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The story
With the 77th NHK Kohaku Uta Gassen broadcast just three months away, the lineup of performing artists is entering its final selection stage. According to recent reports, NHK is on edge about a “strongest rival program” that could eat into its New Year’s Eve ratings. In the 5ch thread that followed, posters questioned the very point of Kohaku itself — noting that the red-team-versus-white-team format has become a hollow formality, debating whether performers from the former Johnny’s (now Start Entertainment) agency should appear given recent scandals, and pointing out that there’s no clear song of the year to headline the show.
Kohaku Uta Gassen’s Ratings Are Bound to Take a Hit… The “Strongest Rival Show” NHK Fears
“We’re now less than three months from the broadcast of the 77th NHK Kohaku Uta Gassen. The selection of performing artists is in its final stage — which artists will make this year’s lineup?” (a sports newspaper reporter)
NHK Kohaku Uta Gassen, the nation’s beloved New Year’s Eve music program that closes out the year.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Great Detective Tsuda could take down Kohaku.
It won't beat it, but it'll put up a good fight.
Inoue Nagi is playing Chacha in this year's NHK Taiga drama, so she won't get cut this year — next year's anyone's guess.
Stop building them a cozy little room and sucking up to them.
That's insane.
And what happened to all that diversity, LGBTQ, genderless stuff NHK loves to push? How much longer are they gonna keep this men-vs-women song battle format?
They should throw rotten garbage at the other team's songs instead of clapping for them.
In recent years the "Red Team host" and "White Team host" titles have all been unified into just "host." The cheering contests and the championship flag are gone too — the men-vs-women staging keeps getting scaled back year after year. At this rate, within a few years they'll probably scrap the win/lose system too, since that's the whole core of the format. My guess is they'll keep the "Kohaku" (red/white) name but reinterpret it as a celebratory thing rather than a gender contest, and "Gassen" (battle) as more of a festival than an actual fight — so the title survives even as the format fades away.
I'd rather they made it a left-wing vs. right-wing song battle.
So it'd be a sing-off between "The Internationale" and military war songs.
That's it, that's the whole point.
Johnny's side, please just decline too.
I'm begging you.
Is this actually a criminal case?
Konto 55-Go's Yakyuken (a comedy duo's classic strip rock-paper-scissors bit).
Maybe "Something-Something… Metsu!" at best.
It's gotta be "INMU KING."
2026 Annual Single Ranking
1st Kenshi Yonezu "IRIS OUT"
2nd M!LK "Sukisugite Metsu!" (Too in Love I Could Die!)
3rd Mrs. GREEN APPLE "lulu."
4th King Gnu "AIZO"
5th HANA "Blue Jeans"
6th M!LK "Bakuretsu Aishiteru" (Exploding Love)
7th HANA "ROSE"
8th Aina the End "Kakumei Douchuu" (Revolution Road)
9th Kenshi Yonezu, Hikaru Utada "JANE DOE"
10th Snow Man "Charismax"
And throw in a surprise final appearance from Shonentai while they're at it.
Shibugakitai would work too lol
TV Tokyo's oldies-show demographic targets around the junior baby-boomer generation — the age bracket that's still got decent population numbers.
Once the new year hits I'll just skip straight to the Momoclo stream lol
Wasn't that supposed to end in the evening?
You can still catch it on YouTube for a while~
Pretty sure that was only last year — no idea what they're doing this year though.
NHK is famous for ruthlessly cutting performers from Kohaku over even minor slip-ups, but the former Johnny's agency — now Start Entertainment — has had two members arrested this year alone: one for indecent exposure, and another for beating a woman so badly she was left bleeding.
Surely not, but…
NHK's always come down hard on other artists and agencies for far less — they wouldn't turn around and offer Start Entertainment a Kohaku slot just because they don't want them showing up on a rival channel instead, right?
Surely they wouldn't do that… right?
Masaharu Fukuyama: "Wait, you're cutting people over a slip of the tongue?"
Rankings like this have really become meaningless.
Makes you wonder what metric this ranking's even based on lol.
If they're mixing a bunch of different metrics together, the result changes depending on the weighting — it's genuinely pointless.
It's all anime and idols.
Wish they'd exclude stuff like TikTok plays and overseas streams from the count.
Make it a "Red vs. White Dance Battle."
But realistically, only songs that are already guaranteed hits get anime tie-ins these days — there's not a single old-school anison (anime theme song) among them.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
For years, Kohaku Uta Gassen has billed itself around a Red Team vs. White Team, men-vs-women format, but in recent years the hosts’ titles have been unified from “Red Team host” / “White Team host” to simply “host,” and staging elements like the cheering contests and the championship flag have been scaled back. As posters in the thread pointed out, the show’s name — “Kohaku” (red and white) and “Gassen” (battle) — appears to be shifting away from a gender-based contest and toward a more celebratory, festival-like meaning. The other major point of contention, the former Johnny’s agency, was renamed Start Entertainment following the 2023 sexual abuse scandal, and ongoing scandals involving its talent continue to fuel debate over whether its performers belong on the Kohaku stage. On top of that, the annual hit-song rankings blend multiple metrics — CD sales, streaming, and social media plays — and the thread’s complaints about not knowing “what metric” the ranking uses stem from how opaque that aggregation process is.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News Flash+) thread “[TV] Kohaku Uta Gassen’s Ratings Are Bound to Take a Hit… The “Strongest Rival Show” NHK Fears.”
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