Playing with New Rules: Radio Quiz Shows and the Reorientation of the Japanese Under the US Occupation, 1945–1952

Abstract

This article traces the introduction of the quiz show into Japanese broadcasting, led by the US occupation forces in the aftermath of World War II. Between late 1946 and the early 1950s, the occupation’s radio personnel guided the Japanese broadcasting monopoly NHK to air several replicas of American quiz programs. These replicas provoked a quiz craze in the war-devastated nation. By positing the quiz show as a cultural form deeply embedded in American-style capitalist democracy, the author argues that early radio quiz shows provided a microcosm in which Japanese listeners symbolically practiced some of the normative participatory principles of the particular form of democracy preferred by the occupation. The popularization of the quiz show, even though a complex and at times uneasy process, channeled and reflected the larger historical transformation in the organizing principles of society and the normative form of subjectivity, which was strongly conditioned by the US hegemony in the rising Cold War.