Many Japanese men live far away from their families because of job assignments. The men in "Sekai Hataraku Otosan" ("Fathers Working in the World"; TV Tokyo, Mon., 7:54 p.m.) live as far away from their families as you can get — in foreign countries. The premise of this documentary special is to have their children pay them surprise visits.
In one segment, twin third-grade boys from Hyogo Prefecture make a secret journey to India to see their father, an engineer for a local ink-manufacturing company. In another, a man who works for a Japanese construction firm in Thailand gets a visit from his fifth-grade daughter. There is also a man who has been working in the Philippines for as long as his fourth-grade daughter has been alive, and another father working on water purification in Vietnam.
In the same vein, the regular series "Sekai no Nihonjin-dzuma wa Mita" ("Seeing Japanese Wives of the World"; TBS, Tues., 7 p.m.) goes abroad to check out a few of the 200,000 Japanese women who have married foreign men and moved to their husbands' countries. The main segment of this week's two-hour special focuses on Tomoko Blanks, the wife of Billy Blanks, who created and stars in the smash-hit exercise program "Billy's Boot Camp." The couple live in Los Angeles, where Tomoko reveals to viewers her problems with Billy's diet, not so much because it's high in calories but because he loves to eat fried chicken with ... Well, you'll see.