Yatta!

Ok- I know I'm super-late to the party, but I've just recently become addicted to "Heroes". My Mom recommended it to me several times, but unfortunately it was impossible to find in Japan. However, last week when Sho-chan and I went to Tsutaya they had a big Heroes display with all the episodes from the first series. We rented the first two disks and watched all 5 episodes on them in one go!

After that I was well and truly hooked and I went back the next day to rent the next 4 DVDs, then back 2 days after that to rent the final 5. I watched the entire first series in less than a week, and now I can't wait until the second series comes out over here. Of course Hiro is my favorite character. He's so adorable with those little chubby cheeks and those glasses and that childish smile of his. I just want to pinch his cheeks and give hima big hug.

It was interesting to watch the various scenes in Japan, because whoever the set-designer was, they've obviously never been here. All the outdoor sets looked like they came from some weird 1980s bubble version of Japan, and other scenes, like the office cubicles were just plain wrong. (Japanese offices don't usually have individual cubicles they have blocks of desks set up facing each other.) Also a lot of the cultural refernces that Hiro makes (X-men, Star-trek etc.) would be unknown to a Japanese guy of his generation, even a big nerd. I realize they had to use characters American nerd viewers would know, but why not go with Astro-boy or Gundam or Macross something else popular with geeks in both countries?

Also, although Hiro's Japanese is quite good (apparetly he's fluent), all of the other actors' Japanese is bad to the point of requiring subtitles, (apart from his sister Kimiko, who is actually Japanese.) The police "interpreter" in the first episode was especially egregious as was the waitress Charlie. George Takei is stilted but understandable. Ando is obviously trying hard, but his intonation is really weird, which makes it hard to follow him, and since he's Korean he has trouble distinguishing between some voiced and unvoiced sounds. He gets an A+ for effort, though.

Are there really so few actors that can speak Japanese that they had to cast Chinese and Korean actors instead?