Japanese CMs

So commercials, or CMs as they're called in Japan, are pretty... interesting in Japan. Most of them, on the interesting scale, I would put up there with superbowl commercials. Some of them you're just kind of, wtf?

However, recently, due to the earthquake, many companies have actually pulled their advertisements because they don't want to be running them in the midst of a national crisis. I don't blame them. This means that there is pretty much only one company that's been running commercials - AC Japan, or Advertising Council Japan. They do things like public service announcements on tv. Breast exams, cancer screenings, so on.

At the end of every commercial they have this little jingle that, due to the fact that ALL the commercials are AC commercials and that there's a LOT of them, pretty much everyone who has even looked at a TV this past month knows it. They've also been running this あいさつ (aisatsu) greeting commercial for kids that basically teaches you the different phrases to say like "itadakimasu" or "ohayo" and combines them with animals.

You can watch that video here.

Since practically everyone knows this commercial, if you make a reference to it, there's a 98% chance that people have heard of it. This can lead to some pretty awesome things, especially if you have a super genki class full of boys who like to speak (even if it's not in English).

In my technical high school, we have a listening exercise at the beginning with this multiple choice section where they have to listen to the tape and circle the correct word and the correct meaning to match the word (it also uses, I swear, the cheesiest background music ever, and part of me dies a little every time I have to hear it, which is four times a day). Naturally, some of these answer combinations include A. Some include C. Some, though a little rarer, happen to be A and C.

So what did the super genki/energetic/talkative boys in my electricity class do?

We have the students volunteer to read out the questions and stuff, so they raised their hands and shouted quite energetically for us to pick them. Unwittingly, this past monday, we chose one of the kids thinking "isn't this great that they're volunteering?"

Little did we know how great it was going to be.

They *sang* the answer (AC) in the form of the AC jingle. So. Effin'. Hilarious. We had to stop for a minute or two because everyone was laughing so hard, us teachers included. Seriously, I think that's been a highlight of my teaching so far. The second most amusing time was probably today, when we played the Telephone game and instead of "I like to eat red fish with rice for lunch" one row answered "I like to eat red fish and Jeshika" for lunch.

I corrected them on my name and we told them what they had actually said in Japanese. Hilariousness. I felt kind of bad for laughing, but only a little.

Some spoofs off the AC commercials are pretty awesome too. So while the song is incredibly annoying since it gets stuck in my head (constantly) and I can now sing the entire jingle,some of the side products have been quite amusing.

On a more boring note, it's raining, but supposedly, rainy season hasn't actually started yet; this is just the rain from some typhoon somewhere. Le sigh. I don't mind the rain as long as I don't have anywhere I have to go, but oh god, the humidity.

I can't wait until summer. Not.

Crap, I totally have the AC aisatsu song stuck in my head now. And whose fault was that?