Little Girl at the TV Window

By Richard Stengel

Japan's No. 1 attraction is a nonstop mover and talker

Six minutes until air time, and still no sign of the star. Standing on the portico of Tokyo's TV Asahi station, her manager, her producer and her director nervously scan the driveway. Five minutes.

Four minutes. Nothing. At three minutes to the hour, a blood-red Mercedes screeches through the gate, careering into a reserved parking place. Out pops a 5-ft. 3-in., 99-lb. woman who, with her porcelain complexion, delicate features and glistening black hair, might pass for a Kabuki doll. As she scampers along on 2-in. wooden platform shoes, her mouth is al eady moving faster than her feet.

The entourage steers her (still talking) toward the studio. Sprinting through a door into a living room-like set, she drops daintily onto a white sofa. A quick glance into a hand mirror. Perfection. As the television camera's red light blinks on, she smiles serenely into the lens as if she had spent the entire morning becalmed in the tranquillity of a tea ceremony.

Tetsuko Kuroyanagi never stops moving or talking. She is the star of three hit shows on three separate networks; before the day is over she will discuss rape with a young feminist author on one show, play a piano duet of Lady of Spain on another and rehearse a review of the week's Top Ten songs for a third. Every weekday afternoon about 10 million viewers see her on the 45-minute Tetsuko 's Room, Japan's first and most successful daily talk show; each Thursday night 30 million fans tune in to the 60-minute The Best Ten, a sort of Your Hit Parade; while on Fridays 11 million watch her play host to several 100-piece classical orchestras on the 30-minute Music Plaza show.

Tetsuko is more than just the most recognizable face in all of Japan. She is a phenomenon, a conspicuous exception to the tradition of servile and "wifely" women on Japanese television. Until Tetsuko, women on the air were invariably hai hai girls, pretty poppets who decorated the chair next to the male host and giggled on cue. But her debut as a talk-show host eleven years ago changed all that. Her quick tongue, candor, spontaneity and irrepressible curiosity were revolutionary and made her a significant role model for ambitious women all across Japan. Says Eiichi Adachi, television critic of Tokyo's daily Hochi: "Tetsuko has had more impact on her audience than any other top personality." woman Today, at 49, unshow-business abashedly unmarried and proudly independent in a country where both conditions are frowned upon, Tetsuko thrives as a tradition breaker.

That is the theme of Tetsuko's charming 1981 memoir, Totto-Chan, the Little Girl at the Window, which has sold an extraordinary 6 million copies, making it the bestselling book in Japanese history. The daughter of a father who was a concert violinist and a mother who trained as an opera singer, Tetsuko was thrown out of her rigid grammar school at the age of six because she liked to stand at an open window and chatter with the swallows and street musicians. She subsequently attended an experimental school in Tokyo that allowed her to blossom in her own way. Her book, a tribute to that school's liberal and humane sensibility, has stirred parents around the country to calls for educational reform.

After graduation from secondary school, Tetsuko hoped to become a coloratura, but her parents wanted her to marry. In 1954, postponing the prospect of marriage, she answered an ad in a newspaper seeking actors for television. One of 13 chosen from among 6,000 applicants, she soon became a popular actress with NHK, the public broadcasting company. "Fame came easily for me," she says. "Because NHK covered all of Japan, my face was seen everywhere."

| In 1971, tired of playing a mini-skirted hostess on a variety show and a frowzy provincial maid on a soap opera, Tetsuko spent a year in New York City studying acting and perfecting her English. When she received a call from TV Asahi, one of Tokyo's commercial networks, offering her the role of principal host on a lunchtime imitation of America's Today show, she promptly accepted. No woman had ever been the principal M.C. of a show. Tetsuko warned the producer that she was far from the prototype of a wife, but he replied, "Housewives are tired of seeing themselves on TV. Through your eyes, your sensibilities, they can see something different."

What they saw in 1972, for the first time on television, was a woman who acted natural. The program was an immediate hit, and three years later Tetsuko was offered her own show, Tetsuko's Room. Her timing had been perfect. "My own evolution and Japan's suited each other," she says. "Housewives wanted out of their conservative shells. What they wanted on TV was my individuality."

Tetsuko has been dubbed the Japanese Barbara Walters, but the comparison is misleading. Unlike Walters, Tetsuko shies away from politicians, explaining, "Politicians talk right around the questions." Her guests include authors, actors, sports stars and foreign celebrities, and her paramount concern is making them feel comfortable. "I don't go at it harshly or directly," she says. She coaxes rather than harangues. Although she prepares for her interviews with notes written on origami-like folded paper, her questions are extemporaneous and her manner casually disarming. A recent guest, Author Keiko Ochiai, notes, "In contrast to some feminists, myself included, Tetsuko has a way of talking softly through the TV."

Tetsuko has not stopped challenging her viewers or herself. On the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, she paused during the frothy pop-tune format of The Best Ten and delivered a haunting commentary at the site of the destruction. Unorthodox? Yes, and a reminder once again that the woman on the screen is still that curious and headstrong girl at the window. --By Richard Stengel.

Reported by Sandra Burton/Tokyo

With reporting by Sandra Burton This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.