Popularizing Japanese TV: The Cultural, Economic, and Emotional Dimensions of Infotainment Discourse 9781138680609, 9781315563992

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
A note on the text
Prelude
Introduction
Infotainment discourse: cultural, intimate, commodified
Infotainment in the Japanese context
Why study wideshows at all?
On the current study
On the book
Notes
Bibliography
1 “No TV. Nolife!”: The centrality of television and infotainment in contemporary Japan
Introduction
On infotainment and tabloidization
The infotainment debate in media studies
The wideshow: A televisual hybrid
Notes
Bibliography
2 Backstage tales: Infotainment under construction
Introduction
The fieldwork: what lies behind the screen
Participant observations
Thematic interviews
History of the programme and the broadcast content
Production strategies
Target audience
The TV stations and the programmes
The fieldwork in MTV
About the TV station
About the programme
About the production members
About the informants
About the production studio
The fieldwork in NHK-Sendai
About the TV station
About the programme
About the production members
About the informants
About the production studios
The fieldwork in NTV
About the TV station
About the programme
About the production members
About the informants
About the production studios
Gender inequality screened
Notes
Bibliography
3 Television for sale by owner: The political economy of infotainment
Introduction
MTV and the economics of local infotainment
Corner-ing the audience
Invisible hand of televised sponsor
Hometown for sale
Infomercials and “mutual benefit”
NTV and the economics of nationwide infotainment
Blurring boundaries
Idols, consumption, and the “pressure point” of the audience
The producer’s task: Predicting the unpredictable
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
4 Infotainment, intimacy, and crafting a televisual uchi
Introduction
On uchi and soto
Local boundaries of uchi
From coastland to the mountains: uchi as the hometown
Emotional boundaries of uchi
Loosening ties, shifting images
Carefully crafted spontaneity
Post-produced reality
Infotainment and public broadcasting
Between tanoshi and tadashi: the thin line in between
Linguistic wrapping
Spatial and bodily wrapping
National boundaries of uchi
Infotainment as a supra-genre
Domestic problems, nationwide solutions
Tarento: stars on earth
Inscribing the emotions
Intimization of the screen
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
5 Discussion, implications, conclusions
Commodification of televisual knowledge
Bargaining the “home”
Tabloid tales
Towards an infotainment society?
Tuning the televisual uchi and the discourse of intimacy
The supra-discourse of uchi
The geographic borders of uchi
Boundary negotiations
Intimacy and “ordinary” members of the televisual uchi
Vanishing borders, hybridized contents
Domesticating the screen
Television, intimacy, and cultural context
Final thoughts and future research
Notes
Bibliography
Glossary
Index

Citation preview

 i

Popularizing Japanese TV

Over the past years, the view has emerged that Japanese TV is dominated by an infotainment mode of discourse. The book extends this view, detailing and interpreting the cultural, economic, and emotional dimensions of this communication phenomenon from an ethnographic perspective. It examines the complex ways in which infotainment works in an advanced capitalist society. As such, this is more than a book about Japan; it is a work that fits within media ethnography and cultural studies, and appeals to readers interested in the question of how television, at the heart of the global media stream, successfully turns into a persuasive, intimate, and powerful member of a televisual audience-​family through carefully engineered televisual discourses, linguistic/​non-​linguistic components, audiovisual strategies, and economic and cultural elements. Drawing on ethnographic observations in TV stations in two major cities, Sendai and Tokyo, the book reveals several essential components embedded within infotainment discourse. Thus, this book not only provides a panoramic picture of a core phenomenon in Japanese broadcasting since the 2000s but also discusses how both cultural discourses and economic considerations influence contemporary television broadcasting. Hakan Ergül is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Hacettepe University, Ankara. He received his MA from Anadolu University, Turkey, and his PhD from the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Tohoku University, Japan. Between 2013 and 2018 he lived in Rabat, Morocco, where he taught at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University and worked as a communication expert for UNHCR Morocco. Currently he lives in Belgrade, Serbia. He has teaching and fieldwork experience in the areas of media ethnography, media and vulnerable groups, everyday life studies, Turkish and Japanese television, and has published books and articles pertaining to these fields.

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Cultural Discourse Studies Series Series Editor: Shi-​xu, Centre for Contemporary Chinese Discourse Studies, Zhejiang University

A cultural-​innovation-​seeking platform in discourse and communication studies, the Cultural Discourse Studies Series aims to deconstruct ethnocentrism in the discipline, develop culturally conscious and critical approaches to human discourses, and facilitate multicultural dialogue and debate in favour of research creativity.

1

Discourses of the Developing World Researching Properties, Problems and Potentials of the Developing World Shi-​xu, Kwesi Kwaa Prah and María Laura Pardo

2

Israeli Discourse and the West Bank Dialectics of Normalization and Estrangement Elie Friedman and Dalia Gavriely-​Nuri

3

Political Discourse as Dialogue A Latin American Perspective Adriana Bolívar

4

Discourse and Mental Health Voice, Inequality and Resistance in Medical Settings Juan Eduardo Bonnin

5

Popularizing Japanese TV The Cultural, Economic, and Emotional Dimensions of Infotainment Discourse Hakan Ergül

For more information about this series, please visit https://​www.routledge.com/ ​Cultural-​Discourse-​Studies-​Series/​book-​series/​CDSS

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Popularizing Japanese TV

The Cultural, Economic, and Emotional Dimensions of Infotainment Discourse Hakan Ergül

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First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Hakan Ergül The right of Hakan Ergül to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 9781138680609 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315563992 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Out of House Publishing

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To Gaia and Regina. The magic lanterns.

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Contents

List of figures  Series foreword  Acknowledgements  A note on the text  Prelude  Introduction 

viii ix xi xiii xiv 1

1 “No TV. No life!”: the centrality of television and infotainment in contemporary Japan 

17

2 Backstage tales: infotainment under construction 

37

3 Television for sale by owner: the political economy of infotainment 

69

4 Infotainment, intimacy, and crafting a televisual uchi 

87

5 Discussion, implications, conclusions  Glossary  Index 

139 158 162

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Figures

3.1 A large group of young fans showing their admiration of the idols inside the studio 4.1 Every August, Sendai city is decorated by gigantic, colourful sasakazari

81 106

 ix

Series foreword

As globalization deepens into the new millennium, human cultures have not become less, but more, divided. On the one hand, America continues to dominate the international order  –​politically, economically, militarily and in many other respects as well. On the other hand, most developing nations remain underprivileged, excluded or else alienated and they feel compelled to change the current unfair global system and aspire to re-​discover, and where necessary, re-​invent, their own voices and identities and to re-​claim their own rights. To make matters worse, the American-​led West-​centrism and consequently the plight of the rest of world have more often than not been smoothed over. At the same time, as multiculturalism spreads across the globe, the human destiny has not become less, but more, shared, however. Cultural diversification, the Internet and border-​crossing have advanced human interaction, information flow and above all socio-​economic development. Along with these, too, however, come for mankind all kinds of risks and threats, seen or unexpected. In this one and the same world, peoples’ interests in well-​being become ever more interconnected, intertwined and interpenetrated. And yet the commonality of human destination is far too often obscured or simply forgotten. Current mainstream discourse and communication studies, despite its theoretical and methodological achievements and beyond, have not been fully conscious and competent to take up common cultural challenges alluded to above. Westcentric and binary in the main, it has too often ignored the cultural complexity, competition and commonality of human discourses and as a consequence has not only become an academic monologue in itself but also overshadowed culturally alternative approaches. It is with issues such as these that the Routledge Cultural Discourse Studies Series concerns itself and endeavours to bring them to the centre stage of discourse and communication research, with a view to forging a culturally conscious, critical and creative form of discourse and communication scholarship. At the meta-​theoretical level, this series forays into: (a) how we as academics are to combat West-​centrism in society and scholarship, (b) how we are to enable and enhance cultural coexistence, harmony and prosperity, and (c) how we are to identify, characterize, explain, interpret and appraise culturally divergent, productive or competing discourses –​not only of familiar, privileged and dominant societies,

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x  Series foreword but especially of less known, marginalized or otherwise disadvantaged communities. There are a few theoretical, methodological and topical characteristics of the series that are worthy of mention here, too. Firstly, it abolishes the conventional and common binary notions of “text” and “context”, “discourse” and “society”, “representation” and “reality”, the “micro” and the “macro”, and re-​unifies them into one of an all-​encompassing and dialectic whole. In this way, human discourse becomes multi-​faced but integrated communicative event (or a class thereof named activity) in which people accomplish social interaction through linguistic and other symbolic means and mediums in particular historical and cultural relations and moreover is recognized and highlighted as cultural in nature –​ cultural in the sense that human discourses are not simply differentiated, but diversified and, very importantly, divided. Secondly, it is culturally grounded and continuously self-​reflexive, its perspectives dialectic and multiple, its data diversified and historical and its conclusions dialogical and temporary. Thirdly, the series has set upon itself the cultural-​political tasks of exposing, deconstructing and neutralizing ethnocentrism on the one hand and developing, practicing and advocating locally grounded and globally minded principles and strategies of communication research on the other hand. In sum, this series publishes works that cross linguistic, disciplinary and cultural boundaries and examines social and cultural issues in communication that are of local and global significance. It aspires to be culturally pluralist, whether in authorship, in publication content or in approaches. A cultural-​creativity-​seeking platform in discourse and communication studies, to be sure, the Routledge Cultural Discourse Studies Series will continue to deconstruct ethnocentrism in the discipline, develop and practice culturally conscious and critical approaches to human discourses, and propel intercultural-​intellectual dialogue and debate in favour of research innovation and advancement. Ultimately, it aims to contribute to human cultural coexistence, harmony and prosperity.

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Acknowledgements

There are so many people who were crucially important for this book. I would like to take this opportunity to look back and acknowledge the following individuals and institutions, for without their generous support, patience, and encouragement, this book would not have been possible. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my mentors and colleagues at the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies at Tohoku University. First and foremost, I am grateful to Todd Holden, my former adviser, who supported and challenged me to do the best possible work during the course of my fieldwork. Yukino Satō, Hiroshi Yamashita, Tsugune Tanaka, Michio Suzuki, and Okada Takeshi: I am truly appreciative of my mentors’ wise counsel and generous support. To everyone who participated in our weekly seminars and offered me their feedback and comments, I am grateful. I must thank Rie (Itō), dear friend, for her valuable contributions and her patience in editing my Japanese writing. It is a particular pleasure to thank Miki Kawabata from Mejiro University, who has answered my endless queries and given me the benefit of her advice and suggestions. I  am grateful to Mark Selden, of Cornell University, for encouraging and advising me about the book idea. I also wish to thank other colleagues who have helped me track down references and obscure sources, or discussed my fieldwork with me:  Ishita Saeko of Osaka City University and Andrew Painter of Kobe-​Yamate University. I am grateful to the Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ) community, for affording me the opportunity to present some of my ideas in such a brilliant academic community. I am also grateful to IAMCR (International Association of Media and Communication Research), who awarded me a grant to deliver the preliminary findings of my fieldwork at the Taipei conference. I extend my special thanks to the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) for awarding me their generous Monbusho scholarship during my research stay in Japan, which made it possible for me to concentrate on and complete my doctoral studies at Tohoku University. To Hacettepe University, Turkey, and the head of my department, Suavi Aydın, I  extend my warm appreciation for their exceptional support during my years abroad. I would like to thank Shi-​xu, from Hangzhou Normal University, China, General Editor of the Cultural Discourse Studies series, who encouraged me to

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xii Acknowledgements submit this work to the publisher. I am grateful to the reviewers, whose sharp insights and valuable suggestions were exceedingly helpful. I  hope that I  have been able to take on board their suggestions in this final manuscript. I thank Katie Peace, Samantha Phua, Leigh Westerfield, and all the team at Routledge, for their editorial attention, professionalism, and patience. Many thanks to Jerry Spring, my language editor, for his valuable feedback and dedicated and excellent work: I have been very lucky to work with him. I owe much gratitude to my interview partners, producers, announcers, newscasters, hosts, managers, and other members of the production team in front of and behind the cameras at MTV, NHK-​Sendai, and NTV studios. They graciously offered continued support throughout the course of this research. Carmen, a friend from Honduras, lent me her famous small TV set, which allowed the entire story begin: Thank you. My mother, Şehriban; my father, Vahdi; my brother, Rıza: Without my parent’s undying support and love I felt from continents away, I would not have been able to reach the end of my long and demanding journey in Japan. A last note of thanks to my wife, Regina, and my daughter, Gaia: my sources of light and inspiration. Regina has always been there to strengthen my confidence and give me wisdom, love, and peace, which provided me with the enthusiasm and energy I  needed to work on this volume. My little daughter, Gaia, added colour, melody, and much-​needed distractions to my working hours. I  would not be here writing this acknowledgement if it were not for their support. Since I can’t thank them enough, I hope this book can convey my thankfulness.

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A note on the text

Throughout the study, Japanese long vowels are indicated by macrons, as ā, ē, ī, ō, ū. However, as customary, familiar names like Tokyo or Osaka have been rendered without macrons. In quotations, I preserve the author’s original terms and spellings. Following convention, Japanese names are given in Japanese order, which is to say family name preceding given name, except in the cases of authors writing in English who choose to reverse the order. The titles of the TV programs included in this study (e.g. OH! Ban desu, THE Waido) are written as they are used in the actual programs. Translations from Japanese to English in this study are mine; hence, any errors in translation are my own.

xiv

Prelude

Over the past years, the view has emerged that Japanese TV is dominated by an infotainment mode of discourse (e.g. Kirsch 2014; Taniguchi 2007; Thussu 2007; Holden and Ergül 2006; Ergül 2004a, 2004b; Ishita 2002; Kawabata 2002). In this book, I extend this view, detailing and interpreting the cultural, emotional, and political-​economic dimensions of this communication phenomenon from an ethnographic perspective. Although this book focuses on wideshows –​a multi-​ purpose news, opinion, variety, and talk show that is a major part of daily Japanese TV, it also works at a higher level of conceptualization. Specifically, it interprets the complex ways in which dominant forms of televisual discourse work via commodified content in an advanced capitalist society. As such, this is more than a book about Japan; it is a work that fits within media ethnography, cultural and discourse studies, and appeals to readers interested in the question of how television, at the heart of the global media stream, successfully turns into a persuasive, intimate, local, and national member of a televisual audience-​family through carefully engineered televisual discourses, linguistic strategies, and economic and cultural elements, some of which extend back to the pre-​television era. Drawing on my ethnographic observations between 2001 and 2006 in three TV stations in two major cities, Sendai and Tokyo, and the recent literature on Japanese televisual environment, I  suggest that in Japanese TV broadcasting, infotainment (a style of packaging and knowledge delivery) forms a distinctive mode of communication, a televisual discourse that functions via a range of broadcasting strategies. This book posits that infotainment is not a unidimensional phenomenon as previous studies have suggested. Instead, it is a complex phenomenon, comprised of a combination of cultural discourses, human units, visual, emotional, and political-​ economic elements, carefully engineered and delivered via the country’s most powerful medium  –​television. This multifaceted approach sets this work apart from much of the previous literature in media sociology. What we observe with Japanese infotainment is more than simply the erasure of border(s) between or the hybridization of the new style of content (i.e. infotainment or tabloid content), on the one hand, and news programmes, on the other. As I demonstrate throughout the book, Japanese infotainment spans traditional genre boundaries, intentionally exploiting some idiosyncratic elements of

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Prelude xv Japanese culture and society. Working through rhetorical, discursive, cultural, and highly commercialized methods, it constructs an atmosphere, an inner-​space, which enables audiences to feel “at home” (as part of a televisual uchi –​or, in effect, subsumed within an emotional-​ physical inner space that is consistent with prior acculturation). To show this, I peer behind the screen, interrogating the Japanese wideshow (ワイドショー), a culturally unique televisual content. Introduced more than fifty years ago, the wideshow is one of the most developed forms of Japanese infotainment. By accessing both local and national television studios, and utilizing multiple methods, I  reveal several essential components embedded within infotainment discourse. Thus, this book not only provides a panoramic picture of a core phenomenon in Japanese broadcasting since the 2000s but also discusses how both cultural discourses and economic considerations influence television broadcasting at two scales: the micro (i.e. in-​studio, at a site of production) and the macro (i.e. political-​economic and socio-​emotive dimensions).

Bibliography Ergül, H. (2004a). “The Infotainment Phenomenon:  A Synchronic/​ Diachronic and Political Economic Approach”. Journal of International Cultural Studies, 11: 217–​234. –​–​–​. (2004b). “Televisual Discourses ‘Under Construction’: Unveiling What Lies behind the Screen”. Paper presented at the 5th International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, 25–​28 June, University of Illinois, Urbana-​Champaign. Holden, T., and Ergül, H. (2006). “Japan’s Televisual Discourses: Infotainment, Intimacy, and the Construction of a Collective Uchi”. In:  T. Holden and T. J. Scrase (eds.), Medi@sia: Global Communication In and Out of Cultural Context. London: Routledge, pp. 105–​127. Ishita, S. (2002). “The Production of ‘the National’ Celebrity:  Wide-​show in Japanese Television”. Paper presented at the 5th Asia Pacific Sociological Association Conference, 5 July, Brisbane, Australia. Kawabata, M. (2002). “Examining Tabloidization of TV News Programs in Japan:  Are They Entertainment, Information or News?” Paper presented at the Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ) Fall Meeting, 2 November, Sophia University, Tokyo. Kirsch, G. (2014). “Next-​Door Divas: Japanese Tarento, Television and Consumption”. Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 6 (1): 74–​88. Taniguchi, M. (2007). “Changing Media, Changing Politics in Japan”. Japanese Journal of Political Science, 8 (1): 147–​166. Thussu, D. K. (2007). News as Entertainment:  The Rise of Global Infotainment. London: Sage.

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 1

Introduction

It is probably redundant for me to state that television is of the utmost importance here because it lies at the heart of this study, as this ought to be inferable from the title. Yet, even though this is one level at which most potential readers may read this work, there is in fact a more profound level that they would be missing that I am about to explain. The medium that I am referring to here is, first, far from abstract or conceptual, and has nothing to do with the one named in the title. Instead, it is my second-​hand, mono TV set –​without a satellite tuner or remote control –​that I borrowed from a friend on arriving in Japan. Indeed, it would not be exaggerating much to say that the entire process of the fieldwork that lies at the heart of this book started with turning that small-​screen TV on more than a decade ago in my tiny room in the Japanese city of Sendai. However, a little background information would be helpful to explain what I mean by this. In 2001, I moved to Japan as a researcher on a Japanese education ministry scholarship. Before travelling to the “Far East”,1 I had diverse and often contradictory images of Japan in my mind. It was a fuzzy picture comprising academic literature, piles of articles, clippings, conference papers, novels, and several manga volumes on my shelves, on the one hand, and the global media’s (mostly stereotypical) audiovisual representations, on the other. Fortunately, the fieldwork I would be conducting was more precise, with specific objectives and relatively clear-​cut borders. In my previous study, I had explored the acceleration of tabloid content in news reports on Turkish commercial TV channels (Ergül 2000), and my aim was to approach a similar question in Japan. My study area was something like infotainment (a form of packaging and knowledge delivery) in Japanese TV broadcasting. I approached this research with a list of those genres considered as infotainment and those that are not. I also brought with me other commonly used concepts in Western media studies, such as popularization, tabloidization, and trivialization of news content. Drawing on these ideas borrowed from traditional media sociology (particularly that emanating from Western Europe), I thought I could use the term “infotainment” to refer to certain genres, such as quiz programmes, documentaries, sports programmes, competitions, talk shows, how-​ to programmes, or, more recently, news/​ current affairs programmes. However, that was before I turned on my TV in Japan.

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2 Introduction As soon as I started watching the programmes appearing one after the other, it did not take me long to figure out that the considerable amount of broadcast content in Japan that obviously included the two indispensable components of infotainment (namely information and entertainment) could not be classified within the conventional genre rubrics of Western media.2 These include shows we might label info-​variety shows (jōhō-​baraetī), wideshows (waidoshō), information/​factual programmes (hōdō bangumi), and info-​wideshows (jōhō-​waidoshō). In short, a variety of Japanese TV genres did not appear to possess distinctive boundaries. This unique feature of Japanese TV broadcasting certainly paralysed my early efforts to draft a research proposal, and prompted me to reconsider most of the taken-​for-​granted conceptualizations that I  had encountered in Western media studies, as well as my methodological approach to the field. However, it was this very distinction between the two regions’ broadcasting practices, particularly the prominent, inquisitive feature of Japanese TV, which further provoked my academic interest in Japanese television broadcasting and its culturally crafted, indispensable component of infotainment. I therefore argue here that the distinctive characteristic of Japanese television touched on above is not limited to  –​and cannot be reduced to  –​the simple conceptual mismatch between what has been defined by traditional communication studies (as developed so far in generally Western contexts) and what is out there on display (in the real world here in Japan). Instead, as I demonstrate in the following chapters, it mirrors a wider phenomenon, which has more to do with different ontologies than a simple distinction between terminologies, and has obviously more to do with cultural particularities than conceptual uniformities. In other words, what I  first observed on display is more than simply the occurrence of “disappearing border(s)” (see Turner 2001; Feuer 1992) between entertainment or tabloid content, on the one hand, and more “serious” news/​ information content, on the other (Thussu 2007:  8; Kawabata 2002; Bruck 1992). Rather, I suggest that, in Japanese TV broadcasting, infotainment forms a distinctive mode of communication that functions through well-​crafted, carefully engineered broadcast strategies. It is more extensive not only in its broadcast content itself but also in its audiences.

Infotainment discourse: cultural, intimate, commodified More than a genre, Japanese infotainment works as a televisual discourse, transgressing traditional genre boundaries to create an intimate, familial communication with television consumers. My use of the term “discourse” here corresponds with that of Shi-​xu, Kwesi Kwaa Prah, and Marìa Laura Pardo (2016), who describe the term as “social events or activities in which people communicate through linguistic and non-​linguistic means with one another in given historical and cultural context” (p.  49). Television, then, is a perfect example of a “channel of discourse” (Allen 1992), or a cultural form of communication built on intersections of habits of thinking, philosophies, histories, and cultures

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Introduction 3 that successfully exploits both linguistic and non-​linguistic resources to engender an intimate communication with its audience. Functioning through cultural norms and values, infotainment engenders a “nexus of discourses” (Fairclough 2006:  148) around which a number of cultural, professional, and highly commercialized nodal discourses cluster, thereby constructing an atmosphere, an inner space, to enable the audience to feel “at home” (uchi, 内). This perspective on the televisual realm inevitably brings us to the significance of “the cultural” in understanding Japanese TV and its unique televisual discourse  –​infotainment. In fact, the growing literature on Asian communication studies provides empirical evidence that concepts, perspectives, or genres –​which are themselves a form of discourse –​developed in reference to a Eurocentric or Western/​American cultural context can easily be misleading or inappropriate in an Asian cultural context (examples of such semantic shifts can be found in discussions on Japanese concepts like uchi/​soto, omoiyari, furusato, keigo in this volume).3 Similarly, recent studies have made a critical contribution to further developing an awareness that discourse is not a universally applicable, neutral category (Takahashi 2010; Shi-​xu 2009; Chen 2003, 2006; Miike 2002; Dissanayake 1988; Ishii 1984). If we accept Raymond Williams’s (1974) approach to television as a cultural technology, then we must take into account this cultural dimension in our research agenda, situate, and understand the televisual nexus of discourses within a broader context. The current discussion in this volume on the ubiquitous discourse of infotainment on Japanese TV and its culturally recodified, hybrid character can be seen as a contribution to this ongoing line of research. This seemingly amorphous, omnipresent hybrid, working via an intensely emotionalized mode of discourse, is carefully orchestrated through the production strategies. There are, indeed, widely used (pre-​ /​ post-​ )production techniques behind the creation of the on-​screen homey space. It is this very nature of Japanese infotainment and its post-​produced discourse of intimacy that plays an operational role in first constructing an uchi (or emotional-​physical interior space) before managing relationships and communication within that space. Metaphorically, what infotainment promises to its local and national audience is a familial in-​group, a televisual social space, that embraces the communities as well as the commonalities of the viewers while, more importantly, creating a culturally and politically inclusive human unit. Functioning as a cultural form of discourse, Japanese infotainment builds a televisual uchi, an imaginary household, located within the ethnocentric, local, and national boundaries of television consumers. It thereby forms a kind of family whose members –​both in front of the box (the viewers) and behind it (the TV personalities) –​speak the same language and share a proximity via the medium. No televised content is constructed in a cultural vacuum where this intimated communication approach emerges only through mythical, imaginary tie-​ups to the audiences’ uchi. On Japanese TV, as Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (2017) observes, “every inch of broadcast time is so absolutely commodified that many viewers are slowly but surely being led to a state in which they can perceive the world

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4 Introduction only from the perspective of consumers” (p.  40). In fact, as I  demonstrate in Chapter 3, at the other end of the televisual continuum, there are strong economic objectives running through production and post-​production processes. Infotainment discourse builds a heavily commodified mode of communication, operating through a variety of geographic, emotional, (popular) cultural, ethnic, and technical elements of this familial televisual space, which in turn further bind target audiences to the TV station’s commercial sources. What I mean by commodification is, in Mosco’s (1996) words, “the process of transforming use values into exchange values” (p. 141). The cultural context I refer to, and where infotainment has become one of the most preferred forms of televised communication, is Japan, a society of hyperconsumption (Clammer 2000:  204). It is again the audience’s uchi, this imaginary realm of cultural attachment, that is commodified, inextricably combined, and bundled together with the TV stations’ (often hidden) commercial intentions. In the remainder of this work, I do once again what I have done countless times throughout the five years of my fieldwork: I turn on my small-​screen television to look at the praxis touched on above. To do this, I tune into local and national television programmes, the “real” simulations of the infotainment phenomenon, which are certainly examples of this programming’s blurred boundaries. Ontologically, they are infotainment incarnate insofar as their content is based on the intentional mixture of information and entertainment. However, they are also structured and carefully wrapped within a specific TV format –​the so-​called “wideshow” (ワイドショー；waidoshō). I also believe that we would come across similar ontologies if we investigated another infotainment content. This is one result of the broadcasting method I mentioned earlier: in Japanese TV, infotainment works as a border-​crossing content, working through similar techniques and familiar TV personalities in a number of different genres. These include news reports and quiz shows, talk shows, documentaries, and comedies, and also hybridized programmes, some of which I listed earlier. Japanese infotainment, in short, functions as a supra-​genre that crosses once-​existing formulaic borders, binding a variety of televisual contents together, and shaping their communication tropes.

Infotainment in the Japanese context In this study, I peer behind the screen to interrogate the Japanese wideshow, a unique form of infotainment. By accessing local (MTV-​Miyagi Terebi, and NHK-​ Nippon Hōsō Kyoku, Sendai) and national television studios (NTV-​Nihon Terebi, Tokyo), and utilizing widely applied ethnographic methodologies, I  unveil various essential components (e.g. production processes, economic considerations, rhetorical strategies, and cultural/​emotional discourses) embedded in the televisual landscape, which operate together to construct the wideshows. To do this, I conduct participant observations and in-​depth interviews with production team members in situ in TV stations. Working through the data sets collected from three wideshows via field journals, content analysis of the televisual content,

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Introduction 5 and long-​term observations of broadcasting data, I identify the dominant ways through which infotainment communicates with audiences; explain why it is popular with both the producers and their audience; and reveal the conditions under which it is shaped, produced, and delivered through contemporary televisual communication in Japan. Based on ethnographic data, I argue that three layers embedded in the title of this study are of particular significance in understanding and analysing the phenomenon. I broadly identify them as the political-​economic, cultural, and emotional dimensions. This research report is, in fact, constructed via reference to these distinct and substantive layers. However, we should bear in mind that these clear-​cut, apparent levels were formed separately to represent and analyse different facets of the same phenomenon. In the actual space where the phenomenon is materialized, all these seemingly disparate layers come together to engineer a multifaceted realm, an ambiguous whole, which is obviously more complicated than it appears under these classifications. Although they (seem they) are mutually exclusive analytical levels, we will see throughout the coming chapters that the themes relevant to these categories address an encompassing phenomenon in which what is cultural and emotional (and because it is cultural and emotional) is largely mediated by political-​economic strategies, and vice versa. My separate use of the concepts “cultural” and “emotional” may also seem somewhat curious. The former, loosely put, should convey the broader meanings that carry more inclusive elements, such as geographical, ethno-​cultural, local, national, linguistic, and popular cultural conventions. The emphasis here is on the audiences’ cultural commonalities and differences (e.g. local, national, gendered), which in turn affect their programme preferences. The emotional dimension, on the other hand, is more related to selfhood and to what John Clammer (2000) calls “the logic of emotions” (pp. 207–​209). As such, it borrows Michelle Rosaldo’s (1984) idea that “feelings are not substances to be discovered in our blood but social practices organized by stories that we both enact and tell. They are structured by our forms of understanding” (p. 143). That is, emotions are neither universal experiences nor natural human phenomena (Lutz 1988); they are culturally dependent, so they must be understood and analysed within the social and cultural context where they are actually experienced (Rosaldo 1983). My interest here is in whether, and if so, how, Japanese cultural discourses –​ such as uchi/​soto (inside/​outside)  –​are utilized in the programmes’ way of communication to create the uchi-​like, emotionalized atmosphere mentioned above. This is of particular significance because, in Japanese society, uchi goes far beyond the idea of “inside” (see Yamashiro 2017; McVeigh 2014; Buckley 2009; Doi 2001; Bachnik and Quinn 1994; Hamabata 1990; Lebra 1976; Nakane 1967). Instead, as Doreen Kondo puts it, uchi is “the center of participatory belonging”, the location of “emotional attachment” (1990:  142). “Uchi is the self and the members of the self”, linked with intimate, informal interactions, while soto refers to the formal domain; the boundaries between them “are fluid and in-​group or out-​group membership changes according to circumstances” (Tanaka 2004: 22). In his account on uchi/​soto, Senko Maynard

6

6 Introduction (1997) emphasizes that, although “inside/​outside” devices are obviously not limited to Japanese culture in identifying who is familiar and who is not, “the Japanese express rather explicitly through strategies of communication that they belong to a particular group” (p. 32). Similarly, Jane H. Yamashiro (2017) notes that “much of Japanese socialization focuses on in-​group identification and distinguishes between insiders and outsiders (uchi and soto)” (p. 38). More discussion on the uchi and soto idiom and its significance for the wideshow follows in a separate section in Chapter 4. Nevertheless, as I demonstrate through a large amount of data, cultural and emotional layers do indeed fuse into a unified communication phenomenon. For instance, during the discussion of how popular TV personalities function in emotionalizing programme content, we will find that the most commonly employed strategies are, in fact, deeply rooted in the Japanese culture –​the audience’s uchi. Methodologically speaking, however, these abstract levels –​though categorical and incommensurable –​are essential if one wants to contemplate the multilayered reality of the phenomenon. This is elucidated further in the section where I introduce the book’s structure and chapters. Before further discussion, however, I will briefly explain my selection of this particular genre within the world of Japanese infotainment.

Why study wideshows at all? Of the various reasons to study the wideshow within the Japanese TV environment, four are essential to my selection of this genre. First, the wideshow epitomizes one of the most developed forms of Japanese infotainment through which the programming strategies mentioned above surface particularly clearly. During its long on-​screen history dating back more than fifty years, the wideshow has gradually become what it is today: a perfect hybrid of components that meld information (e.g. news segments, factual information, and discussions) and entertainment (e.g. soft news and sensational narratives). Wideshow stories include family crises, political scandals, crime, celebrity gossip, tarento (i.e. “talent” or TV personalities –​the ubiquitous faces bouncing from corner to corner, genre to genre, and even channel to channel, across the dial and time slots), along with topics considered taboo or unsuitable for conventional news programmes, like sex (West 2006: 25). Most tabloid stories appear first in high-​circulation dailies before being picked up by wideshows. Halldór Stefánsson (1998) has noted the historical collaboration and interdependence between television and the tabloid press. As he puts it, by “[m]‌utually feeding off each other and into each other, television and the popular press in post-​war Japan have been the major agents for the cultural production of popular idols for mass consumption” (p. 155). Such scandalous narratives not only help secure audience attention and promote the commercial interests of the TV station but also reproduce and reify social norms and values –​in other words, what is considered appropriate and what is not –​in contemporary Japanese society.

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Introduction 7 In his study on scandal rituals in the post-​war Japanese mediascape, Igor Prusa (2012: 66–​67; 2017) also emphasizes the significant role of wideshows in shaping and disseminating public discourse on scandal stories. For example, side events related to scandals (e.g. police arrests or prosecutorial raids) as well as more dramaturgical moments of “televisual climax” (e.g. confessions, public apologies, or sanctions) are carefully staged for the viewers (Prusa 2012: 260–​ 261). In line with this observation, and contrary to those who argue that wideshows do not discuss serious social or political issues (Watanabe 1996), the data I collected from one nationwide wideshow –​THE Waido4 –​ reveals that wideshows actually do cover supposedly more “serious” matters, from political and economic developments to more technical issues, as the title of a newspaper article, “TV ‘Wide Shows’ Question Decision to Restart Oi Reactor” suggests (Japan Times, 22 April 2012).5 The ways in which these topics are produced and delivered, however, may differ from conventional news reporting. Further, all wideshow content, including its news narratives, is decorated with specific visual/​textual tropes: excessive digital effects, close-​ ups, colourful visuals, exclamation marks, and other superimpositions (sūpā or telop –​television opaque projector). These help emotionalize the screen via sensationalism, impose a preferred reading of the televisual text, and successfully increase the show’s proximity with its faithful audience to secure higher ratings. A large number of quantitative and qualitative studies have revealed the positive correlation between the screen’s visual features and audience behaviour. Ryota Hinami and Shin’ichi Satoh’s (2017) recent experiential study, for instance, shows that strong contrasts in colour, entropy, and energy increase audience ratings. In their inspiring volume, Anthony Baldry and Paul Thibaut (2006: 39) utilize multimodal textual and discourse analysis to illuminate how visual images (e.g. different modes of shots such as short, medium, long, or very long) simulate the level of intimacy and personality (proximity or distance), and influence the way audiences relate to the on-​screen visual narrative. My interviews with producers on the current situation and historical background of this broadcasting strategy in Chapter 4 demonstrate their dependence on (or perhaps enslavement to) and the audiences’ perceived addiction to Japanese television’s most noticeable feature (Maree 2015:  171; Gerow 2010: 118). This also explains what prevents them from avoiding it. However, let us delay further discussion over the wideshow’s visual aspects to subsequent chapters for the moment (see the NTV data in Chapter 4) and keep our focus on the general characteristics of the show. The corner (kōnā) strategy also brings differing segments together. These include food, commercial information, happy talk, how-​ to segments, docu-​ tainment pieces, the weather, and news reports  –​in contrast to Western TV, where it is customary to encounter such corners as separate programmes. In Japan, the corners are all placed within the same wideshow, broadcast from the same studio, often by the same announcers. This is demanding and would not be possible without the dedicated work of a massive production team. Content

8

8 Introduction regarding celebrities, for instance, is often prepared by a particular desk –​a production team specifically dedicated to discovering stories about celebrity affairs. The data in Chapter 2 show how this desk strategy –​ reflected also in the office layout –​helps the production team ensure the show flows smoothly and orchestrate the large number of production members every broadcast day. As I  have discussed elsewhere (see Holden and Ergül 2006), the human components –​that is, the main announcers and tarento –​ also contribute to the diminishing conventional genre definitions on Japanese TV, and generate an intimate, continual, infotained flow and familial communication with television consumers. There is little doubt that tarento constitutes both the heart and the capital of the Japanese entertainment world and commercial TV. Tarento first appeared in weeklies in the 1960s before soon becoming a distinctive feature of Japanese TV culture (Tsai 2010:  94–​97). Yoshimoto (1996) went so far as to argue that tarento functions as low-​cost, post-​Fordist audience participation. More recently, Patrick Galbraith and Jason Karlin (2012) emphasized the centrality of the omnipresent tarento to the Japanese mediascape in general, and to the wideshows in particular: This form of intertextuality in the Japanese media necessitates a high degree of familiarity with the performances, as well as the gossip and trivia about idols and celebrity performers that circulates on wide shows and in weekly magazines, tabloids, and other media. Consequently, Japanese idols, even more than their counterparts in other countries, cannot escape their “real life” persona when they appear on the screen (…) As a result, the real world and the onscreen world cease to be different, and instead a deeply intertextual form of televisual pleasure is created between the performer and audience. (p. 11) The data presented in Chapter 4 demonstrate the inner workings of this extraordinarily demanding world of –​in some cases even kawaisō (poor) –​ tarento in wideshows, and how it serves local and nationwide infotainment programmes. One crucial point is that these characteristics mentioned above are no longer limited to wideshows. Instead, the wideshow’s enormous success in capturing audiences quickly influenced other, more factual, forms of programming that promote the well-​known journalistic discourse of newsworthiness or objectivity. News reports, for instance, began to utilize similar methods, such as emotionalized stories, dramatic background music, light information, digitally reframed images, and other audiovisual effects (see Otsuka 1992). In fact, the wideshow is the historical precursor of this recent tendency in Japanese TV broadcasting (Gerow 2012: 222; Ishita 2002). The second reason I selected wideshows lies in the cultural and the political-​ economic context they are framed within. First, the cultural side:  this popular form is considered the most Japanesque genre (Ishita 2002; Painter 1993) in Japanese TV broadcasting. I would like to argue that it is this unique characteristic,

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Introduction 9 this domestic flavour of the show, that communicates its uchi-​like, intimate character. My analysis of the common strategies utilized in wideshows contributes to Japanese studies and anthropology by providing substance to Bachnik’s (1994) observation that “universally defined orientations for inside/​outside (uchi/​soto) are linked with culturally defined perspectives for self, society, and language in Japan” (emphasis in the original, p. 7). By contrast, economic considerations link the wideshow to a larger, non-​ Japanese, global literature of media studies. The corner strategy mentioned above, for instance, is not only a method to create cosy, inclusive content but also an efficient medium, acting as a catalyst for carefully crafted (often disguised) commercial messages:  extended ads that package the material world of the audience into a homey televisual atmosphere. TV personalities, too, have a crucial role to play in this highly commercialized televisual sphere. Focusing on the inner mechanisms of celebrity manufacturing in the Japanese mediascape (e.g. jimusho),6 Jason Karlin (2012: 74) and David Marx (2012) reveal the entertainment and advertisement industries’ extreme dependency on TV personalities’ visual identity (imēji kyarakutā  –​image characters, as often referred to in the Japanese media) in selling products and generating profits. Third, the wideshow is one of the most popular formats on Japanese TV, with the most broadcasting time (between two and three hours per programme), and perhaps the widest of audiences. In addition, two of the three cases I will interpret in the upcoming chapters are based on the most-​viewed shows in their (local and national) broadcast areas during my fieldwork. Furthermore, I will discuss another programme (Tere-​Masamune7) to help us understand how infotainment content is produced and delivered at the periphery of the commercial competition in Japan’s media market, via the public broadcaster. No doubt, conducting a larger project, which also investigates the audience side of the phenomenon and analyses a wide-​range of data collected from different time slots and genres, would further illuminate the issue. However, there were certain limits to what I could and could not cover in my research project. The ethnographic fieldwork and in-​depth interviews at the core of the following chapters date back to 2003–​2006, when I  carried out the fieldwork as part of my doctoral studies at Tohoku University. Since then, the Japanese media landscape has gone through multiple changes with significant implications for audiences’ media consumption practices. For one, the new communication technologies present a multifaceted and convergent media domain where audiences can engage with and share their preferred broadcast contents through mobile devices and online environments (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, and so on). Information and communication technologies’ (ICT) intrusion into and collaboration with the current televisual domain further expanded the audiences’ sense of and participation in uchi through what I examine in this volume: the omnipresent discourse of intimacy and its inescapable supra-​genre, infotainment. In other words, despite certain limits, by selecting and analysing what is representative of the whole, I was

10

10 Introduction able to gain major insights into the phenomenon of the wideshow and how infotainment functions in the context of the Japanese media environment.

On the current study The aim of my inquiry is twofold. First, it reflects a departure from prevailing methodological conventions, which mostly adopt quantitative approaches using content analysis of televisual texts to investigate the infotainment phenomenon –​and its precursor, tabloidization (for example, see Kawabata 2002; Esser 1999; Brants and Neijens 1998; Langer 1998). I believe that while it is certainly important to know what is out there on the screen, it is also crucial to know how this discursive communication approach –​the one I am arguing is now emergent in Japan –​came into existence. One fundamental idea concerning this relates to what Williams (see 1974: 86; 1990) mentioned some forty years ago: television is neither a neutral mass communication medium nor an empty signifier; instead, it is a “cultural form”, which is made by and working through the cultural context.8 My particular interest is in how an intensely infotained form of television and its “hybridized aesthetic” (Hartley 2001: 119) are produced in a particular context. That is, how is it perceived, shaped, and produced in a particular cultural nexus? How is it constructed in and delivered via the production process? I believe that to answer these questions –​and others mentioned above –​researchers must get into the studio to see what sort of televisual discourses are being employed (and how). Another aim of this study is to take an extensive, multidimensional look at the phenomenon and delineate what needs to be further investigated. The majority of the studies cited in the upcoming section on the ongoing infotainment and tabloidization debate in media studies (see Chapter 1) emanate from ideological criticism, essentially claiming that mass-​mediated messages (e.g. meanings, images, codes, and texts) are not simply produced but also are determined by prevailing political-​ economic power relations in any given society (e.g. McChesney 2000; Curran, Gurevitch, and Woollacott 1982). This approach utilizes the base-​superstructure model inherited from Marxism  –​an approach often criticized for its economic determinism (Murdock 1990). Although it may be a valid tack in understanding how economic consideration and power relations influence the commercialized forms of mediated communication, the question of whether and (if so) what role cultural elements play in the infotainment phenomenon has remained unsolved. What much of the conventional research fails to capture, I will attempt to identify and investigate further by offering a multidimensional, ethnographic look at the phenomenon to interpret its cultural and political-​economic aspects. Using this multifaceted approach, the current work makes possible a greater understanding of infotainment and its role in the particular cultural context of Japanese society. To better elucidate this, I  shall introduce the book’s chapters categorized in accordance with the analytical levels mentioned above.

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Introduction 11

On the book Chapter 1, “No TV. No life!”9The centrality of television and infotainment in contemporary Japan, sets the stage for the current inquiry and introduces unique features of Japanese infotainment (wideshows, in particular) in comparison to shows commonly seen on Western TV, while locating it in relation to larger discursive trends in capitalist societies. I  then offer a brief overview of the infotainment and tabloidization debates in both Western countries and Japan. Most previous studies have applied quantitative methods and ideological criticism to their analysis. Their limitations give rise to this research: which offers a multidimensional, ethnographic look at the phenomenon of infotainment to demonstrate how it functions in a particular cultural context. Chapter 2, Backstage tales: Infotainment under construction, aims to provide an ethnographic glimpse of the media production processes that function behind the wideshows  –​an essential yet underexplored subject in the field of media studies in Japan. The chapter provides a brief look at the commonly used ethnographic techniques and explains how they were devised in the current fieldwork. I  first discuss my methods for participant observation (of the offices, studios, meeting rooms, the pre-​and post-​production units) and interviews (with production members and TV personalities) as a means of offering a bird’s-​eye view of the wideshows. I also provide my observations regarding the prevailing factors that reveal power relations among the production members, and impose hierarchies both behind and in front of the cameras (e.g. gender roles, modality of employment, office design, organizational hierarchy, and type of affiliation with TV station). Chapter 3, Television for sale by owner: The wideshows and commodified knowledge in Japanese television, takes up the political-​economic dimension of Japanese infotainment. The interview data shows that much wideshow content is recodified by (hidden) commercial components and routinized through the programme’s corners. It also shows that this is true at both the local and the national level. To deal with this issue, I observe the social and cultural linkages “that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources” (Mosco 1996: 25). As a modest contribution to the increasing attention towards a micro examination of production processes (see Paterson et al. 2016: 3–​12), I utilize qualitative techniques to interpret the wideshow’s economic components (e.g. ownership/​sponsorship mechanisms, advertising, audience research, and tabloidization) to demonstrate the decisive role that economic tie-​ups and economic-​ based power relations exert on production and distribution in television broadcasting. It is no longer possible to draw a broad map of society without considering the most popular ways of information transmission and the ways these connect to commercialization. If the object of analysis is Japan, a country “saturated with consumption as the primary way of life, the altar on which almost all other energies, preoccupations, and social functions are sacrificed” (Clammer 2000: 210), this imperative is even greater. This approach offers insight into the

12

12 Introduction phenomenon of broadcasting in Japan today, showing the powerful role that the economy and economic-​based power relations play in television production processes at both the local and the national level. Chapter 4, Infotainment, intimacy, and crafting a televisual uchi, constitutes the core of this book, examining the cultural elements of Japanese infotainment and suggesting broader perspectives that might clarify how infotainment works to engage viewers, how it is crafted and delivered, and why it is popular both locally and nationally. The data presented here enables me to argue that the various televisual discourses (e.g. the discourse of intimacy, uchi/​soto, furusato, and omoiyari) are deployed in conjunction to construct an intimate atmosphere that makes the audience feel “at home” (uchi). This intimate mode of communication, which is one of the most powerful features of commercial television, may exist in all contemporary societies. In Japanese TV, however, intimacy is a fundamental rhetorical strategy seen across genres; it is a ubiquitous televisual discourse, which is at once both culturally specific and carefully orchestrated through production strategies. Infotainment and its indispensable mode of communication, “intimacy”, build a cultural nexus in which geographic, linguistic, visual, and emotional components are brought together. This discursive practice of infotainment, in turn, provides an imaginary, yet genuinely experienced, locus –​ televised uchi –​within which the televisual family members come together to share televised intimacy. Chapter 5, Discussion, implications, and conclusions, is the final section of this book. Here I  propose that my examination of the wideshow makes possible a greater understanding of a major commercialized form of information transmission, infotainment, and its role in the particular cultural context of Japanese society. This final chapter contextualizes Japan and its wideshow discourse within the global world of infotainment. Japan, I show, is at the forefront of such rhetorical forms –​possibly due to its social structure and cultural history. Yet, despite these environmental features, this discursive approach may find a home in other societies, as I briefly consider in closing.

Notes 1 For me, as someone whose country of origin stretches between the so called “West” and “East” (whether Turkey fits more into Eastern Europe, Western Asia, the Middle East, or Near East changes depending on context as much as one’s standpoint, and hence is destined to remain unanswered), and whose cultural identity is far too heterogeneous to be captured in any simple, ready-​made identity categorization that favours one cardinal point over another, Japan has never felt “far”, even before my first trip to the country. 2 Obviously, the term “West”, or “Western”, is not an essentially given entity, nor does “Western media” refer to a homogeneous, uniform media landscape. I  use the term “Western” to refer to Anglo-​American, European (advanced capitalist and predominantly white) media environments and their areas of influence. 3 Shi-​xu, Kwesi Kwaa Prah, and Marìa Laura Pardo (2016) provide a comprehensive discussion and rich examples regarding the significance of the cultural context in understanding Asian terms, discourses, and communication.

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Introduction 13 4 A co-​production of Yomiuri TV and NTV, the programme was broadcast from Monday to Friday between 5 April 1993 and 28 September 2007 by NTV (Nippon Television Network, or Nihon Terebi, as commonly known). The withdrawal of the co-​producer Yomiuri TV from programme production led to serious financial concerns for NTV, which finally decided not to continue the programme. Yomiuri TV published a “Thank you!” （THEワイド、ありがとう！）message on its web page. To access the message and readers’ online reactions (in Japanese) on the termination of the programme on 28 September 2007, visit http://​komachi.yomiuri.co.jp/​t/​2007/​0928/​149431.htm. See also the article “Death of a Wide Show”, which appeared on the web portal Japan Zone, on 16 May 2007. Retrieved 3 June 2011, from www.japan-​zone.com/​news/​2007/​ 05/​16/​death-​of-​a-​wide-​show/​. In 2010, the same TV station began broadcasting another typical morning wideshow, Asaichi. The format and the corners located in the new programme (for details, see Chapter 2) demonstrate Asaichi’s commitment to the main characteristics of the wideshow. 5 Reported by Philip Brasor. Retrieved 10 October 2015, from www.japantimes.co.jp/​ news/​2012/​04/​22/​national/​media-​national/​tv-​wide-​shows-​question-​decision-​to-​ restart-​oi-​reactor/​#.WoWOXlKcaRs. 6 Offices or agencies that first create celebrities and then manage their entire career in the media sphere. 7 Replacing its predecessor, Yū Yū Miyagi, Tere-​Masamune was first aired by NHK-​Sendai in 2003. As we will see in Chapter 2, significant changes occurred in the programme’s content after the devastating 2011 Tōhoku earthquake hit its main broadcast area, Miyagi prefecture. 8 I have elsewhere looked at this aspect and provided a brief discussion on the medium’s language (see Ergül 2004, 2000). 9 The title of the following message from Hiroyuki Ōnuma, managing director of Miyagi Terebi (MTV-​Miyatere) on the broadcaster’s website:  “We deliver television [broadcasting] 365 days a year to our audiences in Miyagi prefecture. Why do we do that without a single day off? If we lack water, electricity, or gas, our everyday lives become inconvenient. However, lacking a television set wouldn’t generate such a major obstacle. However, would only having basic needs [food, shelter, clothing] be satisfactory for someone to pursue a fulfilling life? Information programmes [jōhō bangumi] useful for the everyday life, news-​factual programmes [nyūsu-​hōdō bangumi] that cut out the “present moment” where I live, variety shows that heal the fatigue of the day, dramas that invite you into a different world far away from reality, a song programme that echoes our hearts (…) We are convinced that television is absolutely necessary for life. Our objective is to help more and more people to live a fulfilling life through television. We look forward so much to everyone who holds the same desire in their heart” (translation is mine, H. E.). Retrieved 16 December 2017, from www.mmt-​tv.co.jp/​ recruit/​index.html.

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14 Introduction Baldry, A., and Thibault, P. J. (2006). Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis:  A Multimedia Toolkit and Course Book. London: Equinox. Brants, K., and Neijens, P. (1998). “The Infotainment of Politics”. Political Communication, 15 (2): 149–​165. Brasor, P. (2012). “TV ‘Wide Shows’ Question Decision to Restart Oi Reactor”. Japan Times, 22 April. Retrieved 10 October 2015, from www.japantimes.co.jp/​news/​ 2012/​04/​22/​national/​media-​national/​tv-​wide-​shows-​question-​decision-​to-​restart-​ oi-​reactor/​#.WoWOXlKcaRs. Bruck, P. A. (1992). “Crisis as Spectacle: Tabloid News and the Politics of Outrage”. In: M. Raboy and B. Dagenais (eds), Media, Crisis and Democracy: Mass Communication and Disruption of Social Order. London: Sage, pp. 108–​119. Buckley, S. (2006). “Television”. In: S. Buckley (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 514–​517. Chen, G. M. (2003). “Asian Approaches to Human Communication:  A Dialogue”. Intercultural Communication Studies, 12 (4): 1–​16. –​ –​ –​ . (2006). “Asian Communication Studies:  What and Where to Now”. Review of Communication, 6 (4): 295–​311. Clammer, J. (2000). “Received Dreams”. In:  J. S. Eades, T. Gill, and H. Befu (eds), Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary Japan. Melbourne:  Trans Pacific Press, pp. 203–​223. Curran, J., Gurevitch, M., and Woollacott, J. (1982). “The Study of Media: Theoretical Approaches”. In: M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran, and J. Woollacott (eds), Culture, Society and the Media. New York: Methuen, pp. 11–​28. Dissanayake, W. (ed.) (1988). Communication Theory:  The Asian Perspective. Singapore: Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Centre. Doi, T. (2001). The Anatomy of Self: The Individual versus Society. Tokyo: Kodansha. Ergül, H. (2000). Televizyonda Haberin Magazinelleşmesi [Tabloidization of television news]. Istanbul: İletişim. –​–​–​. (2004). “The Infotainment Phenomenon:  A Synchronic/​Diachronic and Political Economic Approach”. Journal of International Cultural Studies, 11: 217–​234. Esser, F. (1999). “ ‘Tabloidization’ of News: A Comparative Analysis of Anglo-​American and German Press Journalism”. European Journal of Communication, 14 (3): 291–​324. Fairclough, N. (2006) Language and Globalization. London and New York: Routledge. Feuer, J. (1992). “Genre Study and Television”. In:  R. C. Allen (ed.), Channels of Discourse: Reassembled. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 138–​160. Galbraith, P. W., and Karlin, J. G. (2012). “Introduction:  The Mirror of Idols and Celebrity”. In: P. W. Galbraith and J. G. Karlin (eds), Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–​32. Gerow, A. (2010). “Kind Participation:  Postmodern Consumption and Capital with Japan’s Telop TV”. In:  M. Yoshimoto, E. Tsai, and J. Chui (eds), Television, Japan and Globalization. Ann Arbor:  Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, pp. 117–​150. –​ –​ –​ . (2012) “Japanese Film and Television”. In:  V. L. Bestor, T. C. Bestor, and A. Yamagata (eds), Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society. New  York and London: Routledge, pp. 213–​225. Hamabata, M. (1990). Crested Kimono: Power and Love in the Japanese Business Family. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hartley, J. (2001). “Infotainment Debate”. In:  G. Creeber (ed.), The Television Genre Book. London: British Film Institute, pp. 118–​122. Hinami, R., and Satoh, S. (2017). “Audience Behavior Mining by Integrating TV Ratings with Multimedia Contents”. Paper published on the website of National Institute of

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Introduction 15 Informatics, University of Tokyo. Retrieved 15 December 2017, from www.satoh-​lab. nii.ac.jp/​member/​hinami/​files/​tvrating_​ism16.pdf. Holden, T., and Ergül, H. (2006). “Japan’s Televisual Discourses: Infotainment, Intimacy, and the Construction of a Collective Uchi”. In: T. Holden and T. J. Scrase (eds), Medi@ sia:  Global Communication In and Out of Cultural Context. London:  Routledge, pp. 105–​127. Ishii, S. (1984). “Enryo-​ sasshi Communication:  A Key to Understanding Japanese Interpersonal Relations”. Cross Currents, 11 (1): 49–​58. Ishita, S. (2002). “The Production of ‘the National’ Celebrity:  Wide-​show in Japanese Television”. Paper presented at the 5th Asia Pacific Sociological Association Conference, 5 July, Brisbane, Australia. Karlin, J. G. (2012). “Through a Looking Glass Darkly: Television Advertising, Idols, and the Making of Fan Audiences”. In: P. W. Galbraith and J. G. Karlin (eds), Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 72–​93. Kawabata, M. (2002). “Examining Tabloidization of TV News Programs in Japan:  Are They Entertainment, Information or News?” Paper presented at the Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ) Fall Meeting, 2 November, Sophia University, Tokyo. Kondo, D. K. (1990). Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. London: University of Chicago Press. Langer, J. (1998). Tabloid Television:  Popular Journalism and the “Other News”. London: Routledge. Lebra, T. S. (1976). Japanese Patterns of Behavior. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Lutz, C. (1988). Unnatural Emotions:  Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McChesney, R. (2000). “The Political Economy of Communication and the Future of the Field”. Media, Culture and Society, 22: 109–​116. McVeigh, B. (2014). Interpreting Japan: Approaches and Applications for the Classroom. London: Routledge. Maree, C. (2015). “Telop and Titles on Japanese Small Screen”. In: E. Perego and S. Bruti (eds), Subtitling Today: Shapes and Their Meanings. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 171–​188. Marx, W. D. (2012). “The Jimusho System: Understanding the Production Logic of the Japanese Entertainment Industry”. In: P. W. Galbraith and J. G. Karlin (eds), Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 35–​55. Maynard, S. K. (1997). Japanese Communication:  Language and Thought in Context. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Miike, Y. (2002). “Theorizing Culture and Communication in the Asian Context:  An Assumptive Foundation”. Intercultural Communication Studies, 11 (1): 1–​22. Mosco, V. (1996). The Political Economy of Communication:  Rethinking and Renewal. London: Sage. Murdock, G. (1990). “Television and Citizenship:  In Defense of Public Broadcasting”. In: A. Tomlinson (ed.), Consumption, Identity and Style. New York: Routledge. Nakane, C. (1967). Tate shakai no ningenkankei: Tanitsu shakai no riron [Interpersonal relationships in a vertically structured society]. Tokyo: Koudansha Gendaishinsho. Otsuka, E. (1992). Kasō Genjitsu Hihyō [Criticism of virtual reality]. Tokyo: Shinyōsha. Painter, A. A. (1993). “Japanese Daytime Television, Popular Culture, and Ideology”. Journal of Japanese Studies, 19 (2): 295–​325. –​–​–​. (1996). “The Telerepresentation of Gender in Japan”. In: A. E. Imamura (ed.), Re-​ imaging Japanese Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 46–​72. Paterson, C., Lee, D., Anamik, S., and Zoellner, A. (2016). “Production Research: Continuity and Transformation”. In: C. Paterson, D. Lee, S. Anamik, and

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16 Introduction A. Zoellner (eds), Advancing Media Production Research: Shifting Sites, Methods, and Politics. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3–​19. Prusa, I. (2012). “Megaspectacle and Celebrity Transgression in Japan: The Sakai Noriko Media Scandal”. In: P. Galbraith and J. G. Karlin (eds), Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 56–​71. –​–​–​. (2017). “Mediating Scandal in Contemporary Japan”. French Journal for Media Research, 7. Retrieved 2 April 2018, from http://frenchjournalformediaresearch.com/ lodel/index.php?id=1145 Rosaldo, M. (1983). “The Shame of Headhunters and the Autonomy of the Self”. Ethos, 11 (3): 135–​151. –​–​–​. (1984). “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling”. In: R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine (eds), Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 137–​157. Shi-​ xu (2009). “Reconstructing Eastern Paradigms of Discourse Studies”. Journal of Multicultural Discourse, 4 (1): 29–​48. Shi-​xu, Prah, K. K., and Pardo, M. L. (2016). Discourses of Developing World: Researching Properties, Problems and Potentials of the Developing World. London and New York: Routledge. Stefánsson, H. (1998). “Media Stories of Bliss and Mixed Blessings”. In: D. P. Martinez (ed.), The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 155–​166. Takahashi, T. (2010). Audience Studies: A Japanese Perspective. London: Routledge. Tanaka, L. (2004). Gender, Language and Culture: A Study of Japanese Television Interview Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Thussu, D. K. (2007). News as Entertainment:  The Rise of Global Infotainment. London: Sage. Tsai, E. (2010). “The Dramatic Consequences of Playing a Lover:  Stars and Televisual Culture in Japan”. In:  M. Yoshimoto, E. Tsai, and J. Chui, Television, Japan and Globalization. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, pp. 93–​116. Turner, G. (2001). “Genre, Hybridity, and Mutation”. In: G. Creeber (ed.), The Television Genre Book. London: British Film Institute, pp. 6–​7. Watanabe, T. (1996). “Japan’s Media at Present”. Doshisha Social Science Review, 55, (September): 1–40. West, M. D. (2006). Secrets, Sex and Spectacle: The Rules of Scandal in Japan and the United States. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Williams, R. (1974). Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken Books. –​–​–​. (1990). “The Technology and the Culture”. In: T. Bennett (ed.), Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading. London: Routledge, pp. 9–27. Yamashiro, J. H. (2017). Redefining Japaneseness:  Japanese American in the Ancestral Homeland. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Yoshimoto, M. (1996). “Image, Information, Commodity:  A Few Speculations on Japanese Television”. In: X. Tang and S. Snyder (eds), Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 123–​138. –​ –​ –​ . (2017). “Nuclear Disaster and Bubbles”. In:  C. Thouny and M. Yoshimoto (eds), Planetary Atmospheres and Urban Society after Fukushima. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 29–​50.

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1  “No TV. No life!” The centrality of television and infotainment in contemporary Japan

Introduction If we accept Todd Holden’s (2001) suggestion that “Japan’s current configuration could be called ‘MediaCulture’  –​a ‘total environment’ in which an enormous portion of the socio-​ cultural, political-​ economic, historico-​ mythic content under-​ girding society circulates through media”, we must also recognize television’s supremacy in such a media-​ driven cultural territory. This clearly contrasts with the medium’s relatively poor start in the country. In fact, by 1953, the number of registered TV sets in Japan was less than a thousand, while the number of people watching television collectively in public places exceeded the number of those watching at home until the late 1950s (Yoshimi 2005: 540). However, by 1973, a decade of astonishing economic growth had brought a new vigour to the medium’s modest beginning, as Jason Chun (2007) notes:  “Televisions sprouted up everywhere in Japan:  in gleaming high-​rises, in densely packed public housing projects, in wooden shitamachi1 traditional quarters, in suburban homes, and in rural farm houses” (p.  4). By 1979, the majority of households (27 million families) owned a TV set –​some with three or more televisions, one for each family member (Tsurumi 1987/​2010: 63). Several decades later, in 2013, Japan had the second-​highest communications market revenue per head (£1,099) among the world’s 17 largest economies, second only to Australia (£1,119) (Ofcom 2013: 21–​22). Currently, the Japanese television sector generates the third-​highest revenue worldwide (£23 billion), following the United States and China (Ofcom 2017: 86), and is the world’s leading power in information and communication technologies (ICTs), with an officially declared goal of becoming the world’s most advanced IT society by 2020.2 Even so, television remains the most consumed mass communication medium3 (Oku 2016: 10, 18; Buckley 2006: 515–​517; Kamimura et al. 2000) and has further cemented its place as “a strategic medium of technological convergence” that “occupies center stage in the government-​initiated policy of digitalization of media, culture, and the economy” (Yoshimoto 2010: 3). Despite rapid growth in online and digital media markets and an increasing tendency towards on-​demand visual content, Japanese audiences remain faithful to their live TV watching habits, as evident in

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18  Centrality of television and infotainment sharing (with Poland) the world’s highest TV viewing figures (4 hrs 22 min per day) (Ofcom 2017: 110). According to research by Nippon Television Network (2011), 89 per cent of people watch television every day in Japan, while the number of TV receivers across the country matches the nation’s population (almost 120 million). In this television-​saturated media environment, terrestrial broadcasting plays a critical role in delivering simultaneously and instantly the same information to nationwide audiences, which in turn makes it “the most effective and efficient” medium for sponsors. Findings also show television’s fundamental place and superiority during crises and large-​scale disasters.4 After the 2011 Great Tōhoku earthquake, for instance, television was the people’s medium of choice, with 71 per cent turning on their TV sets to access the most accurate and up-​to-​date information during the first hour after the disaster. As mentioned in the Introduction, the rapid growth of mobile technologies and the Internet has provided multiple channels of communication and generated significant changes in media-​ consumption processes and viewing habits, particularly among the younger generations. Japanese youth’s intense engagement, speed, and adeptness in using their mobile devices had already been noted in the relevant literature via a variety of new slang words and terminologies in the early 2000s, such as oyayubi-​zoku (thumb tribes, thumb family), oyayubi sedai (thumb generation) (Hjorth 2004; McVeigh 2003), oyayubi bunka (thumb culture), and keitai/​deai-​kei (mobile, online encounters) (Holden and Tsuruki 2003). Two decades later, we witness an advanced, literary example of this mobile and interactive communication, keitai-​novels (cell phone novels)  –​fiction that is entirely produced on and consumed through mobile phones –​which are listed among the bestsellers and have been adapted by the television, manga, and film industries (see Hansen 2016). This change has been closely followed and addressed by the Japanese television industry via several new initiatives that bring together traditional television broadcasting, the Internet, and social media to maintain viewership. For example, the five main TV networks based in Tokyo have implemented a joint free streaming video service, called TVer, which provides online access to TV programmes via its own website or app (Oku 2017). These figures, along with many more in the relevant literature, exemplify television’s hegemony in the Japanese media sphere. However, the unique place television occupies in the everyday life (also in the heart) of Japanese audiences lies in another, more qualitative and everyday level that escapes the statistics. From a historical perspective, Shunya Yoshimi (2005) reminds us that, during the 1950s and 1960s, the medium was not perceived as something that people bought, but rather “something that ‘came’ to their home. To these people, television was viewed as something much more significant than an artifact or a machine. Perhaps, we can say that it seemed more like a respected visitor” (p. 547). During the following decades, TV gradually but profoundly entered the domestic sphere to successfully transform itself into an integral part of everyday life within Japanese households. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the medium remained not only the primary source of information and entertainment

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Centrality of television and infotainment 19 for each family member but also, more significantly, a major point of reference for domestic/​familial routines. Highlighting television’s nationwide influence on the organization of everyday patterns within the domestic space, Yoshimi (2005) observes, “intimate sphere of the Japanese household in its postwar form was itself created on a national scale through the medium of television” (ibid.: 553). For the generations born into this television-​ driven intimate sphere, the “respected guest” who was once warmly welcomed into the Japanese households by the previous generation represents something even broader and more profound. It is not only one of the most, if not the most, powerful “national” media to shape the contours of everyday domestic life across the nation (Chun 2007; Yoshimi 2003) but also the authoritative channel of “discourse”  –​a culturally saturated form of communication (Shi-​xu 2005:  1)  –​that reproduces and disseminates the linguistic tropes (symbols, meanings, narratives, characters, and so on) predicated on the dominant cultural norms and values. Hence, television works as a persuasive cultural agent that communicates to Japanese audiences the exclusive ingredient and the spirit of their “imagined community” (Anderson 1983), their Japaneseness, via specific rhetorical packaging, namely Nihonjinron5 (日本人論) –​a discourse of the uniqueness of Japan. Although it is beyond the purview of this study to provide a comprehensive account of Nihonjinron and its impact on the Japanese televisual sphere, it is worth citing a few studies relevant to the current discussion. Also known as Nihon bunkaron and Nihonron, Nihonjinron “is a body of discourse which purports to demonstrate Japan’s cultural differences from other cultures and Japan’s cultural uniqueness in the world and thus tries to establish Japan’s cultural identity” (Befu and Manabe 1990: 124). There is a massive literature on the connotations, literature, and history of Nihonjinron (see Befu 1993) as well as its implications for the Japanese mediascape (see Takahashi 2010). In their pioneering survey of the late 1980s, Harumi Befu and Kazufumi Manabe (1990: 124–​126) illuminated the powerful role of media (especially newspapers) in constructing and propagating the discourse of Japan’s uniqueness. They also raise a cautionary flag: despite Nihonjinron’s prevailing place in media discourse and its particular emphasis on the homogeneity of Japanese people (group-​mindedness, uniqueness, etc.), the majority of survey participants seem not to see themselves as being part of that perceived homogeneous entity. This is in line with a large body of critical reception studies (see Hall 1980),6 which have already demonstrated that popular media texts/​discourses possess multiple meanings, and therefore evoke different audience reactions or readings. Befu and Manabe, too, recognize the potential of various interpretations, as they emphasize: “[the] notion of homogeneity of course flies in the face of the known internal variegations within Japan”. Be that as it may, while the assumption towards uniformity of discourse is rejected and the power of agency is recognized, the authors warn us that one should not underestimate the power of context: It is possible, however, to argue that such internal variations are recognized at one level of consciousness, while at another it is ignored. For example,

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20  Centrality of television and infotainment when one’s attention is focused on intra-​group phenomena, differences and variations tend to loom large (…) On the other hand, when the point of contrast is with other cultures, internal differences shrink in importance. (1990: 126) Befu (1993) emphasizes the significance of the common tongue and “its connotations, meanings, and values implied in its expressions” in creating national and ethnic identity, as he suggests “[t]‌he unique symbolism cast from a language unique to the Japanese creates a cosmos unshared by others and serves as a basis for Japanese ethnocentrism and consequently nationalism” (p.  128). Another influential broadcast strategy that further demarcates the borders of this ethno-​centric linguistic cosmos is to embed non-​Japanese elements into the programme, such as foreign people, things, and the notion of foreignness in the broadcast content. Various studies have already examined this phenomenon, of which we can cite a few recent examples. Looking at the phenomenon of the increasing presence of mixed-​race celebrities (hāfu tarento) on TV programmes, Kenji Kaneko (2010) shows how Japanese television uses the notion of internationalism to promote Japanese cultural nationalism. Similarly, Alexandra Hambleton (2011: 43) employs discourse analysis and interview data to delineate how variety shows on Japanese television create Japan’s cultural “Other” through their portrayals of foreigners while strengthening the idea of a “uniquely unique” Japan. The phenomenon of incorporating an immense number of racial and ethnic foreigners into television content goes beyond the infotainment programmes. From content analysing Japanese TV commercials, Michael Prieler (2010) demonstrates the place and prevalence of racial and ethnic “Others” in Japanese television advertisements and suggests that it is through these cross-​ cultural and racial representations of the “Other” that Japanese advertisements construct a unique sense of Japaneseness by creating differences and highlighting boundaries, which ultimately “reveals how Japanese define themselves” (p.  3). Yoshimoto (2017), too, seems to be concerned about what he calls the “televisual Nihonjinron”:  “the uncontrollable proliferation of variety shows, news magazines, and program segments focusing on the alleged uniqueness of ‘Japan’ ” constitutes “[o]ne of the most conspicuous and disturbing features of Japanese television recently” (p. 44). The data on Japanese infotainment in this volume reveal the role of permanent references to cultural and ethnic identities (in the form of religion, traditional foods, songs, festivals, dresses, history, sensibility to nature, TV personalities, and so on) in generating links between geography, community, and culture, which in turn demarcates the shape and boarders of uchi –​ where targeted audiences and what is on the screen are folded together. Particular emphasis is almost always on uchi’s difference from and, more often, superiority to what is soto. Put differently, uchi as “us” –​“we Japanese” or “our furusato” (home or hometown) –​and soto as “them” –​Western or other non-​Japanese others –​is a common rhetorical and discursive binary in Japanese infotainment. In her brilliant ethnographic work on “discourses of vanishing” in Japanese modernity, Marlyn Ivy (1995) observes,

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Centrality of television and infotainment 21 Japan emerges as the armature of intense preoccupations with essential national-​cultural identity, continuity and community that mark and remark it with the signs of totality. The effort to sustain this totality announces itself in every tourist advertisement, every appeal to “home” (furusato), every assertion that “we Japanese are modern, we have kept our tradition”; every discourse on Japanese harmony. (p. 72). In propagating the nation’s “home” and its exclusiveness, I argue that television and its invasive instrument infotainment represent one of the most devoted and powerful vocalists of the media-​chorus in the Japanese mediascape. As we will see in Chapter 4, in the case of local wideshows, the discourse of uniqueness may shift its focus from national to more “native” borders and refer to the audiences’ local uchi (e.g. Tōhoku region, Miyagi prefecture), often in a sense of furusato (place of origin) or nostalgia vis-​à-​vis one’s cultural/​ethnic roots, but also in a sense of having lost them and, in that case, as a locus of remembrance and melancholia (due to the drastic effects of modernity, war, disasters, and so on). This is of course not exclusive to Japanese society as similar observations about the media and its implications for the sense of and belonging to “home” as the site of cultural, ethnic, and national belonging can be made in other societies.7 That said, the level of interdependence and proximity between television and audiences in Japan indicates a special relationship, as Painter (1993) argues:  “ ‘televisual quasi-​intimacy’ seems especially appealing in Japan, where intimate, informal communication is usually restricted to clearly defined, in-​group contexts” (pp. 295–​ 296), functioning via the accentuation of “themes related to unity (national, local, cultural, or racial) and unanimity (consensus, common sense) in order to create an intimate and comfortably familiar atmosphere” (p. 297). More recently, in her rich, multisited ethnographic inquiry, Toshie Takahashi (2010) extends this view to illustrate the relevance of the Japanese emic concepts of uchi, soto, and amae (psychological dependence) for understanding Japan’s contemporary mediascape and, within that, audience engagement with television and new media technologies. Takahashi’s work also reveals the weight of different media in generating modern and multiple uchi for each family member within the same household. The data presented in Chapters 3 and 4 will reveal further the symbiotic relationship between the TV and its dedicated viewers, and the effective production strategies behind this. Before closing this section, let me share an anecdote along with some observations on Japanese television. One day, back from a studio visit in Tokyo, I  found a Japanese friend of mine staring at the TV, hands tightly clenched on her lap; desperate, almost tearful. On the screen was a breaking news report that seemed to have completely shocked my friend. When I asked her about it, she replied, “Nobuyo Ōyama [a Japanese voice actress] is going to retire. Can you believe it!? What will happen to Doraemon then? It is so sad (…) It will never ever be the same!” For those unfamiliar with the Japanese anime world, Doraemon (ドラえもん)　 was a famous series broadcast by TV Asahi between 1979 and March 2005. Nobuyo Ōyama voiced its main protagonist,

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22  Centrality of television and infotainment Doraemon, a male robot cat, during the entire history of its initial version. For three decades, Ōyama remained loyal to her famous hero, refusing major roles in other projects and not participating in any new project for five years following her retirement. Although the next series with a new voice actress started soon after this in April 2005, the first version, known as the “Ōyama Edition”, has remained warm in the hearts of its fans until today. For my friend (a 30-​something company employee with an MA in economics), and for those who habitually watched nearly 1,800 episodes of Doraemon over the previous 30 years, replacing the voice of their beloved blue cat meant cutting out a companion from their personal and collective history. Today, more than a decade later, Doraemon fans still care for and closely follow8 Nobuyo Ōyama, their favourite veteran voice actress, whose disappearance made not only Doraemon’s beloved persona vanish but also the “voice” of their collective past and belonging. Chapter 4 provides a broader discussion about TV personalities and their on-​screen life via empirical data. One lesson I have learnt during my experience in the field is that television is infused so deeply into the fabric of the everyday life of Japanese people across the archipelago that this medium cannot be silenced by simply pressing the “off” button on the remote control. As the interview and observation data in Chapters 3 and 4 suggest, remaining outside TV’s domain of influence in Japan goes far beyond the physical distance between you, the audience, and a TV set, or what is there on the screen, as suggested by the following extract based on early sketches in my field diary: Just behind the television, on the window that almost entirely covers the wall, the lights of the city’s most flirtatious boulevard come and go. The boulevard is lined with imposing buildings with steel and glass faces, without histories (…) It is a fire of light, screen and colour this boulevard, from every hole the eye can see nightclubs, izakayas9 spill out, a temple of neon lights where sinless but busy sararīman10 come to be cleansed after a long working day, where on the narrow streets the mind is sacrificed to the heart; that’s Kokubunchō11 (…) Infantile-​looking, kawaī12 hostesses cut out carelessly from the pages of a manga or stripped away from a late-​night TV show at club doors. Take the screen in front of me and paste it on this ephemeral image of urban life behind; it would immediately dissolve into fine-​tuned disharmony without notice.13

On infotainment and tabloidization Before further discussion, I shall briefly explain the key concepts of the study: infotainment, its forerunner, tabloidization, and finally, the wideshow. In doing so, I  will first ask whether and (if so) how infotainment and tabloidization differ from one another. Next, I  will explain how and under which conditions the concepts have emerged, both historically (i.e. in actuality) as well as in media studies, to ask: What are the fundamental arguments that have arisen during the infotainment debate? Following this, the discussion moves closer to the Japanese

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Centrality of television and infotainment 23 archipelago, to ask: What is a wideshow? What are the essential characteristics of this culturally unique form of broadcasting? I will also consider how wideshows differ from the Western definitions of infotainment. In the last section, I discuss the significance of my research and how it differs from previous investigations of infotainment. Let me begin with infotainment. Despite increasing global attention to the concept, infotainment is a neologism, a fairly new buzzword that emerged in the 1980s, and has come to refer to certain television genres, such as quiz programs, sports-​magazine programs, competitions, variety programs, talk-​shows, “how-​ to” programs, and, more recently, news/​factual programs (Thussu 2007; Extröm 2000; Brants 1998). According to Douglas Kellner (2000), infotainment suggests the synergies of the information and entertainment sectors in the organization of contemporary societies, the ways in which information technologies and the multimedia transforming entertainment, and the forms in which entertainment is shaping every domain of life from the Internet to politics. (p. 12) Considering the etymology of the concept, there are two core elements, information and entertainment. Ontologically, there are many possible descriptions of infotainment  –​each bearing considerably different nuances. In his book on the rise of “global infotainment”, Daya Thussu (2007) approaches infotainment from a political economic and journalistic perspective, describing the concept as “a handy catchall for all that was wrong with contemporary television (…) an explicit genre-​mix of ‘information’ and ‘entertainment’ in news and current affairs programming” (p.  7). Similarly, the term “global infotainment” refers to “the globalization of a US-​style ratings-​driven television journalism which privileges privatized soft news  –​about celebrities, crime, corruption and violence  –​and presents it as a form of spectacle, at the expense of news about political, civic and public affairs” (p. 8). In line with a large body of critical media studies, the emphasis is on a rapid divergence from conventional news broadcasting. For John Hartley (2002), infotainment is a term used to describe the blending of factual reportage with the conventions usually associated with fictional entertainment. In everyday usage, infotainment refers to particular types of television programming. Examples of this would include “tabloid” current affairs programmes, as well as instructional or lifestyle formats such as cooking, gardening and home improvements shows. (pp. 15–​16) Nonetheless, it is possible to reduce the definition of infotainment to the following description, irrespective of medium: all media contents, mainly based on the mixture of information and entertainment. In accepting this definition, I argue, we

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24  Centrality of television and infotainment treat infotainment as a content or text that can be placed in virtually all manner of television programming rather than a particular genre or format. One crucial point here is that this definition would also work well in defining programs that do not possess clear-​cut genre borders, such as wideshows. Infotainment, in this sense, can be conceived as a narrative form or, as indicated before, a televisual discourse through which a variety of contents (ranging from informative to entertaining) can be reproduced and delivered. During recent decades, as various issues have been raised concerning infotainment, the term has been virtually reduced to the tabloidization process (Hartley 2001; Klein 2000; Sparks and Tulloch 2000; Lumby 1999; Langer 1998). “In critical discourse”, as Hartley (2002) mentions, “the concept is often used to lament the loss of ‘traditional’ news values” (p. 116). Similarly, Peter Dahlgren (2005) sees the dramatic increase in tabloidization since the 1990s as an outcome of the neo-​liberal transformation (deregulation) of the media market, which has led to dramatic developments in the formats of television, not least within factual television, or journalism (very) broadly understood. The docusoaps, reality programs, talk shows, various forms of infotainment magazine shows, and even the traditional news programs themselves, manifest rather specific and obvious trajectories of development toward the sensationalist. (pp. 415–​416) Focusing on the South African context, Herman Wasserman (2010) underlines that “tabloidization means different things in different countries” (p. 47) due to several factors, including media environment, journalistic culture, and economic and legal aspects. In general academic parlance, on the other hand, tabloidization refers to a tendency in news framing and reporting, and can therefore be taken as a part of the overall shift (or decrease) in traditional journalistic values “in a race to the bottom of public taste” (Calabrese 2005:  271–​272). At the same time, however, it cannot be taken as a synonym for infotainment for at least two reasons. For one, in terms of conventional genre definitions, infotainment refers to a variety of different programs including (tabloid) news narratives. Second, infotainment, especially Japanese infotainment, as we will encounter, goes far beyond tabloidization and can be conceived of as an overlapping discourse or supra-​genre, referring to a considerably wider range of televised contents. In the case of Japanese television broadcasting, the list of genres mentioned above, for instance, should be extended to cover other hybrid genres, some of which were mentioned at the outset of this chapter. This point will hopefully become clearer in the coming section, which concerns the possible definitions of wideshow. Considering the historical roots of this recent tendency in Western television broadcasting, it would be safe to say that tabloidization served as a precursor to the infotainment phenomenon. In the current study, the role of the concept of tabloidization is important, though less prominent. I will particularly employ the term in Chapters 3 and 4, especially in the sections that deal with the

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Centrality of television and infotainment 25 cultural, political-​economic, and technical ways in which infotainment functions in news-​based segments. Loosely put, my aim is to show whether and (if so) how tabloidization appears in wideshows; how it differs, if at all, from conventional reflections of the term; how it works in the commodification of televised content (see Chapter  3); and how tabloidized content is crafted with distinct cultural elements (see Chapter 4). Some brief information concerning the historical background of the term tabloidization might be useful. It has been used to describe the increasing trivialization and entertainment-​ izing of the content of news reports. At an operational level, it first appeared in newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century in the United States as “yellow journalism” before appearing in Britain in a more developed form (McLachlan and Golding 2000; Esser 1999). Although the concept has been described in various ways, a dominant view in mainstream reductionist media studies is “a downgrading of hard news and upgrading of sex, scandal and infotainment” (Esser 1999). Put differently, this term has been used to refer to a major shift: the so-​called “contamination” of journalistic values, that is, a change from technically “hard” news reports to sensationalist journalism, along with an increased softening of news, such as the rise in dramatic serial stories, sports, entertainment, and other lighter content. Noteworthy here is that tabloidization is a term derived from the pharmaceutical industry in which “tabloid” referred to concentrated medicines, especially those with narcotic effects and that are easily swallowed. Later, the term was used to refer to half-​size digestible newspapers that contained secondary, peripheral, and sensational stories; scandal-​based narratives; and private matters –​trifling writings that could easily be consumed while travelling to and from work.

The infotainment debate in media studies The prominence of the accelerating trend towards infotainment and tabloidization can easily be seen in academic discussions in both Western (mostly European) media studies (Thussu 2007; Gencel-​Bek 2004; Kellner 2000; Klein 2000; Ergül 2000; Esser 1999; Livingstone 1999; Mutlu 1999; Langer 1998; van Zoonen 1991) and in Japan (Taniguchi 2007; Kawabata 2006, 2002, 2001; Ergül 2004; Ishita 2002; Hagiwara 2001; Yasutake 1983; Sugiyama 2000; Watanabe 1996). What we observe in media sociology is that critical political-​economic considerations focusing on infotainment prevail: some of these include the spreading effects of sensationalist journalism (see Wasko 2005; Langer 1998; Gitlin 1980); the diluting of the political in media content (see Golding and Murdock 2000; Postman and Powers 1992); the mediatization or “colonization” of politics by the logic and necessities of commercial media (see Corner and Pels 2003: 4–​5); the increasing ratio of light content in news-​based genres (see Brants and Neijens 1998; Postman 1985); the diminishing boundary between factual and entertainment programs (see Turner 1999; Dahlgren 1991); and the changing significance

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26  Centrality of television and infotainment of commercial considerations and marketability in the operational definitions of news (see Garnham 1979; Extröm 2000). Following those approaches, it can be said that infotainment, whether clearly expressed or simply read between the lines, is gradually becoming one of the important concepts in media studies. Indeed, it may already have become so. On the Japanese side, too, the list of studies relating to infotainment is growing, although research that specifically focuses on infotainment content is rather limited. As Pharr and Krauss (1996) noted earlier, although “no country in the industrial world is as media-​saturated as Japan”, the number of analytical investigations today that consider the Japanese media environment is still limited (Clammer 2000; Cooper-​Chen 1997). Recently, however, media studies have gradually taken on a larger role in understanding Japanese culture, whether traditional political-​economic analysis (Watanabe 1996), ethnography (Takahashi 2010; Holden and Ergül 2006; Darling-​Wolf 2000; Painter 1993, 1996), popular culture (Freedman and Slade 2017; Galbraith and Karlin 2012; Tsutsui 2010; Kinsella 1999; Martinez 1998; Hagiwara 1998), or advertising (Prieler 2010; Holden 2001; Maynard 1999; Moeran 1996). The question of how infotainment is conceived by media scholars in Japan is also worth investigating. In Japanese media studies, it has been claimed that the mixed form of entertainment and information has not only become more prevalent but also has indeed become one of the most preferred (by audiences as well as producers) forms of information transmission in Japanese television (see Kawabata 2002; Hagiwara 2001) Moreover, it has been stated that, in today’s television broadcasting, infotainment does more than simply absorb nearly all information-​based genres; it has become a sort of extravaganza (see Watanabe 1996). The next section takes up where the above-​mentioned literature left off. It offers a brief, descriptive look at one example of infotainment, a popular way of programming, which is one of the most influential forerunners of the tendency towards hybridization in Japanese television broadcasting.

The wideshow: A televisual hybrid The reader should note that there is no agreement on what wideshow exactly is. For some, it represents “down-​market television programmes, typically featuring celebrity, gossip and sensational crimes” (see McCargo 2002: 71). With reference to its similarity to American “talk show” programmes, Ishita (see 2001, 2002) utilizes the term “tabloid-​television” to label this form of programming. Considering the indispensable elements of its content (information, soft news, entertainment), this may be one of the more convincing definitions. My interview data, however, revealed that even production team members have differing ideas about the show’s genre category. One reason is that there are various strategies utilizing a similar broadcasting format. Consider the following categories offered by production members as they attempt to categorize the three specific wideshows covered in this study. For some, they are info-​variety programmes (jōhō-​baraetī bangumi), simply because they are

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Centrality of television and infotainment 27 comprised of both elements, while for others they can be classified as info-​culture programmes (jōhō-​kyōyō bangumi), info-​wideshow (jōhō-​waidoshō), information programmes (jōhō bangumi), factual/​reality-​wideshows, (hōdō-​waidoshō), comprehensive/​general information programmes (sōgō-​jōhō bangumi), and so on. Moreover, the same production member regularly employed different definitions during different stages of the interview. This, I  believe, exemplifies what one of my informants argued: “Today, all the programs blend together (…) Now it is really hard to say this is what it is”. One point of consensus therefore is that wideshows cover a “wide” range of topics. The target audience is another key similarity among wideshows:  female audiences (mostly housewives) in their 40s or 50s, the majority of whom are unemployed or working part-​ time, which influences program content and delivery (Ho 2012; Buckley 2006; Ishita 2002; NHK 1977). Consider the following accounts:

•

•

•

[B]‌etween meals, while waiting for the husband to return home, the Eiffel Tower, Vatican City, and then the debates at the United Nations General Assembly clearly jump before their eyes. “Seeing is believing” and about 80% of the housewives recognize that the blessing of television, which increases their knowledge, is a great revolution unprecedented in history. Japanese housewives usually do the cleaning and the laundry after their husbands and children leave for their companies and schools. After one or two hours on housework, many of them often watch so called TV wide-​ shows full of information of human interest and scandals from nine or ten o’clock to three or four o’clock even with light lunch in front of the TV set. Our target audiences are housewives, who [until the time show begins] cleaned the house in the morning, did their daily shopping and already prepared the dinner. Their children have returned from school. Now, they all are waiting for the sararīman [in this context, husband, partner or father] to come home.

While the similarities are striking, one significant difference that is worth mentioning is the number of years between them:  the first account appeared in an article (quoted in Chun 2007: 82) in Sunday Mainichi in 1958; the second (Watanabe 1996) comes nearly four decades later; whereas the last one is a comment from a wideshow producer I  interviewed in 2005. Despite several changes (such as broadcast segments, and the new media’s intervention in everyday domestic live and media consumption practices), these reflections on daytime television’s role vis-​à-​vis the gender role of target audiences within the borders of the domestic sphere remain fundamentally valid today. From an historical perspective, Chun (2007) emphasizes the medium’s significant role as a mirror of and contributor to the major transitions in the everyday life and social status of housewives during the post-​war era, and suggests that “[w]‌hile TV may have empowered women by informing them of activity in the public sphere, it also reinforced their role at home by making it easier for them to function as housewives” (p. 82).

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28  Centrality of television and infotainment Whether a traditional shufu (housewife) or sengyōshufu (professional housewife), a karisuma shufu (charisma housewife) or, in a more contemporary fashion, a oshare mama (trendy mother), Japanese media, in general, and television, in particular, exert a strong influence on the construction of the image of housewives as well as on public discourse about them, their social relations within and outside their households, gender performances, tasks, expectations, frustrations, and aspirations or desires within their domestic everyday life14 (Goldstein-​Gidoni 2012). Ulrich Heinze (2011) shows that housewives in contemporary Japan (particularly those between 30 and 50 years old) watch much more television than their husbands and generate the highest ratings. This is expected as the long-​ standing gender gap in the labour force is exacerbated further for women in their late 20s and early 30s due to marriage, childbirth, care of the elderly, and other household responsibilities (JILPT 2016), leaving many married women without a job, and hence with easy access to television. As I  show in the remainder of this volume (see Chapters 2 and 4), the gender imbalance continues behind as well as on the screen, where a majority of the production team professionals and almost all decision makers and managers, including producers, directors, and key announcers, are male. But how does this reflect on the production members’ perceptions of their ever-​faithful viewers? In his inquiry on the wideshow, Andrew Painter (1996) cites a production member’s account:  “[A]‌ ll housewives are interested in is voyeurism, gossip and wife and mother in-​law relations (nozoki, uwasa, yome-​shūtome kankei)” (p. 55). Such formulaic and biased accounts, relegating women to secondary, stereotypical gender positions, are not uncommon among media professionals, and certainly not surprising in a society that ranks the highest in world masculinity indexes (Hofstede 2001). As a matter of fact, versions of such accounts exist in my field notes, too (some coming from senior female personnel). Describing wideshows as “magazine-​style shows for the wife and mother”, Suzuki (1995) shared a similar view on the wideshow’s target audience (housewives), whom he argues, “absorbs most of it [the wideshow content] without being conscious she is doing so” (p.  76). Recent qualitative investigations of housewives’ viewing habits and my own personal observations in the field, in contrast, prove the absolute opposite: Japanese housewives are very well informed and conscious about the format, content, and flow of programmes. In fact, Kensaku Saitō (2011: 34) shows how housewives develop and employ a sort of “mind table” to keep track of exact segments and the content delivered in each corner or time slot –​which information is transmitted in which segment of which show by which channel at what time –​and easily move between channels and programmes based on that knowledge. This is in line with my observations behind the screen: the wideshow production team is well aware that, on the other side of this televisual continuum, are Japanese female audiences with educated minds who are masters of the televisual domain. My observations of production members in situ (see Chapter  3) reveal a high level of caution and awareness about the show’s targeted population and their actual interests. The audiences’ viewing habits are followed meticulously via various sources of information, including the programme monitor (see Chapter  4). The production members

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Centrality of television and infotainment 29 fastidiously mine their audiences’ minute-​by-​minute reactions to live wideshow content every broadcast day; analyse (and respond to) the feedback received via social media, emails, or phone calls; and obtain the exact patterns that increase or decrease ratings. The precise date that wideshows debuted is either 1964 or 1966, depending on which programme is considered the originator of this type of programming. According to the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute,15 Hello Homemakers, launched in 1966, was the first wideshow. Consider the following definition of the programme on the company’s official web page: Every morning 20 housewives assembled in a studio to share opinions and experiences about such issues as conflict with mother-​in-​law, the communication gap between children and parents, how to tie kimono sashes and how to manage family finances. This chatty style earned the show the nickname, “TV Back-​Fence Gossip”.16 The details embedded in this definition (useful information on a variety of topics, finding solutions for the audience’s problems, and so on) show considerable similarities with two of the shows included in this study: OH! Ban desu and Tere-​Masamune. On the same web site but on a different web page, however, the same show is classified under the category “variety and lifestyle programs”. In 1964, another programme called The Kijima Norio Morning Show, created at the request of an American pharmaceutical company, began broadcasting (Asada 1987: 9). For some, this programme is the first wideshow in Japanese TV history. Although the target audience of both programmes was the same (housewives), this show differed in its content as it was, in fact, a sort of information-​news programme. With its narrative based on soft news content, THE Waido, the nationwide programme covered in this study can be considered a contemporary example of such a style. The two programmes may show differences, but in both cases this form of televised communication has operated in Japan for longer than in any other country and has become one of the most preferred forms of programming in Japanese television. Even today, true to its name, it captures the widest audience and constitutes the largest share of daily broadcasting. As mentioned earlier, the wideshow consists of two constants: entertainment and information. Most of these shows last longer than two hours and take the biggest share of total broadcasting time on any one station. As a hybrid form, infotainment functions through a variety of border-​skipping corners (how-​to, news, docutainment, travel, happy-​talk, weather forecasts, city information, etc.). The corners, as I already touched on, are all placed within the same wideshow, broadcast from the same studio by the same announcers. Even the guests appearing on the shows are often the same. In this way, the personnel (announcers, guests, panellists, talents, and other TV personalities) are like a family or club whose members jump from channel to channel. For instance, it is not unusual to encounter a guest in a morning wideshow discussing, say, the kidnapping of Japanese journalists in Iraq, then see

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30  Centrality of television and infotainment him on another wideshow talking about the latest trends in fashion, and then on another evaluating the recent performance of Kyojin, a famous Japanese baseball team. It might be even more surprising to Western analysts to see how different corners cross their own traditional boundaries to create hybrid content within the same programme. For example, while two people behind the cooking set in the studio are chatting about the best way of serving a Japanese dish, others at the main corner may discuss a social problem, such as children increasingly committing crimes. Only a few minutes later, those from the cooking corner may join the other group, with all programme members tasting the food that was just prepared. Following these segments, the main announcers of the programme may appear in the news segment to fulfil their role as newscasters. This example, as well as the difficulties in describing what is on the screen, mirror what I mentioned earlier. Rather than seeing a movement towards infotainment, as many have previously claimed, I  would argue that we are seeing not only a shift in traditional genre borders but also in the form of discourse: as a blended or hybridized form of information packaging and delivery. This, I believe, sets my work apart from many previous studies.

Notes 1 Comprising two words, shita (down) and machi (town), shitamachi historically means “the town below the castle walls” and refers to the mercantile quarter of the city. 2 The Abe government’s “Declaration to Be the World’s Most Advanced IT Nation” was released by the Strategic Headquarters for the Promotion of an Advanced Information and Telecommunications Network Society on 14 June 2013. The objectives of the declaration can be accessed via http://​japan.kantei.go.jp/​policy/​it/​2013/​0614_​declaration.pdf. 3 Average daily television viewing time per household is about 7.5 hours (Oku 2016). 4 My informants’ account (see NTV data in Chapter  4) on their effectiveness in addressing the audience’s collective, nationwide issues in a timely manner provides further evidence of the powerful role the terrestrial TV plays during crises (e.g. the Niigata and Hanshin earthquakes). Several examples show that large-​scale, temporal crises may influence TV programming permanently (e.g. the Tokyo subway sarin attack, the Great Tōhoku earthquake). 5 Also known as Nihon bunkaron, Nihonron, Nihonjinron “is a body of discourse which purports to demonstrate Japan’s cultural differences from other cultures and Japan’s cultural uniqueness in the world and thus tries to establish Japan’s cultural identity” (Befu and Manabe 1990:  124). There is a massive literature on the discourse of Nihonjinron. For an overview of the “literature, contents, premises and history” of Nihonjinron, see Befu (1993). Similarly, Takahashi (2010) provides a useful summary of the literature on Nihonjinron and Japanese culture studies from a historical perspective. 6 Starting from Stuart Hall’s (1980) famous “Encoding/​ Decoding” model, which delineates three potential readings of mediated texts, namely preferred/​dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. 7 Consider, for instance, Marusya Bociurkiw’s (2011) description: “Television is a marker of an affective Canadian national space, one that promises and idea of ‘home’. Home

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Centrality of television and infotainment 31 is a site of affect  –​of embodied feeling, of longing, of pride, and perhaps even of shame. Like the train to which it is often compared, Canadian television travels through national space, connecting Canadians to one another, creating contact zones” (p. 2). 8 On 14 May 2015, the Japan Times announced some sad news: “While the anime’s characters never age, the voice talent playing them does, and the franchise’s generations of fans recently received the sad news that voice actress Nobuyo Ōyama, the voice of Doraemon himself from 1979 to 2005, is suffering from dementia” (Japan Times 2015. Retrieved 27 November 2017, from https://​japantoday.com/​ category/e​ ntertainment/d ​ oaremon-v​ oice-a​ ctress-n ​ obuyo-o ​ yama-s​ uffering-f​ rom-d ​ ementia-​ at-​78). 9 Izakaya is a Japanese-​style neighborhood pub with a casual environment for after-​work drinking. 10 Derived from the English words “salary” and “man”, sararīman is used for Japanese office-​workers with long working hours and with no or little social life. Fu (2012) captures perfectly the shift in the meaning associated with the term: “The term ‘salaryman’ (sararīman) is now often used in a pejorative sense, referring to a man of one’s father’s generation, or the so called oyaji type, who toils long hours for his firm, only socialises with his fellow workers or clients through after work drinking or golf playing on weekends, rarely spends time with his wife and children, much less does anything about household chores” (p. 101). 11 With more than 3,000 restaurants and pubs, Kokubunchō represents the liveliest district of Sendai and the largest entertainment district of the entire Tōhoku region. 12 Kawaī means cute or lovely; depending on the context, it may also connote pretty, attractive, or charming. Evoking “idealized associations with femininity and virtue” (p.  45), Puch Brecher (2015) suggests, kawaī performs as “an affective mobilizing agent, a common language well suited to capturing and channeling emotional fallout from contemporary anxieties” (p. 44). No emotions can remain entirely off the capitalist market, as John Clammer (2001) notes in his discussion on “feeling capitalism” through “somatization of the emotion” (p.  105). Donald Richie (2003:  56) cites research conducted by one of the country’s largest manufacturers, reporting that 70 per cent of Japanese consumers buy goods that are kawaī to seek solace. The findings indicate that the Japanese public’s attachment to cuteness reflects increasing precarization in everyday life. For an illuminating discussion of the shifting meaning of kawaī and its association with precarity in contemporary Japan, see Puch Brecher (2015). 13 The extract appeared in my short story “The Queen of Hearts”, in 2010, with minor changes. 14 For an inspiring ethnographic narrative and rich insights into Japanese housewives, their changing gender roles, and the state’s (i.e. state agents, the corporate sector, media, and market) strong influence in shaping and reproducing such roles from an insider’s perspective, see Ofra Goldstein-​Gidoni’s Housewives of Japan: An Ethnography of Real Lives and Consumerized Domesticity (2012). 15 Bunken, NHK Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūjo. 16 Further accounts of this historical background can be found on NHK’s home page. “In the 1960s, Japan was in an era of rapid economic growth. The spread of home electrical appliances was saving housewives some of the toil of housework, giving them more time to watch TV. The time was ripe for a new type of programme: Hello Homemakers (called Wideshow in Japanese), was launched in 1966”. NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute. Retrieved 5 April 2005, from www.nhk.or.jp/​digitalmuseum/​ nhk50years_​en/​categories/​p42/​.

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Centrality of television and infotainment 33 Galbraith, P. W., and Karlin, J. G. (2012). “Introduction:  The Mirror of Idols and Celebrity”. In: P. W. Galbraith and J. G. Karlin (eds), Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–​32. Garnham, N. (1979). “Contribution to a Political Economy of Mass Communication”. Media, Culture and Society, 1: 123–​146. Gencel-​Bek, M. (2004). “Tabloidization of News Media: An Analysis of Television News in Turkey”. European Journal of Communication, 19 (3): 371–​386. Gitlin, T. (1980). The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media and the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press. Golding, P., and Murdock, G. (2000). “Culture, Communication and Political Economy”. In: J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds), Mass Media and Society, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 70–​92. Goldstein-​Gidoni, O. (2012). Housewives of Japan:  An Ethnography of Real Lives and Consumerized Domesticity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hagiwara, S. (1998). “Japanese Television as a Window on Other Cultures”, Japanese Psychological Association, 40 (4): 221–​233. –​–​–​. (2001). “Nyūsubangumi no naiyō to keishiki” [The form and content of news programmes]. In: S. Hagiwara (ed.), Henyōsuru Media to Nyūsu Hōdō. Tokyo: Maruzen, pp. 67–​114. Hall, S. (1980). “Encoding and Decoding”. In: S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, and P. Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–​138. Hambleton, A. (2011). “Reinforcing Identities? Non-​Japanese Residents, Television and Cultural Nationalism in Japan”. Contemporary Japan, 23 (1): 27–​47. Hansen, K. (2016). “Electronic Literature and Youth Culture: The Rise of the Japanese Cell Phone Novel”. In: R. Hutchinson and L. Morton (eds), Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature. London: Routledge, pp. 301–​314. Hartley, J. (2001). “Infotainment Debate”. In:  G. Creeber (ed.), The Television Genre Book. London: British Film Institute, pp. 118–​122. –​–​–​. (2002). Communication, Cultural and Media Studies:  The Key Concepts. Oxon: Routledge. Heinze, U. (2011). “Radio and Television Consumption in Japan: A Trilateral Intercultural Comparison with the UK and Germany”. Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Article 3.  Retrieved 28 September 2017, from www.japanesestudies.org.uk/​ articles/​2011/​Heinze.html. Hjorth, L. (2004). “Textperts and Other Thumbomena:  Mobile Phones and Japanese Cute Culture”. Natural Selection, 2.  Retrieved 18 March 2011, from http://​ naturalselection.org.nz/​archive/​2/​2.4_​Larissa_​Hjorth.pdf. Ho, M. H.  S. (2012). “Radioactive Beef Scare and Alarmed Housewives:  Narrativizing Fear in ‘Wide-​Show’ Crises News”. Asian Journal of Global Studies, 5 (2): 60–​70. Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s Consequences, 2nd ed. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Holden, T. (2001). “Resignification and Cultural Re/​Production in Japanese Television Commercials”. M/​C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 4 (2). Retrieved 14 September 2005, from http://​journal.media-​culture.org.au/​0104/​japtele.php. Holden, T., and Ergül, H. (2006). “Japan’s Televisual Discourses: Infotainment, Intimacy, and the Construction of a Collective Uchi”. In:  T. Holden and T. J. Scrase (eds), Medi@sia: Global Communication in and Out of Cultural Context. London: Routledge, pp. 105–​127. Holden, T., and Tsuruki, T. (2003). “Deai-​kei:  Japan’s New Culture of Encounter”. In: N. Gottlieb and M. McLelland (eds), Japanese Cybercultures. London:  Routledge, pp. 34–​49.

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34  Centrality of television and infotainment Ishita, S. (2001). “Waido shō to Geinōjin Jōhō no Shōhinka” [The wide show and the commercialization of Geinōjin information]. In: Puraibashī to Shuppan Hōdō no Jiyū. Tokyo: Seikyūsha, pp. 233–​252. –​ –​ –​ . (2002). “The Production of ‘the National’ Celebrity:  Wide-​ show in Japanese Television”. Paper presented at the 5th Asia Pacific Sociological Association Conference, 5 July, Brisbane, Australia. Ivy, M. (1995). Discourses of the Vanishing:  Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. JILPT (Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training) (2016). The Labour Situation in Japan and Its Analysis: General Overview 2015–​2016. Tokyo: JILPT. Kamimura, S., Ikoma, C., and Nakano, S. (2000). “The Japanese and Television, 2000: The Current State of TV Viewing”. NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute, 13. Retrieved 5 November 2003, from www.nhk.or.jp/​bunken/​bcri-​news/​bnl-​s-​feature. html. Kaneko, K. (2010). “Constructing Japanese Nationalism on Television:  The Japanese Image of Multicultural Society”. New Cultural Frontiers, 1 (1): 101–​116. Kawabata, M. (2001). “Nyūsubangumi no Gorakuka Keikōni Taisuru Ninshiki to Hyōka” [Recognition and valuation of entertainmentization/​tabloidization of news programmes]. In: S. Hagiwara et al. (eds), Henyōsuru Media to Nyūsu Hōdō. Tokyo: Maruzen, pp. 201–​220. –​ –​ –​ . (2002). “Examining Tabloidization of TV News Programs in Japan:  Are They Entertainment, Information or News?” Paper presented at the Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ) Fall Meeting, 2 November, Sophia University, Tokyo. –​––​ ​. (2006). “Terebi nyusu bangumi ni okeru keishikiteki gorakuka no genjō to sono mondai: Jimaku/​teroppu chūshin toshite” [Well-​guided or misled? Open captions and the tabloidization of the TV news programmes in Japan]. Sōgō Kagaku Kenkyū, 2: 209–​219. Kellner, D. (2000). Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge. Kinsella, S. (1999). “Pro-​establishment Manga: Pop-​Culture and the Balance of Power in Japan”. Media, Culture and Society, 21: 567–​572. Klein, U. (2000). “Tabloidized Political Coverage in the German Bild-​Zeitung”. In: C. Sparks and J. Tulloch (eds), Tabloid Tales:  Global Debates over Media Standards. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 177–​194. Langer, J. (1998). Tabloid Television: Popular Journalism and the “Other News”. London: Routledge. Livingstone, S. (1999). “Mediated Knowledge: Cognition of the Familiar, Discovery of the New”. In: J. Gripsrud (ed.), Television and Common Knowledge. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 91–​107. Lumby, C. (1999). Gotcha: Life in a Tabloid World. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin. McCargo, D. (2002). Media and Politics in Pacific Asia. London: Routledge. McLachlan, S., and Golding, P. (2000). “Tabloidization in the British Press”. In: C. Sparks and J. Tulloch (eds), Tabloid Tales:  Global Debates over Media Standards. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 75–​89. McVeigh, B. (2003). “Individualization, Individuality, Interiority, and the Internet”. In: N. Gottlieb and M. McLelland (eds), Japanese Cybercultures. London: Routledge, pp.  19–​33. Martinez, D. P. (ed.) (1998). The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture:  Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maynard, M. (1999). “The Power of Foreign Images:  Intercultural Signs in Japanese Television Advertising”. In:  M. Prosser and K. S. Sitaram (eds), Civic Discourse: Intercultural, International, and Global Media. Connecticut: Ablex Publishing, pp. 301–​311.

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Centrality of television and infotainment 35 Moeran, B. (1996). “In Pursuit of Perfection: The Discourse of Cars and Transposition of Signs in Two Advertising Campaigns”. In: J. W. Treat (ed.), Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture: Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture. Richmond, UK: Curzon, pp.  41–​66. Mutlu, E. (1999). Televizyon ve Toplum [Television and society]. Ankara: Türkiye Radyo Televizyon Kurumu. NHK (1977). 50 Years of Japanese Broadcasting. Tokyo: Nippon Hōsō Kyokai. NTV (Nippon Television Network) (2011). “Annual Report”. Japanese Television Broadcasting Industry Characteristics. Retrieved 11 November 2013, from www.ntvhd. co.jp/english/ir/annual/annual/2011-15.pdf. Ofcom (2013). “Communications Sector Revenues”. International Communications Market Report 2012. London: Ofcom. –​ –​ –​ . (2017). “TV and Audio-​ Visual:  Overview and Key Market Developments”. International Communications Market Report 2017. London: Ofcom. Oku, R. (2016). Information Media Trends in Japan. Media Innovation Lab, Dentsu Innovation Institute Report, May. Tokyo: Diamond. –​–​–​. (2017). Information Media Trends in Japan. Media Innovation Lab, Dentsu Innovation Institute Report, June. Tokyo: Diamond. Painter, A. A. (1993). “Japanese Daytime Television, Popular Culture, and Ideology”. Journal of Japanese Studies, 19 (2): 295–​325. –​–​–​. (1996). “The Telerepresentation of Gender in Japan”. In: Anne E. Imamura (ed.), Re-​imaging Japanese Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 46–​72. Pharr, S., and Kraus, E. (1996). Media and Politics in Japan. Honolulu: Hawaii Press. Postman, N. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin. Postman, N., and Powers, S. (1992). How to Watch TV News. New York: Penguin Books. Prieler, M. (2010). “Othering, Racial Hierarchies, and Identity Construction in Japanese Television Advertising”. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 13 (5): 511–​529. Richie, D. (2003). The Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan. London: Reaktion Books. Saitō, K. (2011). “Shichōsha wa asa donoyōni terebi o mite iru no ka. Shūfuni taisuru depusu intābyūchōsa yori” [How audiences watch television in the morning:  In-​ depth interviews with housewives]. NHK-​Hōsōkenkyū to chōsa [Broadcast research and survey], 1: 30–​47. Shi-​xu (2005). A Cultural Approach to Discourse. New  York and London:  Palgrave MacMillan. Sparks, C., and Tulloch, J. (eds) (2000). Tabloid Tales: Global Debates over Media Standards. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Sugiyama, M. (2000). “Media and Power in Japan”. In: J. Curran and M. Park (eds), De-​ westernizing Media Studies. Oxon: Routledge, pp.191–​201. Suzuki, M. F. (1995). “Women and Television: Portrayal of Women in the Mass Media”. In: K. F. Fanselow and A. Kameda (eds), Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on Past, Present, and Future. New York: Feminist Press, pp. 75–​92. Takahashi, T. (2010). Audience Studies: A Japanese Perspective. London: Routledge. Taniguchi, M. (2007). “Changing Media, Changing Politics in Japan”. Japanese Journal of Political Science, 8 (1): 147–​166. Thussu, D. K. (2007). News as Entertainment:  The Rise of Global Infotainment. London: Sage. Tsurumi, S. (2010). A Cultural History of Postwar Japan: 1945–​1980. First published in 1987. London: Routledge.

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36  Centrality of television and infotainment Tsutsui, W. M. (2010). Japanese Popular Culture and Globalization. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies. Turner, G. (1999). “Tabloidization, Journalism and the Possibility of Critique”. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2 (1): 59–​76. van Zoonen, L. (1991). “A Tyranny of Intimacy? Women, Femininity and Television News”. In:  P. Dahlgren and C. Sparks (eds), Communication and Citizenship. London: Routledge, pp. 217–​235. Wasko, J. (ed.) (2005). A Companion to Television. Oxon: Blackwell. Wasserman, H. (2010). Tabloid Journalism in South Africa: True Story! Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Watanabe, T. (1996). “Japan’s Media at Present”. Doshisha Social Science Review, 55: 1–​40. Yasutake, Y. (1983). “CM no Naka no Gaikoku Bunka” [The foreign culture in commercials]. In: K. Kawatake (ed.), Terebi no Naka no Gaikoku Bunka. Tokyo: Nippon Hōsō Shuppan Kyokai, pp. 62–​80. Yoshimi, S. (2003). “Television and Nationalism:  Historical Change in the National Domestic TV Formation of Postwar Japan”. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 6 (4): 459–​487. –​–​–​. (2005). “Japanese Television: Early Development and Research”. In: J. Wasko (ed.), A Companion to Television. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 540–​557. Yoshimoto, M. (2010). “Why Japanese Television Now?” In: M. Yoshimoto, E. Tsai, and J. Chui (eds), Television, Japan and Globalization. Ann Arbor:  Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, pp. 1–​6. –​ –​ –​ . (2017). “Nuclear Disaster and Bubbles”. In:  C. Thouny and M. Yoshimoto (eds). Planetary Atmospheres and Urban Society after Fukushima. London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 29–​50.

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2  Backstage tales Infotainment under construction

[W]‌riting is something writers do, and it stands at least one-​off from what is written about. There is no direct correspondence between the world as experienced and the world as converted in a text, any more than there is a direct correspondence between the observer and the observed. John van Maanen (1988: 8) Like poems and hypotheses, ethnographies can only be judged ex post, after someone has brought them into being. Clifford Geertz (1988: 147)

Introduction At the outset of this study, I briefly mentioned that the analysis that follows in the remainder of this work is based on a multi-​perspectival approach. This, in the main, includes participant observations, semi-​structured and unstructured interviews with production personnel, field notes, content analysis of telecasts, reflective journals, and long-​term observations of broadcasting data. In this chapter, I begin with a brief explanation of the key data-​gathering techniques and how they were devised in the current study. To do this, I first discuss the nature of the participant observation and interview techniques used in this research to provide an overview of my observations in the field. Following this is a descriptive section where I focus on details, particularly concerning the settings (TV stations), wideshows, production personnel, key informants, and physical features of the stations covered in the current study. Where relevant, I also discuss several factors that reveal power relations among production members and impose hierarchies on production staff (particularly gender, modality of employment, office design, organizational hierarchy, and type of affiliation with the TV station). The final section focuses on the gender roles that the production personnel perform behind and in front of the cameras. My aim in this chapter, then, is to provide an ethnographic glimpse of the media production processes that function behind the wideshows –​an essential yet underexplored subject in media studies in Japan.

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38  Infotainment under construction Because much of the observation and interview data come from my visits to TV stations between 2004 and 2005, they may not illustrate the current situation of the production units covered in the study. Despite various updates regarding the TV stations and the current broadcast content, the ethnographic descriptions of the TV studios’ physical and technological features and the production personnel’s profile inevitably refer to the time the fieldwork was conducted. Readers who require a broader exegesis of ethnographic methods or the current portrayals of the TV production units will have to look beyond this book. However, I would argue that the main insights and ethnographic observations on the fundamental sociocultural principles functioning behind the endemic and enduring phenomenon of infotainment in Japanese mediascape remain valid. My objective here is not to offer an overview of the ethnographic techniques listed at the outset of this chapter since this is not a methodology book on ethnographic media studies per se –​and there is already a growing literature on the subject, including a recent edited volume I compiled (to cite a few, see Brennen 2017; Patriarche et  al. 2013; Ergül 2013; Takahashi 2010; Machin 2002; Ruddock 2001; Jensen and Jankowski 1991). Instead, the current book is based on a qualitative exploration of media production processes, for which I borrow and employ widely utilized ethnographic data-​gathering techniques. However, in the real-​life settings of the field, where “conversations and interviews are often indistinguishable from other forms of interaction and dialogue” (Atkinson et  al. 2007:  5), I  often abandoned the boundaries traditionally suggested for these techniques. Likewise, although I  disclosed and retained my main role as researcher throughout my fieldwork, I  often found myself shifting between different self-​ images and performances (e.g. stranger, observer, participant, friend, gaijin [foreigner, alien], accomplice, doctoral candidate from Turkey, assistant, or partner) in different contexts (production unit, lunch place, elevator, meeting room, street-​corner izakaya) to better adapt to the natural flow of the everyday. Often unintentionally, such flexibility granted me the space and freedom I needed to manage a certain impression (Goffman 1956) and from there build a stronger rapport with those observed. It was also helpful to blunt the contours of my otherwise obvious “participating-​in-​order-​to-​write” approach to the field (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995: 17–​19). Whenever possible, I tended to drop my academic guard in the field and abandon jargon-​saturated verbiage in order to expand my possibilities to learn from (not teach to) those whom I observed, and by doing so, to educate myself. This is close to the anthropological sense of education that Tim Ingold (2017) described during my recent interview with him: Far from making us strong and invulnerable, this kind of education disarms us: it leaves us feeling exposed, literally “out of position”. But it also allows us to open up to the truth of what is there. And that, precisely, is what anthropology does. It opens us up to the possibilities of life –​to possibilities other than what we might have ever imagined had we stuck to what we thought we knew already. (p. 8)

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Infotainment under construction 39 Ethnographic fieldwork is a journey that comes to life through a constant interplay between observing, talking, and writing. Here lies its richness but also its limits. Walker (1986: 211) was right in arguing that talking with someone in an everyday setting is a “multichanneled event”, whereas writing is “linear in nature, and can handle only one channel at a time, so must pick and choose among the cues available for representation” (quoted by Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995: 9). Indeed, the details I once observed were carefully recalled, selected, and tailored by my memory; the verbal data I heard were first disassembled for analysis purposes and then reassembled to allow thematic interpretations. Once jotted down, whatever I found vaguely or directly relevant to my research question in the everyday flow of things I was surrounded by was turned into “data”, which are in fact a production of the researcher (Dey 1993: 15). The literary style in this and upcoming chapters may differ depending on the nature of data and the feeling I  intend to communicate to reader.1 Yet, whatever the tone that the ethnographic “tale” indicates (van Maanen 1988), in the background lies an absolute awareness that the ethnographer “ ‘inscribes’ social discourse; he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscription and can be reconsulted” (author’s emphasis, Geertz 1973: 19). That is, the field is not a given entity; instead, it is a construction, produced (not discovered) through the social transactions engaged in by the ethnographer. The boundaries of the field are not ‘given’. They are the outcome of what the ethnographer may encompass in his or her gaze; what he or she may negotiate with hosts and informants; and what the ethnographer omits and overlooks as much as what the ethnographer writes. (author’s emphasis, Atkinson 1992: 9) Precisely. My aim in this chapter, then, is simple and not far from what a playwright would intend to do in the prelude of his or her script: to provide brief directions about the settings and staging, including the rehearsals and the cast, in order to assist the readers’ understanding of the backstage of the televisual piece that I participated in at a certain time in a certain cultural context.

The fieldwork: what lies behind the screen Participant observations Most of the data I report in this and upcoming chapters emerged from my participant observations at several local and national TV studios. My objective was twofold:  to identify the common production strategies devised in producing a popular form of infotainment (i.e. wideshows) and to observe the production members in situ, “to learn from them their view of reality” (Agar 1996: 163). There is a vast literature on the definitions and uses of participant observation. Norman Denzin (1989) argues that it is a “commitment to adopt the perspective

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40  Infotainment under construction of those studied by sharing in their day-​to-​day experiences” (p. 156). This is close to how John van Maanen (1988) describes fieldwork: “living with and living like those who are studied” (p. 2). For Arthur Asa Berger (2000), participant observation is “a qualitative technique that provides the opportunity to study people in real-​life situations” (p. 161). Similarly, D. L. Jorgensen (1989) suggests that the technique serves “to generate practical and theoretical truths about human life grounded in the realities of daily existence” (p. 14). James Lull (1990), in his ethnographic inquiry on television audiences, stresses that the essential contribution of participant observation in the field of mass communication lies in the alternative perspectives it offers to dominant, commonly employed methodologies: “The use of participant observation for documentation of intensive naturalistic case studies in mass communication”, he argues, “allows for theory building which binds together conceptual communicative elements, message linkages, and exchanges by social actors as holistic units-​in-​interaction” (p.  30). For Erving Goffman (1989), participant observation is [a technique of] getting data (…) by subjecting yourself, your own body and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals (…) you are in a position to note their gesture, visual and bodily response to what’s going on around them and you’re empathetic enough –​because you’ve been taking the same crap they’ve been taking –​to sense what it is that they are responding to. To me that’s the core of observation. (pp. 125–​126) It was this empathetic sense of participation that inspired my observations in the field. In his famous work, Raymond Gold (1958) recognizes four levels of involvement in the field: complete participant, participant-​as-​observer, observer-​ as-​participant, and complete observer. The difference between the two middle positions is, as Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson (1995: 104–​108) discuss, rather problematic and vague, and often fades away in actual field settings. Broadly defined, the latter implies that the researcher, whose position is overt to the other members of the group, does not only observe but also, more importantly, plays a role in the group to gain the insider’s point of view of the context (Denzin and Lincoln 1994; Robson 1993; May 1993). On the other hand, the observer-​as-​ participant, in Berger’s (2000: 162) words, “is a neutral outsider who has been given the privilege of participating for the purpose of making observations and recording them”. By fulfilling this role,2 I experienced both the advantages and disadvantages that such a level of involvement generates in the field. For Bruyn (1966:  14), “detachment and personal involvement” are equally important for a participant observer. In my case, the former was a relatively simple task to deliver and, most of the time, also unavoidable, since my gaijin-​appearance always made my presence as an outsider noticeable to others. This is an important aspect because, in Japan, a company is considered a family (uchi); thus, to share

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Infotainment under construction 41 the same workplace or be a member of the same company goes far beyond what the word “colleague” or “coworker” may possibly indicate. Indeed, the metaphor uchi no kaisha (our home company) “is presumably pervasive in Japan, shaping workers’ lives and creating disciplined, loyal employees who strive to achieve group goals” (Kondo 1994: 173). As such, the members of the same company share a common destiny (unmei kyōdōtai) and (are expected to) feel proud of the spirit of their industry (sangyō damashī) (ibid.: 173). The company is considered “as carrying on into perpetuity”, meaning that the current personnel “are valued, but in the sense that they, like a family, ensure the continuity of that particular lineage branch of the company” (Taplin 2013: 41). Surrounded by such a dense matrix of shared values, norms, social relationships, traditions, histories, and hierarchies, it becomes difficult to disclose one’s opinions straightforwardly if they diverge from the hegemonic view of the daily flow at the workplace. This final point brings me to the advantage that my particular positioning provided in the field. While demarcating the social and cultural borders between those belonging to the same family (uchi) and those who do not, including myself, I encountered several cases where my outsider identity surprisingly helped rather than hindered me in building alternative relationships whereby some production members felt more comfortable to share their personal and critical reflections on programme contents, power relations within and outside the TV studios, or obstacles they encountered every broadcast day as they performed their professional duties. Thematic interviews The interviews were carried out with 12 production members at the three stations mentioned above. My interviewees –​some of whom later became my key informants –​were from a variety of different profiles (age, gender) and positions (producers, hosts, announcers, managers, tarento, and assistants), working in front of and behind the cameras. When necessary, I repeated interviews during different episodes of the production processes. A simple definition of interview as a data-​gathering technique comes from Berger (2000:  111), for whom it is a “conversation between a researcher (someone who wishes to gain information about a subject) and an informant (someone who presumably has information of interest on the subject)”. During the interviews, I often shifted between the two roles identified in Berger’s definition in order to allow balanced conversation. Such turn-​taking not only enabled friendlier interaction and stronger rapport with production personnel but also helped in sensing the interviewees’ cultural and professional repertoire, which I later reflected on in my follow-​up questions. As James Spradley (1979) suggests, the ethnographic interview is a speech event in which, through a series of casual and friendly conversations, “the researcher slowly introduces new elements to assist informants to respond as informants” (p.  58). Perhaps such a “friendly” approach to the field may in time dilute the binary observer-​observant positions in the field and, at the reporting stage, also obscure what Denzin (2001) calls the

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42  Infotainment under construction “constructed” or “fictional” nature of the interview, which, she argues, “is an active text, a site where meaning is created and performed. When performed, the interview text creates the world, giving the world its situated meaningfulness (…) [E]‌very interview text selectively and unsystematically reconstructs that world” (pp. 25–​26). Like many in the field, I  conducted my interviews during my participant observations, which not only benefitted from but also contributed to the rapport I generated with my key informants. In so doing, I was able to observe ongoing casual interactions between my interviewees and others in the same setting and note my early impressions simultaneously as my informants carried on their everyday activities. These fragmented notes and often patchy reflections situated the interviews in a real-​life setting, generated new questions to be explored, and ultimately enriched the ethnographic tone of the field narrative. The three most important ethnographic ingredients of an ethnographic interview, Spradley (1979:  58–​ 60) identifies, are “explicit purpose, ethnographic explanations, and ethnographic questions”. A  similar frame was applied in my interviews. Prior to each conversation, the participant was informed about the scope of the research and provided general explanations about the nature of the method. The main thematic questions, prepared ahead of time, were particularly simple and open, designed to promote two-​way communication through which the informants could express their interpretations of the topic in their own terms and, when desired, also pose questions. As expected, a majority of the follow-​up questions I posed emerged during the course of the interviews. I usually avoided using terminology, jargon, and Japanese cultural idioms that lay at the core of this study, such as infotainment, tabloidization, intimacy, uchi, and soto, unless they occurred naturally during the interviews. The following themes were imperative for our conversations:

History of the programme and the broadcast content The members’ own definitions of each show, and its past and present, were particularly sought via the following questions: What are the essential characteristics of the program? Whether and (if so) how did they evolve and through which motives? How do the production members understand and define the specific programme and the segments they produce?

Production strategies The questions under this thematic category aimed at investigating the ways in which (the production members think) the infotainment engages and communicates with the viewers. The technical features (also from a historical perspective), pre-​production and post-​production processes, and their influence on the televisual content were given significant attention.

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Infotainment under construction 43 Target audience Who are the viewers of the programmes? Has the audience profile changed in time and, if so, how? The aim is to grasp the production members’ (particularly those involved in decision-​making) own portrayals of and presumptions about the programme’s target audience. Following the interviews, I  thematically categorized and interpreted the conversational data with the support of audiovisual patterns collected from the field. At this stage, all the available data sets, reflective field journals, memos, and audiovisual materials (pictures, graphics, video-​taped content, sketches, etc.) were combined to build a wider and ethnographically richer picture of the field experience. The following sections provide descriptive details of the TV stations, the programmes, the production staff, my key informants in the field, and the physical features of the settings. Briefly, the observations were conducted over a few weeks in three TV studios: the local stations MTV (Miyagi Terebi, an affiliate of NTV) and NHK-​Sendai (an affiliate of NHK) in Sendai; and the national station NTV (Nihon Terebi), located in Tokyo. Since the time this study was conducted, a number of changes –​some of the significant shifts are mentioned later in this ­chapter –​have occurred in the programmes’ corners and principal personalities. Nevertheless, the ontological features of wideshows and the core production strategies introduced in the previous chapter have changed little. In some cases, even the central figures of the programmes have remained the same until today.3 One important incident that occurred in the local TV stations’ broadcast area (Miyagi prefecture) and had a substantial effect on the shows was the catastrophic 2011 Great Tōhoku earthquake (lasting almost six minutes with a magnitude of 9.1) and tsunami, which together left nearly 22,000 dead and missing, wiped out various neighbourhoods, and entirely washed away parts of the prefecture. The beautiful city of Sendai, where I lived for five years and where the local stations MTV and NHK-​Sendai that I visited are located, was the nearest major city to the earthquake’s epicentre. Unsurprisingly, the massive scale of the tragedy brought about a number of dramatic changes in the local TV stations’ agendas. After the incident, both programmes were suspended for several months, freeing their time slots for news coverage of the repercussions of the disaster. When they resumed, a significant amount of the broadcast content of the local shows was dedicated to the aftermath of the earthquake. Today, six years after the disaster, through a number of newly introduced corners, such as Ganbarou! Miyagi (Let’s Do Our Best! Miyagi), Furusatoni ikiru ([I]‌Live in the Hometown), or Ano hi o mune ni (That Day in My Heart), the local wideshows demonstrate their commitment to rebuild and reinvent what vanished during the six-​minute tragedy –​the televisual furusato (hometown), the audiences’ uchi –​via the viewers’ emotions, grief, and memoirs; their stories of loss and resilience; and live broadcasting on reconstruction efforts, health advice, lessons learnt, and so on.

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The TV stations and the programmes The fieldwork in MTV The first TV station I  visited was MTV, located in Sendai. My access to the studio was made possible through a colleague’s personal connections. My kone (intermediary) was Watanabe (pseudonym), one of the former producers of the local wideshow OH! Ban desu, who later also acted as my key informant. Thanks to Watanabe’s open, receptive attitude, I  was provided with access to the production units prior to and during telecasts. I  was also able to conduct repeated interviews with all the principals in front of and behind the cameras. This included the programme’s hosts, Satō Muneyuki and Ukigaya Miho, and the regular newscasters, Takehana Jun and Mori Tomoko. Considering the breadth and degree of access I was accorded, I can say that I was perfectly positioned to observe the numerous decisions that determine the substance of each corner of the show. I was introduced collectively to the production team by Watanabe one morning at the beginning of the broadcast day. However, the team seemed already informed about my visit, who I  was, what I  intended to do, my institutional affiliation, my plans for conducting observations and interviews, and so on. This provided a smoother entry and allowed me to perform exploratory conversations with the programme’s principals during my first visit. One significant detail worth noting here concerns gender: of the team’s four main figures, the male members were relatively ready and prepared for the possibility of being invited to an interview, whereas the two female members (Ukigaya Miho and Mori Tomoko) were surprised by my willingness to engage with them in an exploratory conversation. It appeared later that the producer had particularly encouraged the male members to provide support for my research and, if invited, participate in interviews, whereas the female members were only superficially informed about my visit. This was yet another cautionary example among many to follow that illustrates gender bias in representation and participation extending behind the cameras. During my observations, I  was allowed to collect visual material and take pictures of the studio, post-​production unit, sub-​studio, and the office. I  was provided with a copy of graphic reports offering up-​to-​date comparative ratings of four local TV stations located in Sendai, obtained from daily bangumi monitā (programme monitoring). I  was generously offered production files and a tick dossier presenting the programmes’ segments and minute-​ by-​ minute flow. During each visit, I  videotaped the show to observe how the combination of long-​standing production strategies of wideshows and instant decisions taken simultaneously during the telecasts are reflected on-​screen. The outcome of this was elaborated data sets and empirical evidence about how executive decisions are made backstage.

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Infotainment under construction 45 About the TV station MTV is one of four local broadcasters in Sendai, the largest city in Tōhoku region, the 12-​largest city in Japan. Sendai is the regional hub of the north-​eastern region of Honshū, with a population in excess of one million. MTV was established in 1970 as a local branch of NTV, one of Japan’s four nationwide networks (along with Fuji TV, TV Asahi, and TBS). MTV’s broadcasting area is limited to Miyagi prefecture, serving nearly 860,000 households. About the programme OH! Ban desu is an indispensable fixture of MTV’s local programme spectrum. Identical to other wideshows, OH! Ban desu takes three hours and ten minutes of the broadcast day.4 Broadcast live, it airs Monday through Friday, from 3:50 to 7:00 p.m. Of all the locally produced shows, it consumes the largest portion of total broadcasting for any one show. First aired in April 1995, OH! Ban desu is the top-​rated program of those produced locally by the four television channels in the broadcast area. Although there is some dispute about what specific type of information-​show OH! Ban desu is,5 it generally adheres to the information wideshow (jōhō-​waidoshō) format favoured by so many others like it. The producer’s account illuminated the policies and politics of labelling: “Well, we would call it an information programme (jōhō bangumi) (…) or perhaps an information-​culture programme (jōhō-​kyōyō bangumi)”. Interestingly, the answer did not match completely with the definition provided on the programme’s web page, which, during the time of my fieldwork, listed the show as an “information-​ variety program” (jōhō-​baraetī bangumi). When pressed, the producer disclosed that the administrative staff made such decisions, but this was not a unilateral process per se. “Generally”, he explained, “the production team comes together and talks about how to categorize the show (…) everybody puts in their ideas (…) and when the discussions end, ue no hito [people at the higher/​administrative level] make the final decision”. At the time of my field visit, the show comprised multiple corners, including, most prominently the following:

• • • • • • • •

Food and “how to” (honobono kicchin) Audience participation (ban desu nettowāku) Commercial information about exhibitions and local events (maru toku jōhō) Information about restaurants or favourite stores in and around the local area Sendai city (machino umai mon) as well as recommended places (osusume spotto jōhō) Local news reports Weather forecasts (ekimae hōsō) Travel information about sightseeing in the wider Tōhoku area

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46  Infotainment under construction Despite significant differences in corner6 titles, much of the broadcast content has remained unchanged in nature, with the exception of new segments devoted to the after-​effects of the Tōhoku earthquake. About the production members The production members of OH! Ban desu included a support staff of three men behind the camera, two assistants, and ten telephone operators. One of the production assistants and all the operators were women in their early 20s. Photogenic, they were seated near the right corner of the studio, behind two crescent-​shaped tables, one positioned within the arc of the other. The operators’ job was to field calls from the audience, who dial a number displayed on-​screen during the broadcast to inquire about recipes for the foods prepared in-​studio during the broadcast. According to Watanabe, the callers provide a glimpse of OH! Ban desu’s audience:  “They are generally women, in their forties, fifties (…) housewives (…) and those who become unemployed after giving birth.7 They watch TV at this time at home”. These conditions dictate the kind of content OH! Ban desu features. “We want to entertain our audiences”, Watanabe said, “not make them too worried or sad. Our broadcast period is the time that audiences take a rest in front of the TV (…) they need some entertainment, not sorrowful stories”. About the informants Watanabe (pseudonym): My key informant was a former producer of OH! Ban desu, in his early 40s. During the period of writing my field report, he resumed his former duties, once again heading production of OH! Ban desu. He was always polite, receptive, and friendly, and, other than in the first few hours of our talk, he usually addressed me with more informal, friendly forms of Japanese. I consider this detail important because, as Hendry (1993) argues, the opposite of this is the formality of polite speech, which “is usual in conversation between strangers, particularly if the meeting holds the expectation of longer term interaction, but these formalities may be gradually dropped as the participants become better acquainted” (p. 57). The producer’s interaction with other production members was also casual, almost chatty. Satō Muneyuki: The central figure of the programme was in his late 50s, dressed stylishly. He is known as a singer of folk songs –​under the stage name “Singer Mune” in Sendai –​and has made over 30 albums, including his best-​known song, “Aoba jō koi uta” (Aoba castle love song). His career began at an FM radio station. Since giving up his promising musical career for OH! Ban desu, he has appeared on-​screen from Saturday to Friday since April 1995. The recorded pieces showing Satō Muneyuki outside the studio demonstrate that he seems to enjoy talking to people in their workplaces, sharing an intimate atmosphere, and getting personal details concerning their everyday lives. In these

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Infotainment under construction 47 segments, we see the compassionate and modest singer Mune on the screen. At other corners, the beloved singer of the program appears as the cook or main announcer. His informal, friendly, and modest tone, on the other hand, often changed backstage (in the production units), where his attitude, appearance, and mode of speaking exhibited a certain level of self-​confidence and pride, which in turn underlined his significance for the program. OH! Ban desu was not the only programme that Satō Muneyuki appeared in. Almost every Thursday, he took part in Omoikkiri Terebi, broadcast from 2 to 4 p.m. on Monday to Friday. This was broadcast by NTV in Tokyo, a nationwide TV channel and parent station of MTV. Readers should note the essential difference between celebrities and a regular kaishain (company employee) who appear on TV shows. Satō Muneyuki, for instance, is not a kaishain. The “stars” or main personalities of most wideshows usually have a special contract with the stations via their jimusho (star agents), whereas the female professionals are usually kaishain (sometimes employed on a temporary contract) and therefore destined to occupy secondary positions in front of and behind the screen. Ukigaya Miho: The main female host of OH! Ban desu was in her late 30s, tall and slim, and always dressed formally. She has been working for the station as a kaishain (company employee) for 14  years (since 1991). Though intending to appear welcoming and friendly, she preferred the polite form of Japanese in our conversations, accompanied by humble manners, which together simultaneously exhibited her kawaisa (cuteness) and performed hazukashisa (shyness) in her communication with a foreigner. In contrast to Mune-​san and the other principle figures in front of the cameras, the burden she undertook appeared much heavier as she was expected to take on multiple responsibilities at the same time. These included dealing with preparations prior to the programme, checking the broadcast content and flow, talking to the other female hosts about the corners, contacting correspondents outside the studio, and also covering Satō Muneyuki during his absences from the studio. She often rushed to the sub-​studios to check the latest production details before informing others about what they needed to do during honban (the actual live broadcast performance). Takehana Jun: The programme’s ankāman (anchorman, main newscaster) and the newscaster of the TV station was in his late 50s, dressed in formal suits, and wearing glasses. He started his career in broadcasting at an FM radio station in Ibaraki8 in 1972. The longest period (more than 20  years) of his 33  years as media professional was as a reporter for MTV. My interview with him was illuminating. Possessing a wealth of knowledge and experience about the TV station and its broadcasting area, Takehana referred to significant milestones in the recent history of TV broadcasting in Japan, and contextualized these into the relevant historical background with a certain ease. During the interviews, he acted as the main reference point for other production members who sought his knowledge about the chronology of certain historical and technological developments regarding the programme and the TV station.

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48  Infotainment under construction Mori Tomoko: The newscaster of OH! Ban desu was in her late 30s and dressed in formal suits. Mori Tomoko has been working for MTV for 14  years since 1991. Takehana Jun and Mori Tomoko share the news segment. Due to her reluctance to engage in a formal, in-​depth interview, we decided to have informal conversations during different stages and segments of my visit. About the production studio Considering the large number of people navigating around inside the TV station, the production unit seemed surprisingly tiny. Technically speaking, it was very well equipped with the latest digital broadcast and editing technology. The number of people in front of the camera varies from two to six, depending on the need of particular segments being shot. Away from the set, there are five rooms: two guest lounges, two pre-​and post-​production facilities, and one newsroom. The last one is particularly noteworthy. Like any ordinary Japanese office, it consisted of rows of desks pushed up against one another without partitions, stacked with papers and books. A miniature microphone was placed on one desk, insecurely fixed with tape; behind the desk was an ordinary low-​backed chair. One meter from the desk was a tripod-​mounted camera facing the desk and chair. It is from this true-​to-​life set that the daily news reports are broadcast. One notable element of the broadcast studio was its “lived in” appearance, having a humble home ambience. As Watanabe explained, “[we have had] the same décor for almost a decade. There haven’t been any major changes since then”. Pointing to some artificial flowers, the producer continued, “Lately, we added those flowers and also some indirect lighting here and there (…) I think that’s more or less it”. A  bit sheepishly, he commented, “It looks pretty old, doesn’t it?” As I will elaborate later, it was this symbolic homelike space –​from the unchanging, familiar setting to the lived-​in appearance, from the warming flowers to the living-​room lighting –​that is post-​produced: a production strategy intentionally put in place to engineer an intimate bond with the audience. Creating linkages between the studio and nature is another tactic to communicate with Japanese audiences as members of a society “where nature and culture”, Clammer (2000) suggests, “interpenetrate and constantly inform each other, not only at the level of philosophy and religion, but in expressions of everyday life, including advertising, architecture, the seasonality of fashions, colors, and interior decorations” (p. 215). In Japan, Brecher (2000) argues, “nature has always been viewed as essentially good and a principal fountain-​head of liberation, be it spiritual or corporeal. By becoming one with the self and accepting subordination to the oneness of Creation the individual can live in intimacy with the natural world” (quoted by Martinez 2005: 185).9 My field data regarding the “nature-​broadcasting” relationship is inadequate to draw generalizations. However, the vast amount of time and effort dedicated to reproducing, replicating, or bringing nature into the

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Infotainment under construction 49 broadcast content (and from there to the audience’s home) via different tactics and designated corners since the inauguration of the show demonstrates clearly the production team’s awareness and attention vis-​ à-​ vis the local audience’s presumed attraction to the natural features of their place of origin (furusato) and their televisual representation. Similarly, I find Joy Hendry’s (1993) perspective on “wrapping” in Japanese society and culture particularly relevant to understanding the ways of crafting applied in front of and behind the cameras, where the physical/​spatial, bodily, and linguistic features of the televisual uchi are constructed and telecast. In Japan, wrapping is a prevailing cultural practice that exceeds any practical function like protection or convenience. In fact, as Hendry demonstrates in her work on different forms of wrapping in Japan (e.g. of the body, language, or space), it functions as a signifier of social relations and shapes what is informal (uchi) and what is not. While I  will revisit this point in the remainder of this book, the next section deals with the second local wideshow, Tere-​Masamune, broadcast by NHK-​Sendai. It will hopefully provide readers with a comparative (commercial versus public broadcasting) perspective via the similarities and differences that surface. The fieldwork in NHK-​Sendai After finishing my fieldwork at MTV, I  sought an opportunity to conduct my next observation at NHK-​Sendai, the region’s sole public broadcaster, to observe whether and, if so, how the institutional profile, economic considerations, and funding modalities influence how infotainment is produced locally. My first visit to the station was in 2003 as a guest invited to join the former morning show Yū Yū Miyagi, along with two gaijin invitees. We were invited to talk about traditional spring festivals and give examples from our home countries. The key facilitator of my second visit to the station and the programme Tere-​Masamune was a colleague from the same graduate institution. My first correspondence was with Igawa (pseudonym), a production member, who then become my key informant in the field. Thanks to her warm and generous attitude, I was able to observe the entire production process, starting from the early preparations to the hanseikai (a post-​programme meeting for reviewing the details of the broadcast or earlier activities) held at the studio, and managed to conduct interviews with the programme’s main figures. The nature of my field experience in NHK-​Sendai was rather different to that in MTV. Several factors influenced my first encounter with the production team and the show, including institutional concerns and higher bureaucratic walls that seriously hindered further visits to the station. I figured that my key informant’s relatively low position and role in the organization –​she certainly did not match the definition of ue no hito (people in administrative positions) –​was yet another factor in the less than enthusiastic beginning. My search for alternative ways to expand my research possibilities and extend my visit was viewed pessimistically by Igawa, although she could overcome the bureaucracy, because the actual

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50  Infotainment under construction problem was that NHK had recently been severely criticized. Just a few months before my visit, a fraud scandal concerning a former producer and the president of an events planning company became public. The repercussions were severe:  NHK received hundreds of complaints, emails, and phone calls from viewers concerned about the incident.10 This affected my fieldwork because the TV station became much more sensitive to any critical gaze from within or outside the institution. Having said that, the observation and interview data were sufficient to get a sense of the everyday flow in a local public broadcaster. The production members I interviewed included Igawa, the female host, Matsumoto (pseudonym), a production member, and Kubota Tsutomu, the main newscaster and TV personality. I was allowed to take pictures of the production units and the studio, but supporting material, such as the ratings graphs, programme flow, and other official documents, were not accessible to outsiders. About the TV station NHK-​Sendai, as its name indicates, is one of 54 local affiliates across the country of NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyokai, Japan Broadcasting Corporation), Japan’s sole public broadcaster (kōkyō hōsō).11 NHK is “a part of the wealthiest television network in the world” and “the largest public channel, which ranks among the top ten public broadcasters” (UNESCO, The World Communication Report, 1997: 188–​192). Imperative for the discussions in the coming chapters, NHK is not a national broadcasting agency (kokuei hōsō). As Krauss (2000) explains, [t]‌ here is some governmental purview exercised by having its Board of Governors appointed by the prime minister, and its overall yearly budget and any receiver’s fee increases must be approved by the Minister of Posts and the National Diet (Parliament). On the other hand it obtains its revenue from receivers’ fees rather than from central government allocation and the government has no direct control over daily administration. NHK is an independent broadcast agency, and on paper at least, perhaps the freest in the democratic world. (p. 3) NHK-​Sendai Broadcasting Station was established in 1928, and the TV station in 1958. Its broadcasting area is the same as MTV’s: Miyagi prefecture. About the programme Tere-​Masamune, in many respects, is identical to the local programme examined earlier in this chapter. One essential similarity is the corner strategy as the entire programme is produced through segments wrapped together with informative and entertaining components. The viewer profiles also match: housewives in their 40s or 50s. However, there were also significant differences, one of which concerns the show’s history. Tere-​Masamune was on-​air for slightly longer than two years

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Infotainment under construction 51 starting in 2003, whereas its rival, OH! Ban desu, had already been broadcasting for more than a decade at the time of my fieldwork. Preceding Tere-​Masamune was another wideshow, Yū Yū Miyagi, which passed on some of its corners (such as fudangi no onsen) to its successor. The team in front of the camera had also changed.12 Another considerable difference between two local shows is the length of each programme as Tere-​Masamune is shorter, lasting only about 100 minutes in total. The first part of the programme is divided equally between the corners Tere-​Masamune Go! Go! and the news segment, Tere-​Masamune Today. The programme broadcasts live from Monday to Friday, from 5:10  p.m. to 7:00  p.m. Common to the wideshow format, not all corners broadcast every day:  some appear once a week, while others broadcast two or three times or every day. These include the following:

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

Local food information around Miyagi prefecture (Go! Go! Shokuzai hantā, Monday) A variety of information about the broadcast region (Hakken Miyagi, Tuesday and Wednesday) How to raise children (Go! Go! Kosodate, Thursday) Stories from a Japanese farmhouse (Ōmori-​san chi no noradayori, Thursday) Stories from working fathers and mothers, with children joining the live programme (Papa mama shigotochū, Thursday) Information requests from viewers (Kitagō ga oshirabeshimasu, Friday) with a search for answers by Kitagō Mihoko Local cuisine (Miyagi wo itadakimasu, Monday through Thursday) Travel information, sight-​seeing in the wider Tōhoku area (Tōhoku kakueki teisha, Thursday) Onsen (Japanese hot springs) across Japan (Fudangi no onsen, Thursday) Disaster prevention (Kei-​san no hyakumannin no bōsai, Friday) Comic haiku of the day (Kyō no senryū, every broadcast day) Picture books for adults (Otona no tame no ehon no mihon, Friday) Food corner (Shokuba hōmon! Osusumenzu wo sagase! Friday)

About the production members The main figures who featured in Tere-​Masamune Go! Go! were Kubota Tsutomu, the male announcer, and Kitagō Mihoko, the female announcer. The female hosts, Matsumori Yumiko and Fujimura Yukiko, also appeared in different segments.13 The only male character in front of the camera was Kubota Tsutomu, the central personality of the programme, reminiscent of Satō Muneyuki of OH! Ban desu. Another similarity lies in the gender (inequality) issue that informs the employment modality. While the male figure, Kubota Tsutomu, is a permanent employee at the station, the female hosts have fixed contracts with the TV channel that must be periodically renewed. Mentioning her strong ambition to become a futsū no shain (ordinary employee), one of my female informants argued that this disparity in employment creates serious gender inequality and job insecurity

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52  Infotainment under construction at the workplace, and forms obstacles that female workers face regularly every working day. There were 18 production members (i.e. program assistants, directors, and other supporters). Three (all male) work behind the camera, while seven directors run the show collectively, rotating according to the programme schedule, although a specific director was assigned for the cooking segment. During my visit, four of the directors were present at the studio. One of them, in his late 30s, was the chief. Through his attitude, appearance, and way of interaction with staff members (via linguistic and behavioural tropes), he displayed a certain “social front” (Goffman 1956: 18)14 pertinent to the level of superiority and detachment he seemed willing to show towards the people present in the studio, including myself. Appearance was not the only element that revealed power. The programme directors were not NHK-​ Sendai employees but kyōryoku-​sha (corporate employees) affiliated with another company, NHK-​Tōhoku Puraningu (NHK-​ Tōhoku Planning),15 which produces Tere-​Masamune Go! Go! for NHK-​Sendai. Informal conversations with junior staff members indicated the directors’ association with another institution –​therefore having only secondary relations with uchi no kaisha (our company) –​as one possible reason for their lack of affinity and measured distance. Despite being employed by an NHK affiliate, the directors did not appear to be fully engaged with or invested in the social relations in the local station as an integral part of the company, which in turn altered their role and diminished their sense of responsibility for the station’s unmei kyōdōtai (shared destiny). Another more collective sense of distance and disconnectedness I witnessed in NHK-​Sendai concerns the production team in general and their rapport with the working environment and the work itself, which differed substantially from what I observed at the local commercial TV station, MTV. In contrast to the sense of belonging displayed by MTV’s staff to the soul of their company (its success, identity, perceived public image, and so on), in NHK-​Sendai, the way staff members from different administrative positions assessed the performance of the show and the TV company revealed a certain level of dissatisfaction. The repeated interviews with production members, Matsumoto and Igawa, for instance, revealed their critical perspective on the working environment and the quality of work they produced. Moreover, none of my informants attempted to persuade me about the efficiency of their performance in the station or to make any particular effort to demonstrate how successful Tere-​Masamune is in approaching local viewers. However, they were not hesitant in articulating their critical opinions about the show and a variety of other production details  –​an attitude not common in Japan’s organizational culture. This critical attitude remained remarkably consistent even when we shifted our conversation towards more sensitive issues (gender inequality, uneven distribution of tasks, etc.) that reveal disapproval or dissatisfaction. In contrast, my informants at MTV appeared more passionate and content about the workplace and their role in it. As mentioned earlier, my analysis and speculations in this section are based on the limited time I  spent

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Infotainment under construction 53 at NHK-​Sendai, so a longitudinal (Algan 2017) and multisited ethnographic approach (Falzon 2016; Marcus 2011, 1995) to the production processes would provide more insights and might offer a different perspective on this point. About the informants Igawa (pseudonym): My key informant was female, in her 30s, tall and slim, dressed in informal, sporty clothes (e.g. jeans and blouse) before the telecasts. In contrast to MTV’s producer, Watanabe, Igawa also performs in front of the cameras. One noteworthy detail is that Igawa’s professional career in the TV business began at the rival station, MTV, before she moved to NHK-​Sendai. Igawa’s experience in both companies put her in a special position to provide me with a comparative perspective on local wideshows and TV stations. She was very friendly and helpful from the outset of our interview, seeming relaxed and comfortable, and her attitude remained the same during the later stages when she expressed her critical views and discontent about how the production members were performing.16 The only interruptions in our interactions occurred when she left the studio for a short time to dress in a yukata (an informal summer kimono) prior to the live telecast and when she was in front of the cameras behind the main table during the telecast. Matsumoto (pseudonym): A male production member in his 30s, slim and casually dressed, Matsumoto oversaw the technical performance and the studio’s telecasting equipment. Having worked for NHK-​Sendai for more than a decade, he was able to provide me with detailed information about the studio and its technical features as well as the station’s limitations. Thanks to his guidance, I was able to access the sub-​studio to obtain a large amount of information about the post-​production process. Just like Igawa, Matsumoto was not concerned about appearing too critical in his assessments of the production process. During the interview, he comfortably detached himself from his current position in the production team and criticized the program as an outsider would. Kubota Tsutomu: The main announcer of Tere-​Masamune Go! Go! and the station’s newscaster was a male in his late 40s, dressed in shirt and trousers. He had worked for NHK for 20 years. His professional career in the media sector was divided between different cities: “NHK is the sixth station I have worked for”, he told me. He continued, “Until 1982, I changed between five stations located in different cities (…) Kobe, Sapporo, Tokyo, and finally Sendai”. I  repeated my interviews with Kubota during the observations, when he appeared more optimistic about the program and its future, although he was dissatisfied with the technological aspect: “Digital broadcasting will change many things in programme content” (for further details, see the discussions on the technological aspect in Chapter 4). His reflections on news and factual affairs programmes were of particular significance for our discussion of infotainment and tabloidization.

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54  Infotainment under construction In contrast to OH! Ban desu, where the news segment was transmitted by a newscaster specifically assigned for this corner (Takehana), in Tere-​Masamune, it is the program’s main figure, Kubota, who performs this task. Referring to his dual role in the programme as newscaster and the show’s principle figure, I  inquired further about the traditional divide between two genres of news and entertainment. During our conversation, I first provided specific examples from the programme’s news segment that epitomize the general tendency towards tabloidization on Japanese TV and then expanded the conversation towards other programmes to assist further comparison. One of them was Hōdō Sutēshon, the factual affairs programme televised by Asahi TV, a commercial broadcaster and one of the four key stations in Tokyo. For Kubota, the programme falls under the category of hōdō-​baraetī (factual/​informative variety programme): For instance, News-​10 [by NHK] is more like a news report, while Hōdō Sutēshon is different. It broadcasts longer than other factual programs with similar format, basically because the programme contains a variety of information. I personally prefer to watch Hōdō Sutēshon during that time of the day (…) because the way Furutachi [the newscaster] communicates with the audience is different (…) He acts in the programme as an ankāman. If we could blend factual information with our personal viewpoint [jijutsu purasu kangae kata], then we, too, could generate a dialogue between the programme and our audiences. Despite structural differences and major contrasts between MTV and NHK-​ Sendai, we see that the production personnel –​including both senior newscasters, Kubota of Tere-​Masamune and Takehana of OH! Ban desu  –​appear to be in agreement that diminishing conventional borders (in this case, between news report and the rest of the programme) in such a way as to allow a more subjective, compelling, and thereby more emotionally engaging (uchi-​like) televisual hybrid is an essential strategy in engendering stronger dialogue with the viewers. About the production studios As mentioned earlier, I first visited the NHK-​Sendai studios in Spring 2003. One detail that surprised me at the outset was the location of the main studio, just next to the station’s entrance, so that anyone entering would encounter the studio and broadcasting team first. This former studio was much smaller than the current one where Tere-​Masamune is shot. The TV station’s technical infrastructure and physical features had changed by my second visit. The small studio I had previously been invited to had been replaced by a brand new, multipurpose studio, three times larger than the previous one, and equipped with cutting-​edge technology. There were three manoeuvrable cameras –​one of them on a jib to allow movement. Yet Matsumoto seemed dissatisfied with the technology aspect. The cameras, for instance, were almost ten years old, while there was a wooden, oval

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Infotainment under construction 55 table and five low-​back chairs on the right-​hand side of the studio. Two micro monitors, placed inside the table, which enabled the announcers to follow the programme flow, were invisible to the audience. For the VTR (videotaped recording) pieces, there was a flat display behind the table, facing the cameras. A few meters away were shelves and stairs, parts of the décor. On the stairs was the programme’s symbol, Warade, together with other decorations. In the middle of the studio was a big screen for the visual materials. The position of the screen divided the studio into two parts: the main set and the cooking corner to the left. Next to the screen were two bar stools, placed near to the shelves in such a way as to add a cosy, pub-​like ambience to the studio. The other side of the studio was dedicated to the cooking set, which was almost twice as wide as the main set, with a table coloured orange, yellow, and blue. Behind this were the stairs, decorated with different coloured lanterns. A few cups, small dolls, a microwave oven, a scales, a big green plant, a wall clock, and other decorative details were placed on and around the shelves behind. In contrast with the clean, well-​arranged table on the screen, the table and cupboards were messy and chaotic. This cosy ambience, crafted by numerous decorative materials and vibrant colours, suddenly ended where the other half of the studio began. Indeed, this part was completely different from the rest: with dark grey and concrete walls, cables, cameras, spotlights, wide screens facing the announcers, and other idle technical equipment left around the studio, forming a perfect contrast to what the audience enjoyed watching. For the news segments, there was another studio, located separately from the main set. It was a small room with a table for five people (with three micro monitors placed under the table’s surface), two cameras, a few spotlights, microphones, and other technical materials, and two wall clocks facing the announcers. The differences between the news units of NHK-​ Sendai and Miyagi Terebi were striking. All the telecast materials employed in the former studio, for instance, were of higher quality than those used in MTV. That is, instead of the true-​to-​life atmosphere of MTV’s set, NHK-​Sendai presented a more serious look and a professionally equipped studio for its news corner, which together demonstrated a sharp departure from the cosy atmosphere of the main studio. What was manifested through these differences in the technical and visual wrapping of the newsrooms in the two stations was a major divide between their approaches to wideshow and, within that, the news corner. For the commercial station (MTV), the news report was just one important, regular segment among the others comprising OH! Ban desu. For NHK-​Sendai, in contrast, news was the single most essential element of the company’s public service broadcasting mandate. During my observations, a fully digital sub-​studio, including more than 60 monitors, one major control board, and pre-​and post-​production facilities, was still under construction. The objective of this initiative was to broadcast Tere-​Masamune from the brand-​new studio, demonstrating the latest, NHK-​led digital era in TV broadcasting in Japan.

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56  Infotainment under construction The fieldwork in NTV The last TV station I visited was NTV (Nihon Terebi), the national broadcaster in Tokyo. My aim here was twofold. First, THE Waido, the most-​viewed and longest-​running wideshow at the time of my fieldwork, was broadcast by this studio. The data collected in the field enabled me to propose answers to the question of how broadcast strategies applied by local TV stations change at a national scale; and how the producers of a nationwide show communicate their content to “national” viewers. Second, because NTV is the parent station of MTV, it is critical for a comparative understanding of the production policies applied in local and national stations belonging to the same company. In contrast to my experiences in the local TV companies, I lacked a particular kone to facilitate my fieldwork in the NTV studios. Instead, I followed a formal procedure and applied by email, outlining the objectives of my research, the programme to be visited, the technical units to be observed, and a few more details about myself and the academic kōza (department/​subdivision) I was enrolled in. After intensive email traffic and phone calls that continued a few weeks, I  was finally granted an excellent position in the production studios, with access to all units, including offices, the main and audio-​studios, the sub-​studio, and the post-​production units. I repeated my interviews with the production personnel; observed and chatted with support staff, working in the main and audio-​studios; and took notes and pictures when and where possible. Among my interviewees were Murakami and Ashizawa, the chief producers, and the producer Ishita (all pseudonyms). Murakami was the only producer who had worked for THE Waido throughout its history and was therefore important for the purposes of my visit. I  also interviewed the department manager, Hagiwara, who worked for Yomiuri TV, a local affiliate of NTV, in Osaka. Hagiwara, whose enormous support provided me with full access to the different units of the station, became my key informant. The repeated interviews in NTV’s studios were conducted prior, during, and after the telecasts. In addition to those working behind the cameras, such as programme assistants, I was also able to interview post-​production members working in different units. My observations in NTV’s studios were particularly enriched by the quantity and the quality of supporting documents, including comparative graphic records of the programme’s ratings and daily share, detailed documentation of the programme’s content, the list of regular guests of the month, and an official (unpublished) report on the history of THE Waido, with a particular focus on the significant milestones that had influenced the programme’s style and content (e.g. the sarin gas attack at Tokyo station and Hanshin Awaji Daishinsai, the major Kobe earthquake). About the TV station NTV (Nihon Terebi or Nippon Television Network), established in 1952 in Tokyo, is the parent station and headquarters of Nippon Television Network,

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Infotainment under construction 57 comprised of 30 affiliates spread throughout the country and 13 international news bureaus located on four continents. Regarding the content spectrum, audience share, and ratings,17 NTV is certainly one of the most popular national private enterprises among the other key TV stations located in Tokyo (i.e. Fuji TV, TBS, and TV Asahi). About the programme THE Waido, as mentioned earlier, was a nationwide programme, which began broadcasting two years before OH! Ban desu (in April 1993)  and remained on-​air for the next 14 years until September 2007. From Monday to Friday it was broadcast from 1:50  p.m. to 3:50  p.m. and obtained the highest ratings of all the four TV stations mentioned above. The descriptive features of the program are hidden in the title: THE Waido or The Wide. As its chief producer Murakami notes, It is all about the content. Just like other wideshows, we broadcast news about politics, economics, society, life-​style, and also geinōkai (the Japanese world of show business). Different genres are covered by a single programme. This is why we call it “wide”. This account adds substance to my earlier discussion about the genre’s characteristics (see Introduction), while contradicting Painter’s (1996) argument that “the name wideshow does not refer to the content of the programs, which are certainly not broad in their scope, but instead to their protracted length: at least 60 minutes” (p.  209). Like the local shows, THE Waido has a variety of corners associated with its central news component:

• • •

• • • •

The main corner  –​following the opening segment  –​that broadcasts hard news, including politics, economy, society, etc. Soft news about stars, events, idols, etc. (Nyūsu jinbutsu waido) This corner, broadcast from a small set placed next to the main set, covers a wide range of news stories, varying from dramatic and intimate human stories to more entertaining content. A story about seven twins enrolled at the same high school, for instance, can be broadcast in the same corner as details of official investigations into the death of a teenage girl. This corner has its own announcer (Sugeno Daisuke), who does not appear elsewhere in the programme. Brief news reports on a variety of issues (Nyūsu totte dashi) Here is where we come across the news, more related to local accidents, secondary political issues, etc. Like the previous corner, it has its own dedicated newscaster, Mayama Yūichi. The quiz corner at the end of the programme (Watashi wa daare? –​Who am I?) The aim of this corner, as its name indicates, is to entertain the audience by inviting them to find out who the person (e.g. tarento) on the display is.

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58  Infotainment under construction About the production members To create this border-​crossing content, a large and devoted production team is a prerequisite. Five main producers (or team leaders) worked regularly for the programme, with two having the title of chief producer. More than a hundred professionals were working under the five producers. What Painter (1996) observed earlier was relevant for Nihon Terebi:  “[T]‌he reporters are virtually always located outside –​the camera only goes inside for the national news and weather segments” (p.  210). THE Waido reporters also broadcast from outside, mainly conducting vox pop interviews and providing details of news stories (scandals, incidents, side events, witnesses, scenes, etc.) that were particularly interesting to the viewers. This enormous team comprised several rotating groups based on a schedule. For every broadcast day, a specific desk allocated tasks to the producers, assistants, and technical staff responsible for the day. At least five people regularly appeared on-​ screen. Among them were three regulars, the main announcer, Kusano Hitoshi; a man in his fifties, sitting in the centre; Mori Fumi, the female host, sitting next to him; and the expert of the day, who changed depending on the topic picked for the program. As we encountered earlier, the main male figure, Kusano, possessed authority and led the programme, while the female host occupied a secondary position under his shadow. As in the first two cases, male and female principals at NTV also had different employment statuses. While Kusano was freelancing via his own agency (kojin jimusho), and therefore had a special agreement with the TV station, the female host, Mori, was a regular kaishain. My previous observations regarding gender inequality in the production processes were true for NTV as well. Like the female employees’ experiences in the local stations, women announcers at NTV carried more and multiple responsibilities, and were supposed to deal with other demanding aspects of preparations prior to the programme itself, whereas the male announcer was assigned a certain level of autonomy and liberty, and granted a more limited role in the programme’s production. Similar observations applied to the producer position. The lack of female producers evidenced the post’s “men-​only” status. Similarly, the number of male professionals working in the production and post-​production units of NTV was dramatically higher than for female staff. During the live broadcast, the busiest period when staff numbers exceeded 30, I only encountered eight to ten women, mostly in their early 20s, and usually serving as assistants for other (male) professionals in the studios.

About the informants Hagiwara (pseudonym): A key informant, he was in his 50s, dressed in a formal suit, slim, and the tallest production member. I contacted him via email a month before my first visit. Although I met him in NTV Tokyo, Hagiwara was working for the local affiliate, Yomiuri TV, but had been temporarily seconded to NTV

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Infotainment under construction 59 Tokyo during my visit. Rotation is a widespread strategy in Japan’s corporate world, with employees rotating from one branch to another during their careers and expected to return to their home company after serving their time. This temporary workplace engagement inevitably informs the nature of interactions there. Hagiwara, for instance, held an administrative position (buchō, head of a section) at Yomiuri TV. However, the field data revealed that Hagiwara’s temporary assignment to NTV-​Tokyo had imposed certain restrictions on his role as sempai (senior employee) and his administrative power as a manager. This, he confessed to me, had marginalized his position in NTV in comparison to those working there permanently. Hagiwara’s negotiated role as insider-​from-​outside position was one essential element that generated, though tacitly and temporarily, a kind of modus vivendi or “working consensus” (Goffman 1956: 4) between him and myself. For both of us, it was easier to talk to an “outsider” than to any permanent member of the production family about what was happening in the station, and to judge or criticize the environment surrounding us and the social relations involved in it. Being new to the station and the show, he seemed comfortable with his performance in the interview and less concerned with potential mistakes or a lack of information regarding the historical background of the programme and the station. Thanks to his candid and generous support from the outset, I obtained rich data regarding different aspects of the programme (e.g. definitions of the show, popular trends in the contemporary TV broadcasting, and the human relations among the programme personnel), and greatly benefitted from his sempai position in the company. In fact, it was through his efforts that I managed to reach other production members; obtain copies of unpublished reports, rating graphics, and the schedule of the panellists; gather audiovisual materials; and –​when our rapport became stronger –​move from one unit to another without restrictions. Murakami (pseudonym): The programme’s chief producer was in his 40s and wore glasses. Although he was having a hectic time during my participant observations, Murakami served as a key informant during my visit. No doubt this was partly due to his career and wealth of experience in NTV. Just like the department manager, Hagiwara, producer Murakami was a member of the Yomiuri TV team. The difference was that he had moved to Tokyo almost a decade before and had been working for the programme from the first moment it was aired. This gave him an authoritative expert position when it came to storytelling and commenting on the history of the programme. He was also Hagiwara’s main point of reference for accurate programme data during our conversations. As a chief producer, Murakami also played an essential role in shaping and producing the programme’s content by actively attending to decision-​making processes (hanseikai), assigning different tasks to support personnel, engineering visual material, and controlling the overall broadcasting process from early preparations to the end of the live telecast. Based on repeated interviews carried out in different places, including the office, studio, sub-​studio, control unit, and cafeteria, I  figured out that

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60  Infotainment under construction Murakami had a somewhat superior position among the other production members, and that he was aware of this. His long career in the media sector and experiences in different TV companies enabled him to narrate the milestones within the history of THE Waido within a wider context through a comparative perspective. He was also able to provide details regarding rival stations and their programming strategies, and connect them to broader developments in the Japanese mediascape, such as an increasing tendency towards infotainment (see Chapter 4). Ishita (pseudonym): One of the programme’s five principle producers, he was in his 40s, wore glasses, and was dressed in a pale jacket and trousers. My first communication with Ishita was by phone before I went to Tokyo. Ishita, who had moved to NTV just a year before my visit, was a permanent staff member of Yomiuri TV. Although polite and open, he also appeared distant and somewhat tense, as evidenced by his gestures and the way he communicated. This was partly due to the demanding responsibilities he was supposed to fulfil as the producer in charge that day. His level of stress was also noticeable to others present in the studio. He needed to navigate between the endless details of the live broadcast, monitor technical problems and propose solutions in a few seconds, guide programme directors and the team, suggest sudden changes and implement them in the broadcast content, and so on. Once the programme ended, he appeared exhausted but also more tolerant and receptive. Ishita’s insights on THE Waido and its rivals (e.g. Jasuto [The just], broadcast by TBS), which were always based on concrete examples and historical evidence, made a significant contribution to the fieldwork data. For Ishita, the show was too serious in its current form compared to its competitors and urgently needed some light (karui) content, easier to comprehend (wakariyasui) by its audience. This observation was shared by other producers, who also argued that inserting some tabloid or soft content, such as geinōjin (entertainers, TV personalities), scandals, and commercial information, could expand the target audience profile and strengthen younger audiences’ engagement with the show.18 Ashizawa (pseudonym): The programme’s chief producer was tall, in his 40s, dressed in stylish, dark, formal suits. In contrast to other producers affiliated with the programme’s co-​producer, Yomiuri TV, Ashizawa was from NTV, the parent station. Moreover, while Hagiwara, Murakami, and Ishita were members of the seisaku spōtsu kyoku (production sports department) of the local affiliate, Ashizawa managed the hensei kyoku (organization department) at NTV. Contrary to his generally friendly, informal attitude, he acted as a no-​nonsense producer with no tolerance for any minor mistakes. He would leave the control room, warn the production team in a commanding manner, request immediate solutions to technical problems, and monitor the entire production process meticulously. During the telecast, the number of people in the control room could vary depending on the segment. However, Ashizawa was always present to ensure the programme’s smooth flow. We had several conversations before and during the telecast.

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Infotainment under construction 61 About the production studios Compared to the local TV stations, NTV, one of the largest national TV enterprises in Japan, is distinct in many respects. These differences relate to several components, such as the number of production team members, the technical infrastructure, and the physical facilities. Let us start with the office, located on the seventh floor of the NTV Tower. Compared to the lobby of the tower, with a somewhat relaxing ambience and highly minimalist touch, this floor resembles any other ordinary office environment in Japanese companies, with piles of files left on desks, dozens of phones, CDs, newspapers, leftovers, and mountains of papers all around. This rather chaotic scene was decorated with personal objects, such as small animation characters, ornaments, photos, food packages, drinks, handbags, and many other items chucked onto the stacks on the desks. Six or seven people share each large desk. In contrast to what we saw in MTV, the desks were placed separately. As mentioned in the Introduction, this is done on purpose as each desk is assigned for a particular broadcast day. The staff wore informal, sporty clothes (baseball caps, jeans, pullovers, no jackets or neckties, etc.), except for administrators. Yet, despite this casual and seemingly horizontal environment, the office layout also displayed power as the producers’ desks were separated from the rest of the office. This was not achieved by walls or separators but by a row of TV sets on cabinets and desks, bunched next to each another to demarcate the unit allocated to the producers. The production units of THE Waido were located separately on the ninth floor. The main studio was right in the middle of a long corridor along which other studios were placed –​each studio was named with the title of the programme shot there, such as Omoikkiri Terebi. Beside the main entrance was a photocopier for use in urgent situations, such as breaking news. Inside were the post-​production units, often called sub-​studios. One of these was a small room, isolated from the rest of the unit by windows with a table for five or six people facing four TV sets close to the entrance. This was where the production members met every day to follow the programme flow and discuss the latest changes in its content. Except for these two rooms, the rest of the sub-​studio was dedicated to new, high-​tech post-​production equipment, including more than 70 midsize screens and three control panels. In contrast to local TV stations furnished with multipurpose studios designed to broadcast different corners, Nihon Terebi has a fully equipped studio, prepared and devoted entirely to its powerful programme THE Waido. Behind the cameras were six production members, four of whom were cameramen. One small room, set apart from the rest of the sub-​studio, was dedicated to the voice-​overs for the VTR pieces. For this, there were two (male) announcers and a female assistant in charge. This detail is particularly important because the announcer, who has a dramatic, deep, and rather serious voice, was the one whom we hear in the opening (news) segment of the programme. The second announcer, however, takes her turn just before the more entertaining corners begin.

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Gender inequality screened This final section picks up where the previous observations left off to offer a few global remarks on the gender aspect. The data presented in this chapter provide substance to the argument in Chapter  1, where I  suggested that gender both plays a significant role in consumption processes in front of the TV where the audience is and also informs the entire orchestration behind (production processes) and on-​screen (delivery). I will briefly comment on these seemingly distinct yet symbiotic realms. Regarding the production process, we witnessed that a variety of different aspects revealed gender inequality in these TV stations. One significant disparity concerned the modality of employment for male and female production members working for the same programme in the same company, which placed female professionals in relatively subordinate positions and increased their vulnerability. During the time this fieldwork was conducted, for instance, the wideshows’ main personalities, all decision makers, and programme directors, and almost all the production teams were male. As mentioned earlier, in NTV and MTV, two of three main “stars” featured in the wideshows were affiliated with the TV companies through their agencies (kojin jimusho or jimusho), whereas the female hosts were regular company employees (kaishain). In the case of the public broadcaster, NHK-​Sendai, the programme’s main figure was a permanent employee, whereas the female host was working on a fixed contract, renewable every two years. Most of the female informants participating in my fieldwork were suffering because their modality of employment generated various disadvantages compared to their male colleagues or programme partners, generating an inequitable distribution of work and poorer job security.19 Similarly, the number of male media professionals dramatically outnumbered female personnel in all three cases, where young women were usually assigned to inferior positions and minor tasks. During my observations, for instance, no female employee was involved in decision-​making processes before or during a telecast. When I inquired about this, Hagiwara (of NTV) replied, Well, your observations are relevant. To bridge this gap [between men and women in the work force], the government implemented some initiatives almost ten years ago (…) We call it Danjo Koyō Kikai Kintōho [the Equal Employment Opportunity Law –​ 1986]. But still, Japan is progressing very slowly. For instance, [in this department] a vice-​manager is female, some directors, too. But none of the chief managers or chief producers is female. The number of male employees exceeds female workers [because] the women employees are not as stable as their male co-​workers [at the job]. They start [their career] in the early 20s, spend five to six years at job before they get married, and then they quit the job. For Hagiwara, it is this prevailing pattern in Japanese society that causes serious disadvantages for women in the work force:

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Infotainment under construction 63 After delivering a baby, women’s responsibilities at home get twice as heavy as men’s. Their primary role becomes housewife. Unfortunately, this traditional perspective is still alive in Japanese society. Change follows an extremely slow path in a patriarchal society like Japan. Not only do these accounts connect the field observations to the broader picture regarding gender discussed earlier (see Chapter  1), but they also draw meaningful parallels between women’s vulnerable position in the production (media professionals) and consumption processes (audiences, housewives), both of which are permeated and constrained by masculine norms and values. The under-​representation of women in the workplace and leadership positions in Japan is not surprising. According to the most recent World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2017, Japan ranks near the bottom (114th) among 144 countries in terms of gender equality. Likewise, a survey by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (2018) found that Japan is the third worst among member states, after South Korea and Estonia. What is less expected, however, are the findings of some recent surveys indicating a serious setback in an earlier trend of married women rejecting traditional values. Instead, there has been an increase in the number of wives following more conservative discourses that strengthen husband-​at-​work–​wife-​at-​home dichotomies (Goldstein-​ Gidoni 2012:  209). Examining men’s attitudes regarding gender role division in Japan and Korea, Jihey Bae (2010) reports that men in Japan who agree with gender role division have greater life satisfaction when their wife does not work. Looking at the relationship between television viewing habits and traditional gender roles, Masahiro Yamamoto and Weina Ran (2014) observe that these traditional norms and patterns remain mostly unchanged –​ which has posed a serious challenge to government efforts towards more gender equality in the workplace since the 1980s.20 As expected, the ubiquitous bias and disparity in gender roles also invade the screen. Irrespective of the programme’s corner and the number of female hosts featured in the show –​who sometime outnumber male participants –​it is usually the male star who is the central figure of authority, whose job is to run the show, conduct interviews with studio experts, moderate dialogues between the guests, ensure smooth transitions between more informative and entertaining components, and, more significantly, represent the epicentre of the show. Being a perfect hybrid, wideshows also broadcast content where such binary divisions (i.e. male for factual-​informative segments; female for softer or sentimental segments) tend to be obscured. As the field data demonstrate, one ubiquitous strategy employed in wideshows is that the main personalities and hosts perform multiple tasks in multiple corners throughout the programme. However, while the televised image that female hosts execute adheres to similar female characteristics throughout the telecast, the central male figure of the programme, whose manliness (otokorashisa) is communicated to the audience in various ways, may change and present another softer, more accessible, and emotional

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64  Infotainment under construction self-​image (see NTV data in Chapter 4) in a different segment. However, such border-​crossing dramaturgical and televisual presentations between hegemonic and subordinate gender roles do not necessarily indicate any change in the social structures that reproduce and maintain masculine hegemony. Robert Hanke (1990) underlines this point in his warning: Apparent modifications of hegemonic masculinity may represent some shift in the cultural meanings of masculinity without an accompanying shift in dominant social structural arrangements, thereby recuperating patriarchal ideology by making it more adaptable to contemporary social conditions and more able to accommodate counter-​hegemonic forces, such as liberal-​ feminist ideology and gay/​lesbian politics. (p. 245) In his discussion on the roots and the shifting meaning of the sararīman (white-​ collar, male employee in a private company) in the second half of the twentieth century, Romit Dasgupta (2005) demonstrates that, despite the increasing popularity of figures in the world of popular culture who do not reproduce conventional gender norms, one should not underestimate “the tenacity of the hegemonic discourse” (p.  131), which may devise alternative ways to persist. Applied to our discussion in this section, softening the contours of masculinity may serve well to gain the consent of female viewers on the one hand while maintaining its hegemony on the other.

Notes 1 In his book, “Tales of the Field”, John van Maanen (1988) persuasively demonstrates that ethnographers masterfully devise different rhetorical conventions in their reports to convey a sense of “I-​was-​there” to their readers. 2 It is still worth remembering that, as Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (1995) suggest, “no field researcher can be a completely neutral, detached observer, outside and independent of the observed phenomena” (p. 3). 3 On the programme’s website, the three main figures of OH! Ban desu appear on the banner:  Satō Muneyuki, the heart of the show, stands in the middle, perhaps with whiter hair compared to when we talked, but still as confident and content as ever. To the left and right are Ukigaya Miho and Mori Tomoko, smiling cheerfully, with raised clenched fists. The picture stands as a momentous example of the show’s lasting success and resilience against many changes. For the programme’s web page and the banner, visit www.mmt-​tv.co.jp/​bandesu/​index.html. 4 During my fieldwork, the show underwent certain changes. Some were relatively cosmetic; others were aimed at drawing closer to the audience. One such change concerned the format. Whereas previously, the bulk of the show’s first hour was allocated to the parent station in Tokyo, from August 2004, the hour between 3:50 and 4:50 p.m. was retained by the local station. This meant, in the words of the show’s producer, “now we have another 60 minutes we have to use. The programme will start at 15:50 still –​ no change in that. But what is new is that we will not connect to the main station after the first ten minutes of broadcasting as we have done all these years. (In the past) we

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Infotainment under construction 65 were waiting till 16:50 to start the main part of the programme, but now we don’t need to do that. We have new corners which will be located in that additional hour between 15:50 and 16:50”. 5 Today, the programme is labeled on its website as baraeti bangumi (variety programme). See the programme’s home page (in Japanese) at www.mmt-​tv.co.jp/​ bandesu/​. 6 Programme details and corner information can be accessed via www.mmt-​tv.co.jp/​ bandesu/​. 7 Masumi Sugawara (2005) notes, “67.6% of mothers who were employed one year prior to childbirth were unemployed six months after delivery” (p. 226). 8 Prefecture in the Kantō area (the eastern half of Japan, including Tokyo). 9 In her discussion on the widespread discourse of the Japanese unique sense of nature, Dolores Martinez (2005: 185–​186) criticizes similar holistic approaches to the society’s attitudes towards nature and suggests instead a closer look at the particular meanings assigned to nature as a social construct, which vary by region, time, and class. 10 The producer, who was earlier separately accused by NHK of a similar crime, and the president were arrested on suspicion of swindling 2.7 million yen (USD 26,000) out of the public broadcaster. The result was dramatic: NHK announced that some 113,000 households had refused to pay their TV subscription fees to protest the fraud by the end of 2004. The total amount of uncollected fees reached one billion yen. Retrieved 14 July 2005 from http://​search.japantimes.co.jp/​print/​news/​nn12-​ 2004/​nn20041205a3.htm. 11 For details about the public broadcaster’s profile, see www.nhk.or.jp/​corporateinfo/​ english/​publication/​pdf/​corporate_​profile.pdf. 12 Kawanome Eriko and Yoshioka Shingo were the main figures featuring in Yū Yū Miyagi. 13 During my fieldwork, the announcers Kubota Tsutomu and Kitagō Mihoko were still the main personalities of the programme, while other members of the team changed afterwards. 14 “When an individual plays a part”, Goffman (1956) observes, “he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess” (p. 10). 15 An event planning company in Sendai. Details can be accessed via https://​www. nhk-​pn.jp. 16 For Igawa, one critical issue that demanded urgent attention was hanseikai, the meetings at the end of every broadcast day. For the meeting, the entire production team gathered in the studio just as they do every morning, prior to the telecast. The directors stand at the centre while the others form a circle around them. The main purpose of hanseikai, as its name suggests (hansei means reconsideration, reflection, review; kai means meeting), is to assess the daily performance, during which the team members are expected to provide a detailed evaluation. While the directors share feedback, criticizing the major mistakes and addressing the team members responsible for them, the staff ’s response is limited to nodding or taking notes. Only a few production assistants share their feedback. When I inquired about this, Igawa, frustrated by the nature of the meeting, commented that there was literally no “hansei” in their “hanseikai”. The atmosphere and the conduct of the meeting were identical to the meeting I observed earlier in the morning. Of 18 staff members gathered in the studio, only the main director’s voice was heard, while others kept silent throughout. 17 Retrieved 4 May 2017 from http://​www.ntv.co.jp.

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66  Infotainment under construction 18 For me as a media scholar at the time, who had previously dealt with the phenomenon of tabloidization in private TV channels from a critical political-​economic perspective (Ergül 2000), hearing the producers’ affirmative opinions, eagerness, and hunger for a more trivial or tabloid content was a lesson that only a qualitative inquiry could provide. 19 In her ethnographic work on power and gender relations at the workplace in Japan, Yuko Ogasawara (1998) underscores employers’ simple motivation behind this widespread strategy in the Japanese corporate world: “Companies found it advantageous to replace OLs [office ladies] with temporary workers and thereby reduce their fixed costs”, since “the contract did not have to be renewed if the company had no need or desire to retain a given temp” (p. 170). However, Ogasawara observes that, in some cases, office ladies’ (ōeru) subordinate position, lack of permanent status, and insecurity in the workplace encourage them to find alternative ways to resist the (male) authority precisely because they have little to lose. 20 For an overview on government policies on the subject, see Abe (2011).

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Infotainment under construction 67 Dey, I. (1993). Qualitative Data Analysis:  A User Friendly Guide for Social Sciences. London: Routledge. Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., and Shaw, L. L. (1995). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ergül, H. (2000). Televizyonda Haberin Magazinelleşmesi [Tabloidization of television news]. Istanbul: İletişim. –​ –​ –​ . (2003). “‘Lightening’ Culture:  Vanishing Borders, Hybridized Contents, and Infotainment in Japanese Television Broadcasting”. Paper presented at the Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ) Conference, 19–​ 20 April, Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan. Falzon, M. (2016). Multisited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research. London and New York: Routledge. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. –​–​–​. (1988). Works and Lives:  The Anthologist as Author. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press. Goffman, E. (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. –​–​–​. (1989). “On Fieldwork”. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 18: 123–​132. Gold, R. L. (1958). “Roles in Sociological Fieldwork”. Social Forces, 36: 217–​223. Goldstein-​Gidoni, O. (2012). Housewives of Japan:  An Ethnography of Real Lives and Consumerized Domesticity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hammersley, M., and Atkinson, P. (1995). Ethnography: Principles in Practice. London: Routledge. Hanke, R. (1992). “Redesigning Men:  Hegemonic Masculinity in Transition”. In: S. Craig (ed.), Men and the Media. Newbury Park, London, and New Delhi:  Sage, pp. 185–​198. Hendry, J. (1993). Wrapping Culture:  Politeness, Presentation and Power in Japan. New York: Oxford University Press. Ingold, T. (2017). “On Anthropology, Education and University: An Interview with Tim Ingold”. Interview by Hakan Ergül. Moment-​Journal of Cultural Studies, 4 (1): 7–​13. Retrieved 15 July 2017, from www.momentdergi.org/​index.php/​momentdergi/​article/​view/​237. Jensen, K. B., and Jankowski, N. W. (1991). Handbook of Qualitative Research for Mass Communication Research. London: Routledge. Jorgensen, D. L. (1989). Participant Observation:  A Methodology for Human Studies. London: Sage. Kondo, D. K. (1994). “Uchi no Kaisha:  Company as Family?” In:  J. M. Bachnik and C. J. Quinn (eds), Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society and Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 169–​191. Krauss, E. (2000). Broadcasting Politics in Japan:  NHK and Television News. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lull, J. (1990). Inside Family Viewing:  Ethnographic Research on Television’s Audience. Oxon: Routledge. Machin, D. (2002). Ethnographic Research for Media Studies. London: Arnold. Marcus, G. E. (1995). “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multisited Ethnography”. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 95–117. –​–​–​. (2011). “Multi-sited Ethnography: Five or Six Things I Know About It Now”. In: S. Coleman and P. Hellermann (eds), Multi-sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods. London: Sage, pp. 16–32. Markus, H. R., and Kitayama, S. (1991). “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation”, Psychological Review, 98 (2): 224–​253. Martinez, D. P. (ed.) (1998). The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture:  Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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68  Infotainment under construction –​–​–​. (2005). “On the ‘Nature’ of Japanese Culture, Or, Is There a Japanese Sense of Nature?” In:  J. Robertson (ed.), A Companion to Anthropology of Japan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 185–​200. May, T. (1993). Social Research. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Painter, A. A. (1996). “The Telerepresentation of Gender in Japan”. In: A. E. Imamura (ed.), Re-​imaging Japanese Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 46–​72. Patriarche, G., Bilandzic, H., Linaa, J., and Jurišić, J. (2013). Audience Research Methodologies: Between Innovation and Consolidation. London: Routledge. Ogasawara, Y. (1998). Office Ladies and Salaried Men: Power, Gender, and Work in Japanese Companies. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Robson, C. (1993). Real World Research. Oxford: Blackwell. Ruddock, A. (2001). Understanding Audiences: Theory and Method. London: Sage. Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers. Sugawara, M. (2005). “Maternal Employment and Child Development in Japan:  A Twelve Year Longitudinal Study”. In:  D. Shwalb, J. Nakazawa, and B. Shwalb (eds), Applied Developmental Psychology:  Theory, Practice, and Research from Japan. New York: Information Age Publishing, pp. 225–​240. Takahashi, T. (2010). Audience Studies: A Japanese Perspective. London: Routledge. Taplin, R. (2013). Decision-​Making & Japan:  A Study of Corporate Japanese Decision-​ Making and Its Relevance to Western Companies. London and New York: Routledge. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), (1997). “Television”. In: A. Modoux (ed.), The World Communication Report: The Media and The Challenge of the New Technologies. Paris: UNESCO Publishing, pp. 155–207. van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walker, A. G. (1986). “The Verbatim Record: The Myth and the Reality”. In: S. Fisher and A. D. Todd (eds), Discourse and Institutional Authority: Medicine, Education, and Law. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 205–​222. Yamamoto, M., and Weina, R. (2014). “Should Men Work Outside and Women Stay Home? Revisiting the Cultivation of Gender-​Role Attitudes in Japan”. Mass Communication and Society, 17 (6): 920–​942. doi: 10.1080/​15205436.2013.860989.

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3  Television for sale by owner The political economy of infotainment1

Introduction It was Friday, around 3:00  p.m., in a large, dim room:  “Actually, we try hard to get rid of these demands as soon as possible”, said the man, in his 40s. “We never like it, but nothing can be done except finishing the job and getting the matter behind us”. A  few minutes later, in the same murky room, two men, younger from and inferior to the one quoted above, commented on a commercial product on the screen they thought outrageously overpriced: “Are these people [the audience] really buying that kind of stuff? These are too expensive! What a waste of money!” His colleague replied, “Waste of money for you; not for those with money”. These conversations might sound like excerpts from a typical thriller. The actual place where they occurred, however, was the post-​production studio of MTV. The production personnel’s comments refer to a multidimensional phenomenon in contemporary Japanese TV broadcasting that I call the commodification of televised knowledge. It is this pervasive and powerful practice that lies at the heart of this chapter. To assist in the reader’s understanding, a little information might be helpful first. The main character in the story is my informant, a producer of the programme. What he was denouncing were the economic power relations that both the station and his programme’s televisual content are strongly tied to. The younger members of the production team were joking about the commercial information that, though hidden, is inescapably and reflexively affected by those same power relations. What they were speaking against and viewing critically was a corner that was intentionally placed at the opening of the wideshow I was observing. That corner was not merely a one-​off; rather, it had appeared on the small monitors of the post-​production studio over the course of the last decade, from Monday to Friday. Those economic bonds that these producers “never like”, nevertheless, cannot be ignored because they are as old as the TV station for which they work. This picture takes us to the long familiar sphere where ownership mechanisms influence media performance and content (McChesney 2000: 110). Drawing on ethnographic data, the aim of this chapter is to interpret the political-​economic components (e.g. ownership, advertising, commodification, audience demands,

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70  The political economy of infotainment and tabloidization) of the wideshow via micro analysis to demonstrate the decisive role that economic tie-​ups and economic-​based power relations exert on the production and distribution processes of television broadcasting (Mosco 1996). The powerful role that the economy plays emerged from my participant observations in two TV studios: MTV, in Sendai; and NTV, in Tokyo. Different from the analysis presented in the next chapter, NHK-​Sendai is not included in this section, mainly because, as indicated earlier, NHK is a public broadcaster, which basically obtains its revenue from receivers’ fees. That is, given the severe commercial competition among private stations, NHK-​Sendai occupies a special (peripheral) position that sets the station apart. Interview data with performers and producers alike underscores the centrality of commodified knowledge and demonstrates that much wideshow content is recodified by (hidden) commercial components and routinized through the programme corners. It also shows how commodified knowledge is dressed in local, national, cultural, and technical elements. The following questions lie at the core of this chapter: What are the common strategies of commercial information transmission in the wideshows? How do these strategies change at local and national scales? How and in what ways do economic tie-​ups function behind the scenes to influence production members and production, distribution, and consumption processes, as argued in the political-​economic approach to media (Mosco 1996: 25)? Does infotainment content, particularly the wideshow, help commercialize televised knowledge, as others have claimed (Watanabe 1996) and, if so, how? For “the consumers of (the) mediated commercial sphere” (Nightingale 2004: 235), what is it that the wideshow, the most viewed genre of Japanese TV, promises? Put differently, how does Japanese infotainment, through which the economic interests of the commercial stations are satisfied, become immersed in and embellished by cultural elements? And, finally, what has this contemporary form of commercial communication come to mean in an advanced capitalist society in which media intensifies the tendency towards consumerism (Eisenstadt 1996: 438)? This chapter, then, demonstrates the many ways in which commodified forms of mediated knowledge function in Japanese society today through its most popular communication form, infotainment, in its most consumed medium, television. In the sections to come, I will discuss the issues that have emerged from a large amount of observational data pertaining to the highly commodified knowledge that courses through and apparently constructs each wideshow.

MTV and the economics of local infotainment As mentioned earlier, for OH! Ban desu, locality is indispensable. The entire programme content –​including its news reports –​is based on the notion of localness, with target audiences exposed to their hometown throughout: the arcades they walk through every day, the restaurant at the corner, the shopping centres they pass by, or the local stores, districts, and familiar dishes presented by their beloved local singer, Sato Muneyuki, who, after featuring in the same programme for

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The political economy of infotainment 71 more than two decades, becomes a family member or neighbour whom audiences meet every broadcast day. The data that emerged from my interviews revealed that this localized emphasis was carefully crafted into the programme content and has been the result of an extensive trial-​and-​error process (see Chapter  4). More than this, as I  will show, commercial knowledge is dressed within local and cultural elements via the various corners of the programme. By this I mean that the programme’s corners are reproduced by reference to hidden infomercials and routinized through programme segments. There are specific corners designed for this purpose, such as honobono kicchin (heart-​warming kitchen), maru toku jōhō (useful [discount] information), machi no umaimon (delicious dishes, restaurants in the city), osusume spotto jōhō (recommended information about discounted products), or ekimae hōsō (details of events, restaurants, exhibitions, and movies, along with the weather forecast, broadcast from in front of the main train station). Corner-​ing the audience The commercial information presented in these corners does not adhere to traditional genre borders of advertisement. Rather, it is more like a mixture of entertainment and shopping tips, often broadcast by reporters in the street or some other intimate atmosphere. Basically, what the reporters appear to be doing is informing the audience about the best shops where material for the cooking corner can be bought, the cheapest restaurants offering a special discount for women costumers, nutrition details from a chef about his locally famous sea-​food dish, trade fairs that are open to public, and so on. The commercial information provided by the corners successfully communicates to the target (female) audiences who constantly crave convenient (benri) and practical information that can support them as they carry on their multiple tasks in the realm of uchi, where it is the housewife or “the mother who watches over the health and well-​ being of each member of the family, and keeps the family bounds strong” (Iwao 1998: 126). This gender-​specific approach that shapes the local programme’s fundamental (commercial) segments is certainly not limited to the local wideshows but is integral to the much wider phenomenon of Japan’s consumer culture, where “women have been, and still are, key figures (…) not only because they are their country’s greatest spenders, but also because they form a group which has been most carefully observed, analysed and defined in marketing studies” (Skov and Moeran 1995: 3). The data I collected from NTV and will present in the next section further demonstrate this phenomenon of consumption and its relation to the wideshows. Invisible hand of televised sponsor This opening segment could be considered a purely commercial corner, if not an extended advertisement produced by the show itself. The announcer appearing in this corner is Nagamine Ryō, a cheerful, energetic character in his early 30s,

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72  The political economy of infotainment usually reporting from outside the studio. We always see him dressed in casual clothes, running with a cameraman on the streets, finding some restaurants with special features, talking to people on the street, testing foods on behalf of the audience, joking with owners or customers, promoting places or trade fairs, and continuously inviting the audience to visit the same places he is visiting during the live broadcast. To do this, of course, detailed information about the location of the place must be broadcast several times during the programme. Behind this intimate and warm invitation, however, there are economic intentions cleverly packaged with what can be termed carefully crafted spontaneity beyond the view of the audience (for further discussion on spontaneity, see Chapter 4). This happens, for instance, whenever Nagamine introduces a specific restaurant or a shopping centre. With the aid of the camera, we, the audience, walk alongside Nagamine for a while. During this short walk we listen to him talking about the street’s visible features (e.g. surrounding houses, gardens, or people passing by). This prelude may take five to ten seconds before Nagamine “happens” to spot this restaurant or that small shop along the way –​usually with a display of great surprise. Then a well-​known ritual takes place: “Look what I’ve found here!” After the announcer and the host in the main studio reply, “Look!” Nagamine continues, “It is written on the window that they ‘serve the best rāmen at the cheapest price’! How can that be possible?” Speaking to the announcer in the main studio, Nagamine asks somewhat rhetorically, “You don’t think I would miss this, do you? Let’s go in there and check it out together!” Again, acting as if this is the first time he has encountered the place, Nagamine enters. As all of us in the post-​production studio know, however, this is not the case. To my query about whether this is contrived, the programme’s producer laughed, “Yes, this is the way it works (…) We tell the audience that we have never been there, but actually someone must go well in advance and inform the owner of that place [that we plan to visit]. For the shooting, we need an appointment and permission. The programme is live, so such logistics require particular attention”. The time of shooting depends on the place that will be introduced in the programme. For instance, in the case of a shopping centre, the producer said, they choose specific times when big crowds go there for shopping. “If not, the audiences will see there is no one there (…) They may think that the place is not popular at all”. Returning to the issue about commercialized information, I observed at one point that Nagamine was at a local exhibition near the city centre for luxury cars and sea craft. He was walking or running around the exhibition, giving details on the prices while joking about the products’ features. While he was offering all these details as well as recommending that the audience come see the exhibition, the post-​production staff in the sub-​studio were laughing and talking about how impossible it was to buy such products. After ten minutes of broadcasting, the first segment of the programme, osakini ban desu, finishes. One would think that there is nothing special about this corner since, after all, this was a private TV channel where the production team

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The political economy of infotainment 73 is expected find a fine balance in programming that attracts both sponsors and audiences. However, the wider picture that emerged during the latter part of my interviews (as well as informal observation and chats with the post-​production team) led to the view that there is more to be gleaned from this dimension of broadcasting. During the segments that the announcer appears in, a discerning viewer can recognize that the reporter always talks about particular brand names, new products, trade fairs, or restaurants. This led me to wonder whether this was not a sort of hidden advertising in itself. When I inquired, Watanabe replied, Sometimes what we do is just like PR. This sort of commercial has increased in time. [Early on] we realized that our audience wanted to be advised about their city. So, every day we have to find something new in Sendai:  a restaurant, an exhibition, or shopping centre. In this we see how the producers have devised some presuppositions about their audience: that they like commercial information and want more. Moreover, if it is local commercial information, then that is even better. When I sought clarification as to the basis for his assumptions about the audience’s demands, Watanabe reminded me about the programme monitor (i.e. the commercial company that offers detailed graphic data on ratings and shares) consulted every broadcast day: When we start giving this kind of [local commercial] information, we get a higher rating. The audience wants to know which shopping centre in Sendai is more convenient or from which department store they can get better deals for particular products. While he insisted that there is no financial connection between his programme’s PR-​like content and the companies, he did confirm that this commercial information makes up the biggest portion of the broadcasting content of OH! Ban desu. During the later stages of my research when our rapport was a bit stronger, I again inquired whether there is a financial connection between certain kinds of events and the TV station. The answer he then offered was slightly different, acknowledging that “sometimes (…) there is this sort of relation with the sales department of Miyagi Terebi”. And a little later, when I asked what kind of connections those are, Watanabe indicated the screen with his head and wanted me to take a look at what was showing. On the display, Nagamine was standing in front of a car exhibited at the local fair. It was the latest, most luxurious model of a well-​known automobile giant. After informing us about the unique features, price, and technical advantages of the car, Nagamine chose to close the corner of that day’s show with the car directly behind him, in full view. “This car exhibition [we are covering]”, Watanabe informed me, “is organized by [company name] (…) one of the most famous companies in Sendai, and they basically sell that car”. Watanabe admitted that the car company and the programme’s parent, Miyagi Terebi, have strong economic ties as the company organizing the exhibition is also a station shareholder. “It is

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74  The political economy of infotainment this company”, he repeated, “so we have no alternative but to broadcast it. It’s unavoidable. If they want to see their product on the screen, it is you –​the producer –​who should find a way to realize their demand”. This is not the only case of a company seeking to wrangle on-​screen advertising. One senior staffer sighed and made the following comment, also quoted at the outset of this chapter: “Actually, we try hard to get rid of these demands as soon as possible (…) We never like it, but nothing can be done except finishing the job and putting the matter behind us”. Other details emerged during my observations that further proved that programme producers are contacted directly beforehand and informed by these companies about how exactly they want their products to be presented. As such, they actively join in the production process. This provides evidence of what Mosco (1988) argues in his work on “the pay-​per society”, in which he argues that advertisers or sponsors “go on to pressure programme producers to shape their work for an audience of likely consumers” (p. 6). One detail worth mentioning here is that, in the new broadcasting flow introduced in April 2005, the telecast time devoted to this opening corner increased from ten minutes to an hour, increasing the local commercial information broadcast in this corner by six times more than before. Hometown for sale So too does this heavy commercial stress continue in the other corners of the programme. For instance, in the cooking corner (honobono kicchin), similar commercial strategies are applied, where we can observe the main announcer, the female host, appearing with a guest audience member, who has offered a recipe. Often it is a local dish, recommended by a local audience member, and cooked with local ingredients. But how can audiences find the ingredients? They not only provide recipe details but also a video including all the details of the shop that offers the best-​quality ingredients at the lowest price. Because the names of the shops and the brands are not considered advertising, they can be broadcast openly without compensation. This commercial information is often blended with intimate human stories, for instance covering who the boss of the establishment is; whether it is a family enterprise or part of a franchise, and, if the latter, then how their service differs from similar branches elsewhere; how old the owner was when the shop opened and what difficulties he or she faced during the first months after the opening; whether it is an original brand; and so on. The conversation, of course, would not end here. More is needed to attract the audience. How about a message about healthy eating from the owner’s wife? Or a small gift she can offer to audience members who saw this broadcast and arrived there within ten minutes? “What if a big crowd arrives here in minutes? Any discount tickets for all the customers for a short period?” the announcer asks. Although the boss pretends that this might be too troublesome, the audience already knows (having watched this type of show so often) that she or he has no choice but to accept the request.

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The political economy of infotainment 75 What is not disclosed to the audience, my interview data revealed, is that this happens through a process of negotiation between the station and the company to be introduced over several weeks. The station offers the commercial establishment a considerable amount of its broadcast time, while the company in return displays its generosity by rewarding the show’s faithful audience. This is not a random strategy for daytime broadcasting. As Skov and Moeran (1995) explain, “During the daytime, television stations put on special programmes (…) and gather audiences of women to applaud, laugh, talk at appropriate points and to receive, if they are lucky, special rewards in the form of advertised stockings, sauces, soaps, shampoos” (p. 2). Another example was a new competition segment introduced during my field observations in 2005. It was a food competition called koraborēshon bentō2 (lunch box collaboration), introduced simultaneously by six local NTV affiliates in the Tōhoku area. Through the wideshows broadcast in their prefecture, the target audiences recommend their hometown’s best food in order to include it as one of the side dishes in Tōhoku’s lunch box. Following this is the segment where the audiences, as the competition’s judges, taste the o-​bento of Tōhoku –​the outcome of their collective effort and collaboration with the TV stations –​and share their comments and reactions enthusiastically with the viewers. When the competition ends, the lunch box is made available in the nearest Sunkus, a well-​known nationwide convenience store franchise. This collectively experienced sense of hometown and locality as a common frame of reference works well and offers opportunities for urban housewives, who are eager and available to set up groups, participate in group activities, and engage in new friendships (Imamura 1992: 92). During the competition, the audiences are captured at three different levels at least: as target viewers of the programme through which the TV stations obtain their economic support (sponsors, ads, etc.); as active participants and decision makers in the production processes (collective event); and finally as consumers of the market (further discussions on this particular example are offered in Chapter 4). Infomercials and “mutual benefit” A large amount of data confirms the strong economic tie-​ups between the TV station and the local commercial sources, which of course reciprocally relates to the localization and commodification of televisual content. Consider the other corner of the programme, called ekimae hōsō. This short segment features the weather forecast, reported by the same female announcer each time. The reader should note that, in Japan, the train station is the most crucial symbol in urban city planning. For one thing, the city centre is invariably built around the main train station, while the encounter with the train station comes to signify that one is in the very centre of the marketplace, comprising the most popular shopping centres, famous restaurants, well-​known brands, numerous coffee shops, movie theatres, retailers, travel agencies, and other attractions. As for the TV programme, it is through this corner that the viewer learns not only the latest details about the weather but also the latest information on

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76  The political economy of infotainment current events, useful products, new discounts, movies, concerts, and foods or beverages from throughout the broadcast area. Again, none of this information is considered commercial information:  No subtitle, genre indicator, or special announcement warns the audience about what they are actually being exposed to. Instead, what the viewer sees is a few smiling people standing behind the weather reporter, holding placards full of details about a product they want to introduce; so too do they experience the female announcer interviewing the placard-​holders as well as passers-​by. Thus, the reporter’s main role in this corner is to transmit carefully designed commercial messages via a set of intimate and instantaneous communicative events enfolded into an experiential sense of “live”ness, which consequently reduces the distance between seller and potential buyer. In this section, I discussed some of the ways in which local televisual content is largely reformulated to conform to commodified knowledge. I also showed how local media professionals meet the audience’s needs through broadcast content in which economic priorities are carefully embedded. Some of these priorities belong to the official financers of the show; others are held by those who do not sponsor the show but whom the show’s producers have decided to support (for whatever reasons). The central dynamics of this phenomenon are based on a well-​ known, archaic form of reasoning, the so-​called “mutual benefit”. That is, the audiences get useful information that they are looking for, while the programme gets higher ratings than its rivals. What happens to the televisual content heavily shaped by economic policies and power relations, though, seems to be a question hovering out there in no man’s land. One might fairly ask whether this is simply a function of locality –​the fact that this programme exists in a particular insular economic ecology, a finite realm of economic actors, and an established history of institutional actors, subject to fixed relations. What happens, one might wonder, if we were to shift our focus from a local wideshow limited to Miyagi prefecture to one broadcast all over Japan? How do the organizational characteristics affect this genre, its overall economics, and televisual content? How does this contemporary method of information transmission mediate between the audience and its economic backers? In the following section, I would like to deal with these questions.

NTV and the economics of nationwide infotainment In an earlier section of this chapter, the term “commodified knowledge” was used, on the one hand, in reference to the localization of televisual content embedded in hidden advertisements, and the decisive power relations exerted on the programme’s content. In the case of THE Waido, on the other hand, the term can be seen as relating more to the professionally structured elements of mediated content as well as to the media organization and its routinized practices (ratings/​ shares, digital audiovisual techniques, focus group research, agencies, tabloidization of news content, etc.).3 One notable detail is that, within this time slot, THE Waido was the only nationwide programme that has lasted for 12  years, with most rivals having

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The political economy of infotainment 77 succumbed to the severity of the competition (meaning the popularity of THE Waido). Over time, replacement shows have shifted their content to resemble THE Waido to survive.4 However, why is that? What makes this televisual format so successful? Is there a relationship between broadcasting strategies and economic considerations, as we found in Miyagi? How different are the strategies employed in a nationwide programme in Tokyo from those utilized in the local programme OH! Ban desu? In the following section, these questions will be discussed, focusing on the economic components in the broadcast context and how they affect programme content. Blurring boundaries To better understand THE Waido, we should first take a close look at the background of the programme. Osaka, a densely populated city in western Japan, is important for the discussion because the story of THE Waido begins at Yomiuri TV,5 the local NTV affiliate in Osaka and the show’s co-​producer, and ends with the station’s withdrawal due to financial constraints. Without question, Kansai province, of which Osaka is the largest city, is Japan’s entertainment capital. In many respects,6 Osaka, is unbeatable with its long tradition of entertainment schools (such as Yoshimoto Kōgyō, started in 1912) and consumption related to global leisure giants (e.g. Universal Studios). Important to this section, show business in Japan (geinōkai) is overwhelmingly dominated by performers of Kansai origin. It is said that if an entertainment programme gets a warm response from a Kansai audience, then no further evidence is required to conclude that it will work at the national level as well. Therefore, most comedy or variety programmes are tested in Kansai first (see Yokozawa 2005: 232–​233) before they are broadcast nationwide. These are the defining features of the city that the production team of THE Waido originated from. Over the past decade, the programme content has been produced by the same team. Before the programme began broadcasting in 1993, there were two separate programmes during the same time slot. In the words of Murakami, the chief producer, “One of the programmes we broadcast was called ‘The Two O’clock Wide’ (Niji no Waido)”. However, “It was quite different [from today’s THE Waido] (…) In that programme, we mostly offered useful tips about daily life or information about performers in show business (geinōjin)”. By contrast, he continued, the second one “was a news programme, including information about politics, economics, society, accidents, and so on. We put them together and created today’s THE Waido (…) That’s why it is called ‘waido’ (wide)”. This is true, but what Murakami forgot to mention was the effect of the top-​rated programme by rival TBS, called Sūpā Waido (The Super Wide). THE Waido had the aim of competing against this strong rival and reclaiming audience share,7 which was the real commercial motivation for the station to speed up the process of creating the programme. What is significant in this discussion is understating the origins of THE Waido as well as the forces that led to the internal configuration of its corners. The

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78  The political economy of infotainment programme’s almost indefinable content is indeed the result of one historical and commercial fact: THE Waido was born from two genres, each belonging to different families that were fused for strategic reasons. One result is that, today, neither the producers nor the audience8 is perfectly sure about how to go about categorizing what is seen on-​screen. For instance, the head of the post-​production unit referred to the programme as an “information-​variety programme (jōhō-​ baraetī)” at the beginning of my interview with him, before later ending up calling it an “information-​wide show (hōdō-​waidoshō)”. A  more representative comment, however, came later: “It is no longer easy to say ‘this is what it is’ (…) In the past, it was easier though (…) The news was news. So, when you look at the programme, the programme would tell you what genre it belongs to”. Today, however, we have THE Waido, of which unpredictability, itself, has turned out to be the main feature of the content.9 Idols, consumption, and the “pressure point” of the audience No matter what the programme is called, there are two unvarying on-​screen components:  entertainment and information, although the balance between them has been drastically revised. How was it in the past and how did it change over time? After mentioning that the entertainment content increased in his programme, producer Hagiwara explained, “Today, almost 60 per cent of the programme is information and the rest is entertainment”. What he is describing –​if only unintentionally –​is an increase in infotainment content that, I would argue, can be shown to be prevailing across the spectrum of Japanese television. The notion that there has been a great infotainizing of televisual content in Japan is clear from Hagiwara’s observation that the time devoted to news content today has fallen, while the amount of entertainment is much larger. At the same time, paradoxically, Hagiwara indicated that there is now more time allocated for news content, providing more space for entertainment. According to the producer, the explanation for this seeming contradiction is that “our audiences are expecting us to broadcast more news about geinōkai. That’s why the news content related to the geinōjin became larger”. In mentioning lengthening the broadcast time for news, he was actually referring to the news about show business in Japan and its ubiquitous actors –​who appear every day, on every channel, in a variety of programmes (for further discussions on this point, see Chapter 4). The reason for this shift is again an old one: capturing the largest audience: “When we broadcast information about geinōjin, the ratings of the programme change unbelievably”, he said, “so we increased the amount of such information over time. Personally, I believe that we should do this more”. Before we go further, I would like to mention a detail regarding the ratings issue. It is obviously one of the greatest pressures on media professionals, and this is of course not unique to the Japanese media milieu. In NTV’s case, this pressure is visible to anyone who enters the station’s office area. The quote from Hagiwara, which underscores the significance of geinōjin and entertainment as programme content, is reminiscent of how the producers of OH!

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The political economy of infotainment 79 Ban desu spoke of the vital role of local information in communicating with their audience. Although Hagiwara argues that 60 per cent of the programme content is currently devoted to more informative/​news content, one would observe that the overall effect of this tabloidization (and I will offer further indicators of this tendency later) is visible in the entire content. In short, THE Waido, which considered detailed information as its core component, has ended up devoting the majority of its content to entertainment-​oriented, tabloid-​style information. As will be detailed in the remainder of this section, this is all done to create an intimate communication with the audience. Imagine this:  the first news during the programme’s opening concerns a recent visit to Japan by the popular Korean artist Bae Yong-​Joon (or Yon-​sama in Japan),10 who stars in the famous Korean television drama Fuyu no Sonata (Winter Sonata, NHK), which is popular among middle-​aged women audiences. Along with the story are long video-​taped pieces, including Yon-​sama’s airplane landing at the airport, catchy fragments abstracted from another popular drama he starred in, and emotional interviews with his devoted fans-​in-​waiting,11 who are often seen crying outside his hotel. During the first 20 minutes, we repeatedly view the same looped footage: of him swimming, working out, greeting people, smiling, and smiling again. The visual material for this “news” story arrived at the post-​production unit just an hour before the programme started –​and if it had not, then the order of the news would have been quite different. Ironically, the Yon-​sama story replaced another news item focused on Korea-​ Japan relations, though from a different and less amusing angle:  it was about Takeshima Island –​a story of a long-​standing conflict between South Korea and Japan, which has led to the souring of relations. Young members of the production team, who were not involved in the decision, reacted negatively to this sudden change: “Yon-​sama! No, not again! How many times more do we have to broadcast this guy in the programme?” Nevertheless, if it is Yon-​sama, the most popular Korean idol in Japan, and if your target audience is also a major fan base of his dramas (two of which were broadcast by the same TV station in 2004), then vital political news, such as the Takeshima Island issue, is certainly sacrificeable. An idol, however, is never only an idol. Instead, she or he is an iconographic or symbolic code that refers to the material world from numerous commercial angles. This material world is one that ensnares both idol and audience, joining them in a fundamental embrace. For example, can we still argue from the Yon-​sama case that Bae Yong Joon is merely a talented foreign actor featuring in romantic dramas? Not for his female audiences in Japan. Indeed, during the period of my fieldwork, he had already become a larger-​than-​life figure with his own special nickname:  Yon-​sama. He had become an omnipresent star, giving his warmest smile to his adoring audience through countless advertisements, magazine stories, newspaper articles, and websites. For middle-​aged Japanese women who feel abandoned and left between their traditional roles as devoted mothers and supportive wives, and entirely neglected by the mainstream media, whose attention focused on young women during the 1990s (Lukács 2010: 11),

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80  The political economy of infotainment Yon-​sama –​and other popular Korean male idols –​engendered ideal male images that combine “devoted lovers, protective husbands, filial sons, responsible fathers, loyal friends, caring citizens, and even benevolent strangers” (Lin 2012: 170),12 with a pinch of femininity (outbalancing masculinity) and sensibility to human emotions. This, does not, however, change the fact that he is a (temporary) project, designed and reproduced in media industries to serve different sectors of the market. Today, his smile is working for an energy drink in an advertisement; tomorrow, the picture of his naked body is working for a lifestyle magazine; next week, he is the author of a diet book known as –​though not originally titled –​ Yon-​sama daietto (The Yon-​sama diet).13 While a bit extreme, this is not an exceptional case by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, extreme commodification and exploitation of the Korean idol’s image in wideshows is part and parcel of another phenomenon of television entertainment that emerged in the late 1980s, called torendī dorama (trendy drama), and later “pure love drama”. In her examination of 1990s trendy drama, Gabriella Lukács sees it as “symptomatic of a shift from narrative to lifestyle-​oriented entertainment”, where “tarento were not only central to drama producers; they were also the main source of pleasure for viewers” (p. 22). Ōta Tōru, legendary drama producer of TBS and the inventor of Japanese trendy drama, provided a snapshot of some key characteristics of this new genre in his invited talk in Tokyo on 23 November 2001: trendy drama is a “mere package” drama where the emphasis is on the music, setting, and cast instead of “serious themes or social issues”. Different than home dramas or historical jidai-​geki (samurai dramas), trendy dramas “target women in their 20s” and “feature fashion, music and trendy places where they would want to go on a date”. Severe criticisms from within the television industry, suggesting that the genre was too shallow, were soon disregarded by managers as “the ratings were excellent”. In the harsh, competitive reality of the Japanese commercial sphere, where introducing a new, unconventional idea is similar to fighting a “guerrilla war”, Ōta claims that kateba-​kangun14 (might is right or the winner is always right). The target audience profile is critical for TV companies because Japanese men, who prefer to spend their after-​work hours in bars or restaurants instead of watching dramas, were “not at all reliable audiences”, while the target women, who are the sponsors’ target consumer as the biggest spenders in the market, were devoted trendy drama viewers. Ōta, the successful producer of the genre, defines himself as a “massage therapist who finds the pressure point for a client” and gives them pleasure through the enormously commodified realm of trendy dramas that “seem to pop out from the fashion magazine” (pp. 70–​72). Other members of the geinōkai, whose very existence depends on their performance on TV as well as the frequency with which they appear on-​screen, also function as accelerators –​via strategies similar to those described above –​between the mass-​mediated product and its faithful buyer, the audience (Figure  3.1).15 As Galbraith and Karlin (2012) observe, idols “organize the market into fan communities that allow predictable patterns of viewership and consumption” (p. 8). Produced and exploited by the Japanese entertainment industry16 to boost

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The political economy of infotainment 81

Figure 3.1 A large group of young fans showing their admiration of the idols inside the studio.

consumption, idols represent “the currency of exchange in the promotion and advertising of all manner of other products and services. For the Japanese consumer, immersed in a culture of celebrity, the idol is coterminous with consumption” (ibid.: 2). The producer’s task: Predicting the unpredictable Despite the programme’s unpredictable flow mentioned above, the decisions about the nature and shape of this commodified tabloid content are rooted in assumptions about audience preferences –​themselves a function of focus group interviews conducted with 500 subjects biannually in Osaka and Tokyo. Even the regular guests of the programme are selected in accordance with the findings of these marketing studies. Who then is the audience of THE Waido? In what ways does the audience profile affect the programme content? According to Murakami (and in words very reminiscent of Sendai’s producers), “they are basically housewives in their late 40s or 50s; some of them are retired or left their jobs right after they got married (…) The husband is not at home during the programme broadcast (…) neither are the kids”. As anyone who views THE Waido a couple of times would realize, a

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82  The political economy of infotainment considerable amount of its content (including all corners and advertising segments) refers to a larger area that does not seem to perfectly represent the target audience’s wants and wishes. Are these retired housewives, generally in their 50s, really interested, for instance, in the latest rumours about the geinōjin or popular idols’ love affairs? With whom does the news communicate, for instance, when it reports on problems in primary school education? In the advertising segments, one finds commercial information about life insurance, hair dyes, or anti-​ageing cosmetics –​ which, considering the viewer demographic, would make sense, yet who is the audience that the young couples in the advertisements are representing? At least part of the answer, I  would contend, is hidden in the severe competition with another wideshow that is its strongest rival, Jasuto (The just), produced by TBS. Both programmes air during the same time slot, although their differing contents tend to communicate with different audience groups. According to Hagiwara, “Compared to our programme, Jasuto broadcasts to a younger audience –​I mean those in their early 30s that we categorize as ‘F-​1’. They are again housewives or those who temporarily stopped working after they delivered a baby”. Although both Hagiwara and the producers appeared unwilling to discuss either their competitors or their policies against them, further inquiries with the production team revealed that they closely follow other programmes broadcast in the same time slot. Indeed, they have up-​to-​date data on their rivals and detailed strategies aimed at keeping THE Waido ahead of the pack. Even more, with Jasuto17 soon to go off-​air, THE Waido producers were hard at work thinking about the kind of new content they would need to attract Jasuto’s previous audience, now zapping between channels while deciding which new programme to tune into. Viewing this situation helps explain not only particular news content –​ for instance, new government educational policies of concern to young women –​ but also the increasing amount of televisual content that is soaked in images of the entertainment world. The common element tying together THE Waido’s content, its basis on audience research, the economic motives of its sponsors, and the material world surrounding the audience is commercialism. To see this, consider Nightingale’s (2004) description of the “mediated commercial sphere”: Although the media may displace their responsibility to the public onto the public or onto government regulation, they take their responsibilities to advertisers very seriously indeed. To this end, they sponsor a form of audience research (ratings analysis) that, in effect, parcels audience viewing into sellable commodities. The result is that people participate in the mediated commercial sphere in two ways:  as consumers and as audiences. They are buyers in the marketplace (external to the media) and they are viewers or listeners (inside the media system). (p. 235) For those who are familiar with Japanese television, the immediate connection between the wideshow’s commercial content and the marketplace will be clear: it

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The political economy of infotainment 83 is far from abstract, and predictable. The continuous, contiguous relationship exists everywhere: a direct line from the content inside the box and the nearest local supermarket or suburban mall. The audience (as consumer), for instance, sooner or later figures out that certain products in the market, which sat on a table with a colourful sign displaying the title of a TV programme, sell out much faster. Furthermore, this tends to happen whenever a specific product is promoted via a corner of the wideshow. Similarly, if products are suddenly ignored by the wideshow, a market glut of that item often develops where only recently there had been TV-​influenced scarcity. Certainly, these associations are not controversial. It is well established that commercial considerations and economic mechanisms (e.g. sponsorship and advertising) have the power to directly influence media behaviour (McChesney 2000: 110) and in turn the programme’s content.

Conclusion Let me conclude with a few remarks about what has been covered in this chapter. Above all, we have seen the numerous ways in which commodified televisual knowledge forms the core of Japan’s wideshows, both locally and nationally. In the case of the local programme we observed, OH! Ban desu, commodified knowledge is more connected to the geographic boundaries of the televisual content as it revolves around the commercialization of the audience’s hometown. From the programme’s opening until its close, Miyagi prefecture is featured with its people (wrapped in the form of emotional human stories, guests, interviewees), subject matter (local events, histories), physical nature (streets, exhibitions, foods), or economic resources (shopping centres, advertisers, sponsors). In this sense, the physical space is transformed into a televisual marketplace in which the audience is triply captured: as viewer, participant, and consumer. However, this economic dimension (i.e. the economic intentions of the TV station) is carefully disguised. Regarding its technical features, infotained content, corners, and network “family”, the nature of THE Waido has much in common with the local programme, OH! Ban desu. The professional routines in which commodified knowledge is reproduced and normalized, in contrast, manifest considerable differences. As the programme’s history implies, THE Waido is a natural-​born hybrid, a wide-​ family in which two (conventional) genres-​in-​law (news and entertainment) were brought together to create its most effective communication tropes of infotainment and tabloidization. Crossing traditional genre boundaries to create intimate –​and commercial –​ communication with its nationwide audience, THE Waido brings us a mediated sphere in which the economic motives of the sponsors meet the audience’s wishes (as consumer). It does this in the form of both advertising or sponsorship and news-​like tabloid content (see, for instance, the discussions on geinōkai and geinōjin), which seeks to appeal to the generally female audience by communicating information about (and thereby playing to their preferences for) consumption.

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Notes 1 A preliminary version of portions of this chapter was presented at the Political Economy of Communication session, organized by Janet Wasko, at the IAMCR Conference, 26–​ 29 July 2005, Taipei, and appeared in Ergül (2007). 2 For a discussion focusing on the cultural elements of localized information as well as its relationship to the discourse of intimacy, see Chapter 4. 3 To underscore the centrality of the commodification of knowledge in Japanese television broadcasting, Yoshimoto (2017) goes so far as to argue that “no matter how oppositional or critical a particular programme may look, its impact is in the end offset by a logic of consumerism. To actualize the potential value of critical information found on television, we need to learn how to disembed what seems potentially useful from the relentless flow of commodified rubbish, and then reconnect it to other networks of critical discourses” (p. 41). 4 The data were obtained from a file offered by the production members during my fieldwork in NTV. 5 Different from Miyagi TV or other local affiliates of NTV, Yomiuri TV works together with NTV-​ Tokyo. While it has its own programmes broadcast in Osaka, it also functions as a substation of NTV. For instance, during the period of my fieldwork, the anime Black-​Jack (Monday), the food show Docchino-​r yōri Shō (Thursday), and Wake up (Sunday) were originally produced in Yomiuri TV studios but broadcast nationwide by NTV-​Tokyo. 6 Osaka is the second-​largest city in Japan, the second most popular site for international meetings after Tokyo, and the world’s second most costly city (together with Kobe). Retrieved 7 May 2005, from www.finfacts.com/​costofliving4.htm. 7 These data come from an unpublished file offered by the production staff, which summarized the historical background of the programme. 8 According to recent audience (focus group) research conducted in both Osaka and Tokyo, the audience seems undecided about the definition of the programme. This is the main reason why, starting from 2004, the producers were eagerly seeking more concrete genre components to counterbalance the current vagueness of the content. 9 This ambiguity continues in the web page of the programme: while there is a home page including detailed, up-​to-​date information available for almost all programmes, no details for THE Waido are offered on the NTV site. If an audience member wants to know about today’s stories then she or he has to tune in to the show. 10 In Japanese, “-​sama” is the most formal honorific for addressing a person who is considered superior than oneself. 11 During his first visit to Japan on 3 April 2004, more than 5,000 fans (mostly women) guarded by hundreds of police officers were waiting at Narita International Airport in Tokyo to greet their Korean idol; the same week, more than 50,000 fans attended his meeting at Tokyo Dome. 12 For an inspiring inquiry on the Yon-​sama phenomenon and its reception by Japanese female audiences, see Ho Swee Lin (2012). 13 The original title of the book is 100 Days of Bae Yong Joon, published by BOF, Inc. in April 2005. 14 The Japanese proverb kateba kangun, makereba zokugun (literally “win and you are the official army, lose and you are the rebels”) reveals that the acts of the victorious army are justified, whereas those of the defeated are condemned. 15 The picture (Figure 3.1) shows a large group of young people (fans), jumping, taking pictures, and screaming to show their admiration of the idols inside the studio. The

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The political economy of infotainment 85 station’s shopping centre, just a few metres far away from the group, is devoted to popular garments from the drama Gokusen as well as a variety of products printed with images of the idols. 16 For a rare comprehensive account of the jimusho system and the “production logic” of the Japanese entertainment industry, see Marx (2012). 17 The programme ended with the beginning of the new broadcasting schedule in March 2005.

Bibliography Eisenstadt, S. N. (1996). Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ergül, H. (2005) “Television for Sale by Owner! Wideshows and Commodified Knowledge in Japanese Television”. Proceedings of the IAMCR conference, 26–​28 July, Shih Hsin University, Taipei, Taiwan. –​–​–​. (2007). “Technocapitalist (Tele)vision: The Wideshows and Infomercials on Japanese Television”. Culture & Communication [Kültür ve İletişim], 10 (2): 91–​124. Galbraith, P. W., and Karlin, J. G. (2012). “Introduction:  The Mirror of Idols and Celebrity”. In: P. W. Galbraith and J. G. Karlin (eds), Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–​32. Imamura, A. E. (1992). Urban Japanese Housewives:  At Home and in the Community. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Iwao, S. (1998). Japanese Woman:  Traditional Image and Changing Reality. New York: Free Press. Lin, H. S. (2012). “Emotions, Desires, and Fantasies: What Idolizing Means for Yon-​sama Fans in Japan”. In: P. W. Galbraith and J. G. Karlin (eds), Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 166–​181. Lukács, G. (2010). Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McChesney, R. (2000). “The Political Economy of Communication and the Future of the Field”. Media, Culture and Society, 22: 109–​116. Marx, W. D. (2012). “The Jimusho System: Understanding the Production Logic of the Japanese Entertainment Industry”. In: P. W. Galbraith and J. G. Karlin (eds), Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 35–​55. Mosco, V. (1988). “Introduction: Information in the Pay-​Per Society”. In: V. Mosco and J. Wasko (eds), The Political Economy of Information. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 3–​26. –​–​–​. (1996). The Political Economy of Communication:  Rethinking and Renewal. London: Sage. Nightingale, V. (2004). “Contemporary Television Audiences:  Public, Markets, Communities, and Fans”. In:  J. D.  H. Downing, D. McQuail, P. Schlesinger, and E. Wartella (eds), The Sage Handbook of Media Studies. London: Sage, pp. 227–​249. Ōta, T. (2004). “Producing (Post-​)Trendy Japanese TV Dramas”. In: K. Iwabuchi (ed.), Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 70–​86. Skov, L., and Moeran, B. (1995). “Introduction: Hiding in the Light”. In: L. Skov and B. Moeran (eds), Women Media and Consumption in Japan. Richmond, UK: Curzon, pp.  1–​74. Watanabe, T. (1996). “Japan’s Media at Present”. Doshisha Social Science Review, 55: 1–​40.

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86  The political economy of infotainment Yokozawa, A. (2005). “Baraetī Bangumi” [The variety programs]. In: Y. Ono (ed.), Hōsō o Manabu Hito no Tameni. Tokyo: Sekaishisōsha, pp. 220–​238. Yoshimoto, M. (2017). “Nuclear Disaster and Bubbles”. In: C. Thouny and M. Yoshimoto (eds), Planetary Atmospheres and Urban Society after Fukushima. London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 29–​50.

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4 Infotainment, intimacy, and crafting a televisual uchi1

Introduction The previous chapter addressed the economic components of Japanese infotainment, the power relations that exert influence on the production members, and the prevailing broadcast strategies through which a highly commodified form of televisual communication is constructed. This chapter is the crux of this volume, examining the cultural elements and discourses that are deployed in conjunction to construct Japanese infotainment and suggesting broader perspectives that might clarify how infotainment works to engage viewers, how it is crafted and delivered, and why it is popular at both the local and the national level. To better understand the cultural borders by which the essence of “home” and feeling intimate are structured in the Japanese context, the well-​known cultural dichotomy uchi and soto (inside and outside), is crucial. Kamimura et al. (2000), Cooper-​Chen (1997), and Painter (1993) claim that, in contemporary Japan, television is positioned as the most authoritative medium enabling its audiences to observe what is soto, what is relatively insecure, unfamiliar, and dirty, while remaining untroubled within the domestic uchi, or what is familial, secure, known, and experienced in common (Bachnik 1994a:  29). In this chapter, I present examples showing that infotainment is not produced as a neutral filter between uchi and soto but engineered as a locus for uchi, a mode of discourse that plays an operational role:  first, in constructing an uchi, then in managing relationships and communication within that space. The carefully crafted familial space creates a culturally and politically inclusive human unit.

On uchi and soto In 1994, Patricia J. Wetzel wrote, “It has become virtually impossible to speak of Japanese society behaviour without reference to (or at least recognition of) the importance of uchi/​soto boundaries” (p. 74). A glimpse of the enormous body of literature on the subject accumulated during the last two decades reveals that Wetzel’s observation is even more relevant today. Before further discussion on the significance of this dichotomy and how it is devised by and wrapped up in

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88  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi the discourse of intimacy in televised communication, let us begin with a basic question: what is uchi and soto? A simple translation into English would be “inside” and “outside”. Other meanings of the terms, however, take us to a broader conceptual area. According to Kenkyusha’s Dictionary, uchi means inside, interior, one’s, I, we, our, my, my [our] group, in-​group, a house, one’s house, my [our] house, home, a household, a [one’s] family, while soto refers to outside, open (air), exterior, another place (see Watanabe, Skrzypczak, and Snowden 2003: 267–​268, 1527). The list can also be extended depending on the situational usage of uchi and soto. As Charles Quinn (1994) rightfully points out, “[U]‌chi/​soto habitus is anything but a rigid, fixed, template, but rather is adapted and remade somewhat in every particular encounter it informs” (p. 39). As discussed at the outset of this volume (see the Introduction), the term uchi, for instance, may refer to the “speaker’s circle” or “I” in a particular context as the uchi of “individual-​in-​relation”. Yet, in another context, it may also refer to “the Japanese nation, ‘the major industrial nations,’ or even planet earth” (Quinn 1994:  42). Takahashi (2010:  59) alerts us to potential Western (mis)understandings2 of uchi, such as confusing the concept with “private”. While private may refer to the private sphere, uchi is not equivalent to private. Indeed, it may in some cases be equivalent to community or public. This is an essential point because, in Western cultures, where an independent understanding of the self prevails, the term private may also signify the individual. In Japan, however, where the culture is more attuned to an “interdependent view of self”3 (Markus and Kitayama 1991: 224–​225), uchi does not contain any specific reference to the individual. Moreover, “since soto and uchi are different for each individual, what is soto for one person may become uchi for a person included in that soto” (Doi 2001:  29). Uchi and soto is an encompassing, inclusive pair of terms that goes far beyond the directional, coordinates “inside/​outside”, used in every society. Instead, “uchi/​soto is a major organizational focus for Japanese self, social life, and language” (Bachnik 1994a: 3). In her work on the Japanese self, society, and identity, Doreen Kondo (1990) underscores the significance of the cultural context: The term uchi describes a located perspective: the in-​group, the “us” facing outward of the world (…) [U]‌chi focuses on the household in close-​up, as a center of belonging and attachment. Uchi defines who you are, through shaping language, the use of space, and social interactions. It instantly implies the drawing of boundaries between us and them, self and other. Uchi means “inside” (…) Depending on the context, it can be any in-​group: ie, company, school, club, or nation. (p. 141) At the other end of the continuum is soto, what “is abstract, objective, and unanchored”, what is “detached, and nonspecific  –​in other words general” (Bachnik 1994a: 28). According to Nancy Rosenberger (1994), “in a more soto context, people act in a disciplined way, detaching themselves from their personal feelings to focus on the definition and productivity of their group in relation to

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 89 other groups” (p. 91). While uchi refers to “I”, “me”, “my group”, or “we”, the word for “your”, “yours”, and “members of your group” is otaku. “This means that”, Bachnik notes (1994b), “the other is not defined solely vis-​à-​vis the self, but rather vis-​à-​vis the group to which ego belongs” (author’s emphasis, p.  157). The terms uchi-​no (e.g. uchi-​no mono means person/​people in [my] family and uchi-​no okāsan means [my] mother) or uchi-​dewa are often used to delineate one’s own people and company/​workplace (see Nakane 1970:  120; Bachnik 1994b:  155, 162; Kondo 1994:  170–​190; Quinn 1994:  48). Takie Sugiyama Lebra (2004) refers to uchi as “closeness and conformity”, whereas “soto implies open hostility or disorderly behaviour toward an outsider” (p.  40). Warning against the insufficiency of binary oppositions, Lebra (1976) has proposed a third, anomic space that embodies some characteristics of both uchi (intimate, warm) and soto (ritualistic, cold). Obviously, uchi/​soto are not the only directional coordinates in Japanese as there are other dichotomies referring to “inside” and “outside” or “self” and “society”, such as omote (in front, surface, the right side) versus ura (back, underside, the wrong side) (Doi 2001); tatemae (principle, one’s public behaviour, the surface reality) versus honne (one’s real intention) (Tobin 1992; Lebra 1976); and ninjō (human/​personal feelings, humanity) versus giri (social duty, obligation) (Doi 2001). However, as Bachnik (1994a) recognizes, uchi/​soto is more basic in delineating indexical organization, for two reasons. First, uchi as “us”, “our group”, and so forth, is explicitly associated with the deictic anchor point, which is not the case for the inside terms of the other sets. Second, uchi/​soto is explicitly linked to the axis indexed by inside/​ outside distinctions, through gauging degrees of insideness and outsideness. (p. 27) Substantive works focusing on the reciprocal relationship between complex linguistic conventions and sociocultural settings –​some of which are cited above –​ offer multiple interpretations of uchi/​soto from different perspectives. Such formulations reveal that uchi/​soto is indeed one of the crucial tools in understanding of how “self”, “inside”, “intimate”, “familiar”, and “society” (uchi); and “outside”, “detached/​disciplined”, and “unfamiliar” (soto) are defined, indexed, and situated in Japanese culture. In the following sections, we will step into the settings where the abstract definitions above dress in their “actual” televisual costumes. My aim is to explore the various cultural, emotional, and discursive strategies that are employed in building the collective, televisual uchi. To do this, I will first focus on the local wideshow OH! Ban desu, broadcast by MTV, a local affiliate of the national commercial TV station NTV. I  will then present data regarding another local wideshow, Tere-​Masamune, telecast by a local affiliate of Japan’s sole public broadcaster, NHK. The discussion in this section will further elucidate similarities and differences in the two stations’ organizational dynamics, production strategies, and programme contents imposed by the fundamental divide in their

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90  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi institutional structure (i.e. commercial versus public broadcasting). Finally, I will move beyond local borders to outline the major themes that emerge from my fieldwork at NTV’s nationwide programme, THE Waido.

Local boundaries of uchi At the outset of this book (see the Introduction), I stated that I approach the cultural, emotional, political, and economic facets of Japanese infotainment separately to facilitate the thematic analysis of my observation data. In their actual settings, however, these layers are often interdependent and work together to engineer a multilayered televisual realm. Locality is an example of such reciprocity: it is an indispensable communication strategy, overwhelmingly employed in local wideshows first to engage local audiences before converting that cultural engagement into an economic value to serve the financial objectives of the local TV stations and their economic backers (see Chapter 3). From coastland to the mountains: uchi as the hometown In the case of OH! Ban desu (MTV), an obvious example of such local emphasis would be the title of this local wideshow. In fact, o-​ban desu is a local expression that substitutes for the more common konbanwa, or “good evening”. When travelling in northern Japan, people are frequently greeted with this local form of salutation. Semiotically, the title and the opening segment, entitled osakini ban desu, signify from the outset that the programme intentionally delineates its geocentric borders: it not only communicates its “localness” to the local audiences but also promises them a familiar roof (uchi) under which they all can come together. Indeed, the data presented in the remainder of this section reveal that the programme’s title is but one example of an all-​embracing broadcast strategy by which the show’s entire content is wrapped up. The interview data reveals that this strong emphasis on the notion of locality is by no means accidental but results from an extensive trial-​and-​error process. “Observing the viewing statistics (bangumi monitā) every morning”, producer Watanabe recalls, “we realized that some blocks of the programme were losing audience”. After this unenthusiastic beginning, the production team painstakingly analysed the minute-​by-​minute programme flow and learnt that segments centred on local information always obtained higher ratings. As Watanabe explained, “the audience watching local news was two times bigger than that of national news”. By the end of the programme’s first year, they had increased the local information and inserted extra “local flavour” into each corner. Takehana Jun, the programme’s newscaster, noted that this was also valid for the news corner. At the beginning, we used to obtain our news mostly from NTV [the mother station in Tokyo]. The journalist transmitting the important news of the

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 91 day (…) knew nothing about the issues in Tōhoku. So, our [local] reporter added the local news into the national reports (…) Still we couldn’t help losing audience daily. After we saw that our audience was more interested in the local, rather than the national news, we immediately changed the content and used much more local information in the news reports. Following this shift in coverage, the news corner’s ratings jumped significantly from 2 to 15 per cent. This prompted a tenfold increase in the amount of time devoted to local reports, from 3 to 30 minutes per broadcast. The fact that the programme has the highest ratings4 among its rivals in Miyagi prefecture proves that the strategy works. As mentioned above, the local emphasis continues in all corners. For instance, we see that the foods or ingredients introduced in the how-​to corners mostly come from Miyagi prefecture (see, for instance, the discussion on “koraborēshon bentō” [lunch box collaboration] in Chapter 3).5 A crucial point to remember is that this overemphasis on the local “essence” both connotes the geocentric borders of the audience’s uchi and also functions as a discourse to testify to the seeming exceptionalness of it: its nature, traditions, ethnicity, popular culture, food, ingredients, and, of course, its “imagined community” (Anderson 1983). That is, the native of the furusato [hometown], endowed with superlative qualities, are undeniably better, healthier, tastier, special, peerless, or unique. Consider, for instance, the corner Hakken Miyagi (Discovery Miyagi), of the rival local show, Tere-​Masamune Go! Go! This corner is designed to “discover” the glamour of the audience’s hometown. As I was conducting my interviews in NHK-​Sendai’s studios, the topic of this segment was shijimi, or Japanese clams. The female host argued that these were not just the ordinary clams we are used to seeing in supermarkets; rather, they come from the Kitakami River of Miyagi prefecture, which flows on the eastern side of Sendai. While the main camera focused on each clam in the wicker basket, four members of the programme, behind the main set, were commenting about the clam’s exclusive qualities. With a display of surprise, the main announcer said, “They look different than ordinary clams, don’t you think so?” To my inexpert eyes, only a few clams seemed slightly bigger than the others, while the rest were the usual ones we encounter in local supermarkets. One notable detail is that there was another plastic bucket full of clams behind the cameras, which had been carefully selected from the bucket hidden from the audience’s eyes. Following this was a documentary featuring fishermen collecting clams from the river. Through the VTR pieces, we sail on the river with the local people and witness how they work in situ, but also listen to dialogues offering micro information on the unique features of the clams, such as their size (how exceptionally big), mineral composition (how healthy), taste (how delicious), and other particularities of the superb clams of Kitakami River. Associated with the landscapes in the background are intimate interviews with the workers, appearing on screen one by one to tell their personal stories in the clam

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92  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi business. Almost 30 per cent of the show’s broadcast time was devoted to this infotained, localized content. Readers familiar with the debate on Japanese cultural nationalism (see Chapter 1) can easily draw parallels with another –​but this time national –​discourse of uniqueness, namely Nihonjinron (日本人論), and its implications for the Japanese mediascape. In fact, much of the observation data revealed that, in engineering and transmitting the exclusiveness of the audience’s inner-​uchi (Miyagi prefecture), the discourse of uniqueness employed in the local infotainment programmes and their repeated references to the audience’s cultural, regional, and ethnic identities play fundamental role. Almost all the commercial information regarding restaurants, shopping centres, trade fairs, or events delivered via the programme’s corners are gathered from Sendai, the TV station’s hometown, broadcast in an intimate ambience by familiar (local) celebrities. Among them, the main figure (“star”) of the programme, Satō Muneyuki, who has presented every Saturday to Friday since April 1995, plays a particular role in the programme’s (and, through that, the audience’s) cultural attachment to the hometown. Before he gave up his promising musical career for OH! Ban desu and became the singer Mune,6 he was known as a singer of local folk songs centred on the Tōhoku area, of which the most well known is “Aoba jō koi uta” (Aoba castle love song).7 Mune defines himself locally, gushing, “I love Sendai and Tōhoku with all my heart. This is my home (…) The audience, too, love their singer Mune (…) Perhaps that was the reason Miyagi Terebi picked me for this programme”. Later in our interview, he said, “I always believed I was more than a TV star. I am Tōhoku’s Mune”. By repeatedly defining himself in reference to geographical and cultural borders, Satō Muneyuki demarcated the contours of televisual uchi, a space into which the audiences and himself become fused. Indeed, after featuring in the same programme for more than two decades, Mune-​san has turned into a member of the Tōhoku family. What further strengthens his belonging to this family is his command of the local dialect available to uchi members. Muneyuki often uses what is known as “zūzū-​ ben”, a dialect employed in Tōhoku, which other Japanese consider one of the country’s thickest dialects, with the shapes of words being hard to catch.8 As such, the programme reveals its intention to eschew nationwideness: those who do not belong to Tōhoku are implicitly placed as soto, given the use of local (uchi) content. The local information and its medium, the local dialect, are welcomed as a means of constructing a hermetic inner world. That is, the local dialect is employed to “ ‘wrap’ a group of people and distinguish them from others” (Hendry, 1999: 72). Beyond the economic (see Chapter  3), geographic, and linguistic, the construction of a televisual uchi depends on one further element:  the emotional. The following section examines this point and discusses the professional routines utilized in the production process to engender an affective, intimate atmosphere through the programme.

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 93 Emotional boundaries of uchi Various examples collected from the programme reveal the prominence of language in engendering the uchi-​like (hence intimate) atmosphere within the show. Consider the nickname mune, which Satō Muneyuki chose for himself. Although mune can certainly be construed as a nickname that comes from shortening his first name (Muneyuki), it also means “heart”, “breast”, or “chest”.9 Today, not only in the programme but also among the station’s staff, Muneyuki is humorously called “Mune-​san”. As such, it is an intimacy publicly shared, which (in its constant communication) renders viewers complicit: a community holding a private communication in confidence. This intimate mode of communication encompasses the female host of the programme, Ukigaya-​san, as well. Both at the TV station and during the programme, the female host is called “Uki-​chan”. This is imperative insofar as “-​ chan” in Japanese is an affectionate diminutive suffix reserved for members of a speaker’s uchi (whether household, family, company, school, community, etc.). In other words, the nuance used in the Japanese language in which pronouns are employed to assist in the construction of uchi and soto is intentionally employed during the broadcast. Clearly, these words are applied to the announcers as a way of drawing them into the sphere of the uchi. I would argue that it is also a strategy that helps place the audience within that circle as well. As Watanabe puts it, Friendly communication is important. It is our job to entertain audiences as if we are all in the studio. While watching the programme, the audience should feel themselves at home (…) we should be like friends. The language we use is the one that the audiences use in their life. One important point is that the uchi is not all-​ inclusive  –​even within the imaginary scope created in the studio. While the announcers, hosts, and audience may belong to this intimate cosmos, other communicators (e.g. newscasters) may not. As Watanabe indicated, while striving for casualness by calling Ukigaya, “Uki-​chan”, and Muneyuki, “Mune-​san”, we cannot do the same for Mori Tomoko because she appears in the news reports. Just imagine that she is reporting some very sad news –​something like “two high school children died in a car crash in Aoba-​ku”10 –​and then the other announcer calls her “Tomo-​chan”! (…) It would be very thoughtless, I guess. We just can’t do that (…) There is a very thin line here. In this context, the “thin line” that Watanabe was considering was indeed the line that delineates uchi –​what is “engaged, intimate, and spontaneous” –​from soto –​what is formal, “detached, disciplined, and ordered” (Bachnik 1994c: 239). In effect, while producers strive to erase the boundaries within the complex geography between the worlds inside and outside the box, they must also manage

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94  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi boundaries within the architecture of the programme. Quinn (1994) clarifies this point, namely how uchi/​soto-​oriented linguistic conventions work: The expressions in which we find the word uchi, and the word soto, or both, are orientational. With these expressions, people get a fix on the world: themselves, other people, reports; in space, in time, in relation to other people; in the waking world and in their dreams, ad infinitum. They also use these expressions to project an orientation onto other people and things as they relate in space, in time, and with one another, even to the extent that they are grammatical constructions that have employed the words uchi and soto. (p. 40) Considering the programme from the present viewpoint, we see that the local geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders communicated through the programme are used to demarcate uchi from soto. Nevertheless, it does not show us how this televisual uchi is constructed via the internal elements of the infotainment content. The next section discusses this point further, focusing on the relationship between the telecast content and the “intimate atmosphere” that is re-​engineered through the programme. Loosening ties, shifting images As mentioned earlier, OH! Ban desu is a wideshow in which traditional genres (information and entertainment) are blended together. Following the history of the programme, we learn that the balance has steadily moved towards a more entertaining and less informative form of communication. During the interviews, I was repeatedly told by my informants that the disappointing beginning of OH! Ban desu powerfully influenced the programme’s content. For instance, the original producer confessed that, having figured out that the programme was “too intense” for their audiences, they mixed the informative parts, including the news reports, with entertaining segments to tone down what he called the programme’s “lecturing tone”. But, what does that mean exactly? How did the programme become easier to grasp and lighter to follow over time? “To be honest”, Mune explains, at the beginning, the programme went really badly. The ratings were decreasing day by day. I told myself, “Singer Mune! You have to do something for your audience!” It was no longer possible for me to fulfil all my concert invitations. [I had to devote] less time to my compositions and more time to the programme (…) I had to be around Sendai. More was involved, though, than the host’s concentration. Watanabe explained what Mune had to do for his audience: “Mune is a funny guy, right? Well, ten years ago, at the beginning of the programme, he was much more serious. He was always wearing this serious mask throughout the programme (…) dressing

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 95 up in a stylish and formal way”. But only for one year. Employing the viewing figures, they realized that the more Mune went out of the studio and talked with ordinary people (ippan no kata) on the street and made jokes, the more audiences followed the programme. Today, Mune wears an apron, cooks in the studio, smiles more often, and even sings once a week. In short, he has evolved from an “intensive” to a “lighter” and “ordinary” style. This relates to what Rosenberg (1994) mentioned in her work: “uchi contexts depend on the ability of at least some people in the group to loosen their restrained energy and express the inner feelings (kimochi) of their spirits or hearts (kokoro), ideally to enable people’s emotions to blend in harmony” (p. 99). Indeed, the elegant image of singer Mune has been transformed into a sort of casual-​looking TV star. As mentioned above, the aim is to engender “friendly communication” that transcends the divide between information and everyday (“less serious”) knowledge. In Watanabe’s words, “We are trying to improve our communication with the audience (…) We must keep thinking about how to maintain contact with them. This is the most important aim”. Toward that end, they have a new strategy: Bandesu Network, which is a corner that enables audience members to share their problems with other audience members, with the host assisting in the collective search for solutions. Watanabe explains, We [have always] received a lot of phone calls during the programme and despite ten operators, the lines are always busy. Audiences ask a lot of questions about a variety of topics –​so many problems (…) sometimes, very little things (…) For example [pulling a paper from a file] this one (…) She asks how to remove a wine stain from a cloth (…) Our audiences are mostly housewives so (…) they are interested in useful information about their daily life or some advice about kids’ problems or social events around Sendai. Watanabe indicated that, while the staff had previously tried their best to answer such questions, now, rather than read books, ask experts, or conduct Internet searches, the network of viewers serve as the main problem solvers. Here again we see how infotainment content is not a referentially empty filter between uchi and soto but rather a symbolic family through which the members can share their very intimate problems and experiences. Carefully crafted spontaneity A crucial factor in a live programme is to induce a sense of real-​time, unscripted communication with the audience. Live broadcasting utilizes the strategy of rawness in creating the risky, unstructured, and fluid content in front of and together with the audience. Although OH! Ban desu is broadcast live, some of its strategies do not seem to include the basic features of live broadcasting. Before we go further, consider its corners. Listing all the sub-​segments of OH! Ban desu, one would say that it is very informative with something to “teach” in all

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96  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi segments. However, this is only true of the titles. As I discussed earlier, its tone has changed over time so that the programme currently has a more informal, entertaining tone instead of a lecturing one. As Mune says, sometimes even I don’t know what will come next in the programme (…) It makes me much closer to the audience (…) It’s like saying: “Look, I’m just like you! I have no idea where this programme will take me (…) So, let’s all just go with the flow”. This idea of spontaneity was confirmed by Ukigaya: “It makes it more fun!” she gushed. “Otherwise appearing in the same programme for ten years would be boring. The audience wants to see us acting naturally on the screen”. Watanabe agreed: “We let it be as it is. Sometimes it makes the show much more natural. If you rehearse the entire content, then it becomes too perfect for a live programme”. This is understandable since using spontaneity can be considered as the principal element of live broadcasting. This reminds us of what Corner (2002) calls the “observational realism” of documentaries: the “sense of spontaneity of action that presents us with something which is perceptually coherent but which is following developments beyond the control of the crew” (p. 127). What I observed in the production and post-​production processes in the local TV stations, however, has considerable differences with, or is even the absolute opposite of, what was described above. First, the content of OH! Ban desu is far from spontaneous. Although the show’s performers and staff may disavow overpreparation, the topics for each programme are, by Ukigaya’s admission, “decide(d) almost two  –​sometimes three  –​weeks before the programme [is aired]. But only the title. We prepare the important parts a couple of days before. As for the tiny details, we decide on them the same [broadcast] day”, as the following anecdote from Mune illustrates. After giving a concert outside Sendai, he tries to return to take part in OH! Ban desu. He finally arrives an hour before the programme begins and gets into the studio just 15 minutes before it goes on-​air. As expected, no one has time to assist him with what is going to happen. “It was scary”, he admitted: But later on, I said, “Just be yourself” (…) Be the singer Mune that people know (…) I saw all the details for the first time when they were happening in the studio. I think that was the longest programme of my life (…) But afterwards, we got very surprising feedback. The audience loved it (…) They found it very interesting. Perhaps they thought, “our Mune is just like one of us (…) He is learning together with us”. This unintentional, unplanned, or coincidental nature of the programme, Mune argues, can increase the proximity between the TV personalities and the audience. But is this really what happens during the preparation of OH! Ban desu? To better understand this, consider the following examples. First, although the programme is broadcast live, the production team has rehearsals for all corners and virtually

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 97 all segments except for the news report. They start practicing how to act and what to say a few hours before the programme telecasts. During these rehearsals, even the body language of the announcers and guests is carefully planned and rehearsed a few times. In the cooking corner, for instance, every step of the recipe is practiced by both announcers. So too are the friendly dialogues, exaggerated gestures, and their own ideas about the taste of each ingredient –​which are not even on the table yet –​rehearsed. During the final segment, Mune and Ukigaya took their chopsticks and acted as if they were tasting the still-​unprepared dish. Ukigaya took a piece of the non-​ existing food, put it into the small serving dish (torizara), tasted it, and said, “This is delicious!” and added jokingly, “but it will be better once it is really cooked!” Even the guest audience member who recommended the recipe was standing next to them and practicing her answers written on a piece of paper in a conversational way. Rehearsals continue while the show is on-​air. Consider the following scene of three women during a commercial break, prior to their upcoming segment: PERFORMER 1:  “I will gesture like this (…) as if I am taking notes”. PERFORMER 2:  “And then I’ll say, ‘Oh, what should I write?’ ” PERFORMER 3:  “And I’ll ask, ‘What should I memorize?’ ”

Suddenly, staring at one another’s poses –​catching themselves in the artifice of the moment –​the three began laughing. What I encountered again and again during my fieldwork at the different TV stations11 is that, despite being broadcast live, almost the entire televised content and the programme’s fundamental component –​a discourse of intimacy –​is planned in detail in advance to the extent that the notion of spontaneity and roughness was one of the most indispensable technical elements. Post-​produced reality So far, I have discussed various strategies functioning via intimate communication tropes. In this section, I would like to demonstrate how the audiovisual elements play a role in this process. At the outset of this chapter, I mentioned that the amount of local information has dramatically changed over time. However, Takehana, the news anchor, argued that this was not limited to a shift towards overly localized TV content; rather, broadcast technology also played its part in further increasing the proximity with the audience.12 “Today, the news reports are more interesting than the past”, he mused: Shifting from 16 mm film to VTR had a big effect on the quality of visual material, that’s for sure. 16 mm gave off an atmosphere similar to the cinema. Nothing looked “real” [in the past] (…) What VTR technology did was to add a perfect sense of reality. Now the programmes on the screen look much more real.

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98  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi What we observe here is that the success of new technological developments in the broadcasting area is measured and evaluated through their contribution to, as Corner (2002: 126–​128) calls it, the “sense of real-​seemingness”. Those strategies aimed at enhancing the cinematic quality of televised content and thereby increasing the proximity between two distinct realities on and in front of the screen are recodified and immensely fortified by the empathy-​seeking, manga-​ esque characteristic of the display. This point will be explained through the field data presented later in this chapter in the section “Intimization of the screen”. Takehana argued that this essential step towards high technology let the producers control the visual material more effectively. Today, adding on-​screen digital effects and reframing the specific focus of news stories are no longer complicated processes: “The visual material in news reports has become as important as the content itself”, as Takehana noted: This is all [to create] a sense of “reality” (…) It started almost ten years ago (…) At the same time, mosaic faces and distorted voices13 appeared in news reports. These [tricks] increase the impact of news content. VTR technology made everything much easier. Now, in this digital era, content can be reshaped many times in minutes. Another significant element is the announcers’ performance in the news segment. According to my informant, “in the past, mimicry (…) humor (…) commentary (…) were all forbidden (…) ‘[just] read the text’ (…) Now, we newscasters comment much more”. In short, the screen has become more emotionalized over time. This is not unique to MTV as it is a widespread strategy employed in a broad range of programmes, such as news reports, variety, and entertainment programmes in Japanese television. As one of my informants said, “the audience doesn’t just sit in front of the screen watching the same channel for hours. Therefore, we have to find a way to keep their attention focused on the screen”. This is what Ellis (1999) was getting at when he asserted, Television’s process of working-​through is crucially linked with the way that audiences use television. No one can watch everything that is on television nowadays, or even the entire content of one channel. Any completeness that television might offer will always escape any one viewer. Television is at once both continuous and incomplete (…) Television constantly offers; viewers take up the offer only when they feel like it. (p. 68) Nevertheless, as I noted earlier, the uchi-​like atmosphere of the programme is not all-​inclusive. With the appearance of newscaster Takehana Jun, the tone of the language shifts from intimate, personal, and affective to more informative, formal, authoritarian, and masculine. The shift in audiovisual techniques employed to achieve proximity and a sense of realness is still there in the news segment, but so is the “thin line” between uchi and soto.

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 99 From the perspectives discussed above, we can see that infotainment, which is one of the central forms of information transmitted in contemporary Japanese television, is not a unidimensional phenomenon. On the contrary, it is a televisual space built on the intersections of simulated subjectivities, cultural discourses, and commercial and institutional policies. Playing with all the familial, cultural (e.g. localized information on food, city, and events), subjective (e.g. changing images of Mune), collective (e.g. using zūzū-​ben), and social (e.g. the “network” corner) spheres of the audience, OH! Ban desu promises a televisual family (uchi) in which the target audience can enjoy this localized collectivity. Kondo (1990) recognizes this point in her discussion on uchi/​soto orientations:  “In symbolic terms, soto means the public world, while uchi is the world of informality, casual behaviour, and relaxation” (p.  141). What we observed through the examples does indeed support this formulation:  while “informal”, “interactive”, “entertaining”, “familiar”, “casual”, “private”, and “relaxing” ways of communication are welcomed to engender televisual uchi, “public”, “formal”, and “informative” means are considered soto.

Infotainment and public broadcasting In this section, we move our focus from OH! Ban Desu to another local wideshow, Tere-​Masamune (or Tere-​masa), which plays the most important role in the total broadcasting content of NHK-​Sendai. As discussed in Chapter  2, Tere-​Masamune displays significant similarities with OH! Ban desu, including its target audience profile, broadcast area, and time slot. However, there are fundamental institutional differences between them in that MTV is a commercial station, while NHK is a public broadcaster. This in turn exerts a strong influence on a wide range of aspects, including hierarchical administrative structure, professional practices, decision-​making processes, and content production and delivery. The data provided in the following section demonstrate the significance of this institutional divide while also evidencing how producer Watanabe’s above-​ mentioned “thin line”, which worked to delineate uchi-​like, intimate content from what is not (e.g. news, factual information), rematerializes in the context of the private-​ public service broadcasting duality. In the Habermasian tradition, the term “public” (e.g. in “the public sphere”) is frequently associated with discourses of objectivity, reason, rationality, information, independence, authority, and masculinity (Dahlgren 2005: 419), which can easily be replaced by a traditional genre definition of “news”, thereby signifying soto. In contrast, the term “private” represents the locus of personal, subjective, and sentimental so it symbolizes what is more emotional, entertaining, inclusive, and intimate in the televisual scape, thereby fitting primarily into the uchi-​like realm of Japanese infotainment. How then, one might wonder, is the intimate and gratifying content of the wideshow manufactured by a public broadcasting institution whose primary task, as one of my key informants argues, is to deliver serious and tadashī (correct, truthful, honest, objective) information rather than commercial and tanoshī

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100  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi (fun, entertaining) content to its audiences? How is infotainment perceived by media professionals working in a public station? What is their perspective vis-​à-​ vis other local wideshows broadcast by their commercial rivals? Do the cultural, discursive, and technical elements we discovered in OH! Ban desu, for instance, apply also to Tere-​Masamune? These questions and others will be examined in the sections below. To do this, I  shall offer data addressing the institutional differences between the two broadcasters and how they reflect on the professional practices and broadcasting strategies employed by NHK-​Sendai from a comparative perspective. Between tanoshī and tadashī: the thin line in between Given the traditional divide between public and private broadcasting systems (Dahlgren and Sparks 1991; Murdock 1990), one would assume that, as a public broadcaster, NHK-​Sendai has a somewhat autonomous position in the media market since economic considerations are not necessarily the most determining pressures on its broadcasting policies.14 Hence, keywords of television broadcasting, such as “ratings”, “prime time”, or “share”, should have different weightings and create different pressures on the production staff in the two local TV stations. As Dahlgren (1995:  29) argues, since public broadcasters’ unique position in the media market releases them from serious concerns, such as advertising revenues or maximizing audiences, it should provide them with a certain level of freedom to focus on how best they can serve the public interest. In fact, while the commercial station’s programme OH! Ban desu, for instance, is strongly constrained by its functionality and effectiveness in the complex milieu of the well-​ known triangle of audience, TV station, and market,15 this competition with rivals is not so severe for the public broadcaster’s Tere-​ Masamune.16 As my field data emphasize, however, this does not mean that the station is completely free from what might be expected of an industry in the media sector. Television, first and foremost, is an industry, irrespective of whether its economic source is commercial or public service license fees, so it must “be seen as the intersection of forces stemming from its organizational structures and dynamics, and the set of professional frameworks operative among people in the television industry, and, of course, its political economy” (Dahlgren 1995:  26). My repeated interviews with production members at NHK-​Sendai further prove this point. For my informants, the public station’s institutional structure and special position in the media market impose several restrictions, which in turn increase the programme’s vulnerability vis-​à-​vis its commercial rivals; hence, instead of mitigating the situation, according to the production members, it aggravates it. More examples regarding these structural constraints will follow; however, at this point, let me briefly digress and share an account from my key informant, Igawa, the female host of Tere-​Masamune. As explained in detail in Chapter 2, among those I interviewed in NHK-​Sendai, Igawa occupies a

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 101 special position. Before she began her career in NHK-​Sendai, she worked for a rival TV station, MTV. Her professional experience in both companies places her in a special position to provide me with a comparative assessment of both wideshows and their TV stations. A few hours before Tere-​Masamune goes on air, Igawa appeared with her colourful yukata (traditional summer dress) in the production studio. “Do you see the make-​up on my face?” she said, annoyed: I did that by myself (…) as I do every day! Oh, how easy it was in Miyagi Terebi (…) We had professional staff taking care of our looks, make up, accessories (…) [We] never worried about our dresses, because for that, too, there was a special designer in charge. But this station [NHK-​Sendai] is a different world! Here, it is always us [her emphasis] who have to take care of every single detail (…) Look! [pointing out the yukata she was wearing] This is mine! I brought it from my own wardrobe! What Igawa was complaining about is but a minor detail extracted from the everyday context of television broadcasting. Yet, considered together with the data and discussions in Chapter 2, it provides a micro reflection of the major institutional and organizational divide between the two stations, including the professional routines, and the production personnel’s distance and level of engagement with their company and the programme they produce. After providing several examples of this disparity, she mused, OH! Ban desu broadcast for (…) how long it’s been? (…) around ten years. They always kept an eye on the audience’s reaction and continuously redesigned the programme’s content accordingly. Each time, the weaker segments [obtaining lower ratings] were replaced by new ones. That’s how it [OH! Ban desu] became better and better over time. One result is that, today, OH! Ban desu manages to obtain ratings five to six times higher than Tere-​Masamune. Laughing ironically, former MTV employee Igawa argued, “Miyagi Terebi is almost incomparable (…) left all other stations behind (…) If we can manage to get 3 per cent [ratings] in this [summer] period, we consider ourselves quite lucky!” One might, therefore, reasonably ask why the production team fails to adopt a similar trial-​and-​error strategy to that which worked so well for MTV in obtaining higher ratings? What is it that prevents them re-​engineering the televisual content with a stronger connection its local viewers? The data emerging from my interviews revealed that the producers at NHK-​Sendai actually do follow their audience’s viewing behaviours via similar methodologies. The local emphasis in the Tere-​Masamune, for instance, has been shaped in time through the faxes, phone calls, and emails they receive from the audience every broadcast day. One difference, however, is that, during my fieldwork, the phone operator

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102  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi strategy (i.e. Bandesu Network) we observed previously in OH! Ban desu did not exist in Tere-​Masamune. My informant explains what is missing in the broader picture: Miyagi Terebi is a private station. In our programme [Tere-​Masamune], we cannot promote a department store or a restaurant. [After giving several examples from its rival, OH! Ban desu], even if we enter an interesting place or a shopping centre: no brand names, phone numbers, or address details can be broadcast unless there is a very important event. The institutional restrictions of NHK-​Sendai, Igawa muses, are among the most significant factors weakening the programme’s position against its strong rival. In fact, interview data with the producers suggests that the commodified information designed to satisfy the commercial demands of housewives and carefully disguised in the programme content (in the form of useful tips, shopping information, event announcements, special discounts for restaurants, etc.) is perceived by production members as one significant strategy behind the private station’s powerful position in the market. As one of my informants argued, “That’s why people prefer to watch the other programme [OH! Ban desu]. We, too, want to introduce some interesting places (…) mixed with cosy interviews with the owners or customers (…) But this is NHK; no way we can do that”. The confessional tone in my informant’s account, however, altered later in the interview: What we broadcast here [in Tere-​Masamune Go! Go!] is not only what is interesting or entertaining but also what is important. That’s why [compared to those working for Miyagi Terebi] we work harder during our preparations. I  think, rather than entertaining [tanoshī] content, correct information [tadashī]17 is more important. Let us pause briefly here and take a closer look at these formulations. In the former account, by shifting the focus from an individual to a more institutional or general level (“we, too, want to”), the production member intentionally points out that the programme’s content –​at least in the way it currently exists –​ is not exactly what they want to broadcast but what they are somehow obliged to. This is in line with other observations underscoring the dissatisfaction, low engagement, and critical distance between the production team members and what they do as professionals.18 Moreover, the production staff, as shown in Chapter 3, may think critically and disparage the work they do, but they often accept, carry out, or even further strengthen the professional routines19 of the stations that they work for. The latter account from the same informant, however, gives us a clue to how the institutional ideology works to construct a discursive packaging through which the production members construe the content of Tere-​Masamune.

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 103 Linguistic wrapping Another factor differentiating public from private broadcasting is the linguistic conventions. As mentioned in the former section, in OH! Ban desu, the main announcer, Satō Muneyuki, often uses the local dialect, called “zūzū-​ben”, for the sake of more intimate communication with the audience. Further, as mentioned earlier, Muneyuki is humorously called Mune-​san, while Ukigaya, the female host, is called Uki-​chan, with the affectionate suffix, during the programme. Both nicknames are reserved for members of a speaker’s uchi. “We cannot do this in Tere-​Masamune”, one of my informants explained: We have to be careful with the language we use. We are supposed to use keigo [polite form of Japanese] as much as possible. We must use “go”, or “o”20 during the broadcast in front of the cameras. It doesn’t matter how close you are to the person in the programme, you must be formal during the broadcast (…) That is certainly not the case for Miyagi Terebi. Readers should note that Japanese is a nuanced language in which there are different levels of politeness within its honorific form, called keigo (Wetzel 2004; Hendry 1993), an upper-​level rhetorical device. It not only helps make the speakers appear polite and well educated but also reflects their social roles and hierarchical position in the society. Keigo comprises three levels of communication: sonkeigo, kenjōgo, and teineigo. Sonkeigo is used when the speaker is in a lower position, or as if in a lower position, than the listener. As for the opposite case, kenjōgo would be the correct way of speaking. Apart from these two levels, particularly used to indicate the social statuses of speakers, teineigo, with no relation to the speaker’s hierarchical position, functions only to show basic politeness to the listener. Japanese learn these appropriate forms of speech at school, at home from their parents, or in the workplace through specific employee training (Hendry 1993:  52). Those who look beyond the massive number of self-​help books or online sources teaching tadashī keigo (correct keigo) may turn to television as popular quiz shows and variety programmes, too, contribute to teaching the correct use of keigo (Okamoto and Shibamoto-​Smith 2016: 149–​152). Returning to the NHK-​Sendai studios, the communication strategy employed in the intimization of OH! Ban desu, which aims to reduce the distance from the audience to create an uchi-​like, familial atmosphere, contrasts with the form of speech used in Tere-​Masamune Go! Go! The language used in NHK-​Sendai is considered the standard for “proper” (tadashī) Japanese diction and grammar –​ assuming only this standard can be correct –​and therefore refers primarily to the locus of formality, distance, and politeness, rather than uchi –​the world of informality (Kondo 1990). NHK, from this perspective, is not unique. In fact, public broadcasting corporations in many societies are usually expected to represent high standards in the use of proper language and are considered an authority in this matter (see Milroy and Milroy 2012; Jaspers and Meeuwis 2006).

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104  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi Keigo implies formality, and, as Bachnick (1994a: 25) argues, in most cases, intimacy and formality are inversely related:  that is, the more that discipline and self-​restraint are required by a social situation, the less that intimacy can be expressed. However, it is imperative to remember that, while keigo is often used to introduce social distance and politeness, it may be decoded differently by actual speakers. In their brilliant work on the “social life of Japanese language”, Shigeko Okamoto and Janet Shibamoto-​Smith (2016: 149–​152) underscore this point:  “The relationship between linguistic forms and a particular social meaning in a specific context must be seen as a fluid and dynamic process negotiated offering and interpretation by the speakers and addressees involved” (p.  19). In a similar vein, Agnes Niyekawa (1984:  83) emphasizes the significance of the context and shows that intimacy in Japanese domestic dramas is often expressed through the content of speech, even though the polite form of speech is preserved. In fact, keigo can also, as Hendry (1999: 72) points out, be considered a sophisticated form of (verbal) “wrapping” that expresses extreme care (teinei) for the person to whom it is addressed.21 This is the intended purpose and strategy of the programme: by the appropriate use of language coupled with an empathetic approach to the audience’s expectations  –​strategies often observed in Tere-​Masamune –​linguistic formality is translated into respect and politeness, hence care for the audience, which increases rather than decreases proximity and engagement. Although the institutional character of the station imposes certain restrictions concerning the broadcaster’s communication strategies and televisual content, it does not prevent the producers from finding alternative ways to diminish the sense of distance and rigidity mentioned above. In fact, the gratifying, uchi-​like televisual ambience in Tere-​Masamune is achieved, borrowing Hendry’s concept, via several strategies of “wrapping”, such as studio ambience, in-​group informal interactions between the central figures, and the appearances of hosts and guests during the live broadcast, even though the language may remain polite or formal. Spatial and bodily wrapping The field data enable me to argue that Tere-​Masamune’s strong emphasis on the notion of locality (as we encountered in the previous local programme) along with other components deeply rooted in geocentric borders –​and thereby in the local audience’s cultural frame of reference  –​is one such strategy for accomplishing intimacy. Consider the title of the programme: Tere-​Masamune. Those who visit the city of Sendai, the largest and most populous city of Miyagi prefecture, will certainly come across the white equestrian statue of a warrior, which stands in the centre of the main train station. It is the statue of the city’s most famous warrior, Masamune Date, with his crescent moon-​shaped helmet, facing the main turnstiles of the station and greeting passengers leaving or arriving in the city centre. Building his castle (Aoba-​jō) in 1600, Masamune became the founder of the city. Today, popularized images of this historical figure are all over the city in various forms:  as a mascot for mobile phones; an animation character

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 105 on commercials; a toy or an icon. From the outset of the programme, it is this televised image of Masamune¸ whose name is equated with the name of the city, which communicates with the local audience. As soon as his colourful, flickering name appears on-​screen, embedded in the programme’s title and with a bird’s-​ eye view of Sendai city in the background, Miyagi’s audience realizes that what is about to begin is their programme about their region, broadcast in their hometown.22 Though significant, the title is not the only component where the audience encounters its local historical hero. The animated character Warade, the mascot of NHK-​Sendai,23 also appears with his Masamune helmet throughout the studio: in the centre of the floor; on shelves in the background; on consoles and stairs; and, in animated/​digitalized form, on the screen and the website.24 From the title of the programme to the decoration of the studio, the “cute” (kawaii) image of local warrior Masamune, founder of our uchi (Sendai), functions to establish proximity between the audience and the televised content several hundred years after his decision to settle down in Sendai. The most significant indicators of such localization occur in the quasi-​ contiguous communication tropes employed in the programme. “Our programme”, one of my informants explained, is all about Miyagi prefecture. Our main purpose is to reach the people in this area from umi-​zoi [coastland] to yama-​zoi [along the mountains]. We offer useful tips and a large amount of local information from different parts of Miyagi prefecture (…) interesting human stories, entertaining interviews with people on the street, for instance. This local emphasis expands to the interior decoration and lived-​in ambience of the production studio. During my midsummer fieldwork, for instance, the studio was decorated with colourful handicraft comets (sasakazari) and vibrant ornaments. This was done to celebrate Tanabata Festival (or Star Festival),25 the most famous festival of the Tōhoku area, held every year from 6 to 8 August.26 During this time, more than two million visitors27 visit Sendai, where the urban space is decorated with gigantic, colourful comets and handicrafts made of washi (Japanese paper), hanging in the streets, arcades, shopping centres, buildings, and train stations. For three days, the city turns into an open cultural exhibition, as does its local wideshow Tere-​Masamune. In this way, the interior space (i.e. the production studio) is transformed into a visual extension of the physical environment outside. The intention is to create an interface between two different worlds whereby the semiotic features of the city can flow into the studio environment and vice versa through this seamless televisual continuum (Figure 4.1). The festive image of Tanabata cannot be completed without a human dimension. During the festival week, people in simple traditional garments, called yukata, hang about the city, watch fireworks, share their bentō in the parks, and enjoy the nature in this modern, urban space. It is worth mentioning that, as Hendry (1993) explains, these fashionable, colourful dresses

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106  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi

Figure 4.1  Every August, Sendai city is decorated by gigantic, colourful sasakazari.

are worn outside on hot summer evenings, and many men will change into these when they return home from work in the evenings. They are provided, too, in hotels and inns, suggesting that many Japanese prefer the loose, comfortable traditional garments in which to relax, as well as for more formal, stiff attire. (p. 88) Yukata, abbreviated from yukatabira (yu [湯] means “bath” and katabira [帷子] means “underclothing”) was formerly used as a bathrobe or a light kimono. However, in contrast to a traditional kimono, in which the body is carefully wrapped and veiled behind impenetrable inner layers, the yukata is an unlined, single-​layer, cotton garment, indicating informality and corporal proximity in a relaxing social ambience. Does Tere-​Masamune, one might fairly ask, which is produced by a public broadcaster, where a set of tacit protocols, including institutional standards, hierarchy, and masculinity (see Chapter  2) inform its broadcasting policies, expose this aspect in its content? Surprisingly (or not), on the festival’s first day, both announcers, Kubota Tsutomu and Kitagō Mihoko, were standing in front of the main camera in their yukata, waiting for the opening segment of the programme. Meanwhile, the production team and announcers were making fun of their unusual look and complaining about how troublesome it is to wear this garment.28

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 107 As soon as the programme began, however, the Kubota acted differently: “It [yukata] was a bit awkward [terekusai] at the beginning (…) but, once you get used to it (…) [Turning to the host] this is actually quite light and cool, right?” The other hosts were also dressed in colourful yukata during the entire festival period. Semiotically, it remains true that the yukata, denoting the cultural borders of “Japaneseness”, refers to the national elements of outer-​uchi. In other words, it is not imaginable that the yukata can be separated from the realm of national identity. However, by synchronizing the period of this strategy with the local festival, the national garment became a local dress, visually strengthening the inner-​uchi, the audience’s hometown thereby creating a quasi-​contiguous communication with the audience. Since my participant observation overlapped with the festival time, one might argue that the heavily localized content and visual components of the festive ambience were predictable but might change once the period was over. The field data, however, suggest the contrary29: televisual wrapping (of TV personalities, production studios, content, and screen) as a broadcast strategy goes beyond a temporal practice. Instead, it is an integral part of Japanese infotainment and its powerful communication trope, the discourse of intimacy. Rather than merely providing an intimate, familial cover for the audience’s inner-​uchi, it manufactures the locus it covers up, thereby becoming the uchi in itself, in which form and content are no longer separable entities. What Santayana (1922) argued for “words and images” is also useful for us to better grasp the meaning of wrapping we encounter here: the forms of wrapping, in this context, function “like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation (…) involved equally in the round of existence” (quoted on the fly page of Goffman 1956). Throughout the earlier sections, I  have discussed numerous ways in which the wideshows are (post-​)produced and delivered via local TV stations. What we have seen through the observation data are not only the popular broadcasting strategies through which local wideshows communicate with their local audiences but also the ways in which the contemporary form of infotainment is costumed by localized elements (e.g. cultural, geocentric, ethnic, linguistic, and technical) of the audience’s uchi. However, do these strategies, one might ask, also exist beyond the borders of the local wideshows? Considering the crucial differences in each target audience’s profile, in other words, what are the popular means of production, and how, if at all, do the modes of address (televisual discourses) change at a national scale? Questions such as these direct us to another nationwide programme, THE Waido, the top-​rated wideshow broadcast by NTV, the parent station of MTV in Tokyo and one of the most powerful commercial TV stations in Japan’s television sector.

National boundaries of uchi As mentioned earlier in this volume, THE Waido is similar in many respects to the local programmes examined previously. Regarding the balance between

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108  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi two characteristic constants (information and entertainment), OH! Ban desu and Tere-​Masamune Go! Go! can be considered as local wideshows in which the informative corners (e.g. local/​national news reports, event information, and weather forecasts) are also embedded. THE Waido, on the other hand, is a nationwide information program that can be classified as an information wideshow (jōhō-​waidoshō) since its content is aimed more at informing/​reporting and less at entertaining. The target audience’s gender and age profile, however, remain identical:  mostly housewives in their 40s or 50s for whom, as Hobson (2005) wrote in the late 1970s, “television and radio are never mentioned as spare-​time activities but are located (…) as integral parts of their day” (p. 93). As we will see in the upcoming sections, this gender aspect is a significant cross-​cutting element that links the local and nationwide wideshows. The data that emerged from my fieldwork within NTV’s studios in Tokyo underscore the significance of the reciprocal relationship between the processes of intimization and tabloidization, which work together to engender THE Waido’s news-​centred narrative. The result is a highly emotionalized, intimacy-​ seeking, tabloid flow. Working with interview data and utilizing actual examples from the programme’s content, I demonstrate the various ways in which quasi-​ contiguous components of the tabloid content are deployed together to build familial, uchi-​like communication with the audiences. Although the structural elements of this emotional proximity show considerable differences from the local programmes analysed earlier, as a typical wideshow, the programme does possess innate formulaic characteristics of Japanese infotainment. What THE Waido promises its audience is a national uchi, a carefully engineered intimate sphere, through which viewers from all over Japan can share an imagined, televised togetherness. In the remainder of this section, I will focus on the pervasive broadcast strategies through which the emotionalized, news-​like (nyūsuppoi) televisual content of Japan’s top-​rated wideshow is produced in front of and behind the cameras. Some of the observations and discussions in this section relate to an ongoing debate in media studies, which can be classified under the term “tabloidization”. Can we now say, given the traditional cliques (neo-​liberal versus critical political-​economy) and the long familiar arguments of the debate (for a brief overview, see Chapter 1), that we have arrived at a point where we necessarily move away from the cultural dimensions of the phenomenon to the more political-​economic components of the context as we shift our focus from the local to the national scale? The answer is “no”, for several reasons. First, I already discussed the economic components in Chapter  3, in which I  attempted to combine the political-​economic approach with ethnographic data to show how economic power considerations influence production processes and thereby shape the programme’s tabloid content. Second, as explained earlier, THE Waido is not identical with the news-​based programmes we are used to seeing on Western TV; rather, it is a unique form of infotainment, which does not exist in the (Western) mediascape within which the tabloidization debate originally emerged.

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 109 A third significant reason lies in the academic interest in the phenomenon of tabloidization. Until now, as outlined in Chapter  1, infotainment and its precursor tabloidization, were mainly analysed through research employing content analysis of televisual texts. I  would argue that, while it is imperative to know and measure what is “out there” on the screen, it is also crucial to know how this discursive approach actually appears. That is, how is it understood, and how is it shaped, produced, and delivered via the production process. To propose answers to these questions, I  sought to enter the studio, aiming specifically at learning what sort of televisual discourses are employed (and how) by production members. This research approach, therefore, reflects a departure from the preferred methodological perspective widely employed heretofore. Infotainment as a supra-​genre The data that emerged from my fieldwork at the NTV studios reveals the significance of infotained flow (nagare) in manufacturing the wideshow’s core characteristics in at least two ways. The flow in the form of the discursive, textual, and visual wrapping strategy assigns the entire wideshow genre its most identifiable characteristics, which create an engaging flow between different corners of the programme. However, this flow also extends beyond the programme’s borders to form an uninterrupted conjunction with other contents, thereby joining the televisual galaxy of infotainment  –​the ubiquitous, powerful supra-​ genre of Japanese television. To show this, I shall first introduce the programme’s main corners with an eye on both the strategies of post-​production and delivery, and the programme’s substance (e.g. themes, narratives, TV personalities). I will then move on to thematically analyse the field data. Entire corners of the programme are based on news and information. Despite differences in weight, character, and tone, the corners are broadcast from the same studio, announced by the same personalities (except for two specific corners), and performed by the same guest panellists. This differs from what we encountered in OH! Ban desu and Tere-​Masamune Go! Go!, where a variety of different contents cross their conventional genre boundaries to melt into a televisual hybrid. Although hybridization also occurs in THE Waido’s content, its form and practices are different. My approach in discussing the programme’s content will therefore be slightly different here. To better understand the ways in which the structural elements of the programme are produced and delivered, I  would like to explore the essential components of the opening and main segments of THE Waido. As we saw in Chapter 2, the main corner telecasts more informative content and “hard” news, for example, about politics, economy, and society. The following two corners focus on stories from the world of entertainment, idols, and celebrities, and a variety of less significant issues (e.g. secondary political problems or accidents), presented by two reporters,30 neither of whom appears in the programme before or after the corner they are responsible for. The programme ends with the quiz corner, Watashi wa daare? (Who am I?). The last three corners take no more than 30 minutes of the total broadcast time. Thus,

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110  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi not all corners31 have the same level of significance for THE Waido, as hinted in the broadcast time devoted to each corner. Hagiwara (pseudonym), a department manager from Yomiuri TV, explains their corner policy as follows: Every day, from Monday to Friday, we have two hours to broadcast. That’s really long for a live programme (…) We certainly need [Hagiwara’s emphasis] these corners to fulfil that task (…) None is as important as the main corner though. That’s why we put the latest information [saishin no jōhō] at the outset [of the programme]. This is critical: Hagiwara’s emphasis on the structural settings of the programme (e.g. length of the time slot and live broadcast) and its link to the corner strategy bring us to Gaye Tuchman’s (1972, 1978) argument about the effects of institutional settings (e.g. pre-​planned events and routine news coverage) and limited resources on news routines. The professional mechanism, as others have argued, leads to news routines in what stories are reported and how they are covered (van Dijk 1985; Schudson 1982; Fishman 1980; Gitlin 1980). So, too, is THE Waido produced through the professional/​institutional routines that shape the news order (which news stories will be broadcast and in what order) and make a two-​ hour programme possible. One notable detail is that the broadcast time set for the corners –​except for the opening and the main corner –​can vary from one day to another to the extent that even the production members are not perfectly sure of the exact time slot for each corner. Moreover, it is not just the time schedule that the producers cannot predict: Some corners can even disappear suddenly without prior notification. Because they are (…) I mean, compared to the fresh news [the main corner] (…) they are just supportive material. We prepare VTR pieces for each of these corners in advance. In case we lack enough stories, then we insert the VTR pieces. It is always safe to have a canned corner for a live programme like this. A little before THE Waido goes on air, the shortest segment appears on-​screen. To assist in the reader’s understanding the opening, here are the headlines broadcast while I was in the post-​production unit: FIRST ANNOUNCER: “Livedoor32 acquired more than half of the shares of Nippon

Hōsō”.33 SECOND ANNOUNCER:  “The party for Hayashiya Kobuhei’s34 succession of (his

grandfather’s) professional name was held: 850 people from different fields came for blessing!”35 his prelude, flashed on-​ screen, is usually presented by the main announcer, Kusano Hitoshi, with Mori Fumi sitting next him. However, instead of seeing them in this segment, the audience only hears their voiceovers on the VTR pieces,

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 111 hinting about the main topics that will be discussed during the programme’s first corner. This is a popular strategy, employed in a variety of programmes on Japanese TV, aiming to keep those viewers who did not switch the channel after the previous programme ended. The first news item in this segment, which is also the most important story of the main corner, is almost always announced by Kusano, the central (male) figure, while the next announcement (if there is one), which is usually more related to secondary or soft news stories like geinōkai, show business, or entertaining issues, is left to Mori, the programme’s female host. Just before the headlines vanish suddenly due to an interruption for commercials,36 both announcers, Kusano and Mori, appear briefly on-​screen to say, “will be broadcast by THE Waido”. Although rather short, this opening includes the essential features of THE Waido, such as loud and energetic background music, dramatic voiceovers, colourful subtitles (e.g. “Raibudoa versus Nippon Hōsō” written in large red letters), extreme close-​ups of the subjects featured in the news story, and digitally manipulated images to further emotionalize the news story. For those who are familiar with Japanese television, this rhetorical and visual wrapping is unsurprising. In fact, what the audiences encounter in the brief opening is not a one-​off (see the section on “visualizing the emotions” in this chapter) but a widespread broadcasting approach in contemporary Japanese TV broadcasting, irrespective of genre and television channel (see Hinami and Satoh 2017; Maree 2015; Gerow 2010; Kawabata 2002, 2006). After the commercial break, the announcers reappear as the programme enters its main corner, where only the news stories considered significant are broadcast. However, for a wideshow, significant may not necessarily mean substantively significant. On the contrary, economic, political, and emotional human stories are always juxtaposed with stories about the entertainment business, tarento, or geinōkai. This televisual mixture works together to form THE Waido’s infotained content, as my key informant, Hagiwara, a department manager in Yomiuri TV explains: We usually have news about politics, economics (…) sometimes also about crimes or accidents. But not only these (…) we have some stories about geinōkai [geinō nyūsu], too (…) All this different factual information [hōdō] is included in one programme. So [referring to the programme’s name] it is the content that is wide [his emphasis]. Now, consider the content and order of the news stories listed below, broadcast in the same time slot as the news stories whose headlines I mentioned above:

• •

Financial details of the latest manoeuvres of a famous company in the media market A party for a famous rakugo-​ka37 (Japanese storyteller) inheriting his grandfather’s professional name

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112  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi

• • •

The deteriorating relationship between Japan and South Korea (Takeshima island issue) The death of a manzai-​shi38 (comedian), Hoshi Ruisu,39 of the manzai duo Sento Ruisu (Saint Louis) News about two monuments built at the initiative of Ebina Kayoko40 in Tokyo’s Ueno Park

As exemplified in these headlines, a serious economic issue can be broadcast first today, whereas the first news item tomorrow could be a 20-​minute story about a geinōjin (for instance, Sugita Kaoru), explaining why she left her husband (“geinōjin rikon!”), describing the details of her divorce, and talking to her fans about her plans for her private life. This strategy is also followed for the rest of the programme’s content. What we see on-​screen are almost always stories constantly blended with emotional audiovisual and discursive elements to attract women viewers. This is reminiscent of Dorothy Hobson’s (2005) early ethnographic investigation of British soap operas in the late 1970s: in television broadcasting, she observes, “[t]‌he ideology of femininity and feminine values over-​determines the structures of what interests women” (p. 101). Indeed, our recent long-​term household ethnographic study in Turkey revealed similar observations, suggesting that more informative narratives are designated by both female and male family members as the “real world” –​the public, rational, factual, material world outside the domestic sphere. These are considered as a man’s habitat, whereas televisual texts with a more fictional, romantic, or sentimental nature are categorized as part of the “women’s world” or “women’s issues”, connoting the private or domestic sphere (Ergül, Gökalp, and Cangöz 2017). One significant point relevant to the current discussion concerns the way the producers link these two gendered worlds within the same wideshow. The interview data demonstrate that the producers are well aware of these clusters and work fastidiously to translate that awareness into a programme strategy that may further underscore the divide. In other words, they focus on the more emotional (e.g. sentimental, tragic, amusing, dramaturgical) and therefore more “womanly” aspects of political, economic, or current affairs, packaging them with the programmes’ emotive audiovisual features, and merging them with topics considered to be of domestic interest of housewives. In this way, the wideshow offers an appealing and overtly gendered horizontal flow between more complicated and entertaining issues while making the entire content easily accessible to female audiences. How the team selects the news stories also relates to the “producerly” part of the process in which both the concept itself and flow are of particular importance. First, the concept: John Fiske (2010) defines television as a “producerly text”, one that takes the audience’s easy accessibility into account. Thus, contrary to avant-​garde text, the medium “relies on discursive competencies that the viewer already possesses”, thereby treating its audience as members of a semiotic democracy who are “motivated by the pleasure to participate in the process” (p. 95).

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 113 The discursive strategies and the familiar modes of representation employed in the programme reveal THE Waido’s explicit objective to reach nationwide female audiences with different profiles. The following quote from Hagiwara provides valuable evidence for my emphasis on flow: [In the past] the production department [seisaku-​bu] and the news department [hōdō-​bu] were two separate units –​totally different worlds. But today, they are blended together so much so that it’s no longer possible to split them up. [In the past], we [the production department of THE Waido] were getting our news stories from the news department (…) It is the opposite today: they get the material we produced for THE Waido (…) We have a flow [nagare] between the different departments (…) It is the same information pool we both use. This is at least partly strongly related to the recent tendency of “blurring boundaries” (Ergül 2003) between different TV contents. Kawabata (2006, 2001) and Ishita (2002) also underscore the significance of this phenomenon in their research into the dramatic tabloidization of television news on Japanese TV. However, drawing on ethnographic data, I argue that the flow is not one way; rather, it is the information pool or news flow that is infotained. Because of this powerful and invasive nagare between different departments –​read as genres –​ previous conventional boundaries are gradually fading away. This explains the audience’s frequent encounters with the same stories delivered through the same audiovisual material in other news reports throughout each day. So too do the ubiquitous personalities of THE Waido contribute to this hybridization of televisual content(s). As I  will explore later in detail, this nexus between different units and the televisual flow among them enables the capture of the programme’s nationwide audience. Domestic problems, nationwide solutions In Chapter 2 we discussed how THE Waido’s hybrid content dates back to the moment that the programme was created. Before it first went on the air, there had been two programmes from different genres (entertainment and information), which THE Waido intentionally blended to challenge its rivals. However, another factor has played a critical role in the programme’s broadcast strategy: biannual focus group research with 500 participants in Osaka and Tokyo. During my interviews, I  was repeatedly informed by the producers that the general topics and news categories covered by the programme are selected based on the findings of this audience research. For chief producer Murakami, what lies behind their successful wideshow, which has lasted longer than any of its rivals (1993–​2007) in its segment, is “the information (…) which is beneficial” for their nationwide audiences. In the case of THE Waido, this is strongly bound up with traditional gender roles that women are expected to perform in their domestic sphere,

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114  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi such as mother, wife, and caretaker of the house, children, and elderly relatives. Murakami explains, Imagine that something important happened. Someone got arrested for some reasons. Then, we immediately let the audiences know the background of that news. We did the same during the Niigata41 earthquake. We passed all the information we have only in seconds to the audience (…) These days, many housewives are concerned about the educational system [kyōiku mondai] since the school year will start soon. So, we broadcast the appropriate information addressing their concerns (…) Elderly audiences have trouble getting their insurance. Then we deal with that in the programme. This is important because, by bringing the most immediate, crucial, and collective problems of housewives into this televised, temporal public space,42 THE Waido communicates its “nationwideness” to its audience. It is not only the audience’s most updated source of news but also their consultant for their children’s educational problems, an expert on economic developments, or a specialist in political issues. As the interview data revealed, this wide spectrum of topics has remained virtually unchanged over the last decade.43 Yet if this is the programme’s objective, then one might fairly ask why is half of the programme dedicated to entertainment segments, mostly featuring popular geinōkai personalities? How does the nationwide audience, mostly women in their 40s or 50s, “benefit” from this heavily infotained, tabloid content? According to Murakami, The news content takes up the most time in THE Waido. But the way we broadcast it is different to other news reports. If it is a normal day, nothing special happened, then we broadcast all the corners with light information to make the programme fun/​enjoyable [tanoshī]. Otherwise you just can’t keep the audience’s attention to watch the same programme for two hours. It took the programme almost ten years to develop its current content. While admitting that the proportion of content dedicated to more entertaining elements has increased (by up to 40 per cent), Murakami also pointed out that stories concerning geinōkai have dramatically expanded over a wide range of Japanese television programmes, not only in THE Waido. Tying this tendency to the audience’s increasing interest in show business, he argued that the producers “just can’t ignore what their audiences are expecting them to broadcast”. In addition, he went on to state, tellingly, “[Today] many programmes have a special corner or at least some content about geinōkai. I think audiences got used to being informed about geinōkai over time (…) This is also true for our news-​like content [nyūsuppoi naiyō]. Our audiences also got used to our style”. Undoubtedly, my interviewee’s point about audience viewing habits is related to the crucial reciprocity between two aspects of the same broadcasting phenomenon: the increasing amount of entertainment content on Japanese TV broadcasting in a more hybrid, infotained, or news-​like content, on the one hand,

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 115 and the omnipresence, on the other, of the world of Japanese show business and its ubiquitous subjects, geinōkai performers, whom viewers are used to seeing every day, in every time slot, on all TV channels –​including, of course, on THE Waido. In the next section, my focus will be on this latter aspect.

Tarento: stars on earth For the ubiquitous tarento, there is no such thing as borders between genres, no particular reason to favour one channel to another. As long as they are invited, and permitted by their jimusho or agencies, they are there to discuss, to lighten the heavy atmosphere, or to make the audiences laugh. If a tarento is asked, for instance, to talk about increasing political tension between China and Japan in a discussion programme, she will go ahead and express her ideas –​often for longer than the experts on the programme –​without any restraint. If another tarento is in the studio, she will not miss the chance to create a funny give and take in which they both can show their talents in dialogue. On the same day, it is not surprising to see the same tarento on another channel’s programme, teaching the audience how to practice yoga at home. The reason they appear on-​screen is to make the content more familial to the audiences and the atmosphere more intimate, uchi-​ like, or homey (see Inoue 1987). With the language they use in a programme, the topics they talk about, the jokes they tease each other with, geinōjin, whose lives pass on the box, are part of the televisual uchi, the privatized public space of Japan, in which the audience is also enfolded. Geinōjin are not the talent we are used to seeing on Western TV, whose presence in show business is often because they are exceptionally good at something (e.g. music, comedy, or art). Instead, they are with us simply because of their success in adapting their image to TV production. As countless examples demonstrate, although tarento can survive in the show business world if they leave their former professions, without the screen, they would disappear in the blink of an eye. There are geinōkai members, for instance, who grow up virtually in front of the viewers, who have followed them faithfully since they were in primary school. What year was it when she first entered a beauty contest? What was the title of the drama he first appeared in? Why did she not warn her husband when she heard about his love affairs for the first time? And what did her husband say when he read in a newspaper that his wife really wants to divorce? They grow, enjoy, live, and think with the audience; and sometimes they fight, suffer, or speak instead of them. Watching tarento in a programme is therefore close to the feeling of seeing someone from the local in-​group or the same family on-​screen. “Because”, as Painter (1993) argues, Japanese audiences do not consider “the tarento as fundamentally different from themselves (…) In a culture where indirectness and nuanced communication are highly valued, the geinōkai may serve as an invaluable vehicle for the expression of all sorts of more locally relevant feelings” (pp. 310–​311). Consider the names in the list of headlines mentioned earlier:  Hayashiya Kobuhei, a famous rakugo-​ka, obtained the highest rank in the rakugo family

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116  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi and became the ninth Hayashiya Shōzō. During the long VTR pieces (the whole segment takes about 15 minutes), we repeatedly see the same loop of him going out of his house to join the big crowd, walking in the streets of Tokyo with more than 140,000 people applauding, standing onstage to show his deepest gratitude to 850 people who came to the party organized for his blessing. In association with the story, there are emotional interviews with the guests, who are again members of the same family, popular geinōkai figures. The next news item concerns the death of Hoshi Ruisu, a popular manzaishi of the 1980s, representing manzai  –​another tradition in the Japanese entertainment world. We see him (for some 12 minutes without a commercial break), crying over the sudden, unexpected death of his partner (in a manzai duo), repeating, “Please come back (…) Let’s do manzai for the last time together”, giving emotional details of their long stage story, and crying again. We cannot imagine that a once-​ popular geinōjin, Hoshi Ruisu, would pass away and that a large crowd from the same family would not appear lined up on-​screen. During the long interviews, other geinōkai members of a similar age to Hoshi Ruisu show the audience how sorry they are by sharing very intimate stories about him. What is significant is that the audience of this sorrowful tale of death were the fan base of Hoshi Ruisu in the 1980s. The final news item in this corner, which lasted for 19 minutes without any commercial break (the second-​longest story after the Livedoor issue), is about Ebina Kayoko, an essayist who lost all her six family members  –​along with some 100,000 people  –​in an air raid in World War II. Through her writings, she transformed her wartime experiences into a life work. The animation film Tomorrow I’ll be Lively! Half Sweet Potato (Ashita Genki ni Naare! Hanbun no Satsumaimo) was adapted from her book, while the autobiographical Who’s Left Behind? (Ushiro no Shōmen Daare?) drew 2.5 million viewers. During the nyūsuppoi story, Ebina Kayoko appears on-​screen to unveil two monuments:  a cenotaph dedicated to the victims of the US fire bombings of Tokyo on 10 March 1945, and a statue of a mother and children. Surrounded by a large crowd of media professionals, we see her crying, suffering through her memories, and explaining how afraid she was that the memory of the air raid would be forgotten without any record of it. Now, she says, her dream has come true. The segment presents a good mixture of intimate parts of her life story, documentary pieces showing the most emotional scenes from Tokyo (before, during, and after the air raid), a few pieces from the animation film based on her book, emotional pictures from happy old times, and VTR pieces showing details of her private memories. For Japanese audiences, “the armature of intense preoccupations with essential national-​cultural identity, continuity and community” (Ivy 1995: 72) in general, and the target audiences of THE Waido, especially those who lost family members in the war, specifically, these sorrowful on-​screen memories are far from abstract. One might argue that, although this news story can be considered another example of the heavy intimization of the programme’s

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 117 content, it is not necessarily related to the televisual family geinōkai issue we discussed above. Instead, the answer lies in the VTR pieces. During the news story, we suddenly see a scene that we already saw half an hour ago in the same programme during the Hayashiya Kobuhei story. Indeed, this is the second time in one day that Ebina Kayoko appears on THE Waido. The reason for this double appearance is that she is not only the essayist whose life was devoted to keeping the memory of the war alive but also the mother of Hayashiya Kobuhei. In contrast to the latter segment, we see her in this segment as happy and very proud of her son, standing together with Hayashiya Kobuhei at the entrance (genkan) of her house. She is seen blessing her son in religious rituals and walking with him through an enormous crowd to the place for the party. Through the traditions they refer to, the memories they reanimate on screen, the nostalgic times they digitally regenerate, and the emotions they collectively share, these stories have something immediate and intimate to communicate with the target audience: a warm reminder of an imaginary collectivity and a generous invitation to participate in the familial atmosphere in which audiences from all over Japan can meet other members of the televisual uchi. Although content related to popular figures of the entertainment world mostly targets female viewers in their 50s, I discovered that the producers were working on a new strategy to attract younger (mostly female) viewers in their 30s or early 40s, who usually prefer to watch the rival programme, Jasuto (The just), broadcast by TBS. Jasuto, as I mentioned in Chapter 3, was soon to go off-​air. The producers seemed like they had almost discovered how to attract those viewers who were undecided as to which programme to watch other than Jasuto. As producer Hitoshi put it, We need more information about popular personalities (…) more about geinōkai and lifestyle (…) some lighter (karui) information in all corners. Today’s young women are interested in cosmetics, useful tips for their skin, beauty, body (…) [In its current format] THE Waido is a bit heavy. For instance, we don’t broadcast gossip or scandals, but we should. This reveals a strong belief among the production members that a lighter, intensely emotionalized content is more accessible (wakariyasui) to and engaging for ordinary audiences (ippanno kata). This intimization of THE Waido is not limited to the on-​screen content but also includes the in-​studio discussions when a group of people talk over the day’s important stories. In contrast to the local programmes analysed before, THE Waido has its own layout in panel form, which is where the programme’s power lies. The panel is the most prominent feature of many wideshows and current affairs programmes (Yoshimoto 2017: 45; Painter 1993: 307). The majority of the panellists in the studio are again tarento with varied profiles, whose expertise about the issue under discussion is no more than might be expected from an ordinary female audience. In contrast to similar programmes, there is no studio

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118  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi audience; instead, we have experts, mostly from the erīto (elite or top) universities of Japan, sitting next to the main announcer, Kusano. The regular panellists sit beside the female announcer, Mori, on the other side of the main set. This grouping, one might argue, demarcates the main figures of the team, or the regular members of the in-​group, from the guests in the panel. “Even when real experts (…) are invited to a program”, Yoshimoto (2017: 45) observes, “it is the trifling observations of nonspecialist commentators, not the opinions of experts, that are the main attraction of these television shows”. Precisely so and, as actual examples in this section will reveal, matching these tacit criteria of lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity (or performance of them) regarding the discussion strengthen the tarento’s capacity to represent the “ordinary” viewers sitting before their TV sets. This is reminiscent of the image shift (from a more distant, star image [Satō Muneyuki] to the casual and ordinary [Mune-​san] appearance) of the main personality of the local wideshow, OH! Ban desu, which we observed earlier in this chapter. No matter what the topic is, whenever Kusano gives the panellists a chance to talk, they do not hesitate to air their ideas one after another in the manner of an expert on the subject at hand. Yet have they been informed about the topics beforehand? “The poor [kawaisō] panellists”, Murakami explains. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury to let them know about the topics earlier. We try [his emphasis] to inform them only a day before the programme. But they may know the discussion topic just 15 minutes before the programme starts. It is a live news programme: you never know what will be the most critical topic of that moment!” In selecting appropriate guest panellists, though, the producers are not without guidance. In fact, they use the previously mentioned audience research towards that end. The selected tarento in turn wholeheartedly embrace their role and, almost acting on behalf of the audience, they constantly –​and excessively –​express affinity, shock, horror, or surprise about the details of the discussion. Such overdramatizations in turn add a tone or colour of everydayness to the supposedly serious discussions, transforming them into light conversations in an informal gathering, which fits perfectly the nationwide audience’s living-​room ambience. Politicians, too, often appear in wideshows, and those who manage to combine everyday politics with a sufficient dose of intimacy and entertainment, and in so doing, successfully “infotain” the televised content, not only increase the programme’s ratings, as Masaki Taniguchi’s (2007) study suggests, but may also gain more votes in subsequent elections. Let us look more closely at the common characteristics of THE Waido panellists and their role in the programme. Seated in the centre is the male announcer, Kusano, steering the whole discussion, talking to the experts, asking questions, offering some background information, making unclear or complicated issues easier to grasp, and, depending on the situation, telling jokes. Interestingly, despite her constant presence, Mori is always excluded from these discussions. In fact, the only serious task she is responsible for during the entire programme

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 119 is announcing the news headlines. Moreover, if a female reporter is chosen to present a news report, it is often because of her “looks and youth, rather than for her knowledge and skills as a journalist”, or else she “has been obliged to announce the lesser events of the day’s news” (Skov and Moeran 1995: 44). This, as the data in Chapter 2 demonstrate, clearly contrasts with the reality behind the cameras (e.g. during preparation and production), where the female personnel’s workload and responsibility dramatically increase. In most daytime programmes we can observe that more informative segments, such as news or factual information, are often preserved as a male domain and broadcast by male announcers, while female hosts serve to add feminine charm, emotionality, and sensitivity, which combine to soften the content. As a broadcast strategy, it not only assigns gender to televised content, thereby distinguishing between male (factual information) and female (entertainment) domains within the same programme, but also ensures a more affable, smoother communication with the audience. There are two categories of panellists. Those who appear frequently are called regular commentators (regyurā komentētā), including those selected from various occupations, such as essayists (e.g. Minami Mikiko); show coordinators (e.g. Katō Taki); once-​famous journalists (e.g. Arita Yoshifu); manga-​ka, or Japanese comic artists or cartoonists (e.g. Yaku Mitsuru); commentators (e.g. Dave Spector); and of course geinōkai reporters (e.g. Ishikawa Toshio). The profile of the panellists alone demonstrates the producers’ intentions to create a televisual spectrum for discussing a wide range of topics from many perspectives: “This is what we are good at” [uchi no tokuchō desu ne], my informant points out. This does not mean that the panellists have nothing in common. Producer Hitoshi explains the producers’ basic criteria in selecting panellists: What is important is to find a person who is able to speak the same language that the audience uses (…) We monitor them [the panellists]. If we think that the person is successful in commenting about different issues, then he may become a regular guest in the future. We have already discussed what “speaking the same language” might connote when it comes to the rapport between tarento and audience. The many examples presented in this volume suggest that this discursive wrapping is a significant factor in the programme’s success in inviting the audience to share televisual uchi. Another criterion contributing to this mediated, imaginary uchi is of course the tarento’s familiarity to the viewers. As we saw earlier, virtually all panellists regularly appear in other genres broadcast by different TV stations. This is what Iwabuchi (1999) was getting at when he asserted, “the frequent appearance of idols in commercial films and other TV programmes makes him/​her look like someone living next door or studying in the same classroom” (p.  191). This proximity and familiarity, I argue, is acquired by the very flow (nagare) between genres and the nexus among the members of the televisual family through which the discourse of infotainment functions in contemporary Japanese TV.

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120  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi Consider Kusano, the former newscaster of NHK, the central, serious figure of THE Waido. How many Kusanos have we met so far in this section, apart from the main announcer of THE Waido, who reads headlines, asks questions to the experts, lets the panellists talk, and decides all other details throughout the live broadcast? Before answering this question, let us wait until the last segment of THE Waido, from which I listed the news stories discussed above, appears on-​ screen. Here we have more “news” about the geinōkai:  Animaru Hamaguchi (Animal Hamaguchi, the former pro-​wrestler who joined the geinōkai) and Sekine Tsutomu (comedian, geinōjin) are standing onstage, surrounded by journalists. We see them answering questions about a new event (a wrestling competition) between geinōjin. After giving details of the event (time, TV station, who will fight who, etc.), Animaru announces that they have a special guest in the group. What we see is a cardboard model of a famous TV personality dressed in a black T-​shirt, showing his muscles onstage. At the beginning, his pixelated face prevents us from recognizing him. A little later, however, another VTR segment shows that this special participant is Kusano Hitoshi, who is sitting in the studio at this moment (dressed in a formal suit), talking about the casual version of himself onscreen. For those who are familiar with Japanese TV, this scene is not exceptional. Kusano, like countless others in the geinōkai, appears in a number of programmes from different genres. For example, every Saturday at around 9 p.m., he appears in Sekai Fushigi Hakken (a travel show) broadcast by TBS, and every Tuesday at around midnight, he appears on the variety show Kusano Kiddo (together with Asakusa Kiddo), of Terebi Asahi. For another example of this border-​crossing broadcasting strategy, consider Dave Spector, the only gaijin (meaning a usually white foreigner from a Western country) panellist. In one interview (“One-​man media airs his views”) published in the online version of the Japan Times, he provides a snapshot of his daily schedule: A typical day for me might be rising at 4:30 a.m. to appear on Fuji TV’s Tokudane program at 8; then writing a column for the Tokyo Sports Shimbun; then The Wide [THE Waido] show at NTV from 2 p.m.; and then a variety-​ show taping at 5 p.m. –​with phone interviews scattered throughout the day. The press calls constantly for quotes, and it really keeps me on my toes. (Schreiber 2003, February 2) He calls himself a “news junkie” in the interview as he explains how much fun he gets from this work. Whether described as a “one-​man media”, “news junkie”, or already “part of the furniture in Japanese pop culture” (New  York Times, 8 April 2014), what justifies his presence and conspicuous image in the programme is his skill in making the atmosphere more casual, intimate, and familial for the viewers. His role then is not fundamentally different from the other studio panellists, although there is another identity aspect that readers should take note of. Yoshimoto (2017: 44) argues that the strategy of inviting foreign guest commentators on wideshows is often related to their role in contributing

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 121 to nihonjinron images, thereby reproducing the discourse of the supposed uniqueness of the national-​uchi, Japan. A production member at TBS studios, the producer of a talk show with a foreign in-​studio audience, tells Koichi Iwabuchi (2010:  33) during the interview that the idea behind the programme was to “elucidate the distinctive traits of Japanese society and culture by comparing them to those of other cultures”, and that the source of his inspiration was the nihonjinron literature he encountered while at university. Consider the multiple roles Spector performs in different programmes. As mentioned above, he appears in every genre on TV, offers his outsider’s point of view on Japanese politics, makes jokes, discusses sport celebrities, and informs –​ but does not lecture –​the audience about the latest developments in American pop culture. In an interview that appeared in the Japan Times, he explains his goal at the beginning of his professional media career as competing with Japanese –​ not other foreigners –​in the field of popular culture and ultimately to go beyond the gaijin tarento category.44 However, in a society where the foreigner’s perspective operates to fortify the discourse of exceptionalness (as evident in popular phrases such as “gaijin no me kara miru to” –​“from a foreigner’s point of view”), he still represents “America’s star power”45 in Japan, a gaijin tarento appealing to Japanese viewers’ curiosity. So far, we have observed the various ways in which THE Waido communicates with its national audience in an intimate, uchi-​like televisual realm. Two indispensable constants were analysed:  the news-​ like, boundary-​ crossing tabloid content of the programme –​the imaginary location of uchi –​and the TV personalities (tarento, geinōjin) as members of the televisual family. The following section explores the third –​most colourful and conspicuous –​element of the programme: the visual features of THE Waido. How does the screen communicate with the target audience? How do the wideshow’s audiovisual, post-​produced technical features work with integral parts of Japanese popular culture to construct the graphic aspect of uchi? Inscribing the emotions Let us recall what we discussed earlier in this chapter. Based on the data collected from MTV and NHK-​Sendai, I focused on how new broadcasting technologies (e.g. shifting from 16 mm to VTR technology and digital effects) are utilized in producing visual material, which in turn increases the impact of the on-​screen simulated reality, thereby contributing to the post-​produced intimization process. I also discussed the reciprocal relationship between this carefully engineered visuality and the tabloidization of broadcast content by exploring major post-​ production strategies, such as the extensive usage of visual effects. I  further underlined that this widespread broadcasting strategy applies to virtually all infotainment programmes on Japanese television. Those who turn on their TVs around 2 p.m. to watch THE Waido see similar communication tropes, evocative of what we indicated earlier. However, the reader should note that there are considerable differences in THE Waido from those analysed earlier. Two deserve

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122  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi particular attention: technically speaking, pretaped material, used for the entire programme content, is much longer than in the local e­ xamples –​some segments last more than 20 minutes without any commercial break. Other than the panel discussions broadcast live from the studio, most content is indeed based on videotaped pieces, digitally manipulated using post-​ production techniques. What the announcers and the panellists do during these long segments is usually the same as what the audience does. They watch the pre-​recorded segment until the camera cuts back to the studio, although they are not totally off-​screen. During these segments, we can see close-​ups of the panellists alongside the VTR pieces:  they are nodding, smiling, or expressing how happy or sad they are, communicating their emotions to the audiences. After acknowledging that the pretaped material used in the programme has increased gradually during recent decades, which further confirms the MTV data, Hagiwara continued, Today, almost the half [of the programme] passes with the VTR pieces. The programmes are changing; so is the audience. Today’s audience wants to see what happened, more than listen to the story. This is TV, not a newspaper. If I want detailed information, I go and buy a newspaper (…) I think the reason audiences watch TV is to see the story [his emphasis]. Before I elaborate on what it is the audiences see on screen, let us consider the second element that further demarcates THE Waido from the local wideshows: it increases the apparent realness of its televisual text (combining written, oral, and visual elements) by embedding the basic characteristics of so-​called “reality TV”. “Reality TV”, in Dovey’s (2001) words, is characterized by camcorder, surveillance or observational “actuality” footage; first-​person participant or eye-​witness testimony; reconstructions that rely upon narrative fiction styles; studio or to-​camera links and commentary from “authoritative” presenters; expert statements from emergency services personnel or psychologists. (p. 135) Many of THE Waido’s visual characteristics are similar to these features. Consider the first news story mentioned at the outset of this section: Livedoor Co. Ltd., the popular Internet service provider in Tokyo, has bought more than 50 per cent of the shares and gained control of Nippon Broadcasting System Inc. One result is that the company has also gained control of Fuji TV, one of the key stations in Tokyo since 22.5 per cent of the station is owned by Nippon Broadcasting System Inc. During the first few minutes, the audience is informed about the background details of this recent development that thrilled Japanese society for several months in 2005. When did Horie-​shachō (President Horie) decide to buy the shares? What impact will this new situation have on the fragile balance of the media market? How did Hieda-​kaichō (chairman Hieda of Fuji TV) react to this situation? And so on…

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 123 On-​screen, the same looped footage repeats panoramic views of the Tokyo headquarters of the two companies and headshot pictures of the main subjects. The most dramatic parts of the interview with Horie-​shachō employ several close-​ ups of his face, replaying and dramatically emphasizing certain statements, and use colourful quotations from the voiceover to reduce the story to various essential components of this repeatedly broadcast visual text: emotional and contradictory sentences (e.g. “What is going to be Horie-​shachō’s next attack?” [tsugi no itte Horie-​shachō wa dō ugoku?]), exclamation marks, digitally manipulated images, dramatic male voiceovers, and loud music.46 It is not unheard of that the main subjects of the story are veiled behind the visual effects and superimpositions (also called the telop, for television opaque projector)47 covering the entire screen. Following this prelude is the segment where we meet the expert (Matsubara Satoshi of Tōyō University), in his late 40s, dressed in a stylish suit, analysing the latest developments in the media market. What is notable here during the first few seconds of the interview is that it is not his face but his hands that fill the screen. Semiotically, his hands are right in the centre of the display, showing his carefully positioned fingers, as he explains the financial implications of the recent development in a delicate manner to assure the audience that they are with a trustworthy expert who represents a perfect balance of sophistication and self-​confidence.48 Meanwhile, the graphics, colourful digits, sub-​and side-​titles translate complicated economic issues into the audience’s language and frame of reference. One might argue that what we observe in THE Waido  –​or in the local wideshows  –​is not essentially different from recent trends in Western TV (Esser 1999; Langer 1998; Postman 1985). In fact, a large body of literature on global tendencies towards hybridization and infotainment draws on similar examples from Western capitalist societies, mostly emerging from ideological criticisms49 (see the discussion on tabloidization in Chapter  1). However, they fail to capture the impact of cultural and emotional factors rooted in the deeper layers of the broader context in which the media operates. In the case of THE Waido, for instance, the audiovisual methods exemplified above go beyond simple technical applications to make the content more entertaining. Superimpositions are used for multiple purposes, including “to prepare the viewer for a turn in the conversation or a gag that will take place several seconds later”, to facilitate the audience’s understanding of complex, technical issues, and to “commodify the gaze and enlist the viewer in the production of television capital itself” (Gerow 2010: 119). The field data reveal that one of the objectives of the producers’ overinvestment in visual effects is to emotionalize the screen; to make the intended feelings more visible and sensible; and by doing so, to create an empathetic thread between the audience and what appears on the screen. This omnipresent, successful broadcast strategy, I argue, is deeply linked to another cultural discourse, omoiyari, or empathy (see Shizumi and LeVine 2002; Travis 1998), that in Japanese culture, Lebra (1976) suggests, “ranks high among the virtues considered indispensable for one to be really human, morally mature and deserving of respect” (p. 38). In

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124  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi fact, Japanese culture can also be classified as an omoiyari culture, one in which the concept refers to the ability and willingness to feel what others are feeling, to vicariously experience the pleasure or pain that they are undergoing, and to help them satisfy their wishes. Kindness or benevolence becomes omoiyari only if it is derived from such sensitivity to the recipient’s feelings. The ideal in omoiyari is for Ego to enter into Alter’s kokoro, “heart”, and to absorb all information about Alter’s feelings without being told verbally. (ibid.: 38) Thus, beyond simply being empathetic, omoiyari implies an active involvement with the other’s feelings, an ability to sense what the other senses, and ultimately to act appropriately, which is only possible with a high level of emotional engagement. Although omoiyari is expected of everyone in the society, expectations from women are higher since omoiyari is a moral standard requiring compassion and warmth vis-​à-​vis others’ needs and vulnerabilities  –​skills stereotypically regarded as feminine (Lunsing 2016:  183; Izumi 2006:  278). Before we focus on the source of inspiration behind the programme’s visual techniques that aim to draw attention and empathy from female audiences, let us consider the following accounts, which elucidate further how the screen has become as colourful and flashy as a video game in contemporary Japanese broadcasting: HAGIWARA: The first programmes that applied these visual effects were the wideshows and the variety shows (baraetī bangumi). Later, it spread to the news reports. For example, we didn’t have subtitles (jimaku) in the past (…) but today it is everywhere. I guess it makes the programme more interesting and appealing (…) The main purpose for all the programmes is the same: we all try to catch the audience. ISHITA: Our job is to catch the audience (…) The digital effects help us to achieve this goal. Audiences change channels from one to another very often. We have only a few seconds to reach them. The audiences have already got used to [narete shimatta] our techniques. I don’t think that we can go back from where we are and stop using sūpā. The audience would feel something is missing from the screen [chotto sabishiku kanjiru]. The latter comment is particularly critical as it indicates that the post-​production methods that were previously employed to improve proximity with, and “catch” or invite the audience to participate in the televised narrative, have already turned into an integral feature of the screen. Yet this does not tell us much about the producers’ original source of inspiration in creating one of the most conspicuous features of Japanese television broadcasting. My interviews with production members indicate that visual intimization of the screen is strongly bound up with one of the greatest industries of Japanese popular culture, the manga (Japanese comics) empire.

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 125 Intimization of the screen To better crystallize this argument, let us consider the historical background to see how and for what purposes these visual applications were devised in the past before they were transformed into the outrageously intense strategies of post-​ production. One of my informants, chief producer Murakami, was there when it all started, as he recalled: “You are talking about what we call sūpā [‘super’, derived from the English word ‘superimpose’] or sūpā-​shō [‘super-​show’]”: There was this programme, called Denpa Shōnen, broadcast by NTV (…) All these digital effects began to appear with that programme. It was all about our technical limitations (…) No big professional cameras, no high-​quality videotapes at that time (…) For all shootings, there was a camcorder [katei bideo] to use. The result was low quality and very amateurish visual material. The images on screen were terribly bad. It would be too raw [nama] and also boring had we broadcast in the way it was, so we thought we must find a way to make it more enjoyable for the audience. A brief explanation about the programme might be useful. Susume! Denpa Shōnen (Forward! electric youth), first aired in 1992 by NTV, was a programme that might be classified as “reality TV”. Slightly different than the survival-​type programmes we are now used to seeing in Japan, in this programme, geinōjin (including would-​ be comedians and well-​ known actors) turned into globe-​ trotting backpackers, were left in indigenous, exotic habitats with no familiar aspects of or resemblance to their culture and asked to accomplish specific tasks, such as getting from South Africa to London on foot.50 As discussed throughout the current volume, the distinct nature of Japanese infotainment manifests itself once again explicitly in the producers’ observations and responses to the audience’s dissatisfaction regarding the visual characteristics of the televised content. In Western media studies, the visual features of the programme that Murakami criticized, such as raw material, camcorder shootings, surveillance or observational “actuality” footage, or eyewitness testimony are often listed as among the most common and effective characteristics of the reality TV genre (Dovey 2001: 135). However, this is not the case for Japanese audiences with their sophisticated sense of visuality, for whom Denpa Shōnen appeared unacceptably amateurish and raw, and hence artificial and unreal. It therefore urgently needed to be re-​engineered with additional visual wrapping to make the content more appealing and tanoshī. How did the producers address the poor-​quality audiovisual material? “Here is Japan”, Murakami says, We were inspired by Japanese manga culture [manga bunka]. For example, if a girl makes an exclamation in the story, then you see “Gyaaa!!!” written across the entire page (…) We started to use this kind of sound effect on screen (…) Manga culture has a strong impact on society. That’s why you don’t come across such techniques in other countries.

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126  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi Importantly, after they included such effects in the visual narrative, the programme achieved the highest ratings (almost 20 per cent) in its history. Soon enough, this successful strategy spread to other programmes, gradually invading the screens with colourful subtitles, animations, exclamation marks, fragments, and so on. “Whenever we didn’t have enough audiovisual material to broadcast, we used sūpā”, one producer said. He added, “Now we use almost 300–​400 sūpā. Nowhere51 in the world can you see so many digital effects in a single programme!” For readers not familiar with manga’s prevalence in Japan, the following overview by Kinsella (1999) might be helpful: The manga industry is one of postwar Japan’s mammoth culture industries: it overtook the domestic Japanese film industry in the 1960s, and by the 1990s it earned three times the revenue of the domestic film industry, and accounted for about 38  percent of all published matter, and 22  percent of all publishing revenue (…) The manga industry expanded relentlessly until the early 1990s when there were 12 magazines with a circulation of 1  million or above, and approximately 50 magazines with circulations between 150,000 and 1 million. (p. 567) The indicators above underscore the unique place of manga among other culture industries of contemporary Japan. Exploring its role in Japanese society, Ito (2005) observes that manga “is immersed in a particular social environment that includes history, language, culture, politics, economy, family, religion, sex and gender, education, deviance and crime, and demography. Manga thus reflects the reality of Japanese society” (p.  456). Clammer (2000) also notes manga’s ubiquitous presence and major role in shaping concepts such as “sexuality, violence, and the imaginary” (p.  214). With its stories and characters, manga refers to the nexus of identities (particularly, national, gender, sex, cultural, or political) through which the (Japanese) cultural subject is constructed. The link that pulls manga and televisual reality together so well can be found in the semiotic heritage of the former. In contrast to Western comics, which have their roots in caricatures and the print media, manga belongs to a cinematic galaxy; masterfully imitating cinematic visual techniques that aim to draw empathy (omoiyari), it promises a visual experience and emotional engagement similar to that of a filmed reality (Huang and Archer 2012: 55–​56). The visual components of the screen, therefore, cannot be reduced to the neutral digital effects that we are used to seeing on Western TV, basically employed to make the programme more eye-​catching, dramatic, or interesting. While this aspect is surely involved, what these Japanese producers are inspired by is in fact manga bunka, communicating with those viewers in front of the screen, who have been brought up within and emotionally educated by the imaginary universe of the manga empire; the people who particularly “love jokes and funny stories, who are humorous, witty, and funny”, and who are “primarily interested in feeling out”,

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 127 concerned, and empathetic –​omoiyari (Lebra 1976: 38–​39) –​about the other person’s mode (Ito 2005: 456). During recent decades, new developments have improved TV technology, such as hi-​vision technology,52 which has incomparably increased the impact of simulated reality. Meanwhile, conventional displays have been discarded to make space for new wide-​screen plasma TVs, which promise the highest-​quality images ever. Broadcasting technology has also undoubtedly changed due to new digital technologies. What has remained unchanged is the manga-​esque feature of the display. The once-​novel idea that producers discovered two decades ago to increase the proximity of the screen and cement the emotional ties between the content and Japanese audiences was so successful that, despite a certain discomfort the producers might feel, no one seems willing to take a risk today. This is evident in Murakami’s reflection: To be honest, I personally don’t like sūpā. It’s way too much. We have high quality of audio-​streams today; bigger and better TV screens, too. We don’t need to use that much sūpā. Yet when it is my turn [as a producer], I use the most sūpā in THE Waido [laughing]. He does so because, like other producers, Murakami, believes that if they did not use this popular visual technique, then “the audience would feel there is something missing from the screen”. The audience’s (presumed) emotional attachment to the manga-​esque nature of the screen, as we saw earlier, is almost a formulaic excuse, repeatedly articulated by other THE Waido producers during our conversations. Apparently, discussions about post-​production strategies  –​ which have now become an indispensable and unique characteristic of contemporary Japanese television –​bring us back to the cultural intersection through which the emotional, popularized, and intimate elements of the televisual uchi are carefully tailored and linked to the viewers’ emotional, cultural, and commercial expectations. It is this intersection that works together to engage the nationwide audience with the programme’s content.

Conclusion This chapter has covered a good deal of ethnographic data collected from three programmes. Throughout, we have found that infotainment works together with various televisual discourses (e.g. discourses of intimacy, uchi and soto, furusato, omoiyari, nihonjinron, and manga culture) to create an emotionalized, proximate televisual space: the audience’s imaginary uchi. However, despite its omnipresence in the televisual realm, we discovered that uchi is not all-​inclusive. In the case of the local wideshows OH! Ban desu and Tere-​Masamune, the consistent emphasis on the sense of localness plays an essential role in constructing uchi. Masamune, for instance, refers to the historical elements of the uchi (hometown), while Tanabata relates to the traditions that demarcate uchi. The former programme –​with both its name and the local dialect (zūzū-​ben) often used in the

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128  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi programme  –​communicates its ethnocentric elements to create a homey, uchi-​ like atmosphere. We also found that the cooking corners further tighten the ties between audience and local borders. One significant difference between the stations is that OH! Ban desu broadcasts a large number of local (hidden) commercials (e.g. shopping hints, discounts, and exhibitions) to further engage its audience, while the public broadcaster Tere-​Masamune cannot do this. The carefully crafted spontaneity (most corners are entirely rehearsed) and the post-​produced intimacy (e.g. VTR technology and digitally manipulated audiovisual material) are common strategies for creating a pleasant atmosphere. There are limits, however: in MTV (and to a certain extent also in NHK-​Sendai) the announcers and hosts may belong to this intimate space whereas the newscasters may not. This uchi-​like atmosphere continues in THE Waido’s content as well. However, the borders of its imaginary family expand to embrace a nationwide uchi. To attract a national audience, the programme utilizes its strongest communication trope: news-​like (nyūsuppoi) tabloid content. One crucial point is that the broadcast strategies employed for the first time in THE Waido spread first to other news-​based programmes and then to other genres on other TV channels. In this infotained content, we meet the familial TV personalities (geinōkai), ubiquitous members of the televisual uchi. The ways in which they reach their audiences vary:  some communicate their position in cultural traditions, while private stories or emotional life matters (e.g. scandals, incidents) may work better for others. Consider too that the studio guest panellists (regyurā komentētā), living under the same geinōkai roof, further contribute to the televised discourse of intimacy. Their presence in the programme is by and large related to their ability to perform on behalf of, and speak the language of, the “ordinary” audience. The screen, we discovered, is another constant component of this intimate visual sphere in that the audiovisual material reduces the informative tone while making the televisual text more digestible for and emotionally appealing to the audience. This is achieved through a wide range of techniques, including colourful effects, exclamations, stylish fonts, reframing, audio narrations, manipulated images, and subtitles. In a culture where the word “empathy” goes far beyond its lexical level (i.e. omoiyari culture), the producers’ original source of inspiration for this visual strategy was manga, a powerful universe of extremely rich emotional expressions and pictorial metaphors, somaticizing the intended feelings on-​screen into visual codes of which the audience is a “native” speaker.

Notes 1 An early version of portions of this chapter was presented at the Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ) conference in Sendai (Ergül 2004c) and the 5th International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference in Chicago (Ergül 2004b). Part of my field data concerning the local wideshow, OH! Ban desu, appeared in my co-​authored work, Holden and Ergül (2006). 2 Examining non-​ Western media discourses from a cultural perspective, Shi-​ xu (2005) underlines the relation-​building role of discourse  –​an aspect that is often overlooked:  “In some non-​western cultures, language and communication function

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 129 not so much to assert individual self or identity as to seek to maintain and strengthen relationships, thereby achieving social and communal harmony” (p. 29). 3 In their cogent interrogation of cultural differences in self-​construal and their influences on emotions, Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama (1991: 224) argue that this “fundamental relatedness of individuals to each other” is not unique to Japan and exists in many Asian, African, Latin American, and Eastern European cultures, where “[t]‌he emphasis is on attending to others, fitting in, and harmonious interdependence with them. American culture neither assumes nor values such an overt connectedness among individuals. In contrast, individuals seek to maintain their independence from others by attending to the self and by discovering and expressing their unique inner attributes” (pp. 224–​225). 4 The data were obtained from the viewing figures I was shown during my fieldwork. 5 An example of this can also be found in the rival local show’s corner, called “Miyagi wo itadakimasu”. In Japanese, itadakimasu is an expression of gratitude offered before meals. What the audiences are invited to eat or taste in this corner is again Miyagi prefecture. The food, in addition to its conventional gender-​based references to women audiences, is associated with geographical as well as cultural components (see Holden 2005) of each audience’s local identity (for a discussion on the traditional role of women as mothers in food preparation, see Charles and Kerr 1988; DeVault 1991). 6 Muneyuki’s career in music started in a FM radio station. Working as a DJ in the station, Muneyuki, decided to call himself “DJ Mune” in his programme. “In Tōhoku area”, Muneyuki says, “Satō is a mundane name, especially for a singer. So, I thought I have to find something unique but also simple (…) I decided to call myself singer Mune, and this became a part of my image for the past 30 years”. 7 Following the enormous, countrywide success of this particular song, the local sites that feature in the lyrics, such as Aoba ward of Miyagi prefecture or the Hirose River (Hirose-​gawa) of Sendai, have become increasingly popular outside the region. 8 It derives its name from placing a “zū” sound at the end of words. 9 I should note that, while some Japanese natives were in agreement with this interpretation, others were not, arguing that without seeing the kanji, they would not associate “mune” with breast. 10 A district in Sendai city. 11 Another example of this comes from my first visit to NHK-​Sendai in 2003 –​which was non-​academic, and so unrelated to my fieldwork. Together with other foreigners, I was invited to join one of the corners of the former programme, Yū Yū Miyagi, in Spring 2013. The topic was something like how people in different countries celebrate their traditional Spring festivals. We foreign guests were supposed to give examples from our home countries. One observation relevant to our discussion on (post-​)production strategies to produce televisual uchi was the “training” of the guests, followed by several rehearsals of the entire programme before the live broadcast. The entire experience began with the guests’ arrival at the studios, as requested, several hours before the programme started. Waiting at the entrance for us was, as expected (see discussion on gender aspect in Chapter  2), a female announcer of the programme, who then accompanied us to the tiny guest room behind the studio, where we met the programme’s male announcer. First, we were informed about the set of questions to be asked during the live segment. After this, we were invited to rehearse the entire segment from the beginning to the closing segment. One might fairly think that such meticulous preparation was basically because none of the guests in the studio was a native Japanese speaker (though fluent in Japanese), which could easily create risks for a live telecast. However, as several examples from the field demonstrate, what I witnessed and participated in was actually a widely employed broadcast strategy in

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130  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi Japanese TV broadcasting. It is through such fastidious preparations and repeated rehearsal –​even the gestures and mimicry are rehearsed until the intended meaning is engineered  –​prior to the programme that infotainment creates one of the most powerful communication tropes: carefully engineered spontaneity. 12 During my observations at NHK-​Sendai, I enquired whether this is also valid for Tere-​ Masamune Go! Go! My key informant replied, “[At the beginning], we were using the VTR pieces every 10 minutes (…) Now, the time devoted to this material is much longer. [For the audience] it is hard to watch eight to ten minute VTR segments (…) So, we started to divide it into smaller pieces and broadcast it more frequently”. What is implied by her response is, in fact, “discontinuity”, the crucial constant of contemporary television, which is also, as Ellis (1999) indicates, “a social fact of television. It lies at the heart of the way television exists as a domestic medium (…) Almost all television programmes, on almost all channels will be broken up by adverts and announcements, will be cut up into episodes, and so on (…) This aesthetic of discontinuity results from the discontinuous attention which domestic viewers typically give to television” (pp.  67–​68). The reader should also note that discontinuity or fragmentation –​and over-​repetition –​of visual material (together with other tropes, such as formulaic usage of dramatic scripts, extensive utilization of exclamatory marks, and digital effects) are often employed to emotionalize the televisual content (for further discussion, see Brants 1998). Examples from the Japanese context are offered in Chapters 3 and 4. 13 These are widespread practices in the news, “reality”, and infotainment shows in Japan today. My informants at the public broadcaster, NHK-​Sendai, asserted that to refrain from such post-​production processes (e.g. digital animations, dramatizations, simulations, voice distortions, and colourful scripts) would not only make the programme content less entertaining but also make the show hard to follow for housewife audiences since they are engaged in other activities while viewing. This is partly related to Morley’s (1986) early observation: watching television is a social activity in which active audiences participate, interact, and share while working and moving around the home. 14 “Its vulnerability was chiefly at the political level”, Dahlgren (1995) argues, adding, “the state and powerful interests could apply political pressure, many times with considerable success” (p. 30). 15 For detailed discussion and analysis of the powerful role that economics plays in the content production and delivery of commercial TV stations (MTV and NTV), and how commodified televisual knowledge forms the core of Japan’s wideshows, see Chapter 3. 16 Considering that the mass media has, as Habermas argued (cited by Sparks 1992: 281), become an indispensable part of public life since the nineteenth century, the notion of public broadcasting can apparently not be reduced to a broadcasting approach that only public institutions are supposed to apply. On the contrary, as argued in several works (Davis 1993), this notion can be seen as both a basic principle and responsibility that all other mass media are supposed to take into consideration. 17 In Japanese, tanoshī means “enjoyable”, “fun”, or “entertaining”, while tadashī means “correct”, “right”, “honest”, “proper”, or “straight”. 18 As I discussed in Chapter 3, the considerable amount of interview data show that some production members tend to denounce, for instance, the (economic) power relations that explicitly influence production processes. In the case of Tere-​Masamune Go! Go!, some production members suggest overcoming the (mostly institutional) difficulties in reclaiming audiences by applying similar policies to those used in the rival wideshow. What we observe in OH! Ban desu are producers often complaining about the unbearable weight of commercial considerations and how power relations interfere with the

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 131 production processes. Observational data collected in NTV’s studios further support this contradiction in professional routines. 19 During the interviews in NTV, for instance, one of the chief producers denounced the tabloidization and extremely infotained broadcasting content. However, he also admitted that, in the case THE Waido, he is the one who most applies the infotainment strategies in the programme’s content. 20 “Go” and “o” are prefixes used in polite or higher-​class Japanese. 21 For a brief discussion of the relevance of Hendry’s perspective on the significance of “wrapping” in Japanese culture for the current analysis, see Chapter 2. 22 The title of the former programme, Yū Yū Miyagi, further proves this local emphasis. 23 Almost all TV stations in Japan have a symbolic figure or mascot representing them. In MTV, for instance, it is Mite, the animation character, who sings a song in the closing segment of every night’s broadcast. For NTV, it is another animated character, Nan darō, produced by the famous Studio Ghibli. 24 When we stopped at the entrance of the public relations section (kōhō-​bu), the person in charge offered me some pamphlets and documents about the station. I later realized that it was again Warade who is smiling in all the documents. 25 Although, for professional routines, this is an exceptional period and therefore cannot be generalized to the whole broadcasting season, during these unusual events, the TV station’s, and generally the mass media’s, emotional sensitivity to and interest in what is local, domestic, and national, and other constructive elements of the cultural uchi peak and become most crystallized (e.g. international gatherings like the Olympics; local festivals; national holidays). 26 Depending on the lunar calendar and the traditional formula of the seventh day of the seventh month, Tanabata is celebrated on 7 July in some regions. 27 The reader should note that the population of Sendai is around one million during the rest of the year. 28 During rehearsals, one female host, wearing a yukata, preferred to use her high-​heeled shoes instead of the zōri, a traditional footwear that would normally complete the garment. Some production members –​and the host herself –​made fun of her half-​ traditional, half-​modern look. Immediately after the programme started, however, they praised each other’s appearance in the yukata because, as Kubota said during the programme itself, “We are in a festival week!” 29 See data in Chapter 2 regarding in-​studio wrapping (i.e. decoration) in MTV. 30 Sugeno Daisuke and Mayama Yūichi, respectively. 31 For more information on the corners of the programme, see Chapter 2. 32 Livedoor Co. Ltd. (kabushiki gaisha raibudoa) is a famous Internet service provider in Tokyo. Takafumi Horie, known to many as Horie-​mon, since his name and look resemble the popular Japanese cartoon character Doraemon, is the founder of the company. Horie’s fame through his sharp manoeuvres in the media market became even greater after he bought more than 50 per cent of the shares of Nippon Broadcasting System, Inc. 33 The original headline in Japanese:  Raibudoa wa shutoku shita Nippon Hōsō no kabu kahansūni tasshita to iu koto desu (translation is mine, H.  E.) Nippon Broadcasting System, Inc., one of the key offices of National Radio Network (NRN), is a Japanese radio station based in Tokyo. 34 Hayashiya Kobuhei is a popular rakugo-​ka (comic storyteller) in Japan. The following news story, which appeared on Japanzone, well demonstrates his reputation: Some 145,000 people turned out to cheer popular traditional entertainer Hayashiya Kobuhei (42) during a 5-​hour parade along the 7 km route from Ueno to the downtown district of Asakusa in Tokyo. He will officially become

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132  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi the 9th Hayashiya Shōzō, the highest ‘rank’ in the rakugo ‘family’, on the 21st of this month. The succession to such names in the traditional arts is a big deal. The Shōzō name dates back to the Edo Period but has been ‘vacant’ for the last 24 years. (Retrieved 25 May 2005, from www.japan-zone.com/news/2005/03/14/ crowds-turn-out-for-kobuhei/)

35 The original headline in Japanese:  Hayashiya Kobuhei-​ san no Shōzō shūmei pātī ga hirakare, kakkai kara 850 nin ga shukufukuni kaketsukemashita (translation is mine, H. E.) 36 One important point –​and one of the representative characteristics of Japanese TV broadcasting –​is that we do not see any genre indicators for commercial breaks. This is also true for several other genres, such as some variety programmes, dramas, and animations. 37 In Oshima’s words (1998), “Rakugo can be best described as Japanese sit-​down comedy or comic story telling. Just as there is stand-​up comedy in Western countries there is sit-​down comedy in Japan” (p. 9). Rakugo represents a long cultural tradition in Japanese comedy, so much so that “the roots of rakugo can be traced to the end of the 17th century”. Usually wearing a kimono (a traditional Japanese garment), rakugo performers are called rakugo-​ka. The cultural role that the rakugo plays in the society lies in its history: First, rakugo stories were intended to teach what would be laughed at in the story and gave people social knowledge. As it developed it became entertainment for common people and the rooms where Rakugo was performed (yosa) became centers for social gathering (…) Rakugo is a unique form of story telling which includes comedy and play as well as art. It is important to the Japanese people that the style, structure and rich tradition of rakugo be passed on to succeeding generations. At the same time the wish to see the changes that take place in society and culture is reflected in rakugo. (Oshima 1998: 9–​12)

38 Japanese stand-​up comedy is mostly performed in Kansai (in south-​western Japan), the entertainment capital. Manzai is a “Japanese traditional entertainment. It is a kind of performance by two or more performers. Everything entertaining is allowed on stage in manzai, like singing, playing musical instruments, speaking and so on” (Hourai 2004:  4). During the performance, two comedians, boke (the fool) and tsukkomi (the straight man; smart person) carry on amusing dialogues. “A performer playing ‘Boke’ often says mistaken or funny things or jokes. Then a performer playing a role of ‘Tsukkomi’ points out his fault and corrects it” (ibid.). Yoshimoto Kōgyō, based in Osaka, is the most famous manzai production company. 39 Hoshi Ruisu was a famous manzaishi. 40 Ebina Kayoko is “a writer who lost all her six family members in the air raid (…) that killed an estimated 100,000 people in densely populated areas in Tokyo”. Two monuments were “a cenotaph dedicated to the victims of the U.S. fire bombings of Tokyo on 10 March 1945, and a Statue of Mother and Children”. Retrieved 11 June 2005, from www.japan-​press.co.jp/​2423/​wwii.html. 41 Niigata City, the capital of Niigata prefecture, is the largest Japanese city along the coast of the Sea of Japan, with a population of about 780,000. The city suffered a powerful earthquake on 23 October 2004. 42 The concept space is ontologically distinct from its counterpart place. “Space”, according to de Certeau (1984), is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced

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Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi 133 by the operations that oriented it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. On this view, in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. (p. 111)

43 During my interview, Murakami referred to a major incident that played a crucial role in the broadcast policies applied in THE Waido’s content: The programme began broadcasting in 1993. The content did not change much for the first two years (…) But the biggest shift happened in 1995. Have you heard about the [sarin gas] attack in Tokyo subway station? That was the major event which affected the programme content enormously (…) I can even say it is after this attack THE Waido transformed into the form we see today (…) It was only THE Waido who paid the most attention and devoted the most broadcast time to this news. The amount of hōdō (factual information) increased dramatically. We did not broadcast any entertainment apart from details about this issue. Other programmes also broadcast similar content but they went back to their former style later on. It was only THE Waido that continued in this way. Murakami also mentioned later that the Great Hanshin Earthquake was another incident in the same year that had a big impact on the programme’s live format. 44 The following dialogue comes from the interview published on the online version of the Japan Times: J.T.: In general, would you agree that Japanese TV tends to use foreigners more as curiosities than for their ability? Do you feel you’ve “earned” a place in the mass media here? D.S.: I wouldn’t for a minute pretend that being a foreigner is not why it came to be. However, I set a goal early on to be different from other gaijin tarento by trying to compete with the Japanese rather than with other foreigners. I would say that at this point a lot of my appearances are based on my longtime participation in show business here and knowledge of current affairs that do not relate to my being a gaijin per se (Retrieved 25 May 2005, from www.japantimes.co.jp/​cgi-​bin/​ getarticle.pl5?fl20030202a5.htm)

45 “America’s Star Power Unrivaled in Japan”. Retrieved 1 April 2016, from www. nytimes.com/​2014/​08/​23/​world/​asia/​unknown-​in-​america-​david-​spector-​carves-​ out-​niche-​in-​japan.html. 46 The strategy of over-​repetition is not exclusive to the usage of sūpā; on the contrary, as Gerow (2010) observes, it “is one of the most prevalent textual devices in contemporary Japanese television” (p. 138). 47 Telop (in Japanese teroppu), or superimpositions, are images, words, pictures, or videos imposed on another on-​screen image. In my fieldwork, however, the technique was only referred to as “sūpa” (superimposition) or sūpā-​shō (super-​show). 48 Grisprud (1999) suggests that scholars who appear on TV to provide their expertise are subject to audience evaluations as screen personalities; in this, television and insistent close-​ups play an important role as they present “a new emphasis on the mediator’s ethos, i.e. his or her ability to convey phronesis (‘sound judgment’), arête (‘good human character traits’) and eunoia (‘goodwill/​good intentions in relation to the audience’)” (p. 46). 49 Looking at television news, Bennet (1988), for instance, worries that the conventional distinctions between news and entertainment are becoming blurred by the formulaic

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134  Infotainment, intimacy, a televisual uchi use of dramatic script. More recently, Dovey (2001) claims that factual television “is now characterized by a very high degree of hybridization”, and that “this new mix is often referenced by the idea of ‘infotainment’ television, in which the primary public service goals of entertainment and the provision of socially useful information are assumed to dissolve into one another” (p. 134). Biltereyst (2004) suggests that reality TV “goes along with tendencies of infotainment and tabloidization, leading to more stereotypes and a narrowed knowledge of wider societal issues. Abstract analyses and background information are replaced by a fragmented image with subjective, individual voices. These techniques (…) can ultimately lead to the implosion of the modern public sphere” (p. 11). 50 In more recent versions of this style of programming (e.g. Sekai Ururun Taizaiki, TBS), we see a tarento –​who could be a musician, comedian, or actress –​trying to survive in a culture which positions her as a complete outsider, starving until she accepts eating what the inhabitants consume (e.g. worms), communicating with people who are or are not willing to talk to her, and so forth. After the period ends, we see the tarento back in the studio, recalling what she experienced. The objective is to invite the audience to participate and get out of their cultural uchi and contact the cultural “other” in exotic soto. 51 Laughing ironically, Murakami mentioned that these techniques are now being used in American television broadcasting, too: They also started to use sūpā just as we do after a few Japanese programmes were introduced into the American media (…) For instance, there is this programme called Ryōri no tetsujin (The philosopher of cooking). They got the programme from Japan and started to use the same content with the same techniques! 52 The following is a description of “hi-​vision reality” from NHK, the pioneer of the technology: Viewers were stunned by the raw clarity of Hi-​ Vision images showing the devastated World Trade Center in New  York, while Hi-​ Vision coverage of the subsequent U.S.  air campaign in Afghanistan gave viewers a greater sense of immediacy than had ever been possible before. US Major League Baseball games. featuring Suzuki Ichiro introduced viewers to a different dimension of television quality. TV on a large Hi-​Vision screen is so clear that the experience has been compared to an abrupt and significant improvement in eyesight. This new standard of image clarity is giving viewers a sharper-​than-​ever perception of current affairs and events in Japan and the rest of the world, bringing everything closer to home. (Fifty Years of NHK Television. Retrieved 19 February 2005, from www.nhk.or.jp/​ digitalmuseum/​nhk50years_​en/​history/​p26/​)

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5  Discussion, implications, conclusions

My concern throughout this study has been with the different aspects of the infotainment phenomenon in Japanese television broadcasting. In the previous chapters, I looked at three cases: OH! Ban desu (MTV), Tere-​Masamune Go! Go! (NHK-​Sendai), and THE Waido (NTV). Using ethnographic data, I identified and interpreted the key issues surrounding the relationship of infotainment discourse to the cultural, emotional, and economic dimensions of the context and their relationship to each other. My aims in this final chapter are to bring together the main discussions from the previous chapters, acknowledge the limitations of the current work, suggest new directions in which this study could be taken by future voyagers, and, finally conclude the study. To do this, I will first return to Chapter 3, where I focused on the relationship between the commodification of televisual knowledge and infotainment content. I will then revisit the data presented in Chapter 4, where I confined my attention to more emotional, cultural, and discursive dimensions of infotainment. Most important for what I will argue in the following sections are the reciprocal relations and permeable boundaries between the analytic dimensions mentioned above. If I  succeeded in showing what I  intended, this should be of particular concern as it is the complex aggregation of these dimensions which deserves significant scrutiny; it is what distinguishes the wideshow from most conventional forms of infotainment and makes it culturally unique. It is this multifaceted approach that sets my work apart from conventional wisdom. Consider the discussion in Chapter 4 on the digital audiovisual effects (sūpā or teroppu) used in the shows: what we see on the screen, the data suggested, cannot be reduced to the technical strategies we are used to seeing on Western TV. For a more profound understanding of the issue, we must broaden our scope of analysis to include the emotionalization of broadcast content and its link to Japanese popular culture (manga) and empathy (omoiyari culture). We also found that this strategy, which is now prevalent in Japanese TV broadcasting, is far from coincidental; instead, it is the direct result of a long-​sought solution to satisfy the economic goals of the station. In other words, what is “emotional” in televisual communication is not a neutral, isolated category; rather, it

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140  Discussion, implications, conclusions is as much culturally structured in nature as it is technically re-​engineered and delivered for economic intentions. This relates to what Fineman (2002) identifies as “transforming emotion into a marketable product” (p. 102). What many of the examples in the current study demonstrate is the obvious fact that the cultural, political-​economic, and emotional elements of the phenomenon are neither detached from each other nor discrete. Instead, they are amalgamated in an equivocal media praxis in such a way as to build one of the strongest tropes of contemporary televisual communication: infotainment.

Commodification of televisual knowledge The main discussions in Chapter 3, at least in my approach to the issue, can broadly be characterized as an attempt to understand the political economy of cultural production, which is fundamentally “concerned with the concrete consequences for the work of making media goods of the broad patterns of power and ownership which are their backdrop” (Golding and Murdock 2000: 84). My methodology (for details, see Chapters 1 and 2), however, differs from most traditional studies in media sociology, which are more concerned with the macro structures operating behind social phenomena. In Chapter  3, I  focused how these holistic structures –​that is, economic tie-​ups and power relations –​influence social phenomena at a micro level; how they operate on the “actual” stage; and how they are perceived and reproduced by media professionals. I did this by looking at what Williams (1980) defined as “conditions of a practice” (p. 48) through the ethnographic data. Although an increasing number of scholars have come to recognize the value of ethnographic methods in political-​economic analysis, the number of studies drawing on the fruitful intersection of two fields is still paltry. I would wholeheartedly agree with Mosco’s (1996) claim that “[t]‌here is nothing in the nature of ethnography that is inherently opposed to political economy” (p. 210). Storey’s (2003) reference to cultural studies completes the picture: What is needed is a more inclusive, a more tolerant cultural studies, one in which political economy and ethnography and audience studies can see themselves as contributing to the same project, existing like two sides of the same sheet of paper, differently inscribed but inescapably bound together in a project of understanding and dismantling the relations between culture and power. (pp. 61–​62) This point implicitly underpinned Chapter  3, which profited much from the melding of ethnographic data and a political-​economic approach. With its power in providing detailed documentation of how media products are constructed behind the scenes and how they are perceived by media professionals, ethnographic inquiry, as I have argued elsewhere (Ergül 2004b), has a lot to offer in the field of communication.

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Discussion, implications, conclusions 141 Bargaining the “home” Before proceeding further, let us recall what we encountered in Chapter 3. First, we saw the numerous ways in which commodified (televisual) knowledge forms the core of Japan’s wideshows. Further, we saw that this is true for both local (MTV) and national (NTV) TV. In the case of the local programme discussed in Chapter 3, OH! Ban desu, commodified knowledge is more connected to the geographic boundaries of the televisual content; it revolves around the commercialization of the audience’s hometown. From the programme’s opening until its closing, Miyagi prefecture is featured with its people (wrapped in the form of emotional human stories, guests, interviewees, etc.), subject matter (e.g. local events and histories), physical nature (e.g. streets, exhibitions, and foods), or economic sources (e.g. shopping centres, advertisers, and sponsors). In this sense, the physical space is transformed into a televisual marketplace in which the audience is doubly captured: as viewers and consumers. This political-​economic dimension –​the economic intentions of the TV station –​is carefully disguised. What we see through the aggregation of corners (including those in which the audience actively participates) is our city: an imaginary, though proximately real and intimate, realm; one that is carefully recodified via (disguised) commercial elements and delivered through the quasi-​contiguous tropes of communication (Ergül 2004a). It is this mediated wonderland, I would like to suggest, that is the very format of the wideshow, through which economic power relations function in contemporary Japanese TV. Although my data considering this point is limited in scope, this tendency is certainly not unique to OH! Ban desu. Indeed, other local and national shows1 also broadcast a large amount of commercial information via the same corner strategy. Everyday, virtually on every channel, we see infomercials or “quasi-​ advertising advice” (Clammer 2001: 104) –​commodified knowledge, carefully wrapped in the form of tips about daily life, shopping advice, intimate human stories, health-​related information, and so on –​serving to attract the target audience. This intensely commodified information is an indispensable and unvarying characteristic of Japanese TV broadcasting, and is certainly not unique to local TV broadcasting. To better elucidate this point, let us go back to the NTV data. Tabloid tales While the nature of THE Waido has much in common with the local programme OH! Ban desu, (e.g. technical features, corners, infotained content, and the network “family”), the professional routines in which commodified knowledge is reproduced and normalized have considerable differences. As the programme’s history implies, THE Waido is a natural-​ born hybrid, a wideshow family in which two conventional genres-​in-​law (news and entertainment) are brought together to create its most effective communication tropes of infotainment and

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142  Discussion, implications, conclusions tabloidization. Crossing traditional genre boundaries in such a way as to create an intimate  –​and commercial  –​communication with its nationwide audience, THE Waido brings us a mediated sphere in which the economic motives of the sponsors meet the audience’s wishes (as consumer). It does this not only in the form of advertisements or sponsorship but also in the form of news-​like, tabloid content (see the discussion on TV personalities and its link to consumption in Chapter 4), which seeks to appeal to the generally female audience (mostly housewives) by communicating information about (thereby playing to their preferences for) consumption. Virtually every broadcast day we come across news content telling us dramatic, sensational stories as well as the latest gossip concerning geinōkai. However, the televisual content in which ubiquitous TV personalities (geinōjin, tarento) appear is not limited to the wideshows. As we encountered in Chapter 4, we also meet them in a variety of programmes (e.g. documentaries, discussion programmes, quiz shows, comedies, dramas, and talk shows) in every time slot. More importantly for our argument here, however, is the ways in which images of tarento are adopted in the consumption world. Looking at consumer behaviour and its link to culture, de Mooij (2003) underlines the distinctive characteristic of tarento, recognizing that [i]‌n Japan, unlike in most countries, celebrity appearances are not limited to famous actors, singers, sport stars, or comedians. Advertising is a stage for established celebrities to capitalize on their fame (…) [t]he function of using such tarento is to give the brand “face” in the world of brands with similar product attributes. Instead of adding personal characteristics to the product, it is linked to the concrete person. (p. 103) These “brand faces” are indeed none other than the members of the televisual family that we often meet in THE Waido. It is certainly their (the nationwide audience’s) wideshow, in which all the main components (including the regular guests and tarento that appear, technical features used, news broadcast, and ads displayed), are crafted and transmitted in a conscious response to the latest results of rating figures and audience research. In commercial television, ratings are not only crucial technical criteria for measuring a programme’s success (or failure). In addition, as Mosco (1996) rightfully argues, they “are cybernetic commodities because they are constituted as commodities in the process of contributing to commodity production. Specifically, they are produced as important elements in the commodification of television and are themselves the central commodity of the rating industry” (p. 151). Ratings are undoubtedly a constant element of commercial broadcasting. In the programmes covered in this study, we observed that rating policies play a crucial role in the commodification of programme content. As a direct result of long-​term trial-​and-​error processes, the informative elements of the programmes have gradually been replaced by more entertaining, intimacy-​seeking content. The broadcast time devoted to (disguised) commercial information has drastically

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Discussion, implications, conclusions 143 increased, while more news about the entertainment world (geinōkai), scandals, and sensational stories is provided. The result is a news-​like (nyūsuppoi) flow, which is recodified with commercial elements, infotained, and intensely commodified. Towards an infotainment society? Obviously, the growth of infotainment and its link to commodification is not limited to Japan. This issue has been theoretically and empirically explored at great length in recent decades. Many scholars, as I discussed in Chapter 1, have observed this tendency in different media environments, linking the phenomenon to the direct influence of neo-​liberal policies on the media market. Kellner (2003) arrived at similar but broader conclusions: “Currently, we are entering a new form of technocapitalism marked by a synthesis of capital and technology, and the information and entertainment industries, all of which is producing an ‘infotainment society’ and spectacle culture” (author’s emphasis, p.  11). If what Kellner recognizes is true, then I  would argue that Japan is certainly one of the most developed examples of this move towards an infotainment society. Yet, televised communication, though central, is not the only mechanism functioning between consumption and infotainment:  along with magazines, game centres, cinema, pachinko, sports, pop music, electronic games, cybernetic commodities, dorama, advertising, manga, and other products of popular culture, the gigantic body of the Japanese infotainment industry wholeheartedly embraces technocapitalism in such a way that it offers an encompassing and stratified (class, age, gender) locus for different worlds of consumption. Although Chapter 3 focused on two wideshows at a local and a national level, at root it interprets the complex ways in which one dominant contemporary form of televisual communication works via commodified content in an advanced capitalist society. This is crucial, I would argue, for numerous reasons. For one, it is no longer possible to draw a broad map of society without considering the most popular methods of information transmission and the ways these connect to commercialization. If the object of analysis is Japan, a hyperconsumption-​oriented society, this imperative is even greater. Given this social milieu, the analysis here is certainly limited in providing a sufficiently broad analysis. What I have proposed, in contrast, is of particular significance because it offers greater insight into the phenomenon of broadcasting in Japan today, showing the powerful role that economics and economic-​based power relations play in television production processes at both the local and the national level. What we have discussed so far is the political-​economic aspect of infotainment, which is more global than local, more uniform than culturally diverse. In the following section, we will return to the major arguments presented in Chapter 4, which were considered more in terms of what is unique and culturally different in this broadcasting phenomenon. To do this, we will shift our focus from economic considerations to the televisual discourses through which infotainment operates in contemporary Japanese television.

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Tuning the televisual uchi and the discourse of intimacy Ellis (1992) was right in stressing that, in contrast to the large volume of research investigating television’s impact on viewers’ behaviour, much less attention has been devoted to “the discourses of television”, meaning the “the complex of all the ways television addresses us, appeals to us, tells us stories, entertains us, and represents itself and the world” (p. 15). Indeed, studies of the deeper grammar of the medium’s language and its modes of address are still limited in quantity and range. But do we really have to consider this point? What would we be deprived of if we neglected televisual discourses in understanding how the medium functions in a particular cultural context? What do we really miss, and how important is what we miss? Obviously, the implications of such questions vary from superficial to profound depending on one’s perception of television and its position in cultural contexts. Our discussion of the cultural aspects of television (particularly infotainment) and their link to various discourses, however, strongly favours the latter response. What the local and national data suggested is that television does not function as an empty signifier with no link to those it communicates with; nor does it operate in a vacuum. Instead, it is the locus of convergence:  a cultural form, built on a nexus of discourses; it is a routine, ordinary enough to fit into everyday life, yet culturally unique. The supra-​discourse of uchi Chapter  4 provided a good deal of ethnographic data in support of this argument. Throughout, I  tried to demonstrate that infotainment works together with various televisual discourses (e.g. the discourse of intimacy, furusato, real-​ seemingness, visual and linguistic wrapping, manga culture, and omoiyari) to create an emotionalized, proximate televisual space that makes the audience feel “at home” (uchi). I am not alone in suggesting that television plays a central role in mediating between what is home, domestic, and national (uchi), and what is outside or foreign (soto) in Japan (see Yoshimi 2003; Kamimura, Ikoma, and Nakano 2000; Hagiwara 1998; Cooper-​Chen 1997). Consider, for example, Painter’s (1993) observation: Many programs in Japan are best viewed as electronically created uchi –​ all purpose “in-​groups” that anyone can join simply by tuning to the right channel. While it is probably true that any group so easily joined cannot expect to capture the entire heart and soul of its membership, for commercial television producers all that is really demanded by the viewership ratings game is that people keep watching TV. (p. 296) Although this interpretation was made in the 1990s, it is still representative of what we see on the screen. Indeed, the homey ambience (uchi) and its link to

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Discussion, implications, conclusions 145 intense commercial intentions plays an essential role in constructing Japanese infotainment. Where this televisual uchi is constructed is neither in the studio nor on the screen. Built on a locus through which what is “public” (soto) is transformed into what is “privatized public” (uchi), infotainment creates a televisual family, an intimate in-​group in which both those on the stage and in front of the box are enfolded together. The ultimate aim of such programmes is to create an intimate relationship with the audience; however, we found that the broadcasting strategies used to create and maintain the homey atmosphere actually vary depending on local-​national and public-​commercial dichotomies. They also change from corner to corner within the same programme. To better crystallize this argument, let us recall very briefly what we observed in Chapter 4. The geographic borders of uchi We saw in the case of the local programmes that localization of televisual content plays a central role in building and then demarcating the borders of televisual uchi. In the case of Tere-​Masamune, the reanimated image of the local warlord Masamune, the founder of the audience’s hometown, appears in the title as well as in every corner, still greeting the local people after almost 350 years. Associated with this historical element are the traditions of uchi, carefully wrapped by sophisticated linguistic (e.g. keigo), cultural (e.g. Tanabata festival and rituals), visual (e.g. sasakazari), and bodily (e.g. yukata) elements. So too does OH! Ban desu communicate ethno-​cultural elements to the local audience, creating a homey, uchi-​like atmosphere. It does this with a number of strategies, including its name –​which is also the first phrase of the opening segment (“o-​ ban desu!”) –​and the local dialect (zūzū ben) often used in the programme. This local emphasis, aiming to strengthen ties between the local audience and the hometown, continues in the cooking corners. A common practice is to cook a local dish recommended by the local audience with local materials. In this way, the food is often linked to the geographic and cultural borders of the audience’s uchi (e.g. the obentō of Tōhoku or the shijimi of Miyagi). One significant difference between the stations is that OH! Ban desu broadcasts a large number of local (hidden) commercials in the form of shopping hints, discounts, or exhibitions to further engage its audience, whereas Tere-​Masamune cannot air this sort of information because it is broadcast by the public TV company. The latter’s production members consider this one reason why it receives lower ratings than OH! Ban desu, which relates to the argument in Chapter  1. Through the political-​economic lens employed in Chapter 3, we also found that intense localization plays a crucial role in the commodification of televisual content. For us the audience, on-​screen are members of our local uchi. Although we have never met them before, and will perhaps never come across them in the future, we are all familiar with them: the main announcer, who has appeared on-​screen for some ten years, for instance, is a once-​famous local singer; the audience member on the phone who asks some advice about her son’s educational issues is someone from

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146  Discussion, implications, conclusions our neighbourhood; the announcer who gives the weather forecast is the young woman we see every broadcast day in front of the main station; the clerk who is interviewed works in the department store that is walking distance from where we work; the fisherman uses the local dialect that we Tōhoku people best know, and is obviously an old member our family; the ōeru (OL or office lady) who writes to the programme to find a solution for her problems with the insurance company could be anyone working on the same floor with us; and among the big crowd in front of the store who came right after discount information was announced in the programme are our friends, parents, neighbours, or indeed ourselves. By appearing in their own private circles (e.g. home, workplace), sharing their intimate feelings, telling their emotional stories, and relating these stories in different ways, the members of the televisual family construct and enjoy the equalizing, intimate atmosphere that would be impossible to maintain outside of this homey ambience; that other (soto), which is a “detached, disciplined, ordered perspective” (Bachnik 1994:  239), dirty (Hendry 2003:  47), and also dangerous. Throughout the corners, the programmes attempt to reach everyone from umi-​zoi (coastland) to yama-​zoi (along the mountains) and bring them together under the same roof, an intimate hermetic scope that is as much informative as entertaining. One significant point to remember is the discourse of exceptionalness and superiority (and its link to the discourse of nihonjinron) inscribed in televised content in the form of locality (inner-​uchi, Miyagi prefecture) and repeatedly underlined throughout the programme’s corners. Boundary negotiations Several examples presented in this study demonstrate that linguistic conventions lie at the core of this familial atmosphere. The language through which uchi members communicate with each other and with the audience is at a level of informality that viewers would feel comfortable using only if they feel they are at “home” (uchi), in their most immediate, intimate circle. This intimate mode, extending from in-​ studio conversations to man-​ on-​ the-​ street interviews, is beyond coincidental. It is manufactured and carefully manufactured by trial and error. As I argued, it is this specific level of language that continuously reminds us that we are in the uchi. We observed, however, that the televisual uchi is not all-​inclusive as there are indeed limits to this uchi-​like communication. While the announcers and hosts may belong to this intimate space, the newscasters may not. The clear line between the news segment and the rest of the programme is created through a variety of strategies involving a more informative and disciplined mode of communication. In this way, news-​centred segments are broadcast via more self-​restrained and therefore less intimate modes of communication, which would not be appropriate among “insiders” in our privatized circle (uchi), but is suitable among “outsiders” and in the public sphere (soto). This strategy can be observed in a wide variety of programmes on Japanese TV. Many programmes that broadcast factual information or news content in a

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Discussion, implications, conclusions 147 specific segment, intentionally demarcate what is news and what is not. A common strategy is to devote a separate corner for news reports in the same studio. In OH! Ban desu, for instance, we saw that the local news report is broadcast from the same studio next to the main set. We often come across scenes in which the main announcers are exchanging information, discussing issues, chatting, or laughing with the newscasters prior to the news segment. This clearly indicates that we are, at least physically, still in the uchi in the sense that we did not completely leave the programme yet. We may note in passing that here is another point of border negotiation between the news reports placed in the shows and broadcast at different times of the day. That is, although it remains true that the news segment addresses not uchi but soto, compared to other news reports broadcast in other time slots, it still belongs to what is less soto, or at least the soto in the uchi. Based on her experiences in a home stay programme in Japan, Rosenberger (1994) also talks about this point: Making a still life of soto and uchi contexts has its problems because these are always fluid according to the perspective one takes. Like a series of Chinese boxes, what is soto in relation to one uchi soon becomes uchi in relation to a more public, detached level of soto. (pp. 97–​98) This is exactly what we observed above. Based on many examples presented in the study, I  argued that televisual uchi is not a fixed category that can be described once and for all; instead, it is an amorphous, relational locus, constructed though a variety of cultural, linguistic, visual, and post-​production techniques (of which the screen and carefully crafted spontaneity are essential parts). A minor change in one of these elements can dramatically shift the borders between uchi and soto. Indeed, a separately broadcast segment, an inappropriate reaction of a TV personality, an expression, the “lecturing tone” used by announcers (e.g. see the Miyagi TV data in Chapter 4), or a joke can easily change the intimate, familial ambience (uchi) to a distant, formal atmosphere (soto), and vice versa.

Intimacy and “ordinary” members of the televisual uchi This uchi-​like, homelike atmosphere continues in THE Waido’s content as well. However, the borders of this imaginary family expand in such a way as to build a nationwide uchi. In order to attract target audiences from across Japan, THE Waido utilizes its strongest communication trope: the news-​like (nyūsuppoi) or tabloidized content.2 The interview data suggested that the broadcast strategies employed in THE Waido have become so successful that they have spread to news-​based programmes and other genres as well.3 To better elucidate this point, it is useful to recall the indispensable elements (e.g. TV personalities, tabloidized news, and audiovisual material) of the programme’s content.

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148  Discussion, implications, conclusions Through the programme’s tabloid content,4 we meet “familial” TV personalities (i.e. tarento, geinōjin) who are ubiquitous members of the televisual uchi. The ways in which they reach their audiences vary: some communicate their positions in the cultural traditions in order to communicate with the audience, while others may contribute to the content by relating matters from their private, emotional life. Consider too that the panellists or guests (regyurā komentētā) in the studio, who live under the same roof or uchi (geinōkai), further enhance the proximity between the televised content and the assumed audience. They are there basically because the audience likes to see them on-​screen (as checked through audience research in Osaka and Tokyo). Their presence on the programme is indeed directly related to their ability to speak in the same (intimate) language with and instead of the target audience. The extraordinary ordinariness of tarento produces an intimate televisual image that is not fundamentally different from that of the target audience; thus, its power does not emanate from the aura constructed on-​ screen that assigns a certain distance to the celebrity image but rather from its accessibility and genuineness for and similarity to those on the other side of this communication equation: the audience. As discussed in Chapter 4, this intimacy-​ seeking approach is by no means unique to a single genre (wideshow); nor is the area of influence and the proven success of this broadcast strategy of Japanese television limited to the Japanese archipelago (see Iwabuchi 2001).5 Although the programme is limited to two hours, this does not mean that the members of the televisual family will leave us right after the closing segment. Instead, moving from one genre to another, playing a variety of roles in different channels, appearing during different time slots, the ubiquitous tarento will stay on the screen throughout the broadcast day. THE Waido is nothing more than another temporal location for this assembling-​disassembling game that prevails in Japanese television. It is therefore not unheard of to see tarento simultaneously serving completely different genres in two different channels. Some switch their roles temporarily from one (e.g. sports expert, announcer) to another (e.g. comedian, singer) during the same broadcast day, while some experience more radical or permanent changes in their televised images called imēji chenji (image change, ime-​chen in short). Newscasters, models, aidoru (a teenage star), experts, manzai-​ shi, writers, movie stars, rakugo-​ka, and other members of the geinōkai act just like different pieces of a construction toy: each time they are called to the scene, they construct something different from the previous programme. The ultimate aim, however, remains the same: to build an emotional televisual in-​group and construct a continuous flow between genres, segments, and channels in such a way that, whatever channel the audience tunes in to, they come across family members, stars on earth, or, borrowing Griseldis Kirsch’s (2014) definition, “next-​door divas”, and enjoy this horizontally built, nationwide, televisual uchi. Vanishing borders, hybridized contents Clearly, whether in news stories (e.g. geinō nyūsu) or in the studio (e.g. tarento), we see that the geinōkai is one of the major ingredients of THE Waido. The news

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Discussion, implications, conclusions 149 content covered by the programme, however, also includes other topics, such as politics, economics, crimes, accidents, and event information. One significant point here is that although the news stories may vary, the common strategies employed in the programme remain valid for virtually the entire content. What we see on-​screen –​irrespective of news stories –​is almost always a tabloid flow, which is reframed, dramatized, infotained, and intensely emotionalized through dominant post-​production strategies. In this way, an economic issue, an emotional interview with a famous comedian, or the prime minister’s speech about a complicated international problem all meld into the same content. The interview data also clearly demonstrated that what the production members are more concerned about is not the differences between news content but that the carefully tailored intimacy is consistent between different segments.6 One of the essential issues we discussed through the local data was the phenomenon of vanishing boundaries between different contents via the same corner strategy. We saw that this is also true for THE Waido:  the corners of program are utilized in such a way as to create an infotained flow throughout the broadcast. However, what is different in the case of THE Waido is the reciprocal relationship between THE Waido and other NTV programmes. As mentioned earlier, it is not unusual to come across the same audiovisual material we saw in THE Waido in other programmes later the same day, which is of course not a coincidence:  in the past it was often the production department (seisaku-​bu) that obtained news content from the information/​news department (hōdō-​bu). However, I demonstrated that this flow between the two departments, and also between what is more informative and what is more entertaining, is no longer one-​way: today, hōdō-​bu also obtains audiovisual material produced by seisaku-​ bu through the “pool” strategy, which enables both departments to contribute and receive news material for different programmes. Thus, I  argued, what is infotained is this very pool and the bidirectional flow (nagare) across former conventional boundaries. This infotained flow of course extends beyond NTV’s studios. In contemporary Japanese TV, tabloid televisual content is an indispensable component, a prime characteristic of virtually all wideshows. Consider, for instance, the following excerpt from a news article (“Violent! The Battle of the Evening News”),7 which appeared in one of Japan’s major newspapers: From an abduction case to an untidy woman: the themes covered by the key commercial TV stations’ news programmes, which became wider recently, keep spreading. “Now, is this a news programme?” some ask critically; the programme producers, on the other hand, say “If it meets the needs of the audiences, it is of course a news programme”. (Asahi Shimbun, 2 September 2002)8 The article, as its title suggests, deals with the severe competition between the news-​centred programmes broadcast by different stations, such as Nyūsu Purasu (“News Plus”, NTV), Sūpā J-​Channeru (“Super J-​Channel”, TV Asahi), Nyūsu

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150  Discussion, implications, conclusions no Mori (“News Forest”, TBS), and Sūpā Nyūsu (“Super News”, Fuji TV). The article also mentions that many producers from major stations are seeking wider topics and stronger techniques to reclaim audiences. With titles such as “The Incredibly Cheap All-​You-​Can-​Eat Course!” and “Special Hot Chinese Noodles!” and detailed information about restaurants (mise-​shōkai), some producers intend to reach housewives. Strategies such as introducing a new segment, the geinō kōnā (special corner for information about the world of show business), are also considered necessary to achieve the same target. Obviously, the topics cited here are very reminiscent of what we observed in the local wideshows, OH! Ban desu and Tere-​Masamune. So too is the idea of employing a new entertainment corner in the programme exactly the same as what THE Waido producers suggested (see, for instance, the interview data with producer Hitoshi in Chapter  4). Another significant detail mentioned in the article is a broadcasting technique that (the producers believe) further engages audiences:  increasing audiovisual digital effects. This, of course, means more sūpā and more on-​screen digital effects, which is again very evocative of what THE Waido’s producer suggested during his interview. Domesticating the screen Through our local and national data, we observed that post-​produced intimacy (including carefully crafted spontaneity) is indeed the sine qua non of televisual uchi. Audiovisual effects are employed to reduce the informative tone, to make the content more digestible and intimate for the audience. This is done through a wide range of techniques, including colourful effects, stylish fonts, the reframing of visual materials with extreme close-​ ups, audio narrations, manipulated images, and subtitles. Such strategies are considered one of the indicators of tabloidization in both Western countries (Esser 1999; Langer 1998; Bennet 1988) and Japan. Ishita (2002), for instance, writes about persistent repetitions of fragmentary information in wideshows and identifies this audiovisual element as one of their major characteristics. She further argues that this strategy can influence the audience’s perception of reality through déjà vu (paramnesia) in such a way that the audience soon becomes familiar with shocking incidents. Based on content analysis of news programmes, Kawabata (2002, 2001) demonstrates that the increasing amount of soft news and visual effects employed in these programmes are indeed crucial components of tabloidization in Japanese broadcasting. What is not sufficiently explored, yet is central for our discussion on televisual uchi, is the cultural context through which this strategy is constructed and delivered. The ethnographic data demonstrated that the producers’ fundamental source for this re-​engineered content is none other than manga, which is another powerful cultural element of the audience’s uchi (see Chapter  4 for further considerations on the powerful role manga plays in Japanese society). The manga-​esque display not only keeps the audience’s eyes on the screen but also increases empathic communication between those in the televised stories

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Discussion, implications, conclusions 151 and the audience. This observation is significant for many reasons. For one, the audiovisual and semantic essence of the screen is yet another example among many discussed in this volume (see Chapters 1 and 4) of how Japanese infotainment discourse simultaneously exploits other nodal discourses to generate the unique ingredient of its mode of address and meaning: a deeply interdependent nexus of cultural discourses. This warns scholars who engage in understanding televisual discourses against the danger of applying Western, Eurocentric, or American epistemology  –​and its binary concepts and theoretical models  –​to Asian media discourses (see Shi-​xu, Prah, and Pardo 2016). Take, as another example, omoiyari, often translated in English as “empathy”. It is argued that the word “empathy” (omoiyari) in Japanese culture goes far beyond its dictionary meaning (see Minami 2002; Doi 1973) in that Japanese culture is an omoiyari culture in which showing sensitivity to and understanding of what others are feeling is fundamental “to being really human” (see Lebra 1976). The screen is a perfect example of how the emotions are inscribed on the televisual narrative to draw empathy, thereby increasing the proximity between the broadcast content and the viewers. The ways through which the screen is popularized are strongly connected to Japanese (popular) culture from various angles.9 This should be considered as another cultural component that distinguishes Japanese infotainment discourse from its Western counterparts. This border-​crossing technique exists in a wide range of programmes across all Japanese TV channels. It is a key component of the supra-​discourse of intimacy (uchi), to the extent that it has already become hard, if not impossible, to imagine televised content without a heavy rain of audiovisual effects. The interview data also showed that producers find it too risky to reduce or remove such effects because audiences, who are already used to it, would feel something is missing from the screen. Eliminating the most conspicuous visual features from the programme content, then, would not only disable the producers’ magic wand and neutralize or emotionally “flatten” the screen, but also would result in an equally significant loss on the side of the audience: loss of an emotional guideline that induces, inspires, and engages viewers with the intended meaning in the televisual text. Thus, while previously used as a deliberate broadcasting technique, an emotionalized screen is now an indispensable ingredient of Japanese TV, so much so that, today, even the producers who first employed the technique do not seem completely sure about how to get back to where they came from.

Television, intimacy, and cultural context Some producers prefer radical changes; some favour more modest shifts. Yet the ultimate aim remains always the same: to create an uchi-​like, intimate communication with the audience. For those who still wonder what happened to the (conventional) definition of news, a possible answer lies in the last sentence of the excerpt cited above: “if it meets the needs of the audiences, it is of course a news programme”. The basic logic behind this claim (i.e. reciprocity between

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152  Discussion, implications, conclusions commercial intentions of the stations and audience satisfaction) has long been familiar in critical media studies. Allen (1992) summarizes this so well: Commercial television’s job is not to sell products but to recruit people who are available to watch television as viewers. Whatever else a television program does, whatever response it hopes to elicit (laughter, tears, outrage, or whatever), it must first persuade a person in front of television set to play the role of viewer, to enter into a contractual relationship that simulates what we experience in face-​to-​face situations. Commercial television constantly reminds you that you are the “you” it wishes to speak to. (p. 119) Most television wholeheartedly embraces what Allen recognizes as its mode of address. Although there is nothing inherent in the medium’s technology that compels it to enhance the proximity between its viewers and what it broadcasts, commercial television must find a way to convince its audience that, in Allen’s words, “you are the ‘you’ it wishes to speak to”. This is indeed what commercial television is most centrally about. Television’s intimate mode of address, which rewards casual communication with the audience, cannot of course be limited to the Japanese archipelago. The medium, as Ellis (1999) puts, is a “highly intimate part of the domestic existence of almost everyone in the developed world (…) Television is intimate, and therein lies its power” (p. 68). Looking at British TV dramas, for example, Jacobs (2000: 28) argued that “the visual closeness” and “the delivery of images to private domestic sphere” were considered as television’s main characteristics, long before recent discussions (e.g. during the pre-​war period), and that television was already defined as “a medium of intimacy”. In her article on TV performance and its link to immediacy and televisual intimacy, Berenstein (2002) also identified that, already by the early 1940s, “television had the reputation of being the medium of immediacy: an apparatus that, more than film, offers its viewers live access to the world around them and hence, it was assumed, to reality” (p. 26). A similar point on these early debates was made by Auslander (1999): “Television’s intimacy was seen as a function of its immediacy  –​the close proximity of viewer to event  –​ and the facts that events from outside are transmitted into the viewer’s home” (p.  16). More recently, focusing on television news in Holland, van Zoonen (1991) recognized “a growing attention to human interest subjects, an intimate and personal mode of address and the treatment of political behaviour and issues as thought they were matters of personality” (p. 217). All in all, what is suggested is that “intimacy” has always been an indispensable part of television’s deeper grammar throughout the medium’s history. That is, this private, intimate mode of communication, which is one of the most powerful features of commercial television, may exist in all contemporary societies. However, differences in the ways in which television (infotainment, in particular) operates in commodifying emotions10 and in the ways in which it relates to dominant cultural structures (e.g. uchi/​soto; omoiyari; manga bunka), are not

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Discussion, implications, conclusions 153 minor. In contemporary Japanese TV, intimacy goes beyond being an inherent element embedded in the medium’s language; rather, it is not just a predictable consequence of tabloidization but a fundamental rhetorical strategy of televised communication; a dominant mode of address across all genres; a ubiquitous televisual discourse, which is at once both culturally specific and intentionally re-​engineered. The discourse of intimacy, together with other sub-​discourses, pulls much of the programme’s content in flow, which, in turn, broadens the imaginary territory of the televisual uchi. The discussion in this concluding chapter brings us back to the point I made in the Introduction. Television is a socially situated, cultural, and highly commodified medium –​and here resides one of the central arguments of the current study; it is therefore imperative for media scholars to examine the medium’s variety of discourses from a multi-​perspectival angle  –​one that takes economic, cultural, and anthropological aspects and their relations to each other into consideration. The field data presented in the previous chapters (Chapters 3 and 4 in particular) further proves Stuart Hall’s ([1973] 1980) argument in the original version of his seminal “encoding/​decoding” essay: television is “a discourse, a communicative not simply a behavioural event” (author’s emphasis, p. 4). Dahlgren (1995), too, argues that “[t]‌elevision operates in this late modern setting as an industry, as an incessant producer of audio-​visual discourses which have a central position in the semiotic environment” (p.  148). This point has turned up again and again throughout this book, more significantly when we interpreted how infotainment, the most conspicuous discourse on Japanese TV, relates to other cultural discourses. In other words, what we encountered through the local and national wideshows is that infotainment discourse and its indispensable mode of communication, intimacy, build a complex, multifaceted nexus (uchi), in which geographic, linguistic, audiovisual, and emotional components are mixed together to meet the discourses of its audience. This broader sense of discourse embracing both linguistic and non-​linguistic means (Shi-​xu, Prah, and Pardo 2016: 49) enables Japanese infotainment to engage persuasively with its audience in an intimate televisual sphere. We also saw that the infotainment discourse is not a fixed entity; instead, it is a profoundly relational and temporal construct, achieved via constant negotiations between the cultural codes inscribed in the televised text and the Japanese audience’s act of interpretation. This discursive practice in turn provides an imaginary yet socially experienced locus, a televised uchi, within which the members of a televisual family come together to share televised intimacy. The current study on infotainment discourse, in this sense, can be seen as a contribution to the rapidly growing literature of Asian communication and discourse studies, emphasizing the significance of situating mediated discourses into their de-​Western/​Eastern cultural, philosophical, linguistic context (Takahashi 2010; Chen 2006; Shi-​xu 2009; Painter 1993; Befu and Manabe 1990; Dissanayake 1988). Epistemologically, it is argued that the meaning of things in Asian communication often connotes an inseparable, multilayered whole, a discursive unity rather than a single, bipolar sense, crafted by dynamic shifts between its

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154  Discussion, implications, conclusions interdependent, interchangeable, and sometimes even contradictory components (Dissanayake 1983). That is to say, everything can be understood only in relation to one another (Miike 2002: 7). Several examples discussed in this and previous chapters, such as uchi-​soto, omoiyari, private-​public, formal-​informal, linguistic wrapping, and keigo, provide substance to this cautionary remark.

Final thoughts and future research This study has highlighted the various dimensions through which infotainment is constructed and conveyed in contemporary TV in Japan. Through a variety of different lenses, I  hope I  have demonstrated that infotainment is not a fixed, linear discourse of commercial media, as many have argued, but a multifaceted phenomenon, composed of cultural, political-​economic, and emotional dimensions and their relationships to each other. Though crucial, what has not been examined is how infotainment discourse transpires in other genres, or indeed in other media, which most likely will reveal new findings. In this sense, conducting broader fieldwork to analyse a wider range of data collected from different time slots and genres (e.g. dramas, talk shows, and variety programmes) would provide a comparative perspective that could further illuminate the themes examined here. Similarly, expanding the research scope towards other traditional and new media technologies (e.g. magazines and newspapers versus mobile telephony, the Internet, digital media, and so on) would be a good idea and certainly help provide a more rounded portrayal of current Japanese infotainment and how it resonates through different media. Another question that also remains unanswered is how audiences (preferably from different genders, ages, socio-​economic, and educational categories) interpret, engage with, and make sense of infotainment in their own universe; how they situate and use it in the constant flow of everyday life. This is a complex question for future voyagers in this field. In the words of Marlow, it is “so mysterious, resplendent and somber (…) full of danger and promising”.11 Such investigations would lead to a deeper understanding of this phenomenon of information transmission in an advanced capitalist –​perhaps even infotainment –​society like Japan. Any future analysis of the ways in which television communicates with its viewers will, however, always remain incomplete and open to new ideas, proposals, interpretations, and reinterpretations.

Notes 1 This list of programmes could of course be extended, such as local programmes, Niji no Chaihane [Two o’clock Chaihane], broadcast by TBC, and Yoji Terebi [Four o’clock TV], by Sendai Hōsō; and national shows such as Omoikkiri Terebi [TV to the max], broadcast by NTV, and Waido Sukuranburu [The wide scramble] by TV-​Asahi. These programmes are shown every day from Monday to Friday. 2 Otsuka (1992) observed an overall trend towards tabloidization (i.e. blurring boundaries between hard news and sensational journalism) in Japanese media in 1991, before THE Waido began broadcasting.

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Discussion, implications, conclusions 155 3 Two incidents, the Aum Shinrikyo group’s sarin gas attack in a Tokyo subway station and the Great Hanshin earthquake (both in 1995), were considered among the major causes of the dramatic change in the programme’s format. With references to the same disastrous incidents, Ishita (2002), and Watanabe (1996) before her, wrote that this period indicated a new stage (of sensational journalism) in the wideshow genre. The dramatic changes that occurred in the overall objective, broadcast strategies, and the content of the local wideshows (i.e. OH! Ban desu and Tere-​Masamune) after the Great Tohoku earthquake further prove the influence of large-​scale disasters on televisual broadcasting. 4 For a short overview of the major debates on the tabloidization issue in media sociology, see Chapters 1 and 4. 5 Looking at the Taiwanese audiences’ emotional involvement in Japanese idol dramas, Koichi Iwabuchi (2001) notes that the prevailing discourse of “cultural proximity” between two societies  –​often articulated by the audiences as one significant factor behind the genre’s success in Taiwan –​“works together with an emphasis on intimacy and ordinariness which are intrinsic to Japanese drama texts” (p. 67). 6 Another example of the producers’ strong intention to communicate an uchi-​like atmosphere to nationwide audiences can be observed in the geographical borders of THE Waido’s content: apart from exceptional cases, most news stories referred to the national uchi, Japan. In the limited international news coverage, we may again experience a national flavour via Japanese people involved in incidents. For instance, in the news coverage following the major earthquake that occurred in Pakistan on 8 October 2005, a large amount of information about the earthquake was mediated through the emotional story of a Japanese person who died during the disaster. 7 “Gekietsu! Yūgata Nyūsu no Jin” (2002), Asahi Shimbun, 2 October, p. 24. 8 Translation is mine (H. E.) Asahi Shimbun is one of Japan’s three leading newspapers (together with Mainichi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun). With a circulation of around eight million, it is also the second-​largest newspaper in Japan. A few months earlier in the same newspaper, Nachimoto Masaru (geinō repōtā) explained the reason for the strong affinity between Tanaka Makiko (the former foreign minister of Japan) and the wideshows: “We always adjust the wideshow to a living-​room ambience; so, too, she adjusted to such an atmosphere in our programmes” (2002) Asahi Shimbun, 15 May, p. 30. 9 Although her work is primarily about the star system and its link to gender and nationalism issues in Japan’s sports media, Ito (2005) also points out the ways through which audiovisual material is constructed through (national) identity and gender components. 10 In his work on the commodification of emotions, Clammer recognizes (2001: 106) the Japanese media as a key institution in society, linking leisure and fantasy, images and commodities. 11 This expression, which is used to describe the East, belongs to the young boy Marlow, in Joseph Conrad’s book Youth (2004).

Bibliography Allen, R. C. (1992). “More Talk about TV”. In:  R. C. Allen (ed.), Channels of Discourse: Reassembled. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 1–​30. Asahi Shimbun (2002). “Gekietsu! Yūgata Nyūsu no Jin”. 2 October, p. 24. Auslander, P. (1999). Live:  Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

156

156  Discussion, implications, conclusions Bachnik, J. (1994). “Uchi/​soto: Authority and Intimacy, Hierarchy and Solidarity in Japan”. In: J. Bachnik and C. Quinn (eds), Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society and Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 223–​243. Befu, H., and Manabe, K. (1990). “Empirical Status of Nihonjinron:  How Real Is the Myth?” In: A. Boscaro, F. Gatti, and M. Raveri (eds), Rethinking Japan: Social Sciences, Ideology and Thought. New York: St Martin’s Press, pp. 124–​133. Bennet, W. L. (1988). News: The Politics of Illusion, 2nd ed. New York: Longman. Berenstein, R. J. (2002). “Acting Live: TV Performance, Intimacy, and Immediacy”. In: J. Friedman (ed.), Reality Squared: Televisual Discourses on the Real. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, pp. 25–​49. Chen, G. M. (2006). “Asian Communication Studies: What and Where to Now”. Review of Communication, 6 (4): 295–​311. Clammer, J. (2000). “Received Dreams”. In:  J. S. Eades, T. Gill, and H. Befu (eds), Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary Japan. Melbourne:  Trans Pacific Press, pp. 203–​223. –​–​–​. (2001). Japan and Its Others. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Conrad, J. (2004). Youth. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing. Cooper-​Chen, A. (1997). Mass Communication in Japan. Ames: Iowa State Press. Dahlgren, P. (ed.) (1995). Television and the Public Sphere. London: Sage. de Mooij, M. K. (2003). Consumer Behavior and Culture. London: Sage. Dissanayake, W. (1983). “Communication in the Cultural Tradition of India”. Media Development, 30 (1): 27–​30. –​–​–​. (ed.) (1988). Communication Theory: The Asian Perspective. Singapore: Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Centre. Doi, T. (2001). The Anatomy of Self: The Individual versus Society. Tokyo: Kodansha. Ellis, J. (1999). “Television as Working-​through”. In:  J. Gripsrud (ed.), Television and Common Knowledge. London: Routledge, pp. 55–​70. Ergül, H. (2004a). “Televisual Discourses ‘Under Construction’:  Unveiling What Lies behind the Screen”. Paper presented at the 5th International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, 25–​28 June, University of Illinois, Urbana-​Champaign. –​–​–​. (2004b). “An Ethnographic Gaze on the Discourse of Intimacy in Infotainment Programs”. Paper presented at the Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ) Conference, 17–​19 April, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. Esser, F. (1999). “ ‘Tabloidization’ of News: A Comparative Analysis of Anglo-​American and German Press Journalism”. European Journal of Communication, 14 (3): 291–​324. Fineman, S. (2002). Emotion in Organizations. London: Sage. Golding, P., and Murdock, G. (2000). “Culture, Communication and Political Economy”. In: J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds), Mass Media and Society, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 70–​92. Hagiwara, S. (1998). “Japanese Television as a Window on Other Cultures”. Japanese Psychological Association, 40 (4): 221–​233. Hall, S. ([1973] 1980). “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse”. Paper for the Council of Europe Colloquy on “Training in the Critical Reading of Televisual Language”, organized by the Council & The Centre for Mass Communication Research, University of Leicester, September. Hendry, J. (2003). Understanding Japanese Society. London: Routledge. Ishita, S. (2002). “The Production of ‘the National’ Celebrity:  Wide-​Show in Japanese Television”. Paper presented at the 5th Asia Pacific Sociological Association Conference, 5 July, Brisbane, Australia. Ito, R. (2005). “‘Princess Megu’ and ‘Powerful Kana’: Japan’s Female Olympic Stars at the Intersection of Gender and Nationalism”. Paper presented at the IAMCR Conference, 26–28 July, Shih Hsin University, Tapiei.

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Discussion, implications, conclusions 157 Iwabuchi, K. (2001). “Becoming ‘Culturally Proximate’:  The A/​scent of Japanese Idol Dramas in Taiwan”. In: B. Moeran (ed.), Asian Media Productions. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 54–​74. Jacobs, J. (2000). The Intimate Screen:  Early British Television Drama. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. Kamimura, S., Ikoma, C., and Nakano, S. (2000). “The Japanese and Television, 2000:  The Current State of TV Viewing”. NHK Culture Broadcasting Institute, 13. Retrieved 5 November 2003, from www.nhk.or.jp/​bunken/​bcri-​news/​bnl-​s-​ feature.html. Kawabata, M. (2001). “Nyūsubangumi no Gorakuka Keikōni Taisuru Ninshiki to Hyōka” [Recognition and valuation of entertainmentization/​tabloidization of news programs]. In: S. Hagiwara et al. (eds), Henyōsuru Media to Nyūsu Hōdō. Tokyo: Maruzen, pp. 201–​220. –​ –​ –​ . (2002). “Examining Tabloidization of TV News Programs in Japan:  Are They Entertainment, Information or News?” Paper presented at the Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ) Fall Meeting, 2 November, Sophia University, Tokyo. Kellner, D. (2003). Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge. Kirsch, G. (2014). “Next-​Door Divas: Japanese Tarento, Television and Consumption”. Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 6 (1): 74–​88. Langer, J. (1998). Tabloid Television:  Popular Journalism and the “Other News”. London: Routledge. Lebra, T. S. (1976). Japanese Patterns of Behavior. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Miike, Y. (2002). “Theorizing Culture and Communication in the Asian Context:  An Assumptive Foundation”. Intercultural Communication Studies, 11 (1): 1–​22. Minami, M. (2002). Culture-​Specific Language Styles: The Development of Oral Narrative and Literacy. Clevedon and Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters. Mosco, V. (1996). The Political Economy of Communication:  Rethinking and Renewal. London: Sage. Otsuka, E. (1992). Kasō Genjitsu Hihyō [Criticism of virtual reality]. Tokyo: Shinyōsha. Painter, A. A. (1993). “Japanese Daytime Television, Popular Culture, and Ideology”. Journal of Japanese Studies, 19 (2): 295–​325. Rosenberger, N. R. (1994). “Indexing Hierarchy through Japanese Gender Relations”. In: J. Bachnik and C. Quinn (eds), Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society and Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, pp. 88–​112. Shi-​ xu (2009). “Reconstructing Eastern Paradigms of Discourse Studies”. Journal of Multicultural Discourse, 4 (1): 29–​48. Shi-​xu, Prah, K. K., and Pardo, M. L. (2016). Discourses of Developing World: Researching Properties, Problems and Potentials of the Developing World. London and New York: Routledge. Storey, J. (2003). Inventing Popular Culture:  From Folklore to Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell. Takahashi, T. (2010). Audience Studies: A Japanese Perspective. London: Routledge. van Zoonen, L. (1991). “A Tyranny of Intimacy? Women, Femininity and Television News”. In:  P. Dahlgren and C. Sparks (eds), Communication and Citizenship. London: Routledge, pp. 217–​235. Watanabe, T. (1996). “Japan’s Media at Present”. Doshisha Social Science Review, 55: 1–​40. Williams, R. (1980). Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso. Yoshimi, S. (2003). “Television and Nationalism:  Historical Change in the National Domestic TV Formation of Postwar Japan”. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 6 (4): 459–​487.

158

Glossary

Aidoru

アイドル

n.

Teenage entertainer (mostly pop singers) idolized by the young

Ankāman

アンカーマン

n.

Anchorman

Bangumi monitā

番組モニター

n.

Program monitor, providing detailed graphic information about TV programmes’ ratings and shares

Baraetī bangumi

バラエティー番組

n.

Variety show

Bentō

弁当

n.

Lunch; a packed (box) lunch

Boke and tsukkomi

ぼけとつっこみ

n.

The fool and the straight man (of a pair of stand-​up comedians); the dumb and the witty roles that draw laughter from the audience in manzai

Buchō

部長

n.

Head of a section in an organization

Close-​shot

n.

Shot of a subject or person approximately from the waist to the top of the head (closer than a medium shot but not as close as a close-​up)

Close-​up

n.

Shot taken from a short distance in which the scale of the object viewed is relatively large (e.g. a person’s head from the shoulders up and filling the entire frame is a typical close-​up shot)

n.

Elite (of society); elite group

Erīto

エリート

 159

Glossary 159 Furusato

ふるさと

n.

Home, hometown, or place of origin

Gaijin

外人

n.

Foreigner; alien

Geinōjin

芸能人

n.

(Show business) personality; (people in) show business

Geinōkai () (n.)

芸能界

n.

(The world of) show business, encompassing everything from movies and television (talk shows, music shows, variety shows, etc.) to radio and now the Internet

Genkan

玄関

n.

(Front) door; (front) entrance

Gesuto

ゲスト

n.

Guest

Giri

義理

n.

Social duty; obligation

Hanseikai

反省会

n.

Meeting to review past activities

Hazukashisa

恥ずかしさ

n.

Shame; shamefulness

Hōdō-​bu

報道部

n.

Press section or news department

Honban

本番

n.

Performance; acting before an audience or the camera

Honne

本音

n.

One’s real intention; motive

Imēji chenji

イメージチェンジ・ イメチェン

n.

Trying to change one’s (public) image (also called ime-​chen)

n.

Sub-​control (production) unit

Jijitsu-​hōdō bangumi

事実報道番組

n.

Factual news programmes

Jōhō-​bangumi

情報番組

n.

Information programmes

Jōhō-​baraetī bangumi

情報バラエティー 番組

n.

Information-​variety programmes

Jōhō-​kyōyō bangumi

情報教養番組　

n.

Information-​culture (education) programmes

Kaisha

会社

n.

Company; corporation

Kaisha-​in

会社員

n.

Company employee

Karui

軽い　

adj.

Light; not heavy

Katei bideo

家庭ビデオ　

n.

Camcorder

Kawaī

可愛い　

adj.

Pretty; cute; lovely; charming

Kawaisa

可愛さ　

n.

Cuteness

Kawaisō

可哀そう　

adj., n.

Poor; pitiable; pathetic

Kimochi

気持ち

n.

Feeling; sensation; mood

J-​sub

(continued)

160

160 Glossary Kōhō-​bu

広報部

n.

Organization’s public relations section or department

Kokuei hōsō

国営放送

n.

National broadcasting

Kōkyō hōsō

公共放送

n.

Public broadcasting

Komentētā

コメンテーター

n.

Commentator

Kōnā

コーナー

n.

Corner; special broadcasting segment

Kone

コネ

n.

Connections; ties

Kōza

講座

n.

Course (of lectures)

Kyōryoku-​sha

協力者

n.

Cooperative worker; collaborator

Manga

漫画

n.

Cartoon; comic book

Manga-​ka

漫画家

n.

Cartoonist

Manzai

漫才

n.

Comic (stage) dialogue; comic backchat

Manzai-​shi

漫才師

n.

Comic dialogist

Mise-​shōkai

店紹介

n.

Information about shops or restaurants

Nagare

流れ

n.

Stream; current

Nama

生

n.

Raw; draft (beer); unprocessed

Ninjō

人情

n.

Human or personal feelings; humanity

Ōeru

オーエル

n.

Office lady

Omoiyari

思いやり

n.

Consideration; thoughtfulness; empathy

Omote

表

n.

Front; face; exterior; outside; right side

Onnarashisa

女らしさ

n.

Femininity; womanliness

Otaku

御宅　

n.

Your; your house; you

Otokorashisa

男らしさ

n.

Masculinity; manliness

Rakugo

落語

n.

Traditional Japanese comic story telling

Rakugo-​ka

落語家

n.

A professional comic storyteller

Regyurā

レギュラー

adj., n.

Regular

Risāchi

リサーチ

n.

Research

Sangyō damashī

産業魂

n.

Company spirit

Sararīman

サラリーマン

n.

A salaried worker; an office worker; a white-​collar worker

Seisaku-​bu

制作部

n.

The production department (in media organizations)

 161

Glossary 161 Sempai

先輩

n.

Senior

Sengyōshufu

専業主婦

n.

Professional housewife; full-​ time housewife

Shichōsha

視聴者　

n.

A (TV) viewer; an audience

Shijimi

蜆　

n.

A Japanese clam

Shitamachi

下町

n.

Derived from shita (down) and machi (town) –​the town below the castle walls; a city’s mercantile quarter

Shufu

主婦

n.

A housewife

Soto

外

n.

The outside; exterior

Sūpā

スーパー

n.

Superimposition; supermarket

Tadashī

正しい

adj.

Right; correct; proper

Tanoshī

楽しい

adj.

Enjoyable; fun

Tarento

タレント

n.

A celebrity; a star; a (TV or other media) personality

Tatemae

建前

n.

Principle; one’s public behaviour; the surface reality

Terebi

テレビ

n.

A television

Torizara

取り皿

n.

A small serving dish

Uchi

内・家

n.

The inside; interior; (one’s own) house

Umi-​zoi

海沿い

n.

The coastlands

Unmei kyōdōtai

運命共同体

n.

A community bound by the same destiny; common destiny

Ura

裏

n.

Back; underside; wrong side

Wakariyasui

分かり易い

adj.

Easy to understand; intelligible; plain; simple

Washi

和紙

n.

(Traditional) Japanese paper

Yama-​zoi

山沿い

n.

Mountainous area

Yukata

浴衣

n.

Informal summer kimono

Zōri

草履

n.

Thonged slippers (sandals); Japanese footwear

162

Index

Abe, Y. 66n20 Agar, M. 39 Algan, E. 53 Allen, R. C. 2, 152 amae 21 Anderson, B. 19, 91 anime 21, 31n8, 84n5 Archer, A. 126 Asada, T. 29 Asahi Shimbun 149, 155n7 Asaichi 13n4 Atkinson, P. A. 38–​40 Auslander, P. 152 Bachnik, J. 5, 9, 87–​89, 93, 146 Bae, J. 63 Baldry, A. 7 Befu, H. 19–​20, 30n5, 153 Bennet, W. L. 133n49, 150 Berenstein, R. J. 152 Berger, A. A. 40–​41 Biltereyst, D. 134n49 Bociurkiw, M. 30n7 Brants, K. 10, 23, 25, 130n12 Brecher, W. P. 31n12, 48 Brennen, B. 38 Bruck, P. A. 7 Bruyn, S. T. 40 Buckley, S. 5, 17, 27 Calabrese, A. 24 Cangöz, I. 112 centrality of television 11, 17 channel of discourse Charles, N., 129n5 Chen, G. M. 3, 153 China xi, 17, 115 Chun, J. 17, 19 Clammer, J. 4, 5, 11, 26, 31n12, 48, 126, 141, 155n10

commercialized form of information transmission 12, 72; forms of televisual discourses 10; methods xv; nodal discourses 3; televisual sphere 9 commodified form of televisual communication 87; information 102, 141; knowledge 11, 70, 76, 141, 143; mode of communication 4; realm of trendy dramas 80; tabloid content 81; televisual knowledge 83, 130; uchi 4 Conrad, J. 155n11 content analysis 4, 10, 37, 109, 150 Cooper-​Chen, A. 26, 87, 144 corner 6–​7, 11, 13n4, 28, 30, 43–​49, 51–​82, 89–​97, 108–​115, 127–​131n31 see kōnā; border skipping 29; strategy 9, 49 Corner, J. 25 cultural discourse xiv, xv, 3, 4, 5, 87, 99, 123, 146, 151, 153 Curran, J., 10 Dahlgren, P. 24–​25, 99–​100, 130n14, 153 Darling-​Wolf,  F.  26 Davis, H. H. 130 de Certeau, M. 132n42 de Mooij, M. K. 142 deai/​kei  18 Denzin, N. K. 39–​41 desk 7, 8, 48, 58, 61 DeVault, M. L. 129 Dey, I. 39 disappearing borders 2, 14 discourse of intimacy 9, 11, 12; of the uniqueness of Japan 19 discursive communication 10 Dissanayake, W. 3, 153–​154

 163

Index 163 Doi, T. 5, 88–​89, 151 Doraemon 21, 22 Dovey, J. 122, 125, 134n49 Eisenstadt, S. N. 70 Ellis, J. 98, 130n12, 144, 152 Emerson, R. M. 38–​39, 64 emotional discourses emotionalized mode of discourse 3 Ergül, H. xiv, 1, 8, 13n4, 25–​26, 38, 66n18, 84n1, 112–​113, 128n1–2, 140–​141 Esser, F. 10, 25, 123, 150 Extröm, M. 23, 26 Falzon, M. 53 Fairclough, N. 3 Far East 1 Feuer, J. 2 Fineman, S. 140 Fishman, M. 110 Freedman, A. 26 Fretz, R. I. 38–​39, 64 Fu, H. 31n10 furusato 3, 12, 20–​21, 43, 49, 91, 127, 144 Galbraith, P. W. 8, 26, 80 Garnham, N. 26 Geertz, C. 37, 39 Gencel-​Bek,  M.  25 gender bias 44 see gender imbalance; gender inequality; gender gap gender roles 11, 27, 31n14, 37, 44, 63–​64, 108, 112–​113, 126; equality 63; gap 28, 44 see gender bias; gender imbalance; gender inequality; imbalance 28 see gender bias; gender gap; gender inequality; inequality 51–​52, 58, 62–​64 see gender gap; gender bias; gender imbalance; norms 64; performances 28; positions 28; profiles 41, 108; relations 66n19 Gerow, A. 7–​8, 11, 123, 133n46 Gitlin, T. 25, 110 Goffman, E. 40, 52, 59, 65n14, 107 Gold, R. L. 40 Golding, P. 25, 140 Goldstein-​Gidoni, O. 28, 31n14, 63 Gökalp, E. 112 Great Tōhoku earthquake 18 Grisprud, J. 133n48 Gurevitch, M., 10

Hagiwara, S. 25, 26 Hall, S. 19, 30n6, 153 Hamabata, M. 5 Hambleton, A. 20 Hammersley, M. 40 Hanke, R. 64 Hansen, K. 18 Hartley, J. 10, 23–​24 Heinze, U. 28 Hendry, J. 46, 49, 92, 103–​105, 131n21, 146 Hinami, R., 7, 111 Hjorth, L. 18 Ho, M. H. S. 27 Hobson, D. 108, 112 hōdō bangumi Hofstede, G. 28 Holden, T. xiv, 8, 17, 18 homey place 3 Hourai, H. 132n38 Huang, C. 126 hybridized programmes 4 Ikoma, C., 17, 87, 144 image character 9 see imēji kyarakutā imagined community 19 Imamura, A. E. 75 imēji kyarakutā 9 see image character in-​depth interviews  4, 11 infotainment phenomenon 4; in the Japanese context 4; as the most Japanesque genre 8 info-​variety shows  2, 25 info-​wideshow  2, 27 information and communication technologies 9, 17 infotainment discourse xiv-​xv, 2, 4, 153–​154 Inoue, H. 115 intimate mode of communication 12, 93, 146, 152 Ishii, S. 3 Ishita, S. xiv, 8, 25, 27, 113, 150, 155n3 Ito, K. 127 Ivy, M. 20, 116 Iwabuchi, K. 119, 121, 148, 155n5 Iwao, S. 71 izakaya 22, 31n9, 38 Izumi, S. 124 Jacobs, J. 152 Jankowski, N. W. 38 Japanese cultural discourses 5; cultural nationalism 20, 92; ethnocentrism 20;

164

164 Index infotainment xiv, xv, 2–​3, 6, 11, 12, 20, 24, 70, 97, 90, 99, 107–​108, 125, 143, 145, 153-​ 154; media environment 10, 26; mediascape 7–​9, 19, 21, 38, 60, 92; nationalism 20, 92; TV broadcasting xiv-​xv, 1, 2, 8, 69, 111, 114, 130n11, 132n36, 139, 141; uchi-​like character of 9 Japaneseness 19–​20, 107 Jaspers, J. 103 Jensen, K. B., 38 jimusho 9, 47, 58, 62, 85n16, 115 jōhō-​baraetī 2, 26, 45 jōhō-​waidoshō 2, 27, 45 Jorgensen, D. L. 40 Kamimura, S. 17, 87, 144 Kaneko, K. 20 Karlin, J. G. 8, 9, 26, 80 Kawabata, M. xiv, 2, 10, 25–​26, 111, 113, 150 kawaī 22, 31n12, 105 Kellner, D. 23, 25, 143 keigo 3, 103–​104, 145, 154 Kerr, M. 129n5 Kinsella, S. 26, 126 Kirsch, G. xiv, 148 Kitayama, S. 88, 129n3 Klein, U. 24–​25 kōnā 7, 150 see corner Kondo, D. K. 5, 41, 88, 89, 99, 103 Kraus, E. 26 Langer, J. 10, 24–​25, 123, 150 Lebra, T. S. 5, 89, 123, 127, 151 LeVine, R. A. 123 Lin, H. S. 80 Lincoln, Y. S. 40 Livingstone, S. 25 Lukács, G. 79–​80 Lull, J. 40 Lumby, C. 24 Lunsing, W. 124 Lutz, C. 5 McCargo, D. 26 McChesney, R. 10, 69, 83 Machin, D. 38 McLachlan, S. 25 McVeigh, B. 5, 18 Manabe, K. 19, 30n1, 153 manga 1, 18, 22, 98, 124–​128 Marcus, G. E. 53 Maree, C. 7, 111

Markus, H. R. 88, 129n3 Martinez, D. P. 26, 48, 65n9 Marx, W. D. 9, 85 masculinity 28, 63–​64, 80, 98–​99, 106 May, T. 40 Maynard, M. 26 Maynard, S. K. 5 Meeuwis, M. 103 Miike, Y. 3, 154 Milroy, J. 103 Milroy, L. 103 Minami, M. 151 Miyagi prefecture 13n7, 21, 43, 45, 50–​51, 76, 83, 91–​92, 104–​105, 129, 141, 145, 146; employment 11, 51, 58, 62 Moeran, B. 26, 71, 75, 119 Morley, D. 130 Mosco, V. 4, 11, 70, 74, 140, 142 multifaceted approach 10, 139 Murdock, G. 10, 25, 100, 140 Mutlu, E. 25 Nakane, C. 5, 89 Nakano, S. 17, 87, 144 Neijens, P. 10, 25 nexus of discourses 3, 144, 151 Nightingale, V. 70, 82 nihonjinron 19–​20, 30n5, 92, 121, 146 nihonbunkaron 19, 30n5 nihonron 19, 30n5 non-​linguistic resources 2, 3, 153 Niyekawa, A. 104 Ogasawara, Y. 66n19 Okamoto, S. 103–​104 Oku, R. 17, 18, 30n3 omoiyari 3, 12, 123–​124, 126–​128, 130, 144, 151–​152, 154 Ōnuma, H. 13 organizational hierarchy 11, 37, 99, 103, 106 Oshima, K. 132n37 Otsuka, E. 8, 154n2 Ōta, T. Ōyama, N. 21, 22, 31n8 oyayubi bunka 18; sedai 18; zoku 18 Painter, A. A. 8, 21, 26, 57–​58, 87, 115, 117, 144, 154 Pardo, M. L. 2, 12n3, 151, 153 participant observations 4, 11, 37–​40, 42, 59, 63, 70, 107 Paterson, C. 11

 165

Index 165 Pels, D. 25 Pharr, S. 26 Postman, N. 25, 123 Powers, S. 25 Prah, K. K. 2, 12n3, 151, 153 Prieler, M. 20, 26 Prusa, I. 7 quasi-​intimacy 21, 105, 107–​108, 141 Quinn, C. 5, 88, 89, 94 rhetorical strategies xv, 4, 12, 19, 20, 103, 111, 153 Richie, D. 31n12 Robson, C. 40 Rosaldo, M. 5 Rosenberger, N. R. 88, 147 Saitō, K. 28 Santayana, G. 107 sararīman 22, 27, 31n10, 64 Satoh, S. 7, 111 Schudson, M. 110 Sendai xiv, 1, 4, 31n11, 43–​46, 53, 65n15, 70, 73, 81, 91–​96, 104–​106, 128n1, 129n10, 131n27 Shaw, L. L. 38–​39, 64 Shibamoto-​Smith, J. 103–​104 Shi-​xu 2, 3, 12n3, 19, 128n2, 151, 153 shitamachi 17, 30n1 Shizumi, H., 123 Skov, L., 71, 75, 119 Skrzypczak, E. R. 88 Slade, T. 26 Snowden, P. 88 soto 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 20–​21, 42, 87–​94, 98–​99, 127, 134n50, 144–​147, 152, 154 Sparks, C. 24, 100, 130n16 Spradley, J. P. 41–​42 Stefánsson, H. 6 Storey, J. 140 Sugawara, M. 65 Sugiyama, M. 25, 89 sūpā 7, 77, 124–​127, 133n46, 134n51, 139, 150 supra-​genre 4, 9, 24, 109 Suzuki, M. F. 28 tabloidization 1, 9, 11, 22, 24–​25, 42, 53–​54, 66n18, 70, 79, 83, 108–​109, 113, 121, 123, 131n19, 134n49, 142, 150, 153, 154n2, 155n4 Takahashi, T. 3, 19, 21, 26, 30n5, 38, 88, 153

Tanaka, L. 5 Taniguchi, M. xiv, 25, 118 Taplin, R. 41 tarento 6–​8, 20, 41, 57, 80, 111, 115, 117–​121, 133n44, 134n50, 142, 148 television opaque projector 7, 123 see telop televisual discourse xiv, 2–​3, 12, 153; uchi xiv, 3, 12, 49, 89, 92, 94, 99, 115, 117, 119, 127–​129n11, 144–​148, 153 telop 7, 123, 133n47 see television opaque projector Thibault, P. J. 7 Thussu, D. K. xiv, 2, 23, 25 Tobin, J. J. 89 Tōhoku region 21, 31, 45, 51, 92, 105, 129n7 Travis, C. 123 trivialization media sociology 1, 25 Tsuruki, T. 18 Tsurumi, S. 17 Tokyo xiv, 4, 18, 21, 30, 43, 47, 53–​60, 64n4-​65, 70, 77, 80–​81, 84n6, 90, 107–​108, 112–​116, 122–​123, 131n32, 148, 155n3 Tsai, E. 8 Tsutsui, W. M. 26 Tuchman, G. 110 Tulloch, J. 24 Turkey 1, xi, 11–​12, 38, 112 Turner, G. 2, 25 TV Asahi 21, 45, 57, 149 uchi xv, 2–​6, 9, 12, 20–​21, 40–​43, 49, 52, 71, 87–​90, 92–​95, 98–​99, 103–​105, 107–​108, 115, 118–​121, 127–​128, 129n11, 131n24, 134n50, 144–​155; local uchi 21, 145; uchi-​like 54, 151, 155n6 United States 17, 25 van Dijk, T. A. 110 van Maanen, J. 37, 39–​40, 64n1 van Zoonen, L. 25, 152 Waidoshō 2, 4, 27, 45, 78, 108 Walker, A. G. 39 Wasko, J. 25, 84n1 Wasserman, H. 24 Watanabe, T. 7, 25–​27, 70, 88, 155n3 Weina, R. 63 West, M. D. 6

166

166 Index West 12n1-​2 Western 1–​3, 7, 11, 12n2, 20–​25, 30, 77, 88, 108, 115, 120, 123, 125–​126, 132n37, 139, 150–​153; TV 11, 108, 115, 123, 126, 139; media 1, 12n2, 125, 128n2 Wetzel, P. J. 87, 103 Williams, R. 3, 10, 140 Woollacott, J. 10

Yamamoto, M. 63 Yamashiro, J. H. 5, 6 Yasutake, Y. 25 Yokozawa, A. 77 Yoshimi, S. 17–​19, 144 Yoshimoto, M. 3, 8, 17, 20, 84n3, 117–​118, 120 Yū Yū Miyagi 13n7, 51, 65n12, 129n11, 131n22