By Suzanne Kamata
Call me simple, call me old-fashioned, but I often find myself yearning for the days of on-and-off buttons, the getting out of one’s chair to change the channel, the times before remote controls were scattered throughout my house.
Most evenings, my husband and I convene in the living room to watch TV. Most evenings, it seems, we have the same conversation.
“Where is that (grumble grumble) remote control?” he asks.
I look at the remote control caddy next to the TV. Of course it’s empty.
“Here it is!” I say, pointing to the coffee table.
“That’s not it. That’s the one for the ceiling fan.”
We look under the sofa, on the bookshelves, and beneath the TV. We search between the sofa cushions, and under the pile of newspapers.
Finally, one of us finds it in some unlikely place – on the kitchen counter, or maybe next to the telephone.
My husband presses a button. “It’s not working.”
“I guess it needs new batteries,” I say.
We change the batteries. Finally, ten minutes after our initial search, we are ready to watch TV.
Of course the complications of TV remote controls are not unique to Japan. On a recent visit to a friend’s apartment in the States, we were told, “If you want to watch TV, push this button on this remote control, and then this button on this remote control, but whatever you do, don’t push this one!” Someone, please, invent an easier way for accessing cable TV channels!
It might not be so bad if the TV remote controls were the only ones in our lives, but here in high-tech Japan, every electronic device seems to come with one of those gadgets. I can appreciate having a remote control device to unlock the car when rain is pouring down and I need to dash from my porch to my hatchback, but do I really need one to operate my portable radio? Or my desk top computer?
And where is the sense in using a remote control to turn the lights on and off instead of flicking a switch? The light fixture we recently installed in my son’s room, a small space which can be crossed in three big steps, came with a remote control. This means that when I enter his room at night, to, say, put his clean socks in the drawer, I often find myself stumbling around in the dark, trying to find that darned remocon so I can see what I’m doing.
Perhaps remote controls are part of an interim phase. It’s conceivable that someday all of our appliances will be voice activated or will turn on and off in response to brain waves. In the meantime, I remind myself of something that my family members are apt to forget. There’s a little button in the back of the television. With just a push, the screen comes to life.
Suzanne Kamata was born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan. She now lives in Japan with her husband and two children. Her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a Special Mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, winner of the Paris Book Festival, and winner of a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.
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