TV coverage, content & treatment / red army incident

[Anne McKnight]

Hi Najib,

    Thanks for your sketch of the auto-detailing styles of September 11 on
TV talk shows.  It was quite a vivid description of how TV makes events
oriented around the WTC bombing make sense.
    Obviously, as this year's September 11 approaches all kinds of
speculation become very fraught.  For that reason, I think that certain ways
of framing & periodizing the incident are very much in transit.
Specifically, in terms of Japan's remote processing of the event, I wondered
what kinds of identification were going on, in the scene you mentioned
between the cute newscaster and the "tall terrifying" cutout of Osama Bin
Laden.  Specifically, where the caster was locating Japan in the set of
relations that also triangulates the US & whatever body or groups the cutout
was standing in for.  It reminded me of the photo you often see of Hirohito
and Macarthur, in which Hirohito stands in the photo position usually
reserved for the imperial consort, and Macarthur towers over him. And this,
too, is obviously an image that stands in for the 'disaster' that has gone
before, as well as a whole series of postwar narratives still to come.
    Secondly, in specific terms of film, the 'detailing' you mention made me
think of the film that came out in 2002 about the Asama sanso jiken, the
"Red Army" implosion of intra-sect murder that took place in 1972, which
many people association with a more general phenomenon of losing their
idealism and belief in leftist movement politics.
    This film, and the earlier pools of images and reportage it draws on, is
interesting in terms of 'detailing' because, from several accounts I have
heard, _that_ 'event' was key in terms of reality TV, because it was the
first 'real-time' event to be filmed and shown on TV.  There were cameras
rolling outside the mountain cabin where things were taking place, and
people did not know how to identify or interpret those 'details' to the
extent that cameras just rolled, and the feeds broadcasted, without a sense
of duration. This means that no-one know where to put commercials, and both
in terms of TV syntax and daily life, the 'frame' within which details
attain significance did not itself take place.  Until much later, which I
guess would be the project of films like The Choice of Hercules (dir. Harada
Masato, 2002, Totsunyu-seyo Asama-sanso Jiken).
    Someone out there may be or may have talked to people who saw the Asama
sanso jiken footage in 'real time.' I'd be interested to know their
impressions and interpretations.

Anne McKnight


on 9/2/02 2:49 PM, Khash Najib at najibjp at yahoo.co.jp wrote:
> 
> I would be interested to know about other views of the
> performance of Japanese TVs. My impression is that all
> Japan got from those supposedly turning-point events is a
> media circus. Perhaps that sounds too pessimistic, but as
> opposed to Japanese media, I believe that Japanese NGOs
> are doing a great job on many levels. So this is probably
> not a general problem of awareness in Japan, but rather a
> problem of major Japanese media.
>