Being an extra in Japan Imagine you were living in Japan and had to wake up at 3:00 a.m. and headed to Togetsukyo Bridge in Arashiyama for a commercial shoot. You may have been told it was for a "TV commercial". This would be drastically incomplete information in any other workplace, but for these kind of jobs it is significantly more information than you usually get. When you arrive the sky is probably dark and you'll have to wait with the other extras, two of you western, another eight Japanese, for around three hours or so while the crew set up a shot of a girl on the bridge. She is holding a phone in a prominent position, but it's an older clamshell phone of the type that was popular in Japan until the iPhone came along and dragged the country kicking and katana-slashing into the 21st century. It's a cold morning and the girl is being made to stand there for hours. She's tall, but she doesn't have the kind of look that is typical on Japanese TV...