The suicide rate goes up at the end of the year, an increase that's usually attributed to depression in the face of what is perceived as everybody else's high holiday spirits. In Japan, there's another reason for despair. That's the prospect of being stuck in the company of relatives you hate eating food you can't stand. To that, add the unavoidable blitz of New Year's TV specials and it's enough to drive even the most well-adjusted person over the edge.

Entertainment preempts everything on TV this time of year, including "wide shows" and news programs, which is why last week's announcement of Princess Masako's miscarriage was not inflated into a national tragedy of hand-wringing proportions.

Actually, the laziness that goes into a lot of yearend programming also accounts for the bonanza of better-than-average filler, like BBC's "Prime Suspect," movies like "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "The Seven Samurai," and full-length concerts featuring Alanis Morissette and Jeff Beck.

These dispatches from the real world provide welcome respite from the cultural banality of Japanese commercial TV. The term kokka, which translates directly as nation-house and is used to describe the citizenry as one big happy family, becomes easy to understand when everyone in the country is sitting at the kotatsu eating osechi and drinking themselves into a stupor while they watch TV shows where famous people sit at the kotatsu eating osechi and drinking themselves into -- well, not a stupor. You can't be drunk when you're appearing on four networks simultaneously.

Monomane specials, those singing contests where people perform popular songs in imitation of the singers who made them famous, exemplify the most conspicuous attributes of holiday TV: surplus celebrities, total immersion in nostalgia and an overpowering atmosphere of self-congratulation.

The model is NHK's New Year's Eve warhorse "Kohaku Utagassen," which pits a red team of popular female singers against a white team of popular male singers. Monomane specials do away with the male-female rivalry but retain the color distinction. Contestants representing every level of celebrity-hood, professional monomane artists and sometimes even noncelebrities, do impressions of pop singers past and present while a panel of celebrity judges rates them on a scale of 1 to 10. The ratings aren't meant to be taken seriously, but the judges never give anything less than a 9, and even a 9 has become so rare that a contestant has to be either really terrible or really offensive to justify one. Subjectivity, or even the idea that there is such a thing as relative quality, is too divisive for such a show.

That isn't to say the impersonations can't be caricatures. The more outrageous they are in poking fun at the original singers' performing idiosyncrasies or appearance, the greater the appreciation. Even the originals themselves seem to get a kick out of it, since they often show up just as the impersonator is finishing his or her song.

The popularity of monomane contests is quite solid across all demographics in Japan. People tune in not so much because they want to see the impersonations, but because they want to see if the washed-up singers show up. That's why the impersonations are not chosen by the people performing them but by the producers, who are approached by talent management companies to have their faded charges lampooned. Though it's far from guaranteed, some careers have been revived thanks to monomane. The most spectacular example is Ken'ichi Mikawa, the fey enka singer who was brought back from obscurity and bankruptcy thanks to professional monomane artist Korokke, and who is now more popular than ever. Reportedly, Korokke is constantly bombarded with requests from other washed-up singers who think that imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery but the straightest route to an instant comeback.

Ironically, Korokke himself was almost washed up five or six years ago when he fired his manager, who must have been a fairly powerful force in Japanese show business since Korokke was subsequently blacklisted by television producers in general. This isn't as dire as it sounds; he could still get live bookings, which pay much better than TV, and in any case, Korokke's shutout was TV's loss since, unlike most Japanese impersonators, he is genuinely talented: imaginative, musically adept, focused and, rarest of all, really funny.

So it's somehow fitting that now that every network offers a monomane show (or two, or three), Korokke appears on all of them except the one on Fuji TV, which originated the concept and, therefore, was most instrumental in making Korokke a star in the first place.

The monomane format has become so locked into predictability, from the inevitable 10s to the "surprise" visits of faded stars (including washed-up foreign singers, who are easy to book since so many tour Japan this time of year), that without someone like Korokke, it simply looks like a parody of itself.

That's probably why Fuji TV did something different this year and added feeds of impersonators performing at Odaiba and atop Tokyo Tower. Though they claimed it was live and the comments were ostensibly ad-libbed, every joke was accompanied by those ubiquitous subtitles that garnish variety shows these days. The jokes were so predictable that, apparently, the director can see them coming a mile away.