Former TV TOKYO Announcer Miyu Iketani’s True Thoughts on “The Realities of Being an Announcer

I returned to Japan during the winter break of my graduate school and met with people from my old workplace for the first time in a long time. It warms my heart to see how grateful I am that there are people who remain friends with me even after I left the company for my own selfish reasons.

Seeing my old colleagues allows me to look back on the past and objectify myself. When I was working as an announcer, I had a lot of fun, but in fact, I spent my days with worries that I couldn’t tell anyone. I would like to take a break from my “Study Abroad Diary” during the winter break and write honestly about my announcer days in this column.

You are not sexy enough.”

What do you think announcers are like?　The way we perceive the profession of station announcer varies widely, even among those who are in the profession. Looking back, when I first joined the company, I was often told that the right thing to do was to be a “royal road announcer” with good technical skills, integrity, and good conduct.

However, the world is not that simple.

When I was a newcomer, a male announcer from another station told me, “You are not sexy enough. I was often evaluated in areas other than technique. When I first joined the company and covered a news program, footage of me eating a fried chicken stick was cut out by viewers and put on social media with an obscene catchphrase. The footage had more of a reaction on social networking sites than any of my tweets. Bouncing, running, eating sticks. These behaviors were often clipped and posted on social networking sites and summary sites.

It was very hard, but I couldn’t say, “I can’t eat sticks because it’s obscene,” and above all, I was always taught in various places that I shouldn’t mistake myself for a celebrity. I didn’t want to be thought of as a celebrity, even though I was a company employee.

Regardless of how you feel about yourself, the reality is that you are treated in a way that is clearly different from a company employee. I was teased by a weekly magazine that I was “surprisingly flamboyant in my private life” when it reported that I was going to karaoke with my classmates on Christmas Day. When I was caught on a normal date, as ordinary company employees do on their days off, I had to apologize for the inconvenience.

I am a company employee, but I am not a company employee. I always felt that kind of frustration.