Last night, I scrolled on my YouTube app to find something to watch (I have been working on spending more time at long-form media instead of quick dopamine hits/doomscrolling) when I found that TV Tokyo has been uploading full episodes of “Solitary Gourmet” on YouTube. This series is one of my favorites, and I mentioned it once on this blog as one of the recommendations.

I used to watch this series back in Indonesia on the WakuWaku Japan channel. That channel, alongside NHK World, was one of my favorites, and I used to watch it while having lunch with Wira when he was still a baby, hahah.

On YouTube, you can choose to have the English-dubbed dialogue or the original Japanese language and have the Closed Captioning (CC) feature active and set to English, which, I did the latter. I always feel that watching series with its original language is the way to go as the dialogue and expressions conveyed better.

However, I must inform you that with all other Japanese works, there’s always a catch — and I really don’t understand why they keep doing this: For international viewers, only the first season is available. For some reason, videos from other seasons are hidden.

Why I said, “– they keep doing this”, is because historically, J-entertainment has been making it hard for itself to open up to the international market. Back when I was still in uni, it was always either you buy original music CDs online from Taiwan or China at an exorbitant price, or go to some “music stores” in some dingy alleys in Jakarta selling CD music with a sign “kualitas ori” (“original quality”) written on it. Things have been much better now, yes, but it still has its own hurdles. I’m honestly hoping that Netflix would take this series, though. I mean, it’s like the last cry for help since I mentioned Netflix.