I didn’t find out until recently that the Shiga Prefectural government has finally created a YouTube account where they are posting videos. They should’ve done this a long time ago. The prefectural government’s Public Relations Dept. has the YouTube username of shigakoho. As far as I can tell, at least one of their vids is in English (embedded above). It’s about Lake Biwa, and it’s quite informative.

Another Internet TV channel is called Konbanwa Shiga (Good Evening Shiga), a local TV news program broadcast in Shiga Prefecture by the Biwako Broadcasting Co. (BBC) on Thursdays from 8:55 pm to 9 pm. Also rebroadcast on Saturdays from 6:35 pm to 6:40 pm. The 5-min. program is in Portuguese hosted by a Brazilian who works at Shiga Prefecture’s International Affairs Office.

They also upload each edition to YouTube in multiple languages. They have a separate YouTube channel for each language besides Portuguese (click on the link to go to the respective channel): English, Tagalog, Chinese, and Spanish. I’ve embedded one of their vids below. It is about an American well integrated in Hino town working to preserve and improve the town’s traditional architecture and townscape.

The problem with both the shigakoho and Konbanwa Shiga channels is that they fail to provide a description of each video uploaded. So you don’t know what the video is about unless you start watching it. This makes it impossible for us to decide which video we would be interested in. But at least they are doing something to reach out to us. Even for a 5-min. program, translating and narrating all that in multiple languages is a major undertaking. Hope it continues.