#I used to haunt /r/JapaneseGameShows

[alexanderwales]

It always annoys me when people talk about Japanese game shows where such and such happens, then I look it up and it's a clip from a variety show. These are, mostly, one-time skits or games, and presenting them as gameshows gives this implication that there's a whole weird media landscape living in Japan that does not, for the most part, actually exist.

There was one in particular where they did the "is it chocolate" thing years before "Is it Cake?", but with their celebrity guests and panel members having to bite down on the objects in question, and I think it would be great if this were a full show with a dozen episodes ... but it's not. They did it a few times on a variety show, and that's it.

And of course the clips from this have been circulating around for more than a decade now, playing up the absurdity of something that was always meant to be absurd, with Japanese comedians doing exaggerated reactions to tasting a door handle that's made of chocolate.

I think it's like that across cultures sometimes, where there's one tiny thing that had its own context, and some other culture hears about it, only to blow it out of proportion as though it's some kind of trend of staple.

And I would love if that stuff actually existed in abundance, if there were some thriving market that I could watch on some sketchy streaming site, if other cultures really did have stuff that was persistently weird and wild, rather than just being (largely) one-of five minute segments from two hour variety panel show.