NHK Chronicle is useful for searching past programs

The programs broadcast by NHK are the property of the people, but if we don't know what programs have been broadcast in the past, we won't know where those properties are. To that end, it would be ideal to be able to search metadata about programs, but as a first step, it would make a big difference if we could just search past program listings.

The current NHK main site "nhk.jp" from the top of the siteLink to program searchHowever, this only allows you to search the most recent results.NHK ChronicleYou can search for past minutes.

For example, let's try searching for Saito Kinen. A huge number of search results will appear in reverse chronological order. I wanted to know about a show that I remember airing in 2007, so I'll go back in time to that point.

This time, I clicked on the page display in the upper right corner to go back in time, but it seems that you can also jump to a different page by entering "&page=14" in the URL. In this way, I found out that the program I wanted to know about was aired on December 2007, 12.

However, as you can see from the image above, you can't tell what kind of program it was just from this page. So I clicked through the "Program Details" one by one and found out what program it was.

This is actually a very valuable recording of the premiere of "Le Temps l'Horloge" at the Saito Kinen Festival, when Dutilleux himself came to Japan. You can see the composer himself applauding. I also think it is quite rare to have a recording of "Mystic Moment."

The URL for this details page is "https://www.nhk.or.jp/archives/chronicle/detail/?crnid=A200712291800001301000" This crnid seems to be the identifier for this content. (←I've properly used the ID theme!)

What to do if you're not sure when it will air: => & You can also search!

In the above example, I remembered the broadcast date, so I was able to search backwards. This makes searching very difficult if you don't know the broadcast date. If you can search with & like "Dutilleux Saito Kinen" here, you can narrow down the search results significantly. So I tried it and it worked. It seems that you can search by separating keywords with half-width spaces.

I can see that it is broadcast twice a year. I actually watched the live broadcast on September 2th, right after the performance. Let's take a look at the program details.

Amazingly, this one has more detailed program details! Not only is "The Mystery of the Moment" the only one, but the official title is "The Mystery of the Moment (for 24 strings, cimbalom and percussion)"¹" The December episode is a re-broadcast, so the content should be the same, but the program information is different. It seems like it would be best to go and watch each episode individually.

It doesn't come up in a Google search (Updated 5/20: It now comes up)

Although the NHK Chronicle is conveniently searchable, there is one unfortunate thing about it. It doesn't come up in Google searches. Try searching for "site:www.nhk.or.jp Momentary Mystery (for 2024 string instruments, cimbalom and percussion)". As of March 3, 18, nothing comes up. This is because crawling is prohibited by robots.txt.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.cgi?
Disallow: /*/api/
(..snip..)
Disallow: /chronicle/

[Figure] chronicle is prohibited by robots.txt (Source)https://www.nhk.or.jp/robots.txt

I think this is a bit disappointing from the perspective of convenience for the public. I wish they would allow this.²

So, NHK Chronicle is convenient. But you can't search it from Google, so you have to go directly to NHK Chronicle and search. And how can you access what you searched for? Not only is it related to the progress of digitalization, but it is also related to the issue of rights processing, so it would be good if it became easier to access in this area.

1. His wife, Junko Sakimura, plays the cimbalom.
2. Is there a reason why this isn't possible? I'll ask about it next time.