Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 495, This Just In.

At 9.30 a.m. on March 22nd, 1925, for the very first time in Japanese history, a brand-new

technology was trialed. From a broadcast station in Shibaura at the library of the state-run

school Tokyo Kōkōkōkōkōkōkōkōkōkoye University,

words rang out on the airwaves for the very first time.

Supposedly the very first broadcast in Japanese history was,

Ah, ah, kikowemaskka, which is roughly, hey, hey,

can you hear me? One assumes there had been grander plans in place for what to say during

such a historic occasion, but hey, you play the hand you're dealt, right?

Regardless of the content, the nature of the broadcast from the Tokyo Horsolkoku or Tokyo Broadcasting Station was historic enough in its own right, both for the technological frontier being crossed and because of the speed with which the new technology had been adopted.

Radio as an idea had moved pretty quickly from the realm of the theoretical into practicality.

In the late 1880s, the German inventor Heinrich Rudolf Hertz had first discovered what were called Hertzian waves at the time.

Radio waves as terminology would take a few more decades to catch on, and had demonstrated how to

transmit said waves from one place to another.

By the late 1890s, there was already active speculation that these waves could be used to create

a type of wireless telegraph, and in 1901, the Italian inventor Guilielielmo Marconi, was the first to successfully transmit

a message over radio, from Cornwall in England to Newfoundland in Canada.

Commercial radio would take a while to emerge.

The first applications for the new technology were for shipping as well as military use.

The Netherlands was the first country with a regular

radio station set up in 1919. In August of 1920, the first American radio station set up by the

Detroit News began broadcasting. And of course, five years later, Japan had its own very first

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