NHK's Revival Plan Lays Off 10 Percent of Workforce

September 16, 2005 by

After months of deliberation, NHK Friday announced details of a plan to revive its troubled finances and restore its tarnished reputation, news reports said. The plan is expected to be approved by the public broadcaster’s executive committee next Tuesday.

Most drastically, the plan calls for laying off 1,200 employees, 10 percent of NHK’s workforce. If realized, it would mark the public broadcaster’s biggest staff reduction since its founding in 1926.

According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the plan emphasizes natural attrition through retirement as well as curtailing the number of new recruits over the course of three years beginning next April. The layoffs will affect reporters, program directors and technical staff.

They are intended to address NHK’s worsening financial situation as more and more viewers refuse to pay its mandatory licensing fees. These fees, which are required of every household in Japan that owns a television, have accounted for 96.4 percent of NHK’s total revenues. They amount to about 1,400 yen ($13) per month for a color TV.

As of the end of July, the number of households refusing to pay licensing fees had risen to 1.17 million.

In the last year, a growing number of Japanese has refused to pay the fees in protest over a series of embezzlement scandals and allegations that NHK censored its own programming due to political pressure. The scandals claimed the job of former Chairman Katsuji Ebisawa, who resigned in January.

The revival plan also contains proposals for cracking down on non-paying viewers. NHK says it will initiate legal action against them by sending letters through summary courts (essentially small claims courts) demanding payment. However, it will not “forcefully exact payment,” NHK President Genichi Hashimoto told The Asahi Shimbun earlier this month.

In the revival plan, NHK reaffirms its commitment to relying on viewer fees for its revenue.

“Precisely because we place the burden [of our finances] broadly on our viewers through licensing fees and do not accept advertising revenues or taxes,” it says, “we can deliver news and programming without being a prisoner to viewer ratings or specific points of view.”

And in a nod to criticism that NHK bowed to political pressure to censor a controversial 2001 documentary about Japan’s responsibility for World War II (for background on this issue, see JMR’s “Asahi Revisits NHK Censorship Allegations”), the plan notes that the mission of public broadcasting is “to attain autonomy and self-reliance, without being pressured or influenced by anyone, and to supply to all, without prejudice, information and richness of culture that is the foundation of all decision-making.”

Filed Under: Business
About David Jacobson

David Jacobson is a journalist with experience on both sides of the Pacific. He graduated from Yale University with a degree in East Asian Studies and attended the Inter-University Center of the Japanese Language in Tokyo and Hitotsubashi University, the latter on a Mombu(kagaku)sho Scholarship. He has both covered and worked for the Japanese media, as a reporter, writer or producer for the Nikkei, NHK, and the Associated Press in Japan, and CNN, TV Asahi, and Nikkei BP in New York. He also has an MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business.