The Nonfiction
ザ・ノンフィクション
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Sunday-afternoon documentaries on the lives Japan looks away from — sex workers, hosts, failed marriages.
The Nonfiction is Fuji TV's Sunday-afternoon documentary strand, broadcast at two o'clock since 15 October 1995, mainly in the Kanto region and on some affiliated stations. Each hour follows ordinary people, sometimes famous ones, through a stretch of their lives, often over months or years, and returns to the most talked-about of them to show what happened next. There is no presenter and no regular cast. Production companies take turns, and each episode has a different narrator, often a well-known actor; Aoi Miyazaki has narrated more episodes than anyone. Every episode closes on the theme song 'Sansara', sung over the years by a succession of artists.
Its subjects have ranged widely. Debt Hell Story (1997), still its highest-rated episode, followed families losing their homes at auction and a 19-year-old working in the sex trade to pay off her father's debts. Other films followed a charismatic Osaka host-club owner through his rise and fall, a specialist cleaner who clears the rooms of people who died alone, young people living as 'mountain NEETs' in a converted school, the clients of a Tokyo marriage adviser, women who ask to have calligraphy brushed on their bodies, and people who want to choose their death in a country without euthanasia. In 2017, Called the Son of a Murderer, an interview with the son of the couple behind the Kitakyushu confinement murders, drew such a response that a re-edited version was shown nationwide.
People it filmed have sometimes complained of being misrepresented. In 2020 the couple at the centre of Maki's Old Age, a series that ran for about twelve years, alleged staged quarrels and sexual harassment by a director; Fuji TV said it had no record of such instructions. The programme reached its 1,000th episode in April 2021 and its 30th anniversary in October 2025, and continues.
Starring
Aoi MiyazakiNarrator
An actress who has narrated more episodes than anyone else, including the follow-ups made for the 30th anniversary.
Miyuki UekusaHerself
A marriage adviser who runs a Tokyo matchmaking agency and guides the clients followed in the programme's marriage-hunting series.
Why it matters
The Nonfiction has spent three decades filming lives that rarely reach the evening news: debt, sex work, loneliness, ageing, the search for a spouse, the wish to choose one's own death. Its most-watched hour, in 1997, was about debt as the economy of that decade collapsed, and the families it swallowed. Its method, long observation with no presenter to reassure, lets people speak at length and in their own time, and it has won international awards and, in 2026, the Hashida Prize. The same method carries a risk. People it filmed have complained of being cut into caricatures, and the programme now explains the risks to participants before filming and supports them after broadcast. It raises the question every documentary about ordinary people raises, only more sharply: who is being looked at, for whose Sunday afternoon, and at what cost to them.