Japan's Cartoon Network? Not exactly...
JOTX-DTV, branded as TV Tokyo (テレビ東京, Terebi Tōkyō) and often abbreviated as "Teleto" (テレ東, Teretō), a blend of "terebi" and "Tokyo", is one of Tokyo's smaller television stations, famous for their specialization in anime. They broadcast and/or co-produced many series that have become iconic in Western fandom, including Pokemon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, The Vision of Escaflowne, Trigun and Cowboy Bebop to name just a few.
JOTX-TV in Tokyo began broadcasting in 1964, originally known as "Science TV Tokyo Channel 12 Television,", then as "Tokyo 12 Channel" and finally as "TV Tokyo" beginning October 1, 1981. (The station broadcast on analog channel 12 until Japan's analog TV shutoff; it now broadcasts on UHF channel 23, or virtual channel 7.) Beginning as a non-commercial station offering instructional programs to schools a la America's National Educational Television (forerunner to PBS), it had some rough times in its early years, almost going bankrupt on one occasion. In the early '70s, it became a commercial, general-interest/entertainment station and, starting in 1982, the flagship station of the TXN network, which opened stations in Osaka (TV Osaka), Nagoya (TV Aichi), Okayama (TV Setouchi), Sapporo (TV Hokkaido) and Fukuoka (TVQ) between 1982 and 1991, later adding a satellite/cable station (AT-X) in 1997. Linked to economical newspaper Nikkei, it also focuses on more "alternative" content that isn't picked up by the other networks, including travel and business news and programs of interest to seniors.
Despite the enduring popularity of Pokemon (arguably TX's cash-cow anime franchise) and a few legitimate home runs over the years in the ratings department, the station has been a perennial also-ran in the Tokyo area for virtually its entire existence (even Evangelion received only mediocre ratings during its initial broadcast), and its news coverage tends to be shorter and less comprehensive than that of the competition. An example of the latter is its coverage of the assassination of former PM Shinzo Abe in 2022, which was limited to a few summary special reports while the other Tokyo stations went to nonstop commercial-free coverage. Even in covering the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the station was criticized heavily for starting nonstop coverage later, and ending it earlier, than the competition. As a result, there's a joke that TV Tokyo would still air its evening anime as usual even if the world were ending.
Was (in)famously also the new Japanese broadcaster of Sesame Street after non-comm network NHK dropped it, and was again heavily criticized for reworking the show into a fully Japanese-language production whereas NHK had aired the series in its original language as an English-teaching tool. It didn't last long, and Sesame hasn't been on the air in Japan since.
Some shows are produced by other TXN stations, especially TV Osaka and TV Aichi. Due to the network's small number of affiliates, many of its shows have historically been aired by affiliates of rival networks in smaller cities.
The station's mascot is a banana caricature named "Nanana," named after the station's virtual broadcast channel, 7 ("nana" meaning "seven" in Japanese).