Kasou Taishou (In hiragana that would be かそうたいしょう, but see the footnote*…) has become one of my favorite Japanese shows. It has been around Japanese television for quite a few years, and I came across it while looking for videos where I could hear Japanese being spoken on YouTube, and there are many episodes on there now. The premise is that it is a gameshow in which anyone can enter. Contestants use costume and props in order to enact a scene of some sort, from every day things to imaginary situations; but the show format encourages a great amount of creativity in presentation, especially in visual ‘effects’ which might be easy to do with video editing but are in most cases quite elaborate when done ‘live’ in front of the small studio audience. So for instance a character might float in the air by means of being held up by people dressed in black who blend into the background (sometimes referred to as ‘ninjas’).
There is a panel of judges who dish out points based on how good they think the skit was. They seem to be quite generous and the point system does not seem to mean much – so long as they get over 14 points they are given a medal by a Japanese woman dressed as a bunny…There are reasons I have a soft spot for Japan, you know…
The show really needs to be seen to understood. If you are fluent in Japanese or able to figure out how to click on the links, the television station website for it is at:
http://www.ntv.co.jp/kasoh/past/index.html
Below are just a few of the skits that really stood out to me, but I could list plenty more!
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| Conductor Orangutan | Scuba | Hot! | Cursed Room |
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| Mogul Skiing | Chameleon | All Messed Up | Baseball World Record |
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| Olympic Games Highlights | |||
* I’m very new to writing out Japanese, and the hiragana above doesn’t seem to pull up proper search engine results. It means something like, "masquerade prize" with the kanji choices 仮装 and 大賞 and a lot of help from the awesome translation site http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi . Apparently my choice of kanji is close, given the Japanese from Wikipedia: "欽ちゃん and 香取慎吾の全日本仮装大賞; Kinchan and Katori Shingo’s All Japan Costume Grand Prix"