On August 31, I went to NHK Culture Center at Aoyama-itchome in Tokyo to attend a lecture presentation of Ms. Yurie Omi. As I wrote in this entry, I have been a fan of the NHK Announcer, and once met her at her talk show in Nagoya two years ago. This time it was held in Tokyo and it was much easier to have access to the venue, so I applied to this lecture presentation as soon as NHK Culture Center began selling the tickets.
(more…)Tag: news
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Yurie Omi
According to Wikipedia, “Yurie Omi (born July 27, 1988) is a Japanese female announcer, television reporter, television personality, and news anchor for NHK. Omi is one of the hosts of NHK morning news show NHK News Ohayō Nippon. She is also the co-host of NHK television series Bura Tamori aired from April 2016.”
I’ve been a big fan of Yurie Omi since the beginning of this year when I sat in front of the TV by chance at my parents’ house and watched her for the first time in Bura Tamori (I had rarely seen it before, though). This program is a travel show where NHK’s broadcaster strolls Japan’s particular town or area with Tamori, one of Japan’s renowned TV personalities, and a geophysicist, a local historian, or a curator, to investigate the place’s topics such as terrain features, history, culture, and civil engineering.
Why do I think she is so attractive? I think the reason is three-fold. Firstly, she sometimes shows goofy behavior in her TV programs, although she is actually very smart and good-looking. She wore her dress back to front in the news show. In Bura Tamori, she read the thermometer incorrectly. (She said the temperature of hot spring water was 940 degrees Celcius while it really pointed 94.0 degrees.) Such slight weaknesses mean imperfection, which is what Japanese people value in tradition. This mentality makes the Japanese regard her weaknesses as charming. Secondly, she acts or speaks less highhandedly than average so-called “joshi-ana” and TV personalities. They often show off, but she doesn’t. They often speak aggressively, but she never does it. Her attitude like this gives a favorable impression to many Japanese viewers. Thirdly, most of her personality looks so similar to mine that I find something congenial in her. I don’t think she is such a personality that is good at thinking on her feet and speaking off the cuff with a ready wit. Rather, she looks genuine, and she can only do diligently what she has to do with simple honesty. Such characteristics are just like mine.
For those reasons, I got fascinated by her. I watch every TV program she appears in. I get up at five in the morning on weekdays to watch NHK’s morning news show she hosts. In Saturday evening I watch Bura Tamori to see her traveling with Tamori.
In addition to watching her on TV, I had a chance to see her with the naked eye. One day I got the information that she was going to hold a lecture presentation at Nagoya on September 30 and was requesting for audience. I applied for it because it might be my once-in-a-lifetime chance to meet her up.
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Virginia Tech, Nebraska and Sasebo gunshootings
Today’s news is repeatedly reporting that a man broke into a sports club building in Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan, firing a shotgun at random and resulted in killing a man and a woman and injuring six people. It was said that the Japanese shooter shot himself to death. A victim happened to be there for waiting a friend.
In Japan or in any other place, slaughters by persons touched in the head can occur everywhere. It might be fresh in mind that a Korean guy fired a shotgun and killed 33 persons in Virginia Tech. In this month, eight people were shot to death by Robert Hawkins who shot at random at a shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska. It is not true that you think “Japan is safe and foreign countries aren’t.” Anywhere you are, there are no safe places these days.
We should keep in mind that life and death of us is just destiny and we can’t expect when we die. Death suddenly comes to us—maybe today. When you walk on the street, you may be hit by a drunk driver’s car, a hard block a mad guy throw from the building by you, or a people himself who attempts suicide by diving from the top of the building. When you are waiting for a train on the platform, a mentally-unstable woman may suddenly push you off the platform on the rails in front of a train rushing into the station. When you are riding on the train, the train may crash. When you are driving, an oncoming car may come to you to collide. When you even are in your house, an earthquake may happen and the ceiling may fall down on you. It’s unpredictable if you may suddenly lose your life.
What we can do to live our lives with no regrets is “not to put off till tomorrow what we can do today.” If you have something you want to do, do it right away. You may want to leave anything unfinished when you go to bed at night, not to regret even if you can’t wake up forever.