Here are a series of Apple iPod advertisements with a voice-over in Japanese, but not just any Japanese. This is deep-fried, bleached-in-the-sun southern Japanese, kind of like south Georgia English, with vocabulary 150 years out of date:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh-sENPLd44&; If this guy was on NHK they would put subtitles on the screen. I have no trouble understanding him, but the people hit by the tsunami up north speak entirely different dialects. They interviewed a farmer from up there who is 101 years old. Without the subtitles I would not have understood him. It is as different as Vermont and south Georgia. England also has a wide range of dialects for such a small geographic area. Some areas were remarkably isolated well into the 20th century. A book about dialects that I read years ago said that in 1943, a linguist found an old guy in a village in southern England who had never heard of Winston Churchill. - Jed
