BBC Japan was a television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

 channel from the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 available via satellite

Satellite television

Satellite television is television programming delivered by the means of communications satellite and received by an outdoor antenna, usually a parabolic mirror generally referred to as a satellite dish, and as far as household usage is concerned, a satellite receiver either in the form of an...

 in Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

. Similar in format to BBC Prime

BBC Prime

BBC Prime was the BBC's general entertainment TV channel in Europe and the Middle East from 30 January 1995 until 11 November 2009, when it was replaced by BBC Entertainment.-Launch:...

 (now BBC Entertainment

BBC Entertainment

BBC Entertainment is an international television channel showcasing comedy, drama, light entertainment and children's programming from the BBC and other UK production houses...

), BBC Japan showed such BBC programmes as Blackadder

Blackadder

Blackadder is the name that encompassed four series of a BBC1 historical sitcom, along with several one-off instalments. All television programme episodes starred Rowan Atkinson as anti-hero Edmund Blackadder and Tony Robinson as Blackadder's dogsbody, Baldrick...

and Fawlty Towers

Fawlty Towers

Fawlty Towers is a British sitcom produced by BBC Television and first broadcast on BBC2 in 1975. Twelve television program episodes were produced . The show was written by John Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth, both of whom played major characters...

, with many of them subtitle

Subtitle (captioning)

Subtitles are textual versions of the dialog in films and television programs, usually displayed at the bottom of the screen. They can either be a form of written translation of a dialog in a foreign language, or a written rendering of the dialog in the same language, with or without added...

d in Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

.

The channel launched on December 1, 2004 and was available over Sky PerfecTV! 110 and 4th MEDIA. It was shut down just 2 years later.

Closure

On 20 March 2006, the BBC announced that its distributor JMC "no longer has the financial means to honour its contractual commitments to distribute the BBC Japan channel". On 24 April 2006, the BBC confirmed that BBC Japan would cease broadcasting on 30 April 2006.