Morning Song

“Radio Taiso” and morning exercises

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

From “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath.

A Balloon in Midair (1875) by Jules Tavernier

Quite early one morning, I got up in time to catch the flowers still slumbering:

The daisy sleeps upon the dewy lawn,

Not lifting yet the head that evening bowed. ¹

But unlike Dylan Thomas, I couldn’t say “the town was not yet awake,” ² because as I headed for one of the parks in my corner of Tokyo, I was able to see a singular display of coordinated human athletics.

It wasn’t one of the many baseball games that are eagerly pursued in the park’s baseball fields or the casual basketball sessions that thud along its pathways. Or even the regular morning runs organised by an insurance company.

It was a little too early for them.

No, at six thirty, I saw hundreds of people, many of them in their seventies or eighties, swinging their arms in unison. Some were in small groups, some large, but all were following the same routine, accompanied by music from a nearby radio.

It was time for Radio Taiso.

A group of people following Radio Taiso exercises in my local park (photo by me).

I’d seen this before. The radio programme has been on in its present form since the 1950s. Its origins go back further, to the late 1920s, when a similar routine was inspired in part by a programme created by insurers Metropolitan Life.

These days, the programme is introduced by a universally recognised theme tune. The basic set of exercises (there are others) lasts just 3 minutes, and the routine consists of 13 exercises. While the radio broadcast plays, I can picture the scene across Japan, millions of people flexing their knees at the same time.

Mostly I’ve seen older people following along. They take up position near someone’s radio to listen to the broadcast and form a momentarily cohesive group. It’s also a social occasion, as people cheerily greet each other before assembling in rough formation around the nearest set.

In the summer, younger children on vacation will join in and are sometimes rewarded by the local community group for completing a certain number of days. In the warmth of August mornings, the music literally beats out the rhythm of the start of the day across the country.

Some offices will follow the exercise (there are broadcasts later in the day), and the sight of construction workers doing these coordinated activities is a familiar sight to anyone who has spent some time living in Japan (and who gets up early). There’s also a TV programme and a version for those who are chair-bound and who follow along from home.

The original name for these exercises was national callisthenics. This term has an ancient history, though the exercises carried out during Radio Taiso are much more modest than those practised by ancient Greek warriors.

If different in content, in essence, it’s not different from doing aerobic workouts to music in a group. And seeing Radio Taiso in action rewinds time for me—to when I did similar exercises in the school gym. I would have been eleven or twelve, shod in flimsy black plimsolls, and we’d be forced, goose-pimpled in the unheated school gym, to step onto and off benches to perky, wholesome music of the kind radio DJs never played.

And as a nationally coordinated moment of physical movement, Radio Taiso also puts me in mind of Britain’s Music While You Work, which began as a way of spurring the production of armaments in wartime Britain and lasted well into the sixties.

That programme was aimed at the factories, though later it became popular with those at home and later with motorists. Strict rules applied: the music couldn’t be lethargic and needed to maintain a consistent volume and tempo and avoid sounds that could be confused with gunfire, like drumming. The tone had to be cheerful, something you could whistle to or sing along with.

Like Radio Taiso, MWYW had a theme tune, with a title that now seems almost quaint with its air of wartime socialism, Calling All Workers. It was composed by Eric Coates, one of the cheerleaders of light classical music in the UK.

While not unique, Radio Taiso still feels in some ways distinctively Japanese. Its formation of beneficial habits at an early age chimes with, for example, the practice of children being expected to clean their school.

Many adults can remember these movements throughout their lives. And I wonder if some listeners might find themselves automatically repeating the actions if they hear the music by chance. Some of the people I see doing the exercises may have first learnt them in the 1950s.

I confess I find it a moving sight, bodies fit, wobbly, or gracefully aged, all moving in unison in the early morning sun, doggedly following a routine that has helped them keep in shape well into later life, a stubborn hymn to the ancient notion of mens sana in corpore sano.

This kind of morning song is a long way from the poem by Sylvia Plath from which I took the epigraph and which gave the title to this post. After all, that poem is about caring for a newborn child. But the measured morning exercises of Radio Taiso seem to mirror the clockwork rhythm of the poem’s exquisite first line, quoted above.

The efficiency of the exercises of Radio Taiso reminds me of the methodical annual health checks that are mandated by law to be offered to employees in Japan.

It feels like part of the acceptance of the mechanical nature of our lives, an acknowledgement that we are part biological machine, set in motion like a clock as in Plath’s poem and then measured and monitored through the ticking of our hearts.

And Plath goes on to emphasise the anonymity and impersonal nature of the universe, where we are set in motion and sustained by forces we barely understand and certainly don’t control:

I’m no more your mother

Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind’s hand.

Plath’s beautiful poem ends with a description of the baby’s cries:

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

And as I hear the sound of the broadcast rise from a hundred radios in the park and watch the exercises of Radio Taiso coming to a close in the accelerating heat of the Tokyo morning, I imagine our collective breath billowing and inflating, like some giant hot air balloon.

I picture it rising skyward like some silvered blimp, lifting ever higher into the trembling upper air as it dances out our own joyous and communal effacement in the clouds.

1. From Morning Exercise (1832) by William Wordsworth.

Here’s a link to the poem Morning Song by Sylvia Plath.

2. Thomas’ radio broadcast Quite Early One Morning is as rhapsodic a hymn to the morning as you’ll ever hear.