Chi-Deji

On July 24th of this year, Japan will end all analog broadcasts and switch to digital television. Yesterday marked the 6 months to go deadline, which in not-quite-sure-why Japanese fashion, brought forth a rash of news reports on this soon to be piece of domestic television history. According to our very own Hokkaido Shimbun ("De Paper"), as of the end of December 120,000 households had yet to prepare (read: shell out for a new digital tv) for this momentous event. The Gaynor-Takahashi family, luddites to the last, are among this number though for all the television we watch, I am not sure why we should bother (though Daddy is excited at the prospect of updating the house's 17 year old Mitsubishi tv to something that may sneakily incorporate a built-in Blu-Ray disc player. Control you envy).
De Paper also informed us that some 4,600 households will be unable to receive the new digital channels because, even by Hokkaido's pretty rural standards, they are too far 'Mucker gone' to have the authorities build relay antennas in their godforsaken parts of the world. In a WTF! alternative plan, said authorities will instead broadcast the digital channels to these lonely outposts via satellite. The WTF! part is that they intend to beam Tokyo tv stations to them rather than their hitherto beloved local Hokkaido stations. This means that Ma and Pa Wackibakki living in some place like Engaru on the (incredibly) remote Okhotsk Sea in north Hokkaido will, from the end of July, be treated to all the news and weather from Tokyo. That's the equivalent, in terms of both geographical distance and climate difference, of the fine people in Buncrana in Co. Donegal sitting down each evening to watch the news and weather from Barcelona.
You have to laugh. Unless you live in Engaru where the weatherman has just told you it will be fine tomorrow with a high of 15 C and you can't see out your sitting room window because the drifting snow is now up to the roof.
As part of their promotional campaign to convince the Gaynor-Takahashi family (and others, but mainly us, as where we lead, the other 119,999 analog loving families will surely follow) that digital is a good thing, they have a mascot.
A yellow, tank-top wearing deer mascot of course, named 'Chi Dejika' (a play on the Japanese words for 'deer' and 'muscle t-shirt'). A somewhat effeminate deer too, if it's possible (and slightly disturbing) to read that into a cartoon character.
And the second picture below deserves a caption - so best caption gets a prize of a box of Pocky and a much sought after Dejika t-shirt (and yes, I will ship them worldwide, even to you, dear readers in Malaysia).