Danish paid TV (TV3 Viasat) is showing an 'intriguing' show - Help, I am in Japan (Hjælp, Jeg er i Japan in Danish) where 10 Danes are selected to live in Tokyo, participate in crazy contests of Japanese game show in TV studio and faced a number of cultural challenges in their everyday life while staying in Japan. The winner will walk away with 250,000DKK.
The ten participants in the program live together in a house where there's a housekeeper - an English speaking Japanese housewife helps with some basic chores. First day when they enter the house, they walked right in with shoes on, even into their own bedroom without realizing how rude this is in Japanese culture (the camera focused on the shoes, haha).
The contestants are also subjected to addition of challenges in Tokyo's street grocery shopping on first episode. They were paired up two by two and one of the team was asked to buy garlic. In Japanese pronunciation, garlic & condom are rather similar. They went around screaming after condom on the street, being corrected several times by locals on their pronunciation but they just wet totally wrong and ended up buying condom home for cooking :s
In the TV studio is where the 'cruelty' is: the elimination of one participants each week. The show is conducted in Japanese with Japanese host & audiences. When the contestants were asked questions, the host will change to English (or rather 'Japlish'), and so we have confused contestants participating in weird funny game shows; whilst the Danes find the exaggerating expression / body language of the hosts funny instead.
Albeit entertaining to see the show (and to wonder at the ignorance of some participating Dane on cultural & tradition difference), one can't help but to ponder: have I been doing the similar respect-less behaviour action sometime somewhere?
Here's a link if you're interested (and understands Danish :) http://tv3.dk/japan/
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