Fascinating Repairmen: A Japanese TV show about mending things like a book and a grater
‘Fascinating Repairmen’ is a Japanese series featuring people giving a new lease of life to old objects. Some of these are much loved items, like the book in the video below. Others are just bit odd. And the more random the item, the more desperate, touching and intriguing the show gets.
Adoxoblog notes:
This one is about a Tokyo bookbinder called Nobuo Okano and his process of restoring a much loved and therefore fairly well trashed English-to-Japanese dictionary. Its owner’s daughter is starting university and he wants to pass it on to her, so Okano does what he can to rescue and regenerate the book.
It’s a fascinating process, and you don’t really need to speak Japanese to appreciate what’s going on. The incidental music’s a bit overpowering, but it goes with the Japanese territory. About the only relevant information you can’t get just from watching is the client actually being quite pleased that the restoration will obliterate the embarrassment of his high school girlfriend’s initials still being written on the side (though you probably won’t miss the narrator triumphantly saying “sayonara” as the ex is amputated), and that it took Okano about four hours to re-flatten all 1000 dog-eared pages with tweezers and a small iron.
All very good. As is this one about restoring a… grater.
Posted: 1st, May 2015 | In: TV & Radio Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
