Pushing a walker by a tv studio in central Tokyo earlier this week, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi slowly climbed three steps onto a sound stage with the assistance of an assistant who settled her right into a creamy beige Empire armchair.
A stylist eliminated the custom-made sturdy boots on her ft and slipped on a pair of high-heeled mules. A make-up artist brushed her cheeks and touched up her blazing purple lipstick. A hairdresser tamed just a few stray wisps from her trademark onion-shaped coiffure as one other assistant ran a lint curler over her embroidered black jacket. With that, Ms. Kuroyanagi, 90, was able to file the 12,193rd episode of her present.
As one among Japan’s best-known entertainers for seven a long time, Ms. Kuroyanagi has interviewed friends on her speak present, “Tetsuko’s Room,” since 1976, incomes a Guinness World Document final fall for most episodes hosted by the identical presenter. Generations of Japanese celebrities throughout movie, tv, music, theater and sports activities have visited Ms. Kuroyanagi’s sofa, together with American stars like Meryl Streep and Girl Gaga; Prince Philip of England; and Mikhail Gorbachev, the previous chief of the Soviet Union. Ms. Kuroyanagi stated Gorbachev stays one among her all-time favourite friends.
Ms. Kuroyanagi, who jokes that she desires to maintain going till she turns 100, is thought for her rapid-fire chatter and knack for drawing out friends on matters like courting, divorce and, now, more and more, dying. Whilst she works to woo a youthful technology — the Korean-Canadian actor and singer Ahn Hyo-seop, 28, appeared on the present this month — lots of her friends as of late communicate in regards to the illnesses of ageing and the demise of their business friends.
Having survived World Warfare II, she broke out as an early actor on Japanese tv after which carved out a distinct segment as a feel-good interviewer with a particular fashion that’s nonetheless immediately acknowledged virtually all over the place in Japan. By fashioning herself into a personality, relatively than merely being the one who interviewed the characters, she helped set up a style of Japanese performers often called “tarento” — a Japanized model of the English phrase “expertise” — who’re ubiquitous on tv right this moment.
“In some methods she actually is just like the embodiment of TV historical past” in Japan, stated Aaron Gerow, a professor of East Asian literature and movie at Yale College.
Ms. Kuroyanagi is distinguished above all by her longevity, however she was additionally a trailblazing lady in an overwhelmingly male setting.
When she began as a spread present host in 1972, if she requested a query, “I used to be advised I ought to simply hold my mouth shut,” she recalled in a virtually two-hour interview in a resort close to the studio the place she had taped three episodes earlier within the day.
“I do suppose Japan has modified from that period,” she stated.
She has championed the deaf and is a good-will ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations Youngsters’s Fund. But critics say that regardless of her pioneering profession, she has carried out little to advance ladies’s causes. “She is an icon for affluent, good-old” Japan, wrote Kaori Hayashi, a professor of media research on the College of Tokyo, in an e-mail message.
Within the interview, Ms. Kuroyanagi didn’t dwell on the indignities of being the only lady in lots of rooms. She stated that in her 30s and 40s, males within the tv business requested her on dates or proposed marriage — gives that she implied have been usually unwelcome — and that she handled feedback which may now be thought-about inappropriate as jokes.
In a society that she stated retained “feudalist” components in gender relations, she suggested ladies to bootstrap their method by their careers.
“Don’t ever say you’ll be able to’t do something as a result of you’re a lady,” she stated.
Though she stated she entered tv as a result of she needed to seem in youngsters’s programming to arrange for motherhood, she by no means married or had youngsters. “With a novel job, it’s higher to remain single,” she stated. “It’s extra snug.”
Her first memoir, about her childhood attending an uncommon progressive elementary faculty in Tokyo, Totto-chan: The Little Woman on the Window, printed in 1981, has bought greater than 25 million copies worldwide. Final fall, she printed a sequel recounting the cruel situations in Japan throughout World Warfare II, when some days all she needed to eat have been 15 roasted beans, and he or she and her mom cowered in a dugout to shelter from air raids over Tokyo.
She stated she was impressed to put in writing the sequel partly by the pictures she noticed popping out of Ukraine after the Russian invasion. Ms. Kuroyanagi plumbed her personal recollections of a wartime childhood, when her mom evacuated the household out of Tokyo to northern Japan.
“Despite the fact that I haven’t stated struggle is unhealthy,” she stated, “I would like individuals to grasp what it was like for a kid to expertise the struggle.”
Ms. Kuroyanagi maintains a childlike high quality herself. For the interview, she switched out of her signature onion hair bun, concealing her personal hair underneath an ash-blond Shirley Temple-style curly bob wig, secured with an infinite black velvet bow.
It’s all a part of a nonthreatening persona she has cultivated over the a long time. “She’s sort of cute and cute,” stated Kumiko Nemoto, a professor of administration within the College of Enterprise Administration at Senshu College in Tokyo, the place she focuses on gender points. “She doesn’t criticize something or carry up something political or say any unfavorable issues.”
Which may be why, Gorbachev apart, Ms. Kuroyanagi has averted interviews with politicians. “It’s too tough for them to essentially inform the reality,” she stated. “And I can’t make all of all of them look good.”
Though typically in comparison with Barbara Walters, the groundbreaking American newswoman, Ms. Kuroyanagi doesn’t push her interview topics too exhausting. Producers ask friends upfront what matters they wish to keep away from or promote, and Ms. Kuroyanagi tends to oblige.
In the course of the taping this week, her visitor was Kankuro Nakamura VI, a sixth-generation Kabuki actor whose father and grandfather have been additionally common guests on Ms. Kuroyanagi’s sofa. Mr. Nakamura appeared to anticipate some questions on his household earlier than they scrolled on to the teleprompter.
“What I put the very best precedence on is that I management the state of affairs with friends in order that the viewers won’t suppose the visitor is a bizarre or unhealthy individual,” Ms. Kuroyanagi stated. “If attainable I would like the viewers to comprehend, ‘Oh, this individual is kind of good.’”
When Mr. Gorbachev appeared on her present in 2001, Ms. Kuroyanagi averted politics. “It could have been a giant deal for him,” she stated. As an alternative, she requested him about his favourite poets, and he recited “The Sail,” by the Nineteenth-century romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov. “I stated I wanted that if I requested such a query of any Japanese politician, it could be nice if there was even one politician who might do this,” she stated.
As she has grown older, she has forthrightly confronted the challenges of her personal technology on the sound stage at TV Asahi, the house of her present for 49 years. Earlier than his dying in 2016, for instance, Ms. Kuroyanagi interviewed Rokusuke Ei, the lyricist of the tune “Sukiyaki.” He appeared in a wheelchair, clearly exhibiting signs of superior Parkinson’s illness. Ms. Kuroyanagi frankly mentioned his sickness with him.
“Outdated persons are undoubtedly inspired by her presence,” stated Takahiko Kageyama, a professor of media research at Doshisha Ladies’s Faculty of Liberal Arts in Kyoto.
Together with her speech noticeably slowed, Ms. Kuroyanagi stated she was motivated to maintain working to encourage older audiences. “To indicate that an individual can seem on TV till I’m 100 with a physique that’s OK and my thoughts nonetheless works,” she stated, “if I can present that, I believe that might be an fascinating experiment.”
Hisako Ueno and Kiuko Notoya contributed reporting from Tokyo.
