Shiawase Kazoku Keikaku (Happy Family Plan)

This is a great show to if you want to watch TV but can't speak Japanese. In this show, people are given extremely difficult challenges, like learning to play Beethoven's Ode to Joy on the xylophone in just one week, or tying six cherry stems in knots. If they are successful, they get 1,000,000 yen (a little over $10,000 US). Before the Unme no jikan (moment of destiny), you see a video-taped segment of the person practising his skill and you really start to empathise with the contestents, making the challenge very exciting. Unfortunately, most of the people seem to lose. Apparently there is an American version that is much easier to win.

Junguru TV Tamori

This is another of those shows that you can watch without understanding a word of Japanese. Remember "Stupid Human Tricks" from David Letterman where university students would stuff themselves into dryers and spin round and round or guys would stop fans with their tongues? Jungle TV is "Stupid Human Tricks" taken seriously. A recent episode featured Aikido tricks where you would knock a person over by putting one finger on the back of their leg behind the knee and push on the person's shoulder with the other or when someone grabbed your wrist, you could cause them to fall without making any effort at all. Other tricks included walking in place with one's eyes closed (fifty steps). You don't feel like you've moved at all, but you'll inevitably find yourself a good foot or two ahead of where you started. Tamori, the host (the guy who always wears black sunglasses) is really annoying, but the show is very entertaining. Jungle TV airs on TBS on Tuesday nights at 10:00.

Namidame (Tear-Filled Eyes)

Namidame is a show about crying. In the words of the show's creators, "The tears of the Japanese are fine. Therefore, let's cry together. As much as possible, let's cry, and face front, and work. Namidame is a program which delivers impression to you." Airing at 11:55 every Wednesday night on TV Tokyo (Monday on TV Osaka), this program’s most popular segment is called "Namidame Battle Royale" in which ten young women compete to see who can cry the most in a contest to win one million yen. They keep the women up in a house over a period of one week, give them two test-tubes to collect their tear drops in, and leave them to cry their eyes out. Techniques include insulting one another and slapping each other in the face, drinking a lot of water so that they would be able to cry well, sitting in front of a fan, and claustrophobic girls locking themselves in closets. Every day the girl who is in last place is eliminated and when the competition really starts to heat up, the girls do things like going to the local video store and renting every copy of Titanic so that the other girls will have nothing to cry over. Just one of these girls has enough neuroses to keep a team of psychologists busy for decades and watching them cry over comic books and sappy love songs or playing bizarre emotional game is as disturbing as it is funny.

Electric Boy

Half way between the reality show and the art of developing the meaningless word, the program Electric Boy offers to some actors without a big notoriety the opportunity to be on tv on a program watched by 17 millions viewers. During eleven months, Nasubi lived in direct live in a little room under the eye of cameras. The rules of the "game" is getting dress, eating, and being entertain only by the benefits of contests proposed in magazines.

I dont really understand the purpose of reality show in general but this one... A lonely man trapped in room doing nothing but filling papers to win contest in magazines seems to me a little but unuseful... The worst of it is that the show is famous and popular!!

The strange world of the japanese television

The first time I turned on the TV in Japan I was of course expecting those "hip" tv shows which would make "All my Children" for a great epic play. Or of course these music programs in which pop singers were perfoming a great routine on a sparkling scene with music worthy of the 70'. Or even anchormen hitting guests with a huge balloon hammer. That was what I was excpecting of Japanese television. That was what I saw in France.
But that's only the visible part of the iceberg because japanese television can also be a rash of human torture, questionable jokes, sex and suffering, but it can also be hilarious...

Japanese TV invents the human tetris

Next to Japanese TV, french broadcast seems very boring. Always looking to new concepts, japanese made a great discovery: the human tetris. The rule: a wall is coming on a poor candidate standing in front of a swimming pool. In order to pass through the wall and not fall into the water, he must take the form of the hole drilled in wall. The shapes of the holes or obviously more and more difficult, making the candidate squirming themselves, like the some piece of a Tetris videogame.

10 times funnier than the best gag program!!

Fox in Japan

Yesterday evening i was switching channels and what a surprise when i discovered that i actually have the Fox channel in my apartment. The same tv shows as in the us were broadcasted, something we don't even have in France. In France it is impossible to watch tv shows in the same time as in the us. You have first to buy the rights to broadcast it in french on your channel. We cannot even access the streaming video which a reserved for american audience only. So what a surprised when i could watch the new episode of Prison Break!

But what's funny about it is watching a very trash reality show subtitle in japanese. Indeed I watched Tempatation Island where girls have to seduce boys in order to make them cheat on their wife while the wife are watching the adventure by video and vice versa. The show seems soooo far away from the japanese culture and seing wet naked bodies dancing together and dumb people explaining the "dilemas they faces in the experience" was very paradoxal with the moral ideals the japanese seem to have.

The shows I yet watched were more like food contest or funny talk shows or kawai manga; I haven't see (yet) any sexy more occidental realty trash, but my job here is not done yet...