“Watching TV as a family” – Tragedy experienced at home

When I was in elementary school, TV was something we watched together as a family.

In the first place, it was common for each household to have only one television, and even if there was a program you wanted to watch, whether you could watch it depended on the situation of the family member who had control over the channel, such as when the father would come home.

My father only watched NHK, and the only commercial channel he watched was an animal program. My father was a stickler for doing things together as a family, so it was hard for him to say, “It’s a boring program for kids, so I’m going to stay in my room,” and we all watched programs we didn’t really want to watch in silence.

That time was nothing but painful. Well, it’s okay if the program is boring. It was common back then to not be able to watch the program you wanted to watch. What was even more painful was that my father kept complaining while watching TV.

Whenever a singer popular among young people appeared on NHK’s music programs, my father would always nag, saying things like, “What’s so good about this?” and “Are you really listening to this kind of thing?” He would also say whatever he wanted about my favorite celebrities, saying things like, “What this guy says is always vulgar,” and “If he’s on, I’ll turn off the TV.”

There are probably still young people who watch the end-of-year Red and White Song Contest with their families at home. In that case, their parents may say things like, “I don’t really understand” or “They’re all the same, I can’t tell them apart” about the popular K-POP idols.

I don’t like it when people criticize the things I like, but even so, I can put up with having to listen to my parents’ conversations about how they’re not up to date with the latest trends only once a year, and consider it part of the fun of going home.

But that was almost every day of my childhood.

Later, my family bought another TV for gaming and video equipment with recordable capabilities appeared, and I gradually became able to watch the programs I wanted to watch, but my childhood memory of my father constantly complaining about the TV remained as a traumatic memory for me.