Japan likes quiz shows. There are many of them on TV, each distinct from the others in some way, but they lack some things that are essential to other foreign game shows; if you compare Japanese shows to ones from the country I popped out of the main two differences are lack of common people and no prizes. One of the most popular quiz shows in Japan, recently, is Hexagon 2. Before we talk about the actual show we might as well talk more in depth about the differences between Japanese and other quiz shows.

While North American quiz shows only have famous people on every once in a while, if you watch a quiz show in Japan you’re likely not going to see any non-famous people unless if they cut to the audience – and they don’t hardly ever do that; this is just a fact of life over here. I could try to come up with a reason why you don’t see many blue/white-collar people on these shows but no matter what I say it will be rooted in conjecture. Nonetheless, it does have many advantages over having a bunch of regular people on a show (e.g. flow, humor).

We’re going to be here for a while.

Whatever type of show you’re watching (well, excepting news and similar programing), there’s going to be banter. In a lot of ways this is the lifeblood of Japanese television. It’s also something that can’t be assured if your cast/teams for the day are in front of a camera for the first time in their life. Try this (without having a long, tedious, casting call) on a show that would normally have two semi-famous people word-punching and you’ll almost certainly see the ratings fling itself off of the closest 10 story building and land at your feet for you to call time of death. I don’t really think I need to explain why there isn’t any money or prizes, right?

Hexagon 2, don’t worry about 1, gives us an interesting look into Japanese culture that we can’t find as easily on other shows, of the quizzical variety or not. Other quiz shows in Japan mostly try to have contestants that show some competency in a variety of subjects, but Hexagon purposefully has their teams consist of the whole spectrum from mouth breathers to those that are already manually editing their DNA by themselves. It started off as their schtick but, given its popularity, it’s obviously captured the attention of many Japanese (for at least one hour a week).

Jus’ ridin’ on the coattails of my slutty-ish sister.

How do we know who hasn’t watered their brain with knowledge juice besides their inability to answer questions? Prior to each episode each contestant takes a short test that covers a general smattering of what they should expect to hear during the program. Then during the beginning of the show all of the players on each team are ranked by their score. This ordering is of little importance through most of the episode (the easier question sets render order unimportant). This all changes in the final part of each show. The main, and likely most popular, portion of the show is the quiz relay. Each member of their team must correctly answer a question before the teammate behind them can have a chance of answering a question. Since this is a IFRL (intelligent first, retarded last) relay, it quickly devolves into a facepalm matsuri.

So what, if anything, does the popularity of this show tell us about Japan? If anything, I’d have to say laughter that comes from complete bewilderment. Bewilderment over how some of these people can be so dumb and yet still be on one of the rungs of the celebrity step-ladder; they can’t read kanji that a 12 year old can read and yet here they are on the TV. Hexagon 2 is, at times, a B (and C) celebrity version of “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”.

One effect this type of show can have is to help everyone see that all celebrities are, after all, just regular people. No need for pedestals nor reverence for people who really are just in a different industry than the blue-collar worker. And what way better to show that than a nice shower.

For the proletariat!

Is Sean Hannity a cross-dressing hooker in Thailand? Why won’t he tell us?

Fortunately, this isn’t the only True American™ that is outraged by this. Genuine Patriots like Bill Brasky Bennett also disagrees. Of course, there are people on youtube who are also angered that Obama would even try to respect any other culture. How dare he? Doesn’t he know that we are better than anyone else and that we will stay that way for all time? This is exactly why it’s important to have a whi, er Republican in office.

By the way, Hannity isn’t correct when he said that a newspaper in Japan refused to show the picture because they were embarrassed. However, there was probably no need for me to say that as you most likely knew that (I hope you don’t expect truth from someone like him).

You can read the story and comments at Japan Today or you can just read below if you don’t feel like clicking.

Photos of U.S. President Barack Obama bowing to Japan’s emperor have incensed critics in Washington, who said the U.S. leader should stand tall when representing America overseas.

Obama on Monday was in China, having wrapped up the Japan leg of his Asia trip two days earlier. But Washington’s punditocracy was still weighing whether or not the U.S. president had disgraced his country two days earlier by having taken a deep bow at the waist while meeting Japan’s Emperor Akihito.

Political talk shows have played and replayed the moment from the second day of Obama’s week-long Asia tour, which set the blogosphere on fire and chat show tongues wagging.

“I don’t know why President Obama thought that was appropriate. Maybe he thought it would play well in Japan. But it’s not appropriate for an American president to bow to a foreign one,” said conservative pundit William Kristol speaking on the Fox News Sunday program, adding that the gesture bespoke a United States that has become weak and overly-deferential under Obama.

Another conservative voice, Bill Bennett, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program: “It’s ugly. I don’t want to see it.”

“We don’t defer to emperors. We don’t defer to kings or emperors. The president of the United States—this coupled with so many apologies from the United States—is just another thing,” said Bennett.

Some conservative critics juxtaposed the image of Obama with one of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, who greeted the emperor in 2007 with a firm handshake but no bow.

“I’ll bet if you look at pictures of world leaders over 20 years meeting the emperor in Japan, they don’t bow,” Kristol said.

Some said the gesture was particularly grating coming after Obama’s bow to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah at a G20 meeting in April.

The U.S. president’s Asia trip comes just over a year after he won election to the White House, and is designed to shore up U.S. power in a region increasingly dominated by rising giant China.

But back home, Obama’s bow in Japan seems to have grabbed much of the attention being paid to the trip.

The gesture appears to have touched a particularly raw nerve among Obama critics who said the president has hastened America’s decline as a world superpower by being too apologetic and too deferential in his dealings with other world leaders.

While most of the commentary about the bow in Japan was decidedly negative, some political observers, like longtime Democratic activist Donna Brazile, came to the president’s defense.

“I think it’s a gesture of kindness,” she told CNN, adding that the bow appeared intended to show “goodwill between two nations that respect each other.”

Meanwhile, an unnamed, senior Obama administration official told the Politico.com news site that the president had simply been observing protocol.

“I think that those who try to politicize those things are just way, way, way off base,” the official told Politico.

“I don’t think anybody who was in Japan—who saw his speech and the reaction to it, certainly those who witnessed his bilateral meetings there—would say anything other than that he enhanced both the position and the status of the U.S., relative to Japan,” Politico wrote.

“It was a good, positive visit at an important time, because there’s a lot going on in Japan.”

Sometimes something simple surprises sensibilities. Cellular phones can be deceptively different is may ways. The majority of people stay put (to some degree or another) in one area so the chances of knowing how cell phones (or the contract you would enter) differ. You might not think that cell phones would be so varied as to warrant a poorly written article, but since you are Rear Admiral Wrongy Wrongerson I must show you the error of your ways.

I don’t want to my time discussing differences that everyone (should) know: North Americans talk more since texting is insanely expensive, everyone else texts more since calling is costly, etc etc. Since Japan is included in not North America people don’t call their friends that often, they text. There is no factor in the Japanese phone system that changes this oft stated, and quite correct, assertion. Given the well-known nature of this, I’m not going to spend anymore time talking about it.

I feel sorry for all those dumb bastards not in Freedom land who don’t have companies competing for our hard-earned dollars.

When buying a cellphone in a country such as the great US of A, your phone is usually either free or greatly discounted. This is made possible by making everyone pay more for minutes and text messages; i.e. gouging everyone. Now if you made the awesome and #1 conclusion that this is how everyone else does things, here’s a hat for you. Here in the country of giant-balled racoons we do things a little differently; the big three cell phone companies in Japan (DoCoMo, SoftBank, and AU) don’t usually subsidize their phone in anyway (the iPhone is a current exception to this rule). What they do is charge you a fee every month so that after 24 months of paying this fee you have a phone that is yours; if you decide to continue the contract without getting a new phone then your phone bill drops to just the services that you use. For the budget conscious, this way of doing things is vastly superiour to the American system, you can save money at first by buying a cheaper phone and then you can save even more money if you don’t get a super awesome phone that will give you hugs.

The above picture of an AU phone gives you an example of this. The amounts in the bottom right of the orange ringed box (top of the picture) show you how much you’d pay each month for either a 24 month contract or a 12 month contract, 2,055 and 4,110 yen respectively. The red number above those monthly figures is the retail price of the phone (49,320円 in this case) and the big red numbers are how much you have to pay upfront. These numbers vary depending on the phone you’re looking at, but unless if you’re here and you’re looking to buy a prepaid phone you’re going to see these numbers pop up again and again. And remember that none of these amounts are taking into consideration the price of the plan.

This way of paying for cell phones, albeit quite different than what many might be used to, is a good system. It doesn’t adversely affect the penny pinchers while still having monthly bills that would be competitive in many different markets.

Begin quivering in expectation for part 2 where Nancy Drew finds Mrs. Nickersons’s secret passage and gets caught in a stick situation.

I’d say that if you want something to be pissed about, it should be something more like this.

This just happened on TV a couple of days ago. He says 馬鹿 (ばか, stupid), which is fine, but he immediately follows it up with チョン (epithet against Koreans). I think he got off too lightly with his quick apology. Interestingly, Debito has nothing on this yet.

Update: The video is gone, go here or here to watch the video.