I Survived a Japanese Game Show

I Survived a Japanese Game Show (originally titled Big In Japan) is an American reality show that saw its first season premiere on ABC June 24, 2008. The show follows a group of Americans, who leave the United States for Japan where they compete in a Japanese style game show. The winner takes home US $250,000. The series won the both the Best Reality prize and the overall prize at the 2009 Rose d'Or ceremony.
Format


See also Big in Japan (format)
In Season One, contestants are informed that they are to take part
in a reality-style competition, but not informed of the nature of the
show. They are flown to Tokyo, Japan, and taken to the Toho Studios, where it is revealed that they are to compete on a Japanese game show called Majide (本気で^?). For Season Two, Majide host Rome Kanda
surprised each of the contestants in their hometowns informing them
they were going to Japan. They are broken up into teams and, in the
first six episodes of Season One and first nine episodes of Season Two,
compete in games against each other. The winning team is given a reward
activity while the losing team is given a punishment activity. In the
second season, the first game played saw the winning team have an
advantage into the second game, where rewards and punishments were
handed out afterward. Two members of the losing team are chosen to
compete in a additional game head-to-head where the loser of that game
is eliminated. In the final part, the teams are broken up and the four
remaining players face three elimination challenges; in all cases, the
losing contestant is eliminated from the show and carried offstage and
sent back to the United States by the "sayonara mob" (脱落`者决定)！, dressed
in black suits.
The series follows not only the Majide competition, but also the contestants' activities backstage and outside the game show in reality style. The contestants live in a house (Kasai House) together, with a Mama-san (Kozue Saito), who generally expects the contestants to live in line with Japanese culture and customs.
The host of the series is Japanese-American Tony Sano, whose additional television credits include MTV Spring Break Japan and a recurring role on the The CW4Kids series '''Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight''' . ^[7]
About the show, Sano commented, "It's going to be like nothing American
audiences have seen on network television" (Matt Hurwitz, Associated
Press) ^[8] Episodes are narrated by Robert Cait.
The show is produced by A. Smith & Co. Productions (the producers of Gordon Ramsey's Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares
in the USA) with Arthur Smith, Kent Weed of A. Smith and Co. and Tim
Cresenti of Small World International Format Television as executive
producers and Weed directing, and is distributed by Disney/ABC's Greengrass Productions division. The format was created by Danish producers Karsten Bartholin and David Sidebothin for Babyfoot Aps, and was originally titled Big in Japan.

Majide


Majide (which is Japanese vernacular for "seriously!?","for real?"), the show-within-the-show, is not an actual Japanese game show, but is intended to resemble what a stereotypical Japanese game show is like.^[9]
The American producers watched hours of these Japanese game shows, took
the most common elements and created all of the games, with help from
producers in Japan, who also produced the game segments at Toho Studios.^[10] In contrast to many American game shows, which are usually based on either trivia (such as Jeopardy!) or mental skill (like The Price is Right), Japanese game shows tend to be more physically oriented, such as Takeshi's Castle. The Nickelodeon game show Double Dare was a hybrid of both the American and Japanese styles.
Majide is hosted by Rome Kanda^[11]
and judged by Masahiro Hurugori, known on the show as Judge Bobu (Bob).
Kanda has translated "Majide" (マジで) as "You've got to be crazy!"