BE A SCRIPTWRITER
(Yohei Kimura)
2009-11-19
Yohei Kimura is a junior scriptwriter lives in Osaka, western Japan. When he was in high school, Yohei often listened to a radio show where listener could post their ideas. There was one week when the radio played his ideas 3 times in a row. That was how he started to write and dreamed to be a scriptwriter one day.
Today, he works for a radio and tv station. In radio station, he is responsible to provide information and topic to be discussed in a show. Every morning, Yohei gets up earlier. He gets up 2 or 3 am every morning to prepare the morning news program. He arrives at the office and immediately checks the early newspaper. The newspaper distributor delivers the papers to Yohei’s office earlier. Therefore, he can update the latest news and the radio will air it before the news read by public. After that, Yohei will collect the information he get. He writes list of topics he has collected and show it to the program director. Program director will finally choose one topic to discuss in their program. Another program is a comedy program called ‘Monster Engine’. Sometimes, he has to find important information based on the topic that is discussed in that program, right away when the program is aired. It’s really challenging because he only has few minutes to get it from internet. Yohei enjoys his job very much. Lots of time, he spend his days looking for unique topics. He also love to make people laugh. That’s why he likes to travel and find out new, fresh, and funny topic, for example: wordsplay.
In TV station, Yohei is lucky that he can work with Tetsuo Hikita, a famous senior scriptwriter. There are 20 writers in his division. Those 20 writers should have one interesting topic to bring to a meeting with Hikita-san. In this meeting, they discuss 20 topics from 20 writers. In the end of the meeting, Hikita-san will choose one topic to be aired two weeks later. That day, Yohei’s topic about a Tuna restaurant is chosen. So, the day when his topic is going to be aired, Yohei should prepare everything. He has to make sure that the show is smooth-sailing. It is obvious that this job challenges young people a lot. All of the young writers feel eager to find the most unique and interesting story, so their topic will be chosen for the tv program.
To work as a scriptwriter, there are various ways to start. First, you have to enter a technical school. A school that has writing or journalistic as a major subject. You can also try an apprenticeship in TV or radio station, to give you more references and experiences. After that, you can work as a freelancer and you can handle various type of scriptwriting. For this job, a scriptwriter is paid based on two regulations. The first is based on how many programs that he handles, and the second is based on the amount of material that adopted and chosen in tv and radio show. In the case of Yohei, he gets more or less $ 1200/ month.
P.S: Wish i still have NHK so i'll be able to post another MyNHKs, amiiin!!!
