Terrace House, a Deeper Dive: Yamachan

Yamasato Ryota (b. April, 14 1977) is kind of analogous to Chris Hardwick: he's primarily a stand-up comedian who has built a career out of being a host. He hosts game shows, talk shows, radio shows and award shows. He has leveraged his image as a nerd into gigs where he gets to interact with the people involved in his fandoms. His focus appears to be more into entertainment in general rather than the things we normally associate with Japanese otaku. He does not appear to be huge fan of manga, or anime, for instance.

Like most comedians in Japan he is part of a comedy duo or manzai. His partner is Yamasaki Shizuyo who has had a successful career as an actress, but who also made a credible attempt to make the Japanese Olympic team as a boxer in the last couple of Olympics. Collectively, Yamasoto and Yamasaki are known as Nankai Candies (apparently through the usual process of a series of puns which can get far more complex in Japanese as different sounds of associated with written characters get substituted). They broke onto the entertainment scene in 2004 by placing second in an important comedy competition.

Yamachan's career has brought him, unsurprisingly, in contact with many other people and threads related to Terrace House. Here, for instance, is Yamachan as a CGI Pharaoh mummifying Torichan ("Yama" means "mountain" in Japanese, and so if Torichan is our little bird on the panel, Yamachan is our little mountain) on a game show before they joined the Terrace House panel:

Yamachan also had ties to AKB48 (which I discussed in the entry on Tokyo Idols) having served as the referee for three of their Janken competitions. (Yes, in addition to their annual popularity elections, AKB48 also more occasionally determines who will get to be on a single by a single elimination rock-paper-scissors tournament.) The last time he refereed the tournament was before Rie joined AKB48, however, and so they would not have met then.

More than anyone else on the panel, Yamachan is a fan of Terrace House. For B&GITC he produced a video after-show for the Netflix YouTube channel with his thoughts on each episode. He also tweets more about the show than anyone else on the panel, but, then, he tweets a lot in general.

His role in the panel is often as a foil: he is likably comfortable with taking positions contrary to everyone else in the group, and cheerfully accepts their mocking and condemnation. He does appear to express more traditional attitudes towards dating than certainly You and Tokui. He sides with the idea that a couple should not kiss or hold hands before they have stated that they like each other, for instance. And he expresses his ire with a light and humorous touch when dating etiquette is violated. He genuinely seems to care about the show and the people on it, and is more than anyone else the surrogate on the panel for obsessive Terrace House fans even though his expressed opinions might differ from such fans.