stolen by a wrestler, Homer subdues him (with the help of Bart) before throwing the Emperor of Japan into a receptacle of worn mawashi. He and Bart are put in jail and bailed out by Marge, leaving the family with a single million yen note. To cheer up a disappointed Lisa, Homer makes the note into an origami crane, which subsequently blows away in the wind. Needing to earn the money to return home, the family work in a fish-gutting factory in Osaka, where they happen upon a TV game show called The Happy Smile Super Challenge Family Wish Show, where winners are given a prize of their choice. They go on the show and are subject to humiliating challenges at the behest of the host Wink in order to win plane tickets to Springfield. Their final challenge has them collect the tickets from a rickety bridge over an active volcano, which they succeed at but fall into the lava, which turns out to be Orangeade with added wasabi. The Simpsons finally leave Japan, though their flight out is briefly halted by four giant monsters – Godzilla, Mothra, Gamera, and Rodan. Production The episode, which was originally titled "Fat Man and Little Boy" (which went on to be used for the name of a season 16 episode), was directed by Jim Reardon and written by Donick Cary and Dan Greaney. It was first broadcast on the Fox network in the United States on May 16, 1999. "Thirty Minutes over Tokyo" was one of the last episodes produced for the series' tenth season. Staff writers Cary and Greaney wrote the draft in a couple of days, and it was then rewritten "extensively" with The Simpsons writing staff. Originally, there would be a long scene about how Homer had bought a "pre-Columbian vase" on the Internet, however the scene was ultimately cut from the episode. The episode's title is a reference to the 1944 war film 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. Originally, the staff wanted the title to be "Twenty-two Minutes over Tokyo", since an episode of The Simpsons is approximately twenty-two minutes long, but they eventually changed it to its current rendition because it “sounds closer to” the title of the film it references. According to Cary, the writers did a lot of research in order to accurately depict the Japanese language for the episode. For example, the three categories in The