2008 Japanese TV Olympic Theme Songs

Japanese TV stations love theme songs. Love 'em. If there's an event, they want a new song they can play to death and pound into your head until you have no choice but to use UltraGet to grab the youtube video of the song someone uploaded go to the video store and rent the CD single to copy to your hard drive and share with a few million anonymous friends whatever. You get the point.

The Olympics are being shown on NTV, TV Asahi, Fuji TV, TBS, TV Tokyo and NHK (General and BS-1). It can get a mite bit confusing as each station covers different events and sometimes NHK broadcasts the same events as the other stations. And every station has their own theme song. This year's line-up:

TBS SMAP - この瞬間 (Kono Toki)

(thanks to youtube user ULTRAMOOMIN)

NTV (日本テレビ) 嵐 - 風の向こうへ　(Arashi - Kaze no mukou e)

(thanks to youtube user johnnysmovix)

Fuji TV (フジテレビ) レミオロメン - もっと遠くへ (Remioromen - Motto tooku e)

(thanks to youtube user remio0000)

NHK Mr. Children - Gift

(thanks to youtube user kyuwheel)

TV Asahi テレビ朝日 福山雅治 - HIGHER STAGE (Fukuyama Masaharu)

(thanks to youtube user jakugi061)

Can't find the TV Tokyo theme song anywhere but it's Fly Away by Hiro of EXILE.

A quick word about the Beijing 2008 Olympics and Shunsuke Nagasaki 長崎峻侑 と 北京オリンピック

Since people (the two of them know who they are) have been coming here looking for information, I'd like to clear something up.

Unfortunately for SASUKE (Ninja Warrior) fans, Shunsuke Nagasaki (長崎峻侑) will not be in Beijing representing Japan. Japan's two men's trampoline spots went to Ueyama Yasuhiro 上山容弘 and Sotomura Tetsuya 外村哲也.

Ueyama and Sotomura are currently ranked 1st and 9th in the world respectively in the men's individual (Shunsuke is 18th) and together are ranked 1st in the men's synchro (there is only an individual competition in this year's Olympics).

G4 and TBS must have hyped Shunsuke up enough that people began to assume that he was automatically going to be competing in Beijing, thus the confusion.

Still, we should support the trampoline event because if it spreads in popularity the event can be increased to include the synchro event and give Shunsuke (and his coach, former SASUKE regular and Muscle Musical participant Nakata Daisuke 中田大輔) more chances to compete in future Olympic events.

The trampoline event (men's and women's) will be held between August 16th and 19th.

Links:
International Gymnastics Federation home page (find rankings and info there).
Broadcast schedule in Japan.
Broadcast schedule in the US.