Shinkon-san Irasshai!
新婚さんいらっしゃい！
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Newlyweds confess their courtships and bedroom quirks on Sunday daytime TV; Guinness named it the longest-running TV talk show with the same presenter.
Shinkon-san Irasshai, 'Welcome, newlyweds', has been made by Asahi Broadcasting in Osaka and shown on Sunday afternoons since 31 January 1971. Each week couples married for between six months and three years, chosen from applicants, sit on stage opposite the hosts and tell how they met, how they finally got together and what they now argue about. They talk in Osaka dialect or their own, and for most of the show's history without on-screen captions. The host presses for the moment the couple got together, cuts the story off before it turns crude, and when a confession goes too far he falls backwards off his chair, the show's best-known gag, while his co-host sets the chair upright. For decades a prize game followed, first a memory game for a trip to Hawaii and later a game of coloured ribbons, and from 2008 each couple went home with a YES/NO pillow.
Sanshi Katsura, later Bunshi Katsura VI, hosted from the first broadcast until March 2022, more than fifty-one years; in 2015 Guinness World Records recognised the show as the longest-running television talk show with the same presenter. His co-hosts included Nagisa Katahira and, for almost twenty-five years, Mami Yamase. In April 2022 Takashi Fujii and Sakura Inoue took over as joint hosts. The couples have included international marriages, older newlyweds and second marriages, and in June 2023, for the first time in a Japanese studio, two men: a ballet dancer and the husband he had married in France.
Starring
The rakugo storyteller who hosted from 1971 to 2022, first as Sanshi Katsura, famous for tumbling off his chair.
Mami YamaseHost
His co-host from 1997 to 2022, the longest-serving woman in the role, who set his chair upright after every fall.
Nagisa KatahiraHost
An actress and his co-host from 1981 to 1992.
Takashi FujiiHost
The comedian and singer who took over as host in April 2022, keeping the chair and the tumble.
Sakura InoueHost
A television personality who has co-hosted with Fujii since April 2022, as an equal rather than an assistant.
Why it matters
For more than half a century Shinkon-san Irasshai has let ordinary couples talk about marriage in their own voices on Sunday afternoons, frank about sex without being crude and funny about the small wars of a shared home. Its method is restraint. The host asks exactly how a couple got together, then falls off his chair before the answer goes too far, and embarrassment becomes laughter the couple can share. Over the decades it has also recorded, slowly, who counts as newlyweds. In June 2023 two men who had married in France sat on its stage, the first same-sex couple in its Japanese studio, in a country that was then the only G7 nation where they could not have married. The question the show always asks, how two people became a household, sounded different that week, and the answer was as ordinary as anyone's.