What's going on
Detective! Knight Scoop has been running in the Kansai region since 1988 on a very simple premise: a viewer writes in with a problem, and a comedian in the role of a detective is dispatched to solve it, with the whole investigation played back later to a studio audience. Requests range from linguistic mysteries to childhood memories to lost objects. This one is a lost object.
The object is a solid gold ring. The place it was lost is a botton benjo — a non-flush toilet that opens directly onto a holding tank underneath. They are no longer common in Japan, but they are far from extinct in areas the sewer lines never reached, and a truck comes around periodically to pump the tank out. The ring slipped off the man's little finger and went straight down. He cried about it. Then he wrote to the show.
Detective Hiroshi Tamura drew the assignment. A pumping contractor was brought in, the tank was emptied, and roughly four hundred liters of the worst possible search medium were worked through on camera. The comments below are from people who watched a grown man cry twice in one episode — once when the ring was gone, and once when it came back.
Comments
My take
Comments loosely translated for tone. Reactions collected from Togetter and X threads.
View original thread →
In Japanese net slang, 草 (kusa, literally “grass”) means “lol” — it grew out of typing strings of w for warau, to laugh, which look like sprouting grass. Under this video people keep swapping in 臭, also read kusa, meaning “stinks.” Identical sound, very different smell.
金運 (kin-un) means luck with money — 金 is gold, 運 is fortune. But un is also the standard toddler word for poop. So gold plus un comes out as “money luck,” which is the joke, and the ring has now been through both halves of it.
黄金 (ōgon) is the grand word for gold, but it has long doubled as a polite dodge for human waste — night soil used to be sold to farmers as fertilizer, and calling it gold was only half a joke. So the line reads as gold from gold in both directions at once.