Abstract
The publication of textbooks for NHK’s radio lessons started in 1925, the same year radio broadcasting commenced. Taking the opportunity of the centennial of Japanese broadcasting, the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute is digitalizing radio-lesson textbooks published before World War II to unitize them in research and studies. In line with this effort, this paper reviews pre-war educational and cultural programs as a three-part series.
Radio-lesson textbooks emerged in 1925 as learning materials for radio language lessons and the transcriptions of lecture programs. In the initial phase, as there was no broadcast network connecting broadcast stations around the country, local stations, such as in Osaka and Nagoya, produced their own educational and cultural programs, and various textbooks were published by each station. However, with the start of the Radio 2 service in Tokyo and the establishment of the Japan Broadcasting Publishing Co. (current NHK Publishing, Inc.) in 1931, the publications of textbooks were gradually concentrated on the publisher. Still, publications continued in areas other than Tokyo as well, and diverse types of textbooks were published in different places, tailored to hobby and cultural programs devised by each station.
The expansion of textbooks advanced through the late 1930s, but, with the outbreak of the Pacific War, Radio 2 was suspended: language programs became unavailable, and radio-lesson textbooks allowed to be published were limited to those related to National Schools or contributing to the maintenance of the wartime regime. Textbooks were reintroduced only after the end of the Pacific War.
The first part of the series overviews the pre-war textbooks for radio lessons and looks back on its history. Based on this, the second and third installments analyze the textbooks by genre and examine the actual conditions of educational and cultural programs before WWII
