About the studio
NHK Enterprises was founded April 1, 2005 as the commercial, for-profit content and licensing arm of Japan's public broadcaster NHK, itself established back in 1926. Based in Tokyo, NHK Enterprises handles production, licensing, and archive management for NHK-related content, including some of the anime that airs on NHK and NHK Educational. *A public broadcaster needing a separate for-profit subsidiary just to handle the business side of its own content is a very bureaucratically Japanese solution.* This is a genuinely distinct legal entity from NHK itself, worth noting since the two names get used somewhat interchangeably by casual viewers. Twenty years since its founding, NHK Enterprises exists as a reminder that even public broadcasting, funded partly through mandatory viewer fees, still needs a commercial arm to handle licensing and monetize its content properly.