Mr. Barakan, you call yourself a broadcaster.
To begin with, I didn’t call myself that. I never found titles very important. I’ve never really required one for myself. But if I had to have one, which, in Japanese, more often than not, is the case, you have to have a business card, and it has to have something written on it. So I would call myself a disc jockey or whatever.
And then what happened was that in 1988, I was asked to appear on a television show called “CBS Document,” which was basically the Japanese broadcast of an American news magazine show called “60 Minutes.” And I was the onscreen host, or one of them, for that program. So, that was the first show that I’d like done on either radio or television that wasn’t music-related.
And now, when people ask me, “OK, what’s your title?” I would have to say, well, I can’t say I’m a disc jockey because that doesn’t cover what I’m doing on this program. So the only thing I could come up with was “broadcaster, “ which in English is actually no problem.
The word has two meanings. It can mean a broadcasting company like NHK, or it could mean an individual who does what I do, which is express yourself in broadcast media.
There was one person who made me want to be on the radio more than any other factor. It was a man called Charlie Gillett, who unfortunately is no longer with us. He had a Sunday lunchtime radio show on the local BBC station in London. It wasn’t nationwide. And it was the first time I’d come across a radio program where the person was playing music of which almost everything appealed to me aesthetically.
And also, he spoke in a very natural way. It felt like it was a friend talking to you in your own house or something. And I’d never felt that with another radio presenter before.
I thought, “Wow. If this can be done on the radio, that’s what I want to do.” And that became my dream after listening to his show, which started, I think, in 1972.
So I’ve always wanted my own shows to have that same kind of ambience of just relating very naturally to the listeners.
