Nehorin Pahorin
ねほりんぱほりん
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Puppet interviews with anonymous guests — sugar babies, spouses who were cheated on, former drug users — public television's frankest room.
Nehorin Pahorin is a talk show on NHK's educational channel, E-tele, that interviews people with a story they could never tell on camera, and hides them inside puppets. Two moles on a sofa ask the questions: Nehorin, voiced by the comedian Ryota Yamasato, and Pahorin, voiced by the television personality YOU. The guest of the week appears as a pig under a false name; a pig because buta is taboo turned around. When a difficult word comes up, a cow dressed as a newsreader, voiced by the veteran announcer Norio Ishizawa, steps in to explain it. Each episode closes on a distant view of the moles' house late at night and a caption: humans are interesting.
The talk is recorded first in a radio booth and edited. The puppeteers sit in on the interview to catch the guest's manner, a pig is made to resemble each one, and only then is the puppet play filmed to the soundtrack, so an episode takes at least four months. The guests have included former drug users, people wrongly accused of groping, young women who date older men for money, people raised in children's homes, women who poured money into hosts, parents who abused their children, people who joined the Hong Kong protests, spouses who were cheated on, drivers for call-out sex services and former young carers.
It began as a pilot in July 2015, titled Nehorin Hahorin until another network's similar title came to light, and became a series in October 2016. A new season has aired every autumn to spring since 2017, with an all-night special on New Year's Day, and the tenth ran from October 2025 to March 2026.
Starring
Ryota YamasatoNehorin (host)
A comedian of the duo Nankai Candies who voices the mole Nehorin and questions each guest; he says the puppets make a space to speak without watching faces.
YOUPahorin (host)
An actress and television personality who voices the mole Pahorin, the second interviewer on the sofa.
Norio IshizawaNarrator; the cow Ushizawa Norio
A longtime NHK announcer who narrates and voices the newsreader cow that explains difficult words.
Why it matters
Nehorin Pahorin solves a problem every film about stigma runs into: the people with the most to say are the ones who cannot show their faces. Its producer calls the puppets a new kind of mosaic, and they work like one, except that they add expression instead of blurring it, and make harsh stories sound, somehow, gentle. Behind the soft felt are some of the hardest subjects on Japanese television: addiction, abuse, sex work, prison, sugar dating, betrayal, people without papers. That it airs on the public broadcaster's educational channel, drawing on the tradition of its children's puppet shows, is part of the point. No one is presented as a warning or a curiosity. The caption that ends each episode makes the claim plainly, and each half hour tests it: humans are interesting, including the ones a society would rather not hear.