And things are about to get ugly.
Where to even begin with Japanese TV? I guess it would be prudent to dispel a few of the myths surrounding Japanese TV for the those of you whose experience and knowledge of the product is exclusively from YouTube. Because that stuff generally isn't what I'm talking about. 99% of the stuff that makes you go "lol those crazy japanese lol" you see on YouTube is about 1% of the actual content of Japanese TV. Many Westerners who have never lived there seem to operate under the delusion that Japan is a mecca for quality TV dramas like "Liar game" or "Rookies," or awesome game shows that uncreative Western TV producers shamelessly rip off (see: "I Survived a Japanese Game Show").
What I'm about to tell you is the truth of the matter.
Japanese TV is where the same 35 talentless hacks go to circle-jerk each other raw every day in front of a live studio audience.
These two shows are completely exempt from any of the bad shit I'm about to say
When I say this to most people, they immediately retort "sounds like American TV." Well, no, idiots. Because as shitterible as shows like Maury and Access Hollywood and everything on MTV is, you can still avoid it. That option simply does not exist on Japanese airwaves. If you turn on the TV, there's a 99% chance you're watching garbage. And every time you change the channel, you roll the dice again. Because virtually every single Japanese TV show is "The View," except with an offensively technicolor set and about three to six times the number of obnoxious, saccharine, soulless jackasses doing the same obnoxious, saccharine, soulless routines that earned them their 15 minutes of fame 15 months ago. Japanese TV is almost entirely populated by arbitrarily famous people bullshitting in front of a live studio audience and calling itself programming. It's what you would watch if you were a lonely, depressed person to pretend you actually have friends.
It's seriously, 24/7, celebrities sitting around eating, with close-up camera zooms of some dipshit with Parkinson's holding food up for the camera and the same worthless picture-in-picture reaction shots of the same worthless people shouting "OISHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII" at the top of their lungs as if this time it will somehow grant them the attention and acceptance from the audience they never received growing up, to fill the black, empty void left by their childhoods. I'm not just talking about talk-shows either. What I just described happens on the God damn news.
The most confounding part of Japanese TV is that their TV "personalities" are referred to as "comedians," despite having no routine, no prepared material, and not doing anything remotely funny or entertaining. I suppose the reasoning behind this nomenclature is that "attention whore" doesn't translate well.
Perhaps, by this point, you feel that I'm being entirely too harsh. Culture, and especially humor, are entirely subjective. I'm just one man spitting in a typhoon.
I thought so, too, until I watched some of these famous TV personalities venture out in public and saw that no one else can really tolerate them, either. Occasionally, you'll see a couple of attention whoremedians go out and do their act on the street, or in front of some famous restaurant, and just get absolutely killed. No one laughs or even cracks a smile. The live audience just exchanges uncomfortable glances until the ordeal is over and these hacks go and peddle their shlock in front of someone else.
One TV moment that stands out as a shining example of this is when one particular boil on the collective ass of Japanese TV decided to take on the Guinness Record for longest stand-up performance: 30 hours. Less than 20 minutes in, he had clearly run completely out of any sort of prepared material and was reduced to making faces and screaming strange sounds at the ocean of empty seats. It was like watching a somehow-less-funny Robin Williams.
Occasionally, a curious passerby would sit in for a few minutes, a vacant, emotionless stare fixed on the zoo-animal in front of the cameras, and moving on, wishing him a "ganbare" (remember what I said about what that actually means?) as they left. It's only when his shit-shoveling act was joined by other "comedians" and celebrities that his "act" ever got any laughs at all. And that was the moment, for me, that exposed the sham of Japanese TV for the poorly lubricated circle-jerk it truly is.
The TV studio is a closed system where people with the same career all gather to contratulate each other on a mediocre-job-well-done in front of the only 200 people in the country who give a shit. It's like watching an awards show, all day, every day, 365 days a year. The idea of "game shows" featuring random people off the street, or someone breaking into Japanese show-business without being heavily connected, paying their dues, or having belonged to an idol group being heavily pushed by a record label is absolutely unheard-of. It's just the same self-congratulatory bullshit all the time.
From time to time on Japanese TV There are talent shows where "comedians" will come up and do their "routine," which is typically either speaking really fast and screaming the same punchline over and over for a few minutes, or making faces and falling down while screaming. Again, if this sounds funny, believe me it loses its charm after a couple months when this is seriously every other person's act. After they do their routine, there's a panel of judges who rates them. The most famous of these shows is "Red Carpet," where comedians stand on a red conveyor belt and do their thing, and then are whisked away and the judges rate them as either 大笑 (very funny), 中笑(pretty funny), or 小笑 (not very funny).
In two years, I only ever saw two people not get the highest possible ranking--they got the second-highest. Occasionally you see people up there and you can tell they worked really hard on making a good routine, and it's gut-bustingly funny. And it's completely devalued by the fact that Japanese TV, by design, is a circle-jerk that lavishes praise upon itself and its members for trivial accomplishments.
It's why every shot has a picture-in-picture of a celebrity's reaction shot, because God forbid we go one second without seeing a celebrity! We might forget they even exist. It's like watching a party through a window, except everyone inside has Asperger's Syndrome, and the place was designed by a colorblind meth addict.
The one major thing that makes it all so infuriating is an appalling lack of effort.
You can literally go an entire day channel-surfing--24 hours--without hearing a single line of scripted dialogue outside of the narrator's voice-over describing whatever ramen or daifuku place the flavor-of-the-week celebrities are screaming at the top of their lungs at.
And what's so infuriating about all this is that when honest-to-God effort is actually made, the product is almost always fantastic. I'm not even saying "fantastic by comparison," either. I mean flat-out great, world-class entertainment.
I can't remember the name of the show exactly, but in my last few months of in Japan, there was a TV show about a giant game of tag set in an old-style Japanese village. The contestants, all Japanese celebrities (of course, who would want to see anyone new?), dressed in Naruto-style ninja outfits as they tried to run and hide from "hunters," who were basically guys dressed as Matrix-style agents--and these guys seriously must have been former Olympic sprinters because no one ever outran these guys for long.
The basic premise was that the contestants had to survive for three hours, and as each second rolled off the clock, the value of the cash prize went up. If any of the contestants could complete a set of objectives, they were free to go to a certain spot and leave the game with whatever amount the pot was at. Anyone who survived the full three hours would get the full amount. By itself, it's a great premise, but the beauty, as they say, is in the details.
Rather than being a ghost town, the old village was populated by actors playing the part of characters from various Japanese fables, or merchants, guides, or monks there to offer advice or just bring the setting to life. Occasionally, the contestants would run into a character and have a chance to do something to help out one of these characters, who, in turn, would help the contestants out later on. For example, one of the characters roaming the ancient Japanese setting was Kintaro.
Kintaro lost his axe, and asked a contestant to help him find it. Upon the contestant finding it and returning it to him, Kintaro thanked him and went on his way. Later on in the game, monsters attacked the village and started a 10-minute journey to a shed containing 20 hunters. If they made it to the shed before the contestants could find someone to stop the monsters, they'd release the hunters, effectively doubling the chance of the contestants getting tagged out. But if the contestants could find someone to stop them...
This guy looks like a competent monster-slayer
...then the hunters would stay locked up in the shed for the rest of the game, making it easier to survive.
Unfortunately, 10 minutes isn't a lot of time. So, when things looked dire and the time limit drew closer, out came an axe-wielding Kintaro to stay the monster's rampage, buying the contestants valuable time to complete the objectives necessary to put a stop to the monsters once and for all.
The game was full of great moments like this, where every action influenced the outcome, and every scene was shot in a dramatic, cinematic style. It was funny, it was smart, it was interesting and exciting and better than any game or contest I've ever seen in the States by a factor of a thousand.
But unfortunately, it requires effort, so the odds of ever seeing anything like it again are insignificant.
Japanese commercials, similarly, have way, way higher production value than the TV they interrupt. Why? Effort. As anyone in advertising will tell you, the amount of effort put into an advertising campaign is directly related to the dividends it pays. Commercials have stiff competition to earn your hard-earned yen, so they can't afford not to impress.
Japanese TV is locked in a status-quo spiral that I fear it will never, ever pull out of. No one has to try to impress anyone, because people will watch TV, even if it's all shit, because there's nothing else to watch. And trust me, it's all shit.
For anyone still in Japan, I want you to try a little experiment. Next time you're over at your Japanese friend's place and they're watching some celebrity circle-jerk, wait for a commercial and turn to them and just ask "what is the name of the show we're watching right now?" In three years, I have never, ever seen anyone give the correct answer.
And so, Japanese TV, for sucking so consistently, for being so routinely obnoxious, and for extolling the absolute worst of Japanese culture, fuck you. Just... fuck you.
And try. Please, please just try.
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