NHK's Silk Road and Kitaro

Late October 1978, a bullet train heading for Kyoto. Deng Xiaoping, then China's vice premier, was on a state visit to Japan, and in his private carriage sat an NHK director named Hajime Suzuki. He had one thing to ask: could NHK film the Silk Road? He put the request through Deng's secretary. On New Year's Eve that year, word reached NHK that the answer was yes. That is how NHK's own archive tells it.

Seven years in the making

It had started in September 1972. Suzuki went to Beijing to cover Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka's visit, and when he got back he wrote a proposal called "The Adventures of Marco Polo". It became the blueprint for The Silk Road. The head of broadcasting, Yoshio Hori, led the negotiations with the Chinese government and CCTV. This was still the Cultural Revolution. No foreign television camera had ever been let onto the Silk Road, and permission did not come.

The door opened only after China turned to reform. The New Year's Eve permission was followed by a joint filming agreement with CCTV, and the project became NHK's first large international co-production. On 28 August 1979 an NHK camera was pointed for the first time into the pits of the Terracotta Army at Xi'an. Suzuki wrote that day that seven years on, he was standing at last in Chang'an, where the Silk Road begins.

The records that came out of the series are covered in the Silk Road review, along with Kitaro's demand that the programme go out in stereo. This piece is about the other side: the television.

Three crews, 450,000 feet

The crew was split into three teams of three. The route was divided into thirds, and each team spent five to six months on its section. They crossed the Yellow River, went through Dunhuang with its cave temples and on into Xinjiang, across the Taklamakan, over the Tian Shan and up to the Pamirs. Getting there took a year and a half. By the end they had 450,000 feet of film, and it was cut into twelve monthly programmes.

The series ran in the NHK Special slot on NHK's main channel: 8pm on the first Monday of each month, 49 minutes an episode. It opened on 7 April 1980 with "Distant Chang'an" and closed on 2 March 1981 with "Crossroads of Peoples: From Kashgar to the Pamirs". In between came episodes such as "Dunhuang", "Digging the Kingdom of Loulan" and "A Musical Journey on the Southern Tian Shan Road". Writers travelled with the crews and appeared on screen, among them Chin Shunshin, Yasushi Inoue and Ryotaro Shiba.

The special was an audition

Kitaro's first job was not the series itself. On 7 January 1980 NHK aired a New Year special called "Flying the Silk Road", and he scored that first. In notes for a reissue of the soundtrack he said the special was also a test on NHK's part. He wrote 17 new pieces for it, and most of the Silk Road themes came out of that session, the main theme, "Bell Tower", "Westbound" and "Everlasting Road" among them.

He found out what had really been going on much later. In a 2025 interview Kitaro recalled a conversation with the NHK producer Isao Tamai. "That broadcast was your audition." If the special had drawn a poor audience, he would have been let go. It did well, and he stayed on for the whole year of episodes.

The work ran backwards from the way you might expect. As each crew came home and finished editing, the footage for the next episode went straight to Kitaro. He said he had no days off. All he had was picture. The music went on first, and Koji Ishizaka recorded the narration afterwards. In Kitaro's telling, Ishizaka listened to where the music rose and fell and placed his words to match. The theme was written in Kamakura; nearly everything else came out of his house in Nagano. For the first part alone he wrote 180 pieces.

It was not all smooth. Kitaro said he argued with people at NHK about what programme music was for. To them it was an accessory to the programme, something that could just as well be sound effects.

How each episode began

Every episode opened the same way. NHK's archive describes it: Kitaro's synthesizer theme, a camel treading the desert sand, the bell on its neck swinging, a caravan crossing endless dunes with the sun going down behind it. Then the titles, and then Ishizaka's first words. The Silk Road begins in Chang'an. Go west and you reach Persia and Rome. And the Silk Road ends in Chang'an.

Twenty per cent, then on to Rome

The ratings held at around 20 per cent an episode. One newspaper ran a piece asking whether people would watch the Giants game or the Silk Road. The prizes followed. Episode five, "Digging the Kingdom of Loulan", won an excellence award at the 1980 Arts Festival of the Agency for Cultural Affairs. The 28th Kikuchi Kan Prize went to Yasushi Inoue and the NHK Silk Road crew. Kitaro received a commendation at the 18th Galaxy Awards for the music. Ryotaro Shiba called the series the most fruitful Sino-Japanese cultural exchange since the war.

Viewers wanted more. According to NHK's archive, the message was that the Silk Road does not stop in China; it runs all the way to Rome. From April to September 1981, NHK aired Another Silk Road, 24 half-hour programmes recut by theme from the first series' footage. Then, from April 1983 to September 1984, came the 18 episodes of Part 2, The Road to Rome. The crews went through what was then the Soviet Union, India, Iran and Iraq, and reached Rome. Ishizaka narrated, and the music was Kitaro's again. In all, he said, he scored the series for six years. Part 3, The Maritime Silk Road, begun in 1988, had music by someone else.

Abroad

NHK says the series was shown in 38 countries in Asia and Europe. In his 2025 interview Kitaro said the narration was replaced with English or the local language, but the music was always left as it was. According to English Wikipedia, the first English version of Part 1 was narrated by the Australian presenter Graham Webster and released on VHS by Central Park Media in 1990. In 1991 a new English version, narrated by the journalist Takashi Oka, aired on the Monitor Channel in the United States. In Britain, Sound On Sound's May 1989 interview with Kitaro noted that part of the series had been shown on Channel 4 the year before.

The music travelled with it. NHK puts soundtrack sales at seven million records and CDs at home and abroad, alongside 3 million copies of 18 books on the making of the series and 660,000 of a ten-volume photo set.

Twenty-five years later

In 2005, for NHK's 80th anniversary, Part 1 was digitally remastered. The same year NHK broadcast The New Silk Road, shot in high definition, which went back to people and places from the 1980 series. This time the music was by Yo-Yo Ma. In September 2025 Kitaro marked the 45th anniversary with a remastered collection, Best of Silkroad.

How to listen

• Before you play the first soundtrack album, picture the opening: the camel bell, the caravan against the sun, the theme.
• Volume one is the music for the Chang'an, Hexi Corridor and Dunhuang episodes. Played in order, it follows the crews west.
• Remember there was no voice yet when this was written. Kitaro scored the picture before Ishizaka said a word.

The one track to send a friend

Send the main theme, a little over 4 minutes. Then tell them this: the bones of it were written three months before the series started, for a New Year special. That special was an audition for the composer, and the composer did not find out until years later.

Where to get it

The series itself is on the digitally remastered DVD set NHK Enterprises released in 2005. The music first appeared on the first soundtrack album from Canyon in 1980, and in the West Silk Road Suite, which combines volumes one and two, has come out on several labels. The theme starts, the camel bell swings, and behind the caravan the sun goes down.

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