03:30 PM by 
I decided to check out “I Survived a Japanese Game Show,” an ABC send-up featuring Tony Sano and Rome Kanda. Sano, a Japanese-American, plays something of a straight man to Kanda’s exaggerated Johnny Gilbert. It’s standard reality-TV fare—win the games, avoid eliminations, get a big cash prize. The only real twist is some “cultural learning” opportunities thrown in here and there. But the viewing left me with a few questions.
Number one: Is it racist? My quick answer—no. I haven’t watched every episode, but ABC seems to be poking fun at the zany game shows in Japan, not Japanese culture as a whole. Twenty or thirty years ago, that may not have been the case. Have you seen anything on the show that rubbed you the wrong way?
Number two—There are no Asian-Americans competing on this show. What does that say, if anything? Maybe Asian-Americans are just too smart to sign up. But it’s also possible that the producers purposely left Asians out. Non-Asians frequently fail to recognize differences among Eastern cultures, and between actual Asia and Asian-America. There’s an assumption made—“You’re Asian, so you must understand.”
Case in point: I once read about a Korean-American girl waitressing at a Thai restaurant. She was frustrated when customers asked her to “interpret” the meaning of the Thai artwork. When she explained she was not Thai, they countered with, “Oh, but the cultures are very similar.”
This kind of thinking frustrates me as well. I would really like to have seen an ABC (as in, American-born Chinese) or Filipino perspective on the wacky Japanese games.
Three—do you prefer watching actual Japanese game shows? Do the originals translate well?
Below is a link to Tony Sano’s interview for Asian Week:
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Better than youtube. Lol.
