Japanese Society Midterm 3 Lecture 1 11 11 13 Media Culture in Japan Imaged Away The Toden murder case The drama adaptation becomes a flop The producer s agenda o Story of gender discrimination o Assumption that dramas offer narrative entertainment pleasure comes from the storyline Why did the drama version become a flop o Viewers do not think that the role fits the tarento who plays the heroine o Viewers watch trendy dramas for the tarento And dramas are supposed to be tailor made for the tarento Dream Labor in the Dream Factory The young scriptwriter boom o Becoming a television scriptwriter is one of the five most popular professions in the 1990s o Scriptwriters were the public face of primetime dramas What explains this boom o Young female scriptwriters mediate between the new target audience young single women and the male producers and directors The relevance of the scriptwriter phenomenon for TV in Japan o Television in Japan remains a mass medium o The response of commercial networks to market fragmentation target a wealthy audience segment young women are trendsetters in 1990s Japan o The growing interdependence between TV production and reception o Semiotic war not between producers and viewers but within the production team female scriptwriters usually lose What s Love Got To Do With It Love dramas target young single women The parasite single phenomenon Love dramas tap into and reinforce the parasite single subjectivity Love dramas are similar to Sex and the City they are about attitude and lifestyles expressed via consumerism They encourage their viewers to become elite consumers Viewers benefit from the post Fordist tarento oriented media economies They enjoy love dramas via the tarento The tarento become positive role models of social success they suggest that style is the key to self determination Japanese Society Midterm 3 Labor Fantasies in Recessionary Japan The development of workplace dramas in the late 1990s o E g office lady dramas cop shows hospital dramas etc Workplace dramas advocate the importance of social realism o Directors of workplace dramas say that love dramas are unrealistic Social responsibility was a successful strategy to re attract male viewers to television o Male viewers are less committed to television o Workplace dramas can be enjoyed as independent episodes Why is the Shomuni series so popular o Chinatsu is a stand in for the male freeter o More and more young men are in the structural position of office ladies o The series encodes neoliberal ideologies away from working to find pleasure toward finding pleasure in work The heroine of Shomuni becomes a role model for male viewers These dramas mobilized young men into a flexible work regime by encouraging them to Make the best of your job and have fun while doing it be autonomous and responsible Epilogue Image Commodity Value Affect Tarento are transformed into image commodities their circulation produces value Away from plot driven entertainment toward lifestyle oriented programming How affect becomes productive of value A Woman s Right to Shoes Japanese Society Midterm 3 Lecture 2 11 18 13 Transnational Japan Imperialism and Japan 1 Is Japan racially homogeneous a The denial to deal with Japan s imperialist past 2 Imperialism was a process by which categories such as Japanese Nation the Japanese were produced Historical Amnesia in the Present East Asian governments resent that o Japan refused to take responsibility for its imperialist politics in Asia Historical Amnesia and the Number Game Approximately three million Japanese died as a result of the Asia Pacific war and the majority of them were military personnel About 20 million non Japanese Asians died and most of them were civilians Anti Japanese Demonstrations in both Korea China and Taiwan Koizumi s Visit to the Yasukuni Shrine Shrine founded in 1869 It is dedicated to individuals who died for Japan 1978 it enshrined the 14 A class war criminals o Including Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo Shinto humans are transformed into deities when they die and worshipped The Controversy Around Koizumi s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine The Yasukuni Position o World War II was a war fought in self defense o Class A war criminals were falsely accused Sensitivity has increased when Japan o Claimed a permanent position in the UN Security Council o Sent troops to Iraq on humanitarian missions The Comfort Women Issue December 2000 Women s War Crimes Tribunals in Tokyo o To investigate the subjection of women to institutionalized sexual abuse in comfort stations established by the military o To provide a public hearing of the testimony of 62 women and 2 soldiers The Nanjing Massacre Touted as The Rape of Nanjing July 1937 the second Sino Japnaese War Severe atrocities during the fall of the capital Nanjing o 250 000 300 000 people were killed many of them were women o 20 000 women were raped Japanese Society Midterm 3 Imperialism The annexation of territory and imposition of alien rule over the people who live there Characteristic o A process of construction a relationship of domination o Domination is formalized in institutions of colonial administration The Main Characteristics of Western Imperialism Colonies are not contiguous with the territory of colonizing country Reasons for expansion o Economic interests o Place of excess population o To deflect domestic problems e g sharpening class conflicts Colonization is rationalized in the name of spreading civilization White Man s Burden The Characteristics of Japanese Imperialism Japanese Empire was restricted to Northeast Asia Anti Western Imperialism o Russo Japanese War Japan liberated Asian territories from Western domination o Japan is the only non Western non white colonizer Emphasis on the racial proximity between colonizer and colonized o In reality the Japanese did not consider all Asians equal To counter the protectionism of the Western economic block Japanese imperialism emerged within and in response to an already racialized world divided between white and non white populations Japanese colonialism started off as colorization without capital o Japan uses its colonies to extract raw materials for the Japanese industry o Without its colonies Japan could not compete with Western scales of production Mark Driscoll Cool ie Japan Traces the development of colonial administration The rhetoric of civilization The critique of Western colonization o The Japanese treated Chinese laborers better