For the past few weeks when I check out the news I’ve been hearing about the Handball Controversy.

First off, I didn’t know that handball was an olympic sport. I know there are lots of olympic sports that I don’t know much about, but I have never seen anything about handball in the US.

That is one interesting thing about Japanese TV: I see all sorts of topics that just are not on the radar at all for American Media. In general, I think American Media is just awful, reporting on unimportant things and ignoring interesting topics, completely dominated by large corporations and advertising to consumers. I like NPR, and that probably gives you a pretty good idea of what I’m about.

Anyway, I can’t say that Japan is all that different, but the NHK news here does touch on a lot more international topics than news in America.

I’ve seen a few stories on the handball thing, and didn’t really pay much attention but it seemed like there was some officiating controversy at the handball playoffs that decide who will go to the Beijing Olympics to represent Asia. I didn’t get much more out of it than that – they played some clips, but I don’t know the first thing about handball, so I didn’t know what was going on.

This morning I saw that Japan and Korea will be re-playing a tournament. Japan and Korea. That sounds like it could be explosive. These countries have a long history of competing, and it can get serious.

Since I didn’t know what was going on though, I did a search of the English web. Wow! Based on this afp news story and this story on China Daily it is even crazier than I thought! I basically thought that Japan and Korea had some problem with the officiating (and they do!) between the games they played. It turns out that they are accusing that the Kuwaiti team benefited from a late switch of officials (Germans to Jordinians) and cheated their way into an Olympic berth.

Korea and Japan appealed to the International Handball Federation who ruled that the tournament be re-played. The president of the Asian Handball Federation, Kuwaiti prince Sheikh Ahmed Al-Fahad Al-Sabah (who also serves as the head of the Olympic Council of Asia) does not sanction the replays and has threatened action against any other nations that play in them.

So in the end only Korea and Japan are playing in the IHF re-plays. The women play tonight, and the men play tomorrow.

I just wonder what will happen with the results? I mean, two teams can’t make up an entire tournament, can they?

Since I saw that the game is actually going on live, I thought I would take a peek at the seven channels I get on my TV to see if it was on. It wasn’t, but completely randomly I came across Doctor Who (dubbed in Japanese!) on NHK! It was great to hear Rose and the Doctor in Japanese. Rose doesn’t seem as strong and independent in Japanese, but she’s still cool. The doctor doesn’t sound as funny and irrelevant either, but I only caught the last 10 minutes of the first part of the two-parter “The Impossible Planet” (Episode 22). The second part airs on Feb 5th at 7pm. I’ll have to leave home early to make sure I catch it. 🙂

And now I’m watching “Sanma Palace”, which is a show with a comedian that takes to a bunch of other “talent”. I don’t get it.

Also, they broke the talent into two teams, the “complete idiots” and the smart team. But when you look at the text they use to title the segment, it is the “not intelli(gent)” (ノットインテリ) against the “intelli(gent)”　(インテリ). I think – I’m just guessing, and usually that means I’ve completely and horribly misunderstood the Japanese. I liked when they introduced the baka team with a segment “this is when you realized that you’re stupid”.