Thursday, March 5, 2009

The Japanese shower radio

P3050008

I bought this little radio to listen to while I am taking a shower. One thing I did not take into account was, well, the fact that the shower is like a metal box, reinforced to be a safe room in the case of an earthquake, and therefore it has almost zero reception of electromagnetic signals like radio waves. The door is not metal though and the radio does get some reception from there but out of the whole range I get only one channel loud and relatively clear – America’s Forces Network (AFN) on AM. The songs are nice and stuff but the ads/infomercials they put in the middle can sometimes be a bit weird for anyone not in the army, like telling soldiers that “sexual harassment creates friction which affects the running of the engine that is the army” or that their family members may be under the jurisdiction of local authorities but the service members are under shared jurisdiction with the army. It is not quite as weird as the AFN TV that I could watch at the hotel in Seoul but still… interesting experience… If you live in Tokyo you should be able to pick up the signal too – just search on your AM band.

2 comments:

Betty said...

It's interesting you get US army radio in Japan. Is any of the ads more directed at US army stationed in Japan vs. elsewhere (like Iraq)?

Ulaş said...

Not that I could tell actually. It seemed pretty general though the one in Korea was mostly targeted to Korea with ads talking about specific army shops in specific camps.