NHK: Does Japan’s powerful public service broadcaster serve the public?

This is the first in a multi-part series exploring Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK, and its increasing inability to avoid political interference and inform the Japanese public about sensitive topics.

On Aug. 15, 2025, NHK aired a special program to mark the 80^th anniversary of Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II. The program, which was titled, "太平洋戦争最終回: 忘られた悲しみ" (The Pacific War: Final Episode – The Forgotten Sorrow), told viewers that 3.1 million Japanese people died in the conflict. It had not a word to say about how many non-Japanese people were killed – an estimated 3 million – 10 million Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans and others. It might plausibly be argued that Japan’s most powerful broadcaster should be less parochial about such a vital and sensitive issue.  

NHK’s portrayal of Japan as a victim of the Pacific War rather than an aggressor is not an anomaly. According to an analysis by Córdoba (2019), 88% of Japanese represented in dozens of television programs on Japanese TV over four decades were victims. This trend is becoming more pronounced as relations between China, the biggest victim of the war and Japan worsen. The number of TV documentaries in Japan dealing with the war (usually broadcast in August) has declined steadily since the 1990s. Programs that show the Japanese Imperial Army perpetrating war crimes fell from 26 in the 1990s to almost zero today. 

Government mouthpiece

NHK is a complex organism. As one author argues, “it tends to report on established facts and avoid controversial issues or unresolved value debates,” partly a way to dodge accusations of bias, which may affect its parliamentary-approved budget. But it has also built a reputation over decades for accurate news coverage and documentaries that challenge official narratives, especially about the war. In August 2017, it won rare praise from China for broadcasting a documentary about Unit 731, an infamous Japanese germ warfare unit that operated Imperial Japan’s occupation of northeast China from 1935 to 1945. 

NHK competes only with CCTV, China’s state-owned broadcaster, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and German ARD/ZDF for power and influence. It employs more than 10,000 people, runs two terrestrial television stations, two satellite stations, three radio stations and an international broadcasting arm that reaches about 150 countries and regions. It is widely trusted. With an operating budget of about 643 billion yen, NHK is in the unique position of being able to produce high-quality and even provocative journalism free – in its own words – from influence “by the government and private organizations.”

NHK is often compared to the BBC for good reason. Both have enormous, publicly funded budgets (through license fees) and both are compared favorably with the commercially driven content served up by private networks. NHK operates an international service – NHK World – so both have privileged roles as the authentic “voice” of their countries of origin. Both (as set out in article 7 of Japan’s broadcasting law) are required to “contribute to the public good.” But there is another similarity: The BBC and NHK are expected to maintain political impartiality. Promoting political agendas or mouthing state propaganda should be left to the newspapers and weekly magazines. 

Anchors being removed

In recent years, however, NHK has been accused of being simply a mouthpiece for the government and for the powerful. In late 2020, the weekly media noted the removal of Yoshio Arima from his role as anchor of NHK’s flagship evening news program News Watch. During a live interview in October 2020, Arima had asked then Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to explain why he had blocked the appointment of six scholars as advisors on government policy, reportedly as payback for their criticism of his predecessor, Shinzo Abe. Arima was quickly replaced. 

In 2014, Hiroko Kuniya, who had for two decades anchored NHK’s investigative program, “Close-up Gendai,” was also removed following an uncomfortable encounter with Suga. The popular weekly press then, too, blamed Kuniya’s downfall on an interview during which she asked Suga, who was then chief cabinet secretary, an impromptu question on the possibility that new security legislation might mean Japan becoming embroiled in other countries’ wars. Arima’s predecessor, Kensuke Okoshi, was also allegedly ousted after a clash with a member of the Abe government.

At NHK, it is typically asserted that such anchors are not removed, they are simply coming to the end of their terms and being transferred. One of the advantages of this rotating system is that it allows people to be moved out of sensitive positions if they run into trouble, and managers can plausibly say “their time was up.” Real opinionated troublemakers (of the kind that fill the American airwaves, for example) never get on the air and can be quickly changed if they get above their station. 

Kuniya’s show had been on air for two decades and was due a revamp. Insiders say she was on a high wage and protected by older managers. The spat with Suga “was a good occasion for those who wanted to oust her,” said one former NHK anchor. It is notable, however, that when her time came, she appears to have been guilty of little more than publicly holding politicians to account – surely top of any journalist’s job description. 

Threat against broadcasters

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic in Japan in 2020-22, NHK was again accused of being a state mouthpiece. Until the announcement that Japan was postponing the Olympics in March 2020, little news time was allocated to the impact of the domestic virus on Tokyo. Once the announcement was made, NHK News 7 dramatically increased its coverage, according to one careful study. In early 2021, NHK reportedly cancelled a studio discussion on the Olympics, infuriating staff at the corporation.

The controversy peaked in 2016 when then communications minister (now prime minister) Takaichi Sanae, threatened to close television stations that flouted rules on impartiality. Those of us who criticized this overreach were told to “go back to China.” Yet, in 2023, internal documents from the telecommunications ministry seemed to support the arguments of Takaichi’s critics. The documents purported to record attempts by top Abe aide, Yosuke Isozaki, to cajole ministry bureaucrats into changing their interpretation of the Broadcast Law in 2014-2015.

The law, passed in 1950, reflected America’s newly minted “fairness doctrine,” which demanded that broadcast companies be politically impartial – or lose their right to broadcast. The scrapping of the US doctrine in 1987 has since been blamed for opening up the partisan media wars that have poisoned American politics.

Isozaki reportedly bullied bureaucrats like a “loony yakuza thug,” according to one source, in his efforts to get them to agree that the law could be applied to a single ‘biased’ TV program and not just (as had been interpreted for 64 years) on the totality of a broadcaster’s programming. Isozaki was jolted into action after watching Kishii and other commentators on TBS’s current affairs show “Sunday Morning” in November 2024 criticize Abe ahead of a general election the following month. The entire segment was biased, Isozaki tweeted at the time, because it was not leavened by comments from a single Abe supporter.

Government intervention

In the same month, Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) sent a letter to ‘Hōdō Station' demanding "fair and neutral programming” of the government and Abenomics, the economic creed that Abe launched after he took office in late 2012. These interventions, carrying Abe’s implied imprimatur, threw bureaucrats into a panic as they tried to devise an interpretation of the law that would satisfy Isozaki. This was the context in which Takaichi asserted that the government was legally entitled to order TV stations and networks to be shut down if they continued to broadcast ‘politically biased’ programs, as stipulated under the Broadcast Law. “I don’t think I would resort to such measures myself. But there is no guarantee that future internal affairs ministers won’t,” she said. 

Needless to say, the discussions that proceeded this all took place behind closed doors and without public oversight, despite their alarming implications. As the Asahi Shimbun points out, revising the Broadcast Law to suggest that individual programs might be suspect would be “extremely dangerous for democracy” because nervous producers would begin editing content to keep out of harm’s way – a recipe for more self-censorship.

Abe and other LDP politicians had for years bemoaned bastions of ‘leftist’ journalism, particularly in The Asahi Shimbun and NHK, and blamed the press corps for contributing to the downfall of Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, in 1960, and the erosion of LDP power in the 1990s. In recent years, the media has been taken to task for its supposed ‘anti-Japanese’ tendencies: One of Abe’s earliest political rows was in 2001 when, as deputy chief cabinet secretary, he met with senior producers from NHK to discuss an upcoming documentary on Japan’s war crimes. The documentary was subsequently eviscerated.