| Audience participation shows are a valuable and effective means of connecting NHK with its viewers. The audience and performers together create a lively program of entertainment that expresses the strong community spirit of the region from which it is broadcast. |
NHK Amateur Singing Contes: our village, our town, our country |
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| Launched on postwar
radio The NHK Amateur Singing Contest was first broadcast on radio on January 19, 1946. It soon caught on, and the first national contest was held on March 23, 1948. There were three categories: solo, popular song and folksong. When TV broadcasts began in 1953, the program went out on both radio and television simultaneously. The MC was the popular announcer Miyata Teru, while stars whose careers were launched by the program have included the singers Kitajima Saburo, Shimakura Chiyoko and Misora Hibari, actors Satomi Kotaro and Baisho Chieko, comedian Maki Shinji, and composer Endo Minoru. In 1970, the NHK Amateur Singing Contest adopted a new format that continues to this day. Each week, 25 local groups or soloists compete to win the jury's seal of approval, signaled by a peal of bells. The jury selects a champion of the week. Two guest professionals are also invited onto the show and select the most enthusiastic singer from among all the participants. Announcer Kaneko Tatsuo was the new MC, and a year-end NHK Amateur Singing Championship Contest was also inaugurated to select the grand champion from all the weekly winners during the year. The program has always been transmitted live from towns and villages up and down the country. Boosted even further by the karaoke boom of the 80's, more than 3,000 applications are received each week. Going global In 1995, the NHK Amateur Singing Contest celebrated its 50th anniversary with a special program on October 28 called 50 Years of Smiles and Tears: The Amateur Singing Contest. The latest in a string of announcers, the present host Miyakawa Yasuo took over from Yoshikawa Seiichi. In 1984, the program was shown on satellite TV for the first time, and in 1996 in Hi-Vision (HDTV). In 1998, the NHK Amateur Singing Contest went abroad for the first time and was staged in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to commemorate the 90th anniversary of emigration from Japan to Brazil. It was next broadcast from Lima, Peru in 1999, then live from Hawaii in 2000, Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2001, and in 2002, San Francisco in the United States and Beijing, China. |
Audience participation The live variety stage-show format was pioneered by The Comic Trio, which was launched in November 1955 on radio, and broadcast simultaneously on TV the following year. From April 1960, the show was broadcast on television alone. The writer Nawa Seiro says, "I wrote it as a variety show, performed by actors but taking in elements of rakugo (comic monologues) and manzai (stand-up comic dialogue)." Viewers and live audiences were delighted by the bumbling antics of performers like Edoya Nekohachi, Ichiryusai Teiho, Sanyutei Kokinba, as their herculean efforts only served to lead them from one disaster to the next. This show later became Comedy On-Stage, which began in 1972 and ran for a decade until April 1982. The show was a great hit. The Tenpuku Trio (Minami Shinsuke, Ito Shiro, and Totsuka Mutsuo), served as hosts, providing clever comedy and also glimpses of the everyday faces of celebrities in the "Minus Points for Daddy" corner. The Hometown Song Festival began in 1966 and was MC'd by the announcer Miyata Teru. It was a live broadcast from various parts of Japan and featured folk songs and dances, traditional events, and local customs introduced by regional performers and guest singers. Each time, the program opened with Miyata Teru's greeting of "Evening, all!" delivered in a rustic style of Japanese. The show remained a hit for eight years. Since then, the tradition of audience participation programs has been carried on by Hometown Concert, Theater Comes to Town (Umezawa Theater Company, Yoshi Ikuzo and Maekawa Kiyoshi performing entertaining material based on local themes) and Hometown Theater (Umezawa Theater Company and Maekawa Kiyoshi performing comic routines interspersed with songs requested by viewers). As of 2002, NHK was showing a total of 1,222 audience participation programs a year. About 16 million people have taken part in these programs and related events. |
 NHK Amateur Singing Contest |
 Hometown Theater |
 Comedy On-Stage |
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