Gabriella Lukács is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.

SCRIPTED AFFECTS, BRANDED SELVES

Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s JapanBy GABRIELLA LUKCS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4813-9

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………viiIntroduction JAPAN AND TELEVISION AT THE CENTURY’S TURN………………………………………………………….1One INTIMATE TELEVISUALITY Television Dramas and the Tarento in Postwar Japan……………………………………29Two IMAGED AWAY Agency and Fetishism in Trendy Drama Production and Reception……………………………………59Three DREAM LABOR IN THE DREAM FACTORY Capital and Authorship in Drama Production………………………………….91Four WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? Love Dramas and Branded Selves………………………………………………117Five LABOR FANTASIES IN RECESSIONARY JAPAN Employment as Lifestyle in Workplace Dramas of the 1990s…………………147Six PRIVATE GLOBALIZATION Bootleggers, Fansubbers, and the Transnational Circulation of J-dorama…………………..177Epilogue IMAGE COMMODITY, VALUE, AFFECT…………………………………………………………………………201Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………….211References…………………………………………………………………………………………………..239Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………….253

Chapter One

Intimate Televisuality

TELEVISION DRAMAS AND THE TARENTO IN POSTWAR JAPAN

Scholars have argued that Japanese television networks’ success in creating a “partial substitute for vanishing communal forms of entertainment turned Japan into the ultimate TV culture” (Morris-Suzuki 1994, 195). As a particular feature of this televisual culture, Japanese tarento serve as hosts, guests, and contestants in game shows; participate in variety shows; perform in television dramas; release compact discs; and endorse commodities in commercials. Producers fortify the transmedia employment of the tarento by commonly casting them in dialogue with their earlier performances. For instance, the television drama Keizoku (Beautiful Dreamer; TBS, 1999) features a detective sidekick whose hobby is ballroom dancing. This aspect does not add much to the drama’s plot except the pleasure of recognizing that Tokui Yu, the actor playing this character, had previously been cast in the hit movie featuring ballroom dancing Shall We Dance? This cross-genre and transmedia employment of the tarento turns television watching into a process of moving between programs and leads to the production and reception of meaning in a network of texts, genres, and media forms. The game of encoding and decoding not only renders program production more enjoyable for the producers, but it also makes participation in domestic media culture more pleasurable for the audiences. Further, the cross-genre and transmedia circulation of the tarento creates a culture of intimate televisuality, participation in which generates a vital sense of membership in a nationally based televisual community.

As a new global division of labor was emerging in the media economy and media ownership was becoming more concentrated in the 1990s, nationally based television production and consumption declined worldwide. However, the Japanese television industry has not only managed to reinforce its self-sustaining business structure; it has also joined the ranks of global cultural exporters. (I analyze the latter phenomenon in chapter 6.) This chapter explores how Japanese commercial networks reinforced their self-sufficient system of production and centrality in the Japanese media economy in a business environment destabilized primarily by market fragmentation and secondarily by globalization. While Japanese viewers started demanding more custom-tailored entertainment, the domestic television industry could not easily adopt niche targeting, because it depended on large-scale consumer markets to finance its highly capital-intensive system of production. However, with conventional primetime formats such as family-oriented, historical, or mystery dramas, the local commercial networks were decreasingly able to unite the viewers in front of their television screens and thus to deliver the ratings their sponsors expected. By the mid-1980s, audience erosion and the concomitantly shrinking viewing rates had led to a structural crisis in the television industry.

The development of a new primetime genre, the trendy drama, played a key role in resolving this crisis. By placing the tarento system at the heart of program production, trendy dramas succeeded not only in reviving a general interest in domestic televisual culture, but also in keeping transnational media out of the domestic market. The tarento made domestic programming more appealing to Japanese viewers than international shows available on cable channels whose celebrities did not carry the same informational value to them. As the tarento gained primacy in television production, a new media economy emerged in which these celebrities became the links through which new tie-ins were established between media institutions. Thus, by accelerating the flow of media content and integrating formerly unrelated markets, the tarento system helped networks reinforce viewers’ commitment to local television networks and other local media producers. The collaborative relationships between media institutions operated on the logic of cross-media branding in which endorsement by the tarento at once served the interests of client brands, host media, and the client tarento.

By exploring how and why the television industry adopted the tarento system as the new center of its economic activities, this chapter examines how the subsequently emerging media economy mediated social realities and relationships and forged new kinds of subjectivities in the process. As the tarento system gained primacy in television production, programs increasingly became vehicles for the transmission of information about the tarento. It is through such practices of accumulating knowledge about the local celebrities that a culture of intimate televisuality has evolved. I argue that in the wake of the prolonged economic recession, intimate televisuality has offered a sense of comfort and familiarity that effectively compensated for the erosion of older forms of solidarity and community. At the same time, I will suggest that as the tarento became more important to rendering everyday realities intelligible, the culture of intimate televisuality has simultaneously reified human relationships and social life.

Television Broadcasting in Japan

Japanese television networks became self-sufficient in the postwar period, and such independence was an important precondition for the development of the tarento system. Nippon Hoso Kyokai (Japanese Broadcasting System; NHK) and Nippon TV (NTV) began broadcasting in 1953. Black-and-white television sets were among the first three privileged items of mass consumption in the 1950s, yet in 1957 only 5.1 percent of the Japanese households owned television sets. As the price of a set was twenty times higher than an average monthly income, few households could afford one. In the 1960s, the rapid increase in television ownership was partly the result of NTV’s aggressive efforts to popularize the medium. NTV placed television sets in railway stations and plazas, where crowds congregated; giant television screens are still a prominent feature of downtown landscapes in Tokyo. Steady economic growth and rising wages encouraged the development of a mass consumer market that, in turn, brought down the price of television sets. In 1964, when the eighteenth Olympic Games were held in Tokyo, 87.8 percent of Japanese households owned black-and-white television sets, and by 1975, 91.7 percent of the population’s households had color television sets. By 1975, the total amount of advertising fees paid to television had surpassed advertising spent on newspapers, and television had become the leading medium in advertising. It has held that position to the present. By the mid-1970s, Japan had become the second-largest television market outside the United States (Iwabuchi 2002). Currently, 49 million Japanese households own 100 million television sets, which mainly provide their viewers with domestic programming.

Japanese television broadcasting consists of two types: commercial and public. NHK, the main public channel, is legally independent of the government and covers its operational costs from subscription fees. NHK is divided into two networks, one of which, NHK Sogo (General) broadcasts news, cultural, and entertainment programs. The other, NHK Kyoiku (Educational), airs mainly educational programming such as language classes, cooking programs, and shows for children. This book focuses on commercial television broadcasting, the main networks of which in Tokyo are Fuji TV, part of Fuji News Network; Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), part of the Japan News Network; Nippon TV, part of Nippon News Network; TV Asahi, part of the All-Nippon News Network; and TV Tokyo, part of TV Tokyo Network. Each television network has a nationwide network and a key station based in Tokyo. The majority of the 127 terrestrial television broadcasters nationwide are affiliated with these five stations.

The domestication of program production was a relatively rapid process in Japan. Until the early 1960s, television networks had lacked sufficient expertise and facilities to produce their own programs; they relied instead on imported programming and on domestic film studios such as Toho, Shochiku, Daiei, Toei, Nikkatsu, and Shin-Toho. Yet with the growth of contracts for television subscriptions, the popularity of cinema declined, and in 1956 this trend prompted the Japan Motion Picture Association to foreclose the transference of broadcasting rights for domestically produced films to television networks. Film studios also stipulated that actors and actresses who were under contracts to them could not appear in television programs without permission.

As a result, television networks lost a precious source of programming and had no other choice but to import television programs, mainly from the United States. American television programs such as Father Knows Best (broadcast by NTV from 1958) and I Love Lucy (broadcast by NHK from 1957) formed a large part of primetime broadcasting in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Beginning in the 1960s, however, television networks began to develop their own programming. The five major film studios did not hold out long in the face of the rapidly growing popularity of television. As early as 1963, they resumed selling films to television networks, and began to subcontract their actors and actresses to them. By 1981, Japan imported less than 5 percent of programming annually, 90 percent of which was from the United States. By the 1990s, television networks imported less than 3 percent of their programming. The primary source of program imports has remained the United States (Hara 2004; Iwabuchi 2002, 2004).

Satellite and cable broadcasting have not succeeded in challenging domestic television networks. Japan Satellite Broadcasting (JSB) launched its service in 1984 and commenced full-scale broadcasting in 1991, but it did not turn a profit until 1995. Since that time, the increase in the number of subscribers has remained slow. As of 2000, JSB had only 2.5 million subscribers. sky Perfectv, another cable-television provider, started full-scale digital broadcasting in 1996 and provides access to more than sixty channels. In 2000, SKY Perfectv had 2 million subscribers. In 2000, cable-television suppliers were serving a total of 9.5 million households-that is, 20 percent of households nationwide. In many cases, however, this system has been used primarily to improve the reception of regular TV channels in areas suffering from interference. As mountainous areas occupy most of Japan’s territory, bad television reception has long been a problem for many households. In sum, it is the public television service, NHK, and the five commercial television networks that most viewers watch.

The genre of the serialized television drama has played a vital role in developing and maintaining a self-contained televisual culture, for it has been the backbone of primetime entertainment throughout the postwar period. In the next section, I will map the postwar history of television drama to foreground my investigation of how the tarento began to gain primacy in television production in the late 1980s. Here I depart from anthropological studies of television that have analyzed this medium predominantly as an ideological apparatus of the state (Abu-Lughod 2005; Mankekar 1999). Arguing that in Japan the television industry is a vibrant sector of the national economy, I situate my analysis of the history of television dramas at the intersection of culture and capitalism. By centering my analysis on drama production in postwar Japan, I aim to show that ideological and economic interests are intricately intertwined and implicated in the ways in which television has mediated social realities and forged new subjectivities. Television producers commonly strive to portray realities in ways that are most agreeable to the broadest cross-segments of the audiences. They also try to feature characters in their programs that the largest number of viewers will find appealing. By reinforcing dominant visions of normalcy, television fulfills an ideological function. Yet this objective also serves an economic end, for it functions to maximize viewership (and raise the ratings).

Television Dramas in the Postwar Period

Television dramas are mainly produced for the primetime slots. Networks invest the most capital in these programs, for they are aired in the hours when the most viewers are available to watch television and networks gross the largest revenues from advertising. This is when commercial fees are the highest. At the same time, primetime programs provide the most cultural cache (Lotz 2007) and hence serve as a powerful vehicle for branding. Working on the premise that primetime television dramas were a space where the dominant values and role models were contested and reworked, histories of this genre blended into social histories of the postwar period (Hirahara et al. 1991; Sanuka 1978; Toriyama 1993). Similarly, feminist analyses have used television dramas to trace changing gender roles and relations by analyzing how women are represented in these programs (Iwao 2000; Muramatsu and Gossmann 1998). I draw on these works, but my interest in the genre is different. I am concerned with the ways in which the televisual production of certain subjectivities is also an effect of how the television industry adjusts its business structure in response to changing patterns of consumption. The key questions are thus: who are the preferred audiences, and what thematic or programming strategies are engaged to reach these viewers? By analyzing changes in thematic foci and programming strategies, I will concentrate on the shift from offering story-intensive entertainment to wide-ranging audiences to attracting diversified audiences by offering them lifestyle-based programming that capitalizes on the tarento system.

In Japan, television drama was recognized as an art form in 1959, when the Art Festival established a separate category for this genre. Contemporary drama professionals often speak nostalgically, pointing out that in early television dramas the entertainment value and the imperative to maximize markets did not enjoy primacy over educational content. A case in point is Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai (I Want to Become a Shellfish; TBS, 1958). The drama portrays a small-town barber who is arrested by American occupation authorities on a wartime murder charge. He confesses that he did kill an American soldier, but in his defense he argues that he was following orders, which at the time had to be obeyed as if they had come directly from the emperor. In the end, he is convicted and executed. Undoubtedly, this story line was not meant to provide lightweight entertainment to draw broad cross-segments of the audiences to the screen. The producers emphasized that their goal, first and foremost, was to educate viewers on the social ramifications of Japan’s involvement in the Second World War (Sanuka 1978, 13-16).

Television had become a mass medium by the beginning of the 1960s, as Japan entered a period of high economic growth and the number of television subscriptions (to NHK) rose to ten million (Hirahara et al. 1991). Consequently, business interests and corporate politics started to take precedence over artistic expression. In the 1960s, an upheaval in television censorship supported by rightist social groups, politicians, and commercial sponsors took place. An example is Hitorikko (Only Child; RKB [Radio Kyushu Broadcasting, now RKB Mainichi Broadcasting Corporation], 1962), which portrays a family that lost a son to the war. The ultra-nationalist father takes pride in his loss, while the mother secretly believes that her son’s death was a waste. Family tension reaches a fever pitch when the second son announces that he will enter the National Defense Academy, a decision the mother opposes. Responding to pressure from the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, Toshiba withdrew its sponsorship of the drama. For the period 1962-66, Hirahara Hideo lists twenty-six more cases of canceled episodes, postponed broadcast schedules, and censorial editing (Hirahara et al. 1991, 61-65).

I understand the development of home drama from the early 1960s as the maturation of the genre into a full-blown mass commodity. The early home dramas peaked in 1964, when Shichinin no Mago (Seven Grandchildren; TBS) and Tadaima Juichinin (Now Counting Eleven; TBS) were broadcast. Borrowing heavily from narrative formulas of imported American serials such as Father Knows Best, in which the father character was at the center of the program (Hirahara et al. 1991, 113-16), both serials portray the everyday lives of large families with strong, central father characters who play crucial roles in resolving family conflicts (Painter 1996; Sakamoto 1997). These dramas were clearly out of sync with social realities that were determined by the massive youth migration to urban centers that had led to the decline of extended families, the decrease in the birthrate, and the increasing absence of fathers-the primary wage earners-from the domestic sphere.

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