Japan — news channels live

ANN — the All-Nippon News Network — is the news network led by TV Asahi and one of Japan's major commercial broadcast networks. It unifies regional stations across the country into a single news service, giving ANN the capacity to move pictures quickly from anywhere in Japan.

Its YouTube account does something unusual in Japan: it carries a continuous live news stream. Because the rolling news channel tradition is weak in Japanese television, that feed is one of the most direct routes to following the Japanese agenda in real time.

TV Asahi belongs to the same corporate family as the newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

FNN — the Fuji News Network — is the news network led by Fuji TV and one of Japan's major commercial networks. FNN Prime Online is its digital news service and carries a live stream on YouTube.

The network has broad field capacity through its affiliated stations across the country. Fuji TV belongs to the same corporate family as the newspaper Sankei Shimbun, one instance of the newspaper–television pairing that characterises Japan.

NHK WORLD-JAPAN is the English-language international service of Japan's public broadcaster NHK. It draws on the corporation's domestic resources but sets its agenda for an international audience: developments in Japan are explained on the assumption that a foreign viewer does not know the context.

Its documentary output is as prominent as its bulletins, with an extensive archive on Japanese society, technology, food and the country's measures against natural disaster. NHK's institutional capability in disaster coverage feeds straight into the channel: earthquake and tsunami warnings go to air in English immediately.

For a reader who wants Japan and East Asia from the region itself, it is a primary source. Its live feed is free and open on YouTube.

This is NHK's Japanese-language news service. The corporation's domestic bulletins reach the widest audience in the country and constitute the common ground of Japanese public knowledge.

NHK's journalism rests on institutional sources and is delivered in a measured register; as a public broadcaster it carries an impartiality duty. In emergencies the schedule is interrupted immediately and the corporation activates its nationwide warning infrastructure — which makes NHK, in Japan, a public safety institution as much as a news organisation.

The Japan Times was founded in 1897 and is Japan's oldest English-language newspaper. For more than a century it has explained Japan to an English-reading audience and has been a principal source for the foreign community in the country, for diplomats and for researchers following Japan.

Its journalism carries into English the domestic politics, society and culture that Japanese newspapers generally publish only in Japanese, which makes it one of the few routes into the country's agenda for a reader without the language.

Nikkei — the Nihon Keizai Shimbun — is Japan's business and economics newspaper and is considered one of the most influential financial publications in Asia. The clearest measure of its international weight is its 2015 acquisition of the Financial Times, the long-established British business paper.

Its journalism concentrates on Japanese corporations, industrial policy, Bank of Japan decisions and Asian economies. For a reader following the Japanese business agenda at first hand, it is a primary source.

The group belongs to the same corporate family as the broadcaster TV Tokyo.