October 29, 2015
That's Edutainment!
"Is Japanese Television a Tool for Establishing Social Order?" asks Erik Luebs. Yes, but he mostly avoids the sort of academic navel-gazing you'd expect from a thesis question like that (until the last paragraph), and instead wonders aloud what can be read into the television habits of the average Japanese.
American and Japanese watch about the same amount of television. Except the slow penetration of cable in Japan means that for half of the population, their viewing choices are confined to a handful of networks. Japan's "Golden Age" of television hasn't ended, which makes those habit easier to generalize.
Luebs looks at the top-rated television shows in the U.S. and Japan from May 2015.
To clarify: Shoten resembles a haiku version of the original Whose Line Is It Anyway? The host sets up a scenario and feeds lines to the (seated) panelists, who improvise responses with an emphasis on verbal wordplay. A clever and entertaining show, it's been on the air since 1966.
And neither is the "variety/talk show" analogous to its American counterpart. There are "celebrity-of-the-day" chat shows (NHK's Studio Park, for example), but these are not that. They are "talk" shows in that people talk, and "variety" shows in that a variety of topics are discussed. But the topics take precedence.
Some of these shows get pretty brainy on the edutainment scale, a good way to catch up on the latest pop science. The formula remains as described above, with experts educating the tarento. (Strip away the entertainment factor and you end up with Today's Close Up, NHK's version of Nightline.)
A tarento ("talent") is a professional TV personality. To be sure, a tarento may be an actor or singer or scholar, but is a tarento when acting as such. His job is to always have something clever or insightful to say, regardless of the subject. For the viewer, explains Luebs, they become real-life Walter Mittys:
This is spot on, though I read "social order" in the most benign sense: lessons on how to play the game of life (specifically: Japanese life).
But Luebs can't help slewing back to the comfortable confines of scholarly cant. No, he concludes, it's not "indoctrination," but "without the cultural synergy created by diversity, homogeneous cultural ideas are refined and concentrated, and the TV is the medium that projects these values onto the individual."
As if these cultural ideas didn't exist before television, and only sprang into being around 1950 in the smoke-filled room of a producer's office.
I think it more likely that this hallowed "diversity" in mass media instead reinforces our individual silos: with 250 cable channels, we only have to watch what we want to see. But old-school Japanese broadcasters must attract the largest audience possible. They do that by giving the audience what it wants.
Or at least by not showing what the audience doesn't want to see.
If anything is being projected onto the individual, well, the individual is holding up a mirror reflecting it right back at the set. This is readily apparent to somebody who prefers the Japanese approach to "reality" to the American brand.
An awful lot of travel shows on Japanese television focus on traveling in Japan, and then there are the travel shows about going to foreign countries . . . in order to find a Japanese person living there. (An attempt to address the mystery of why any Japanese would choose to live anywhere but in Japan.)
But note that the host and audience are always impressed, even awed, by these daring explorers of the World Outside Japan. They serve as proxies for the audience, not cautionary tales. It's not that complicated. All you have to do is stipulate a more introverted and nerdier population and it all makes sense.
They're doing it so we don't have to. Thank you very much.
American and Japanese watch about the same amount of television. Except the slow penetration of cable in Japan means that for half of the population, their viewing choices are confined to a handful of networks. Japan's "Golden Age" of television hasn't ended, which makes those habit easier to generalize.
Luebs looks at the top-rated television shows in the U.S. and Japan from May 2015.
• NCIS (crime drama)
• The Big Bang Theory (sit-com)
• NCIS: New Orleans (crime drama)
• Dancing with the Stars (contest/dancing)
• The Voice (contest/singing)
• Ma're (family drama about cooking),
• Shoten (sketch comedy)
• Pittan Kokan (variety/talk show)
• Jinsei ga Kawaru (variety/talk show)
• Himitsu no Kenmin (variety/talk show)
To clarify: Shoten resembles a haiku version of the original Whose Line Is It Anyway? The host sets up a scenario and feeds lines to the (seated) panelists, who improvise responses with an emphasis on verbal wordplay. A clever and entertaining show, it's been on the air since 1966.
And neither is the "variety/talk show" analogous to its American counterpart. There are "celebrity-of-the-day" chat shows (NHK's Studio Park, for example), but these are not that. They are "talk" shows in that people talk, and "variety" shows in that a variety of topics are discussed. But the topics take precedence.
These celebrity panels chat and share anecdotes about various topics--tear-jerking stories about family reconciliation, first loves, travel, and maybe the most popular topic: food. Their chats are interspersed with short documentaries and dramatizations, in which the viewer can watch each celebrity's emotional reaction to the content through a "picture in picture" embedded at the side of the screen.
Some of these shows get pretty brainy on the edutainment scale, a good way to catch up on the latest pop science. The formula remains as described above, with experts educating the tarento. (Strip away the entertainment factor and you end up with Today's Close Up, NHK's version of Nightline.)
A tarento ("talent") is a professional TV personality. To be sure, a tarento may be an actor or singer or scholar, but is a tarento when acting as such. His job is to always have something clever or insightful to say, regardless of the subject. For the viewer, explains Luebs, they become real-life Walter Mittys:
Popular Japanese television looks inwards, into its own society. The variety TV show concept is based on the viewer personally relating to specific individuals who represent various tropes of Japanese-ness. Whether intentional or not, watching these celebrities chat with one another serves as an instructional guide for what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior in society. They give the viewer a clue into how to participate in any number of conversations, and how to react in any number of situations. These programs are just as much a form of entertainment as they are a framework for establishing social order.
This is spot on, though I read "social order" in the most benign sense: lessons on how to play the game of life (specifically: Japanese life).
But Luebs can't help slewing back to the comfortable confines of scholarly cant. No, he concludes, it's not "indoctrination," but "without the cultural synergy created by diversity, homogeneous cultural ideas are refined and concentrated, and the TV is the medium that projects these values onto the individual."
As if these cultural ideas didn't exist before television, and only sprang into being around 1950 in the smoke-filled room of a producer's office.
I think it more likely that this hallowed "diversity" in mass media instead reinforces our individual silos: with 250 cable channels, we only have to watch what we want to see. But old-school Japanese broadcasters must attract the largest audience possible. They do that by giving the audience what it wants.
Or at least by not showing what the audience doesn't want to see.
If anything is being projected onto the individual, well, the individual is holding up a mirror reflecting it right back at the set. This is readily apparent to somebody who prefers the Japanese approach to "reality" to the American brand.
An awful lot of travel shows on Japanese television focus on traveling in Japan, and then there are the travel shows about going to foreign countries . . . in order to find a Japanese person living there. (An attempt to address the mystery of why any Japanese would choose to live anywhere but in Japan.)
But note that the host and audience are always impressed, even awed, by these daring explorers of the World Outside Japan. They serve as proxies for the audience, not cautionary tales. It's not that complicated. All you have to do is stipulate a more introverted and nerdier population and it all makes sense.
They're doing it so we don't have to. Thank you very much.
Labels: cooking shows, education, food, japanese culture, japanese tv, nhk, pop culture, social studies, television
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