I watch NHK US a bit. Every night they have some show with a westerner riding some train line or riding a bike around and the landscape - which is pretty thin on people. Train lines manned by retired workers just to keep them going. Cyclist stops at at famous peach or strawberry orchards and there is some 90 year old on their knees weeding, kids are all in the city. Of course, it will all become industrial agro-farming once they're gone, but is that the best cultural, social, economic solution?
It reminds me of western Ireland. Hiking around for hours through the country and not seeing a living soul. Expensive (holiday I assume) houses with slate roofs on a couple of hectares and empty.
Western Ireland has been like that since the Great Potato Famine in 1840. Beautiful country; I've ridden from Carna to Galway on horseback. Not good farmland, though.
This sounds interesting, I'd love to watch it, could you link to one of those videos? I see lots of video results for NHK US, but a lot don't seem to be of the type that you're talking about.
Some can be seen on demand, others, they’ll give a repeat date. These are fascinating, and be warned, they can swing from happy to gut wrenching. There’s one episode where they’re in a Home Center talking to kids about their projects and the next they’re talking to a guy about kitchen tiles. He talks about his wife always wanting a new kitchen, but he was always too busy... and now she’s dead. So he’s working on the kitchen in her memory.
It’s an introspection on a society that is fraying at the edges. The producers seem to be trying to communicate that. As Krugman says, if you want to know our future, look to Japan.
NHK is just a national broadcaster, like NBC in the US. I assume the grandparent means semi-promotional documentaries about the Japanese countryside, like this.[1]
It reminds me of western Ireland. Hiking around for hours through the country and not seeing a living soul. Expensive (holiday I assume) houses with slate roofs on a couple of hectares and empty.