A story I forgot to tell earlier

There's a regional morning TV show here called "Mezamashi Terebi." (Warning: Link contains really loud J-Pop, and weird flash animation) A few months ago, the producers of Mezamashi Terebi ("wake-up TV") got in trouble for faking human-interest type news stories. For example, they had a feature where a pro baseball player is given a good luck charm by his girlfriend, and in the next game, he got four hits including a home run. Turns out that the good luck charm came from one of the producers ("say that your girlfriend gave you this") and the interview bits were scripted. The producers were sacked, and the show was re-tooled.

There'd be no point to this little story, but for the fact that a week before the scandal broke, I was actually interviewed for this show.

Sakaiminato is the home town of a famous cartoonist named Shigeru Mizuki. His most famous work is a series entitled ゲゲゲの鬼太郎 (Ge-ge-ge no Kitaro). Kitaro is a mystical character who protects ordinary folk like you and me from the supernatural -- usually things from Japanese folklore, but occasionally monsters from other countries as well. Part of his arsenal are the (sentient) wooden sandals on his feet (下駄, "geta").

During one of the annual local festivals, there is a geta kicking contest, where you kick for distance. I took part (I got 17 meters, the winner got somewhere around 30). After I was finished, I turned to put my socks and shoes back on...and all of a sudden two video cameras were in my face.

The "reporter" (it was a fluff piece, after all) interviewed me in Japanese, asking me whether I had worn geta before (no), how it felt (um...okay?), and what I was doing in Japan, among other things. Apparently, my answers were comprehensible, because they showed pretty much all of it on TV the next morning. (They even took a close up of my foot, which was about five or six cm longer than the average Japanese guy's foot.)

People still come up to me these days (MONTHS later!) to tell me they saw me on TV. I wanted to get a copy of it, but before I could call the TV network and ask, they had their little shake up, and my boss advised me to forget about it. Probably for the best. And no, there was not a causal relationship there.