NHK Documentary on Fenghuang

I should be watching Korean dramas and such on TV here in Seoul to improve my horrible listening skills, but tonight I ended up seeking the familiar comfort of the Japanese public television channel NHK, which for some reason I can get here in my dormitory. Tonight they were showing a documentary on Fenghuang （凤凰) in Hunan province.

Most travel documentaries that I watched on Japanese channels in the past consist of the TV host introducing the audience to the delicacies of some particular location, places to stay, and then the famous tourist attractions of the area (roughly in that order). Most of the time seems to go to watching people eat and then search desperately for some new way to elegantly describe how much they loved the food.

While choosing a location that is popular with tourists, this NHK documentary was nothing of the sort. The series, called 世界ふれあい街歩き uses the interest format of simply following a smoothly moving camera throughout the city. What impressed me most was the fact that it spent most of its time on the back streets and went out of its way to give the audience a feel for various aspects of the daily life of its inhabitants. I found the whole program to be an extremely effective format for generating a feeling of presence for the viewer.

Although I don’t know how orchestrated the interaction with the Chinese locals in the documentary is, it successfully creates an extremely casual feel. As the camera moves through the maze of back alleys (just watching this almost brought forth tears of nostalgia for my time spent in China) a Japanese woman’s voice provides a running commentary of the “thoughts” and voice of the person we are supposed to be in this documentary. Whenever we come upon something interesting, the camera stops and we have a conversation with whoever is in view of the camera that might provide some answers. It can be anything as simple as noting the fact that socks are being dried in the hundreds on the windows in a high school dormitory, to looking out a shop window and seeing a woman lower a mop into the river to wash it while other women at the water’s edge below are using the same river water to wash clothes and vegetables. At another point we stop and chat with a woman washing clothes outside her house and talk to a tile maker about the particular kind of tiles made for the roof.

There were two or three “Information” breaks during which some local expert talks about something we just watched (the tile maker talked about roofs, another old man talked about the houses leaning out over the river) The only overtly touristy thing I saw during the program was an attempt to find the southern gate of the town but we instead find nothing but a pile of rubble. Wondering what happened to the gate “We” ask an old woman, but she just says, “It was taken apart.” Unsatisfied, “we” enter a nearby noodle shop and ask another couple about the gate. While the woman buries her head in a bowl of noodles, the old man there explains that the gate was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.

At one point we get lost in the back alleys as we continually come to signs saying “no way through this way.” This eventually leads us to some kind of housing for students and the camera takes us up to their room where we ask (and get) and answer to the mystery of the aforementioned socks. In another scene, we pass an old man watching something out his window. We discover he is looking at the flowers in his garden, and are promptly given a tour of his little cultivated plot across from his house along a hill. In yet another scene, we come upon an old couple playing a chess-like game (I can’t remember what it is called but it is the one which is shaped something like a web, and you can put black and white pieces on top of each other…). The board is simply painted on cardboard and the pieces are made out of broken tile (black) and onions (white). When the old man loses, he trades the onion pieces for carrots and later tomatoes but the delighted old woman continues to beat him.

If you have access to NHK, I highly recommend the documentary, even if there are some idle moments as the camera wanders through occasionally empty streets (this only adds to the participatory feel for the viewer). You can find its schedule (and locations) for future episodes here.