Mecha Ike!
24 May 2003, 19:58
Absolutely my favourite show on Japanese television, Mecha Ike (How Cool We Are!) is a variety show starring the comedy duo known as “99”, Takashi Okamura and Hiroyuki Yabe. It’s difficult to classify because it jumps from travel information to food sampling to just plain silliness. But the highlight of this show is undoubtedly when the show’s six or seven male hosts dress up in biker gear (and Elvis wigs), climb aboard Harley Davidsons and play a Japanese word game while going round in a circle on their bikes.
Here’s how the game works: in English, counting stuff is easy. 3 cats. 7 spoons. 1 minister of defence. But in Japanese, objects are counted differently depending on their size and shape. There are probably 30 or more different ways to count things, and this game tests the competitors ability to count stuff in their own language (note: if Japanese can’t do it, how is a foreigner ever supposed to get their head around it?)
So round they go: vroom, vroom, vroom-vroom-vroom! 1 dog, 2 wardrobes, 3 poofters… until someone makes a mistake and counts “7 wardrobes” as “nanatsu” instead of “nanatosa”, and they have to fight a sumo wrestler. That’s right, the real thing. To the music of The Godfather, ten big fat angry sumo wrestlers complete with colourful mawashi loin cloths and snarling faces appear, and the unlucky loser has to tackle one of them.
And they go down. Big time.
These sumo boys are big. And strong. And they show no mercy. Guys have been dumped arse-first in rubbish bins, spun around and let loose to fall crashing on their backs, and given a good solid kick to the guts while they are down. And everyone laughs. Everyone except for the poor bastard lying on the ground, grimacing in real pain. Then they start all over again.
But for the person who loses the most rounds: the batsu game. Last week’s batsu game involved making the poor guy dress up in a sumo mawashi himself (the ultimate wedgie – surely humiliating enough?), go to McDonald’s and order a meal and specifically ask for everything to be not small size but sumo size, drink the cola of an old man next to him, then leave McDonald’s shouting “gotsu-an desu!!!” in a high-pitched voice, a stereotypical sumo wrestler phrase for “Thankyou for the feast!”
It doesn’t get much better than this.
[For those in Japan: Mecha Ike, otherwise known as Mecha mecha ike te’ru: Saturday nights, 8pm, Fuji TV. Don’t miss it.]
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