Tonight 2
トゥナイト2
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
The last of the great late-night adult information shows — soaplands, adult video and the Heisei night economy.
Tonight 2 was TV Asahi's late-night information show, broadcast four nights a week around midnight from 4 April 1994 to 29 March 2002. It took over from Tonight, which had run since 1980, with a new host, Jiro Ishikawa, a former editor of the magazine Heibon Punch, and a woman assistant beside him, for three and a half years the TV Asahi announcer Sayaka Shimodaira. Each night belonged to a different reporter. Issei Ran had Mondays. Makoto Kitano had Tuesdays and a series called the Grown-ups' Telephone Advice Line. The writer Masahiko Katsuya had Wednesdays in the later years. On Thursdays the film director Shinya Yamamoto, 'Kantoku', who had reported for Tonight since 1980, brought his reports from Kabukicho and the sex trade and his series Forms of Love. Many young women reporters worked alongside them.
The show made its name with the risqué segments other stations were dropping. Since the mid-1980s, after Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone asked broadcasters to restrain sexual content, late-night television had been moving away from it; Tonight 2's reporters kept covering the sex industry, while also reporting from the Hanshin earthquake zone and on other hard news. Complaints came from parents' groups, women's organisations and feminists, and in 1997 Ran was taken off the show for a time after a sponsor objected to a remark about commercials. The show gradually cut its sexual content and widened its topics, and in its last years it no longer showed bare breasts. Its ratings held, but TV Asahi gave late night over to comedy. Tonight 2 ended in March 2002, after 4,101 episodes counting Tonight, and with it thirty-one years of late-night talk shows on the channel.
Starring
Jiro IshikawaHost
A former editor of the magazine Heibon Punch who hosted the show from its first night to its last.
Shinya YamamotoReporter (Thursdays)
A film director known as 'Kantoku', who reported on the sex trade and Kabukicho across both shows for about twenty-one years.
Issei RanReporter (Mondays)
A broadcaster carried over from Tonight, taken off the show for a time in 1997 over a remark about commercials.
Makoto KitanoReporter (Tuesdays)
A television personality who had Tuesdays and ran the series the Grown-ups' Telephone Advice Line.
Sayaka ShimodairaAssistant
A TV Asahi announcer who sat beside the host from October 1995 to March 1999.
Why it matters
Tonight 2 is a record of how Japanese television handled sex at the end of the twentieth century, and of how that changed. For eight years a mainstream network sent reporters into Kabukicho and the sex trade four nights a week, at a time when political pressure had already pushed most late-night television away from such material. The show shaped how a generation heard about the night economy, often through the eyes of middle-aged men, with young women reporters as both guides and spectacle. The complaints it drew, from parents, women's groups and feminists, and the way it slowly covered up, belong to the same history. So does its ending: not a scandal but a schedule. Whether it opened a window on lives television otherwise ignored, or turned them into late-night entertainment, is the question it leaves.