Japan is finished....lost..LOL

Just as there was a spark for an economic recovery, Japan has decided to dumb down their people even further than before... LOL

Reality TV heads to Japan

Zone Vision's Reality TV Network is heading for Japan, following a joint-venture agreement with the country's top five trading company, Jupiter Programming.

Under the terms of the deal, the joint-venture calls for the formation of a new company, Reality TV Japan Co Ltd, which will be based in Tokyo.

Zone Vision and Jupiter Programming will each have a 50% stake in the new company. The 24-hour channel will broadcast in Japanese and launches in February 2005.

[SB - NATPE 2] Chris Wronski, chairman and president of Zone Vision Enterprises, said: "This is a tremendous step in our worldwide expansion efforts for Reality TV.

"We've made great strides throughout Asia in the past year and have always felt this channel would do well in Japan," he added. "By teaming with Jupiter, we will have the ability to reach cable and satellite subscribers across the country and become the source for reality programming in Japan.ﾂ"

Jack Matthews, representative director, coo and evp of Jupiter Programming, said that there were few sources for reality programming in Japan and welcomed the move.

In order to launch Reality TV in the major Asian territory, the joint-venture has acquired the existing channel BB Factory, a gaming and computer channel from Softbank and Yahoo.

As a result, when Reality TV launches next month, it will be available on Sky Perfect DTH platforms and be distributed by Jupiter to cable and broadband platforms throughout Japan.

Jules Grant
12 Jan 2005
© C21 Media 2005

This will probably not help for those living in the Tokyo-Yokohama area:

Tokyo-Yokohama area rated world's riskiest on disaster scale
(Kyodo) _ Tokyo and Yokohama would be the worst hit of the world's big cities in the event of natural hazards such as the Dec. 26 massive earthquakes and tsunamis that hit Southeast and South Asia, a leading reinsurance company said in a report released Tuesday.

The grim assessment on Japan's capital and Yokohama, close to Tokyo, was carried in the report "Megacities -- Megarisks" issued by the Munich Re Group.

The company will submit the report to the U.N. World Conference on Disaster Reduction to begin Jan. 18 in Kobe, which was devastated by the Great Hanshin Earthquake on Jan. 17, 1995.

The report said there is an extremely high risk of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis and floods in coastal areas of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as their vicinities, where 35 million people reside.

If a massive earthquake occurs in this area, hundreds of thousands of people will become victims and economic losses will amount to several trillion dollars, with the likelihood that it will greatly affect the world economy, the report said.

Under the natural hazard risk index, the Tokyo-Yokohama conurbation ranks top with a score of 710, followed by San Francisco at 167, Los Angeles at 100, and the Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto area at 92.

Given that megacities, such as Tokyo-Yokohama, are "vulnerable to natural perils, technological risks, terrorism and environmental hazards," Munich Re Group said, there is a need for "more risk awareness" on the part of all parties concerned.

And to finish it off, the first Reality TV show in Japan will have to be Kops....

Japan's dim crims go bananas in Year of the Monkey

By Ryann Connell Staff Writer Mainichi Daily News January 11, 2005

Cops are not usually the first place a crook would go to ask for help, but that's exactly what one dim-witted robber did in Shizuoka in September to become a symbol of Japan's clumsiest criminals in 2004's Year of the Monkey.

The bicycle thief wasn't the only one. A knucklehead from Nagasaki went to the cops to get back a knapsack he'd left at the scene of his heist.

And a goofy gunman packing a shotgun went straight to the cops when he lost his way looking to track down a Tokyo loanshark.

These guys were just a handful of the simpler villains whose words and actions saw them end up in the arms of the law.

Like the Yokohama youth caught mugging an old woman late last month to get the money he needed to pay for CDs he was caught shoplifting.

Or the trite trio who made it third time unlucky when they were caught burgling the same house they had already successfully pilfered twice.

A Kagoshima crook slipped up when went back to the home of a woman whose knickers he had earlier nicked because he left his slippers there.

Panties proved a problem for another bloke who made a woman give him her skids as collateral for a loan only to open himself up to blackmailers.

A Tokyo bandit saved crimefighters a load of trouble when he shot himself on the way to bungling a raid brought on by a desperate need to finance his botched brothel business.

And an old man in Tottori prefecture did his best to show that crooks always return to the scene of their crimes (well, that's what they say in the old cartoons at least), when he did over a pachinko parlor one day and then went back to play at the same place the following day.

"I needed the money," the old man told the police. And just to show the old cartoons never really work in real life, there was the bandit who would hold up stores by pretending to be armed with a gun but actually only sticking a finger in his pocket.

Stuck in a trap of an entirely different type was the peeping tom who became entangled in the drainpipes above a women's toilet at Kansai International Airport.

And headed for the cooler now is the clumsy Kagoshima kook who locked himself in a freezer so he could steal some crabs only to have to call for help when he couldn't get out again.

Not all Japan's dumbest crooks were entirely lacking in neural activity. There was the fishy guy whose angle on crime involved him using fishing equipment to reel in electronic goods in Shizuoka Prefecture.

Luring a Tokyo man with lust and snaring 8 million yen of his money was another guy who pretended to be a sex-starved flight attendant.

And then there was the other burglar who covered his tracks by replacing money stolen from a bank safe with paper cut in identical sizes so that it would take longer before anybody noticed the cash was gone.

Sometimes, the crooks could even be quick-witted, like the wag who relieved a taxi driver of his car while the driver stopped to relieve himself.

Though sometimes the baddies mistakenly thought they were being clever, like the locksmith who deliberately broke toilet doors at an airport because he thought it would bring him more business and the student who diddled a vending machine so he could play his boom box only to be arrested because he stole electricity with the value of a mere 1 yen.

Even the man who stole thousands of lottery tickets must have thought he had some chance of bolstering his bounty, but the twit merely ended up with a bunch of almost worthless stubs when only a few turned out to be winners.

Who knows what Yokohama's gate thieves were thinking, but the gates have been shut on them now, perhaps because they couldn't fence their pinched property.

And crimebusters were dirty on the guy who raised a stink by stealing a sewerage truck because he wanted to drive "a vehicle different from normal cars." The owner of the poo pickup was shocked.

"I met the (thief) before when I visited his home to clean up his sewerage," the truck owner said. "I never though about the truck being stolen. I don't understand why he did it." If the filthy thief wasn't in the **** on his joyride, he certainly was after his arrest, though many may pooh-pooh such a suggestion.

Sometimes, crooks failed to realize that pretending to be cops wouldn't be enough to prevent them from being caught, like the rotten egg who acted as though he was a special police officer to squeeze fines out of others and the Tokyo man who strolled around in a police uniform he bought through a mail-order catalog.

"At first I was content with just wearing the uniform at home, but when I walked around the neighborhood, people asked me for directions and they thanked me when I answered them, and I got hooked," the counterfeit cop said after his arrest.

(Originally published on December 19, 2004)

First reality show? Half of Japanese programming is reality shows of one kind or another, albeit with a celebrity panel involved somehow...

And wasn't Takeshi's Castle or Ryouri no tetsujin "reality TV"?

yeah, but they weren't Amelikanized, so I guess they don't count...