The drug-induced world of Japanese children's television

Being a parent in Japan is great due to the sheer number of bizarre children's shows you get to watch with your kid. Really, I do not know how Japanese society stays so orderly when most of the population is weened on shows that were designed to scar them for life. Forget that pseudo-weird hipster Spongebob, this shit is on a whole other level. Here are a few of our favorites, courtesy of YouTube.

I got started on this line of thinking when my Welsh buddy inquired about the Kure Kure Takora DVD box set. Kure Kure Takora is a kid's show from the 70's featuring a greedy red octopus. In this infamous episode (censored by NHK according to Wikipedia!), the titular main character pretends to be insane in order to extract gifts from the other characters. When his ruse is unmasked, his victims beat him until he actually is a tad crazy.


Someone actually subtitled this, so you can follow the action! The "Algorithm Koushin" or sometimes "Algorithm Taisou" series has been on NHK's popular children's show Pythagoras Switch for years. I don't know how to describe it. It's a kind of comical line dance I guess. In each episode, the hosts get a group of poor schmucks to perform it with them. Usually they get office guys, probably there at the behest of their companies, but this one features Ninjas!


Now we enter the even stranger world of kiddie cartoons. In Japan, they get away with a lot more than you could in the US. Take Zenmai Zamurai, a series of shorts about a dead samurai resurrected as a human/clockwork hybrid who can sooth people by shooting possibly barbiturate-laced rice cakes into their mouths. This episode, in which Zenmai and his ninja pal Mamemaru go in search of buried treasure, features my favorite scene ever from a kid's cartoon --the main characters being chased down a tunnel by a giant ass.


Oden-kun is a cartoon with characters designed by popular author/illustrator Masaya Nakagawa (aka Lily Franky). All the characters live in a stew pot and are ingredients in a boiled dish called oden. As such, occasionally a giant pair of chop-sticks descends from the sky to take them away to be eaten. Oden-kun, the main character is a mochi kinchaku, which is an edible sack made of bean curd filled with mochi (pounded glutinous rice). He can scoop the sticky mochi out of his own head and use it for a variety of purposes. Although it is shown as part of what is ostensibly a kids show, Oden-kun often deals with the problems of adults in modern society. This episode, for example, deals with the tender love that blossoms between a block of tofu and a boiled octopus tentacle.


This series, titled Pants Pankurou, just freaks me out. I guess it is meant to encourage children during their toilet training phase, but the idea of a fully sentient, talkative toilet gives me the jim-jams. In this episode, after singing about the wonders of taking a nice morning dump, Pankurou discusses the ultimate fate of his excrement with the toilet. He decides that it probably goes to the "Unchi no Kuni" (nation of poop) where it will become the king of poop.

Yoko's car?

This was parked in the lobby of one the buildings where I work. It seems to be part of some sort of roving VW promotional campaign. I am not sure how they got the car through those doors. Maybe it disassembles like a giant lego kit, or perhaps the movers just tilted it on its side and slid it through.