Japanese TV Research Articles

Japońskie reality show z perspektywy zachodniego widza

Japanese reality TV shows can be considered outstanding and exceptional among the world’s productions, considering their enduring domestic popularity. They remain, however, difficult to understand for the viewers outside the Land of the Rising Sun. Nonetheless, international curiosity does not abate. These shows derive from the unique ingenuity of Japanese people and their culture, and the specific character of the productions differs from the character of other countries’ productions; they feature bright aesthetics, hyper-activity and intense commitment from the participants, frequent changes of scene and dynamic, intense and disruptive noise and, most significantly, a high degree of contrivance and cruelty. All this does not cease to amaze and shock the foreign spectators. In this article, I intend to analyse the most popular productions in recent years in order to understand their character, identify and evaluate the differences between Japanese and Western TV programs, and reflect on what the essence of their phenomenon could be.

THE UNCIVIC POP CULTURE?

Based on a discourse analysis of the fan-audience discussions found in the National Taiwan University and Soochow University Bulletin Board Systems, this case study discovers that the Taiwanese youth in fact draw on Japanese TV dramas as a springboard for reflexive discussions of their own social and political conditions in post-authoritarian Taiwan. The Japanomania fan discourse played a crucial role in Taiwan's democratization and nationhood-building in the 1990s. This paper argues that fan discussion networks are ‘pre-political’ because they create social conditions and alternative discourses that could prepare media users for potential social changes. I contend that foreign media are not necessarily the most immediate oppressors and could become the source of subversive symbols and new meanings for local resistance. Further research is called for to illuminate the shaping of identity by the global media in non-Western contexts.

Impact caption as a highlighting device: Attempts at viewer manipulation on TV

The novel use of intra-lingual subtitles other than as an aid for the hard-of-hearing population originated from Japanese TV in the 1990s. This innovative use, also known as impact captions, is now seen as a feature of Japanese (and other Asian) TV but has also spread into Western broadcasts (cf. the drama series Sherlock on BBC and the film Night Watch) in recent years. However, there is little research on the interpretive mechanism or viewer experience of such use and hence industries continue to use impact captions in an ad hoc manner. Working within Sperber and Wilson׳s (1995) relevance theory, this paper is an attempt to explain the way viewers interpret the content of programmes with impact captions and the role these captions play in the interpretation process. I claim that impact captioning is a device the creators can use to manipulate the viewers’ interpretation by highlighting certain elements.

일본에서 인기 높은 한국드라마의 연애스토리: 일본의 연애스토리와의 비교

일본에서 인기 높은 한국드라마의 연애스토리: 일본의 연애스토리와의 비교

地上デジタルテレビジョン放送日本方式(ISDB-T)の国際展開

地上デジタルテレビジョン放送日本方式(ISDB-T)の国際展開

A Study of Linguistic Politeness in Japanese

This paper re-examines theories of linguistic politeness in Japanese, and holds that linguistic politeness is a very complicated issue influenced by multiple factors in different layers including general face wants of participants, the participants’ societal positions and social relationships, social norm that the interactants share, the interactants’ discernment or interpretation of the social rules, immediate context of the interaction, and possible strategies for the interactants to choose under the constrains of the other simultaneously functioning factors. Based on the data collected from recent Japanese TV dramas, this study maintains that, as a general principle, Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) theory of face does apply to Japanese language and culture and forms the base of politeness. Similarly as in any other culture, facework in successful communication in Japanese is a result of choice by an interlocutor in accordance with normative polite practices. What makes linguistic politeness in Japanese unique is not that Japanese speakers need to act appropriately according to their social norm, but that their discernment (wakimae) and recognition of the social position and relationship (tachiba) of the participants, which form the second layer of the determining factors of politeness, make speakers of Japanese always attend to and try to fulfil the other participant’s face want including both positive and negative face, and, at the same time, maintain their own positive face but rarely claim their own negative face especially when an interactant has less power and in a lower social position in an interaction. The data also suggest a model of face-redressing strategies co-occurring with face threatening acts (FTA) in Japanese.

Matching Word-Order Variations and Sorting Results for the iEPG Data Search

This paper describes using a finite-state automaton (FSA) to retrieve Japanese TV guide text. The proposed FSA application can be considered novel due to lack of research on the subject. The automaton has been implemented for matching and extracting all possible combinations of search query words in all possible word orders that may be present in the TV guide text. This implementation also sorts the extraction results by analyzing word semantic features (such as “being an object” or “being a property of an object”). The present paper also proposes a search system using the above implementation and compares it with a baseline system that matches query words (of multi-word queries) in exactly the same and exactly the opposite word orders only. Both systems use morphological parsing and apply a stop list to the query. A multi-parameter evaluation has shown advantages of the proposed system over the baseline one.

Local vs. Foreign Television Drama: Niche Analysis of a South Korean Audience's Use of Korean, American and Japanese Dramas

The present study explored the reception and consumption processes of a Korean audience’s viewing of local and international television dramas. Findings indicated that the influential factors on the level of viewing in regards to Korean, American, and Japanese TV dramas among Korean viewers differed. In particular, a significant difference was found in terms of perceived drama characteristics. Applying niche theory, the present study also examined the audience’s motivation for watching these television dramas. Results demonstrated that Korean TV dramas possessed the broadest niche breadth and were the most competitive. In a comparison of the perceived characteristics of TV dramas, American drama earned competitive superiority for most characteristics. The implications from the results were discussed in terms of cultural discount and proximity.

A scientist or salesman? Identity construction through referent honorifics on a Japanese shopping channel program

This paper explores how referent honorifics contribute to identity construction on a Japanese TV shopping channel program. Drawing on Ochs' two-step model of indexicality (1993, 1996) and Agah's proposal (1993) that honorifics are not directly linked to social status but index a 'relative position within events of discursive interaction' (p. 134), this paper first proposes that the direct index of the Japanese referent honorifics is the act of elevating the addressee and/or the third party (in the case of humble forms, the elevation of the addressee and/or the third party is achieved by the speaker's lowering him/ herself) and then examines how the male guest's dual identities (i.e., those of scientist and salesman) are constructed on the program by qualitatively analyzing the use or non-use of referent honorifics and co-occurring linguistic features. The paper finds that while the female host positions the guest as a scientist by addressee-elevating strategies including referent honorifics, the male guest constructs his own identity as a scientist by employing a detached stance indexed by avoidance of referent honorifics and other co-occurring linguistic forms. In contrast, his salesman identity is indexed by the use of the humble forms. The paper contributes to our understanding that referent honorifics do not simply mirror pre-existing social realities.

The Korean Wave (Hallyu) in East Asia: A Comparison of Chinese, Japanese, and Taiwanese Audiences Who Watch Korean TV Dramas

The major purpose of this study is to find out what factors are responsible for Hallyu, the flow and popularity of Korean popular cultural products in East Asia, and which direction Hallyu is heading for. To do this, recent structural and institutional changes in the region are examined and the 2008 EASS data analyzed. Opening up of the cultural market and development of the mass media industry, especially television, laid the ground for Hallyu in East Asia. The 2008 EASS data reveal that social proximity and two demographic variables are common factors for the rise of Hallyu in East Asia, but globalization and modernity variables had no effect on Hallyu. Females are more attracted to Korean TV dramas than males, but typical Hallyu fans are youngest in China, followed by Taiwan, and Japan the oldest. Besides these characteristics of Hallyu fans, the quality of Korean cultural products is an important factor in their success abroad. Since the second decade of the new millennium, Hallyu evolves into a new, or second, stage in which its contents, strategy, and media change considerably. Hallyu, representing a case of alternative globalization, signals a new phase in the recent history of globalization.

Toward multimodal ethnopoetics

AbstractMultimodal analysis of discourse is a fast-developing area of linguistic research. With this trend in mind, the purpose of the current chapter is twofold: first, to briefly review previous endeavors in the study of linguistic poetics with special attention to parallelism and repetition (cf. Jakobson 1960, 1966), and to seek potential paths to expand it to multimodal analyses of natural discourse by incorporating the ideas from ethnopoetics (Hymes 1981, 1996, 2003) and gesture studies (McNeill 1992, 2005); and second, to present a sample analysis of media discourse in the framework of “multimodal ethnopoetics” by highlighting the interplay between the verbal-nonverbal coordination and the audio-visual representations. With these goals in mind, we confirm that poeticity is not a distinctive quality restricted to constructed poetry but is an endowment to any kind of natural discourse that is co-constructed by language, the body, and the environment.Specifically, I first review some basic and extended concepts of repetition and parallelism, identifying the notion of “lines” as the fundamental criterion for conducting Hymesian ethnopoetics, in which lines are weaved into larger, culture-specific units on the “verse/stanza” levels. In addition, it is proposed that para-linguistic and nonverbal aspects of language use may (un)consciously contribute to the construction of poetic structure, typically in terms of “catchment” (McNeill 2005) and the distributional configuration of gestures (Kataoka 2009, 2010, 2012). In the latter half of the paper, we move on to examine an actual case (a Japanese TV commercial) in which poetic intentions are apparently maximized for greater appeal to the audience and larger profit from the product. The analysis indicates that the aesthetics encoded and shared therein could be an outcome of the repeated practice, accumulated and sedimented by attending to the ongoing – whether actual or virtual – participation, which is generally facilitated by favored manners of conduct, or “habitus” (Bourdieu 1990).

Memory and myth: the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima in German and Japanese TV drama

Japan is often blamed for not coming to terms with its own wartime past and for focusing solely on its role as a victim of the war. Germany, however, is often seen as the model that Japan has to emulate, having penitently accepted responsibility. Thus, in order to work out how these popular myths are being perpetuated, the media prove to be a good source of information, since they help to uphold memory and myth at the same time. In this paper, it will be examined how the “memory” of the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima is being upheld in Japan and Germany 蜢 and what kinds of “myths” are being created in the process. In focusing on two TV dramas, it shall be worked out to what extent Japan and Germany are represented as “victims” and to what extent, if at all, the issue of war responsibility features in these dramas.

Violence in Japanese Television Commercials: Application of the NTVS Coding System to Commercial Analysis

In this paper, a content analysis of 7,599 Japanese TV commercials was conducted to examine the characteristics of commercials that showed violence and violent behaviour. By applying the National Television Violence Study (NTVS) method (Smith et al., 1998), we modified coding items for the content analysis. The results showed that 4.51 percent of the examined commercials contained violent behaviour. These were often aired in the late evening and morning, and found in animation programmes and movies. As for the types of products in the commercials, they are mostly advertisements for video games, music, movies and TV programmes. The commercials also contained elements such as the means and realism of violent behaviour that promote the learning of aggression from the perspective of social learning theory. We discuss the possibility of applying the NTVS coding system to commercial analysis.

Interstellar Meteoroids in the Japanese tv Catalogue

The present work is based on an analysis of the 14763 precise determined meteor orbits collected in the Japanese tv catalogue (SonotaCo (2009)), with the aim of determining the real proportion of interstellar meteors in this database. If interstellar meteors are present among the registered meteor orbits, the distribution of the excesses of their heliocentric velocities should correspond to the distribution of the radial velocities of close stars. For the velocity $v_i$$=$ 20 km s$^{-1}$ of an interstellar meteor, with respect to the Sun, we obtain a heliocentric velocity of $v_H$$=$ 46.6 km s$^{-1}$ of an interstellar meteor arriving at Earth. Any error in the determination of $v_H$, especially near the parabolic limit, can create an artificial hyperbolic orbit that does not really exist. The analysis of the data did not produce any convincing arguments in favour of the existence of true hyperbolic meteors in the catalogue. It was shown that the vast majority of the 484 hyperbolic orbits has been caused by an overestimation of their velocity, and approximately 50% of them belong to meteor showers. Furthermore, the hyperbolic excesses of the velocities in all cases are very low, about one order less than the velocity distribution of neighbouring stars suggest. The upper limit of the proportion of possible interstellar meteors to interplanetary ones among all investigated meteor orbits in the database is 1.3 $\times$ 10$^{-3}$.

Mental health care and East Japan Great Earthquake

Mental health care and East Japan Great Earthquake

An ACO-based algorithm for optimising the revenue of TV advertisement using credit information

We propose an algorithm to optimise a sum of products of revenue and credit information in TV advertising. This algorithm exploits the credit information of the advertiser and the ant colony system. To evaluate the performance of the algorithm proposed in this research, we conduct numerical experiments using real data in the Japanese TV advertising market. The results show that the method in this paper is efficient and promising.

From Passive Receivers to Distributing Consumers: The Changing Role of Japanese TV Drama Audiences in Hong Kong

This paper examines the changing role of Japanese TV drama audiences in Hong Kong. Many studies on cultural circulation have assumed the audience of cultural text as a group of passive individuals and they have been accused of falling into a trap of blinkered thinking, which often overlooks the audience's ability to re-create and re-circulate the cultural product and to attach a new layer of meaning to the text in the process. The paper tries to show that the traditional cultural circuit of “Producer–Product–Receivers” cannot fully explain the complex use of cultural products in daily life by investigating the consumption of Japanese TV dramas in Hong Kong, from the perspective of the changing role of audiences and its relation to the changing social circumstances.

Ältere Menschen in der japanischen Fernsehwerbung: Eine umfragebasierte und inhaltsanalytische Untersuchung

This article presents results from a survey on the image of older people in Japan and a content analysis of how they are represented in Japanese TV commercials. The representative survey resulted in 720 responses from people between 15 and 65 years of age in the greater Tokyo area. Among the findings: The term kōreisha (elderly people) is generally used to refer to people over 70, although the official definition in Japan is over 65; kōreisha and dankai no sedai (baby boomers) are identified as very distinct groups with different characteristics; and there is a generally positive attitude towards ageing, while negative stereotypes are rejected. The survey participants were also asked for their impressions of how older people are depicted in TV advertising. These impressions were then compared to objective measures of Japanese TV ads through the use of content analysis. The systematic sample consisted of 2,972 television commercials aired in the years 1997 and 2007. The results echo the findings of other research studies conducted in various countries and include the following: a general under-representation of older people and especially of older females; the representation of older people mostly in leading roles; and older people's occurring predominantly together with other age groups.

MEN'S ADULTERY AS SICKNESS: METAPHOR, GENDER CATEGORIES AND THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER DIFFERENCES ON JAPANESE TELEVISION CONSULTATION PROGRAMS1

This article describes how Japanese TV programs adopting a consultation framework construct different realities for women and men concerning a specific social phenomenon, namely adultery. To do so, two perspectives, the theory of metaphor promoted by George Lakoff and membership category analysis, are combined toward a discursive analysis which reveals that, in the case of men's adultery, advice givers typically shift responsibility away from men and instead scrutinize the behavior of women. In contrast, in the case of women's adultery, participants on the programs directly reprimand the female offenders, using metaphors and gender categories to emphasize the immorality of their actions and how those actions are detrimental to men. The implications of the analysis for the study of gender and language in general and, more narrowly, in Japan are discussed.

A Study on the Correlation between the Visual and Verbal Factors of Japanese TV Public Service Advertising

A Study on the Correlation between the Visual and Verbal Factors of Japanese TV Public Service Advertising