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Synopsis

Early August is the key period of war commemoration in Japan. The anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks and the war end anniversary (6, 9 and 15 August respectively) generate much media attention. The way in which Japanese television covers war issues in August is analyzed for the period 1991-2005.

General Sources

Details of what Japanese people watch can be found at Video Research Ltd, an online viewing figures service. Online TV listings and guides can be found at Za Terebijon and Internet TV Guide (which has listings the same as the daily newspapers).

Despite the importance of television, it has been largely overlooked in studies of Japanese war memory. Television studies pose numerous technical and methodological problems, not least the inability to access to all past programmes. Japan does have two excellent public-access television archives, The Broadcast Library in Yokohama and NHK Archives in Saitama. However, these are mainly for documentaries and drama/entertainment specials and are nowhere near comprehensive.

Japan has a highly respected public broadcaster, NHK (often called "the Japanese BBC"). The current system of NHK plus five commercial networks, each one affiliated to one of the national quality newspapers (see chapter 4), had stabilized by 1969. The commercial networks broadcast via local affiliate stations across the country, and the local stations in the Hokkaido area (where the 2005 commemorative programmes survey was carried out) are included in the table below. In recent years, there has also been an explosion in the number of satellite and digital channels, although terrestrial TV remains the most important place to view war-related Japanese television.

The key documentaries on Japanese TV are NHK Specials and ETV Tokushu documentaries on NHK Educational. One of NHK's flagship history programmes is Sono toki rekishi ga ugoita, which has looked at major turning points in war history on a number of occasions. This programme is one of the few regularly released on DVD and transcripts of the programmes are even released in book form, too. Whereas the documentary genre is dominated by NHK, NNN Document on Nippon Television also has periodic war documentaries.

NHK's scheduled news programmes, such as Ohayo Nippon (Good Morning Japan) and News 7, regularly have war-related news around major anniversaries and when war issues are on the political agenda. The most watched TV news programme in the 1990s was TV Asahi's News Station, anchored by Kume Hiroshi. Kume retired in 2003 and News Station was replaced by Hodo Station, anchored by Furutachi Ichiro. TBS' flagship news programme is News 23. It used to be anchored by Chikushi Tetsuya (in the period covered by the book), who has a reputation for being progressive on war issues. Fuji Television, Nippon Television and TV Tokyo's regular news bulletins tend to have much less war coverage.

Of the talk shows, Asa made terebi (an all night talk show once a month on TV Asahi) has had some long and heated debates on war issues. On Sunday mornings there are political talk programmes on most channels such as NHK's Nichiyo toron, Sunday Project on TV Asahi (hosted by famous journalist Tahara Soichiro) and Fuji Television's Hodo 2001, which is the most friendly programme to right-wing commentators.