Wheel! Of! Gameshow!

All about eating chocolate

Let’s dip our toes into Japanese television. If I poll a hundred people on what they picture when the words Japanese TV are put together, I’m sure at least eighty will include the words “game show”. For the average foreigner, game shows are the final brick in cementing the idea that Japan is weird, along with their superior toilets and penchant for raw fish.

So what more is there to say about this widely mocked but rarely examined part of Japanese life? For someone whose Japanese vocabulary derives greatly from watching public Japanese broadcasts, this will be my first guide to understanding the cultural force of television.

Game or no game

Japanese game shows have somehow become synonymous in the West with weird and wacky. Yet no one ever thinks to wonder, what is a game show?

Is it:

A) A way to get famous, or at least on television, for the regular mass media viewer?

B) The quickest way to earn lots of money, with only a slight chance of national humiliation?

C) A fun way to explore how people would react in absurd scenarios, that are only granted through television’s extreme budget?

D) A vehicle for funny people to remain funny on screen?

If you answered any of the above, then you can collect your prize of being a proud subscriber of Hidden Japan!

To me, these are all valid possibilities to how a game show is formatted and the type of contestant that appears on them. What I find surprising is how outside observers of Japan expect all game shows, or more extremely, all television to be in the C category, absurd scenarios for ordinary citizens to struggle against, all manufactured by a television broadcaster.

Based on my personal observations, Japanese TV is almost entirely category D. Overwhelmingly speaking, public Japanese television will showcase the same faces. These faces may be presented in specific formats like a travel show, or quiz show, or even a game show, but it has been rare to find anything on public television that does not feature a nationally famous comedian.

Today we’ll take a deep dive into arguably Japanese television’s most viral clip. More commonly known as the “Is this Chocolate?” segment. For onlookers, they can accurately see a bunch of middle-aged Japanese people rushing to bite items in a room. For context, these aren’t regular people drafted to chew, but celebrities who would be doing some other ridiculous task on a TV show otherwise. For example, this clip shows the star of Godzilla Final Wars (2004) biting a table leg, the equivalent of Jason Statham massaging a lawn mower on free to air TV.

What this reveals to me is that stars in Japan are just more willing to try new concepts and move the medium forward. All the “strangeness” that was claimed about Japanese television shows are now omnipresent in western media. These shows are prototypes for emerging trends we know and love in the content space: Japanese celebrities have more avenues of wacky exposure for their adoring fans; weird and unusual clips go viral with ease; and Japanese commentator bubbles are the decades-old precursor to today’s live-streaming options.

Commentator bubbles

Perhaps the most unusual thing that I found with Japanese television was the commentators. While back in Australia, I understood the role of commentators for live sports to add insight into what was being watched in case the viewer wasn’t glued to the screens (and to keep people company). This had never struck me as odd, having two or three people just talking about what was happening on the field, even though that would be massively distracting live or in any other form of entertainment.

Well, apparently this exact form of hearing random people, sometime cast as experts, is exactly what everyone was craving in all media. Nowadays, companies like Twitch make billions off this precise phenomenon, of hearing people talk about what is already being seen on the screen. As mentioned above, Japan had this all figured out years ago, with giant panels of other celebrities in tiny talking head squares commenting on the goings-ons. They knew that what the audience was asking for was just more people they liked.

Even from the short clip above, you can see the sheer number of different people occupying that small space is as packed as can be. Beyond the people numbers, the actual viewing space is maximised for greatest efficiency, with text and information crammed into any area not occupied by celebrities. A wild hypothesis is perhaps the cultural expectation for densely filled television sets to match the crowds and population density of major Japanese urban centres. Or maybe people just enjoy a bit of controlled chaos captured inside the four walls of a television screen.

Modern followers

I’ve cited that Japanese shows are the shoulders on which giants of media stand today. Consider the gentlemen simply known as MrBeast, otherwise referred to as the most subscribed individual on YouTube. Without stereotyping his work, I would say that his videos could almost all be higher budget versions of Japanese game shows. Just look at the list of his most popular episodes. Something like “Ages 1 to 100 Fight For $500,000” is simply an evolution of similar ideas, like three soccer stars against 100 children.

I guess my point is that the forefathers of Japanese television are to thank for the rise of Youtubers and Twitchers. No matter which mindless content you choose to consume, perhaps Japan has played a part in bringing it to life.