How to Watch Japanese TV in America

There are many reasons people may want to watch Japanese tv shows.

Some people may want to watch them to learn Japanese or practice their Japanese listening skills. It's one thing to listen to the CDs that came with your textbook, but if you want to hear real, living Japanese, tv shows can be the answer. For students who want to hear live, natural conversations, I would recommend some of the ubiquitous talk and news shows, including morning news shows similar to "Good Morning America", and others morning feel good shows in the West.

Others may want the pop culture knowledge that can only be found on domestic tv shows. For these viewers, I would recommend music tv shows, comedy shows, and entertainment news shows from Japan.

Still more people looking for cultural inspiration might enjoy some of the Japanese tv shows that focus on cultural or traditional topics, documentaries, or some of the domestic travel and culinary tv shows that are popular in Japan.

Another type of show that might appeal to many non-Japanese viewers are variety and quiz shows that bring together a collection of comedians, actors, actresses, and other personalities and have them participate in various quizzes, challenges, or classes about something topical or fun.

Japanese dramas may be a bit harder to understand for people still developing their Japanese language skills, but can be a great way to see what life in Japan looks like from the inside. They tend to run between 12 and 16 episodes of an hour each, and follow on large story arc with smaller story arcs covered during each episode. If you don't mind being a bit confused sometimes, they are definitely worth the time for people interested in Japanese language and culture.

Because of the limited market that exists here, Japanese tv shows are not available on many pay tv systems. There is TV Japan, a channel with limited access to Japanese programs, which mostly shows some of the shows from NHK (Japanese government and public supported tv). There are a good amount of documentaries, some dramas, and a few kids' shows.

If your system does not offer TV Japan, your next best bet is, believe it or not, YouTube. YouTube carries a good amount of Japanese tv shows. There are a lot of different shows on YouTube, and often you can find entire drama series and extended scenes on YouTube. The challenge is doing a bit of internet research to find out what shows are interesting, popular, or may be of interest to you. Since there are a large number of English speaking people who enjoy Japanese tv shows, there are plenty of sites that cover pop culture.

Some shows can also be found on BitTorrent, but others are available on the internet on Korean, Chinese, and Japanese sites such as mysoju.com.

Another way to get access to shows is to download some of the programs that receive live broadcasts of shows in Japan. This is actually one of the best ways if you can manage the time difference. If you want to see a Japanese drama on at 10pm, and don't mind watching it (or using VLC or another program to record it) at 9am, this could be the way to go. One great way is to watch Japanese TV with Keyhole TV.