SLP spent a semester in Japan in college, and a high school friend of hers moved there permanently. From the stories I’ve heard from them, along with things like the restaurant where you get what the person before you ordered and, of course, Turn It Around!! I’m left with the distinct impression that in Japan weirdness is embraced in a way that would delight me, but which seems to be beyond the tolerance (or perhaps the comprehension) of the average American.

Anyway, that big set-up was just to say that if you asked me to name a country where someone might train a pet penguin to wear a backpack and walk to the fish market every day to pick up dinner, I’d have a pretty good guess.

The strangest thing to me about this video (well, aside from the obvious, which is… all of it) is that when they interview the woman in the shop, what she says is dubbed into English, whereas the rest of the video doesn’t even have English subtitles. (Then again, and I don’t know my Asian languages very well, it doesn’t sound to me like the reporter is speaking Japanese. Maybe this video has been dubbed multiple times.)