by Sota Nakanishi
Sakata became interested in the Hakone Ekiden with its 40th running when he started working at Nippon TV in 1964. The promising Juntendo University 2nd-year Keisuke Sawaki ran despite having knee pain pre-race. He finished 15th of 15 on the highly competitive Second Stage, but afterward head coach Hiroaki Chosa defended him, saying, "We need to have people we can put in charge of the Second Stage all four years or we'll never be able to win Hakone." Two years later during Sawaki's senior year Juntendo won for the first time.
Sakata was deeply moved by the determination they had put into Hakone and their preparation for it. He immediately approached the network's upper management, saying, "Let's do a broadcast of the Hakone Ekiden." But the directors just looked at him in surprise. At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics NHK had just pulled off the world's first live broadcast of a full marathon. The technological problems were enormous, and the idea of broadcasting the Hakone Ekiden was just a fantasy.
As the event's popularity continued to grow, 14 years later in 1978 Sakata got a call from Takeshi Yuasa, head of the sports division at the Yomiuri newspaper, co-organizer of the Hakone Ekiden. "I remember you saying that you wanted to broadcast the Hakone Ekiden," Yuasa said. "Is that dream still alive?" Tokyo Channel 12, now TV Tokyo, had contacted them asking about doing a Hakone broadcast. Sakata told him, "When Nippon TV is prepared to do the broadcast, please let us handle it."
Tokyo Channel 12 presented the first Hakone broadcast in 1979 for the event's 55th edition, showing edited highlights of the first nine stages and a live broadcast of the anchor stage and finish line. Although it was a low-quality production, it immediately scored a high viewership rating of 10%. In following years that grew to 12 and even 13%.
Sakata felt anxious about the broadcast's success with the audience. In the early 1980s Nippon TV was ranked 3rd in viewership behind Fuji TV and TBS. The atmosphere in its studios was heavy. Eager to broadcast the Hakone Ekiden as a catalyst to bigger success, Sakata repeatedly lobbied the network's upper echelons that they could not afford to wait. Finally, in June, 1986, the board gave him the go-ahead to pursue the project.
Tokyo Channel 12, which had continued its mixed recorded and live broadcast every year since 1979, was willing to let Nippon TV take over the live broadcast, a symbolic "tasuki handoff" to the bigger network. When Sakata and his boss expressed their gratitude to Tokyo Channel 12 sports chief Taketatsu Shiraishi he told them, "Well, we'd like to get the rights to one Yomiuri Giants game, but...Anyway, we're looking forward to seeing what Nippon TV does with the Hakone Ekiden."
But there were other problems. Nippon TV had already been handling the National High School Soccer Championships since 1972, and there were worries about whether it had the production capacity to also take on the ekiden. Some in the company were skeptical of the project's chances, saying, "A local Kanto Region university event is never going to get big ratings," and, "If there's an accident on the course or something goes wrong with the broadcast it's going to damage our company's business."
But Sakata had thought of ways to deal with these issues. He prepared pre-recorded segments with athletes who had run in the first edition in 1920, with those who had run in the final pre-war race, and with those who had worked to bring the event back after the war, and planned to air them if the broadcast signal was lost mid-race. While doing this, he said, "I realized that while the live broadcast itself was important, sharing these stories actually increased its value." What had simply been an attempt to be ready to mitigate risks became something that showed the way to conveying the importance of the event's history.
Sakata and his team also worked relentlessly to make the Kanto Region event interesting to viewers nationwide. When looking at the list of athletes entered in the race, they realized that only two of Japan's 47 prefectures were not represented. By introducing where each athlete came from, they were able to persuade local affiliate stations to pick up the broadcast.
In this way, Sakata and his team were able to carefully resolve each issue that came down the pipeline. But in the 1980s the National Police Agency was increasingly irritated about providing security for the growing number of road races and demanded that the Hakone Ekiden either be canceled or use a different course. JAAF vice president Yohei Kono begged them, "Please wait another year or two."
They agreed, and when the Nippon TV nationwide broadcast came to screens across the country for the Hakone Ekiden's 63rd running in 1987 everything changed. Viewers loved seeing the race, and especially the historical episodes, and the event's popularity skyrocketed. "It got so popular that it forced the police's hand, and they couldn't afford to try to have it canceled," Sakata smiled.
The live nationwide broadcast brought a lot of associated incidental benefits like that, but it also brought endless headaches. Biggest among them was the issue of broadcasting the Fifth and Sixth Stages up and down the mountain in Hakone. "I knew that if we didn't work out how to deal with the mountain then we wouldn't really be doing a Hakone Ekiden broadcast," Sakata said.
Despite the opposition of Nippon TV's technical department, he funneled a large part of their effort into handling the Fifth and Sixth Stage, which had always produced some of Hakone's most dramatic moments. If any technical problem happened with the broadcast the technical department would be held responsible, so they would not give their approval for anything unless they were "200% sure" that it would work. But Sakata did not give up. When he talked to his colleague Kazutaka Onishi, who had received technical training in the U.S.A., Onishi agreed with him, saying, "There's nothing more interesting than doing the impossible."
When broadcasting the Hakone Ekiden, footage from cameras was transmitted to a helicopter using a Microman radio transmitter attached to the roof of the broadcast truck. From there, the system relayed the signal to the broadcast center. But if the weather was bad, helicopters would not be able to take off. The solution they came up with was to set up multiple broadcast relay stations on the peak of Mt. Hakone. These would take the signal from the broadcast trucks and relay them to the main broadcast center.
Radio waves travel in a straight line, and if they are not transmitted properly to the relay station the signal will be interrupted. Takayuki Fukuoji was put in charge of the Microman on the lead camera truck. Bad weather would make it impossible to see the relay station at the top of the mountain, and with Hakone's mountain roads being full of switchback curves it is extremely difficult to maintain a sense of direction. As they did test run after test run in preparation for the first broadcast, Fukuoji instilled in himself a physical sense of which direction the relay station was in at all times, developing the skill to act as a sort of human compass to direct transmission of the signal the right way.
During Nippon TV's first live national broadcast in 1987, fog in the mountains on the downhill Sixth Stage at the start of Day Two made it impossible to use the broadcast helicopters. But with the Human Compass Fukuoji at the helm the signal footage made it to the broadcast center uninterrupted. Once the runners were out of the mountains conditions improved, and the helicopters took off. In an era before GPS, the success of pulling off that part of the first live broadcast could be put down to humans' pure innate abilities.
With the mountain conquered, the biggest hurdle to achieving the first live broadcast had been cleared. There were cheers throughout the broadcast center, and some Nippon TV staff even cried. Years of hard work had finally paid off. People had said it was impossible, but just as Sakata had predicted, Nippon TV's success in doing a live nationwide Hakone Ekiden broadcast served as a catalyst that made the network the major player it is today.
The Hakone Ekiden broadcast pulls in incredible viewership ratings around 30% every year, an order of magnitude greater than you'd otherwise expect from a college sports event. Analyzing the broadcast's popularity today, Sakata says, "I think it conveys how the athletes put their entire lives into their training, and that when they are one of the lucky ones to be selected to run they do it from the heart with everything they have. I think some elements of that speak to the Japanese mind."
In continuity with past generations connected through the tasuki, the athletes and the race itself arrived at the 100th running this year. Now 82, Sakata has words of advice to pass on to the younger Nippon TV staff now responsible for the Hakone Ekiden's future. "Television should not change the Hakone Ekiden, and the Hakone Ekiden itself should not be changed. As the times change, the value of an unchanged Hakone Ekiden becomes even greater. History must be cherished, and the thoughts and stories of everyone involved must be told. I hope that all of those to come who work on the Hakone Ekiden broadcast are doing it with the mindset that they are a part of The Hakone Ekiden Broadcast."
It's not just the TV employees who carry that sense of gratitude at being a part of something bigger. That goes for the athletes too. Gone are the days when they can just focus on racing, Sakata says. "It's important to think about how what they are doing contributes to society. Even something simple like what some schools do now with organizing team trash pickup days. I'm glad to see them doing things like that."
For 100 years Hakone has been a place where stories have been given birth. What kinds of stories will be written there in the next 100 years? Nobuhisa Sakata has played a key role in setting up the infrastructure for those stories to be recorded and told, and his hopes and ideals will resonate through the future generations yet to come.
source articles:
translated and edited by Brett Larner
Comments
This is phenomenal. Thanks for sharing.