Bari Bara
バリバラ
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
NHK's barrier-free variety show, notable for its episodes on disability and sexual life.
Bari Bara, from 'barrier-free variety', was a weekly half-hour programme on NHK's educational channel, E-tele, made in Osaka and broadcast from April 2012 to March 2025. It began in April 2010 as a monthly segment of Kiratto Ikiru, a welfare documentary series. Its host, the social worker Yukinori Tamaki, who has cerebral palsy, wanted to stop showing disabled people 'trying hard'; his co-host, the radio DJ Shu Yamamoto, said that sounded like variety, and the producers agreed. Billed as Japan's first variety show for disabled people, it set out to laugh with them, not at them, with disabled performers often joking about their own disabilities.
Tamaki and Yamamoto hosted with regulars who have disabilities themselves. Recurring features mocked useless barrier-free fittings, such as a ramp with steps in it and a wheelchair gate a wheelchair user could not get through, and ran a comedy contest for disabled and minority performers, the Show-1 Grand Prix. The entertainer Ai Haruna produced a fashion show with disabled models. The show talked openly about the sexuality of disabled people, long a taboo, with episodes on their sexual worries and, in 2022, on disabled women's bodies and sexual lives. From 2016 it widened its subject to every minority for whom life is hard, including sexual minorities, people facing buraku discrimination and people with drug addiction.
In August 2016, opposite Nippon TV's charity telethon, it held a live debate on 'inspiration porn', the use of disabled people's struggles to move an audience, in yellow T-shirts that mimicked the telethon's. For four years from 2019 it ran a counter-special on telethon night. It ended in March 2025 with a two-part special looking back over fifteen years.
Starring
Yukinori TamakiHost
A social worker with cerebral palsy who hosted from the start and whose refusal to show disabled people 'trying hard' shaped the show.
Shu YamamotoHost
A radio DJ who co-hosted throughout and first suggested turning the welfare slot into a variety show.
Ai HarunaVoice of Ai-chan
An entertainer and trans woman who voiced the cartoon character Ai-chan and produced the show's fashion show with disabled models.
Why it matters
Bari Bara asked whether disabled people must always be shown as brave in order to be shown at all. Its answer was comedy made by disabled people, about the world's clumsy attempts to accommodate them and about their own bodies, including their sexual lives, which television had treated as unmentionable. Its 2016 debate on 'inspiration porn', broadcast opposite Nippon TV's long-running charity telethon, brought into the open a complaint disabled viewers had been making for years: that being turned into an object of emotion is another way of not being seen. As it widened to sexual minorities and others who find life hard, it kept one rule, building each programme from what the people concerned said. Whether an audience taught to pity can learn to laugh with someone instead is the question it spent fifteen years testing.