"Perfect Kan-Kan" is one of those television shows where, when I research it, I find scores of people saying things like "I remember watching this! I loved this show!", but few, if any, actual full episodes are preserved. Such is the case for Akihiko Hirata's tenure on the show, which as far as I can tell would be in the dustbin of history if it were not for Hibari Misora.
Starting in 1975, Hirata appeared as a regular on this game show, the specifics of which are obtuse and not helped any by machine translation. From what I understand, the concept is that a team of four "regular people" are pitted against a team of celebrities (hosted by Konto 55's Jiro Sakagami for a while) to answer trivia questions in front of a live audience. There's a couple of episodes on YouTube (mostly from the late '80s), but none with Hirata on the team - except for one. This survives only because Hibari Misora personally owned a VHS recording of it. The studio lost the master tape, so they had to use her copy for a re-broadcast in 2009.
Here's the whole damn thing. I'd embed the video, but the uploader disabled embedding.
Now, I do understand a little Japanese, but Japanese game shows are on another level. I was missing 90% of this. Misora is, obviously, a guest, and most if not all of the trivia questions appear to be about her. The two I understood seemed to be something like "what did she get for a present" (Hirata answers "a letter" and then "a kiss"[!], the correct answer was "a ring") and one about her favorite food (I believe Hirata guesses sashimi, but the correct answer was ochazuke [green tea over rice]).
I wasn't happy with not knowing what everyone says before they introduce themselves, so I tried to translate YouTube's auto-generated Japanese subtitles into English, and it's probably a dumpster fire, but take it anyway, I spent an hour of my life on it:
Jiro Sakagami: "People often say 'Jiro-san is really dark-skinned, it must be that he gets tanned while in the sea', but really I got tanned while weeding. After all, I have a 20,000 tsubo garden." [This would be approximately 66,000 square meters, or 710,418 square feet]
Akihiko Hirata: [The subtitles absolutely hate this part but I think it's something to the effect of not having time to tan because he has to read 20,000 books this summer]
Maria Asahina: "Jiro-san told me 'Maria, you've lost weight'. Of course, I lost 20,000 kilo this summer."
Shunji Fujimura: "People say that Fujimura has a strange look on his face, and that's no wonder, I was born 20,000 years ago."
Everybody is making some kind of pun around the word "ni man" (20,000) that I can't even begin to decipher. The auto-generated subs also kept thinking people were saying "nasu" [eggplant] instead of "natsu" [summer] which was causing some trouble.
The only other pictorial evidence I found of any of Hirata's appearances on the show was a Japanese Soundcloud rapper who used a still from an episode as cover art. Writing for this blog really leads me to some strange places sometimes. (The track is, admittedly, fire.)
This episode was the first time I'd ever seen him not playing a character. Of course there are interviews with him in text form that are not difficult to find, but I don't think there's exactly a huge corpus of out-of-character appearances on video out there, so this was pretty cool. Thanks, Hibari Misora, and whoever else was holding onto that tape for 29 years.
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