Ten Years

Ten years ago (approximately today) six young people dragged their suitcases into a posh rental house in Shonan some thirty miles southwest of Tokyo, and their introductions to each other as housemates for what should only have been the next few months were filmed for a reality television series called Terrace House. We do not know exactly what day that first shoot was, but the first episode was broadcast on Fuji-TV on Friday night at 11 pm on October 12, 2012, and it was clear in subsequent weeks that the production had set itself the challenge of presenting each episode a week after shooting them because this was the rare if not unique reality show in which the cast could watch the show on the show. In some ways, the series was something completely new in the genre, and in some ways it was just another reality dating show. But Terrace House was great, and Terrace House was terrible, and the wings of Icharus melted at the height of his trajectory and he fell, crashing into oblivion and legend. 

Well … since it’ll be both men and women

There might be some exciting romances that emerge

Or maybe surprisingly just nothing will happen

- Translation by Terracemouse

There was a lot of reality television before Terrace House, but its obvious antecedents were The Real World and Ainori. Unlike The Real World, however, the housemates on Terrace House rarely if ever “stopped being polite”. The housemates on Terrace House were not generally cast for the drama that they would bring to the show. Terrace House was never about people coming from different backgrounds and being confronted by that difference. Both shows kept cameras and microphones off the screen, and both provided opulent, aspirational living environments, but the aesthetics were nearly opposite: The Real World digs were popping with colors and the promise that parties could break out at any moment while the Terrace Houses were monochrome with little to distract from the minutiae of people living day to day, People entered The Real World knowing the shoot world be over in a few weeks and they’d be back to their lives. Terrace House was life, a place for people to live for a while and to progress.

The more immediate predecessor of Terrace House was Ainori which had wrapped its first 451 episodes before its Netflix era nearly 8 months earlier also on Fuji-TV. Ainori was on Monday nights at 11:20, the slot TH would take over the following year. In many ways, Terrace House was an immobile, de-gamified and upscale Ainori. Terrace House, in contrast to Ainori, was like: let’s step back, breathe and stop pressing these young men and women to confess and to start dating. Just let them be, and see what happens.

But the one key thing that is shared between the two shows is the panel. Panels are extremely common, in fact, nearly ubiquitous on Japanese variety shows.But Ainori unlike most Japanese variety did not use continuous insets of the panelists’ faces reacting to the edit, and chose, instead, to have intro and closing panel segments as well as occasional commentary segments in the midst of the action. Terrace House initially scaled that back even further to its single host YOU only doing intro and exit segments, but since It also did not use producer-prompted confessional segments like The Real World, the only real source of narrative exposition within the show were the producer-prompted boy talks and girl talks. Doing so certainly increased the documentary feel of Terrace House, but at the same time it missed a bit of that audience surrogacy that could only come with panelists marveling over what had just occurred on screen. It is probably no coincidence at all that Torichan was introduced immediately after Riichan’s sunset rejection of Tecchan’s attempt to hold her hand - who wouldn’t want to share the watching of such iconic moments and talk about them?

Because the first season of Terrace House was never shown on Netflix outside of Japan, Boys x Girls Next Door remains comparatively difficult for fans of the show outside of Japan to find and enjoy. In many ways it remains the best season of Terrace House. But it’s reputation as the golden age of Terrace House distorts the truth about its position in Japanese culture and hides the fact that there were almost certainly more problematic issues happening behind the scenes than even Tokyo 2019 - 2020 whose reputation following the suicide of Kimura Hana was so sullied that we are almost certainly never to see anything released under that brand name again.

One article has collected all the accusations that were levied against the producers of BxGND: https://renote.jp/articles/168807 . Bear in mind that all of the sources cited are essentially tabloids, nevertheless, it seems likely that most of these are true if only because they are the kinds of things that have been documented in other reality TV productions throughout the world.

It seems likely that Miwako and Yuiko were sexually harassed. I doubt that Tecchan climbed into bed with Yuiko because both his lawyers and, more important, her lawyers sent cease and desist letters explicitly denying that he did so to the bunshin that repeatedly published that story. OTOH, there’s no reason to disbelieve Yuiko when she said in her blog at the time that someone who had access to the house did so, and that she slept in one of the cars for a couple of nights in fear.

Likewise, it would not surprise me at all if someone on the staff wanted Maimai (chay) to name drop her father’s company Nagatanien during her introductory episodes, and that she refused to do so. (chay’s grand uncle created a packaged instant ochazuke in the early 50s that made the company a hugely successful food brand. She is not in the direct line of succession, but her father is in charge of a production facility, and they are still quite well-to-do: she attended the private school that the imperial family attends.) She has openly spoken of having a difficult relationship with her family who have been against her musical career ever since she first started busking.

The cash for kisses and confessions story seems likely to have occurred as well, but I am skeptical that it occurred more than once or twice. It seems likely that it’s something that a disgruntled member of the production staff did see happen, but it also seems likely that that staff member was fired and was bearing a grudge against the company. I suspect we would have seen way more kisses if that cash bonus were always on offer from the company. And, of course, the opposite allegation is made against Riko (and to a lesser extent Aya) in refusing to let their relationships be captured on camera.

Lastly, the final inevitable allegation is that production scripted everything like all reality shows do everywhere. Here we were told that the head of production and the same guy who allegedly grabbed Miwako’s breasts would harangue house members on the phone telling them what to say and who to date on the show. I am skeptical that the phone was necessary. I am also skeptical that the show was ever as scripted as the tinfoil hats want to believe it was. Almost certainly the production had a hand in the selection of all locations outside the house: that’s pretty much a legal and logistical necessity. And there is ample evidence that production would often make suggestions to housemates on shoot days. But if production were scripting everything, then they were terrible at their jobs since they could have been making swoopy pairings every month at rates much more in line with previous shows like Ainori. The more likely scenario is that production was perpetually more concerned about what was going to be shot next week and capturing interesting if not spicy moments than mapping out story arcs for each of the housemates.

But if Terrace House was terrible in the same ways that many reality television shows are terrible, if Terrace House was never the pristine, objective documentary of some young people’s lives in Japan that some of its fans wanted to believe it was, if Terrace House was sullied by occasional if not chronic power harassment and sexual harassment behind the scenes, then despite all that Terrace House was also great. And here’s why:

The most important essential ingredient in Terrace House’s recipe was its casting formula. Yes, the housemates were selected for beauty, charisma and style, but that’s true of most of reality television. Many shows begin with, “let’s put a bunch of young, hot people on screen.” As fans came to the show in its later years the assumption was that everyone on the show were models. But the formula for casting on Terrace House was never a suburban version of the cast of America’s Next Top Model sharing a house. Instead, the show generally targeted for casting at most two models among its six slots, at least two artists, musicians or athletes, and two people with more normal jobs outside the public eye. These latter two slots were essential audience surrogates and, in the middle of the first series, they became a huge driver of audience engagement when the show started accepting applications from anyone to live in the house. 

Terrace House needs reasons to get out of the house. Dates and group dinners are fine, but if one of the housemates were, say, a member of the biggest selling jpop group in Japan, then the show could film at the group’s events promoting both the group and the show. And so Terrace House consistently cast at least four members whose jobs would take them outside the house and provide hooks that would entice existing fanbases to try watching the show.

A second important element of Terrace House’s success was positioning itself as not being entirely about romance and dating.The panelist YOU always asserts that the show only provides the house and a couple of cars. There is “no script at all”. We the audience are just supposed to watch and see what happens. If the hot housemates begin to get interested in each other, then we’ll just happen to be seeing that too. Here’s an article from a music site a week before the show started:  https://www.barks.jp/news/?id=1000083585. 

Fuji TV's "Terrace House" is a full-fledged "Reality Show" that records six men and women living together, but the program has become a hot topic because AKB48's Rie Kitahara will be appearing on it. What kind of life will this AKB48 member (who is prohibited from dating) live in a house with six men and women? Youth, friendship, love, dreams, jealousy, frustration, etc.: a drama without a plot unique to a reality show will develop. [Edited Google translation]

As you can see, even in the press release that this article was obviously based upon Fuji-TV was pushing the idea that anything could happen and if that happened to be a forbidden love between and idol and a mere mortal, then so be it (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

A third essential element of Terrace House was the production design and aesthetic. No cameras and mics ever on screen. Minimalist interior design for the houses. No interactions with hosts on screen or even in real life (to the extent possible -Torichan had a few scenes in a jdrama where OND’s Risako played a waitress prior to Risako’s joining the house.) The intent of the production design in the world of the housemates was to convey the illusion that the housemates were not on a shoot and were just living their lives as they would have in that situation without the presence of camera operators, sound techs and other production staff who obviously had to be there all the time during filming.

At the same time, the housemates could and were encouraged to watch the show on the show. Or, at least, we were allowed to see them watching part of the show on the show: the instances when they are shown watching a panel segment are very rare. The housemates in the first series only learn that the show is coming to an end from seeing Torichan announce from the episode filmed three weeks earlier. And Emika in the final Japanese series receives a bunch of goodbye photos including one of her flipping off Yamachan while she watched. In the world of the show, the panel almost completely does not exist for housemates. In some sense, this structure is not a new idea at all: sports competitions have had announcers since at least the advent of radio broadcasting, and the players never need to acknowledge their existence. We never even question that we are watching people watch the game in sports programming. On Terrace House life itself is a sports broadcast.

Outside of sports broadcasting, having a group of panelists discuss filmed footage was comparatively unheard of in television (in the US at least) prior to Terrace House. Talking Dead had achieved some eclat for being a show about watching a show in the four years prior to Boys & Girls in the City’s release on Netflix. And so the idea of having a group of people talk about a show on the show itself, while common on Japanese variety shows, was comparatively novel in the US and helped spark audience engagement through the meta nature of that process. To talk about the panel on Terrace House was to talk about people talking about people on a show. To talk about one of the many podcasts about Terrace House which started springing up in 2017 is to talk about people talking about people talking about people on a show. Which goes even one layer further when we talk about that here.

Thus, a panel is essential to what Terrace House became even if it was not there at the start. My guess is that the panel was originally built to represent the demographics that the show was hoping would watch the show: men and women from teens to fifty-somethings. In some ways, the panel for Shanghai Share Life was even better than the stellar panel recruited for Terrace House. In terms of ages, the SSL panel is essentially five Torichans and a YOU which brings a bit more energy to the discussions, and it also helps that not having the Japanese sempai/kohai dynamics allowed that panel to share the discussion much more equally. The Chinese version did not have the issue of that the youngest member had to wait for everyone else to talk before he could say anything.

The fact that there was ultimately no planned end-date for any of the Japanese versions of the series is also another great aspect of the show although Shanghai Share Life did fine having one. There was a sense in the middle of each of the series that life in the house could go on forever with new people moving in as people left for whatever reason.

Lastly, a word must be said for the music. The demographics of the music selection probably skews towards Dad Rock throughout all the series, but the show always had its hand on the pulse of current popular music as well. BxGND was part of Taylor Swift’s push into the second largest music market on the planet. There are people in Japan who still primarily regard her as part of the show. 

When Netflix started financing the production of the show there started being two versions of the sound track with similar versions of each track being chosen from 5 Alarm Music for the international version of the show. It’s generally agreed that the earlier curation of the 5 Alarm selections is better in B&GITC and AS than in subsequent series. For people outside Japan Slow Down and Tomorrow’s Ours by Lights Follow are quintessential Terrace House. In fact, the international version of the soundtrack is now the only version available anywhere online for those two series. Netflix Japan has moved to that version and even the unlicensed streaming sites ripped that version back before the show surged in popularity.

But all these things are just the frame for what made Terrace House great. It was a franchise filled from beginning to end with iconic moments. From Riichan’s emphatic rejection of Tecchan’s attempt to hold her hand to The Meat Incident to Tsubasa and Shion to Reo revealing he still carries Yo-san’s key from the first series in Tokyo 2019 - 2020 and even beyond to the utter cringe of the double confession to Carmon in Shanghai Share Life, the show consistently reached peaks of drama and investment in the people on the show that are rarely matched on other reality series even on dating shows set up to bring couples together far more efficiently than Terrace House.

Could the show have created a safer experience for the housemates, and should it have done so? Yes. There should have been better psychological screening when casting the members of the house (if there was any whatsoever). And there should have been counseling resources readily available at all times. And there should have been aggressive social media monitoring and management and legal response to online hate. Would these things have prevented Hana Kimura from ending her life and the show? Probably not. There were other factors that contributed to that tragedy including lockdown during the pandemic, her agency refusing to let her leave the show when she first wanted to, her prior history of self-harm and the popularity of the show itself at its peak.

The good news ten years after the housemates first rolled their suitcases into the house is that by most standards the franchise was a huge success wildly expanding beyond the humble aspirations of a late night Friday broadcast that mostly had a 6% rating during its initial run. If we include Shanghai Share Life, the Terrace House franchise brought us 301 fantastic episodes of reality television and a movie. The Real World and Ainori have both had far more episodes, but Terrace House is still in pretty rarified air as far as these things go.

And there is absolutely no reason that its key elements can not be brought back in new series in any country. The essential elements are mise en scène and can be copied by any production. Many of these elements have been used in other shows. Unfortunately, most of the producers of successors to Terrace House have looked at the show and decided that what is needed is gamification like Ainori to bring couples together. Heart Signal in Korea, then China and now Japan took that approach and now Youku and Abema routinely put out shows with that format. The redditor u/MNLYYZYEG routinely tracks such shows. Here’s a recent list: https://www.reddit.com/r/koreanvariety/comments/xrzrbp/comment/iqiekpd/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 .

But for me it’s not Terrace House when the focus is only on the dating. I love the bonding and friendship in general. For all the protestations that “it was all fake”, that everything was scripted, the evidence in subsequent years is that in the vast majority of cases these people in the house came through the experience having grown and made friendships that persist to this day. I want more of that. I wanted to see even more of, say, Ami and Tsubasa’s friendship that really only comes to light on the show when Ami leaves. I want a show about whole people and the whole of their lives. Because at its core, that’s what made Terrace House unique. That’s what made Terrace House great.

Ten Years. I still have hope there will be more.