Short answers, pulled from the story.
Kenjiro Takayanagi pioneered electronic television in Japan, beginning his research in 1924. In December 1926, he became the first person to reproduce a recognizable image on a cathode ray tube display, showing the Katakana character イ. By 1928, he had transmitted human faces in half-tones and reproduced moving images at 14 frames per second.
Regular television broadcasting in Japan began on the 1st of February 1953, when NHK started programming for approximately seven hours each evening. The first commercial television broadcaster, Nippon Television, went on air on the 28th of August 1953.
The Japanese television license fee ranges from 12,276 yen to 21,765 yen per year, with reduced rates for households in Okinawa Prefecture. The fee funds NHK. There is no legal authority to impose sanctions or fines for non-payment, meaning households that choose not to pay face no legal consequences.
Japan uses the ISDB-T standard for digital terrestrial television. Service began in December 2003 in the Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya metropolitan areas. Japan developed ISDB-T after finding that the older analog MUSE system was incompatible with digital standards, and the ISDB standard has since been adopted in other countries across Asia and South America.
Color television broadcasting in Japan began on the 10th of September 1960, using the NTSC standard. Japan was the third country in the world to introduce color television, after the United States and Cuba. Only 1,200 color sets were sold in that first year, but sales grew to over 6.4 million units by 1970.
The Tokyo Skytree is a 634-meter tower inaugurated in 2012 in the Sumida ward of Tokyo. It was built because the existing 333-meter Tokyo Tower proved insufficient to cover the Kantō region with a digital terrestrial television signal after Japan completed its analog-to-digital switchover.