Television, Japan, and Globalization offers thirteen essays that quickly bring readers in touch with the critical edge of current academic debates on its tripartite constituents: television, Japan, and globalization. The book's preface and its concise introductory essay “Why Japanese Television Now?” by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto powerfully guide readers in this venture. The two objectives of the book are set up here: to draw critical attention to Japanese television in U.S. academia and to problematize the “Japaneseness” of Japanese television. Sounds familiar? But the book is by no means a mere addendum that fills a gap in the U.S. scholarship, nor does it simply pass by the sign “Japan” on its way to global televisual cultures or global television studies. Rather, Yoshimoto questions the assumed status of globalization as “a new state of the world that makes obsolete an old paradigm of scholarship centered around nation-states as a fundamental unit of identity” (p. 4). On the contrary, argues Yoshimoto, global consumer culture's aggressive gaze at Japanese popular culture has led the reorientalizing tendency of Japanese studies. It is thus his contestation that globalization has not yet brought “genuine problematization of Japan's fixed identity” (p. 1). Readers must resist an interpretative leap in assuming a fixed narrative from the book's tripartite title.
In this regard, Jung-Bong Choi's essay is an elucidating assessment of the current state of media globalization with a concrete case study of Murdoch's Sky Television's entry and withdrawal from Japan. Choi tackles one of the myths of global media, namely, “the antithesis between local/national media and transnational media” (p. 8) and the moral sentiments attached to such a myth by highlighting the parallel between them. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano's polemical piece also offers an excellent example of the downside effect of uncritical faith in globalization on the academic discourse on anime. She argues that both ahistorical, culturalist account of anime's Japaneseness and overemphasis on textual analysis in the current U.S. anime studies have marginalized the discussion of the Japanese TV anime and its local reception within industrial and economic contexts. The problem is not limited to academia as her analysis of Metropolis locates the ideological operation of the stigmatic view of Japanese TV anime as aesthetically inferior to both Japanese anime films and Disney-style full animation within the aesthetics of this animation film. It is perhaps not surprising that gender perspective in Noriko Aso's essay on the iconic figure of the revolutionary girl escapes the aesthetic hierarchy and institutional politics that burden mainstream anime and its studies.
The book does not read as a straightforward history of Japanese television. Nevertheless, several distinctive turns in its history are identified here. One such turn is the emergence of niche markets in the late 1980s and the subsequent transformation of televisual cultures. Along with Kelly Hu's analysis of the theme of pursuing happiness in Japanese trendy drama, Eva Tsai examines the lover-subject, one of the most invested culture figures of contemporary Japanese cultural industry. Stephanie DeBoer's piece takes a different route to interrogate the aesthetics and its international appeal of the trendy drama with a particular emphasis on the production of urban experience in television out of the close relationship between its media technologies and urban development. In particular, her essay delineates the complex spatiotemporal make-up of the Fuji TV station, which evolved around an environment that was conceived in the era of bubble economy and a milieu of cosmopolitan urban optimism in the 1980s, but then turned into a place filled with desire for “yesterday's future.” By extending her discussion of television's construction of urban experience beyond televisual reflection on the local viewer's urban life to include technological imagination and global dreams of mobility and connectivity that configure a complex geometry, her essay engages the question raised by Hu's essay as to what extent Tokyo, or even Japan, is a significant object mediating reflexivity for pan-Asian audiences. The fourth essay on trendy drama is offered by Gabriella Lukacs, who interrogates the rise of trendy drama as part of the historical transformation of national television industries in Japan. A new relationship between production and reception in the Japanese televisual cultures of the late 1980s and onwards is considered in terms of political economy of post-Fordist production. With that, Lukacs's ethnographic treatment of female scriptwriters compellingly argues for a shift in the focus of analysis to televisual production itself, which she regards as today's primary site of semiotic negotiation.
Shuhei Hosokawa looks at how the programming of NHK Nodojiman was closely intertwined with naturalization of the postwar ideology of democracy in Japan. Koichi Iwabuchi's essay then offers an account of a more recent turn in Japanese nationalistic discourses by drawing an example from a TV talk show, Kokoga hen dayo Nihonjin, which turned to “ordinary foreigners” who supposedly help enhance Japanese viewers’ sense of national belonging. The sense of belonging is also an important theme in Hirofumi Katsuno's account of a local but transnational reception of a live-action television program Kikaida broadcast in Hawai‘i during 1974 and 1975 and its rebroadcasting twenty-six years later. Katsuno's interviews with Kikaida's adult fans testify that television has become a rich archive of embodied experience and has been increasingly tied to the economy of nostalgia in late modernity. Christine R. Yano then warns us that such an economy of nostalgia might manifest itself in a problematic discourse about the racialized other in her examination of the representations of Nikkei in Sakura, NHK's morning serialized drama in 2002.
Read as a book, Television, Japan and Globalization shows not only that the totalizing effects of television and its transnational networks exceed the global consciousness and one-dimensional expectations, but also how powerfully they demarcate historical experience in concrete terms and form various collective and/or personal identities precisely by incorporating the affective labor of its inhabitants into its effects. Aaron Gerow's call for the incorporation of political and economic analyses of television and its efforts to commodify the gaze into our consideration of the postmodern textual production and consumption holds particular significance here. While he does not deny the value of critical media or stylistic strategies of nonappropriation in tuning the critical faculties of individual viewers, he doubts that this can be achieved “without making viewing an issue of collective agency, if not the public sphere itself” (p. 146).
The book certainly encourages critical engagement on the part of students in appreciating and challenging the validity of the individual arguments of the essays in relation to their particular concerns and methods.
