It's all kinds of wrong, I know, but bear with me.

Because I'm hopelessly pedantic and needlessly reductive, I like to think that the values of an entire society can be parsed simply by deconstructing the game shows of a given culture. For example, when I look at the shows of my own society I see that America is clearly little more than 100 million overweight fantasists with annoying families and a love of catch phrases. After all, what other kind of culture would find it entertaining to watch ignorant, undeserving people gamble away the equivalent of a year's salary just to spite an imaginary banker at the behest of a soul-patched comedian gone to seed? When I see Japanese game shows, I see a country-wide psychological disorder that, while no more or less disturbing than America's, makes me want to give that entire nation a reassuring hug.

By writing for this blog and consuming various bits of cross-cultural flotsam, I've seen enough Japanese game shows to break them down into a basic formula. Observe:

                                    R+A(iP+H)-C=Show

Let me translate this for you. R, a regular person or several regular people (meaning what Japanese people assume is regular), is or are given A, an arduous task of some sort. The intensity of this setup is multiplied by P, pain, which itself is multiplied by being i, impending rather than ongoing. The product of i and P is further intensified by the addition of H, humiliation. You then subtract C, any clear reward for success, from the total product.

In the case of this video, a room full of men are being asked to undertake the arduous task of not laughing at what seems like a mentally handicapped man's attempts to read, recall and pronounce basic English. Should one of these men fail, he will not only lose the game but be subject to a hard spank on his way out. What the winner, if there is even the possibility of winning, gets for holding in his giggles is anyone's guess.

When I compare game premises like this to the absurdity of American shows, the difference in what counts for entertainment in each culture is clear. As an American, I want to believe that a shlub like me will one day be handed a briefcase with a million dollars in it by a supermodel just for being lucky and persistent. The entertainment is in watching that fantasy come true for someone else (a flawed premise, but whatever). By contrast, the Japanese don't really want to see each other succeed, at least as analogs to themselves. Rather, they'd like to watch their fellow man suffer and fail. From this I can only conclude that the entire island system of Japan is populated by self-sabotaging masochists who completely lack empathy.

Of course, the optimist in me wants to believe that these game shows are just evidence of a Japanese willingness to endure pain with the promise of reward, a sort of bootstrapping grit we Americans used to claim as our own. But then I remember all the tentacle porn and I realize that I'm just being an ignorant American fantasist again.