Aisuru futari ---> bokeshi

[Abe' Mark Nornes]

At 8:06 PM -0800 11/24/99, Michael Badzik wrote:

> One would think that the public would not be too surprised at incidents of
> yarase, given the frequency with which it occurs. So I wonder how much
> of the uproar over the supposed yarase was actually exaggerated by the
> media.

I think in this case it had a lot to do with the character of the show
itself. It was presented in the confessional mode of the raunchiest American
talkshows, although lacking the irony that you often see with Jerry
Springer. Some of the stories they covered involved pretty heart wrenching
marital problems, and the fact that people were revealing these publicly led
everyone I know who watched it to ask if there was yarase involved. In other
words, the reason that it was such a big deal---aside from the show's high
ratings---is the fact that everyone doubted its veracity in the first place
because it was such a new animal to Japanese television.

Perhaps I'm misreading this, but my sense is that Americans went through a
phase worrying about yarase in their own talk shows. However, after the
Jenny Jones murder and the revelation of faking on Jerry Springer, people
have come to enjoy the mix without worrying about yarase....something like
the mode in which they watch pro wrestling.

I didn't watch the show more than twice, but I was struck by the following
comment Michael made:

> the relentless taunting and goading of the married couple (for their own
> good of course!).

The shows I watched directed the criticism at one side of the couple,
white-hat/black-hat style. The first show I watched involved women who were
cheating on their faithful husbands, causing the imminent breakup of the
marriage. I was extremely uncomfortable with cruel way they were coming down
on the women. But then the next time, they did the same thing with men who
were unfaithful.

This raises the question why people were willing to do that. Friends working
on reality television in the States suggest that the desire to be on
national television overwhelms any self-censorship over their self-image,
whether they're revealing a fling on Jenny Jones or getting arrested on
Cops. However, in Aisuru Futari the couples always had their identity hidden
through mosaic.

Has anyone noticed that the use of mosaic has increased dramatically? It's
everywhere, almost like it's a new convention just for the hell of it. Ten
years ago, you'd see it mostly for covering the faces of men on shows about
prostitution. Now they use it for nearly everything.

Sometimes it's clearly used to incite visual pleasure, a kind of ditigal-age
veiling provoking the desire to see. For example, the other incident raging
through the media recently has been the family that took their father to die
in a Narita hotel room. Members of a group with roots in Sai Baba's
religion, they tried to restore the man's health even after death. Despite
gradual mummification, they fed "it" tea and recorded things like the daily
restoration of the color of the fingernails. They also took photographs of
the blackened body, and these were widely broadcast. Recently, they showed
these images straight on, however, at first they used mosaic. At the same
time, they'd mosaic the hotel behind reporters *for no apparent reason*,
since everyone knew where and what it was.

So while you can imagine why they'd mosaic a mummy's hand to make people
want to see more and peer into the image, and while it makes sense to mosaic
children's faces, most use of mosaic seems unnecessary.

Is it simply a way of hyperbolizing the image (although NHK does plenty of
it, too)?

Or was the a legal case or incident that has provoked this self-censoring by
the networks?

When did this trend start?

Markus