Upsetting Day: Japanese Punishment Shows

Once, long ago, there was a comedy website that only wanted three simple things: to make people laugh, to teach them a few things, and to not get piledriven into the dirt by corporate scavengers. It succeeded in two of those goals, before getting piledriven into the dirt by corporate scavengers. Some of its archives have been deleted, some of them have been corrupted, and some just suck. You decide which one this is. It’s such a cute throwback -- look how far we’ve come! How innocent we were, that this made our radar. It’s like Baby’s First Hot Dog, it’s...

Our society has collapsed and fallen into a casual dystopia, and all we can do is distract ourselves until Elon Musk starts his Meme Fiefdom and puts us to work in the NFT mines. But if we're going to live our lives by proxy in a media hellscape, the least we can do is give it a little Running Man flavor. Luckily Japan is ahead of us in everything: robots, boning, boning robots, and TV suitable for the collapse of society.

The Mummy Show

It's never a great sign when the episode’s thumbnails look like somebody paused eight tabs of torture porn once the post-nut shame set in.

That grim collage of snuff caps is from TORE!, a game show where contestants answer trivia questions while avoiding booby traps. Except hahaha -- no, they don’t. Some games have the illusion of escape. Some are just about postponing death. Here’s the Mummy Machine.

It is the single most horrifying thing I have ever seen, and I have seen the internet. Those two giant arms spin around you, binding you ever tighter, slowly mummifying you alive from the feet up. Oh, but there's something you can do about it! Answer the questions correctly, and you can pause the machine ... which makes it all so very much worse. It fosters the illusion that you have some control over your fate. It puts the fault on you, for failing, rather than the demented mechanic in the otter mask masturbating offscreen. Giving you agency in your own mummification means you don’t spend your last moments reflecting on family and friends, you spend them cursing the feeble brain that cannot remember the lyrics of the Japanese Love Boat theme to save its own life.

And yet, if this all happened to a schoolgirl, I promise you somebody would be masturbating to it right now.

Oh ... I ... I guess you're welcome. I really should remember to filter the YouTube results by most views and check if all the top results are women. That’s how you sound out a fetish.

The Komodo Dragon Show

This is Ayako Imoto.

This is Ayako Imoto tying meat to herself.

This is Ayako Imoto, meat tractor, trying to outrun a hungry Komodo dragon.

And she did it all while wearing a Kimono. To a Komodo dragon, that's like the little tab you pull to open a box of Hot Pockets.

I know this is no crazier than the stunts on Jackass, so it's a little xenophobic of me to write about how wacky Japan is for doing it -- like every one of their weddings ends in a Komodo Drag Race. But the world balances out: somewhere in Japan, a young comedy writer just discovered America's Funniest Home Videos and is typing up a 200-word piece about how those crazy Americans are constantly ramping their Rascal Scooters into above-ground pools. Japanese Cracked will pay him $5 for it, but only if he can find a seamless way to tie it into the portable blacklight disinfector sold in their affiliate shop.

The Orifice Punishment Show

Gaki no Tsukai is about Japanese comedians punishing each other in hilarious ways that are definitely not erotic, and it’s crazy that you walked in on this one moment and got the complete wrong impression.

Haha, what even is Bottom Topping - that’s a thing? That’s a real sex thing, with a thriving community who appreciates the subtle art of anal centrifuge? The gentle interplay of willing flesh and spinning metal, the tension as you feel the top hit the ramp and you know the descent has begun? Well, haha, this isn’t that! This is just a prank!

If it's important to you, the top was intentionally designed to cause maximum rectal damage.

And if it’s really important to you, I can assure you that man screamed like a cat in a garbage compactor when the top drilled his anus. If those details were important to you, perhaps you should take a minute now and reevaluate your life. Somebody gave birth to you. They had hopes for you. And you’re here. Reading this.

Here’s another fun game: This one’s a performance art piece about the population decline devastating Japan’s long term economy.

That’s the Chinko Machine, and it is a factory line of testicular demolition. If at any point a contestant cannot name an obscure side character from Ultraman, they are dick-mashed by a robot arm purpose-made to mash dicks.

It sure doesn't look like a polite phone call taken in the gentleman's lounge. The worst part? You're not disqualified when you lose. You have to keep playing. You don't get to leave with unmutated future children if you get an answer right. It's like an old arcade game -- there’s no endscreen, there’s only wave after wave until you either quit or your dick explodes.

That happened to you guys too, right? In Galaga?

The Mortality Show

American prank shows are all about making strangers feel awkward. Japanese prank shows are about making strangers believe they are going to die, and then laughing as they face their own mortality. I'm pretty sure that's the premise of at least two Kafka stories. In this one, we open on a lone pedestrian in an empty alleyway. When he's about halfway up, a massive and visibly armed gang enters, blocking the entire street. He turns to run, but another massive, visibly armed gang is coming up from behind.

He tries to hide, to make himself small, but there is nowhere to shelter. If you go frame by frame, you can actually see the exact moment where he makes his peace with death.

His eyes are closed tight. His face is pulled into his shoulder. He's not even hoping he survives this anymore, he just wants an open casket.

After this prank wrapped up, I’m sure that guy laughed with relief. But then he went about his day feeling strangely hollow. Jokes didn't land anymore. He couldn't be present in conversations. He got home and drank and stared at the wall. He realized that his whole life until now was just a series of distractions, keeping him from considering his own inevitable death. He'd been treating time like an infinite resource, and was now acutely aware of how quickly his hourglass was emptying.

Or maybe he forgot about it like a week later and went back to playing hentai games on the train. I don't know, a lot is lost in translation.

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