Terrace House: Opening New Doors

I started watching Terrace House because I was teaching myself Japanese and wanted something to listen to that was not a textbook. What I got instead was a show I loved, a year of comfort I did not yet know I was going to need, and, indirectly, a friendship.

If you have never seen it: Terrace House is a Japanese reality show with the simplest possible premise. Six strangers, three men and three women, move into a beautiful house together. They keep their real jobs and their real lives, there is no script, and the cameras just watch. Every so often the show cuts to a panel of comedians and personalities sitting in a studio, watching the same footage you are and gossiping about it, teasing the cast, calling their shots. That panel is half the fun.

Opening New Doors, set in the snowy mountain resort town of Karuizawa, was the very first season I watched, in January and February of 2020. The timing matters, because this is the show I turned around and recommended to Mary right when we met, and watching the rest of the series together became the spine of our friendship. So Opening New Doors is not just a season I liked. It is where a lot of my life since started.

A couple of things grabbed me right away. One was how low the stakes were, in the best way. After a lifetime of American reality TV built on manufactured screaming, here was a show where the big dramatic event might be someone being too shy to confess a crush, or a quiet disagreement about who did the dishes. It was wholesome and gentle and a genuine slice of everyday life in Japan, which, given that my head was already pointed at Japan, was exactly what I wanted. The other thing was the house. The Karuizawa scenery is gorgeous, all mountains and snow and changing seasons, and the place had this stunning onsen-style bathroom that Mary and I, to this day, still bring up out of nowhere. We both basically wanted to live in that bathroom.

But the reason I love this season is the people. We came in completely blind, knowing nothing about the show’s history, so we met Seina fresh, as a returning veteran the show clearly expected us to already know. She came across at first as a little aloof, a little full of herself. And we fell for her completely anyway. There was a guy early on we did not want her to end up with, and then she connected with Noah, an aspiring airline pilot who was apparently in line to inherit his father’s airline, and the two of them just fit. We were rooting for them hard. And here is the part that still makes me happy: out of every couple in the whole franchise, Seina and Noah are the one that actually worked. They got married in early 2021 and had a baby boy the next year. The single real success story, and it was the two we wanted.

The couple we loved most in the moment, though, was Shion and Tsubasa, a male model and a female ice hockey player. We adored Tsubasa especially. Her energy was the best thing in the house, and we loved watching the two of them slowly figure each other out. We were sad to read, afterward, that they split up once the show ended. That is just how it goes sometimes.

The rest of the cast had its characters. We liked the snowboarder, Taka, a lot. And then there was Yuudai, the self-described aspiring chef who slept with a couple of stuffed pandas and was, to put it kindly, a lot. He became the housemate the whole internet loved to be annoyed by.

The thing I came to love about Terrace House as a format, and you feel it most here, is the turnover. Housemates leave when they are ready, a new stranger moves in, and the chemistry of the whole house resets. People come and go, you get attached, and then you meet someone new. It keeps the thing alive.

The intro

I have to talk about the opening song, because this was the first Terrace House intro I ever heard, and it hooked me before a single housemate said a word. It’s “Trying” by Eleventyseven, off an album called Adventures in Eville, and I’d have never found it on my own. That’s the thing this show is quietly great at: picking songs that aren’t famous but absolutely nail the mood, the kind that make you feel like you’re about to head down some path into a wonderful experience. This one set that tone for the whole series for me.

This was where it all started for me: the show, the Japanese practice, and a recommendation I handed to a brand-new friend without any idea what it would turn into. We watched the rest of the seasons next, and I will get to those.