Call for Papers--Japanese TV Anthology

[Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto]

I¹d like to thank all those people who sent us proposals, ideas, and
inquiries in the last two months. Response has been rather overwhelming, and
we are now trying to figure out what the final shape of the anthology will
or should look like. However, we¹d like to extend the deadline for paper
proposals for a few more weeks because we¹d like to see if there are any
potential contributors interested in dealing with the following key issues
and topics: 

1. Japanese television programs except drama and commercials: especially
animation, education programs, music/variety shows, news-infotainment, and
cuisine programs 
2. Japanese television station and its material and imaginary impact on
urban development and transformation: for example, the role of Fuji TV in
the transformation of Odaiba and Tokyo as an imaginary landscape
3. Television workers: personalities, news announcers, idols, script
writers, etc. 
4. Japanese television and its relationship with other media and information
technology 
5. The University and Japanese television: how Japanese TV is/is not studied
in academia, the history and politics of Japanese television studies, the
relation between Japanese television and cultural studies (in Japan and
elsewhere), or between Japanese television and Japan studies, etc.

If you or somebody you know are working on any of these or related topics,
please contact me or the two other members of the editorial collective:
Jungbong Choi (juchoi at blue.weeg.uiowa.edu), and Eva Tsai
(eva-tsai at uiowa.edu).

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto
The University of Iowa
(mitsuhiro-yoshimoto at uiowa.edu)


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CALL FOR PROPOSALS
An Anthology on Japanese Television

Television is important in Japan. It is a formidable entity entrenched in
Japan¹s changing political and economic systems. Its presence in familiar,
everyday settings‹in a living room or on a tall, metropolitan building‹has
become part of many people¹s daily experiences, even structuring, mediating,
and reinforcing their way of life.  People in Japan are spending more time
than ever consuming televisual entertainment and information. Even when
television is not the direct object of consumption, its interconnectedness
with other aspects such as education, sports and leisure, and technology has
facilitated many symbolic environments through which people negotiate
identity and culture.

But Japanese television is not just relevant within the Japanese national
boundaries. In the past twenty years, Japanese television has decidedly
entered new spaces and contexts as a result of global movements of people,
capital, technology, and ideas. Some examples can be found in the accidental
³spill² of Japanese television programs via regional satellites in East
Asia, the rental and exchange of programs on video in diasporic communities,
the sales of Japanese VCDs by online retail stores, and the active
distribution of Japanese television programs on local and cable channels
outside Japan. Encounters between Japanese television and new contexts have
set off new debates concerning formations of identities, historical and
cultural imperialism, and processes of globalization.

As a fertile site that bears historical and contemporary importance,
Japanese television is surprisingly under-researched in the academe. The
existing discourse on Japanese television, while valuable, presents limited
viewpoints and approaches. Understandably, the dominating topics‹such as
digitalization, government regulation, measurement of audience
rating‹³rightfully² examine the structure and power that inflect television
as a business and technology. However, without undermining the significance
of issues pertaining to technology, government and business, we need more
voices to interrogate and reflect on the conditions and discourses that gave
rise to these topics as well as to call attention to issues yet to be widely
addressed such as ethnography of Japanese television production and gender
representation in television programs.

Paper proposals addressing the following and other topics are requested from
scholars working in communication studies, cultural studies, film and
television studies, media studies, anthropology, sociology,  history, and
any other relevant disciplines or fields.



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