Lofty TV Goals

Winning fans with quality

Two shrines stand a stone's throw from each other in Tokyo's Shibuya district. One looks toward the past; the other embodies the present. The first, the Meiji memorial, a Shinto edifice of Japanese cypress embellished with gilded copper, is dedicated to Emperor Hirohito's grandfather. The other, which glints a deep azure in the sun, is the modernistic steel-and-glass headquarters of NHK, Japan's public broadcasting system, symbol of a national obsession: television.

The Japanese lead the world in the number of hours spent in front of the TV set. A 1982 study shows that in Japan the average family spends 8 hr. 15 min. a day watching TV, in contrast to 6 hr. 43 min. in the U.S. Television ownership is the highest in the world. Some 98% of homes have a color set (U.S. 89%). Another recent study reveals that the tube has become so essential that 31% of the Japanese would rather part with their cars, refrigerators, newspapers or telephones than give up their TV screens.

For the Japanese, television in essence means NHK, the world's largest, richest and most diverse public broadcasting network. Although there are 99 commercial stations around the country affiliated with the five major stations in Tokyo, the noncommercial NHK is watched as much as all the others combined. Like the BBC, NHK subsists on collection fees: 30.4 million subscriber homes pay $41 each year, giving NHK more than $1.24 billion to work with. The fee is optional, but almost no one refuses to make the donation.

Unlike almost everyone else in the world, NHK viewers seem to regard television as life enhancing and benign. The reason is that NHK actually lives up to most of its lofty goals. Launched in 1953, the TV network is self-governing and independent of all political authority. Its constitution grandly states that NHK must "contribute to the ideals of world peace and the welfare of mankind," while ensuring "the preservation of the outstanding examples of national culture." No small order.

NHK tries to fulfill this promise by devoting as much as 40% of its daily general-service programming to educational purposes: lessons in calligraphy, the guitar, economics, political science, English, French, German and Russian. News takes up a considerable 35% of general programming, entertainment only 24%. One recent highlight: The Silk Road, a multimilliondollar, 30-hour epic that explores contemporary life along the ancient Chinese and Central Asian routes followed by the silk caravans. NHK's second channel is dedicated to education and often works in tandem with the nation's primary schools. It also offers Shakespeare, symphonic music, Noh plays and Kabuki drama.

NHK also caters to popular tastes, beaming out sumo wrestling tournaments, baseball games and Japanese-style soap operas. Currently, the most watched show on all television is NHK's Oshin, a lachrymose 15-minute daily drama that traces the vicissitudes of a farmer's ambitious daughter who becomes the owner of a chain of supermarkets.

While NHK wins wide audiences with generally distinguished fare, the commercial networks sometimes counterprogram with sex and violence, serving their viewers a steady diet of chambara (samurai s wordplay), which consists of bloody doses of murder and mayhem set against the exotic background of feudal Japan. A popular weekly commercial series called Business Is Homicide strains to come up with ever more ingenious methods of murder, such as strangling by means of the strings of a musical instrument. The commercial networks also program B movies, variety shows and game shows.

NHK's success with quality programming may be a result of the highly literate audience that exists in Japan. NHK's accomplishment seems to confute the American notion that mass equals crass, that the major portion of TV programming must inevitably be inconsequential. One American observer, Robert Christopher, author of The Japanese Mind, taking note of the excellence of Japanese television, concludes: "TV plays a far more constructive role in Japanese society than in our own." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.