Adventures with Kazutaka Shiozaki, a car painter in Nakashibetsu

NHK Hokkaido was hesitant to adopt a "project brought in" by a person active in the local community. The adventure, called "Local Friends," attracted a group of friends and accelerated. The group included a writer, a Buddhist monk, and an auto-painting company employee. An unprecedented program production has begun.

Hello, I am Ryo Osumi, director of NHK.
In this issue, I would like to introduce a friend of mine who has quietly and drastically changed the way TV stations create programs. He came to us with the idea of introducing "small voices" living in the community, and he actually accomplished it. Local Friends Staying in Hokkaido" and "Local Friends News" are aired on NHK Hokkaido's evening news program, "Hot News Hokkaido. Here is a behind-the-scenes look at the production of this unusual program.
"Local Friends," a project brought to NHK by Okhotsk-born entrepreneur Kazuya Saokozaki, was broadcast as an evening news program in January 2020, followed by a late-night program in March 2020 on NHK General and Hokkaido area.

The program was created not by a TV station, but by local people.
We on the media side were the most excited about this. The opening of the late-night version really shows this. The first Local Friends was Mr. Takuro Nakanishi (President, General Incorporated Association Dot Doto), who was introduced to us by Mr. Sakaozuya.
Mr. Nakanishi is a person with horsepower who has privately published magazines. His network of contacts extends over the entire Doto area (in other words, his territory covers an area the size of Kyushu). Mr. Nakanishi, who has endless vitality running around a vast area on a daily basis, introduced us to some of his friends in the East Hokkaido area.

The friends who turned cow pee into deodorant
The friends who won the competition for the Olympic medal case
A fellow who bought a quick freezer to produce fisherman-produced marine products.

The program took us around to these friends who are active in the East of Hokkaido and gave us a sense of their unfathomable energy.
The pilot program was extremely well received, and NHK asked viewers to give their impressions and evaluations in the form of "monitor reports. The feedback was "nice! The program was also highly rated by the influential SAKANOIDS and the local Friends.

In addition, the fact that the program was produced by the influential SANKYO Kazuya and NAKANISHI Takuro gave a big boost to the program, as did the excitement on SNS. Thus, we decided to make a "series" of six 15-minute programs in the new fiscal year.

Before airing the late-night version in March, we at NHK Hokkaido took a "gamble. We decided to make a "bet" that we would broadcast the late-night program in March, and that was to "publicly recruit" local Friends. We put a large QR code at the end of the program and called out to the public as follows. Nakashibetsu Town in East Hokkaido, where dairy farming is thriving.
Someone in this town has been watching "Local Friends Wanted. He is Kazutaka Shiozaki, a 37-year-old company employee who works as an automobile painter.

Mr. Shiozaki sent me a message saying that he wanted to join Local Friends, so I called him back.

He said, "Thank you for your application. By the way, Mr. Shiozaki, are you involved in any local activities?"
What I'm doing now is a chatting lounge.
Chatting?
We all get together at the guesthouse and chat.
Do you feel like you would like to introduce that on the show?
Yes.

It seems that he applied for the program because he wanted to introduce the local chit-chat in the program.

Are there any other interesting people in the community around you, Mr. Shiozaki?
Mr. Shiozaki: "Yes, Mr. Sato. His family runs a restaurant called Sato-san's Gyoza.
Yes.
The mother used to be a part-time housewife, but she opened the restaurant because her gyoza was delicious. But she wasn't very good at making flyers..."

Are there any more flashy stories?
I swallowed my words and listened to the story.

Although we had made an open call for applications, I was already getting worried about whether the program would be possible with this kind of approach.

What we gathered was a unique group of applicants.
In addition to Mr. Shiozaki, a company employee who wanted to introduce chitchat, there were three others: a freelance writer from Hakodate and a monk from Date City.

Since they live far from Sapporo, we decided to hold our meeting online. This was at a time when the new coronavirus was still in its infancy and online meetings were rare.

Hakodate is often thought of as a tourist town, but I think it can be seen as a cultural town,"
Seira Suzuki, a freelance writer from Hakodate, said, "The owner of a coffee shop has a coffee shop.
The owner of a coffee shop has a wonderful collection of used books that I would like to show you..." "There is a university student who renovated an old private house that is over 100 years old and started a communal living..." "One after another, I heard information I had never heard before. One after another, information I had never heard before came out.

Recently, they started building a temple in a VR space."
Masahiro Okuda, a monk from Date City, started the strange story.
He has been holding Buddhist memorial services using an online conferencing system with Corona countermeasures and envisions a temple using virtual reality technology, among other unusual activities.

No~ it was interesting."
After our online meeting with the three of them, our production team's impression was simply that it was a lot of fun.
People from different areas, with different jobs, and of different ages gathered together and came up with the idea of what kind of TV program they would create. It was so much fun, it even felt like a healing experience.
I was looking forward to the next meeting.

However, a big problem loomed.
"I am no longer able to make travel programs"
I opened up to the three members of Local Friends at our second online meeting on April 14, 2020.
The reason is the spread of the new coronavirus. It was because we, as TV crew members, were no longer able to go on location.

Unfortunately, we have decided to stop producing our travel program, #Local Friends Meeting Travel, and replace it with a section where Local Friends introduce how they spend their time at home."

I was disheartened. It seemed that if the director of the TV station could no longer go on location, there was little he could do. I decided to change the title to "Local Friends Home Time," hoping to at least keep the corner going, and I was working on laying the groundwork within the station.

As the atmosphere was dominated by a sense of "we have no choice," Takuro Nakanishi, the first Local Friends member, opened his mouth.
Can't we really do a travel program?"
'I think it would be difficult since we can't go on location by any means.
He continued, "It's times like this that I think it would be good to have some information that would energize the local community."

Local Friends are in a "yes, yes" mood.
As a result, the Local Friends Home Time section was rejected, and it was decided to continue the travel program somehow.
But how?
It's a travel show, but neither the announcer, who is a traveler, nor the location crew can go there.
If that's the case, how can we get the locals to take selfies?
Selfie, selfie, selfie. Come to think of it, there were some college students who seemed to be in good spirits...

With this in mind, I decided to contact the university students at the old private house share house that Seira Suzuki, a writer in Hakodate, had told me about.

I'd like to introduce your activities."
The university student representing the share house said, "Oh, I'm so glad to hear that.
I can't go on location. So I wanted you to take a selfie.
"That's fine!
They decided to make a pseudo travel program using two of their own smartphones (one for live broadcasting and the other for recording).
If you ask them, they often live-stream on social networking sites, etc., and they don't seem to mind filming and being filmed by themselves.

Ten days after the meeting, a section called "Local Friends Meeting Travel, Online Edition" started in the evening news. In the midst of news programs with heavy content, "Online Journey," in which local people use their smartphones to introduce their communities, seemed bright and like a ray of hope.

Both Seira Suzuki, who played the role of Local Friends, and the university students at the share house were delighted.

Moreover. The broadcast received a response from the media industry as well.
We were contacted by a production team from a commercial broadcaster, and even the director of NHK's nationally broadcast information program "Asa Ichi" contacted us to say that they had used it as a reference for a new corner.

It was a selfie program that we created out of desperation in response to a request from local residents, but it turned out to be a successful experience, showing that innovation can come from such a place.
In this way, regular online meetings between Local Friends and the production team became a common practice.

<Friends Meetings>
▼Online meetings are held once every two weeks.
Open to anyone involved in the project
Open discussion about project policies

What has changed since we started having these meetings is that we no longer hold "planning meetings" within NHK's production team.
Because even if something is decided within NHK, it can be overturned by the opinions of local Friends (something we learned during our online journey), we decided to make decisions together with local Friends from the beginning.

By opening up the planning meetings in this way, we were able to create a series of unique ideas that were not bound by industry conventions.
One such idea is our program policy of actively introducing people who are not yet known to the public. One day, one of our local friends said to us.
One day, one of our local friends said to me, "I feel like the same people are on TV nowadays.
It's true that when a scandal happens, it's the same on every channel, but that doesn't make sense to have more than one channel.

It is true that this is not a new phenomenon, but it is quite common to see the sensationalism of politicians and celebrities as the sole topic of discussion. Furthermore, we were told that this structure is the same for programs that feature the local community.

He said, "When the TV stations contact the tourism associations and town halls, they end up having to appear on all the same people. The people in the community think, "Oh, that person again."
Once a person appears on TV and becomes famous, other channels follow that person.
Local Friends wants to introduce people who have never been on TV before.

In this way, the program policy of focusing on "people who are not well known but lead affluent lives," rather than on "prominent local figures," was established.
It's good, this kind of radicalization.
If that is what people in the community want, we TV people will make something that meets their wishes.
We would ask the viewers about it, and if it didn't work, we would take down the sign.
The spirit of experimentation accelerated.
Mr. Shiozaki of Nakashibetsu was the most frequent attendee of the Friends Meeting and slowly changed the way he thought about program creation.
He wanted to introduce "local chatter" and "Mr. Sato's gyoza.

As I was exposed to Mr. Shiozaki's liberal thinking over and over again, before I knew it, I even came to believe that "a local broadcaster is only as good as the small voices of the community it serves. Mr. Shiozaki and others in the community who gathered together decided on a policy of "not drawing a line between people who are active in the community," which has virtually eliminated the need for NHK to select applicants for the Local Friends program.

When someone contacts us and says, "I want to do Local Friends," we say,
When I was contacted by people who wanted to become Local Friends, they were suspicious of my explanation, saying, "We don't have any fixed criteria or selection process for Local Friends, and we operate in such a way that everyone is a Local Friend.

In this way, a wide variety of Local Friends gather together.
Among them are "ordinary housewives. That's right, this project will accelerate its experimental nature to the point where housewives who are not particularly involved in local activities will produce a TV program. But that is still some way off.

And "young people who have just moved to the area" will also serve as Local Friends.
This is also a great story. It is a common practice that a local guide is someone who has lived in the area for many years, but that common practice is becoming a thing of the past.

If the planning meetings had been conducted only by media people, we would have never been able to enter this realm. The adventure continues in the next issue.
Illustration by Nao Sakamoto

＜Click here to see past articles in this series.
Adventures of Local and Media
(1) Using Television to Build Local Communities: Introduction
( 2) A proposal that challenged NHK's resolve