Today, I want to share a story from over twenty years ago. Back then, there was a TV show titled Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? that aired in a lot of countries worldwide. In Japan, it was called Quiz $ Millionaire and aired by Fuji Television. I sometimes watch the show and casually applied to it through Interactive Voice Response system. They had no web forms yet, as I recall.

I almost forgot applying it until I received a postcard inviting me to Fuji Television. They said they would pay my transportation fee. I'm a curious person, so I went there on the day they scheduled. There were numerous people and we took a paper test in a large room. The test was easy, and naturally I got a postcard for the next round.

After that, I started to watch the show and analyze it seriously every week. In Japanese version, the top prize was ten million yen, which was approximately ninety thousand dollars at the exchange rate back then. So it was too small to call Millionaire, but of course huge amount for me — especially at that time, I had just divorced and was a newbie as a single mom.

I found out that the quiz questions weren't that difficult. The show wasn't serious about quizzes, that made viewers have familiarity to challengers. The host, Minomonta, unnecessarily prolonged the suspense by staring down the challenger intently before giving the correct answer. It seemed that made the viewers' hearts race. Minomonta often came off as arrogant, and I didn't like him. However, I thought the level of quizzes was easy enough even for me, a total quize amateur, to go for the top prize.