Television on KineJapan

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

Thanks to Birgit and all those who answered the inquiry about 
anthropological studies of Japanese TV for broaching the subject on 
KineJapan.  As you all may recall, KineJapan is a list about Japanese 
"moving image culture" and thus was intended to include discussion of TV 
from the beginning.

But as Michael just observed,

>But for some reason television is rarely mentioned on this list - at least 
>since I joined, anyway.

But maybe there is some interest in discussing TV.  One place to begin, I 
think, is asking how to approach Japanese TV.  I recall that Birgit's 
original post asked for studies that were "not just descriptions of the 
outrageous, the hilarious and the unbelievable (with this "look! how 
weird!"-undertone)." I can sympathize with her, since most of the times 
Japanese TV is depicted in English, it is through a lens which exoticizes 
or Orientalizes the object, often with the result of degrading or 
infantalizing it.  By inserting Japanese TV in a binary structure (often 
that of East vs. West), such discourses serve more to construct the 
identity of the observer than provide insight into the object observed.

Yet it is clear more serious studies often take up a comparative 
perspective, pointing out the differences between, usually, US and 
Japanese TV and then using these differences as insight into some 
cultural difference which explaings their existence.  One wonders if they 
have escaped the binarism that haunts "less serious" accounts.

How then does one approach Japanese TV?  This is an issue that has been 
much discussed with regard to Japanese film, but TV adds new dimensions 
to the problem.  Much of the work on Japanese film (Burch, Schrader, 
etc.) has tried to locate the source of the difference of Japanese cinema 
in a traditional culture (Zen, Kabuki, etc.), but this is clearly harder 
to do with TV.  It is too much a product of a modern, consumerist media 
culture to be unproblematically related to the "obvious" signs of 
Japanese difference such as traditional culture.  Perhaps this is then 
where the image of Japan as "more postmodern than the West" enters in and 
TV becomes the exemplar of that postmodernity.

What do people think?



Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
KineJapan list owner
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