreffing, everybody.
Posted by: chris at October 2, 2005 08:47 PM
I support any activity which promotes teenage Asian boys getting in speedos and dancing around. There should be many more venues for wholesome synchronized swim events for svelte, Japanese lads with their smooth, flawless skin, perfectly round, muscular butttocks, and generally lean, taut physiques. And please let us not forget the virtually unexplored are of teenage Japanes boys oil wrestling in speedos. That's just good clean fun.
Posted by: tim at June 14, 2006 08:35 PM
While I couldn't disagree more, Tim, I suspect that if you hang around long enough, it'll appear on NHK eventually.
Posted by: chris at June 14, 2006 08:58 PM
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