KIKU (channel 20) is an independent television station in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, which primarily airs Japanese and Filipino programming.

As part of a group affiliation agreement, KIKU converted to the home shopping network ShopHQ in June 2021, a switch met with outcry and dismay by Hawaii viewers.

[9] A station employee, Hideo Fujii, recalled that "older people in the Nikkei community would sit up straight in bed and weep" watching KIKU's programs.

This prompted general manager Joanne Ninomiya, who had run channel 13 since 1969,[13] to depart in January 1981; she then started her own company, JN Productions, to broadcast Japanese-language shows on cable.

[16] Ninomiya renewed her association with KHNL beginning in 1986, providing six hours of Japanese programs on Sundays as well as a daily newscast from Japan and subtitled sumo broadcasts.

For one of the principals, John A. Serrao, it was a return to Hawaii, as he had been general manager of KHVH-TV (channel 4) in the early 1960s when it was owned by Kaiser Broadcasting.

[23] ICN moved the station to new studios on Sand Island Access Road in 1991, built a new transmitter, and expanded its weekly broadcasting by 28 hours; more than half of the new airtime featured programming in Chinese.

The first move made with the change in management was the consolidation of the cable programming from JN Productions as well as KHNL's Japanese-language shows onto channel 20's schedule.

[27][28] KSCI and KIKU were sold in 2000 to a consortium of The Korea Times and private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners, known as AsianMedia Group.

[39] In January 2012, AsianMedia Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; the station, along with KSCI in Los Angeles and its San Diego repeater KUAN-LP, was sold to NRJ TV (a company unrelated to European broadcaster NRJ Radio) for $45 million in March 2012, in a transaction that included the assumption of AsianMedia Group's debt.

On December 9, 2019, WRNN-TV Associates announced it would purchase NRJ's TV stations;[43] the acquisition received FCC approval in January 2020 and was completed the next month.

[44][45] WRNN-TV Associates continued the Asian format until announcing in May 2021 that it would affiliate all of the stations it owned with ShopHQ, a home shopping network, on June 28.

For ShopHQ, this deal brought high-definition cable and satellite carriage on TV stations reaching more than 20 million homes in the major markets of New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Dallas–Fort Worth, San Francisco, Houston, Washington, and Boston.

[47] It also meant the closure of the KIKU studio in the Pacific Guardian Center, in part because ShopHQ programming did not include local advertising.

[42] Observers, including Ninomiya, noted that running a Japanese-language TV station carried with it significant costs for licensing programs and additional expenses and needed personnel skills to translate and subtitle them.

[35][49] While a variety of sources for Japanese- and Filipino-language programming, such as Nippon Golden Network, continued to be available, these were all pay services to which viewers may not have necessarily been able to subscribe.