In fact, a Japanese gal was pretty shocked when I told her I loved Seed, she hated it and preferred other Gundam series

Many things say Japan – kimonos, temples, sushi…
Yet it’s the image of a girl in a cardboard box that BBC Four has chosen to trail its Japan Season. Using an animation, the trail explains that ‘girl in a box’ is a Japanese expression given to a girl with over protective parents. Have a guess at the origins of another idiom in the trail, ‘bar code bald’. That one describes the comb-over job used by balding men. Oliver Harnett from Red Bee (who made the trails) describes the thinking behind
it all. ‘Language is the key to any culture, and in the course of our research, we discovered that the Japanese have an amazing array of words of which there is no equivalent. They’re weird portholes into how Japanese people see the
world.’ Channel controller Richard Channel controller Richard
Klein agrees. ‘The trails are a way of saying Japan is just different.’ They certainly give an enigmatic introduction to a season on a country that Klein
describes an enigma. Inspiration for the season
came off the back of Japan: A Story Of Love And Hate, where
filmmaker Sean McCallister meets a businessman (salagirl in box ryman) who lost everything when the bubble burst in the 90s. ‘It offered the chance to
look at Japan through a different lens… I thought if we could find other ways to show that it’s a difficult place to understand, we could have a season,’
says Klein. What followed were two other commissions: Fish! A Japanese Obsession about the country’s cultural and culinary connections. And
Japan: In Search of Wabi Sabi With Marcel Theroux, about
the wabi sabi philosophy, (which Wiki describes as ‘a
Japanese world view or aesthetic
centred on the
acceptance of transience’).
In among the commissioned
programmes, trails,
and archive footage about the
country, Red Bee has created
15 mini ‘Japanese words of
the day’ films. ‘You should be
aware that there is something
Japanese going on on the
channel,’ says Harnett.
You’ll probably come away
with a better Japanese vocabulary
and insight into the country,
but it won’t be the complete
encyclopaedia. You’ll recognise
that Japan is still mysterious,
but that’s part of its charm. You
could probably say the same
for England really…’
Clare Dyson