⛩️ #17 Four New Geniuses of Japanese Comedy

The Headlines, This Week in History, and Much More

Welcome back! It’s Tempura Day in Japan and we’ve good some good stuff for you this week:

• We watched a few hundred hours of video to bring you the 4 people we think are the new geniuses of Japanese comedy…

• News of another weird meet-and-greet where fans can shake hands with their idol — and this time the idol is locked inside a box…

• Plus your regulars: the quiz, events from this week in Japanese history, and some scaldingly entertaining links. Let’s get into it!

THE QUIZ

A picture that Japanese people will recognize instantly. Do you?

Question: what delicious dish is this?

Answer at the foot of the mail.

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THE HEADLINES

1. $1 = ¥160

[🤡]

2. Koiké vs Renho: All Female Battle For Tokyo Governor…

[Renho walking tightrope: accepting Communist support but keep it shush]

3. …and people are putting up posters of p*rn stars on official election signboards

[Also: host clubs and QR codes for scam sites]

THE IMAGE

We Don’t Know What a Glory Hole Is, But if We Did We’d Probably Think It Looks Like This

Image: Universal Music Japan

Japanese music fans love an opportunity to meet their idols. Music executives love making money.

This has led to the popularity of handshake events, a kind of extended meet-and-greet where fans can get up close and personal with their favorite artists — preferably (for the music executives) by purchasing multiple physical copies of an album for the chance to secure a ticket.

Meanwhile, singer Ado made the biggest splash for a new artist in decades when, in 2020, at the age of 17, her debut single hit the number 1 spot in the Japanese charts.

Maintaining her popularity in the intervening years, July will see the release of her second album.

The only quirk? Ado remains anonymous, never having shown her face in public, existing in and born of Internet culture.

But no one is going to let this small fact stop the cash-cow that is a handshake event.

So Universal Music Japan has come up with the compromise of locking Ado in a large box so she can maintain her anonymity while fans get their handshake fix through a tiny orifice, as if they are clean-suited scientists working on nerve gas.

With the level of adoration Ado has received, no doubt her supporters will come away satisfied regardless, plus, depending on the size of the aperture, it may discourage people from attempting that favorite tactic of the obsessed fan — forcing the artist to engage in an extended “hip-hop” style handshake, to maximize skin-to-skin contact time.

Read more: A few weeks ago we examined that time a man stabbed two members of mega-group AKB48 at a handshake event.

THE COMEDY

Last night we laughed longer and harder than we have for a long time; we were re-watching comedy duo Reiwa Roman tackling the “100 Jokes & Retorts” time trial challenge.

Reiwa were already 74 jokes deep when member Kuruma picked up a shaker of green juice, considered it for a second, then described the contents.

Try for yourself. Look at the shaker in the photo, then, in 3 seconds, come up with the funniest way to describe it:

Image: NO BROCK TV via Youtube

3

2

1

Here’s what Kuruma said:

That’ll happen when you shake Tinkerbell too hard.

* * *

Japanese comedy is shit and unfunny.

Is a very common opinion, derived mainly from the zoo of TV shows that feature bleachers packed with glass-eyed Z-listers fake-laughing at the furious hamming of a small coterie of congealed middle age men reciting sub-“routine” clumps of language for the 1000th time.

(We remember when Sando Katsura was on television for hundreds of hours based off counting to ten in a weird voice).

But this kind of time-waste panel show also exists in the UK, which considers itself a mecca of comedy, and is underpinned by the same logic: keep the production budget cheap, churn the shows out quick, and use them mainly as a sponge to suck up the available hours of otherwise-unemployable comics represented by influential management companies.

The actually interesting Japanese comedy happens live or, more recently, on Youtube.

And Youtube’s king of comedy, or should that be eminence gris, is Nobuyuki Sakuma.

Sakuma began as an assistant director at TV Tokyo, where he first gained notice by creating cult late time show God Tongue, whose brow-level can be guessed from segment names like “Kiss Endurance Championship” and “Let's get the idol to show us her boobs”.

Now, after several decades in network TV, he has struck out on his own, creating Youtube channel NO BROCK TV, whose output ranges from the completely unwatchable to the compulsively rewatchable. The jewel in the NO BROCK crown is the Hundred Boké Hundred Tsukkomi Challenge series.

* * *

In Japan, stand-up (known as manzai) is a pair sport.

One member of the duo is the boké — the fool, who serves up dumb remarks for their partner, the tsukkomi, to return. To boké and to tsukkomi are also verbs; the boké bokés, the tsukkomi tsukkomis.

In the Hundred Boké Hundred Tsukkomi Challenge, a manzai duo is put in a room alongside an innocent (and attractive…) young woman, who has no idea the challenge is going on, and usually reacts with complete bafflement at the manzai pair’s furious back-and-forth.

The comedians are timed to see how long it takes them to do 100 pairs of boké and tsukkomi: joke plus retort.

When done badly, by midgets of the trade, this degenerates into the boké blurting out random non-sequiturs, or engaging in “physical comedy” — i.e. punching their partner or throwing things across the room — while the tsukkomi berates them for their stupidity.

But when done right, by a manzai duo who eat, sleep and wipe their ass comedy together, you have a perfect mind-meld that creates moments of hilarity surpassing anything in Western comedy.

* * *

Reiwa Roman and La Land

Two of the most brilliant manzai duos to come to prominence recently are Reiwa Roman and La Land.

Reiwa won last year’s M-1 Grand Prix, a months-long competition where more than 8000 manzai groups battle it out to be crowned the funniest duo in Japan.

Kuruma (literally “car”) is the boké, and Kemuri (“smoke”) the tsukkomi. Much is made of the fact that the duo met at an all-boys school, and thus remain awkward around women (although knowing the kind of company comedians usually keep in Japan — pornstars and party girls — this must by now be inaccurate).

What is remarkable is their growth between their first Hundred Boké Hundred Tsukkomi Challenge appearance and their second. Only months apart, their M-1 Grand Prix win in between has not only visibly increased their confidence, but the quality of their bokés and tsukkomis have increased exponentially — this is comedy operating at a rare level.

La Land’s Nishida and Saaya. Image: NO BROCK TV

La Land are the most interesting manzai duo to have emerged in years, for one simple reason: members Saaya and Nishida have eschewed Yoshimoto Kogyo, the entertainment conglomerate that keeps a virtual stranglehold on the comedy world with their control of artist management, production, live theaters and even schools (which churn out the majority of new comedy talent).

Instead, La Land represent themselves and control all their own productions — or rather, Saaya does, because Nishida is notorious for his laziness, poor timekeeping and rudeness.

Nishida receives massive online vitriol for his shortcomings, and La Land have leaned into it, creating Youtube content detailing Saaya’s rehabilitation plan for her partner’s personality faults, including withholding all his earnings and instead putting him on fixed salary until he repays his debts to his long-suffering parents.

La Land’s first and second goes at the Hundred Boké Hundred Tsukkomi Challenge are masterpieces of comic inventiveness and timing. Inverting conventional wisdom, which would have ne’re-do-well Nishida the boké, instead it is Saaya who fires off silly jokes, observations and embarks on insane flights-of-fancy and Nishida who skewers them with well-timed tsukkomis.

Now, for those Dear Readers still beginning their Japanese learning journey: NO BROCK does add subtitles to some videos, and has even experimented with (horrible) English dubbing — but you’re battling not only a language barrier but a cultural one too — the challenges are chock full of cultural references and (especially) merriment caused by offenses against traditional Japanese hierarchies.

Still, if you are love comedy and/or Japan, check out the Reiwa Roman or LaLand links in this article and remember:

Don’t learn Japanese to enjoy comedy, enjoy comedy to learn Japanese.

(To go or not to go. Dear Readers, we have a quandary: Reiwa Roman are playing a show in Osaka in August; unfortunately they’re sharing a bill with the truly excruciating musical duo Yoneda 2000…)

THE HISTORY

Happenings from this week in Japanese history:

A Big Juicy Scandal

1948: The Showa Denko Case. A chemical company disgorged massive bribes to obtain funds from the Reconstruction Finance Bank in carnaged post-war Tokyo. The police catch on and soon dozens of powerful politicians — including Prime Minister Ashida Hitoshi — are in custody, though rumors abound the whole thing is a turf war between different factions of the American military government.

In the end strings are pulled and only hapless Minister of Finance Takeo Kurusu convicted; future giant of literature (and committer of seppuku) Yukio Mishima, a clerk in that ministry, once began the official minutes of a speech by his boss by calling him a bald old codger.

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Playing With Fire: The First Tokaimura Nuclear Accident

1986: Fire at the Tokaimura nuclear plant exposed 37 personnel to radiation. The Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation mandated two workers falsely report the chronological events; radiation levels in the nearby area rose 200% (falsely reported as 20%). Don’t worry, accidents like this never happen again!

In 2000 it happened again. 2 died, 667 were irradiated. 11 years after that, the world woke up to the Fukushima catastrophe.

THE LINKS

Good stuff you should read:

1. Yuki Gomi’s Japanese Food Simply. The pictures alone will make you slam your head into your screen like a cat spotting a bird on TV.

2. Mark Kennedy with some photographs of this week’s summer solstice from Funakoshi Observatory in Nagasaki Prefecture.

3. Burcu Basar on the one-two punch of rainy season then brutal summer.

THE ANSWER

Question: what delicious dish is this?

Answer: yami nabé (闇鍋)

Nabé is traditional Japanese hotpot, often shared with friends. Yami means “darkness”. In yami nabé, everyone must contribute something for the communal pot, except it should be an ingredient ill-suited to the job (chocolate, for instance, or sushi), then the whole thing is simmered - in the dark.

After everyone is served one ladleful, the lights go on, then you have to finish your bowl, whatever happened to be in it — that’s yummy yami nabé!

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We’ll see each other again next week,

The Kyote

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The Kyote is published in Kyoto, Japan every Sunday at 19:00 JST