TV Asahi

• 1. Birth of a Broadcaster

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  TV Asahi began not as an entertainment network but as an act of cultural correction. In 1957, critic Soichi Oya had already declared Japanese television a medium that turned the country into "a nation of 100 million idiots." That charge was the spark. Japan's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications had issued frequency allocations on the 17th of February 1956, granting the Kanto region three broadcast licenses. One went to NHK Educational TV. The remaining two went to competitive bidding, drawing in film studios Toho and Toei Company, radio broadcasters Nippon Cultural Broadcasting and Nippon Broadcasting System, and an educational publishing group. The ministry eventually unified those competing bids into a single entity on the 4th of July 1957. That entity, at first called Tokyo Educational Television, held its first shareholders meeting on the 10th of October 1957 and rechristened itself Nippon Educational Television Co., Ltd., known by its initials as NET.

  NET moved fast to get on air. After rival Fuji Television announced a start date of the 1st of March 1959, NET advanced its own launch by a full month. Test transmissions began on Christmas Eve 1958. The broadcast license was approved on the 9th of January 1959, and test signals ran nightly after that. NET finally signed on at 9:55 a.m. Japan Standard Time on the 1st of February 1959, airing at least 6.5 hours of programming per day. By April that figure had extended to 10 hours.

  The site for NET's headquarters had been chosen with similar deliberateness. Six locations were considered: the Ochanomizu Kishi Memorial Gymnasium, land near Hotel Okura in Toranomon, a plot facing Aoyama Street in front of Jingumae, the site of the Fuji Television headquarters in Kawada Town, and two Toei properties in Roppongi. Toei ultimately selected a 9,100 square meter plot at the former Spanish embassy to Japan, the same Roppongi district that would define the station's identity for decades.

• 2. The Education Pretense

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  NET's broadcast license came with a serious obligation: at least 50% of airtime had to be educational, and at least 30% had to serve children's educational programming. That constraint would prove impossible to honor commercially. By July 1959, the network's average ratings had fallen below 5%, a number that made the educational mandate look like a slow financial drain.

  The response was creative rebranding. In 1960, NET began airing anime and foreign films, justifying them under the educational license by claiming they served instructional purposes. American western series Bonanza and The Virginian, both airing on rival networks, were labeled educational by NET's management on the grounds that they described the history of the United States, comparable to NET's own dramas set in Japan's samurai period. The logic was thin, but it held. NET changed its on-air identity in December 1960 from Nippon Educational Television to the shorter NET TV, and ratings climbed to around 10% after 1963. The station still ranked last among its rivals, but the gap was narrowing.

  One executive shaped those early international ambitions decisively. Kenichiro Matsuoka, born in America and fluent in English, joined NET's board and secured licenses for the American western series Laramie and Rawhide from the United States. Those acquisitions produced high ratings and gave NET its first competitive edge over NHK and Fuji TV. Matsuoka would later become an Executive Vice President and the eventual founder of Japan Cable Television. NET also made early broadcast history in November 1963 by joining forces with NHK General TV for the first live satellite telecast in Japanese television history.

• 3. Power Struggle and the Asahi Shift

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  Behind the cameras, NET's move toward entertainment programming triggered an open conflict within management. Hiroshi Ogawa, who came from Toei Company and served as NET's president, backed entertainment programming aggressively. Yoshio Akao, representing the educational publishing group Obunsha, saw the shift as a betrayal of the station's founding purpose and pushed back hard against what he called vulgar scheduling.

  In November 1964, Akao succeeded. Working with shareholders outside Toei and Nikkei, Inc., he forced Ogawa to resign from the presidency. Toei's hold on NET's direction began to loosen from that point forward, and The Asahi Shimbun stepped into the vacuum. The following year, Asahi Shimbun appointed Koshiji Miura, a former Deputy Minister of Political Affairs, to the role of station director.

  While management fought, the programming found its footing. NET's 1964 premiere of The Morning Show created a lasting template for news-talk programming on daytime Japanese television, prompting rival networks to follow with their own morning formats. A 1966 drama called Hyoten pulled a 42.7% rating in its finale, the kind of number that could reshape a network's identity. NET adjusted its target audience toward single and married women as a direct consequence. The station launched color broadcasts in April 1967 and had its entire schedule in color by 1969. One year later, on the 1st of April 1970, NET launched the All-Nippon News Network, becoming the country's fourth national network.

• 4. Tokusatsu and the Roppongi Era

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  In April 1971, one year after the All-Nippon News Network launched, Toei brought NET a program that would outlast every management dispute: the original Kamen Rider. The superhero series, along with Metal Hero Series and Super Sentai, broke a long-standing arrangement in Japanese television. Since 1958, TBS and Fuji Television had been the only networks to air tokusatsu productions, holding a duopoly through the Ultra Series franchise that had run for nearly half a decade. Kamen Rider changed that on arrival. TBS quickly recognized NET's tokusatsu programming as a competitive threat, and a three-way rivalry took hold.

  For Toei's staff, the success carried a specific meaning: it signaled a resurgence of their influence following Hiroshi Ogawa's forced resignation in 1964. The Super Sentai franchise traced its origins to a follow-up series, Himitsu Sentai Gorenger, another Toei production that debuted on the 1st of April 1975, the same month Kamen Rider transferred to rival TBS. Gorenger's success locked Super Sentai into the ANN network permanently, and the franchise has continued on what is now TV Asahi to this day.

  The regulatory environment caught up with NET's identity in November 1973. The Ministry of Posts revised how television broadcasters would operate, abolishing education-focused licensing entirely. NET and Tokyo Channel 12 simultaneously applied for and received general-purpose television station licenses. Both stations ended their educational programming in March 1974. Around the same time, The Nikkei transferred its stake in NET to The Asahi Shimbun, making the newspaper the network's largest shareholder.

• 5. Olympic Gamble and the Name Change

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  On the 1st of April 1977, NET TV changed its corporate name to TV Asahi, a move that formalized what the preceding years had made clear: The Asahi Shimbun now controlled the broadcaster in both name and practice. The station had also been broadcasting in stereo audio since the 17th of December 1978.

  The most unusual chapter in TV Asahi's early history involved the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Koshiji Miura had cultivated a relationship with Ivan Ivanovich, head of the Japanese Section of the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Through that connection, Miura met Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev directly. TV Asahi secured exclusive broadcasting rights for the Moscow Olympics, marking the first time a private Japanese television station had been exclusively granted Olympic broadcast rights. The deal was immediately controversial: rival broadcasters, including NHK, opposed it openly. The controversy deepened when Japan followed Western nations in boycotting the 1980 Summer Olympics. TV Asahi aired only the highest-profile Olympic events and absorbed significant revenue losses as a consequence.

  Meanwhile, the station was reshaping its physical presence. Its Roppongi headquarters had run out of space, and the surrounding residential neighborhood made expansion difficult. TV Asahi partnered with property developer Mori Building Company to redevelop the area, temporarily relocating to studios at Ark Hills while the new headquarters was planned. The Ark Broadcasting Center was completed in 1985. Local residents near Roppongi resisted the redevelopment, delaying the project. The old headquarters was eventually demolished in 2000.

• 6. Triple Crown and Corporate Reorganization

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  The 1985 launch of the evening news program News Station gave TV Asahi a durable audience at the 10 p.m. weekday slot. A strategic partnership with Turner-owned CNN and Capital Cities/ABC-owned ABC News strengthened its news credibility further. On the 22nd of November 1995, TV Asahi premiered The X-Files at 8 p.m., the network's first prime-time American series premiere since Knight Rider. The station's decision followed the series' breakout performance in Japan's home video market, where 200,000 cassettes had been sold well past the baseline threshold of 10,000 units. TV Asahi organized a convention in Tokyo that same month, featuring episode screenings, celebrity appearances, Japanese editions of X-Files books, and an X-Files Mystery Tour to the Canadian filming locations.

  After Iwate Asahi Television began broadcasting in 1996, the ANN network reached 26 affiliated stations, completing its national footprint. That same year, media investor Rupert Murdoch and Masayoshi Son moved to acquire a large stake in TV Asahi, threatening Asahi Shimbun's majority position. TV Asahi's president Toshitada Nakae traveled to the United States personally to meet Murdoch and request that he hold his shareholding steady. Asahi Shimbun subsequently bought out both Murdoch and Son's shares.

  TV Asahi listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on the 3rd of October 2000 and launched its satellite channel BS Asahi in December of the same year. On the 29th of September 2003, the company moved back to Roppongi Hills. Two days later, it renamed itself TV Asahi Corporation to mark the broadcaster's 45th anniversary. Ratings reached 7.5% in 2004, placing TV Asahi third among commercial broadcasters in the Kanto region after a 32-year gap. By 2005, the station ranked first in late-night ratings. In 2009, Hiroshi Hayakawa became president, the first to have served the broadcaster since its founding day. Between April and June 2012, TV Asahi achieved the Triple Crown in ratings for the first time: 12.3% in primetime, 12.7% in evenings, and 7.9% for the full broadcast day. On the 1st of April 2014, the broadcaster reorganized into a certified broadcasting holding company, TV Asahi Holdings, Inc., with a newly established TV Asahi Corporation taking over broadcast operations directly.

• 7. Branding and the Underworld Connection

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  TV Asahi's visual identity has been redesigned more than once, each version carrying its own cultural footprint. Upon becoming TV Asahi in 1977, the station adopted a red and green "10 mark" logo referencing its channel number. In October 1996, following the launch of Iwate Asahi Television and the completion of the ANN network, a new special logo was commissioned from Tim Garvin, a designer then known for his work on Hollywood films including Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven.

  The current branding, introduced in 2003, came from British design collective Tomato, working alongside TV Asahi's in-house department. Some Tomato members also perform as the electronic music group Underworld. The resulting visual system features computer-generated "sticks" on a white background that shift in color and movement in sync with accompanying music. The background music chosen for TV Asahi's sign-on and sign-off videos is Underworld's Born Slippy.NUXX and Rez, both from the 2003 versions. TV Asahi updated those videos again in 2008 with a revised animation and new music.

  From 1991 to 2001, TV Asahi was the only national Japanese network to use an English-language theme song, Join Us, across its startup and closedown sequences. Before that, from 1977 to 1987, the station used a Japanese-language song whose title translates roughly as Our Friend on Channel 10. The fonts in current use are Akzidenz Grotesk Bold for English text and Hiragino Kaku Gothic W8 for Japanese. The station's official abbreviation, EX, derives from its callsign JOEX and has been in use since the 1st of October 2003. TV Asahi's mascot, Go-chan, designed by Sanrio, launched on the 10th of May 2011 and now appears in the station's opening sign-on identification.