Tengo-Chan

Mitsugi Moriguchi is an 82-year old survivor of the nuclear bomb on Nagasaki. He devotes himself to telling people about his wartime experiences. In 2014, he was verbally abused by visiting schoolchildren who told him he was a useless old man who should die. Moriguchi felt his storytelling mission was futile and decided to give up. Then he had a change of heart. He began exploring how to communicate with youngsters in ways that would get them to take an active interest. Many young Japanese see World War Two as irrelevant to themselves. So NHK programme-makers decided to turn an edition of ‘Tengo-Chan’ into a forum where he could communicate with them. They used social media as a way for them to engage with him during a live broadcast. NHK sees the task of conveying memories of the war as one of the most important parts of their publicbroadcasting mission, commemorating the end of WWII each year with 10 specially made films. With this edition of ‘Tengo-Chan’, they took a novel approach based on virtual reality. They used this experimental show to generate interest and interaction via the multiple platforms of TV, the web, Twitter, and YouTube.