I am going mad at listening to crap Japanese Internet Radio!

In the middle of Jan I am going to start learning Japanese properly. One of my plans is to listen to the radio constantly. I used to live in Japan and this helped a great deal.

I have a subscription to NHK JSTV which I enjoy and does help. However, I naturally like the radio, always have and it does leave you free to do other things and wonder around. I have an internet radio and have searched on the net. How very disappointing.
If I liked Japanese music more it would help. I do like listening to traditional music and even enka (even some J-Pop) but not for long periods and it does not help me in the way 'talk' would. There is some news but not often. I could be making a mistake but when I tune into NHK radio it is rarely in Japanese and does not last long.

What I really want is something like Radio 4 or 5 (Brits will know what I mean) or ABC Radio National in Australia or PBS in the US. Something with alot of talk, conversation, some drama, analysis, feature etc. In Japan over 20 years ago I did listen to something like this. Searching on the net they are mostly FM stations. Sometimes I can find a website of these station with live stream but cannot get them to work and my Japanese cannot cope with the Japanese on the website for instructions.

Does anyone listen to an internet radio station that is half intelligent and not just with a couple of people spouting a whole load of bollocks? There must be something out there.

Maybe you live there and listen to one. Perhaps they broadcast over the net and I hve not found it yet. Or you listen abroad and have found one.

I don't mind some music and guff but I want to listen to one with an emphasis on talk.

Thanks.

TBS radio has a bunch of talk shows in podcast format.

http://www.tbs.co.jp/radio/timetable/index-j.html

There's Dig, which is kind of a news talk show. It's not too dumb.

http://www.tbsradio.jp/dig/index.html

I also really like the JUNK series. It's comedy. This one is my favorite:

http://www.tbs.co.jp/radio/format/bakusho.html

partner55083777 Wrote:TBS radio has a bunch of talk shows in podcast format.

http://www.tbs.co.jp/radio/timetable/index-j.html

There's Dig, which is kind of a news talk show. It's not too dumb.

http://www.tbsradio.jp/dig/index.html

I also really like the JUNK series. It's comedy. This one is my favorite:

http://www.tbs.co.jp/radio/format/bakusho.html

I'm a big fan of Dig and JUNK, so I highly recommend these as well. Word of advice to the OP; while passive listening certainly doesn't help, make sure you actively listen at least for a bit each day. You gain a lot more from paying attention then you do from leaving it as background noise.

At what hours are you listening to radio? If you're in Europe and listening in the evenings after work/school then it's the middle of the night in Japan, so most stations don't have a lot of news or talk shows at that time. Having similar problem I've tried listening multiple stations and the best I've found so far on simulradio is: http://www.simulradio.jp/asx/kiryufm.asx Lots of talking and number of awful jpop hits is rather low.

@partner: TBS爆笑 is just awesome!! I remember them having a podcast on 大便先生 or so, if I recall correctly XD I didn't understand the context, though T-T

I like Dig a lot, too. It's pretty well varied in topic selection, so that helps a lot. TBS generally has a lot of good podcasts, and they don't play tricks with Japan-only availability. (Yay.)

If you *really* want to listen to JP radio, then invest in a good proxy server that's located there. Ideally, roll your own somewhere on something like Linode's Tokyo cluster. Linode isn't cheap, but that's because it isn't cheap, if you know what I mean. That would get you access to a lot of radio stations that won't broadcast their radio streams outside of Japan... like NHK. *facepalm*

Hak5 did a 5-episode tutorial on rolling your own proxy server/tunnel a few months back, around ep 1108, IIRC.

A JP proxy server has been on my to-do list for a while now, because I want some decent radio, too. I'm just too busy these days. -_-

NHK does release a radio news feed in Japanese, so you can keep up to date on what's going on, and it's pretty good. No proxy required. The 7 and 10 o'clock news are 44 and 57 minutes long on weekdays, so either one will give you a lot of stuff to listen to. The EN feed skips a lot of internal Japanese news-- it's sometimes worth listening to, and sometimes it will help you get a foothold on some of the stories in Japanese by telling you what's going on.

If you can find it, the first 2-3 seasons of "Tokyo Local" are a fun listen (before it turned into a beauty podcast and then disappeared from the net.) Search the forums to see if anyone has a zip file up somewhere.