While “Team GB” (what’s wrong with “Great Britain”?) enjoys its best Olympics for 100 years we ex-pats in Japan have so far been unable to watch most of the action. As Chris Hoy won his third gold medal three TV channels were broadcasting the men’s parallel bars. One channel is enough, surely?

Yes yes, I understand that Japan is good at judo and gymnastics and therefore it’s natural that TV companies would focus on them, but it’s damn annoying. Plus I can’t watch the highlights on the internet due to regional licensing restrictions.

Ah well, at least I was able to watch the women’s 400m final last night.

One more thing: since when has it been okay to use the word “medal” as a verb?

Despite my moaning about the general rubbishness of Japanese TV, the internet still manages to provide the odd gem from its “prank” heyday. One of my all-time favourites is the “100 man troop”:

I can’t imagine this kind of thing would ever be able to happen in the UK: the very idea of sending 100 screaming nutters down a street towards a retirement-age salaryman (with a possible dodgy ticker) would have TV executives wetting themselves.

In what has to be the best news story of the week, a Japanese high school student was accosted by a slow loris pygmy monkey while walking home. Even more intriguingly, the student in question looks remarkably like a species of monkey himself:

The student said: “Firstly, the monkey climbed up onto my back, and after that climbed even further upwards.”

Slow lorises are not native to Japan, and are found mainly in southeast asia. The buying and selling of them was made illegal in September 2007, but they can still be bought on the thriving exotic-species black market for a cool ¥1 million (£5,000).

NHK news report:

Clip of a domesticated slow loris living somewhere in Japan:

When I first came to Japan I expected that - seeing as the economic bubble burst in the early 90’s - the trend of Japanese companies paying horrendous sums for past-it Hollywood “talent” to advertise their goods was well and truly over. Oh how very wrong I was…

Tommy Lee Jones is currently the face of Boss Coffee, one of many, many canned coffee companies that provide that essential caffeine-boost for your average nine-to-nine salaryman. The basic premise is an alien being lands in Japan, takes the form of Tommy Lee Jones in order to “blend in” with the locals (err, well…), and attempts to understand the nature of human society by taking random part-time jobs in Tokyo. The end result is a collection of bat-shit insane TV adverts that, thanks to the power of YouTube, you too can now enjoy! Here’s the latest one, in which Tommy takes a job working the night shift in a karaoke bar:

There’s also Meg Ryan currently advertising Nescafe, but sadly with Nestle being a nondescript multinational corporation with an international brand image to uphold, all the commercials are about as amusing as an evening down the pub with Michael Howard.