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

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