My 2 minutes on Japanese TV

One day you are a  lady of leisure, the next day you are a TV star. That's just the way it rolls in Tokyo. Ha ha, I wish!

I was on TV very briefly when a report was done on Second Harvest Japan and I happened to be volunteering that day. The TV crew from TBS Channel 6 filmed us for their program 'Ippuku!' and were we on from 8:20am in the morning for about 20 minutes on Monday 19th May.

Some of the other volunteers getting interviewed.

Here are some dodgy screenshots I took while watching the report from home. I assume this was part of the explanation of how Second Harvest Japan works.

This part of the report cracked me up. They mentioned something about having lots of gaijin (foreign) volunteers and showed a shot of me packing some boxes.

And they say gaijin again and zoom in on me!

And this is me trying hard to listen to the questions in Japanese, understanding very little and then waiting for the 2nd presenter to translate the question into English. I then reply in English which was later dubbed over in Japanese and subtitled as a bonus measure.

I managed to get two whole sentences out in Japanese before I had to switch to English. My Japanese teachers at home would have been so proud. Ha ha. 

The little guys in boxes on the bottom right are the presenters back in the studio. They like to show the expressions of the main presenters while they are watching the pee-recorded reports.

I told them about volunteering in Australia and how I used to pick up donated food for a similar organisation back in Melbourne. They seemed interested in hearing that food is also wasted in Australia but we try and collect it and re-distribute it too.

They seemed to get some good publicity from the report and a small increase in donations. They also had a few more people arrive to collect food because they saw the story as well!

The volunteer co-coordinator was keen to point out to me that the program was shown nationally from Hokkaido to Okinawa.  Watch out Japan, I'm taking over!