NHK and the Olympics
It's an absolutely beautiful autumn day, as if all the blue skies in the world had gathered over Tokyo." With these words, announcer Kitade Seigoro hailed Japan's first-ever live Olympic broadcast—the opening ceremony of the 1964 Games in Tokyo.

Tokyo Olympics

The Olympic Games had aroused nationwide attention in Japan since Berlin 1936, when people listened on radio and rooted for Japan's star swimmer with shouts of "Go, Maehata!" Olympic broadcasting had always been an important function of NHK, and it was the Tokyo Olympiad that brought this tradition into the television era.
NHK's coverage occupied more than 10 hours per day, most of it live. Hosting an international event was felt to confirm the great progress Japan had made in national reconstruction after the Second World War, and people were thrilled when Japanese athletes won gold medals in women's volleyball and men's gymnastics events. The audience share for the women's volleyball final scored a record 85%. For the first time, an entire marathon race was broadcast live, and henceforth an Olympics without TV seemed unimaginable.
Sapporo 1972 created a new interest among Japanese viewers—the Winter Olympics. More than 50% of Japanese households now had color televisions, and NHK overcame temperatures as low as minus 10 degrees Celsius to broadcast the entire event in color eight hours a day. Color TV also helped to popularize figure skating, and the 1972 success of Janet Lynn would later be emulated by the Japanese star Ito Midori. The 70-meter jumps achieved by Japan's dashing "Rising Sun Flyer" ski jumpers gave them a clean sweep of the medals and attracted enormous public interest in that sport, too.

Blanket coverage
NHK has broadcast the drama and passion of every Olympics, except the 1980 Games in Moscow, when exclusive rights were sold to a commercial company. At the 1972 Munich games, NHK broadcast a special program on the tragedy of the 14 Israelis killed by Palestinian guerrillas who broke into the athletes' village. The incident reminded everyone that the Olympics were not immune to political events and opinions.
The hours of coverage rose sharply with the introduction of satellite broadcasting (BS). The 1988 Games in Seoul provided a total of 497 hours, shared between the terrestrial General TV channel, satellite BS-1 channel, and Hi-Vision (HDTV). By the 2000 games in Sydney, the figure had reached 846 hours of truly comprehensive coverage.

The World Cup scores!
Japan's national soccer team made its debut on the global stage at the 1998 World Cup in France. NHK followed their progress closely on its news programs, and set up an exclusive live joint General TV and Hi-Vision feed to cover Japan's matches rather than using the shared international feed—the only national broadcaster at the Cup to do so. Japan's matches attracted an audience share of over 60%, and firmly established the World Cup's popularity in Japan.
NHK had been broadcasting the world's greatest soccer event since the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, and having followed Japan’s hard battles to qualify over the years, France '98 was also a much-awaited moment for the broadcaster.