The Japanese TV show that tried to build the Pyramids of Giza
People have this idea that Japanese pop culture is weird for the sake of being weird. Their television in particular. When you really think about it, that’s basically nonsense.
The only reason we think it’s weird is that we, as westerners, most often don’t understand what’s going on or don’t have the cultural knowledge to know what’s being referenced… Imagine not being from the United Kingdom and trying to parse what in God’s name is going on in, like, Naked Attraction, or The League of Gentlemen – hell, try explaining to people who weren’t there at the time what the fuck was going on with Mr Blobby.
So no, Japanese TV shows aren’t more or less weird than any other TV industry… though there are some examples that really make you wonder whether that’s really the case. I mean, not too long ago, that show went viral of people locked in a room who had to work out what things in that room were edible or not by biting them alone, and then you get this strange story from 1978, when the Japanese TV company Nippon tried to put one of the great mysteries of history to the test.
They wanted to know how hard it would be to build the Great Pyramid of Giza, and sought permission from the Egyptian government to set up shop in Cairo, a few hundred metres away from the pyramids themselves, and try to build a replica of the Cheops pyramid… A bizarre move, but something that had been a passion project of Sajuki Yoshimura, the Japanese architect who pitched the project to the TV company, ever since he was young.
Nippon green-lit the project with the intention of turning it into a pair of documentary specials. Thus, Yoshimura and a team of workmen decamped to Cairo to get to work. The idea was that they would use a version of basic tactics that the ancient Egyptians said they used to build them. This time with less, y’know, slave labour. At the start of the project, the intention was to build a scaled-down model of the Cheops pyramid. Where the original is 482 feet high with a 756‐foot base, this one would be 65 feet high and 96 feet across.
This sounds achievable, and it probably would have been, had it not been for a farcical issue. You see, word had gotten around Cairo that a TV company were coming to town and was trying to replicate the construction of the pyramids. This meant that the team would need all the limestone they could possibly get. This meant that every company in Cairo that sold limestone suddenly jacked up their limestone prices by three or four times.
This was a project with a big budget. The workers on the project, all hired from Cairo, were all paid pretty handsomely for their efforts (unlike last time). However, they had not predicted that the limestone merchants would be so cutthroat, so the size of the project had to be decreased. The production team also hadn’t counted on the fact that a literal desert provided no solid foundation to be built upon, so they had to make one themselves, making the budget spiral even further.
By the project’s end, it was impressive that they’d made a pyramid at all. One that stood at 11 metres tall with a 15 metre long base. A step down from their original plan, but still a serious achievement – what the project highlights most of all is what an unbelievable feat of engineering the original pyramids were… After all, Yoshimura’s team had cranes and mixers at their disposal, whereas the ancient Egyptians did not.
Let’s be real here, whoever you’re from, analysing that would make for some pretty great telly, right?