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                

Television and nationalism Historical change in the national domestic TV formation of postwar Japan

Shunya Yoshimi University of Tokyo

A B S T R A C T This article attempts to throw some light on the linkage

between television and nationalism in contemporary Japan, focusing on: 1)

the historical development of TV as a symbolic object in everyday life; 2) TV

as a technology of time–space articulation; and 3) the textual formation of

TV programs. By the late 1950s, TV sets were placed not in homes, but on

street corners, where large numbers of people gathered. The symbolic

meaning of the ‘collective’ nature of TV changed after the 1960s. From the

early 1960s onwards, when TV entered households, it became an overarching

medium linking the family with the state, defining the national

consciousness and dominating people’s imaginative views of both the past and

the present. This article analyzes the ideological relationship between gender,

technology and nationalism in TV images through the postwar period. But

TV also provides a flow of information and discursive structures for the

horizons of the social imagination. Thus, the article also shows how TV

broadcasting was structured around the three nationwide time zones of

morning, midday and evening. Through these time zones, it was possible to

link domestic memories with national history via its major programs. The

stability of TV as a national medium was threatened in all these dimensions

from the late 1980s. Increasingly, media became personalized, transgressive

and transnational. Despite the gradual break-up of the stable position of TV

in households and the national timetable constructed through broadcasting,

more powerful and aggressive national times and discourses have come into

being in the face of crises. In the context of this contradictory situation, the

dominant central TV stations in Japan today are becoming increasingly

stagnant while, on the other hand, the internet and independent video

journalism are showing greater dynamism.

K E Y W O R D S domestication , emperor system, identity, public viewing, technology

and New Delhi Vol () 459–487

[1367-5494(200311)6:4; 459–487; 038063] www.sagepublications.com

      

www.sagepublications.com

Introduction

Among all the forms of media, it is television that has had the most

special significance and influence in postwar Japan. Throughout the 20th

century, our lives have been bound up with various forms of media, but,

among these, TV in particular has played a privileged role. Even today,

Japanese people watch on average more than three hours per day,

making it the second largest use of their time after sleeping. TV forms a

major part of the lives of people all over the world, but it is above all in

Japan that it has come to play such a central role in the culture of daily

life, besides simply being a major source of influence. A survey carried

out in 2002 by NHK (Japan Broadcasting Association) Broadcasting

Culture Research Institute (2003) shows that 23 percent of the Japanese

population watch TV for an average five hours or more per day. This is

close to double the figure for the United States or France (14 percent). In

the same survey, 23 percent of Japanese surveyed place TV at the top of a

list of items deemed necessary for daily life. This figure is 4.6 times

greater than for Americans (5 percent), 2.3 times greater than for the

French (10 percent) and close to double the figure obtained among

people surveyed in Thailand (13 percent). From an international com-

parative perspective, few nations attach as much importance to TV as do

the Japanese. Whereas, in the US, it is Hollywood movies that have been

most closely associated with the national identity, in Japan it is TV that

has occupied this role. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that

Walt Disney rose to national prominence through making films whereas

Tezuka Osamu attained a similar national status as a creator of stories for

children in Japan by producing animated cartoons for television (of

which the most well known is Atom Boy). In postwar Japan, TV became the most important ideological apparatus for the creation of a new form

of nationalism, different in one respect from the nationalism of the

wartime era and before. In this article, I want to throw some light on this

linkage between TV and nationalism in contemporary Japan, focussing

on three aspects or dimensions: 1) the historical development of TV as a

symbolic object in everyday life; 2) TV as a technology of time–space

articulation; and 3) the textual formation of TV programs.

Nationalism in the TV of the transitional era

Since the 1990s, two apparently contradictory tendencies have come to

the surface in the Japanese media. On the one hand, media organizations

such as NHK and Fuji Television have been quick to respond to the trend

towards globalization by forming alliances between Japanese and foreign

or global media capital, outsourcing program production and par-

ticipating in the international market for program software. This is the

face that the media present to the outside world. On the other hand,

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however, there has also been a consistent trend towards more rigid media

control in a nationalistic direction. This is seen in the content of the

programs and articles now being produced in the media and in increased

intervention by media management towards journalists and program

producers. This trend is particularly evident in Japan’s largest media

organizations, such as NHK and Yomiuri Shimbun. Thus, since the

1990s, the Japanese media have expanded financially and organization-

ally so that their sphere of activity now transcends the nation state while,

at the same time, becoming increasingly nationalistic on the level of

ideology and discourse.

The coexistence of these two tendencies is certainly not without

contradiction. This is illustrated in the case of an NHK program called

Wartime Sexual Violence in Question, which was broadcast on 30 January 2001. When producers working on this program attempted to deal with

the issue of wartime sexual violence from a perspective sensitive to the

concerns of the international feminist network, they met resistance from

station managers, forcing a major revision of the program’s content.

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with this incident, let me explain

briefly. The issue goes back to the Women’s International War Crimes

Tribunal, organized in December 2000 by a group of international NGOs

in order to reassess the responsibility of Emperor Hirohito and the

Japanese government with respect to the wartime system of recruiting

‘comfort women’ for the Japanese military. Several months prior to the

opening of this tribunal, directors in NHK’s General Education

Department recognized its historical significance and requested that a

production company produce a documentary about it. The preparations

leading up to the tribunal were covered as planned and the production

staff went ahead with the process of putting together the program.

However, in January 2001, just 10 days before the scheduled broadcast,

members of NHK’s top management were given a preview of the

program, as a result of which there was a sudden change of attitude and

pressure arose for a revision of the program’s content. Despite the fact

that it was NHK that originally proposed the production of such a pro-

gram, responsibility for the problems that occurred was foisted onto the

production company. In the end, the efforts of the program directors

were rendered worthless and, with only a few hours to spare before the

broadcast, the program was revised root and branch by the station

managers themselves. After the broadcast, NHK was subjected to a

barrage of protests, criticisms and confessions from intellectuals and

citizen groups.

Nevertheless, it became clear that, although this program revision had

been a very messy and coercive process – or, indeed, precisely because it

had been so – in terms of the representations erased, it had been done

extremely systematically and thoroughly. First, one aspect of the tribunal

deliberately erased in the revision were the defendants themselves, the 461

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agents of wartime sexual violence. These included the Japanese military

personnel who repeatedly committed rape and sexual abuse against the

women in the so-called ‘comfort stations’, the Japanese state, which

pursued the policy of setting up these comfort stations during the war, and

the man who occupied the top position in the government of the time,

Emperor Hirohito. This erasure of the agents of violence is clearly shown

in the following program revisions: 1) the program title itself was altered

from Japanese Military Wartime Sexual Violence in Question to Wartime Sexual Violence in Question; 2) testimony given at the tribunal by former Japanese soldiers was excluded from the broadcast version; 3) the scene

from the tribunal in which the ‘verdict’ recognizing the responsibility of

the Japanese government and Emperor Hirohito was delivered was not

shown; and 4) statements made in the discussion referring to the

responsibility of the Japanese government and military were erased to the

extent that the flow of dialogue was completely disrupted.

However, these were not the only revisions. Not only were the agents

of wartime sexual violence erased, so too were the agents seeking to

revive and reassess the forgotten past by initiating the tribunal. These

included the international feminist network supporting the movement

for justice and compensation for the former comfort women. As a result

of these revisions, the program gave viewers no idea as to who organized

the tribunal or who was being accused. Although it was ostensibly a

program about the tribunal, it deliberately failed to represent the tri-

bunal for what it really was. In the process of revision, an interview with

a conservative historian was inserted into the program in which it was

emphasized that the tribunal did not live up to the criteria of a ‘trial’

such as other existing trials in Japan. Doubt was thus cast on the very

existence of the ‘tribunal’, as such. The announcer’s commentary also

stressed that it was nothing more than a ‘mock trial’, that its verdict was

not legally binding and that the victims’ testimony could not be verified.

As a consequence, the women who had been forced to be comfort women

were reduced from being prosecuting agents to mere objects of

observation. Their expressions of outrage were not permitted to move

viewers’ hearts, becoming no more than a commonplace matter of

passing interest.

Thus, we can clearly see the extremely systematic and structural

nature of the revisions carried out by NHK and how seriously they put

into question the very foundations of public broadcasting in postwar

Japan. Generally speaking, in the Japanese mass media (especially TV),

editorial control over program content is monopolized by the managerial

elite. During the American military occupation following the Second

World War, GHQ adopted the policy of conferring on media managers

absolute and wideranging power over editorial matters. This was in order

to exclude the influence of trade unions on newspaper editing and

prevent communist infiltration. Clearly reflecting the authoritarian

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nature of occupation policy in general, this policy was established in the

‘Declaration on Securing the Editorial Rights of Newspapers’ issued by

the Japanese Press Association in 1948. Although initially applying only

to print media, this was later extended to TV as well. Even in 1970, NHK

issued the following public statement of opinion on editorial rights: ‘This

right is central to the executive authority of the corporation president,

and furthermore extends to the furthest reaches of broadcasting manage-

ment, in accordance with the corporation’s internal structure of executive

authority.’ Program-makers are thus denied any authority over program

editing.

This kind of power structure has enabled management in the Japanese

media to intervene constantly in program-making. Until the 1980s, the

concentration of editorial control in the hands of TV managers remained

largely unquestioned. However, since the end of the 1980s, in parallel

with the expansion of major Japanese stations into transnational net-

works, managers have increasingly exercised their monopoly of editorial

power to intervene in program content. At the same time, such inter-

vention has become a matter of growing critical concern. The question

we need to consider, therefore, is why this kind of problem did not arise

so decisively during the ‘golden era’ of TV’s development. In order to

deal with this issue, we must take another look at the relationship

between TV and nationalism in postwar Japan from the perspective of

the role of TV in people’s everyday lives.

Open-air TV and the consumption of professional wrestling

In Japan, many of the early TV sets were placed not in the home, but on

street corners, in front of railway stations and in parks, where large

numbers of people gathered. Thus, TV in the mid-1950s was something

like an ‘open-air theater’ (Gaitou Terebi). This open-air TV has its origins in the marketing strategy of Nihon Terebi (NTV), a commercial

station that started up in 1953, almost at the same time as NHK. At that

time, a TV set cost about ¥20,000. Since the starting salary for a

university graduate was only ¥8000 per month, TVs were still luxury

items that most households could not afford. NTV installed 220 large

screen TVs, 55 in front of railway stations and others in places where

large numbers of people gathered. Even though most people could not

afford a TV, there was still widespread interest in the new medium.

NTV’s intention was to encourage this interest and instill in people the

desire to buy their own TV sets, besides boosting the station’s advertising

revenue. Open-air TV proved to be very popular and every day large

crowds gathered to watch. Most popular of all were the relays of

professional wrestling. When these were being shown, as many as several

thousand people would gather in front of a single screen. 463

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It must be emphasized that the popularity of open-air TV occurred

before the general distribution of household TVs. When NHK started

broadcasting in 1953, a mere 866 households had contracts to receive

the broadcasts. Although this number had risen to 50,000 by 1955, the

number of people watching TV outside amidst a crowd far exceeded

the number of people watching at home until the late 1950s. In Septem-

ber 1953, NTV conducted on-site surveys at the places where open-air

TV sets were located, according to which there were on average a total of

9200 viewers at any given time, each of whom spent on average 30

minutes standing in front of the screen. From these results it was extra-

polated that the average number of daily viewers numbered in excess of

10,000. In those early days of broadcasting, watching open-air TV was far

more significant than viewing within the home. Open-air TV was

important not only as the stimulus for the quantitative growth of TV

viewing, but also reflected a linkage between TV and the popular imag-

ination characteristic of a certain postwar period. The greatest strength

of open-air TV was not drama or documentary, but the relaying of sports

events. Without a doubt, it was professional wrestling matches featuring

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Figure 1. People gathered in front of Gaitou Telebi when a boxing match was taking place, May 1955. Source: Hideo Tsumura (1955) Shinbun Houdou Shashin Kessaku Shuu 1955 (All Asahi Press Photography 1955). Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun. Reproduced with kind permission

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the wrestler Rikidouzan that were the greatest showpieces of open-air

TV. Due to the limitations of camera technology at the time, action

unfolding over a wide space, such as baseball, was difficult to cover. By

contrast, professional wrestling, whose high-speed action was confined to

a small ring, was ideally suited as a genre for TV. As succinctly described

by Naoki Inose, in postwar Japan, the ‘existence of television was

dependent on professional wrestling, and the existence of professional

wrestling depended on television. Rikidouzan became a hero thanks to

television, and television gained an audience by giving birth to such

heroes’ (1990: 285–6).

Rikidouzan’s showmanship was American-inspired and always con-

scious of the TV camera. On the screen, he played out a scenario in which

he performed the role of a brave Japanese wrestler confronting foul-

playing giant American wrestlers. This formidable performer skillfully

established postwar Japan’s convoluted pseudo-anti-Americanism in the

medium of TV. Whereas other professional wrestlers based in the Osaka

and Kyushu regions saw in wrestling nothing more than a combative

sport, Rikidouzan perceived that professional wrestling was no mere

sport, but a national symbolic drama performed to an audience of several

million people gathered in front of the TV. In this way, he gained his

great success by resonating his own brilliant performance with people’s

convoluted feelings towards all things American. Thus it was in February

1954, in his first tag match with the Sharp brothers, that he knocked

down his giant American opponent with a karate chop to a groundswell

of cheers from the excited crowds.

The overwhelming nature of professional wrestling’s popularity in the

1950s can also be seen in the contemporaneous fad of imitative ‘wrestling 465

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Figure 2. People gathered in front of Gaitou Telebi on a normal day. Reproduced with kind permission Source: Nihou Telebi Housoumou Shashihensanshitsu (1978), Taishuu to tomoni 25 nen (25 Years with People). Tokyo: Nihon Terebi.

games’ among children. This phenomenon developed into a social

problem when it gave rise to injuries and even deaths. In November 1955,

for instance, a sixth-grade elementary school pupil in Maebashi (Gunma

prefecture) died as the result of being kicked while pretending to be a

professional wrestler. As such incidents became frequent and public

criticism of professional wrestling mounted, Rikidouzan made repeated

appeals to the effect that wrestling was a ‘professional sport valuing

sportsmanship’, required intensive training and was not a children’s

game. Professional wrestling retained its popularity throughout the

1950s, irrespective of the number of these incidents. Newspapers con-

tinued to report numerous cases of disturbance associated with relayed

broadcasts of professional wrestling. These include a case where people in

a public bath got into a fight over seats for watching the broadcasts and a

case in which so many people packed into a house to watch a match that

the floor collapsed. Even as late as the early 1960s, by which time TV sets

in the home had become widespread, wrestling match relays still had far

higher audience ratings than any other type of program. For example, in

October 1960, the audience rating for the professional wrestling relay

was 50.3 percent, far ahead of the second most popular program (which

was the American program A Dog Called Lassie) at 36.7 percent. From the late 1950s, open-air TV lost its position of dominance to

indoor and domestic TV. Realizing that the success of open-air TV could

be used to attract more customers, owners of shops and restaurants began

installing TV sets inside their premises or in their windows. Thus, TV

moved from the open air to the indoors of commercial establishments

and, finally, to the home. With this shift in the ‘place for watching TV’,

the social significance of TV as a form of media changed. Asahi Shimbun had already pronounced, in its 9 September 1955 edition, that open-air

TV’s popularity had passed its peak and that the place of TV was shifting

‘from the outdoors to the home’. The article also stated:

Around the time that commercial stations were setting up open-air

televisions in great numbers, the sponsors did not think that the people

gathered there would become good television set buyers. The new stratum of

TV viewers, however, are well within the bounds of prospective buyers. (p.4)

As this trend continued, the focus of TV programming shifted from

sports relays to programs more suited to ‘relaxed domestic viewing’ such

as dramas and studio programs.

Indeed, the relaying of professional wrestling matches was clearly out of

step with the development of TV as a medium for domestic entertainment.

In the early 1960s, a survey showed that professional wrestling match

relays were the type of program most often cited as ‘trashy’ and ‘unfit for

domestic viewing’ by commercial TV viewers (Kokumin Seiji Kenkyukai, 1964). Although such relays were still overwhelmingly popular in terms of

their ratings, they had also become the object of intense criticism as

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deviant and unsuitable for domestic TV. The type of incidents associated

with wrestling relays shifted from those in which people were actively

involved to cases emphasizing the ill effects of the relays on people. A

typical case occurred in April 1962 when it was widely reported that two

elderly people watching a Rikidouzan match ‘died of shock’ at the cruelty

of what was being shown. In reality, the two individuals concerned

suffered from existing heart conditions and there was no proof of any

causal link between the content of the program and their deaths, even

considering the overwhelmingly high audience ratings of the program.

Nevertheless, newspaper coverage particularly emphasized the ‘cruelty’ of

professional wrestling. Reports of violent acts by professional wrestlers

further damaged the reputation of the sport, and its image became sullied

by the stain of deviance. When Rikidouzan was stabbed to death by a

gangster in December 1963, the indifferent attitude displayed in the press

towards the death of this postwar ‘hero’ hardly came as any surprise.

The transition from an age when people crowded around small screens

to peer at the rough and tumble of professional wrestling to an age in

which the whole nation sat in their living rooms to gaze at the nuptial

parade of the prince and princess shares some parallels with the tran-

sition from the 1920s to the 1930s in America, when the cinema was

transformed from a disreputable pastime of the urban working class to

an honorable national medium. This parallel is confirmed when one

considers in detail the kinds of places where open-air TV sets were

located. In 1950s Tokyo, open-air TVs were located not only in places of

popular leisure and entertainment (sakariba), such as Hibiya Park, Ginza Yonchome and the west side of Shinjuku, but also in the grounds of

temples and shrines frequented by the working class. These latter sites

included Koto Rakutenchi, Asakusa Kannon, Suitengu, Sugamo

Togenuki Jizo and Kagurazaka Bishamonten. Among the railway stations

where open-air TVs were installed, the majority were located in the

eastern part of the city, near the coast where factories were concentrated.

These included Ueno, Shinagawa, Asakusa, Gotanda, Omori and

Kawasaki as well as 16 stations on the Keisei line and four on the Keihin

line. By contrast, in the middle-class residential districts of western

Tokyo, there were surprisingly few open-air TV viewing places in

proportion to the population. There was therefore a major regional gap

between the areas where open-air TV was concentrated in the early

phases of its development and the areas that led the way during the later

expansion of domestic indoor TV.

The royal wedding and the ‘three sacred treasures’ of the postwar family

From the early 1960s onwards, TV became an overarching medium

linking the family with the state, defining the national consciousness and 467

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dominating people’s imaginative views of both the past and the present.

Professional wrestling, which had once been the mainstay of TV

broadcasting in its early stages, had to be pushed to the margins of this

new form of TV as a national medium. During the 1960s, new forms of

TV culture emerged from within the sphere of family life, into which

tiny TV sets had been introduced, although they were still very

expensive for ordinary people in Japan. In parallel with this change in

the location of TV, the role of the hero(ine) in Japanese TV culture was

transferred from ‘Riki’ (Rikidouzan) to ‘Micchie’. Micchie was the

nickname given to Michiko Shouda, who had become engaged to Prince

Akihito, the elder son of Emperor Hirohito. After the announcement of

their engagement in 1958, a popular fad for the new princess emerged all

over the country. Furthermore, the emerging TV networks mobilized this

fad with their full strength. The image on the TV screen with which

people now wanted to identify was no longer so much the karate chop

delivered by a small Japanese wrestler against a monstrous American

opponent, but instead the happy smile of the new beautiful princess who

was said to have been chosen from among the ‘ordinary people’.

The number of TVs registered in Japan had already exceeded 1

million by April 1958, but the number increased even further later that

year when the engagement was announced. It exceeded 2 million in

April 1959 and 3 million by October the same year. Behind this rapid

popularization of TV was the relay broadcast of the marriage parade in

April 1959 and the highlighting of a series of ‘fevers’, in which three

stations (NHK, NTV and KRT) competed with one another. For each

station, there were around 40 TV cameras arranged and lined up along

the roadside. Each station sent approximately 10 relay broadcast vehicles

to strategic places. The cameras pursued the passing horsedrawn carriage

by moving in parallel with it and tried to take close-up photographs of

the prince and princess’s expressions. Each station laid down rails for

carrying trucks that would transport TV cameras anywhere along the

roadside and also devised a plan to shoot the procession from a bird’s-eye

view by placing a camera on top of a large-scale crane more than 5m

high.

Takahashi Akira et al. (1959) have conducted a study of the con-

nection between TV and the popular classes with regard to the marriage

parade. They emphasize that the TV screen structured an image that

clearly surpassed the actual sightseeing experience along the roadside

and exerted a powerful influence on the viewers’ ‘feelings about the

emperor system’: ‘While the sightseers watching the parade from the

roadside come in contact with the “real thing”, that experience does not

go beyond one point along the total distance of 8.8 kilometers.’ In

contrast, ‘the site as it is reconstructed’ on TV connects close-ups of the

hero and heroine with the motion of the frenzied crowd, thus creating an

impression of going beyond the momentary contact of sightseeing. In

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addition, the TV commentary, by building a bridge from one screen to

another, instantly projects the entire structure and mood of the parade.

Takahashi et al. conducted a sample survey of TV viewing among

approximately 600 households whose residents lived along the route of

the marriage parade. According to this study, the majority ‘gave up their

chance that was bestowed by geographical proximity, and turned to “the

site as it is reconstructed” ’. However, when the viewers gave a reason for

their choice, they did not cite the ‘passive’ reason of the unprecedented

crowding of the roadsides predicted by the media; rather, they stated that

TV enabled them to see the whole picture, while only part could be seen

from the roadside, or that more than that ‘seen by the eye’ could be

understood by watching TV because of the announcers and commen-

tators. Takahashi et al. suggest that the dramatization of the marriage

event by the media translated into a victory over the desires of the people

for direct experience.

The above study shows that, for many Japanese people, the marriage

ceremony of the prince was a TV experience whereby they individually

received within their homes a festive portrait edited for their

consumption. In fact, the number of people who watched the parade on

TV was estimated to have reached nearly 15 million, while the number

of people who actually went to the parade was not above 500,000. The

marriage of the prince, as an event that symbolizes the birth of the

popular emperor system, materialized primarily within the TV screen.

Furthermore, in line with the structural principles of the space of

imagery, the close-up of the prince and princess inside the horsedrawn

carriage was the image that garnered the greatest attention. Each TV

company invested a great deal of effort in shooting close-ups of the

couple’s cheerful expressions. For example, NTV distributed its cameras

and adopted the slogan ‘The Up Couple!’ as the pillar of its entire

coverage of the parade. The close-up image itself, cut off from the

surrounding setting and enhanced by sound effects, was made into a

snapshot ready for consumption. The imagination surrounding this

image approximates that of snapshots, which try to show this century’s

stars in a familiar way.

In the course of the shift from the period when tremendously large

crowds had thronged around open-air TV screens to the period when

innumerable eyes concentrated on the happy smile of the princess on the

TV placed in the living room, a structural transformation took place in

the definition of TV. In a sense, this change of definition can be

compared to the change in the definition of movies in US national

culture during the 1930s, when movies were transformed from a

disreputable urban entertainment for the poor laboring classes to a

special emblem of American national culture. Throughout the 1960s, TV

as the ‘national media’ attained a special position through which

Japanese people reconstructed their national memory and identity and 469

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also their image of the future. After the 1960s, within this TV as national

media, there was no space for professional wrestling to retain the centri-

petal role it had played in the formation of early TV culture.

What, therefore, did the TV set placed in each Japanese household

after the 1960s mean for the ordinary Japanese? The most familiar image

of the TV set at the time was that of being one of the principal ‘kaden’ (domestic electrical appliances). In the mid-1950s, the words kaden and katei denka (home electrification) had not yet even come into use. In addition, the appliances that became the major kaden in later years (such as washing machines, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners) had not

necessarily been major products in the first half of the 1950s. According

to a survey on the proliferation of electrical appliances in households

conducted by Kansai Electric Power Company in 1951, the top electrical

appliances in use then were the radio (67 percent), the electric iron (38

percent) and the electric kitchen stove (23.5 percent). Therefore, the

electrical appliances that people most wanted to buy in the near future

were not refrigerators or washing machines, nor of course TVs.

However, a new image appeared after the mid-1950s. The symbolic

change in the image of home electrical appliances from the mid-1950s is

reflected in the expression Sanshu no Jingi (three sacred treasures). This prevalent expression referred specifically to the washing machine, the

refrigerator and the black and white TV. Although these appliances were

quite expensive for the standard family at that time, they rapidly became

popular among Japanese households. In 1955, the proportion of house-

holds owning washing machines was 4 percent and the figures for TV

sets and refrigerators were both less than 1 percent. However, the use of

these appliances increased rapidly and, by 1960, 45 percent of Japanese

homes had acquired washing machines, 54 percent had TVs and 15

percent had refrigerators. By the 1970s, the figures for all of these

appliances had exceeded 90 percent.

Although there are various arguments about the origins of the

expression Sanshu no Jingi, there is no doubt that it appears in the same context as the naming of the economic boom that began in 1955 as the

‘Jinmu boom’ (Jinmu was a mythological emperor in the ancient period).

The next economic boom in the 1960s was then called the ‘Izanagi boom

(Izanagi was also a mythological figure). The phrase has something to do

with the prevailing trend since the late 1950s to talk about the economy

in terms of images taken from Japanese mythological antiquity, which

was reinforced by nationalistic discourses. What is important, therefore,

is the mythical meaning that the expression inherently holds. The

original ‘three sacred treasures’, consisting of the sword, the jewel and

the mirror, are national symbols for authenticating the position of the

emperor as the ruler of the Japanese archipelago and they were empha-

sized during the formation of the modern nation state. However, this

expression has been used in the private domain since the late 1950s as a

                                6 ( 4 )

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       :                        

symbol for authenticating the identity of the individual household as a

‘modern family’.

Besides this, according to the testimonies of many people who lived at

the time, TV was not something that they ‘bought’, but something that

‘came to’ their home. For example, the Association of Japanese Commer-

cial Broadcasting Networks received 454 letters from the general public

about their memories of the role of TV in their lives. Among these, one

woman, who was only 10 years old in 1960, wrote that she cried with

excitement when her family bought a small secondhand TV: ‘TV has

come!’ She also wrote that many school children talked about the

‘coming’ of TV while playing at school. TV was something more than an

artifact or a machine for them. Perhaps we can say that it seemed more

similar to a respected person who suddenly came to one’s home. Such a

person used to be regarded as a ‘living god’ by Japanese in the country-

side before the modern period. Beginning in the 1890s, the Japanese

government distributed the Emperor’s portrait photograph (Goshinei) all over the country, and each village and school celebrated the ‘coming’ of

the photograph. There was a similar mentality among postwar Japanese

when they welcomed the ‘coming’ of the TV to their home.

This symbolic importance of TV to the ordinary postwar Japanese

family is also corroborated by the fact that Japanese families tended to

cling to TV much more than did Americans up to the 1970s. In the early

1970s, NHK’s Broadcasting Culture Research Institute comparatively

surveyed the attitudes of Japanese and Americans towards some

important consumer goods. They asked the respondents what they would

choose if they could only bring one item from among the TV, car,

newspaper, telephone and refrigerator to a new life in an out-of-the-way

place. According to this survey, 41 percent of Americans answered that

they would bring the car, 38 percent the refrigerator, 11 percent the

telephone, while only 5 percent chose the TV. In contrast to this result,

37 percent of Japanese respondents answered that they would bring the

TV. Only 12 percent of Japanese said they would bring the car. Thus, at

least until the 1970s, TV had a special symbolic value for ordinary

Japanese people.

The housewife and engineer as symbols of national and domestic identity

In order to think about changes in the social images of TV associated

with domestic appliances in the postwar period, it is convenient to look at

ads for electric appliances. It was only after the 1950s that electric

appliances became the major item in the field of advertising in Japan.

Before this, Japanese ads used to be mainly for medicine, cosmetics or

books. For example, in 1930, ads for medicines occupied 23.8 percent of

the total advertising space in newspapers. Cosmetics occupied 16.7 471

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percent and books 12.8 percent. Compared to these items, ads for

‘machines’ (including electric appliances) represented only 4.5 percent of

ads, and yet, by the end of the 1950s, ads for machines had become a

major item. In 1958, the advertising expenditures for medicine and

machines were nearly the same and each of them took more than 15

percent of the total advertising expenditure of Japanese companies. The

following year, in 1959, the proportion of machine ads became 18.4

percent, far surpassing the figure for medicine ads. Since the end of the

1950s, ads for electric appliances have been the central images in the

world of Japanese consumer goods.

From a semiotic perspective, many of the prewar radio ads focussed on

young women in a manner that was reminiscent of the image of the

‘modern girl’ and presented the radio as a symbol of urban modernism.

The radio was closely associated with city life, but not yet connected with

‘home electrification’. The relationship between the man who performs

the music on the production side and the woman who listens to the music

on the consumption side is symbolized in the style of urban modernism.

This tendency did not change during the last half of the 1930s and the

recipients of such advertising were still young women; that is, in these

commercial images, there is a metaphorical relationship uniting the

modernity of the products with the modernity of young urban women.

At this point, when women appeared in the ads for electric appliances,

they were positioned as symbols for the modernity of the products to be

sold. They were not portrayed as ‘housewives’, users of electric appliances

in the home.

This disposition continued even into the postwar period. The female

models presented in ads were indeed related to the images of movie stars

and were equated with the modernity of products, not with the domestic

image of the housewife. At the same time, in the ads of the postwar

period, there was often use of the image of America as the symbol of

‘affluence’. In an ad for Japan Columbia Records in 1949, Shizuko Kasagi

(a popular singer at the time) merrily advocated the American way of

life. Matsushita also had a radio ad that declared the coming of ‘two

radios to a home as clearly expressing America’. In particular, ads in 1951

stressed the big difference in the use of household electric appliances

between America and Japan: ‘In America, cooking, laundry, cleaning, and

house work are all done by electricity, while in Japan, only ten percent of

the population has a radio and the introduction of household electric

appliances is still a long way off.’ While the image of women in the ads of

the postwar period retained the image of the ‘modern girl’, housewives

appeared as the subjects who promoted the strategy of home electri-

fication and the development of the ‘American way of life’.

It was around the middle of the 1950s that the housewife image as a

symbol of the American way of life appeared in the postwar ads of

Japanese electric appliance manufacturers. In an ad by Matsushita in

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       :                        

1953, the following copy appeared: ‘From the moment you wake up in

the morning until the moment you go to bed at night, having electric

appliances in the home will fill your life with joy.’ It was not only

Matsushita who connected the American lifestyle with the use of many

electric appliances. Sanyo Electric used Michiyo Kogure as ‘Mrs Sanyo’

and pushed the connection between electric appliances and the American

lifestyle to the fore. In an ad for washing machines in 1954, Sanyo

proudly announced that their product was the ‘agitator type that is most

popular in America and Europe’. In one of Matsushita’s ads, electric

appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, mixers, radios, TV

sets, electric fans, electric rice cookers and vacuum cleaners surrounded

the smiling Hideko Takamine (very popular movie actress). The copy for

this ad, ‘Madame smiles as she buys the products one after another’,

created an ideal image of a new home life in which the housewife was in

the middle, surrounded by various household electric appliances.

In the images equating the introduction of electric appliances with

Americanization in the postwar period, the housewife was not simply

depicted as the recipient of a life with electric appliances; she was also

projected as a subject who would promote such a life and manage it. It

was claimed that ‘introducing electric appliances is the same thing as

democratization’ and the housewife in the images created was con-

structed as the subject of power. An ad in 1959, which connected the

theme of democratization with the necessity of bringing electric appli-

ances into the home, indicated this point clearly

In Article 25 of the Japanese Constitution, there is a phrase saying that ‘The

people of Japan have the right to enjoy a healthy and cultural life.’ One of the

things that people wish to have realized is the possession of electric

appliances in the home.

This ad equates achieving democratization with bringing electric appli-

ances into the home. It is important that, in the ads of this period, a

housewife was positioned as a subject who utilized all household

technologies.

In parallel with this tendency, another disposition of subjectivity

appeared in the early 1960s and gradually formed the main subject of ads

for home electric appliances. For example, an ad for the Sony portable TV

set in 1960 declared, ‘we have one more instance of Nippon’s pride!’. This

ad was designed to show to Japanese consumers that Japanese technology

was regarded highly in the ‘eyes of the world’. Manufacturers also began

to appeal to the same technonationalistic disposition in their advertising

during the 1960s. In the case of Sanyo, the following copy appeared in

1961: ‘A small piece of metal surprised doctors all over the world.’ In

1962, Matsushita had an ad that asserted: ‘Proudly made in Japan.’ This

ad summarizes a tendency in the advertising of the 1960s. What

permeates these variations is the notion that the ‘world’ is taking note of 473

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‘Japanese technology’, on the one hand, and that ‘Japanese technology’

can prosper due to its own ‘uniqueness’ while being under the scrutiny of

the ‘world’, on the other hand. It was stressed that the ‘severe and earnest

scrutiny of the world’ was on Japan and that Japan had been receiving

‘awards for technology’ from the ‘eyes of the world’.

Particularly in the late 1960s, statements were made such that ‘world

leadership’ in technology was an expression of Japanese culture. For

example, Matsushita’s ad in 1966 for the ‘artificial intelligence’ color TV

stressed that this TV was successful in searching out ‘Japanese color’.

There was a strong tendency in the ads of the late 1960s to emphasize

that Japanese electric technologies were closely related to ‘native’

Japanese color, craftsmanship and nature. Ads by Matsushita repeatedly

stressed that their TV matched with Japanese ‘native’ and ‘authentic’

colors. They also stressed that their advanced technology was based on

the delicate craftsmanship of traditional culture.

Moreover, one of the interesting marketing strategies of the electric

appliance companies was to give their products names reminiscent of

‘native’ elements of ‘traditional’ Japanese culture. TVs, refrigerators and

washing machines sold in the late 1960s and early 1970s were given

names such as Saga (an old temple region in Kyoto), Utage (a traditional

style of festival in Japan), Ushio (a traditional name for tides) and Asuka

(an era in ancient Japanese history). All of these names and their designs

showed a strong relation with the image of ‘Japaneseness’. This is a

shrewd tactic of ‘self-orientalization’, which Joseph J. Tobin (1992) points

to as one of the dominant tendencies in Japan’s process of ‘domesticating’

the West. The collective image of home electric appliances was intro-

duced into postwar Japan particularly from the US. However, this image

was domesticated and ‘orientalized’ as an ‘essential’ element of Japanese

culture. The western gaze (the ‘eyes of the world’) played a crucial role in

this process of ‘self-orientalization’.

It is noteworthy that all of this image politics took place before

Japanese electronic technology actually gained a positive reputation in

western countries. Certainly, after the 1970s and especially during the

1980s, Japanese electronic manufacturers expanded the exportation of

their technologies to the international market. However, in the 1960s,

they were still eagerly importing the advanced knowledge of American

electronic industries. In the case of Matsushita, although the first full

page ad in an American popular magazine appeared in 1964, their

advertising strategy in the US and Europe was actively developed only

after the 1970s, when they began to present themselves under the names

Panasonic and Technics. In the 1960s, the products of Japanese electric

appliance manufacturers were still viewed as those of one of the newly

developing countries.

So far, I have analyzed the development of advertising images in the

electric appliance industry in the postwar period. On the one hand, the

                                6 ( 4 )

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       :                        

housewife image emerged as an active subject in the domestic sphere in

the late 1950s. However, at almost the same time, ads in the 1960s

pushed the image of Japanese technological power, especially the image

of the pre-eminent ability of Japanese engineers, to the forefront. These

two images of the technological subject are structurally correlated. The

crucial aspect of this correlation is gender differentiation. On the one

hand, the housewife’s subjectivity was stressed on the ‘consumption’ side;

on the other hand, the engineer’s subjectivity was stressed on the

‘production’ side. In the ideological practice of advertising, both indus-

trial space and domestic space were articulated in terms of a ‘gendered’

technological subjectivity. The image of kaden, symbolized by Sanshu no Jingi, was the very point of action. Here, we have to consider the historical and ideological relationship between gender, technology and

nationalism in the postwar period.

The invention of national TV time and TV narrative

The significance of TV in Japanese society since the 1960s goes even

further than its importance as one of the Sanshu no Jingi decorating the living room and its place as a symbol linked to the domestic subjectivity

of the housewife and the productive national subjectivity of the engineer.

TV is related to everyday practice in at least two further dimensions.

First, besides being a symbolic object linked to nation and gender in

specific ways, TV is also a flow of information structuring the horizons of

people’s bodily sensations and experience through its broadcasts. Second,

TV is a textual medium that produces and disseminates programs with a

particular discursive structure. It is necessary to consider how daily

broadcasts connect to our daily lives and structure our horizons of

experience in this second dimension apart from the content of specific

programs. In addition, a third dimension for consideration is the process

of audience interpretation and meaning production through the various

genres of texts and their customary codes. Some consideration must be

given to these remaining two dimensions in the present investigation.

Considering, first, the second dimension of TV as a form of media, we

see that one of the most important effects of TV has been the intro-

duction of a nationwide time structure into the domestic sphere. TV

inherited this function from radio. In the process of putting out a

continuous stream of daily programming, broadcasters arrange programs

according a particular way of thinking, thus creating a particular

structure of time. Besides the direct mechanism of the ‘time signal’,

broadcasting has fulfilled the role of providing a uniform national time,

whereby the rhythm of people’s daily lives has come to be organized

according to the programming schedule. The earliest instance of this in

Japan was the physical exercise program first broadcast on the radio in

the early Showa era (late 1920s–1930s). This developed into a regular 475

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media event in which listeners participated nationwide. However, in

those early days of radio broadcasting, the structure of programming was

fairly loose and the weekly cyclical organization of programs had not yet

been established. It was only after the war, particularly with the advent

of TV, that the structuring of time according to a unified national pattern

through broadcasting came to affect the finest details of daily life.

The most remarkable manifestation of this structuring effect of TV is

the phenomenon of ‘golden time’. This is the term used in Japan to refer

to the three hours between 7p.m. and 10p.m. during which TV viewing

was concentrated from the 1960s until the 1980s. The experience of

many Japanese households during those hours became extremely uni-

form. This would usually begin with the news at 7p.m. followed, in the

same hour, by children’s cartoons and family quiz programs. The focus

would then shift to drama and variety programs after 8p.m., with drama

becoming dominant from 9p.m. Professional baseball games were also

usually broadcast between 7p.m. and 9p.m. These were particularly

popular with adult male viewers. Such TV viewing patterns remained

extremely constant throughout the 1960s–1980s. The fact that these

evening hours were called ‘golden time’ rather than ‘primetime’, as in

other countries, is an indication of how important this ‘living room time’

(ochanoma no jikan), created by TV, was in the overall temporal lifestyle of the Japanese family.

TV led to the creation of at least two more national time zones in the

1960s. One of these is the morning period between 7a.m. and 9a.m. In

the households of urban salaried employees, this coincides with the busy

period immediately before the commute to work or school. Since the

1960s, TV stations have oriented their programming during these hours

to the tastes of female viewers, with such programs as terebi shosetsu (soap operas) and the morning shows of the commercial stations. This

time zone thus contrasts with the evening ‘golden time’ when the

selection of which channel to watch is usually a male prerogative.

Through the creation of these morning and evening time zones, TV

became a place of mediation where the real-life time of the household

was synchronized with the postwar national time consciousness. Another

time zone created by TV is the period between 11a.m. and 2p.m. when

mostly drama serials (merodorama, literally ‘melodrama’) and talk shows (waidosho or ‘wide shows’) are shown. Whereas the first two time zones mentioned have had the role of synchronizing the rhythm of family life

to the tune of national time consciousness, the latter period has given rise

to a gendered reality, in a manner similar to that of women’s magazines,

since most of the viewers at this time are women. Until the 1980s,

Japanese TV broadcasting was structured around these three contrasting

time zones of morning, midday and evening. Broadcasting at other times

of day was relatively unstructured and formed a margin around these

core time zones.

                                6 ( 4 )

476

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       :                        

The important point here is that, as a result of the creation of such

time zones, the very meaning attributed to different times of day,

whether it be 7p.m., 8a.m. or 12 noon, came to be experienced through its

relation with TV. This in turn led to a restructuring of the everyday

forms of social groups. For example, according to a nationwide survey

carried out by NHK (1981: 85) on the temporal aspects of daily life, there

is a striking correlation between the time flows of people watching TV

and people eating. However, this does not necessarily mean that people

started watching TV during their already established meal times. This

may be true to some extent, but it is also the case that people have

adopted the habit of eating their meals during times when they are

watching TV. This is also true of people’s experience of time itself. It is

impossible to say for sure whether people watch the NHK news because

the time is 7p.m. or whether the time 7p.m. itself exists for people as the

experience of watching the NHK news. TV is certainly not an external

factor constraining our experience of time and lifestyle habits from the

outside; on the contrary, TV is a key structural constituent enabling those

very experiences and habits.

It is therefore entirely inappropriate, at least as far as concerns postwar

Japan, to view the family as a closed pre-existing social unit into which TV

intervened from the outside. The intimate sphere of the Japanese house-

hold in its postwar form was itself created on a national scale through the

medium of TV. Indeed, according to an NHK (1981: 115) survey carried

out in 1979 and 1980, there is a positive correlation between the

frequency of communication among family members and the amount of

time spent watching TV. In the same questionnaire, the number of people

who answered that TV had increased the opportunity for discussion

among family members (50 percent) was far higher than those who

replied that TV had a negative effect on the opportunity for discussion

among the family (19 percent). When asked whether TV was ‘necessary

for a harmonious family life’, affirmative responses (46 percent in Tokyo;

61 percent outside the capital) far outnumbered negative ones (15 percent

in Tokyo; 10 percent elsewhere). When asked whether they actually had

the TV on during times that the family spent together, 67 percent in

Tokyo and 77 percent in the regions answered affirmatively. The par-

ticular form of family life characteristic of postwar Japan, whether

described in terms of domestic harmony or communication, has depended

on the existence of TV and was itself created through the medium of TV.

Even before the advent of TV, radio had already begun to have a

particular mediating effect on family relations. This is illustrated very

well by the following account given by a housewife soon after the Second

World War concerning her relation to the radio:

For housewives who are inclined to be confined to the home, radio is not just

the only pleasure, but also a source of cultural enrichment and knowledge. 477

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But, I used not to be able to hear all the programs I wanted to, because I felt

constrained by my mother-in-law. So, I turned it on only for the news and

women’s programs I especially wanted to hear, and asked her to come and

listen with me. At first she would not listen, but later she gradually listened

more and more, so we were able to listen together. It also became very useful

for having conversation in the evenings, with my husband there too. Despite

her earlier fixed view of the radio as noisy, my mother-in-law now listens

with pleasure. This is only a small thing, but it has led to a warming of

relations between my mother-in-law and myself, and has allowed me to gain

more free time. (Roudosho, 1961: 21–2)

This case shows very clearly that the mass media are not only conveyers

of information, but also act as a catalyst for the reorganization of social

time and relations.

TV’s catalytic role is not restricted to temporal organization and

relations within the family. With respect to the previously mentioned

third dimension of TV programs as texts, TV has played a central role

since the 1960s in linking the time of domestic memory with the time of

national history. This is well illustrated by the ‘serialized TV novel’

(renzoku terebi shosetsu) which has become a fixture of morning broad- casting on NHK since it began in 1961. The first such serial was a

dramatized adaptation of a novel by Shishi Bunroku called My Daughter and I (Musume to Watashi). The original novel portrays the history of the author’s own family from the end of the Taisho era, through the war and

into the postwar period, ending with the daughter’s departure for Europe

in 1951. In order to make this story into a TV serial to be shown con-

tinuously from April 1961 to March 1962, the scriptwriter Yamashita

Yoshiichi (1962) attempted to ‘recreate in dramatic form the memory of

the most difficult period for the Japanese people, the War’. This was

something not mentioned directly in the original text of the novel.

Yamashita explained that he ‘thought it was necessary to portray My Daughter and I from a contemporary perspective amid the turbulent waves of the times’. As a result of this adaptation, the ‘rebuilding of a

family’s good fortunes’ after the wartime upheaval became the central

theme of the drama serial as a whole. Thus began the 40-year history of

the morning ‘TV novel’, which continues to the present day. Its stereo-

typical style became established by this very first serial. All subsequent

serials, including the highly popular Ohanasan (shown in 1966) and the unprecedented international success of Oshin (first shown in 1983), followed the same pattern of portraying the lifestory of a woman

attaining happiness after passing through the travails of the prewar and

wartime eras.

From what perspective did these morning drama serials, with their

obvious repetitious pattern, narrate the popular historical memory of the

Japanese during the period of high economic growth? Being shown every

                                6 ( 4 )

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morning around breakfast time, they were viewed mostly by women.

They were usually set in the historical period straddling the Second

World War (1920s–1950s), since this was the period that attracted the

highest viewer ratings. This was in sharp contrast to the historical

dramas described below, which were set mostly in the 16th and 17th

centuries and became particularly popular among male viewers. The

experience of the Second World War was the period of history with the

greatest real meaning for postwar Japanese women. The TV dramas

repeatedly presented the Japanese war experience from the perspective of

‘Japanese women as the victims’. Men appear in the dramas as soldiers

sent away to the battlefields and returning home wounded after the war.

There is, however, no direct portrayal of the invasions of the Asian

continent and Pacific islands, nor of the harsh conditions experienced by

soldiers at the front. Women remain the main characters of the drama,

experiencing military oppression and American attacks as victims,

suffering great loss even as they finally live through the ordeal. History

is presented here in the form of an individual person’s memory from the

perspective of the average Japanese woman, leaving no room for the

memories and viewpoints of those who were colonized or invaded.

The historical periods and themes on which the historical dramas

shown on Sunday evenings were based are in stark contrast to the

morning serials described above. The first of these historical dramas,

Hana no Shogai, was shown on NHK in 1963 and depicted the tragic fall of the Shogunate in the mid-19th century. The program producers’ stated

objective was to ‘create a large-scale work of healthy entertainment’

rather than to make a serialized historical drama. It nevertheless became

a representative expression of popular historical narrative among postwar

Japanese, following the second series called Akou Roshi and the third, Taikouki, portraying the unification of the country under Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the late 16th century. The basic pattern for these highly

popular programs became established by the 1970s. The most popular

series were those set in the 16th and 17th centuries. The dramatized

exploits of Japanese warlords in the age of transition from the ‘warring

states’ period (Sengoku Jidai) to the era of ‘unification’ (Tenka Toitsu) have consistently gained the greatest popular following among viewers,

as illustrated by Ten to Chi to in 1969 (viewer rating 32.4 percent) and Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1983 (viewer rating 37.4 percent). Besides providing a narrative of nation-building, this focus on the historical period at the

end of the Middle Ages when the Japanese state was unified also had the

significant effect of divorcing this history from the modern history of

Japanese imperialism and the invasion of the Asian continent. Although

drama series have not infrequently been set in the 19th century, these

have never achieved the same degree of popularity as those set in the

period of ‘warring states’. The age of Japanese imperialism, from the

Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War until the Second World War, 479

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has not once been covered by these historical dramas. This is in stark

contrast to the historical dramas shown on Korean TV. Although Korean

Television modeled the pattern of its historical dramas to some extent on

those of NHK, its most popular series have been precisely those dealing

with Korean resistance to Japanese imperialism.

Another factor in the popularity of these weekly dramatized repre-

sentations of the historical narrative of civil disorder and unification is

that the view of society portrayed in them resonated with accepted

notions of liberalism and capitalism. The virtues of those warlords who

survived the era of disorder had something in common with the ethos of

the entrepreneurs who made it in the competitive society of the high

economic growth era. On the one hand, there was the narrative of the

Japanese state’s unification obscuring the history of modern imperialism

and expansionism, while, on the other hand, the entrepreneurial spirit of

capitalist society was narrated through the metaphor of medieval

warlords. In a certain sense, there was something in common here with

the morning drama serials like Oshin. The latter portray, in one detailed episode after another, how women exercised their wit and perseverance

in order to survive the war and ‘managed’ their households in a way

similar to an entrepreneur, bringing economic success to their families.

This simple narrative structure characterized NHK’s high-profile drama

programs almost constantly for a period of more than 30 years from the

1960s to the 1990s.

The two types of NHK drama described above show a pattern in which

the history of Japan as a nation is narrated metaphorically from the

standpoint of ‘Japanese women as victims’ and ‘businessmen as medieval

warlords’. Although this pattern was certainly hegemonic during the

period of high economic growth, it did not entirely dominate the whole

of TV broadcasting. Different dominant patterns can be seen in the

contemporaneous drama programs of the commercial stations, where

stories tend to be centered around mother–daughter relations (or

mother-in-law–daughter relations) or the exploits of eccentric heroes

bringing salvation to the community (including, in many cases, the

feudal regime of the Edo Shogunate). Taken as a whole, the narrative of

TV is always multifaceted and cannot be reduced to a single structure.

Nevertheless, as a conclusion to the above discussion, one can say that

Japanese TV from the 1960s until the beginning of the 1980s was closely

linked to postwar national identity and the particular constructs of time

and history associated with that identity. This is true whichever of the

three dimensions we consider: TV as a symbolic object; TV as a factor

organizing the horizons of everyday experience; or the world of textual

meaning according to which programs and genres of programs are

structured. Until the 1980s, the link between TV and nationalism was

also highly stable and largely unconscious. The three dimensions

together formed a firm structure. This stable structure was predicated,

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first, on a very clear-cut gender division (engineers vs housewives,

‘golden time’ vs ‘morning time’, Sunday historical dramas vs morning

drama serials); and, second, on the transition in the social location of the

TV set from the public space of the open air to the privacy of the

household.

Epilogue

The stability of TV as a national medium was threatened in all its

dimensions from the end of the 1980s. In many cases, this stability even

broke down. At a relatively early stage in this process, the clearest

manifestation was in the dimension of the symbolic object. After the

1980s, there emerged a tendency to place electronic products amid

colonial scenery such as a tropical jungle, a beach or a desert. Ads

appeared in which ‘bushmen’, ‘Tarzans’ and ‘Indians’ were the major

characters. The important point here is the decontextualized relationship

between the ‘native’ body and advanced electronic technology. In

advertising since the 1980s, the image of someone’s body putting on a

new electronic technology has transgressed all kinds of borderlines,

including those that separate man and woman, the national and the

foreign, city and countryside, machine and nature. Each electronic

appliance represented here can no longer be placed in the same

domestic/national space as that prior to the 1970s. This means that these

technologies cannot be consistently related to fixed roles such as those of

housewife or engineer. In advertising images since the late 1970s, the

once structured relationships binding together the technology, the user’s

gendered social role and the space where the technology was placed have

been decontextualized. Where there had once been an emphasis on the

specific roles of the housewife or engineer, there is now a new focus on

the ‘technological’ body, itself moving all around the world.

In response to change in the social nature of advertising expressions,

the unified image of the electric household appliance, which had once

encapsulated the daily mental attitudes of the Japanese, collapsed. When

we turn our attention to the companies involved, we see that Matsushita’s

role as image leader had come to an end by the mid-1970s. In the period

that followed, Sony came to play the most important role in producing

the predominant image of electronic technology. Sony’s ads are not

permeated by the stress on household electric appliances; on the contrary,

Sony has continually tried to create an image of their products as

something that has ‘moved away’ from household electric appliances. For

example, the concept of the Walkman is a departure from the stereo set

in the household, and Sony’s TV concept is a departure from that of the

TV in the living room that family members eagerly watch together.

Throughout the 1980s, images of electronic appliances in Japan

became more and more hybrid, transgressional and diasporic. In the 481

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typical images of the 1980s onwards, a body with electronic appliances

transgresses the borderlines of nation, culture, gender and race. In

addition, the once strong nationalistic image of the ‘three sacred

treasures’ lost its popularity and electric home appliances lost their unity

as a genre. Instead of ‘home’ technologies, ‘personal’ and ‘body-conscious’

technologies such as the Walkman, cellular phone, portable computer,

pager (known in Japan as the ‘pocket-bell’) and tamagocchi came to play the leading role in the image of technology in everyday life.

The structural change in media as symbolic objects of the lifeworld

occurred simultaneously with a shift in the national time structure that

TV had until then established in the household. As mentioned above, the

institution of ‘golden time’ in the TV schedule since the 1960s, followed

later by ‘morning time’ and ‘afternoon time’, had created a uniform

national time structure whereby the daily lifestyle of the average

Japanese household synchronized perfectly with the TV schedule. From

the TV stations’ perspective, decisions about what programs to show at

what time were decided automatically according to what type of

activities people would most likely be doing at any given time of day.

Programs were planned in accordance with this national daily/weekly

timetable and also with regard to the yearly cycle of the calendar. Until

the end of the 1980s, program producers had an extremely clear-cut and

detailed model of viewers’ yearly and daily life rhythms. They produced

and scheduled programs in accordance with this model. Seen from the

opposite perspective, it could be said that this approach to programming

was simply a sure way for TV stations to obtain high viewer ratings.

However, since the 1980s, many TV stations have begun to notice that

producing and scheduling programs according to this accepted timetable

do not produce sufficiently high ratings. One direct cause of this is the

growing use of video recorders and TV games. These have allowed TV

sets to be used in a way no longer bound by the time constraints of

broadcasting. The development of this technology has gradually eroded

the power of TV broadcasting to uniformly condition people’s lifestyle

timetables. On the other hand, people’s lifestyles have themselves

become diversified in postindustrial society. Lifestyle rhythms have

become individualized and the proportion of women confined to the

home as housewives has decreased. This is another major factor

impeding the establishment of a uniform national timetable.

Thus, it is certainly true that there has been a gradual weakening,

since the 1980s, of the structure whereby a national lifestyle timetable

corresponded closely to the TV programming schedule. Nevertheless, I

also want to emphasize that the function of TV as a national timetable

has not been completely lost in Japan. Despite their concerns about the

gradual decline in viewer ratings, many stations continue to plan and

schedule their programs according to a presumed national timetable

model. Neither have TV viewers entirely relinquished the national

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timetable underwritten in the past by TV, notwithstanding the diver-

sification and personalization of media and TV’s loss of its former image

as a domestic electrical appliance (kaden). There has also emerged one factor that has temporarily increased TV’s role as a time coordinator for

the national community. Since the 1980s, there have been numerous

major events, such as the death of Emperor Hirohito, serious crimes,

terrorist attacks, natural disasters and wars, which have drawn intensive

public attention. When such events occur, all the TV channels devote

themselves simultaneously to non-stop coverage, reporting every detail.

This, at a single stroke, increases the chance of the formation of a unified

national timetable. In the past, national time consisted of a stable pattern

repeated continuously on daily, weekly and yearly levels. In contrast, the

type of national time that has grown in importance recently is temporary,

unstable and, in many cases, exhibits a blatantly belligerent and exclus-

ionary attitude towards outsiders and those who are different (‘others’).

This corresponds with the shift from the postwar economic growth-

centered nationalism of the Cold War era to the crisis-driven neo-

nationalism of the age of globalization. Since the 1980s, the previously

unquestioned national timetable has come under threat and oppor-

tunities have increased for the deliberate creation of national time by

playing to people’s anxieties and sense of crisis, thus focussing public

attention, even if only temporarily. In this, TV has continued to play a

central catalytic role in social change.

The contradictoriness evident in the time structure of TV since the

1980s becomes even more complex when we consider the level of TV as a

text; in other words, the level of the actual programs broadcast. In the

1980s, the predominant fad was for ‘trendy dramas’ in which the love

lives of young people were portrayed against the backdrop of Tokyo’s

fashionable urban scenery. This became a major influence on TV around

Asia, especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong. On entering the 1990s,

however, Japanese TV began developing in a more nostalgic direction,

with a growing tendency to look back nostalgically on the country’s

‘youthful’ self in the age of high economic growth. This tendency is

particularly evident in NHK’s quasi-documentary program Project X, which has been gaining high viewer ratings since the late 1990s. Other

programs display a similarly retrospective ‘returning-to-the-self ’ per-

spective. Until the 1980s, there had been a symbiotic relationship

between the public broadcaster NHK and the commercial channels, with

the former having its strength in programs with a high message content,

while the latter concentrated on popular song shows and dramas for

entertainment. Since the 1990s, programs that present issues for

discussion have gradually disappeared from NHK and the commercial

stations have increasingly introduced entertainment and talk shows into

their news programs. Programs that challenge viewers’ preconceptions

and attempt in the course of an hour or half an hour to convince people 483

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to think differently have been marginalized. In many cases, viewers’

reactions are predicted on a minute-by-minute basis and program

content is decided in accordance with the expected psychological effect.

Broadcasters say, ‘we always provide programs in accordance with the

viewers’ wishes’. As a result, programs reflecting and underwriting the

majority’s received notions have increased in this TV as the ‘national

medium’.

The case introduced at the beginning of this article about the revision

of an NHK documentary on the military’s ‘comfort women’ is precisely

an instance of this contradictory situation. On the one hand, the social

environment since the 1980s has rendered the notion of TV as a domestic

electrical appliance impossible, while more personalized, transgressive

and transnational media have become dominant. However, on the other

hand, the way programs are made plays to a national consciousness more

than ever before and the tendency to seek to alleviate the pain from such

a national consciousness has been reinforced. Despite the gradual break-

up of the national timetable constructed through TV broadcasting, an

even more comprehensive and powerful communal national timetable

has come into being at times of major crises. In relation to the general

remit of this article, the theme of ‘television and nationalism’, one could

summarize as follows: although the nationalism forming the basis of TV

has began to disintegrate, on the level of ideology and program sched-

uling, nationalism is even stronger than before. In the context of this

contradictory situation, the dominant central TV stations in Japan today

are becoming increasingly stagnant while, on the periphery, the internet

and independent video journalism are showing greater dynamism. As

the national medium, TV may be on its way towards a quiet demise.

However, in a society such as Japan, which during the Cold War devel-

oped into an extremely pure form of the nation state, acceptance of TV’s

demise may not come so easily, precisely because TV was the central

medium in the creation of this postwar nation state. We are likely to

witness many more counterattacks from the nationalist backlash through

the medium of TV. In order to meet these counterattacks and to open up

TV and the media in general to horizons not confined to the framework

of the nation state, it is necessary to carry out a thorough investigation of

the history of TV in postwar Japan and Asia.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank David Buist for translating this article, which was first

presented at the fourth International Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference

held at Tampere, Finland in 2002.

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Biographical note Yoshimi Shunya is Professor of the Institute of Socio-information and

Communication Studies, University of Tokyo. He has published extensively on

cultural studies and the cultural history of popular culture in modern Japan. His

texts include: Capitalism and the Voice: The Social Construction of Telephone, Gramophone and Radio in Japan (Koudansha, 1995); Realities in Transit (Kinokuniya Shoten, 1996); Dialogue with Cultural Studies (with Tasturo Hanada et al.; Shinyosha, 1998); Cultural Studies (Iwanami Shoten, 1999); Perspectives on Globalization (with Kang Sang-Jun; Tokyo University Press, 2000); and Media and the Body in 1930s Japan (Seikyusha, 2002). A D D R E S S : Institute of Socio-information and Communication Studies, University of Tokyo,

Japan. [email: [email protected]]

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