Sesame Street (Japan)

The American children's television series "Sesame Street" has a long history in Japan, airing for three decades as a dubbed program, and recently restarting as a local co-production.

esame Street's dubbed original

The original show aired on NHK until April 2004.

esame Street's Japanese co-production

The new series began airing in October 2004. The series currently airs Sundays at 9 am on TV Tokyo.

Besides basic literacy skills, this version of "Sesame Street" focuses on ethics, interacting with friends, and environmental issues. The series is entirely in Japanese, except for regularly included English lesson segments.

At the start of the show, four new Muppet characters were introduced: Teena, a pink monster girl who likes to sing, Mojabo, a bossy green and purple monster who likes to exercise, Pierre, a blue frog, Arthur, a little yellow bird and Joe, a large rhino like muppet whose only trait is jealousy. In 2006, two new Muppets were added -- Grorie, an orange Grover-like monster, Meg, a Japanese girl, and Yann, a Japanese cat girl. A few established "Sesame Street" characters also appear in new segments, most notably Elmo, who in the Japanese series has a propensity to cry and is used heavily to deal with emotional issues.

While Sesame Workshop is generally on the forefront of cultural understanding when creating the co-productions, this is apparently not the case with the Japanese version. One script included a plot line where a child trips during a race at a school sports festival. Sesame Workshop insisted the other characters must help him up, something the local producers insisted was unrealistic in modern Japanese culture.

Muppet Cast

*Elmo: Kenta Matsumoto
*Big Bird: Satoshi Tsuruoka
*Cookie Monster: Kei Kikuchi
*Teena and Pierre: Rena Mizushiro
*Mojabo: Hideki Tanaka
*Arthur and Grorie: Kaori Takeda
*Meg: Ayako Iguchi
*Yan: Aiko Yamada

Human Cast

*Ari Ota
*Hirotarō Yamada
*Sanae Morisawa
*Nana Koizumi
*Dario Toda

Crew

* Director: Hajime Matsuki
* Producer: Yoshikazu Beniya

References

*

External links

* [http://www.sesame-street.jp/ Official Japanese site]
* [http://www.tv-tokyo.co.jp/sesame-street/index.html TV Tokyo Sesame site]
* [http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Sesame_Street_%28Japan%29 Muppet Wiki: Sesame Street (Japan)]