by Pushing a walker through a television studio in central Tokyo earlier this week, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi slowly climbed three steps to a sound stage with the help of an assistant who settled her into a cream-beige Empire chair.
A stylist took off her sturdy custom-made boots and slipped on a pair of high-heeled mules. A makeup artist brushed her cheeks and touched up her deep red lipstick. A hairstylist tamed a few stray strands of her signature onion hairstyle while another assistant ran a lint roller over her embroidered black jacket. With that, Ms. Kuroyanagi, 90, was ready to record the 12,193rd episode of her show.
As one of Japan’s best-known artists for seven decades, Ms. Kuroyanagi has interviewed guests on her talk show, “Tetsuko’s Room,” since 1976, and last fall earned a Guinness World Record for most episodes hosted by the same host. Generations of Japanese celebrities from film, television, music, theater and sports have visited Ms. Kuroyanagi’s couch, along with American stars such as Meryl Streep and Lady Gaga; Prince Philip of England; and Mikhail Gorbachev, former leader of the Soviet Union. Kuroyanagi said that Gorbachev remains one of her all-time favorite guests.
Kuroyanagi, who jokes that she wants to keep going until she turns 100, is known for her fast talk and her ability to engage guests on topics such as dating, divorce and, now, increasingly, death. Even as she works to woo a younger generation: Korean-Canadian actor and singer Ahn Hyo Seop28, appeared on the show this month; Many of her guests these days talk about the ailments of aging and the disappearance of their industry peers.
Having survived World War II, she rose to prominence as one of the first actresses on Japanese television and later carved a niche for herself as a feel-good interviewer with a distinctive style that is still instantly recognizable almost everywhere in Japan. By becoming a character, rather than simply the person who interviewed them, he helped establish a genre of Japanese artists known as “tarento” – a Japanese version of the English word “talent” – who are ubiquitous today. television.
“In some ways, she really is like the embodiment of television history” in Japan, said Aaron Gerow, a professor of East Asian literature and film at Yale University.
Mrs. Kuroyanagi is distinguished above all by her longevity, but she was also a pioneering woman in an overwhelmingly male environment.
When she started as a variety show host in 1972, if I asked a question, “they told me I should keep my mouth shut,” she recalled in a nearly two-hour interview at a hotel near the studio where she had recorded three episodes earlier in the year. the day.
“I think Japan has changed from that time,” he said.
She has advocated for the deaf and is a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. However, critics say that despite her pioneering career, she has done little to advance women’s causes. “She is an icon of prosperous old Japan,” Kaori Hayashi, a professor of media studies at the University of Tokyo, wrote in an email.
In the interview, Kuroyanagi didn’t dwell on the indignities of being the only woman in many rooms. She said that when she was in her 30s and 40s, men in the television industry would ask her about dates or marriage proposals (offers she said were often unwelcome) and that she treated comments that might now be considered inappropriate as jokes.
In a society that, according to her, retains “feudalistic” elements in gender relations, she advised women to make their way in their careers.
“Never say you can’t do anything because you’re a woman,” she said.
Although she said she entered television because she wanted to appear on children’s programming to prepare for motherhood, she never married or had children. “With a single job, it’s better to stay single,” he said. “It is more comfortable”.
Her first memoir, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, published in 1981, about her childhood attending an unusual progressive elementary school in Tokyo, has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. Last fall, she published a sequel recounting the harsh conditions in Japan during World War II, when some days all she had to eat was 15 roasted beans, and she and her mother took refuge in a shelter to protect themselves from air raids on Tokyo.
He said he was inspired to write the sequel in part by the footage he saw leaving Ukraine after the Russian invasion. Ms. Kuroyanagi probed her own memories of her wartime childhood, when her mother evacuated the family from Tokyo to northern Japan.
“While I haven’t said war is bad,” he said, “I want people to understand what it was like for a child to experience war.”
Ms. Kuroyanagi maintains a childlike quality. For the interview, she removed her signature onion bun and hid her own hair under an ash-blonde curly Shirley Temple-style wig, held in place with a huge black velvet bow.
It’s all part of a non-threatening personality he’s cultivated for decades. “She’s kind of adorable and cute,” said Kumiko Nemoto, a management professor at the School of Business Administration at Senshu University in Tokyo, where she focuses on gender issues. “She doesn’t criticize anything or bring up anything political or say negative things.”
Perhaps that’s why, apart from Gorbachev, Kuroyanagi has avoided interviews with politicians. “It’s too hard for them to tell the truth,” he said. “And I can’t make them all look good.”
Although she is sometimes compared to Barbara Walters, the groundbreaking American journalist, Kuroyanagi does not put too much pressure on her interview subjects. The producers ask guests in advance what topics they want to avoid or promote, and Ms. Kuroyanagi tends to oblige.
During this week’s taping, her guest was Kankuro Nakamura VI, a sixth-generation Kabuki actor whose father and grandfather were also regular visitors to Ms. Kuroyanagi’s couch. Nakamura seemed to anticipate some questions about his family before turning to the teleprompter.
“What I give the highest priority is to control the situation with the guests so that the audience does not think that the guest is a strange or bad person,” Ms. Kuroyanagi said. “If possible, I want the audience to realize, ‘Oh, this person is quite nice.’”
When Gorbachev appeared on his show in 2001, Kuroyanagi avoided politics. “It would have been a big problem for him,” she said. Instead, she asked him about his favorite poets and he recited:Sailing”, by the 19th century romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov. “I said I wish if I asked any Japanese politician that question, it would be great if there was at least one politician who could ask that,” he said.
As he grew older, he openly faced the challenges of his own generation on the soundstage of TV Asahi, the home of his show for 49 years. Before her death in 2016, for example, Ms. Kuroyanagi interviewed Rokusuke Ei, the lyricist of the songSukiyaki.” She appeared in a wheelchair, clearly showing symptoms of advanced Parkinson’s disease. Mrs. Kuroyanagi spoke frankly with him about his illness.
“Older people are definitely encouraged by their presence,” said Takahiko Kageyama, a professor of media studies at the Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts in Kyoto.
With her speech noticeably slower, Kuroyanagi said she was motivated to continue working to inspire older audiences. “Showing that a person can appear on television until I’m 100 years old with a body that’s fine and my mind still working,” she said, “if I can prove that, I think it would be an interesting experiment.”
Hisako Ueno and Kiuko Notoya contributed reporting from Tokyo.
