そのテレビ番組をなんですか？

November 9, 2005 10:51 AM

Searching frantically for a Japanese variety show I used to watch.

I can't recall the title at all. I remember it not making much sense in Japanese (made up word?), or at least my basic skills weren't enough to decipher the meaning in the title. I'm sure I'll recognize it when I see it, it's a tip-of-the-tongue thing. I remember the title being two words, a short one followed by a longer one.

It was a 30 minute show which would have a different theme each week. One episode that particularly stood out for me was about one-of-a-kind things. They found the last person that was making tatami covers by hand (it's all automatic nowadays). I remember them visiting a very rich guy and checking out his house and his collection of unique things (very expensive purse, some art, don't recall much else). They presented the (I believe) inventor of the can opener that cuts the lid of a can off from the side instead of cutting on the inside of the lid at the top.

I think the first episode I watched was about sushi. There was a cool restaurant where you'd sit down at your table, look at an LCD screen that showed you the inside of an aquarium/water tank, and just touch the fish you wanted on the screen, get details and price and order right from there. Another show was all about glasses. Yet another was about street fashion somewhere (Osaka? Tokyo? Certainly not Harajuku fashion).

I hope some of this rings a bell for some of you. I am dying to find the show again. I used to fetch it from newsgroups, alt.binaries.multimedia.japanese, but I haven't seen it there lately; I would have recognized it.

posted by splice to media & arts (4 comments total)

any idea around what year they were broadcasted (or is it still being broadcasted)?

ps. change the "wo" to "ha" in your title :) as in "ano televi no bangumi ha nandesuka" - i know those wo, ha, ga things are pretty tough.
posted by grafholic at 10:56 AM on November 9, 2005

"no" is pretty tough too. The correct Japanese is:

このテレビ番組はなんですか

No idea about the show, unfortunately. There are many shows like this on Japanese TV.
posted by dydecker at 11:22 AM on November 9, 2005

Yes, I noticed my mistake with regards to wo/ha after posting. Shame I couldn't edit it out :)

dydecker, you meant to change sono to kono? I imagine that makes more sense...

Well, I'll keep trying to remember the title... Hopefully som...

OMG!!! I just recalled the title out of the blue! "Soko ga shiritai" it was. Three words, not two. I guess it means something like "I want to know about this"?

Betcha if I didn't post this question I'd never had recalled the name. Uh, thanks, AskMefi :) Now I most likely won't find any downloads of it, but do you guys have any suggestion about similar programs? I heard that Next Stop Discovery might be good, I'll try that out.
posted by splice at 11:55 AM on November 9, 2005

Well, FWIW that show stopped production in 1997, so there are no new episodes -- though there seem to be something like 725 episodes in total.

I don't know about any other kinds of shows like this off the top of my head, but you will probably have a very difficult time finding them on the Internet. Have you tried emailing KIKU-TV (the Hawaii station) to see if they can help you find more of this show or shows like it?
posted by armage at 3:16 PM on November 9, 2005