ARTS Contestants on Hole in the Wall, a Japanese television show, stand on the edge of a pool of water as a moveable wall rushes towards them. To avoid being knocked in and soaked, they must contort their bodies to fit through variously shaped gaps cut into the wall – from basic “T”s and “L”s to comically positioned human silhouettes.
Such is the simple genius of Japanese TV. After clips of Hole in the Wall became viral hits on YouTube, Fremantle, the UK-based creator of Pop Idol, bought the rights to the format and sold them to broadcasters in 16 countries. Versions of the show will soon appear in the UK and the US.
As low-budget reality and game shows tighten their grip on the world’s airwaves, clicking the remote control in Japan can feel like peeking into the future of television. In any given hour of prime time, most offerings are likely to feature people puzzling over trivia or “brain-training” riddles, bashing through obstacle courses or roughing it in the bush with African tribesmen.
Just about anything can be turned into a gripping test of wits or stamina. One recent hit is Y10,000 Monthly Budget Savings Challenge!, in which contestants try to survive on impossibly little money ($93, €59, £47). The most creative competitor bought a chicken for eggs and speared his own fish, but lost to an even more frugal opponent.
As with so many things in Japan, however, close inspection of the television landscape reveals sharp differences with the west. Take, for example, the near-total absence of non-famous people, even on the sort of quiz and reality programmes in which they regularly appear in other countries. Japanese shows’ baroque challenges may look like those on Survivor or X-Factor, but the competitors are rarely anonymous amateurs.
“Japanese people don’t care about strangers,” says Yutaka Shigenobu, chief executive of TV Man Union, one of Japan’s biggest independent production companies. “Regular people are all strangers. Celebrities are more like friends and family to them.”
Watching Japanese TV can thus feel like an endless marathon of Celebrity Jeopardy! or Strictly Come Dancing – a version of which exists in Japan, entitled Shall We Dance? The contortionists on Hole in the Wall are professional comedians, although Fremantle’s export will feature non-celebrities. The chicken-raising spear fisherman on Savings Challenge! is also a comic.
The same faces seem constantly to be on the air. One emcee, Monta Mino, hosts a dozen live and recorded shows and holds the Guinness record for appearing on the most hours of live TV in a single month: 22 hours, 15 seconds.
Japan’s celebrity fixation has left it in a sort of parallel television universe in which some of the biggest worldwide hits of recent years have been ignored. Fremantle’s Idol format has been reproduced in 40 countries, from the US to Kazakhstan, but Japanese networks have so far turned down proposals to make a “Japan Idol”, on the apparent grounds that if the contestants are not already famous before the show airs, no one will watch.
“Japan is much less persuaded than other markets about the value of international content,” says Tony Cohen, Fremantle’s chief executive, who blames a “celebrity-oriented television culture” for the failure of many formats to take hold.
When foreign shows have been adopted for the home market, Japanese networks have taken a reverse-Hole in the Wall approach by fielding famous contestants in place of the ordinary people used abroad. Who Wants to be a Millionaire? was a flop until its producers ditched plucked-from-the-audience competitors for actors, singers and sports stars. (Japan’s version is hosted, inevitably, by the record-holding Monta Mino.)
Ordinary people haven’t always been unpopular. Shigenobu created one of the world’s earliest reality shows in 1975: Trans America Ultra Quiz. Part quiz show and part Amazing Race, the programme fielded amateur contestants in a race across the US, ending with a quiz-off at the Statue of Liberty in New York. It was a huge hit, attracting a 30 per cent audience share at its peak. “If the idea of selling TV formats had been around then, it would have been a global success,” Shigenobu says. “We were too early.”
His view points to what may be the biggest reason for the celebrity bias: Japan did the ordinary-people thing years ago, and has moved on. It had a version of Idol before there was Idol: Asayan, a music audition show that ran from the early 1990s until 2002 and discovered some of today’s biggest Japanese pop stars.
A few amateur-centric shows have survived, such as Ainori (“Sharing a Ride”), a late-night travel-and-romance programme in which young people hook up and break up as they drive round the world in a van. Ratings are not what they used to be but the show has nonetheless made it into its ninth year – helped, perhaps, by its in-studio celebrity panel, which takes up half the show with analysis of the action and unrelated chit-chat.
That reality TV of any kind is capable of losing its grip on popular tastes will be good news for westerners who loathe the genre. Producers should take note too: one reason the amateur trend faded in Japan, says a director at one of the country’s big networks, is that too many shows were caught practising yarase – fixing contests and staging “spontaneous” scenes between participants. Even the beloved Ainori has been accused.
“People started to suspect every show,” he says.
This article is part of a series on TV around the world. For earlier pieces, visit www.ft.com/arts/tv
