Thoughts on Japan

Kingaku kara no omoi - 金額からの思い

Thoughts on Japan from the National Institute of Japanese Studies. University of Sheffield

Last week I was talking about the wonderful subject of Japanese television dramas in terms of the general types of plots and characters which tend to appear, and what broader lessons about Japanese society we can draw from watching them, quite apart from the linguistic and entertainment benefits that can be obtained. This week, I said I’d take a look at the types of academic studies which scholars have done recently. I’m not going to pretend that this is anything like a comprehensive study or review of the literature – I don’t have time, or space, for that – but I can identify some of the broader areas which have attracted attention and flag up some of the more interesting studies for you to look at if you want to go into the subject in more depth.

Television drama can, of course, be a research topic for any number of academic disciplines, some of which can pay less attention to the dramatic aspects of the medium than others. For example, Senko Maynard, who I’ve mentioned before when talking about Japanese rhetorical structures, has recently been analysing the language used in a particular dorama in order to determine how language use between individuals changes as their relationships mature and alter, and discovering that ‘linguistic strategy such as stylistic shift expresses changing emotions between the characters, and, in particular, that stylistic shift indexes changing degrees of intimacy.’ (Maynard 2001: 1). This is straight linguistics research, which just happens to be using a drama as a resource – she could equally have gone out and recorded examples of speech and analysed those, although as the dorama in question, Majo no Jōken 魔女の条件 (TBS, 1999), concerned the progression of an illicit affair, it might have been difficult to obtain real-life examples easily.

It’s also possible to draw more firmly grounded academic conclusions about the current state of Japanese society from looking at what appears, or doesn’t appear, on television. Two recent studies, Valentine (1997) and Stibbe (2004) have analysed TV programmes in order to determine what they can tell us about the representation of minorities in Japan. Valentine’s work on marginalised sexualities shows that ‘lesbians and gay men can be freely stereotyped’ (Valentine 1997: 59), with lesbians in particular being portrayed, when they are represented at all, in almost wholly negative terms. For example, in the drama Kōkō Kyōshi 高校教師 (TBS, 1993), a lesbian character, even though not explicitly acknowledged as such, ‘is associated with…non-reciprocated, enforced relationships involving abuse of power’ (Valentine 1997: 60), while gay men generally, when not portrayed comically as okama オカマ, are ‘stereotypically defective in love, decency, honesty or courage: they are lonesome and/or loathsome’ (Valentine 1997: 69). Stibbe (2004), on the other hand, investigated representations of the disabled on Japanese television, discovering that from the beginning of the 1990s, there was ‘a massive boom in the portrayal of fictional disabled characters, played by non-disabled actors’ (Stibbe 2004: 23), with the characters being both positive, attractive and involved in romantic relationships (Stibbe 2004: 23). These dramas worked, however, to reinforce accepted social norms in that they either almost invariably concluded with the death of one of the protagonists, suggesting that the barrier between able-bodied and disabled people is ‘a taken-for-granted fact of Japanese society, without so much as a hint that it might be overcome’ (Stibbe 2004: 26), or else suggested that disabled people could be cured, or needed the protection of someone able-bodied (Stibbe 2004: 27), thus marginalising them and denying them an identity of their own.

The final major area of research on Japanese television is the consideration of its relationship with East Asia – either in terms of how it may contribute to the formation of a common East Asian popular culture and identity (Chua 2004), or how it spreads beyond the shores of Japan to Hong Kong and China (Nakano 2004) (other scholars have also considered the penetration of Japanese popular culture into Korea). In the former, it is not simply Japanese television which becomes the object of study, but other countries’ products of popular culture, too – I’m sure you are all familiar with the vogue for all things Korean recently in Japan, the so-called Kanryū būmu 韓流ブーム - and how they cross cultural boundaries and are received in environments other than that in which they were created.

There might be a tendency to view the international spread of the artefacts of Japanese popular culture – television programmes, films, comics, music, and so forth – as the result of cultural and economic imperialism. That is, Japanese corporations aggressively pushing their products into other East Asian markets, and overwhelming the domestic products. According to Nakano (2004), however, this is not the case: the spread of Japanese entertainment into Hong Kong and China was consumer driven, with young people watching pirated copies of Japanese dramas, and demanding more themselves. This is important because ‘this shift in perspective might help us break with the concepts of Japanization as well as Americanization that put the economic power at the absolute center of globalization’ (Nakano 2004: 249), and allow us to develop a more people-centred view of East Asian relations.

So, in answer to the question posed in the title of this column – I’d have to say, we can learn a great deal from dorama, both about Japan, and the part of the world in which it is.

References:

Chua, Beng Huat (2004) ‘Conceptualizing an East Asian popular culture’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5 (2): 200 – 221.
Maynard, Senko K. (2001) ‘Falling in love with style: Expressive functions of stylistic shifts in a Japanese television drama series’ Functions of Language 8 (1): 1-39.
Nakano, Yoshiko (2002) ‘Who initiates a global flow? Japanese popular culture in Asia’ Visual Communication 1: 230-254.
Stibbe, Arran (2004) ‘Disability, gender and power in Japanese television drama’ Japan Forum 16 (1): 21-36.
Valentine, James (1997) ‘Skirting and Suiting Stereotypes: Representations of Marginalized Sexualities in Japan’ Theory Culture Society 14: 57-85.

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