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In mid-2016, the tranquillity of the FT’s Tokyo office was broken by the thunder of TV helicopters circling low over the Kasumigaseki district. Their cameras were fixed on the arrival at the Tokyo District Court of Kazuhiro Kiyohara — one of the greatest Japanese baseball players of all time, eight years into retirement and facing charges of illegal stimulant possession.
The court appearance was not, in any meaningful way, an event that needed to be covered from the air. But for many decades, gratuitous aerial coverage has been a staple show of strength from a Japanese TV industry bloated on cash, power and an outsized share of audience eyeballs in the world’s fastest-ageing nation.
Also true to form was the aftermath of the trial. The last that Japanese TV viewers saw of Kiyohara was his confession, conviction and subsequent suspended prison sentence. Like a long parade of celebrities sullied by low-level criminality or scandal, he became, in effect, cancelled. This was Japanese TV playing its cherished role of all-powerful gatekeeper to the country’s households and unchallengeable maker and breaker of stars.
But that omnipotence, as the supremos of Japanese TV are now discovering the hard way, is being systematically dismantled by social media. This has happened in other countries but Japanese TV seems uniquely stunned by an era when YouTube and other platforms give audiences and talent direct control over who does and does not disappear from the public sphere.
Figures produced by the state broadcaster, NHK, suggest that, in common with other countries, a fast-growing proportion of Japanese 18- to 34-year-olds do not watch any traditional TV during the week. Their viewing time, says Nobuyuki Okamura, a media expert at Musashi University, is increasingly ceded to TikTok, YouTube, Twitch and other online platforms, and the money has flowed accordingly.
The latest figures from the advertising giant Dentsu show that in 2019 Japan reached the critical inflection point where total expenditure on online advertising passed total expenditure on TV advertising for the first time. This trend-line is expected to have accelerated significantly since the Covid-19 pandemic.
So rather than vanishing from public view, as someone in a similar situation would surely have done in the past, Kiyohara has established an extraordinarily popular YouTube channel. Launched last December, Kiyochan Sports now has more than 320,000 subscribers — a viewer base that grew by more than 2,000 in the time it took to write this column. Many of the uploaded videos, in which he chats baseball, weight loss and other watchable stuff, have been viewed more than a million times.
The problem for Japanese TV executives is that Kiyohara is not alone, and that he and others are creating terrifying templates for independence. AÂ year ago, the famous comedian Hiroyuki Miyasako, ostracised by mainstream media following a paid performance to an organised crime gang, began his own YouTube channel and has amassed more than 1.35 million subscribers.
The danger for the TV companies is not only that their capacity to determine futures is in retreat but also that their once unrivalled power — as the primary place that talent can make a decent living — is eroding fast. Comedians and singers in particular have realised that TV no longer holds their fate so tightly in its hands. They can now potentially generate significant income from online channels with the kind of young audiences advertisers are desperate to target.
The TV channels, meanwhile, are locked in a vicious circle: the more feverishly they work to retain the support of corporate advertisers and sponsors for individual shows, the more conservative they are forced to become.
As Okamura puts it, Japanese TV has become increasingly chary about introducing new comedians and other performers, for fear that anything edgy or challenging will upset the sponsors. Blocked from the traditional route to Japanese audiences, upcoming comedians have been establishing dozens of new social media channels and making their living that way.
For years, Japanese entertainment has been controlled by an iron triangle connecting the TV companies, the advertising giants and those agencies with dominant control over the world of comedians, musicians and actors. Kiyohara’s banishment from the mainstream airwaves — and re-emergence online — has exposed just how flimsy technology has rendered that triangle.
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo correspondent
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