Neruton Benikujira-dan
ねるとん紅鯨団
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
The bubble-era group-date show that gave Japanese the word 'ねるとん' for matchmaking parties.
Neruton Benikujira-dan was a Saturday late-night show on the Fuji TV network that turned the group matchmaking party into television. It ran from October 1987 to December 1994, hosted by the comedy duo Tunnels, Takaaki Ishibashi and Noritake Kinashi, and its title joined the duo's name, syllables reversed, to the name of the programme it replaced. It began with a different theme every week, but the matchmaking episodes were such a hit that they became the whole show.
Each week a dozen or so men and a dozen or so women, ordinary people recruited by theme, met on location: sportsmen, car lovers, high-school students, medical students, people from Hokkaido or Kyushu, a beach, a fairground, a boat. One of the duo went along to run it. The men introduced themselves, with captions giving their age, their party trick and how long they had been single; then, on Ishibashi's weeks, he went ahead alone to inspect the women, calling out his catchphrase, 'Taka-san check'. The two groups met, showed off their talents and named their first impressions, and in the free time that followed pairs drifted off to talk. The host watched on a monitor, commentating, and called over anyone left alone to give advice.
Then came the confessions. Each man stood before the woman he had chosen and held out his hand or a present. If another man wanted her too, he could shout 'Chotto matta', hold on, and step up beside him. She took the hand she wanted or said 'Gomen nasai', sorry, and a rejected man usually ran off, sometimes straight into the sea. Around Valentine's Day the women confessed instead. Some weeks several couples formed; some weeks none. For a late-night show its ratings were remarkable, averaging about 17 per cent and peaking at 24.7 per cent in March 1989. It ended in December 1994, the year Nippon TV launched Koi no Karasawagi, a rival show about love, in the same Saturday slot; year-end celebrity editions continued until 2004.
Starring
Of the duo Tunnels, the host whose 'Taka-san check' and cries of a 'grand reversal' became the show's signatures.
Noritake KinashiHost
The other half of Tunnels, who took turns with Ishibashi running the matchmaking on location.
Yuko MinaguchiNarrator
The voice actress who was the show's first narrator, and who returned for the 1999 celebrity special.
Why it matters
Neruton gave Japanese a vocabulary for dating that outlived it. How long someone has been single, a 'two-shot' for a man and a woman talking alone, 'hold on' for a rival stepping in, a 'grand reversal' when a sure couple fails: the phrases spread from a late-night Saturday show into ordinary speech, and 'two-shot' entered the standard dictionary of current terms in 1990. Its innovation, as one retrospective put it, was to let ordinary participants move freely while the celebrities only helped, so that viewers felt they were watching real courtship; a sports magazine later called it a reality show that came too early. It also turned public refusal into a punchline, a young man running into the sea after hearing 'sorry', and made wanting someone a thing done in front of an audience, years before the genre had a name.