Yarase

Sooner or later, most reality shows will have an ugly moment on their hands. Try as they might to prevent or delay it, someone will eventually leak information that the show is not entirely what it presents itself to be; that the reality show is not, shall we say, real. Some key moments will turn out to be staged or heavily prodded into turning out like they do, such as drama being fueled by the show providing copious amounts of alcohol, as done on, among others, The Bachelor/ette. A key premise of the show will be undercut, such as Man Vs. Wild's Bear Grylls having survival challenges set up and staying in hotels overnight. A show at least partially revolving around money, or the challenges behind only having a limited amount of it, will show the main cast to be paid enough money or given enough things to remove a lot of that drama, such as the revelation of the salary per episode paid to the main cast of Pawn Stars, including $25,000 an episode to Chumlee. A competition show will run low on quality applicants in the application process and devolve into casting an inordinate number of actors and models, as Survivor has done to the point of bringing us the word "mactors". For a talent-search show, it may be as simple as the realization of checking up on the former contestants and finding they're not panning out as well in their post-show careers as the show has been hoping for, particularly the winners, an accusation leveled at American Idol in recent years.

How common is it? Mike Fleiss, executive producer of The Bachelor/ette, claims that 70-80% of reality show content is fake in some way. (He exempts his own show, of course, despite all claims from within and without to the contrary.) The list can keep going on.

Usually, the moment comes and goes with a lot of fanfare, but not all that much immediate damage. Longer-term damage can result as people slowly drift to other shows that have not yet had their equivalent ugly moment, or in a few rare cases, are thought to be unlikely to ever have one (Deadliest Catch being a good example of the latter). We keep being surprised every time it happens. It recently happened again with Storage Wars, as bidder Dave Hester, in the midst of a long downward spiral in bidding success, accused the show of planting items in lockers. He was fired from the show soon after, though producers denied it was because of the accusation.

The same issue pops up all over the world, but in Japan, it's common enough that a word has long been around for it: yarase. In the linked piece, a Japan Times article from 2003, it actually is broken down even further, including a second word, shikomi:

Another producer, Mr. B, corroborates Mr. A’s assertions, but doesn’t apologize for them, stating that “many viewers don’t really understand yarase.” He distinguishes between yarase, preparation (shikomi) and direction. When he shoots videos of teenage girls soliciting sex, he likes to have his subjects weep on camera. According to Mr. B, yarase would be “telling the girl to cry.” If you give her onions to draw tears, that’s “preparation.” And if you tell her to imagine what her “dead grandmother in heaven would think” of her selling her body, that’s “direction.”

Or in American terms, seeding a Storage Wars locker would be yarase, wheeling in alcohol for Bachelor/ette contestants would be shikomi, and asking leading questions in any confessional anywhere would be direction. It should be noted that this particular quote has another level to it: yarase, and its companions, was employed in a much more insidious context: as part of a news report. This is part of how it got common enough to get a vocabulary for it. No less than National Geographic has been accused of yarase, in their case by Jake Adelstein concerning a documentary on the yakuza.

Oddly, in some cases yarase ends up slightly beneficial to some programs. Japanese game shows are notorious for being further over the top than anywhere else.

For example, take this clip from a show called All-Star Athletic Games in which contestants attempt to avoid getting flung off turntables. The idea here is that, if they fall off, they get flung into a pool of hot water and they have to immediately run off into a kiddie pool filled with snow to cool back down.

This kind of thing is pretty extreme and even the Japanese know it. They also know that if you want to get on TV, you're going to have to mug a bit for the cameras, as Todd Newton explored in 2009 when competing on the show Urakage for Travel Channel one-episode-wonder Are You Game? (Something I remember watching, but for which the Internet appears to have purged all video that I was going to use.) The more extreme elements will get written off as yarase in order to make viewing it a little more bearable.

Not that it always is. The most extreme example of Japanese television might be the ordeal of a man who went by the stage name Nasubi, who was locked in an empty apartment in 1998 for as long as it took to win one million yen (roughly $10,000) worth of magazine contests. He was given absolutely nothing beyond the materials needed to fill out the postcards. Anything else, he had to win, and that included food (which it took him two weeks to win; the producers are thought to have helped him out a bit until he won his first bag of rice), and toilet paper (which it took him ten months to win), and clothing (which he never won at all, unless you count the single pair of women's lingerie that didn't fit). It took him over a year of total isolation- punctuated by a shift in apartment when reporters were about to track down the one he was in, during which they forgot to bring his rice along- to reach the goal... after which he was sent to South Korea to win enough to pay for his flight home. And then enough for business class. And then enough for first class. And then he was sent into another empty box... which promptly fell away as soon as he stripped naked to reveal a live TV audience, the first real human contact he'd had in 15 months.

There wasn't any yarase. In fact, in order to prove it, the producers set up a live feed of the apartment so people could see for themselves. The only real fakery going on was some editing done for the show to make Nasubi seem happier than he really was. In reality, Nasubi contemplated escape several times, especially since he wasn't promised much of a prize: the stuff from the magazine contests and maybe some extra publicity. (The real prize: they made a soup commercial from footage of the producers handing him a bowl of ramen at the end of the Japanese segment of the task, they published the journal he'd been keeping, they sold ad space on the show website, and that all made Nasubi some hefty royalties. If Wikipedia's to be believed, he currently is a drama actor in his native Fukushima.)

Are reality shows faked? Quite often. Are the cast members willing participants? Again, quite often; as far back as the first season of Survivor, Kelly Wiglesworth stated, on-camera, "We're not bad people, we just play bad people on TV." Do we watch anyway? Usually.

But, in a sense, it may be worth asking what would you rather have in the end: the knowledge that some of the insanity and drama you see is staged and that people aren't really like that and would not really be so cruel, or the knowledge that it's not, they are, and they would?

Break Out The Picket Signs

Commentators reporting from inside the Supreme Court are coming away largely certain that the Court, come June, is going to strike down the Voting Rights Act, 5-4, on a party-line vote. (To those who bristle at the phrase 'party-line vote' being used in conjunction with a Supreme Court vote, let me remind you how many people can tell exactly, to a man, how the vote breaks down just from those three words. The Supreme Court is nonpartisan in the same way March Madness bracket pools are illegal.) The only real question is how far the 5 are intending to go.

Gentlemen, start your taking to the streets. You do have until June, and given last year with the Obamacare ruling, Roberts at least is paying attention to how he'll look in the history books.

Animals Go In The Corner

Journeyman Pictures brings us today's video, produced by Kate Iles and Kamau Levitt. For this, we go to Kenya, where people... well... there's no easy way to put this...

...they poop in the street. They are not supposed to be pooping in the street, and local officials are trying to get them to stop pooping in the street, but when it's pooping time, people have poop, the village has a street, and they've never used a toilet in their lives and they figure they've been fine so far, so bombs away.

If you are offended by the word 'shit', this may not be the video for you.

Sequest, Out

So we're moving headlong towards our latest entirely self-inflicted economic disaster, the sequester: across-the-board automatic spending cuts set to start on Friday. (Here's a state-by-state report from the Pew Research enter; a lot of places are linking to the White House's reports, but even though I personally side with the White House here, I think I'd rather have a neutral party's take on them for article purposes.) The idea was supposed to be that the sequester cuts were so odious that surely- SURELY- Congress wouldn't be stupid enough to let them happen and would merely use them as an incentive to pass something better. The whole idea of the sequester cuts is that Congress considered them so bad that they would force themselves to do something to stop them.

Congress has, in the starkest possible fashion, overestimated itself.

This all leads to one big, important question. ...no, not 'why won't they nut up and deal'. Who wins, silly. Bill Schneider of the Huffington Post gives us a perfect example of this just in the title of his article: "Leveraging Likability: Why Obama Will Win The Sequester". The article itself is exactly what you'd expect an article with a title like that to be: horserace analysis of partisan brinksmanship, leverage, who's going to blink first, who the public's going to blame, and most importantly, who's going to come out the other side looking better in comparison to how they looked in the public's eyes beforehand.

And if you work in Washington, or spend all your time talking to those who work in Washington, I'm sure that seems important because it helps determine who you're going to be dealing with every day in the future or whether you get to keep working in Washington or not. For the vast majority of us, though, this is decidedly not the case. What has happened here- what happens to a lot of people when they get into the big leagues- is that they completely lose perspective. The people they used to deal with every day fade into numbers, statistics, points on a scoreboard, or more insidiously, pawns and bargaining chips.

That's how it can get to the point that articles like this are written. Sure. One side's going to get blamed more than the other, but that doesn't mean the other side 'won'. Obama end up with improved political capital, but he does not win. He loses as well. He loses because the countrymen whom he leads will be made to suffer despite his efforts. Conflicts do not always have a winner and a loser. This is not a zero-sum game, no matter how much Election Day may make it look like it is. It's not Election Day anymore anyway. Sometimes everyone wins. Sometimes everyone loses. If we reach sequester, everyone loses.

The public at large, no matter how much it gets drummed into their heads who's winning a certain news cycle and what side they should be on, ultimately really wants one thing: they want shit to get done. They want their lives to be as improved as possible, they want their futures as secure as possible, they want to know someone, anyone, has their back if something goes wrong. The fact that their anger over these things not being done has been met from their leadership not with a renewed effort to get them done, but rather with gamesmanship, and the fact that that gamesmanship is far too often not only not condemned by those journalists who cover them, and not focused and refocused on the constituents whom it would affect, but instead encouraged, cheered, and aided and abetted, serves only to further erode public confidence in all involved: the elected officials who finger-point, and the journalists who allow and engage in finger-pointing themselves.

People don't like having their concerns be ignored. They don't like writing to their elected officials and getting form letters back that either are only tangentically related to the issue at best, or thanking them for holding the opposite opinion from that which they said they had. They don't like it when a reporter shows up in town for an inadequate amount of time and completely misrepresents what's going on to make for a better-sounding story. They don't like feeling like their questions have gone unanswered. They don't like feeling like their leaders and the people who watch them seem to exist in some alternate universe where TV ratings and decibel levels have taken the place of votes.

I do not blame Schneider's side of the argument for causing the sequester, presuming that some last-minute deal does not come down the pike (like, admittedly, it has a tendency to do). I do, however, blame the mentality that he brings to the table and places on display.

Imagine If It Had Been Storks

So I assume you're all familiar with the modern method of determining whether someone is pregnant, which is to basically pee on a stick and see what the stick says. There are things you look for in blood and urine that will say whether pregnancy's taken place, and the stick looks for those. Failing that, you can also have an ultrasound and see if there's a fetus rummaging around in there.

But that's now. What were we using before urine-detecting sticks? Because we were using something... well, at least since the 1920's. Before the 20's, you pretty much had to wing it and guess. The word 'hormones' didn't even come into play until the 1890's.


We used lab animals, of course.

The first pregnancy test that didn't involve random morning sickness and observing that the missus was getting quite fat for no particular reason involved mice. In 1928, German scientists Bernhard Zondek and Selmar Aschheim noticed that when you injected urine from an early-pregnancy female into an immature female mouse, the mouse's ovaries enlarged. (The full report in California and Western Medicine is here, if you want to try to figure out the chain of events that would lead to wondering what would happen if you injected urine from an early-pregnancy female into an immature female mouse.) The thing is, in order to find that out, you had to slice the mouse open and have a look at the ovaries. After finding that you got the same result from rabbits, rabbits became the animal du jour, so much so that the phrase 'rabbit test' entered the lexicon, and the phrase 'the rabbit died' became slang term for a positive test.

Though really, the rabbits died either way. They still had to cut them up to look at the ovaries. Ah, science back in the 1930's.

Then in 1939 came the toads. This may seem like a gigantic step in the wrong direction, but quite the opposite: you could test on the toad without killing it. The toad was the African clawed toad. (Also known as African clawed frog, because how many of you can really tell anyway?) This time, the urine needed to be injected into a dorsal lymph sac, notable for being something you can reach without a whole bunch of rest-of-the-toad standing between you and it. You waited to see if eggs formed in the sac; if so, you had a pregnancy. For both toad and woman, in fact. Because the toad not only lived, but could be used over and over again, the rabbits were let off the hook. The rabbit test became the toad test until 1960, when non-animal tests were introduced and things progressed towards something suitable for home use.

After all, the kids might not appreciate wondering where their pets keep going.

How To Campaign

Step 1: ...should this be 'don't campaign'? Because I think that there are quite a few of us who think Step 1 ought to be 'don't campaign'.
Step 2: If you must campaign, it's quite acceptable to 'straight talk' with voters. However, remember that ultimately, you must then ask for their vote, and in order to keep your job, they must agree to give it to you. So it helps to not talk down to people if at all possible.
Step 3: If you are contacted by the victim of a tragedy, such as the mother of someone killed in a mass shooting, be sympathetic. That's your job. In fact, that's your responsibility as a decent human being.
Step 4: Mothers of people killed in mass shootings do not appreciate it when, after expressing their concerns, they are told that they are in need of 'straight talk' while their concerns are dismissed out of hand.
Step 5: They particularly do not appreciate if your expressed need to supply straight talk is accompanied by applause from the crowd.
Step 6: If you must supply 'straight talk' to such a person, do not expect their vote in the future.

BONUS STEP: It also helps if you refrain from calling your constituents "jerks".

Hot Asian Girls

...they're clothed. Sorry for any misunderstanding.

Two things we're covering today. First, out of Oddity Central, there's a piece concerning Japanese girls who are renting bare skin out as advertising space. This isn't quite on the level of some guy offering his forehead up to be tattooed with the logo of the highest bidder. It's not the forehead. It's down quite a bit further. See, a long-running fashion in Japan is miniskirts and high socks. That leaves some thigh skin showing, known as 'zettai ryouiki' or absolute territory. There is a TV Tropes page devoted just to that part of the flesh. The idea is, since guys are looking at that part of the girl's body so much anyway, why not put an ad down there?

This is a thing that the woman has to actively sign up for, through a PR company called, naturally, Absolute Territory, and according to Oddity Central, as of November, about 1,300 women had done so. They have to be at least 18. (As it looks from the company site, you can stick a Green Day label down there if you want.)

In China, women are working from a less advantageous position. There is, apparently, a tendency to call women unmarried going into age 27 'leftover women': the women still single after all the other women have gone paired off with men. In your mind, you might think of these women as ugly, but in fact the opposite is true. We're actually talking, chiefly, about the women considered to be most attractive. The thing is, Chinese men are regarded to have a tendency to trade down a grade, and not go after women they consider out of their league. They also tend to marry younger. So eventually, you're left with two types still on the market: really ugly guys, and really pretty, very well-educated girls who naturally want nothing to do with the really ugly guys.

By age 27, women come under increasing pressure to pick someone, marry them and give their parents a grandchild. The term 'leftover women' is used a shaming device, aggressively so in not only state-run media, but also the state-run All-China Women's Federation. It's a device the women labeled with it are now fighting. Under particular fire is a March 2011 article from the Federation entitled "Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy", and included lines such as this:

"These girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don't realize that as women age, they are worth less and less. So by the time they get their MA or PhD, they are already old - like yellowed pearls."

Shockingly, that didn't go over well with smart women. (Other articles noted that if the guy goes on to cheat on you, you're supposed to sit there and take it lest the guy lose face. Which pretty much any self-respecting woman would regard as the entire goal of not sitting there and taking it.) You won't find Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy online now, because in the face of righteous fury from the women, the Federation eventually- slowly, slowly eventually- backed down and took the 'leftover women' articles down. They now refer to unmarried women age 27 and over as merely 'old'. The phrase, however, remains otherwise widespread, to the women's chagrin. They will marry who they feel like, when they feel like it.

I'm sure there are plenty of American guys who will line right up.