Quick Celebrity Sightings on a Game Show!

Shoko Nakagawa and Neko Hiroshi Appear on The Best House 123!

Last week we were able to find more Japanese programming and thought we’d watch a few game shows. One of the ones we watched was a TV show called The Best House 123! and this particular episode was a two hour special that featured celebrities playing. The premise of this game show is a little bit different. The players each pick their top 3 of anything they want , and prepare a short video presentation on their picks. Then on the show, the hosts at random using a buzzer choose a few of these presentations to be shown on the show. Viewers at home then vote on which player’s presentations they liked best, and the best ones are included in a book called “The Best Encyclopedia”. It’s kind of a neat show and definitely a change from the image of most Japanese game shows that we have seen where players are subjected to strange obstacle courses or get an electric shock when they do something wrong.

As we mentioned above, last week was a two hour celebrity special, and two celebrities that we have reported on in the past were players and also had their presentations chosen. Now we would have loved to upload some clips of the show, however after heeding the warnings on Fuji’s site, we elected to post some screencaps and a summary instead.

Shoko Nakagawa appeared on the show and cosplayed as Haruhi Suzumiya from “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” - a popular anime which we are sure most of you have heard of by now! Shoko was the third to be chosen to present second, and for her topic she picked the Best 3 Dismantling Operations. We were surprised, we totally expected her to do the top 3 best cosplays in the world or something to that effect :p. In third place was a case in China where 16 apartment buildings were demolished simultaneously. This took place in 2005 in Yunong Village, and the engineers had made a computer simulation to map out how best to make the buildings fall as not to destroy other buildings that were nearby. They showed a shot of one building which survived the blast (but all the others around it were destroyed). Her second place pick was the dismantling of a gas tank in Japan that was inspired by a housewife’s apple peeling - spiraling around only once and getting the peel out in one shot. So they cut off the bottom of the tank and worked slowly spiraling around the top of the tank. This method takes about a week compared to an older method that took a month to dismantle the whole tank, and earned the engineers at Bestera a patent. Shoko’s top pick for her topic was the destruction of a B-52 Stratofortress. Here’s some history for you all. In 1991, the US and Russia signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. 365 of these aircraft were flown to Arizona, all the useable parts were salvaged, and then a 13,000 lb blade was dropped from a crane and chopped the planes into several pieces. Shoko seemed really fascinated with this one!

Neko Hiroshi (Real Name: Takizaki Kuniaki) is a popular comedian in Japan who is very short and incorporates his infamous cat motions (a cat paw gesture followed by “nya!”) in his routines. Neko played Kami-Sama in Bishoujo Celeb Panchanne - a series which we have been following very closely on Moon Chase because of it’s similarities to Sailor Moon! Neko chose to talk about the top 3 animals that sound like other animals. In #3 was a species of frog in Japan that sounds like a dog when it croaks/barks. It was discovered in Neba Village in Nagano in 2005. There is a mansion that people can visit just to hear this new species of frog bark! #2 is the cheetah, which has the ability to sound like a chirping bird along with the scary growls that we are all familiar with. #1 went to the giraffe, which can grunt and bleat like a cow. At the end of the show , all the contestants laughed at his entry. Neko Hiroshi can currently be seen in the Live-Action Saiyuki (unrelated to the anime of the same name) movie that was just released in Japanese theaters. He is playing the false Cho Hakkai.

There were other presentations that were made , such as the best glassware, aquariums, haunted houses, cutting devices, poisonous sea animals, and the kicker: the best women who turned into men. As of this writing we are unsure which ones have made it into The Best Book.