The Japanese-to-the-rest-of-the-world interface comes up with some hilarious messes from time to time, but probably one of the most memorable for me was one of those interminable "samurai go mad in downtown Kyoto and commit mass murder" movies which used to get screened with somewhat monotonous regularity on New Zealand late night television.

The Japanese seem to dub these films in English before they're released and the cultural gulf yawned wide in this particular case. The voice of the lead samurai (who'd accounted for half the population of Honshu within five minutes of the film's beginning and hadn't even worked up so much as a sweat) had been dubbed by someone who had a fairly high-pitched voice and an incipient lisp. I watched the movie through tears of laughter ... now if only he'd looked like Frankie Howerd!


The idiot also known as Capfka ...