The 6th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Sociological

Association

Theme: Asia Pacific Societies in Globalisation and Localisation

Date: 17th - 19th of September 2004 Venue: Seoul National University, Se

oul, South Korea

Session 2. Media, Culture and Identity: Panel 2: Exploration of Japanese Media

The Tele/Cell Society:

Understanding Japan's Contemporary Binding

Mechanisms

About this Paper

The name of this presentation and the paper I have spent the last few weeks writing for this presentation are different.

So, too, is ： the methodology the findings the discussion and the conclusions!

About this Paper:Binding Mechanisms

What is not different is my underlying view – my belief – that what both have in common 　 is that they concern binding mechanisms.

The way that certain social forms work to create links with people in a society, joining them into a community of interest, involvement, investment and intimacy.

– in the case(s) discussed here these forms are media

The Bindingness Thesis

Today I wish to argue that the significance of two technologies – TV and Cell Phone -- inheres in a common characteristic: their binding power.

Television at a national (or macro) level

The cell phone at a personal (or micro) level.

The Bindingness Thesis

Where my work will (ultimately) go is to argue that far from functioning in differential ways, two very different media technologies work to produce powerful, meaningful sociological phenomena – albeit in different ways.

-- but that I will leave for another day, say a book on “Media, Self and Society”

Theoretical Claims: The Context

Japan, like any other (post)industrial society, has increased in complexity; its social organization denoted by: Contractual affiliation Rationality Increased anonymity, and A widening (though diminution in grip) of social networks.

Much has been made of its purported “disintegration” from a collectivist to individualist character (Nakane 1970; but cf. Moeur and Sugimoto 1990).

Theoretical Claims: Media’s Social Role

Media in Japan today serve as a spur to what Durkheim labelled “conscience collective”– the external emotional and moral conditions that

produce social solidarity.

Like a “gemeinschaft” organization, media can assist in forging organic relations, providing a shared vocabulary, a place for affective experience, a common pool of moral understanding that underpins consciousness

About Cell Phones

Owned and used by 73% of the population Represents the fastest growing technology in

Japan Also the most extensive platform for Internet

use in Japan (by a ratio of 2:1) A means of taking photographs, movies,

sending mail, downloading images and music, as well as sending mail.

Theoretical Claims: Cell Phone

The cell phone has been characterized by its “interiority” (McVeigh 2003) This is said to be emblematic of the socially

fragmenting, segmented, inward turn (of Japanese)

However, I assert that cell phones are actually highly integrative devices (e.g. Holden and Tsuruki 2003; Holden 2004) The integration transpires at the lowest units of

sociation: dyads, triads, clubs, associations.

Past Work: (Holden 2004) Theorizing from

Observations of Adolescent Cell Phone Users How “Adolechnics” Develop a Relationship with the Technol

ogy Technology’s role in Creation/Personal Growth Individuation: Personalizing the Machine The Question of Interiorization

Externalization through “Net-Working”Externalizing through linkage with societal institutions

The Realities of Societal Integration Socialization Ritual Sociation Economic System reproduction Cultural reproduction

The Matter of Status The Question of Place

The reality of non-space

About TVAbout TVTV has a diffusion rate of 100%Is viewed by virtually every Japanese person every dayIt outpaces other popular forms of information processing:

newspapers (86%)cell phones (73%)the Internet (27%)

Collectively, media consumption is the third largest activity engaged in by Japanese during the day (behind “sleep” and “work”)

It has been reported that, on average, at least one TV set plays 7 to 8 hours a day in each Japanese dwelling

Personal viewing rates per day approaching 225 minutes.A recent European survey ranks Japan second worldwide in

terms of daily TV viewership.

Theoretical Claims:Japanese Television

Television, in contrast to Cell Phones, is integrative in different ways.

While its various genres (i.e. news, sports, game shows, talk shows, wide shows, ads) are distinguishable, it has a major mode of discourse – a genre-spanning communication trope called “infotainment”

Infotainment employs: Rhetorical forms Technical devices Semiotic tropes Specific subject matter and A limited set of performers who repeatedly cycle

through the televisual universe

About Today’s Presentation

Today I will focus on Japanese Television.

This paper is predicated on data obtained by a graduate student in my department: Hakan Ergul

It then extrapolates theoretical positions from that work. Making claims about: How contemporary TV communicates

In particular, 3 predominant modes of discourse; The role of television in Japanese society; What TV discourse tells us about societal structure; What televisual discourse tells us about the needs and orien

tations of viewers

About the Study

We gained access to Oh! Ban desu! the most-watched locally-produced show in Sendai the twelfth largest city in Japan, Sendai is the regional hub i

n the northeastern region of Honshu, with a population in excess of 1,000,000.

We employed an assortment of ethnographic methodologies, including: participant observation, semi-structured interviews, interpretive field notes, and content analysis of the broadcasting content

3 Levels of Discourse

1. Infotainment the most immediate of these communication practices a form of packaging and knowledge delivery

2. Intimacy operating at an affective level a link forged with the audience which stems from both

the form and content of the infotainment broadcast

3. Televisual Uchi a discursive practice that flows from the prior two an extensive, singular, linked public on the image of an

all-encompassing private Similar to a “gemeinschaft” organization

About Infotainment

Traditional communication studies – particularly those from Europe – have employed the term “infotainment” to refer to a certain kind of TV show One blendng information and entertainment.

Traditionally, such a communication style has been con

sidered appearing only in the guise of certain, fixed, genres.

These include: Quiz programs Docutainments Sports programs Talk-shows How-to programs And, more recently, news/current affairs programs

About Infotainment in Japan

We suggest that in Japan, infotainment operates on a different model. It is more extensive It spans all genres, integrating them, culling,

mixing and matching, and melding their variegated elements

It has become a sort of extravaganza — by which we mean something beyond the norm of simple information transmission. It is a mass-mediated spectacle A production that moves beyond the everyday,

mundane world A fabricated communicative event associated

with popular culture

Links to Other Discursive Forms

Finally, infotainment does more than circulate and reinforce the popular

This rhetorical form exerts profound cultural effects.

These impacts inhere in the construction of a kind of national family, what we call the televisual uchi

Intimacy:Affect as Media Effect

Infotainment creates a way of perceiving and interpreting the world

It: elicits emotion plays on a sense of closeness and belongingness transcends the “normal” barriers between people in public

Intimacy is sub-genre, but continuous and also genre-spanning; it serves as a balm, a precious social nutrient that flows between and amongst the distinct genres

It can be said to piggie-back on the trans-genre communication trope, infotainment

While infotainment can be called a “super-discourse”, intimization of televisual content can be thought of as a “sub-discourse”.

Theoretical Claims: Super-genre into Sub-genre into Supra-genreThe notion here is that infotainment employs affect,

which ends up engaging and building audiences

The constant use of a unitary communication form of discourse creates a unified audience

What results is a televisual uchi an insular, hermetic, collective “family”

Continually reproduced, these elements have the ability to unify viewers into a common national audience, who possess shared understandings, beliefs, emotions, cultural products, goals, heroes (and villains), myths, and identity.

Infotainment and Intimacy

In this way, the visible members of Japanese television are like a family or a club.

Their constant appearance in viewers’ lives creates a shared, on-going conversation with viewers.

In this persistence the private worlds of atomized viewers are transcended;

The televisual community becomes tied together into a collective public via a shared set of rhetorical forms and intentionally-mediated discourses.

Infotainment and Intimacy

There is a second dimension to seamlessness which assists in engineering greater intimacy: the integration of disparate elements within any one show.

Japanese infotainment programs tend to meld “corners”, thereby crossing traditional boundaries of televisual genres.

Effects: 1. hybridizes content within the same program.

For example, while two people are featured in the in-studio “kitchen” discussing the preparation of a Japanese dish, others in an adjoining set in the same studio worry aloud about the social problem of children increasingly committing crimes. Shortly thereafter those from the cooking corner join the entire assembly and all members of the show’s cast taste the food that was just prepared. Following this group sampling, the main announcers may then assume the role of newscasters.

The Significance of Infotainment

What is suggested by this multiplicity of roles and fluidity between content areas is that Japanese TV has (via infotainment) reconfigured traditional genre borders.

Its content reflects a shift in the operant discursive formation: toward a blended or hybridized form of communication, toward a novel way of packaging and delivering both information and entertainment.

This view sets our work apart from past studies of Japanese infotainment, specifically; and, because we are claiming that this is a rapidly encroaching evolution in Japan’s televisual communication.

This constitutes a profound shift in rhetorical forms underpinning and employed to breath life into Japanese public culture.

About those Studied

These observations were made possible by a connection at Miyagi Telebi, a former producer of the program.

On these pages we will refer to him as “Watanabe”.

Thanks to him we ad the run of the studioWe also interviewed all of the principals in front of, a

s well as behind, the cameras. This included: the hosts of the program, Satou Muneyuki and Ukigaya Mi

o the regular newscaster, Takehana Jun

About Method

Our research approach reflects a departure from the preferred strategy widely employed heretofore.

Until now, the infotainment phenomenon — and its precursor tabloidisation – was analyzed in the main by quantitative researches employing content analysis of televisual texts.

We argue that it is imperative to know how discursive approaches in communication actually appear.

In a world, how is it understood, shaped and produced; how is it constructed in and delivered via the production process?

Thus we sought to enter the studio.Our focus was on trying to observe and interrogate televisual i

nformation and entertainment workers in situ, as they produce their content.

About Oh Ban desu! Miyagi Terebi is one of four local TV stations in Sendai Established in 1970 as a local branch of NTV (Nihon Terebi),

one of Japan’s four nation-wide networks. MTV’s broadcasting area is limited to the Miyagi area, a stat

e comprised of nearly 860,000 households. Oh! Ban desu! could be said to be an indispensable fixture o

f the local program spectrum. It commands three hours and ten minutes of the broadcast d

ay. Broadcast live, it airs Monday through Friday, beginning at

3:50 p.m. and running until the seven o’clock news. Of all locally-produced shows, it consumes the largest porti

on of total broadcasting for any one show. It is now the top-rated program of any produced locally by th

e four television channels in Sendai.

The Show’s “Corners”

Generally adhering to the information wide show, Oh! Ban desu! is comprised of multiple “corners” , including:1. Food and “how to”, (called “honobono kicchin”)2. Audience participation (the so-called ban desu nettowāku),3. Commercial information about exhibitions and local events

(maru toku jouhou)4. Information about restaurants or favorite stores in and aroun

d 5. Sendai city (machino umaimon) as well as recommended plac

es (osusume spotto jouhou)6. Local news reports7. Weather forecast (ekimae housou)8. Travel information about sight-seeing in the wider Tohoku are

a.

The Audience

“They are generally women, in their forties, fifties… housewives. Also, those who stopped working for a year or so to deliver babies. They watch TV at this time at home…They cleaned the house in the morning, made their daily shopping and already prepared the dinner. Their children have returned from school. Now, they all are waiting for the sarariman to come home.”

These conditions dictate the kind of content Oh Ban desu! features. “We want to entertain our audiences,” Watanabe says, “not make them too worried or sad. Our broadcast period is the time that audiences take a rest in front of TV… they need some entertainment, not sorrowful stories.”

The SetOne notable element of the show’s set is its “lived in” appearance

– almost as if it mirrors the humble homes into which it is broadcast.

Our informant said: “(we’ve had the same set decoration) for almost ten years. There haven’t been any big changes since.”

A bit sheepishly he commented “it looks too old, doesn’t it?”

Pointing to some artificial flowers the producer continued, “lately, we added those flowers and also some indirect lightening over there and… I think that’s all… the rest is the same.”

As we shall argue later, it is such symbolic content – from the unchanging set, to the lived-in appearance, from the warming flowers and lighting – that is post-produced, a form of conscious production that works to engineer an intimate bond with the audience.

Constructing the Televisual Uchi

In the following section we arrange the data in focused ways, enabling us to explicate how specific discursive practices in contemporary Japanese television relate to social organization, values and behaviors.

By the conclusion we hope to show the powerful role that television exerts in forging a nationwide “public” in contemporary Japan.

Uchi: the Japanese Private Public

The major way in which television creates a public is by employing its discourse to construct an insular, hermetic world.

Such a world features a shared vocabulary and realm of experience, a common way of seeing and interpreting the world.

This experiential “space” is propped up by numerous pillars: the geographic, economic and linguistic, among them, as we will consider in detail below.

We will refer to this hermetic world as an uchi, one part of a binary that has long been asserted as a major structuring principle of Japanese society (despite certain recent contestation).

Uchi: the Japanese Private Public

Kondo (1992, p.141) explains:depending on the context, uchi can be any in-group: company, school, club, nation…[U]chi describes a located perspective: the in-group, the ‘us’ facing outward of the world… (As a centre of) belonging and attachment… uchi defines who you are through shaping the language, the use of space, and social interaction… Uchi always exists together with the term soto. In symbolic terms, soto means the public world, while uchi is the world of informality, casual behaviour, and relaxation… (In a word), uchi is not simply home or inside but “a circle of attachment and a locus of identity.

The Significance of uchi

To be sure, any society provides a shifting set of associations for its members; ones that can be defined variously, in terms of (though certainly not limited to): geographic, historical, genetic, associative, social, moral, economic and political membership.

However, in Japan, the fact that nearly all social relations are defined, conjugated, and evaluated in terms of belongingness and difference is important in understanding the structure, logic, meaning and outcomes of societal activity. This, we would argue, is no less true on Japanese TV.

Teleuchi: domesticating the exogenous

Past researchers Kamimura (2000) and Cooper-Chen (1997) have looked at TV vis-à-vis uchi and soto.

They see the TV as a screen – a protective filter, enabling the audience to peer out at what is relatively insecure, risky, and unfamiliar, while remaining safely ensconced, free of harm, within the domestic (generally nationally-defined) uchi.

We recognize this function, but also see TV – through its production strategies as constructing affective experience providing an insulated space, a metaphysical, but tangible

locus in which the audience can come together and engage in moments of intimacy with one another as members of the televisual family.

Further, we suggest that TV provides the material for viewers to carry outside the boxed world (once they extricate themselves), and then employ that knowledge during the course of unmediated social relations outside the box (i.e. in their everyday lives).

Creating Insiderness Japanese Televisual form and content sets borders ar

ound the concepts of “Japan” and “Japaneseness”. Most often served up through the infotainment style, s

uch operations communicate the essence of “home”; they engender feelings of shared intimacy with hosts, guests, in-studio audience members, featured “real life” everyday participants, and fellow viewers.

In fact, in observing Oh! Ban desu! we were able to discern any number of intentional strategies (both pertaining to form and content), adopted by producers which work to engineer “insiderness” or otherwise tender invitations to inclusion and membership.

The geographic dimensions of uchi

“Oh! Ban desu!” derives from a local dialect, thereby immediately signifying that the program is to be interpreted within particular geographic borders.

The greeting communicates “localness” to viewers; when they tune in they know they will be entering a space that is familiar, physically proximate, historically understood and emotionally shared

The geographic dimensions of uchi

The “inside” world does not begin and end there The local emphasis recurs in other corners of the

program, as for instance, where foods and prepared dishes generally emanate from Tohoku.

So, too is there a continual emphasis on the local in the news segments, the audience participation, recommended travel and shopping spots and local event information.

In this way we could speak of an intimate atmosphere generated by and buttressing familiar subjectivities.

The geographic dimensions of uchi

An additional factor underscoring the localization of discourse is embodied in the show’s male host.

The main figure of the program is a famous local singer, Satou Muneyuki. Known as “Mune”, he has recorded more than 30 albums over the last 30 years.

His reputation stems mainly from songs centering on the Tohoku area.

The linguistic aspets of uchi

Obviously the boundaries between geography, polity, and culture become fuzzy and diffuse at numerous junctures.

One example of this is in the way that “cultural space” is invoked, then used as the base upon which the televisual uchi is created.

Here such space is conjured via the use of local dialect in the program.

The linguistic aspects of uchiMuneyuki, for instance, often employs what is known as “zu-zu be

n”, a local dialect. This has the effect of bringing the show closer to home; of ma

king it more intimate for the local audience. As our informant explained: “(Mune) uses that local dialect ver

y often… it gives a more frank conversation with people of the Miyagi area. The audience likes to hear their own dialect from someone on TV. And Mune is very good at this dialect… “

Considering that this dialect is limited to the Tohoku area, the program communicates the desire to circumvent “nation-wideness”; it aims at fostering “localness”. As such, “Japan” is cleaved and placed on the outside; its parts are differentiated into “us” and “other” (or in the logic of uchi/soto, of “inside locality” and “outside locality”).

The economic dimensions of uchi

Local information – in the form of economic opportunities, available goods and services, and examples of actual consumption – can also work to situate communicators and viewers in a larger social system of reproduction.

In this way, infotainment serves as a discursive formation that works to create a substantive, need-based, satisfaction-oriented, utilitarian – but ultimately empathic – relationship with the audience.

The economic dimensions of uchi

A major dimension of communication on Oh Ban desu! concerns the dissemination of commercial knowledge.

Numerous corners amount to highly elaborate “infomercials”— a mix of entertainment and information about shopping, often delivered in situ or else in an otherwise intimate setting.

The economic dimensions of uchi

A reading of the content unequivocally communicates the aim: to inform viewers about the best shopping

centers and the cheapest restaurants, most often those which offer special discounts to female customers.

This emphasis not only reflects a keen awareness for the program’s target audience, but also determines what foods, shops, and bargains are featured (day after day).

“Carefully Crafted Spontaneity”One of the central discursive strategies on Oh Ban desu! (but also

most live TV programs) is what we call “Carefully Crafted Spontaneity” (CSS).

CCS conveys the sense that the audience’s experience of a person, place or thing is transpiring in simultaneity with the communication.

By doing so, the message recipient is pulled within the orbit of the broadcast; s/he is more immediately engaged.

Of greatest import – as we shall demonstrate in detail below – is to convey a sense of roughness, of unscripted action. This works to suggest a sense of immediate, unmediated, un

structured, fluid – even risky – content. None of this works perfectly without the audience’s interpreti

ve complicity. Not only the suspension of disbelief, but of the active wink of the eye, the willingness to suppress awareness of an elaborate, well orchestrated “set up”.

The economic dimensions of uchi

What viewers do see, however, is an announcer walking along the street or in a shopping-mall first “exploring”, then unveiling the fruits of a

physical space beyond both the studio and viewer’s home.

Importantly, it is the physical world singled out for its economic characteristics: a site of production and/or consumption.

Economic Staging

This is all staged of course, as our informants suggested

Less clear was the degree to which it was also paid for – or else a quid pro quo for program underwriting

These are aspects we consider in our data, as well

Reading the Economic

The fact that all of this commercial information appears in the opening 10 minutes of the show is significant.

It communicates a dominant thread of the show: provision of useful information, packaged in an

entertaining, light, way.

It also suggests by utilizing a formula so attuned to and patterned after catering to audience interests, commerce and consumption are among the major ways that this is deemed possible.

Economic Intimacy

Bringing an audience closer by simply fulfilling their needs about consumption may not be intimacy, per se, but it does work to engage interest and narrow distance.

It is the aim of drawing the audience closer, we claim, that explains why there is currently such a large representation of commercialized information on Japanese TV.

Economic Intimacy

The communication is also affective in that it reduces the bounds of separation between physical and emotional zones: those of commercial venture (or product) and television viewer/potential consumer.

Viewed in this way, the role of Oh Ban desu! is to assist in the dismantling of any walls separating the two.

The show, in effect, serves as a conduit for creating greater intimacy – a closer proximity between viewer and that viewed.

Rationalization: the motive force for infotainment and intimacy

The producer acknowledged that it was the audience driving the focus on economics and consumption.

This information reflects precisely what the audience wants. “When we start giving this kind of (economic)

information,” Watanabe explained, “we get higher ratings.”

It is audience interest that led to the decision to institutionalize the commercial corner into the daily show.

In this way we see that crafting the infotainment message is a conscious process; it is rational, systematic and, above all, audience-attuned.

Using Statistics to Get Closer to Audiences

A series of examples from the first year of the program show how the stars were made more “normal”, transformed into everyday people; they were put in the street, told to ad-lib, be more real.

So, too, was news localized – reported less national events and more local material.

Such changes were all based on audience ratings

Engineering Intimacy

In the sections that follow, we wish to emphasize some intentional strategies that work to transcend distance between audience and the show inside the screen

or better, strategies that work to redefine the boundaries of the screen to embrace, subsume -- if not consume – the audience. These include: boundary negotiation, carefully-crafted spontaneity, post-produced reality, and intentionally engineered intimacy.

Boundary negotiations

In this section we show that boundaries must be negotiated between audience and TV performers; so, too, though, must boundaries be created amongst the performers.

In short, intimacy is not as straightforward as knocking down walls between the worlds inside the box and outside the box.

Boundary negotiations

We show this through the use of affectionate names – which for some of the staff (the hosts) can be employed;

Though for others (the newscasters) these pet names can’t be used.

In this way, intimate links are created between inside and outside (with some performers) though not with others.

Boundary Negotiations

The thin line, in short, is between uchi and soto, suggesting that even within the televisual box, boundaries demarcating the intimate and the exogenous world exist.

Uchi is not all-inclusive – even within the conceptual space created by the program. While the hosts and the audience may belong to this intima

te space, other communicators – such as the newsreaders and reporters—may not. “Infotainers” have appellations which connote “uchiness” – they are inside, within the intimate grouping – while reporters are outside, apart, separate from the intimate association.

Knocking down Barriers

There are numerous examples used to show strategies employed by the producers to eliminate “soto-ness” and construct “uchi-ness”. Above all, via services provided by the staff in t

he studio What the producer calls “friendly communicati

on” In his words: “We are trying to make our comm

unication with the audiences better… we must keep thinking how to contact with the audience. This is the most important aim.”

Carefully-Crafted Spontaneity

I earlier explained this idea of the artifically crafted reality, coupled with the audience’s leap of faith into simulation

We explore the mythology of spontaneity that pervades this show, the view that it is all about rough edges and under-planning.

In fact, though, this is merely a myth. Everything is planned out, practiced.

Carefully-Crafted Spontaneity

We noted that “spontaneity” is generally secured by recourse to scripting. For instance, the hosts begin rehearsing how

to act and what to say for each segment two hours before airtime.

The program is so structured that even the short intros for each corner and the body language that will be used are run-through in detail.

Carefully-Crafted Spontaneity

During a commercial break, for instance, three women discussed how the next segment would unfold. One by one each discussed their reactions to the coming on-camera moment:

Performer 1: “I will gesture like this… as if I am taking notes…”

Performer 2: “and then I’ll say: ‘Oh, what should I write?’.”

Performer 3: “And I’ll say ‘what should I memorize?’.”Then the three of them began laughing, staring at one

another’s poses, catching themselves in the artifice of the moment.

CCS and Intimacy

Therefore, the discourse of intimacy becomes an engineered text, an item produced in the studio. In short, what we see emanating from the studio is far from what it purports to be: rather than being simultaneous, original, spontaneous, unrestrained, undefined and rough, it is consciously crafted.

Post-Produced Reality

What is not engineered before-hand may be attended to afterward, in the production booth. There, technicians add colorful subtitles,

digital images, sound effects, and special frames to the pre-recorded visual material.

Decisions about all of these details lie in the hands of the producer of the program.

Post-produced Reality

There is a sense, expressed by those in the studio, that, given how television discourse has evolved in the past decade or so, failure to intervene through technological enhancements, will result in the loss of audience.

In the view of those packaging the shows, the audience has been primed to a certain type of communication and would not tolerate any other approach

Post-produced Reality

This section shows (in the interview data) that technology, and the communication techniques it has spawned has affected the multiple relationships in the communication circuit (e.g. Hall 1980)

As between announcers and their material there is less distance now and greater subjectivity.

Beyond this intimate connection between reporter and information so, too, has there been a drawing in of audiences with material, a triangular “hug” between those producing information, those consuming it, and the information, itself.

A discourse of intimacy has arisen out of the logics of each component in the televisual circuit, due to heightened technological capabilities, economic imperatives, and audience preferences.

Intentionally Engineered Intimacy

We have already explained that uchi and soto reflect a complex set of social orientations in everyday Japanese life, governing individual psychology and inter-personal behavior.

This has led to strategies for managing emotions – separating interior, private faces from the external, public one.

We have suggested that TV programming appears to understand that, finding ways to break boundaries down between the worlds outside and inside the box.

Intentionally Engineered Intimacy

Painter (1996) has also identified this phenomenon, speaking of them in terms of “quasi-intimacy”.

In his view, these are programs “emphasiz(ing) themes related to unity (national, local, cultural, or racial) and unanimity (consensus, common sense, identity) in order to create an intimate and friendly atmosphere” (1996:198).

Intentionally Engineered Intimacy

The bulk of current Japanese TV fare today adopt a friendly, cozy ambiance, with guests, audiences and announcers bathing in a light, often frolicking atmosphere together.

The language they employ is ordinary (i.e. not refined, or based on the formal, stilted, distance-putting verbal constructions); rather, they talk to one another as if they all are old friends.

Of course, since the inner architecture of TV culture is built on the constant recycling of the human components (who rotate from show to show across the dial and time slots), they, in fact, often are old friends.

Depending on the program, they touch or hit each other in a humorous way. In Painter’s (1996:198) words: interactions tend to emphasize “spontaneity and play in order to simulate intimate, informal in-group interaction.”

Conclusions

During the course of this review, we identified three discursive practices that flow through Japanese television today: infotainment, intimacy and uchi.

All are connected with one another, with links that run from the surface of communication content to a style of affective attachment forged by TV producers among their audiences.

The end result is the forging of communal links at the level of social structure.

Conclusions

The Centrality of TV in Contemporary Japan

The “Supra-discourse” of Uchi The “Sub- discourse” of Intimacy

The Centrality of TV in Contemporary Japan

Fukutake (1981) describes a Japan that has urbanized so quickly, it has led to mass anomie. In so doing he describes a Japan much as if through th

e eyes of Durkheim’s industrializing France (1907) or Marx and Engels (1848) viewing capitalist installation

In this condition, I argue, media has become one of the sole binding mechanisms

I am not alone in making the claim of the powerful ritualistic, catalytic nature of television. Tasker (1987) – albeit in a few short paragraphs – allud

es to the same view of media as a shared collective organizer.

Media as Binding Mechanisms

Cell phones (Holden and Tsuruki 2000) also appear to have a binding effect.

As for television, its specific merit is to build connections among its viewers; working to forge them into a private public a village-like collectivity with shared values, pr

actices, ways of seeing and, importantly, feeling

This is certainly true insofar as infotainment programming goes.

The “Supra-discourse” of Uchi

It is television that determines admission and exclusion. Beyond this, through its discursive practice of infotainment,

television presents an intentionally engineered umbrella that helps define (if not conjure) the viewer uchi.

Under this awning audiences can come together and share the intimate atmosphere as a member of the televisual family.

What they view, infotainment-ized content, also works as a protective screen, enabling those inside to view the world beyond. In this way, what is relatively insecure, risky, and unfamiliar can be regarded without contamination, reprisal or duress, from the hermetic womb, the protective custody of the televisual uchi.

So, too, though, is affective connection secured.

The Sub- discourse of IntimacyThe imperative for intimacy may exist in all contemporary societies, sim

ply because of the nature of structure and their tendency to create distance, accentuate competition, and exacerbate conflict.

However, the overwhelming specter of intimacy – or emotional need and the desire for empathic connection – appears to pervade both the form and content of Japanese media. Allison’ has spoken of “the commodification of intimacy”

A central component in Japanese capitalism Through “cute” icons such as Doraemon, Hello Kitty and Pokemon

van Zoonen has argued that there has been an “intimization of TV news” in Holland “a growing attention to human interest subjects, an intimate and personal

mode of address and the treatment of political behavior and issues as thought they were matters of personality.” (R:217).

In our own interviews, such a trend was noted by a newscaster whos said: “I think (today’s news programs)… don’t look as serious as they were in the past. Now news content is lighter, but easier to watch.”

The Sub-discourse of Intimacy

In this presentation I have focused on wide shows, but it could just as easily been sports, advertising, public affairs broadcasting, games shows

Indeed, all TV genres have been intimized.More than genre, intimacy operates within genres as one of the

genre’s key rhetorical strategies. Intimacy, thus, is a mode of discourse – a sub-discourse in that

it under girds, yet flows through and across all television genres.

It serves as one of the key ways in which audiences can connect with what is on the screen, and possibly even be drawn within the box.

There, inside the box, they can merge with others in a contemporary collective; an extensive private public based on affect and shared experience.

Final Thoughts, Next DirectionsThroughout, we must bear in mind that this is based on data that has be

en obtained from one locality in Japan.We believe, that they apply equally at a national scale

they mirror techniques employed in other Japanese localities, as well as on nation-wide television broadcasts.

We would quickly admit that it is less likely that such discursive practices are employed in other countries (whether in Asia, or elsewhere in the world).

More, even if they are, they are almost certainly not identically expressed or pursued.

Instead, we would wager, it is almost certainly the case that these discursive practices are reflective of social, cultural and historical ontologies rooted in this particular context; Ontologies pertaining to self, group, community, and society, So, too, the communication styles The place of television among the constellation of media in this particular

society, The role of TV in this society, The import of star-based popular culture in this focal context

Final Thoughts, Next DirectionsThis chapter has shown a number of important, invisible aspects of the wo

rld behind the contemporary screen in Japan. Hopefully it has also demonstrated the extent to which what is behind the

screen has origins, as well as impacts out in the larger world within which it sits.

What this chapter has not shown, however – but which we think prevails nonetheless – is that the phenomenon described on these pages transpires, as well, on the national stage. The same tropes described here are, first of all, repeated in other lo

cal contexts, such that, when all these localities are aggregated into a collectivity, TV communication and consumption behaviors – encoding and decoding acts – transpire in relatively identical ways.

Beyond this, these discursive tropes and acts of engineering a collectivity via the construction of shared moments and events of intimacy, are also employed on national TV.

In such cases, it is not local localism that is attended to and played on; rather, it is national localism.

If so, televisual communication has major repercussions on matters of national identity and nationalism. Showing this to be true is one challenge for subsequent research.