Indeed, NHK, as part of its core mission, aims to keep viewers levelheaded.
“We see it as our social role to prevent further damages,” said Tamaki Imai, NHK’s executive managing director.
This makes NHK, at once, the best place to follow a disaster and the strangest. Its restrained reaction to all things harrowing and life-threatening is one of those textbook Japanese paradoxes, and in recent weeks Japan has responded to its crisis much in the manner that NHK has presented it.
On March 11, when a tumble of black water submerged buildings and lives, an NHK chopper beamed the real-time footage — a sensational horror, under-sensationalized.
“We are showing you the current situation,” one of the anchors said.
And then: “We can see how houses are being pushed away by the tsunami.”
And then: “Houses, buildings are being washed away. Gulping down farms as well. We can see buildings and cars. Black waves gulping down buildings and farms.”
And then, repeating: “This is the current situation at the mouth of the Natori River in Sendai City.”
We brave our disasters with our televisions, and in Japan, NHK is the preeminent source. It reaches 50 million households in this island nation, where a majority still has 10 channels or fewer. “If you rolled ABC, NBC and CBS News together you’d have something equivalent to the place of NHK in Japanese media,” said Ellis Krauss, a professor at the University of California at San Diego who has written several books about Japan’s broadcast politics.
For those accustomed to the breathless coverage of Western cable news, NHK can feel almost pedantic — it has the resources of the BBC but the quirks of a middle-school science teacher. In-studio analysts hold long talks about microsieverts. A cardboard model of a nuclear reactor is kept behind the anchor desk, available as a prop to illustrate the malfunctions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
For many viewers, the cardboard reactor is far more recognizable than the on-air personality talking about it. NHK has no star personalities, and in fact, it doesn’t want them. During disaster coverage, it rotates its anchors off camera every hour, as if to ensure their namelessness. They are paid and treated equally, one executive said.
Long before this 9.0-magnitude earthquake hit Japan, NHK had spent lots of time planning how to cover a crisis. It set up 460 remote cameras across the country, allowing for immediate footage of any disaster site. It integrated an emergency warning system that could warn of a quake — preempting coverage — seconds before a tremor hit. It mandated that a certain number of anchors live within five kilometers of the studio, so they could run to work if downtown Tokyo were crippled by a quake. Every night after the final newscast, NHK’s Tokyo bureau held a mock disaster drill, with backroom workers cuing up the meteorological warnings and on-air anchors barking them out. They held a similar drill every night at the Osaka bureau, just in case the folks in Tokyo became trapped or unreachable.
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