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Illustration by Yukiko Leitch

Before you start to read this rant, be warned: The subject may cause your eyes to glaze over. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: The Boringness of Japanese TV News.

You may say that any news would be boring in a language you don't understand at news level. So let me say the boringness seems to be universal, whether or not the news is bilingual, and no matter which channel you watch. It's as if the TV news programs all think they are on the radio-they don't show any interesting pictures.

Their number one technique for boring the viewers is the Picture of a Meeting. In this format we see a lot of elderly men in suits, plus usually a token woman in a suit, sitting either in rows or around a table, looking down at piles of paper while the voice-over describes some deadly tedious economic announcement or minute legislative change which has been made today. The most exciting moment is when the camera pans from left to right.

A close second in the snooze rankings is the Picture of a Building. This usually accompanies a story about bribery and corruption in high places, and involves a picture of a building, followed by a picture of 50 men in suits walking into a building, followed by a picture of 50 men in suits walking out of a building carrying boxes, followed by another picture of the same building. If we are really lucky we get a couple of boring PowerPoint slides with numbers on them to go with all of this.

You would think that NHK could have done something quite gripping with what everyone else in the world, such as BBC and CNN, was billing as "Japan's Nuclear Crisis," and illustrating with heart-rending photos of mothers carrying babies in gasmasks. You would also think that someone putting poison in the matsuri curry could have had some visual interest. But no! The nuclear leak was illustrated by (you guessed it) the Picture of a Building, interspersed with the Picture of a Meeting in which everyone looked slightly more worried than usual, and the curry case actually broke new ground by featuring the Picture of a Blue Plastic Sheet (behind which, the voice-over assured us, interesting things were happening). During the first two days of coverage we were treated to several whole minutes of Blue Plastic Sheet, but after that someone must have twigged that it was really quite boring because it was replaced by a not very good crayon drawing of the suspects done on brown cardboard.

By the way, before I started to write this, I sat down to watch NHK News at Nine so I could give you a sample of a typical night's news. By the second item, though, I felt the urgent need to switch over to something (anything) on another channel, or perhaps even to shoot myself. You see, the very first item was so boring that my eyes had glazed over.

Many thanks to reader Susan Andrews for this Rant.