The Kohaku Uta Gassen (Red and White Singing Festival) is a four hour and forty-five minute Japanese musical extravaganza. It's wholesome family entertainment, broadcast every year for New Year's on NHK: a big stage show with all the pop singers, enka singers, and novelty acts who hit it big over the year, featuring lots of production numbers, in which nothing stands in the way of spectacle. Certainly not the bounds of good taste. The more horrific the production numbers, the better, as far as I'm concerned. The show is framed as a song contest between the red team (girls) and the white team (boys). The drag queens and drag kings get to pick which team they want to be on.
This year I noticed that whenever the song featured the word "baby" in English, that was the cue to send out the NHK children's dance troupe. Which led to some incongruous things, like the pop singer dressed in black netting singing "Take me, baby" (in English) surrounded by ten-year-old girls in pink and blue tissue lamédancing with heart-shaped balloons, and big plush cartoon characters from NHK children's programs.
Taken in context, this was not too bad.
There's another group, sort of a novelty act. They do costumes: long black coats, huge poofy rockabilly hair, black sunglasses. For their production number, they started out with a boxing theme. The group came out on stage in their usual costumes, but accompanied by boxers: on one side, a group of Japanese dancers in white fat suits, satin shorts, and boxing gloves, and on the other side, black guys (Actual black people, from what I could tell, as opposed to painted Japanese people. In this setting, would Japanese people in blackface be worse?), also in boxer drag, but with special goggles of big, round, white eyeballs, so they looked like cartoon black people. Then a boxing ring set piece, beneath a looming, ten-foot-high golden hand, is slid forward and some Japanese guys with the poofy rockabilly hair, but wearing American flag wrestling singlets (Because boxing is American?), dance around on it and sing backup. This continues for a while and I'm not really paying attention to the song, which is secondary to the spectacle anyway. I'm still processing the eyeball goggles.
Suddenly the camera pulls back to a view of the side stages that extend along the walls of NHK Hall and into the audience. Swarms of tiny people in black suits come running down the side stages and—"Oh! Are those children?"
Yes. And the inevitable English lines with the word "baby" followed:
"Can you master baby? Can't you master baby? Master master baby."
(All the lyrics are subtitled. This is what was on the subtitles, bad punctuation and all.) (I'm not making this up.)
So the children launch into their dance number amid the boxers and the singers, and the song continues. The lead singer picks up a kid and holds him while he continues to sing. On cue, the kid yanks off the fake hair, so the singer is left with the other part of the wig standing up all around the edge of his bald head. The child is replaced on the floor, the song continues. The children start tossing the fake hair back and forth over their heads and when it hits the floor, they stomp on it. All this while, the boxers and wrestlers are still shaking booty in the background. Eventually the song ends (Thank God!), the hairpiece is retrieved and the lead singer is carried off by his compatriots.
At this point there's still nearly three hours to go.
In the next hour: Darth Vader and the Dance of the Sugarplum Stormtroopers.
616 words | January 1, 2006 08:27 PM | Real true story