Japanese TV vs American Reality

America turned itself into a reality show. Why didn’t Japan?

I moved from the U.S. to Japan in the spring of 2003. As a result, I missed seeing one of the single biggest developments in American pop culture unfold: the explosive rise of reality television. It’s almost trite to note that we’ve elected a reality TV star to the presidency twice, or that his reality TV style has reshaped the law of the land, transforming the ways we view ourselves, our fellow citizens, and the ways we interact with allies and rivals. The President of the United States made this clear in February, when he remarked, after a shouting match with the President of Ukraine, that "this is going to be great television." A king-like autocrat is something for which the Constitution was designed; reality-show governance is an X Factor, ha ha ha, sob sob sob, that the blissfully television-deprived Founders never saw coming.

A college friend of mine, David Gould, was actually the first contestant Trump "fired" on The Apprentice back in 2004. “It was a lark,” he told me of auditioning for the show. “A bit of fun. I was a closet performer, had just finished business school, and was exploring a potential transition to real estate.” When the time came, David executed his task successfully, but Trump booted him out anyway – a watershed moment in the show, in Trump's career, and as it would turn out, in American politics.

More akin to giving a thumbs up or down at a gladiatorial contest than a business decision, it established a game without clear rules, where the outcomes would be unpredictable, dramatic, and chaotic: a perpetual storm whipped up by Trump with himself at its center. It grew large enough to sweep up all of America, and now we’re all contestants, struggling to keep up with waves of disruptive changes, contradictory announcements and mysterious rulings.

Reality shows seem a product of the American media machine, even of the American mindset. But they actually thrived in Japan decades ahead of the West. In fact, the formats for more than a few seemingly all-American reality hits were actually sourced from Japan, including America’s Funniest Home Videos, Shark Tank, and Iron Chef. Even if you’re a Japanophile, you may well have missed this trend, because Japan lacks a homegrown catchphrase for what English-speakers call “reality TV.” So much of what is shown here fits the broad definition that it’s simply known as terebi, “TV.”

Once upon a time on terebi, extreme formats dominated. In the Eighties, Za Gaman (“The Endurance”) pitted college students against one another in contests that felt kind of like Jackass meets “Ow! My Balls.” On the other hand, Takeshi-jo (“Takeshi’s Castle”) took a wackier approach, sending folks in crazy cosplay through zany obstacle courses. You might know these shows because they were widely covered by foreign media outlets, which inevitably framed them as bizarre outliers of the sort that would never be aired in their more civilized markets.

In the Nineties, reality TV continued to thrive, but citizen contestants were increasingly replaced by tarento (“talents”), professional performers, many of whom were stand-up comedians or pop-star idols. Being eager for fame, they were much easier to coax into radical scenarios such as the 1998 Susunu! Denpa Shonen (“Stop! You Crazy Kids”). It imprisoned an aspiring comedian in a tiny room, only permitting him to clothe and feed himself with prizes from mail-away sweepstakes for a year and a half. Meanwhile, late night timeslots grew increasingly racy; on Gilgamesh Night (1991-1998), hosts cavorted with topless female porn stars in a kind of real-life version of I’d Buy That for a Dollar! from Robocop.

At the turn of the Millennium, however – and ironically, just as the success of Survivor supercharged reality TV in the States – Japan’s sensational shows began disappearing. In their place appeared more wholesome fare like Tetsuwan Dash (1998-2025), which embedded boy-band TOKIO in rural farming communities. The early-Aughts hit Suiyo Do Desho (a.k.a. How Do You Like Wednesday?) was a zero-budget celeb stunt-travel show filmed on handicam that feels like a YouTube channel, years before YouTube existed. Ironically, the most wholesome of all was also the most similar to an American reality show: Terrace House, which aired from 2012-2020 in Japan and on Netflix abroad. Again the foreign press framed a Japanese show as a strange outlier, but for different reasons: they saw Terrace House as pleasant and heartwarming compared to Western reality shows, many of which had come to resemble those shocking Japanese series of the Eighties.

With its outrageous origins, you’d naturally expect Japanese reality TV to have grown even more unhinged over the years. But as you can see, it didn’t. Instead it evolved into the milder variant that dominates local airwaves today. The average variety show features a group of B-list celebrities sitting around talking about food (which is always, always delicious.)This often leads foreign critics to dismiss Japanese TV as repetitive and banal, but they’re missing the point. It isn’t designed to shock or stimulate, but rather to comfort and calm. Japanese variety shows offer viewers a kind of virtual camaraderie, a simulated in-group to which everyone is invited.

So if Japan pioneered reality TV, and still watches it today, why is it that modern Japanese reality TV is so inoffensive, while the American strain is so virulent? It’s tempting to argue that Japan’s more sedate broadcast entertainment is a reflection of a healthier society and America’s adversarial entertainment a reflection of a sicker one. That American entertainment is the product of an outrage economy, while Japan’s a product of what might be called a soothing economy. Which makes sense, because some of Japan’s top exports are designed to comfort, empower, and heal. It’s particularly evident in publishing: the popularity of escapist isekai manga; the current boom for female authors like Yoko Ogawa and Mieko Kawakami; self-help hits likeThe Courage to be Disliked and Marie Kondo’s cleaning magic.

Those sweeping generalizations might have some basis in reality. But the current state of broadcast affairs in Japan isn’t due to some nationwide epiphany, or because the country is maturing, or because producers stopped making provocative shows out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s because of regulations.

Much like its society as a whole, modern Japanese reality TV feels a lot less chaotic than America’s. This is by design. “Japan isn’t cable TV country,” a producer friend of mine told me, asking to keep his name off the record. “The content needs to be more moderate. And TV has more to lose than ever from the internet. Both in terms of viewership, and in terms of damage to its reputation. So you see it getting more and more defensive. You have to worry about sponsors, [advertising agency] Dentsu, and the BPO.”

By this he means the Broadcasting Ethics & Program Improvement Organization. It’s a citizen advocacy group that was founded in 2003 – coinciding roughly with the time that Japanese TV started to calm. Its rise paralleled a series of Aughts scandals involving documentary shows faking footage, but its influence was turbocharged by a pair of scandals: the suicide of Terrace House star Hana Kumura in 2020, and the 2023 revelations about music producer Johnny Kitagawa’s decades of sex abuse. While the BPO doesn’t have any regulatory capability itself, it has the ear of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, which issues broadcast licenses.

A tarento friend of mine, who also wanted to speak off the record, agreed with this. “Previously, viewers who had a beef would call the TV station directly or send a letter, or send a letter to a newspaper but would not approach a sponsor directly. Now sponsors have websites. A noisy minority of viewers contact them directly saying they are upset over something. The sponsor gets worried and complains to the station’s sales or programming departments, then those departments yell at the individual programs, who in turn yell at the staff. And the BPO is a very big element. They have no real authority but when there is questionable content on TV, even something nobody would have cared about before, they latch onto it and make a big stink. That’s the reason Japanese TV has gotten so wholesome – not by choice.”

Japanese call this konpuraiansu – compliance, as in with broadcast standards. Once shock value was the lifeblood of Japanese TV; today it is compliance. In a total coincidence, as I started writing this newsletter, local news filled with reports of that wholesome boy-band (or more accurately, now, middle-aged-man-band) TOKIO announcing their official break-up due to “compliance issues” and that one of their member, Kokubun Taichi, would be fired from the still-ongoing Tetsuwan Dash. Strangely, none of the reports give any details as to what this issue might be, which goes to show how powerful of a word “compliance” has become in the industry. It’s such a big deal, in fact, that the Cabinet Minister for Communications has demanded an official report from Nippon Television. (Kyodo reports that the case involves, predictably, sexual harassment.)

Once, America had an organization similar to the BPO that was involved in moderating the tone of its broadcast scene: the Federal Communications Commission. But when Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, he made deregulating the FCC a top priority. His chief target was the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to cover both sides of controversial viewpoints. In a 1969 ruling, the Supreme Court had declared the doctrine “not only constitutional, but essential to democracy.”

Reagan’s elimination of the doctrine, codified in law in 1987, paved the way for the hyper-partisan infotainment outlets that deliver the majority of news to American viewers today. It also, coincidentally, allowed for the commercialization of children’s TV, which had the unintended side-effect of unleashing a flood of Japanese anime onto the airwaves, including Robotech, Voltron and The Transformers. There’s undoubtedly some deeper lesson here in how a staunch market protectionist like Reagan unwittingly gave Japanese toymakers the keys to the hearts and minds of American kids, and the Japanification of the Western fantasyscape.

While there isn’t a perfect one-to-one correlation among the BPO, FCC, and the Fairness Doctrine, in a sense the Japanese media marketplace has swapped places with America’s. From the American standpoint, it’s hard to imagine ever going back. In the individual-first, rebellious America, “compliance” feels like a four letter word. Meanwhile Japan, for all its (many!) issues and challenges, still possesses a common sense, by which I mean a relatively broadly shared idea of what constitutes acceptable public behavior. America, if it ever did, no longer possesses any such consensus regarding ethics, etiquette, or even reality, save for perhaps its shared love of the televised kind. For that reason alone it’s hard to imagine us embracing an organization like the BPO, if doing so would be a good thing -- or if it would even matter, with social media influencers being the primary sources of entertainment and information for so many. Enough Americans have voted with their remote controls, and their ballots, that reality TV reality is here to stay.

In a sense, my college buddy David was one of the first to experience the new reality firsthand, back on The Apprentice in 2004. “A future presidency wasn’t on any of our minds,” he told me. “But what was abundantly clear was that he made for truly great ratings – the first season, anyway. They declined in later ones.” Perhaps this is another way reality TV presaged everyday reality: the President’s approval rating is sagging in his second “season,” too. So while America has made its choice for now, Japan’s example hints, alluringly, that it’s possible for a society to change, if enough people want it -- and if the government is functional enough to listen.