Rule Requiring Tengo to Collect NHK Fees with His Father on Sundays

The Rule Requiring Tengo to Collect NHK Fees with His Father on Sundays governed Tengo’s childhood from before kindergarten until the end of his fifth year of primary school. More than a family chore, it made Sunday a day of compulsory labor: his father’s fixed schedule overrode illness, friendships, and the child’s own wishes, leaving Tengo with a dread that persisted into adulthood.

The weekly obligation

Every Sunday, Tengo’s father, an NHK fee collector, took him on his rounds. The routine began before Tengo entered kindergarten and continued without interruption until his fifth year of primary school, except on the rare Sundays when special school activities were scheduled. They rose at seven in the morning. His father carefully soaped Tengo’s face, checked his ears and fingernails, dressed him in clothes that were clean but not showy, and promised him a good meal afterward.

The father gave the child several reasons for bringing him. He did not want to leave Tengo alone while schools and childcare were closed; he wanted his son to see that their lives depended on work and hardship, a lesson consistent with his own history of laboring in the fields even on Sundays. But the arrangement also served a practical purpose: an adult collector accompanied by a young child found it harder for residents to refuse payment. The father therefore took Tengo to households especially reluctant to pay. Tengo understood that his presence was being used to make people yield, and found the role hateful and unbearable. Still, he learned to perform it intelligently, partly because pleasing his father meant being treated kindly that day.

A day without exceptions

The collection rounds lasted from morning until evening. At the door, Tengo stood with his father while he asked strangers for money; if a resident refused, the father might threaten, coax, or argue. They could be insulted and driven away. These encounters were not stories Tengo could comfortably share with his classmates, and the work made his Sundays unlike theirs in ways that were difficult to explain.

The rule was absolute. A cold, a persistent cough, a fever, a stomachache, or nausea did not excuse Tengo from going. He followed his father on unsteady legs and sometimes wished he would drop dead, imagining that this might finally make his father recognize how harshly he had treated him. But Tengo was physically sturdy; even feverish or nauseated, he never collapsed, lost consciousness, or cried on the long rounds. The obligation thus trained endurance without offering him any meaningful choice.

Social cost and lasting effects

When Tengo was in third grade, his classmates learned what his father did, perhaps after seeing them on their rounds. They began calling him “NHK.” Although he excelled academically and in gymnastics, and was respected by teachers, the work marked him as different from children in a school attended by white-collar families. He could not accept invitations to Sunday outings or gatherings. He understood that his father would not listen when he tried to explain that friends had invited him, and eventually his classmates stopped asking. Tengo recognized that he belonged to no group and was entirely alone.

The rounds also intruded on his sense of privacy. His father’s collection territory was in the city center, far from the suburban Ichikawa neighborhood where Tengo lived and from his school, so they did not normally visit classmates’ homes. Even so, when Tengo occasionally encountered a schoolmate in the busy streets, he hid behind his father rather than be seen. Sunday had become not simply a workday but a public exposure he wished to escape.

Narrative significance

As an adult, Tengo no longer experienced Sunday as the threat it had been in childhood, yet he could still wake on that day depressed, physically uncomfortable, or nauseated. The bodily aftereffects make clear that the rule outlasted its formal duration: a repeated schedule imposed in childhood remained lodged in his unconscious. Sunday, conventionally associated with rest, became for him its distorted opposite—a recurring reminder of coercion, instrumental use, and exclusion.

The rule also gives Tengo’s childhood solitude a concrete structure. His father’s stated lessons about work were bound to a collection practice that recruited a child’s appeal as leverage against strangers; the son was both the subject of discipline and part of the means by which it was enforced. What appeared to be a simple weekly routine therefore shaped Tengo’s relationship to authority, belonging, and his own body, while supplying the recurring Sunday dread that still shadows him as an adult.