Robert Baldwin: the foreigner who knows more about Japan than you do

If you watch Sanma-san’s Karakuri TV on Sunday evenings, you’re probably familiar with a segment on the show where foreigners attempt to prove their vast knowledge of Japan by challenging Japan trivia expert Robert Baldwin. Challengers enter a tatami mat room and sit down across from Mr. Baldwin, drawing a Japan-related category out of a box. If he/she can come up with a question from that category that Robert cannot answer, he/she becomes the next champion of Japan knowledge! Here’s a clip from last Sunday:

Robert Baldwin speaks excellent Japanese and proves himself to be a veritable encyclopedia of Japan-ology. The first challenger is a Nigerian guy who has no idea how to read the kanji for bakumatsu, nor does he know enough about that historical period to even make a question about it. The second challenger, also from Nigeria, talks about how he loves Japanese chicks and then proceeds to ask Baldwin a question about Ultraman. Since Baldwin specializes in Ultraman trivia, he easily destroys the challenger’s question. The third challenger, Japanese film expert Eija Niskanen, draws the geography category asks him to name the smallest prefecture in Japan (even I knew the answer to that one: Kagawa). After soundly defeating 2 African men and one European woman, Robert Baldwin held on to his crown as king of Japan trivia.

While I don’t doubt that Mr. Baldwin is extremely knowledgable about Japan and speaks fluent Japanese, the quality of his challenges makes me wonder about the purpose of this show. Why would the show pick an African guy who can’t read kanji and doesn’t know much about Japanese history as a challenger? And what about the other Nigerian guy, who talks about how he digs Japanese women so much prior to being soundly beaten by the serious-minded white Canadian man? Are these two fellows little more than comic relief, or worse, were their appearances on the show completely staged? Perhaps this trivia challenge segment is more about re-assuring the Japanese audience that their country is something uniquely difficult for non-Japanese to understand. Sure, there’s Robert Baldwin, who probably knows way more about Japan than most Japanese people do, but in the end he’s nothing more than an anomaly. The creators of the show may not have set out to make something that comes across that way, but that’s how it seems to me. And get this: according to Japanese wikipedia Robert Baldwin was born in Japan! Gee, how strange that this guy can speak Japanese so well and know so much about Japan….

International readers: Does your country have any TV shows in which foreigners take trivia challenges about the nation they have immigrated to? Is the show heavily weighted towards cartoon/children’s TV/scifi trivia? How would such a show be viewed if it were aired in your country?