Noisy Voices from Japan

That the book Voices from Japan ありのままの日本を知る・語る is hailed in the foreward as a breakthrough tells a lot about the untold story that opportunities to listen to next door's people talking in Japanese about things of life is not obvious. Besides the acute lack of choice in Japanese podcasts, normal, non-marketing, non-media intoxicated daily Japanese language, spoken by anyone expect people well known to be famous is a rare resources. The voices space is massively occupied by marketing-marketed-order-made voices. So yes, this collection of short interviews of unknown Japanese on various subjects should be welcome. The closest thing is the Colligan-Taylor Living Japanese book that comes with a DVD. Unfortunately, the recording quality of the audio CD that comes with that new book is appallingly bad, so much that I could hardly recommend it. Why on earth do we have to cope with such bad quality in 2009, in a country, Japan, that spells technology? There might be ways to filter the content, betterize it to some extent, and yes, a few tracks are not perfect but audible. But all in all, listening to the whole is a painful experience. I was thinking to use the CD in my interpretation course but it won't fit in the bad acoustic of the classroom.