Used to watch it quite frequently because there was a Kodi add-on that could pull down their stream w/o too much trouble.
It's fun to watch, but you should always take it with a grain of salt. I imagine the "budget" to produce English-language NHK content must be coming from the state's tourism board or something, so in the five years I watched the channel, there was nary a negative fact about Japan ever mentioned. There are no problems, no conflicts...only beautiful country where old women still gather acorns by hand, and 80 year-old men who are free to hone their lifelong craft of making tofu.
I think the producers are very self aware of portraying a culture that is slowly circulating the drain.
Every 80 year old guy is "the last X artist of the prefecture" and grandma is crawling around picking acorns or wrapping pears by hand as "my children moved to the city". Every rural train and road are empty. I'm sure the Japanese have an appropriate word for melancholy.
Document 72 Hours can be soul crushing. One minute school kids buying paper products at a HW store, the next an older guy looking at kitchen tiles and talking about how his wife always wanted a new kitchen and he never had time for it. And now she's dead.
We love Document 72. It's one of our favorite things to watch, but it is absolutely true that the majority of episodes feature at least one person explaining that a family member recently died of cancer.
It's fun to watch, but you should always take it with a grain of salt. I imagine the "budget" to produce English-language NHK content must be coming from the state's tourism board or something, so in the five years I watched the channel, there was nary a negative fact about Japan ever mentioned. There are no problems, no conflicts...only beautiful country where old women still gather acorns by hand, and 80 year-old men who are free to hone their lifelong craft of making tofu.