Pushing a walker via 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 toes and slipped on a pair of high-heeled mules. A make-up artist brushed her cheeks and touched up her blazing pink lipstick. A hairdresser tamed a number of 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 report the 12,193rd episode of her present.
As certainly one of Japan’s best-known entertainers for seven many years, Ms. Kuroyanagi has interviewed visitors on her discuss present, “Tetsuko’s Room,” since 1976, incomes a Guinness World Document final fall for most episodes hosted by the same 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 certainly one of her all-time favourite visitors.
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 visitors on matters like relationship, divorce and, now, more and more, demise. At the same time as she works to woo a youthful era — the Korean-Canadian actor and singer Ahn Hyo-seop, 28, appeared on the present this month — a lot of her visitors today communicate in regards to the illnesses of getting older and the demise of their trade friends.
Having survived World Struggle 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 type that’s nonetheless immediately acknowledged nearly all over the place in Japan. By fashioning herself into a personality, quite 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 at this time.
“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 surroundings.
When she began as a spread present host in 1972, if she requested a query, “I used to be informed I ought to simply hold my mouth shut,” she recalled in an almost two-hour interview in a resort close to the studio the place she had taped three episodes earlier within the day.
“I do assume 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 performed 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 real lady in lots of rooms. She stated that in her 30s and 40s, males within the tv trade requested her on dates or proposed marriage — provides 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 manner via their careers.
“Don’t ever say you may’t do something as a result of you’re a lady,” she stated.
Though she stated she entered tv as a result of she wished to look in youngsters’s programming to organize for motherhood, she by no means married or had youngsters. “With a singular job, it’s higher to remain single,” she stated. “It’s extra snug.”
Her first memoir, about her childhood attending an uncommon progressive elementary college in Tokyo, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, revealed in 1981, has offered greater than 25 million copies worldwide. Final fall, she published a sequel recounting the cruel situations in Japan throughout World Struggle II, when some days all she needed to eat have been 15 roasted beans, and she or he 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 partially by the photographs she noticed popping out of Ukraine after the Russian invasion. Ms. Kuroyanagi plumbed her personal reminiscences of a wartime childhood, when her mom evacuated the household out of Tokyo to northern Japan.
“Although I haven’t stated battle is dangerous,” she stated, “I need individuals to know what it was like for a kid to expertise the battle.”
Ms. Kuroyanagi maintains a childlike high quality herself. For the interview, she switched out of her signature onion hair bun, concealing her personal hair beneath 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 many years. “She’s form of lovable 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 deliver up something political or say any detrimental issues.”
Which may be why, Gorbachev apart, Ms. Kuroyanagi has prevented interviews with politicians. “It’s too troublesome for them to actually 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 arduous. Producers ask visitors prematurely what matters they need 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 best precedence on is that I management the scenario with visitors in order that the viewers won’t assume the visitor is a bizarre or dangerous particular person,” Ms. Kuroyanagi stated. “If potential I need the viewers to understand, ‘Oh, this particular person is sort of good.’”
When Mr. Gorbachev appeared on her present in 2001, Ms. Kuroyanagi prevented politics. “It could have been an enormous deal for him,” she stated. As a substitute, 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 will 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 era on the sound stage at TV Asahi, the house of her present for 49 years. Earlier than his demise in 2016, for instance, Ms. Kuroyanagi interviewed Rokusuke Ei, the lyricist of the track “Sukiyaki.” He appeared in a wheelchair, clearly displaying signs of superior Parkinson’s illness. Ms. Kuroyanagi frankly mentioned his sickness with him.
“Outdated persons are positively inspired by her presence,” stated Takahiko Kageyama, a professor of media research at Doshisha Ladies’s Faculty of Liberal Arts in Kyoto.
Along 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.