Radio calisthenics
Exercise routines distributed by radio broadcast; primarily done in Asia
Radio calisthenics (ラジオ体操, rajio taisō; literally, "radio exercises") are warm-up calisthenics performed to music and guidance from radio broadcasts. Originating from the United States, they are popular in Japan and parts of China, North Korea and Taiwan.
United States
The idea for radio broadcast calisthenics came from "setting-up exercises" broadcast in US radio stations as early as 1923 in Boston (in WGI). The longest-lasting of these setting-up exercise broadcasts was sponsored by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (now MetLife), which sponsored the setting-up exercise broadcasts in WEAF in New York which premiered in April 1925. The MetLife-sponsored program—officially known as the Metropolitan Life Health Exercises but later known as the "Tower Health Exercises", after the tower where the exercises were broadcast from—was also broadcast in WCAP in Washington, D.C., and WEEI in Boston, among others.
Japan
In Japan, radio calisthenics are broadcast to music on public NHK radio and television early in the morning, and is a rare example of a sponsored program in the NHK (the sponsor being the Japan Post Insurance Co.). ラジオ体操 (Rajio taisō) were introduced to Japan in 1928 as a commemoration of the enthronement of Emperor Hirohito; an employee of the Japanese postal insurance division (predecessor to the Japan Post Insurance Co.)—originally dispatched to MetLife to study the insurance system in the US—found out about the Tower Health Exercises and immediately brought samples of the exercises from MetLife back to Japan. The exercises were widely used to improve the overall health of the Japanese soldiers both at home and abroad during the 1930s and 1940s. The exercises were introduced to several other pacific nations, including Taiwan, Hong Kong and Indonesia during Japan's colonization period.
After Japan's defeat in 1945, the broadcasts were banned by the occupying powers for being too militaristic in nature.
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This entry incorporates text from “Radio calisthenics” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.