Television and Nationalism

Abstract

This article attempts to throw some light on the linkage between television and nationalism in contemporary Japan, focusing on: 1) the historical development of TV as a symbolic object in everyday life; 2) TV as a technology of time–space articulation; and 3) the textual formation of TV programs. By the late 1950s, TV sets were placed not in homes, but on street corners, where large numbers of people gathered. The symbolic meaning of the ‘collective’ nature of TV changed after the 1960s. From the early 1960s onwards, when TV entered households, it became an overarching medium linking the family with the state, defining the national consciousness and dominating people’s imaginative views of both the past and the present. This article analyzes the ideological relationship between gender, technology and nationalism in TV images through the postwar period. But TV also provides a flow of information and discursive structures for the horizons of the social imagination. Thus, the article also shows how TV broadcasting was structured around the three nationwide time zones of morning, midday and evening. Through these time zones, it was possible to link domestic memories with national history via its major programs. The stability of TV as a national medium was threatened in all these dimensions from the late 1980s. Increasingly, media became personalized, transgressive and transnational. Despite the gradual break-up of the stable position of TV in households and the national timetable constructed through broadcasting, more powerful and aggressive national times and discourses have come into being in the face of crises. In the context of this contradictory situation, the dominant central TV stations in Japan today are becoming increasingly stagnant while, on the other hand, the internet and independent video journalism are showing greater dynamism.