Granny Pee-Pants and Other Tales

I regret to inform all of you that this is going to be an extremely stupid post. Just thought I`d warn you in advance.

As Ryan mentioned in the previous post, Japanese television is second to none. During my training week, my fellow trainees and I became absorbed in a Japanese drama about a woman having an affair with a married man. The moral transgression inherent in such an act wasn`t what kept us enthralled. No, it was the woman`s son -- a seven-year-old boy who put thumbtacks in the married man`s shoes, tricked him into drinking poison, and even attempted to set him on fire. Finally, when the kid came after him with a knife, the man strangled him to death in front of the kid`s mother. It was then revealed that the man had murdered his own father when he was just a tyke.

The moral of this story? Who the hell knows. I suppose ostensibly it`s `don`t screw around with a man who`s already spoken for,` but it came across more like, `don`t let your homicidal psycho son hang out with your homicidal psycho boyfriend while you sit in the next room crying about what a homewrecker you are. And don`t keep poison where your son can get at it. And take your son to therapy if he tries to, oh I don`t know, SET YOUR BOYFRIEND ON FIRE.`

I`ve come across less spectacular -- though no less weird -- examples of Japanese TV insanity over the past two weeks. One that leaps immediately to mind is the case of Granny Pee-Pants.

Watch your leg, kid. Grandma just drank a manhattan.

A couple days ago, I was sitting around in the Fuchu-cho municipal office waiting to get my temporary Alien Registration Certificate. It was about nine in the morning and there was some sort of `Ask the Doctors` program playing on the television in the lobby. Well, that`s what it turned out to be, anyway. I didn`t know initially. The first thing I saw was an old woman sitting up in bed and sneezing. The camera zoomed in on her as she made a face of abject horror and panic. I thought she had a cold or something and this was Japan`s heavy-handed way of reminding us to get our seasonal flu shots. I thought wrong.

The program proceeded to show the same woman laughing on a couch, stopping abruptly, and making the same terrified face as the camera zoomed in. She was shown picking up a flower pot -- same abrupt stop, same freaked expression. Finally, they showed her walking up the stairs and halting on the landing, clutching her stomach and looking like someone had just told her she had ovarian cancer. Only when they cut to a shot of an animated bladder did I realize what this woman`s problem was: she couldn`t stop peeing her pants.

This was all well and good, but then they decided to kick it up a notch by revealing that the woman we had just seen had been an actor performing a dramatization of true events. We then saw the woman upon whom Granny Pee-Pants had been based. But here`s the kicker: they only showed her from the neck down. And when she talked, they put a distorted chipmunk effect over her voice like she was informing on the mob or something. Essentially, this show took one woman`s extremely mundane struggle with overactive bladder and presented it with all the drama and uncalled-for gravitas of an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.

All this for a woman with pee pants. Granny, seriously, if you`re so embarrassed about peeing your pants that you won`t show your face or let us hear your unaltered voice, don`t go on TV at all. Go out and buy some Depends for Christ`s sake! And what kind of a slow news day does it have to be before you get dramatic reenactments of an old woman repeatedly pissing herself?

Japan, you are one in a million.