NHK World Radio 12

The directory lists six streams in Japan under this name, told apart by a number alone. This page is number twelve. Nothing here is taken from the other five.

NHK World Radio 12 sits in the tail of Japan's 88 entries. The tail is the part of a directory that goes missing first, and it is the part worth keeping: the head of every country's list is the same handful of national broadcasters, and everything that makes a dial local is behind them.

NHK World Radio 12 leads with international, a tag 15 other stations in Japan use and one the country hub lists among its headline genres. If the country's sound is what brought you here, this is squarely part of it.

The stream is 66 kbps where Japan's median is 128. Below the country's middle, which usually points at an older encoder or a deliberate choice to stay light, and matters far more for music than for talk.

This one is HLS, a segmented format rather than a single continuous stream. It is worth knowing because the failure is specific and fixable rather than a dead station: the address works, the browser just cannot open that shape of address unaided.

Its audio comes from master.nhkworld.jp. Six other stations in Japan stream from the same host, which is a smaller sharing than the big platforms and often means the same people run them all.