The colour TV Broadcasts in Japan
The first color TV broadcasts in Japan began on September 10, 1960. Japan thus became the third country in the world to use the NTSC system, following the United States and Cuba. The NTSC system, the standard chosen by the U.S.’s National Television System Committee, had 525 scanning lines. One of the most significant characteristics of this system was its ability to make the contents of color TV programming available for viewing on a black-and-white TV set. Regular color TV broadcasts were provided on the General and Educational TV channels of NHK Tokyo and Osaka, Nippon Television Network Corporation (NTV), Radio Tokyo (the present TBS), TV Asahi, and the Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation. Note that eight years had elapsed since the first Broadcast Day of March 22, 1952, in which a public color TV broadcasting experiment was conducted at the Broadcasting Hall in Uchisaiwai-cho, Tokyo. The system used in the experiment was a mechanical CBS system, and it occurred one year prior to the start of regular black-and-white TV broadcasts.
Early color TV broadcast programming centered on foreign color films, sports relay broadcasting, and short educational programs, due to the inadequately equipped broadcasting stations. Even seven months after the opening broadcast, color TV programming on NHK’s General TV channel amounted to only one hour a day, with 2 hours and 42 minutes on NTV, and 6 minutes on TBS. A 21-inch color TV at that time cost 500,000 yen. This was too expensive for most people to purchase, and only 1,200 units had been sold by the time color TV broadcasting started. In March 1966, a nationwide microwave network for color TV broadcasting was completed by Nippon Denshin Denwa (currently NTT), making it feasible for color TV broadcasts to be viewed throughout 93% of the country.

World’s First “TV Olympics”
Broadcasters in Japan, including NHK, made a collective effort to make a TV broadcast of the Tokyo Olympic Games in October 1964. They developed television equipment domestically, including an image pickup tube and equipment for satellite relay broadcasting. Live broadcasts of the Olympics used the geostationary satellite Syncom 3, becoming the first satellite broadcast in history (although the satellite, which had been designed for telephone circuit use, did not have adequate capacity to transmit TV signals, an application of compression technology led to a successful test just three days prior to the opening ceremony). During the games, eight events were broadcast in color, including the opening and closing ceremonies, wrestling, volleyball, gymnastics, and judo. To ensure picture quality for the large number of viewers who were watching the program on black-and-white TV sets, the broadcasts employed a separate luminescence color camera with two image pickup tubes, which were designed to preserve picture quality for black-and-white TV. The Olympic broadcasts accompanied the release of new technologies, such as a close-pickup microphone and a slow-motion VTR, which could replay recordings of the recorded competition in slow motion. The Tokyo Olympic Games was remembered as the “TV Olympics.”
The Tokyo Olympic Games became an event in which the whole Japanese nation was united by the broadcasting media. This was especially true for the finals of women’s volleyball, which pitted the national favorites, the “Eastern Sorceresses,” against the Soviet Union’s team, setting a historical record for viewers (95%).
The Olympics provided an opportunity for the TV industry in Japan to foray into the world market, in addition to showing the world the high level of broadcasting technology in Japan.

1.Color TV systems