Multiculturalism or Cultural Nationalism? Representation of Ellie Kameyama as a Conduit and the Other in the NHK Morning Drama Massan

Abstract

ABSTRACT NHK’s decision to depict the story of Ellie and Masaharu Kameyama in the drama Massan seemed to suggest its desire to reflect Japan as a more multicultural society. Combined with positive representations of international couples, the drama seemed to embrace multiculturalism. More prominently, however, NHK promoted cultural nationalism. Although the drama praised Ellie as an ideal Japanese woman, it used her as a conduit through which Japanese traditional virtues were revisited. In addition, the drama marked her as the distinct Other. Ellie’s hair was blonde, which marked her as conspicuously non-Japanese. Her language use also painted her as the Other. She was assigned dialogue in Standard Japanese and used regional dialects only in marked utterances. She also spoke gender-neutral Japanese, rather than feminine Japanese. In addition, the drama creators assigned her simplified and disjointed grammar, utterances with ‘mistakes’ in the prescriptive sense, and occasional English phrases within her Japanese discourse. By manipulating her appearance to be distinctly non-Japanese and linguistically alienating her, the drama highlighted Ellie’s role as the outsider and underscored the idea that only ethnic Japanese know the Japanese language and culture. In this way, Massan provided an example of how diversity is contained and managed in Japan.