On or around New Year’s Eve 2010, heading into 2011, as a summer child not yet initiated in the ways of the Far East, brought up to hold in my Western mind Jay Leno and David Letterman as the obvious standard-bearers of late-night television, I had no idea what passes for nocturnal entertainment on the tube for East Asians.
But I was about to find out.
Having arrived late in the evening at a nondescript hotel in downtown Taichung, Taiwan, to await the arrival the following day of the secretary of my new employer, an English as a Second Language (ESL) agent who placed foreign English teachers (me) with local Taiwanese schools for a modest slice of the pie, with no other ideas about how to entertain myself, jet-lagged from hours spent on airplanes and in airport terminals, I turned on the television in the hotel room.
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What I found, to my great surprise, believing Asian culture to be generally, vaguely conservative, across multiple channels were attractive young ladies in skimpy outfits and compromising positions, engaged in all manner of game show competition that universally involved some unsubtle sexual innuendo.
Such was my boots-on-the-ground introduction to East Asian late-night TV culture.
Purely for reference purposes, these are a couple of the tamest of the videos I could find of this decadent genre, the suggestiveness being quite obvious. There’s far wilder stuff out there, but I leave it to you to find if you are so inclined.
Being, again, at the time, totally green in the Eastern Hemisphere, wildly culturally illiterate, unable to distinguish between the various ethnicities of the region based on appearance, and unfamiliar with language differences, I assumed what I was watching were Taiwanese productions.I came to understand later that it was all Japanese.
Later on, while teaching for an exceptionally abbreviated stint at Joy! Language School — my time in Taiwan ended up a far briefer affair than originally intended for reasons that would take too long to explain here — one of my older students, a teenager relatively fluent in English (English fluency is, in fact, highly relative in the rural Taiwanese mountains), during a geography lesson in English, politely raised his hand.
I called on him.
“Jimmy, yeah?” I prompted him. (They all had fake English nicknames, many of which were highly unconventional, like one kid in a different school later on who went by “Chevrolet.”)
“Japan are pervert,” Jimmy declared.
The rest of the class laughed and nodded their heads.
Jimmy had apparently been watching Japanese late-night entertainment.
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Reflecting on these experiences — having been reminded of them by clips of such game shows that pop up on my social media feed, I recently queried Grok: “Why are Japanese game shows so sexualized?”
Its answer I found interesting, particularly as it relates to the East Asian fetish for “saving face” and the resulting entertainment they derive from watching others humiliated while trying to preserve their dignity, a dynamic that can be seen in a lot of these late-night scenarios:
The short version is: it’s a mix of TV economics, cultural norms about sexuality, and shock-value entertainment, not that “Japan is uniquely pervy.”
A few big factors 👇
1. Shock = ratings (especially in the ’90s–2000s)
A lot of the clips people see are from a specific era when Japanese TV was competing hard for attention. Extreme concepts—pain, humiliation, nudity, sexual innuendo—were cheap ways to stand out. Western shows did this too (Fear Factor, Jacka**), but Japan leaned into it more theatrically.2. Sexual content isn’t framed the same way
In Japan, sexuality can be more compartmentalized:
- Public behavior = restrained, polite, formal
- Entertainment = exaggerated, absurd, over-the-top
So a game show might treat sexual situations as comedy or farce, not intimacy. It’s often meant to be ridiculous or embarrassing, not “sexy” in a romantic sense—even if it looks sexualized to outsiders.
3. Variety shows love humiliation humor
Japanese variety TV has a strong tradition of:
- Embarrassment
- Loss of dignity
- Physical discomfort
Sexualized challenges often fall into that category. The joke isn’t “this is hot,” it’s “this is mortifying.”
East Asian culture, totally alien from the West, often to the point of incomprehensibility, never fails to titillate the Western mind — a theme I explore ad nauseam in my expat memoir, Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile.
