Vermilion Pleasure Night
—Japanese glam-rock midnight show

Yoshimasa Ishibashi is a film director, who made Kuruwasetaino, which won an award in 1999. He also performs under the group name Kyupi Kyupi. Ishibashi says his main influences are George Lucas and Walt Disney—creators who can transplant their visions into a variety of formats. He once said in a interview that “I cried at Disneyland because I was so amazed by Mr. Disney who inspired others to create his world, even after his death.”
So, what is Vermilion Pleasure Night? And what is Ishibashi’s vision and how has he transferred it into a TV show? 

VPN is a late show in Japan sponsored by the big Osaka-based comedy agency Yoshimoto Kogyo, broadcast every Sunday on TV Tokyo, starting at 1 a.m.
VPN is an omnibus show full of kitsch and black humor.
One of the regular skits is “The Fuccon Family” ( http://www.fuccon.com/ ), a family drama that features mannequins for actors. Dad, Mom and their son Mikey all have grotesque smiley faces, and they talk, fight, give each other trauma, and laugh mindlessly in a nightmare parody of sitcoms and the nuclear family. One day Mikey is kidnapped and returned home a week later in a box with his arms and legs hacked off. Even then, a huge smile is still plastered on his face. “The Fuccon Family” might be VPN’s most successful feature. This kind of doll’s show is supposed to be for kids, but as soon as they start dealing with adult matters (like when Todd Haynes made The Karen Carpenter Story using only Barbie dolls), the surrealism greatly increases.

Eventually, “The Fuccon Family” were displayed in the HMV record store in Shibuya without any explanation, which invited smiles only from people who knew the truth about these “dummies.”

Another VPN skit, “Starship Residence”, belongs to an older, more traditional type of Japanese comedy. A sexy female drug dealer accidentally sells cocaine to an alien who is sick with a cold and needs medicine. In “One Point English Lesson”, starring yet another sexy chick, a horny Japanese girl in geisha attire teaches you various ways to say, “You’er SOOOO good” while lying in bed (even though “You’er” is spelled wrong). “Midnight Cooking” is an enka (a traditional Japanese song genre) karaoke-style cooking show. Two gals sing and cook in an overemotional, exaggerated fashion. “Cathy’s House” is a parody of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood-style children’s shows, only with a set that looks like it was designed by Junko Mizuno.
At times, VPN can almost give you a painful feeling, like watching a badly dated relic of once “cutting-edge” video art from the eighties. Moreover, VPN is a cauldron of bad taste. It is showy, loud, overtly sexual, flashy, and gaudy all the time. And that makes it GLAM and that means great entertainment!

One new component of this show is that you can smell a lot of pheromones coming out of your TV set. You might realize that you want to do “something about it” after you’ve finished watching this show late at night. Eroticism mixed with art has was never cooked well most of the time on TV; however, VPN does it well. Perhaps this is the intention and vision of Mr. Ishibashi. Or maybe he’s just a dirty old man. 

—J.Tack