Hairyneville
Angry Postal Worker
- 28 Nov 2002
- 54
- 6
- 18
Tokyo. Gleaming megalopolis or characterless concrete amalgam of lesser settlements? I'm sure everyone has their own opinion . . . but that's not what I'm interested in.
It seems that whenever I see Britain represented in foreign media (usually movies, but comics, novels and even the news, too) London and London accents are always at the fore. This really annoys me. I live about thirty miles from Central London in what used to be a quiet part of the Surrey countryside - urbanisation has seen to it that all the farms have sold up and turned into either golf courses or business parks - and I hate London. Every time I go there I'm either harrassed by huge groups of kids, small groups of coppers or, in the worst case scenario, I'm mugged. Even the "local" BBC news programme focuses on London and is always going on about "our city".
Plus, of course, Britain is in reality three countries - four if you count Northern Ireland as a country separate from the Irish Republic. Thinking of London as the epitome of British life seems short-sighted.
So, getting to the point (finally). It seems that every readily available source on modern Japanese culture focuses almost exclusive on the Tokyo metropolitan area. There've been a lot of programmes on Brit TV lately about Japan - alas, mostly about the sex trade in, you guessed it, Tokyo. . . I'm convinced that this can't be all there is to Japan. What do people living in Okinawa, Kyushu or Hokkaido think about foreign views of their country when it's based on information about Tokyo? Do you lot think first of Tokyo when you think of Japan? What about foreign views of your own country? Tell me, tell me. . .
And even if no one responds to my post, at least I finally got to write "megalopolis". . . Twice!
It seems that whenever I see Britain represented in foreign media (usually movies, but comics, novels and even the news, too) London and London accents are always at the fore. This really annoys me. I live about thirty miles from Central London in what used to be a quiet part of the Surrey countryside - urbanisation has seen to it that all the farms have sold up and turned into either golf courses or business parks - and I hate London. Every time I go there I'm either harrassed by huge groups of kids, small groups of coppers or, in the worst case scenario, I'm mugged. Even the "local" BBC news programme focuses on London and is always going on about "our city".
Plus, of course, Britain is in reality three countries - four if you count Northern Ireland as a country separate from the Irish Republic. Thinking of London as the epitome of British life seems short-sighted.
So, getting to the point (finally). It seems that every readily available source on modern Japanese culture focuses almost exclusive on the Tokyo metropolitan area. There've been a lot of programmes on Brit TV lately about Japan - alas, mostly about the sex trade in, you guessed it, Tokyo. . . I'm convinced that this can't be all there is to Japan. What do people living in Okinawa, Kyushu or Hokkaido think about foreign views of their country when it's based on information about Tokyo? Do you lot think first of Tokyo when you think of Japan? What about foreign views of your own country? Tell me, tell me. . .
And even if no one responds to my post, at least I finally got to write "megalopolis". . . Twice!