After hearing about everything Atron and David experienced in Japan, it definitely sounds like a surreal experience. I’ve always wondered what it would be like visiting Japan ever since I’ve grown to like their media, specifically when I witnessed Japan’s girl group AKB48 skyrocket in terms of popularity.
A place where AKB48 posters are regularly hung on the sides of buildings and singles can be bought in any music establishment? A place that has an official store where I can buy goods directly without an expensive middle-man? Where their magazines and photobooks are casually lain about in a 7-11? It’s definitely not the world I live in. Even throw-away fliers for various merchandise baring the sacred ‘AKB48′ logo feel like they have some sort of value simply because they don’t exist outside of Japan.
While I have to scour and look for whatever media my favorite idols appear in through the internet, all I would need to do in Japan is turn on the television.
Such thoughts were even more punctuated when I came across this Japanese commercial for the XBox 360′s ‘Kinect’.
It’s a pretty funny commercial, parodying old ads from the 70′s and 80′s, complete with antiqued audio, questionable dubbing and a grainy-bleached aesthetic; but the casual inclusion of SKE48′s Matsui Jurina and Matsui Rena had me doing a double-take. Was that really them? In a ‘Kinect’ ad? I bet the general public didn’t think much of it, but that’s what’s so funny; how the ordinary becomes extraordinary just because I live across the ocean.
