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Sue Perkins

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Japan with Sue Perkins: Series 1: Episode 2

Episode 2

BBC One - Japan with Sue Perkins, Series 1, Episode 2

Sue Perkins enjoys a night out with geishas and goes free diving with the ama divers.

Sue Perkins enjoys a night out with Kyoto's geishas, goes free diving with some ama divers and visits Hiroshima. In  Tokyo, she explores how the Japanese are tackling the future.

Sue Perkins continues her journey though Japan, exploring a nation caught between the traditional values of the past and challenges of the future. 

She starts in Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital city and home to the iconic and secretive geishas. Sue wants to understand what it takes to become a geisha and whether there is any truth to the perception of them as rich men's playthings. In a traditional tea house outside Kyoto, she meets Kikuno and her apprentices, who are working hard to keep geisha culture alive as Japan becomes more open to the outside world. Dressed in a kimono and wearing full make-up, Sue helps entertain clients with drinking games and music.

The Ise-shima Peninsula, south of Kyoto is famous for its seafood, its pearls and for its ama divers, the women of the sea. There were once thousands of these traditional free-diving women working along the coast, but now there are only a few hundred left and many of them are in their eighties. Sue spends the day diving for shellfish to sell at the local market and finds a sense of humour and community very different from the vast megacities of modern Japan.

The amas come from a generation of Japanese people that witnessed terrible suffering. Sue's next stop is Hiroshima, where allied forces dropped an atomic bomb to end the Second World War. She meets Mr Tetsushi, an 84-year-old survivor of the blast. He was just ten-years-old when the bomb hit, travelling on a tram with his mother, just 750 metres from the epicentre. Sue joins Mr Tetsushi on a tram through Hiroshima and hears his incredible story of survival.

After the war, Japan set about rebuilding its shattered economy. Sue rides the bullet train back to Tokyo, the engine of Japanese growth. Within 40 years, Japan had risen from the ashes of the war, to become the world's second largest economy, with huge global corporations. But this transformation, built on the Japanese values of hard work and sacrifice, has come with a cost. Modern Japan is struggling with some new problems – some people work so hard they have no time for love or family. The marriage rate is down, the birth rate is falling and the country's population is shrinking. 

Back in Tokyo, Sue explores how the Japanese are finding ways to combat these modern challenges. Ms Megumi runs a rent-a-family business. It's an agency where lonely people can hire actors to play the part of loved ones for social occasions. Sue meets Ms Megumi as she auditions for the role of wife to a busy businessman and his lonely mother. Rental families are now big business in Japan.

Tokyo is one of the most densely populated cities on earth and real estate is at a premium. Increasingly, there's not even room to bury the dead. Sue visits the Koukoku-ji Temple in Ruriden, where they now have an LED cemetery. Instead of graves, they have a bank of glowing Buddhist statues, that light up when you enter the pin code of your loved one. Here you can store the ashes of the deceased and come to pay your respects without the fuss and expense of a traditional burial plot.

Sue's last stop in Japan is a Konkatsu event. Konkatsu means 'marriage hunting' and these events are designed to try to alleviate Japan's celibacy crisis by introducing young people looking for love. It's state-sponsored speed dating. Sue joins the young hopefuls one morning as they make mayonnaise together to break the ice and watches as they overcome their shyness to exchange business cards.

Japan with Sue Perkins: Series 1

BBC One

Sue Perkins visits Japan, a nation caught between a hi-tech future and a traditional past.

Sue Perkins visits Japan, where she finds a nation caught between a hi-tech future and a traditional past.

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