☆　Welcome to the NHK!　☆

Two weeks ago, me and all other exchange students from my university (Tôkai) were able to make an excursion with our teachers to go see Kabuki (traditional Japanese theater) and visit the NHK Studio Park! I totally forgot to blog about it was too lazy to edit all pictures that’s why I am late on that event. Since it was a thrilling day I don’t want it to get lost on some empty space on my computer, so here you go!

All exchange students (were approximately 100 I’d say) went with three busses from our university to Tokyo which is a two hour ride by car. I LOVE TAKING THE BUS. I don’t know, I prefer it over train. I love sitting at the window, watching the unknown landscape flowing by and get lost in my thoughts…. however, since we got up at 7 AM and I am not a morning person I fell asleep right after we took off and woke up 5 minutes before we arrived at the Tokyo National Theater xD““ Usually I don’t do that because I really love to watch the world through the window but I was too tired although I drank coffee. We didn’t really know what to expect from the Kabuki performance since nobody had seen any of it. It’s still a very elite form of performance and is therefore extremely expensive (barely under 100$). I was very grateful that our university sponsored us the trip for free! 😀

Kabuki is, as I wrote earlier, a traditional form of Japanese theater. I don’t know that much about it honestly, we never really had that in university as a topic. All roles are displayed by men, even the female ones which is seen as high art in Japan. The actors mainly sing rather than speak and mostly in very old, complicated Japanese or even Ancient Japanese, therefore it’s hard to understand even for native speakers. We had the whole script in modern Japanese which made it a lot more easier to understand. 

Sadly, the performance we watched was A LOT more boring than the video I displayed here, basically nothing happened in our performance. It was about some guys on an island, a ship came which would take every guy back to Japan except for one and then they fought for hours who could go on the ship and who couldn’t xD Nobody really liked the performance and the singing was really strange. My friend Ashley laughed 2 hours in a row which was very funny for me too (we laughed silently to not embarrass the actors, of course.)  Although I didn’t like it that much I am grateful for the experience, most people don’t have the chance to watch this for free, so thank you dear Tôkai University 😀

We then headed for the NHK Studio Park. I guess most of you NHK which is the national television programme of Japan. The NHK Studio Park is half museum and half real broadcasting center which means they are really producing some stuff there and you can watch. Unfortunately they didn’t produce any shows when we were there except for a very very annoying child series and everyone was screaming with veeerryyy high voices, lol. I kinda liked it though because Domo-Kun was everywhere!! 😀

Pachi and I waiting for entry to the NHK Studio Park <: Read on for more pictures & next post preview 😀

Entering the Studio Park, it was really crowded in the beginning! :c

They had different areas which had all different color themes, I loved the mint green area because of it’s color and because of the Domo-Kun overload! 😀

Interactive quiz and games for Kids

Pachi was the earnest news speaker while I was just the sexy sports + weather bitch looking good LOL

I FEEL A LACK OF DOMO-KUN IN THIS POST 😀 (I don’t know what Ashley was doing…)

I just loved how interactive the Park was, one really could do a loooot of things. Like trying out cameras, learning to make animations etc. Japanese museum are so so so much better than the boring ones we have in Germany, even the National Museum is so much cooler than any other museum I went to!! (And I visited a loooot of museum in my life already.) They really do a lot to make „facts“ more interesting, I highly recommend to visit some museum when you are in Japan, it sometimes is more like an amusement park than anything else :3  And it wouldn’t be Japan if they didn’t have some special purikura machines! (There are several „special“ purikura machines like at the Tokyo Tower, the Fuji, amusement parks and tourist spots!)

….DOMO-KUUUUN! 😀

One couldn’t write or stamp anything on them, just chose 4 backgrounds, then chose 2 of them and you get the pictures printed out. Guess that is to prevent extremely long waiting time in case it is crowded. I really like the idea though, you could also get a lot of little goodies like Domo-kun stickers with your name in Hiragana on it etc! 😀

Altogether it was a really nice day. We were super tired afterwards but it was fun and I saw a lot of things I may not have seen by myself. I really like the little events our university does from time to time to support their exchange students (we did a trip to Hakone back in October as well :3 )  I don’t know if someone is even reading until here, but I have a preview for my next post! I proudly announce my first DIY tutorial and I am so excited and hope a lot of people will find it useful! ^___^

Thank you for reading & see you -hopefully- next time around!

– Sam.

P.S. If anybody gets my pun in the title of this post I will definitely marry that one, lol. (I doubt that though.)