This Might Be The Strangest Gameshow That Japan Has Ever Made

In the vast, seemingly endless ocean of weirdness available on the internet, Japanese game shows stand head and shoulders above the rest. Catch a clip unprepared and you'll feel a level of confusion usually reserved for overzealous DMT experimentation. Watch one on purpose, and you'll experience more doubt in your own life choices than you ever thought possible.

To call something "the strangest" anything is a matter of perspective — to paraphrase Morticia Addams, "what's freaky to the spider is Thursday to the fly." And it's not as if the island nation has given us a shallow pool to choose from. There's Tore!, the program where contestants have to answer questions before they're mummified alive, according to Kotaku. Then there's Unnamed Sleeping Game, a competition in which a room full of sleeping models are awakened one by one, and get pie thrown in their face if they're judged to be less than cute.

But maybe, just maybe, one Japanese gameshow could accurately be described as "stranger than those." It's called The Bum Game, and yes, thank you for asking, it's absolutely about butts.

Pucker up

The Bum Game, now helpfully tucked away in the archives of Reddit's "WTF" forum, is a classic for a reason. It's a simple concept. Heck, you've probably come up with something similar.

Two contestants are ushered in front of a wall. In the wall are two holes. In those holes are two butts. The contestants are tasked with identifying who the butts belong to using an old investigative trick: they kiss the butts.

The owners of the butts are revealed. Sometimes, a boy contestant will kiss a pretty girl's bottom. Sometimes he will kiss another male's bottom, which is an absolute knee-slapper. Sometimes, the show's hosts probably return home for the holidays and lie to their parents about what they do for a living.

Crowds of supporters, decked out in their team's colors and looking like an army of sexually frustrated Wiggles, stand to the side, waving their arms and chanting. The world, meanwhile, looks on in equal parts curiosity and horror. All in all, though? Still better than Wheel of Fortune.