KZOO or Kay-Zoo (1210 AM) is a

radio station Radio broadcasting is transmission of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radio ...

catering to the

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

community of

Honolulu, Hawaii Honolulu (; ) is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Hawaii, which is in the Pacific Ocean. It is an unincorporated county seat of the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, situated along the southeast coast of the island o ...

. The station plays news, talk shows, and

J-Pop J-pop ( ja, ジェイポップ, ''jeipoppu''; often stylized as J-POP; an abbreviated form of "Japanese popular music"), natively also known simply as , is the name for a form of popular music that entered the musical mainstream of Japan in the 1 ...

. It is owned by Polynesian Broadcasting, Inc. KZOO also retransmits on Oceanic Spectrum digital channel 888 for the entire state of Hawaii. KZOO has been broadcasting continuously in Japanese since the station signed on October 18, 1963. It was not the first Japanese-language station in Honolulu (competitor KOHO/1170 signed on in 1959), but it is the only one still on the air today.

History

The station has been owned by Polynesian Broadcasting since 1967, when businessman Noboru Furuya took over KZOO's operations. Furuya's son David and his wife Robyn took over management of the station in the mid-1990s when Furuya's health began to decline. Noboru Furuya died in 2002 at the age of 82; David and Robyn Furuya (now the president and vice-president, respectively, of Polynesian Broadcasting) continue to run KZOO today. Though most of their programs are broadcast from their offices at the

Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii The Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii (JCCH, ja, ハワイ日本文化センター, ''Hawai Nihon Bunka Sentā'') is a cultural center and history museum in Moiliili, Hawaii that focuses on the Japanese-American experience in Hawaii, especially ...

, in 2011 KZOO began broadcasting special interviews from a studio in the

Shirokiya was a chain of department stores and other retail establishments founded in Japan and later located in Honolulu under the ownership of Shirokiya Holdings, LLC, a United States-based corporation. The company's last location closed in 2020. Compan ...

in Ala Moana Shopping Center.

Programming

KZOO's programs include news, talk shows, and Japanese music. Most of it is original programming, but some of the talk shows are from Japan. Many of KZOO's current on-air staff have been with the station for decades, including Keiko Ura, host of an

Okinawan language The Okinawan language (, , , ) or Central Okinawan, is a Northern Ryukyuan languages, Ryukyuan language spoken primarily in the southern half of the Okinawa Island, island of Okinawa, as well as in the surrounding islands of Kerama Islands, Ker ...

show on Sundays, who joined the station in early 1964; Maki Norris, one of the hosts of a popular daily talk show called "Moshi-Moshi Time," who has worked at KZOO since 1976; and Harumi "Danny" Oshita. KZOO has a history of sponsoring Japanese speech (''Nihongo Hanashikata Taikai'', started by announcer Keiko Ura in 1965) and nodojiman and

karaoke Karaoke (; ; , clipped compound of Japanese ''kara'' "empty" and ''ōkesutora'' "orchestra") is a type of interactive entertainment usually offered in clubs and bars, where people sing along to recorded music using a microphone. The music is ...

song contests in Honolulu, with winners going on to represent Hawaii at contests in Japan. The station's broadcast day also includes simulcasts of programs from Japan as well as local talk and advice shows on a variety of topics, from health to the law.

Disaster relief

When KZOO was knocked off the air by the

2006 Kiholo Bay earthquake The 2006 Kīholo Bay earthquake occurred on October 15 at with a magnitude of 6.7 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (''Severe''). The shock was centered southwest of Puakō and north of Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, just offshore of the Kona ...

, the station's assistant general manager, Kaoru Ekimoto, contacted English-language

adult contemporary Adult contemporary music (AC) is a form of radio-played popular music, ranging from 1960s vocal and 1970s soft rock music to predominantly ballad-heavy music of the present day, with varying degrees of easy listening, pop, soul, R&B, quie ...

music station KSSK, who put her on the air with disaster relief information in Japanese; the station also set up a hotline to answer listener questions. The station later added a backup generator for its transmitter.

References

External links

FCC History Cards for KZOO
* {{coord, 21, 17, 41, N, 157, 51, 49, W, type:landmark_region:US_source:FCC, display=title

ZOO A zoo (short for zoological garden; also called an animal park or menagerie) is a facility in which animals are kept within enclosures for public exhibition and often bred for Conservation biology, conservation purposes. The term ''zoological g ...

Radio stations established in 1963 Japanese-American culture in Honolulu

Japanese-language mass media in the United States 1963 establishments in Hawaii Japanese-language radio stations