adventures in Japanese TV: “Gathering of 13 Trans Women”

…once again i get home from work, turn on the TV to see a panel show doing a special featuring trans women. despite the title of the special, shown on the top left of the screen as「13人のオネエ大集合」 / “Gathering of 13 Trans Women”, it was actually 13+ guests divided into three groups: gay men, cross dressing gay men and trans women.

click the photos to see translations / context in the captions.

this time the feature wasn’t anywhere near as bad as others i’ve seen, thankfully. in typical Japanese TV fashion, the guests freely divulged all kinds of personal information about all kinds of topics that you’d never see discussed so openly on national TV in America– which i’ll admit is one of the positive things about Japanese TV, i guess. be it trans related or not, in America it’d only be on late night TV– not prime time TV– when some of the discussion that happened on this show might happen on American TV, but even then it wouldn’t be a panel of (L)G(B)T people candidly talking to each other as much as anyone else about such intimate things as this. however, by the same token, the total lack of any kind of TV ratings or in fact the very concept of “adult content” or “some people might not want to see this” on Japanese TV can quite frankly be alarming in general at times… seriously, you’ll literally see someone getting killed uncensored on the news sometimes. anyway, back on topic– also in typical Japanese TV fashion, the show was ridiculously way over the top at times and a lot of things were said specifically to induce laughs from the audience. sigh! unless it’s a feature on the news, nothing on Japanese TV regarding LGBT people ever gets presented seriously. every time the ratio of comedy / entertainment to education is 5:1, which i personally find really frustrating…

anyway, it was an interesting feature zzz…