Color Television Broadcasting Day

What Is Color Television Broadcasting Day?

September 10th is "Color Television Broadcasting Day" in Japan. On this date in 1960, five broadcasters — NHK, Nippon Television, Radio Tokyo Television (now TBS), Yomiuri TV, and Asahi Broadcasting — began regular color television broadcasts in Tokyo and Osaka. Japan is said to have become the third country in the world to broadcast in color, after the United States and Cuba (some sources call it the second, after the United States).

What Color TV Was Like in Its Earliest Days

When regular broadcasting began, color televisions were extremely expensive and well out of reach for most households.

• What it was called: when color TV first appeared, it was called "sō-tennenshoku terebijon" ("full natural-color television")
• Adoption: even in 1965, five years after broadcasts began, there were fewer than 50,000 color sets in the whole country
• Limited programming: color programming itself was still limited, so most households continued watching in black and white

From the Tokyo Olympics to the Osaka Expo

One trigger for adoption was the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. It spurred the conversion of relay lines to color and improvements in picture quality, and production of color sets began to rise. Later, as performance improved and mass production brought prices down, color TV spread explosively around the time of the 1970 Osaka Expo, and in 1973 the household penetration rate of color TVs overtook that of black-and-white sets.

Tips for Marking This Day

• Look up old TV programs or footage from the early days of color broadcasting with your family
• Learn about the history of television, from black-and-white to color to the digital terrestrial transition
• Look back at old photos of vintage televisions and home appliances
• Ask family members about their memories of seeing color TV for the first time

The Day People Marveled at a World in Color

For people at the time, simply seeing color appear on a screen that had always been black and white must have been a genuine source of wonder. Let September 10th be a day to reflect on the origins of the excitement that advances in visual technology have brought us.