My Top Pick for 'Nichiten'

For about a month now, I've been hooked on the TBS Radio show 'Shinichiro Azumi's Sunday Heaven' . It's a live, two-hour broadcast that starts every Sunday at 10:00 AM. It's a long-running program that has been on the air for 20 years, primarily broadcast in Tokyo and the Kanto region.

Since I have lived in Okayama for a long time, I had no idea this radio show existed. Around this summer, a manga editor living in Tokyo told me,
'If you like surreal humor, I'm sure you'll like it too, Nekono-san.'
So, I decided to give it a try and started by listening to the 20-minute short version on Podcast.

I was drawing manga while listening to this gentle program that starts with Tokyo weather and traffic reports, thinking to myself that it had nothing to do with Okayama, but once they started introducing listener letters based on that day's theme, Announcer Azumi's energy level would really shoot up.

After reading letters sent in about common radio show themes like 'Embarrassing Memories' or 'Things I Treasure,' Announcer Azumi would share his own experiences, and these stories are usually extraordinary.

Like the story of when he was a child and pretended to be the taxi driver he admired, picking up passengers on a vast riverbed, playing both roles by saying, 'Driver, hurry to the tire storage area!' 'Certainly!' while pedaling at full speed.

Or the story of how, to encourage himself after failing to act well at his coming-of-age ceremony, he attended a second ceremony at a different venue, carefully raised a small cactus he received as a celebratory gift, entrusted it to his parents' house, and years later, when his mother called to tell him, 'By the way, it bloomed the other day,' he got angry and asked, 'Why didn't you tell me when it actually bloomed!'

The stories just keep coming. It's a show that has been running for 20 years, and there's still no sign of it hitting a ceiling.

A 20-minute short version just isn't enough. I got greedy and wanted to hear the full two-hour broadcast! When I looked it up, I found the official YouTube channel. Aha! I started listening with a beaming face and quickly became a heavy listener.

This channel contains 'Masterpiece Selections' chosen from the past 20 years of broadcasts. If you don't have the time to listen to the full episodes, you can still enjoy it enough by just picking and listening to the masterpiece selections.

Since I'm a newcomer and haven't covered all the broadcasts, I'm not qualified to proudly declare things like 'This is the Nichiten Top 5!' (Nichiten is short for 'Sunday Heaven'), but from what I've heard so far, I'll introduce three videos below that might provide some kind of vitality for you.

Announcer Azumi is very good at imitating unique vocalizations and rhythms, such as the chanting of Buddhist monks. In this video, he performs an imitation of a Shinto priest's prayer.

'Specific Prayer'

An episode from 2010 when Announcer Azumi went to a shrine with a friend and had a prayer for matchmaking performed. It seems Azumi-san was having bad luck with women at the time, and wanting to receive a good match, he wrote down a specific request before the prayer started, which the priest read out loud exactly as written in front of several other worshippers.

His vocal imitation of the prayer at this time is truly excellent. The precision was so high that I felt like I was visiting a shrine while in my own room.

'The Man with a Tight Mouth'

The 'man with a tight mouth' here refers to a listener. Nichiten often does giveaway projects, but this time Announcer Azumi had certain circumstances and recruited applicants by saying, 'I will only give this to someone who can promise never to speak of it to anyone. I will give it secretly only to those who can keep that promise.' He called a listener he chose from many applicants, and it's a quite thrilling segment where he tries to determine if the person is truly tight-lipped.

As you listen to many of the letters sent in, you realize that there are many experts among the long-time Nichiten listeners, and to put it bluntly, many are people with a dead-serious sense of playfulness. It's an episode where you can enjoy the nail-biting battle between such high-level listeners and Azumi-san.

The last one I'll introduce is the episode that aired just last Sunday. In other words, it's too new to be in the archives and isn't in the 'Masterpiece Selections' yet. However, because it covered a valuable topic that I can guarantee will definitely be included someday, I'm posting the regular full version here.

You can listen from the beginning, and I actually recommend that, but for those who don't have the time, I've excerpted the relevant parts,

around 2:00 to 10:00.

It all started with a listener's letter sent in for the theme 'My Misconception.' The person had believed for many years that the 'woo—' siren sound that plays at the start of high school baseball games at Koshien was actually a voice made by the stadium announcer herself.

So, Announcer Azumi says, 'Is it something like this?' and does an impression of the voice just by feel. He performed it the previous week as well, but it seems he practiced after that, and thanks to that effort, the reproduction quality was even higher this week.

Furthermore, after performing it himself, he called for recorded voices from listeners who thought they could do better.

1:22:00~

You can hear the 'human siren sounds' from two listeners. The first person has a 'whiskey-burnt voice', and the other is a 'professional vocalist who is 10 months pregnant and finds it difficult to hold breath in her lungs' professional vocalist.' I suspect the staff who chose these two from the mountain of audio data they likely received are quite the characters themselves.

That concludes the introduction of these three rather eccentric segments.

Mr. Azumi calls people who intentionally listen to the program on the radio on days when Nichiten overlaps with major events like the Tokyo Marathon or Olympic broadcasts 'true listeners'. Next, he calls those who listen to the live broadcast 'regular listeners,' and those who listen later via streams like YouTube are treated as irregular.

However, many people who enjoy Nichiten in rural areas or overseas seem happy to comment on YouTube, saying, 'I am an irregular listener!'. I don't comment myself, but I feel the same way they do.

Perhaps because I don't watch TV, I have no interest in a moving Announcer Azumi. I spend my days drawing manga while listening only to his voice as he does whatever he wants at his old stomping grounds, sometimes dropping my pen in shock. Announcer Nakazawa, who has served as his assistant for 20 years, provides the perfect accompaniment with her exquisite interjections and laughter as she deals with Mr. Azumi, who constantly brings up topics that are difficult to handle on a live broadcast.

It's also a pleasure to have such unique guests every week, such as a researcher who discovered that a whale sinking to the ocean floor after living out its life becomes a once-in-a-few-decades feast for deep-sea fish, or a historian who enthusiastically talks about how a daimyo riding in a palanquin during the Edo period would relieve themselves.

I hope Nichiten, which I recommend to subculture lovers, continues for a long time to come.

Lastly, although I don't meet the requirements for participating in the project at all, since I was kindly invited, I will participate in Chainner-san's 'Let's Expose Our YouTube History 2024' in a festive mood.

I should have introduced a wide variety of videos, but since I am currently subsisting entirely on Nichiten, I apologize for this very biased selection.