Originally Posted by
waddo
Those NHK vids are awful advertisements masquerading as documentaries. Chance meetings are all pre-arranged. I watched them and never stopped cringing. I live in Japan.
The "chance meetings" did seem a little forced in the episode I watched, with some furtive glancing off to the sides by the person encountered. Frankly, I would have fast-forwarded through them if I were watching online. The scenery, though, looked fantastic.
A long time ago, in the pre-digital age when I was a teen-ager (think early 1970's), I used to listen to NHK in English via shortwave. There was a program called "One in 100 Million" that would focus on some person doing something uniquely Japanese. It was interesting without feeling like an advert. Back then, the only way that I could possibly conceive of going to Japan would be to join the US military (didn't happen).