Mongo Nation

…Are awesome!

By Jeremy Azevedo

We’ve all seen the Japanese import game shows in which people have to participate in potentially dangerous “Double Dare” type physical challenges…

…But did you know that there is an entire genre of game shows over there that are so sadistic that they were banned from Japanese television? Lucky for us, that ban doesn’t extend to the Internet. Today, those very same shows are available for you to watch in their entirety online! If you can imagine a show actually being banned from the air in a country that has coin-operated (used!) panty dispensers on their city streets, then you can probably also imagine that these shows live up to their reputation of being absolutely batshit insane.

Denpa Shonen: Like “Oldboy”, only without all the murder and stuff.

The first show I took a look at was “Denpa Shonen”, a program that’s more or less about kidnapping and exploiting people who are willing to do anything to be famous. Now I understand that the phrase “willing to do anything to be famous” is one that is bandied about quite frivolously these days. But believe me when I tell you, the word “anything” means more to the people of Japan than it does to the litigious crybabies that make up our population of reality television contestants here in the US.

The season of Denpa Shonen that I watched followed the life of a young man named Nasubi, who was locked in an apartment with no clothes and no means of escape for nearly a year. By himself. To make matters worse, Nasubi was forced to live on nothing but sweepstakes winnings, including food. It probably goes without saying that the dude goes completely bananas (but in a funny way!) Watching this show is worth it just to see how excited Nasubi gets when he wins a lousy bag of rice or an eggplant or whatever. Or how pissed he gets when he wins a catalogue or a poster or something for the 5th time in a row.

Closed captioned so you can read their cries of anguish as well as hearing them.

The second show I watched was called “Gaki”, and was about four guys, locked in a gymnasium together for 24 hours. Not particularly exciting, until you factor in that “Taggers” dressed in black from head to toe like The Gimp from “Pulp Fiction” can pop out at any minute to beat the shit out of them with sticks, put them into a figure-four leglock, burn them, stuff them into a tiny box or do pretty much whatever the hell they feel like. I shit you not, these dudes look like gladiators from “The Running Man” and suddenly fly out of the floor like super heroes with smoke and everything. It’s terrifying.

Check out Denpa Shonen and Gaki now and see for yourself what the totally awesome future of reality Television should have looked like. Once you’ve seen the kind of stuff that’s too extreme even for Japanese audiences, you’ll probably never want to see another vapid dating show or half-assed drama parade like “The Hills” ever again.