These are the stories Japanese grandmothers actually tell. No plot armor, no moral sweetening, no Disney ending waiting in the wings. A peach splits open and a boy tumbles out fully formed. A princess arrives from the moon in a piece of bamboo. An old man's tears bring a dead tree back to life. The show moves through them with the patience of someone who has told these stories a hundred times and knows you need the silence between sentences to feel them sink in. Watch this if you want to understand what shapes a culture's bones, not its surface.

Traditional Japanese folktales, the kind parents and grandparents tell their children again and again, are retold in this long-running TV collection of 258 episodes. Each half-hour episode holds three standalone stories, some famous and some little known, that show both the bright and dark sides of life. You'll meet a boy born from a peach, a princess from the moon found inside bamboo, and an old man who can make a dead cherry tree bloom. These tales have carried moral lessons from one generation to the next. The program gives special attention to heartwarming stories from Tohoku, the northern region hit hard by the 2011 earthquake, and it aims to lift the spirits of the people affected and offer them hope.