Fans of reality television — this is the polite way of describing people who revel in the humiliation of others — are in for shameful extremes of pleasure next week. Japanese game shows are coming our way.

Ritualized humiliation festivals are not my field, but daily life has its reality show moments. Most of us limit it to those toothpaste-on-the-lapel moments that seem not so bad until you wake at 2 a.m. and realize fellow diners might have thought it was something that was not toothpaste.

But we avoid the major agonies, the ones where you have to smile through a spreading pool of dignity blood. Like that U.S. cable reality show combining competitive eating and extreme sports. It is called Hurl. We will neither watch nor appear on Hurl, we announce.

In Japan, the equivalent declaration would be “I will not tie slabs of raw meat to my face, stick my head out of an onstage hole and try to be the last contestant standing before a ballistic Komodo dragon bites into my skull and dredges my thinker. I find this degrading.”

Esquire offered an online sampling of what they consider the most gnarly Japanese shows, but Esquire was too polite. They included the eating game where your face is on a bungee cord and marshmallows dance around your head. And they also chose the one where contestants attempt tongue-twisters.

In our part of the world, you fail and you get that buzzer sound. There, they are whacked hard in the genitals by a slapping machine.

Candid Camera, the toilet version

The worst show is the Japanese version of Candid Camera. Perfectly nice people stroll along on a sunny day and decide to use a public toilet stall, like the ones we have in Canada for construction workers, but bigger and nicer.

These unfortunate men are filmed inside the stall pulling down their pants and squatting on the toilet when suddenly the interior of the stall, toilet included, is hydraulically whisked up into public view. Some men freeze and attempt to blend in with the landscape, but the rest desperately try to get their pants back on, and you can imagine.

They’re lucky. Sometimes they pull out the floor and toilet horizontally on a Jet-Ski. But these horrified toilet-goers are naked from the waist down, clinging to a pole at high speed and then nearly drowned if they overturn while trying to dress, or perhaps kill, themselves.

I have come to resent the internet for offering me videos like this, even if I am at least half to blame for watching them. But having come this far, I’ll tell you about those Komodo dragons who menace young female contestants.

They were responsible for what one Guardian journalist called the most disgusting sight of his life, which was dragons doing what comes naturally. They ate a buffalo that didn’t die. Furthermore, they ate in what you might call an “interior” style that was deeply upsetting.

We humans are the unnatural ones. We anthropomorphize animals and expect them to dine with a knife and fork. But we’re the ones wearing a meat hat. And ABC TV producers are the ones claiming to be superior to Japan while stealing their shows to mock the Americans who will watch them.

Even the BBC

I Survived a Japanese Game Show debuts on Tuesday. ABC, in its last shot at beating cable, has chosen 10 sad cases to recreate some of the tortures of Japanese fun TV.

ABC’s capsule descriptions of its contestants fizz with contempt. They’re hicks. One is a desperate single mom adrift in “the dating scene of Sandpoint, Idaho.” Another hails from Trussville, Alabama. It is made clear that the contestants are trash, and I don’t doubt they are, but ABC is trying to have it both ways.

Even the BBC is doing it. They have bought Human Tetris, a segment of Japan’s cult hit show Tunnels, and will recreate it as Hole in the Wall. Contestants face a wall speeding towards them across the top of a swimming pool. The wall has a hole, vaguely human-shaped, and the poor sap who signed up for this has to contort himself to get through the hole or he is slammed, soaked and ridiculed.

But Japanese people are slim. Sometimes they look at the elaborate shape heading for them, shrug and stand sideways, a perfect fit. Given that the two greatest sources of boffo humour in British life are fat people and every aspect of “bums,” you can bet a lot of Brits will not make it through the hole at belly level or lower.

I Survived a Japanese Game Show and Hole in the Wall will be the thin end of the wedge. I’m not predicting bear-baiting. But I do note that we tend to confuse performance and real life, and reality shows make the distinction even fuzzier. Here’s an example.

Gate 25

Last week I was waiting in the Ottawa airport for a quick flight home to Toronto. Over the loudspeaker came a voice telling us to leave Gate 18 and head for Gate 25, which I did, casually wondering what deaf people do.

So I was at Gate 25, filled with prosperous business types gazing at an elderly Chinese woman, who clearly didn’t speak English, showing her boarding pass to a uniformed airline attendant. He told her to go away. “I have nothing to do with that,” he said. “That’s another airline,” he said dismissively.

Six times, literally, this uniformed man publicly dumped a helpless woman, in front of a thoroughly Canadian audience. It was our very own reality show.

So I checked her Air Canada boarding pass for Calgary, got her to the right gate and found someone to guide her onto the plane. Later, I wondered about this reality show segment entitled How Much Will You Tolerate?

Would the ticket agent have treated an archetypal Canadian woman that way? And why am I, as a friend once hurtfully said to me, the mensch? I was as reluctant to get involved as anyone else. But why didn’t five people step forward? I was thinking of dazed Polish-speaking Robert Dziekanski, dead after being shot by a Taser by the RCMP in Vancouver’s airport.

The answer was that we will tolerate a great deal of pain, as long as it is the pain of others.

This Week

The National Gallery of Canada had a rather good show, The 1930s: The Making of the New Man, about changes in the depiction of man under Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. Men were stone-faced, slim, muscular, hard and liked to be seen in large groups marching about in uniform. The individual was scorned. The Italian sculptures were purely terrifying — imagine Italians trying to pass themselves off as soulless automatons — but ending the show with Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was too easy. It was also off-putting for Ottawa parents on an outing, who pushed strollers into the gallery theatre and came out aghast, wondering how much little Ethan had taken in of Hitler shouting at the Bad Men about the Thousand Year Reich. Consider your audience, I say.