This is a podcast recommendation for those of you whose Japanese is up to the task, but it’s worth it because, while most of the content on this audio offshoot of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper is a little more difficult to understand than the slower, more polite, and more standard Japanese of a typical NHK news report, it’s also more interesting. Speaking as a woke, PC, liberal, snowflake, bed-wetting, leftie, hippy-dippy type, when the Asahi Shimbun was recommended to me, I was pleased to discover that it’s basically a Japanese version of The Guardian, which my woke, PC, liberal, etc. mother used to read every day and as an adult, I used to read every Saturday.
The main presenter is a guy called Daisuke Kanda, who is very amiable and speaks relatively comprehensible Japanese, which is another good reason for students of the language to follow this podcast, although the person who has emerged as its true star is a guy called Takashi Funakoshi.
Kanda and Funakoshi began recording very long and rambling episodes about three or four years ago (these are now divided into more convenient hour-long chunks), which I urge you to trawl through the archives and check out. At the time, Funakoshi was working at the A.S. office in Shanghai, and his insights into Chinese daily life, politics, culture, and customs are – even since he returned to Japan – absolutely fascinating. Aside from this, he’s just very intelligent, well informed, and articulate about pretty much any subject that comes up in the course of his conversations with Kanda, and has become popular enough that he was the star attraction at an A.S. live discussion event in Tokyo a few months ago.
If you’re looking for a typical Kanda/Funakoshi episode to start you off (their tagline appears to be ‘＃ふな’) this one is pretty good, as it is Funakoshi’s customarily astute and insightful take on the recently developed Chinese AI company/model DeepSeek.
There is plenty of other interesting content on the podcast – two episodes (actually, they may well have been two-parters) that stood out for me were one about a couple who managed to defect from North Korea to Japan, and another about why Japanese houses are so cold in winter and hot in summer (kind of a no-brainer – i.e. they don’t have enough insulation or double glazing – but also an in-depth look at the background and possible solutions) – and apart from the main ‘ニュースの現場から’ (something like ‘On-site news’) strand, there are now spin-offs such as ‘Media Talk’ and ‘SDGsを話そう’. Another plus point is that, at the time of writing, all of this is still free (A.S. apparently has a subscription plan for their print and online content, but not the audio).
The only minor minus points are the fact that slightly too many episodes involve journalists talking shop (all of the presenters are in house and don’t appear to have any particular training in radio or podcasting), and Kanda’s deliberately jovial buffoonery can at times be mildly irritating.
