Heart Net TV
ハートネットTV
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Welfare and human-rights magazine covering LGBTQ life, sexual violence survivors and solitude.
Heart Net TV is the welfare information programme of NHK's educational channel, E-tele, broadcast at eight in the evening since 2 April 2012, Monday to Thursday at first and Monday to Wednesday since 2019. It merged two earlier programmes, Fukushi Network and Heart o Tsunago, and looks at social problems from the side of welfare: how people live with them and what might help. Each half hour is built from filmed reports and studio talk, with messages from viewers gathered online and through social media.
Its strands have come and gone. There have been series on the spread of poverty, on rehabilitation and care, on social entrepreneurs and on the Paralympics, and Our Voices, a round table at which people who find life hard, among them the transgender activist Fumino Sugiyama, speak in their own words. Since 2017, On the Night of 31 August has given teenagers who dread going back to school a place to say so on the eve of 1 September, the day on which teenage suicides peak; it has linked the broadcast to a smartphone chat and holographic avatars so they can speak without being identified. Since 2021 Niji-kuro has let LGBTQ+ teenagers, appearing as a cartoon closet, bring their worries to mentors. Episodes have also examined sexual violence, among them one in April 2025 on abuse within relationships of power, at work, at home and at school.
NHK announcers present the studio, first Kenji Yamada, then Atsushi Nakano, then Chudai Seta. In April 2023 Heart Net TV became the name of a weekday zone in which a different programme takes each night, and the zone continues.
Starring
Kenji YamadaHost
An NHK announcer who presented the programme from its launch in 2012 until March 2017.
Atsushi NakanoHost
An NHK announcer who presented the programme from April 2017 to March 2023.
Shunsuke KazamaSegment presenter
An actor who has led several strands, from stories of people breaking through hardship to a series that teaches welfare from the basics.
Fumino SugiyamaRegular, Our Voices
A transgender activist and former fencer who sat on the round table where people who find life hard speak for themselves.
Why it matters
Heart Net TV gives a regular evening slot on public television to subjects that are hard to watch and harder to talk about: poverty, disability, care, suicide, sexual violence, the lives of LGBTQ+ teenagers. Its method matters as much as its topics. It has kept looking for ways to let people speak without being exposed: a cartoon closet for a teenager not yet out, a chat line and avatars for young people who cannot face the new school term, a project named a Jury Selection at the Japan Media Arts Festival. Its 2025 programme on sexual violence within relationships of power named what many survivors describe, that the person who abuses is often the person who decides their job, their grades or their home, and that speaking up can cost a job or a place to belong. The question it keeps open is how a society cares for people who cannot yet risk being seen.