NHK – THE LONG COUNTDOWN

NHK Reaching Out to Teenagers with Angela Aki’s Tegami

September 28, 2008 Nick RamsayJapan

Life for a Japanese teenager is supposedly harder than for anyone else. The pressure to study hard has driven many people over the edge, as demonstrated a couple of years ago when there were a spate of suicides among junior high school students in Japan. The Japan broadcasting corporation, NHK, has an educational channel filled with children’s programming every evening. Currently they are playing a song by Angela Aki which […]

NHK English Characters Worse than Nara Mascot?

June 9, 2008 Nick RamsayESL

We were all highly critical of the “freaky looking deer-horned Buddha” mascot that was chosen to represent the Nara Heijo-kyo anniversary, and rightly so, but I fear that even he was more appealing than the two characters that front NHK’s “Eigo de Asobo” children’s TV show. Meet Kebo and Motch Let me introduce these ambassadors of the English language… This picture from the cover of an NHK CD actually shows […]