Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, And Capitalism In 1990S Japan - Softcover

Lukács, Gabriella

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822348241 ISBN 13: 9780822348245

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

In Scripted Affects, Branded Selves, Gabriella Lukács analyzes the development of a new primetime serial called "trendy drama" as the Japanese television industry's ingenious response to market fragmentation. Much like the HBO hit Sex and the City, trendy dramas feature well-heeled young sophisticates enjoying consumer-oriented lifestyles while managing their unruly love lives. Integrating a political-economic analysis of television production with reception research, Lukács suggests that the trendy drama marked a shift in the Japanese television industry from offering story-driven entertainment to producing lifestyle-oriented programming. She interprets the new televisual preoccupation with consumer trends not as a sign of the medium's downfall, but as a savvy strategy to appeal to viewers who increasingly demand entertainment that feels more personal than mass-produced fare. After all, what the producers of trendy dramas realized in the late 1980s was that taste and lifestyle were sources of identification that could be manipulated to satisfy mass and niche demands more easily than could conventional marketing criteria such as generation or gender. Lukács argues that by capitalizing on the semantic fluidity of the notion of lifestyle, commercial television networks were capable of uniting viewers into new affective alliances that, in turn, helped them bury anxieties over changing class relations in the wake of the prolonged economic recession.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gabriella Lukács is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.

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"Trendy dramas showcasing the hip lifestyles of young Tokyo sophisticates were a powerful television genre during Japan's watershed decade of the 1990s. Gabriella Lukacs artfully weaves an analysis of the production and content of the genre programming with an analysis of the lifestyles and work ways of its viewers. She shows how this television programming is forging new selves, a new economy, and a new society. The result is a remarkably new way in which anthropology can engage television and a critical contribution to our understanding of Japan's current transformation."--William W. Kelly, Yale University

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SCRIPTED AFFECTS, BRANDED SELVES

Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s JapanBy GABRIELLA LUKCS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4824-5

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................viiIntroduction JAPAN AND TELEVISION AT THE CENTURY'S TURN...................................................................1One INTIMATE TELEVISUALITY Television Dramas and the Tarento in Postwar Japan..........................................29Two IMAGED AWAY Agency and Fetishism in Trendy Drama Production and Reception..........................................59Three DREAM LABOR IN THE DREAM FACTORY Capital and Authorship in Drama Production........................................91Four WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? Love Dramas and Branded Selves......................................................117Five LABOR FANTASIES IN RECESSIONARY JAPAN Employment as Lifestyle in Workplace Dramas of the 1990s.....................147Six PRIVATE GLOBALIZATION Bootleggers, Fansubbers, and the Transnational Circulation of J-dorama.......................177Epilogue IMAGE COMMODITY, VALUE, AFFECT....................................................................................201Notes......................................................................................................................211References.................................................................................................................239Index......................................................................................................................253

Chapter One

Intimate Televisuality

TELEVISION DRAMAS AND THE TARENTO IN POSTWAR JAPAN

Scholars have argued that Japanese television networks' success in creating a "partial substitute for vanishing communal forms of entertainment turned Japan into the ultimate TV culture" (Morris-Suzuki 1994, 195). As a particular feature of this televisual culture, Japanese tarento serve as hosts, guests, and contestants in game shows; participate in variety shows; perform in television dramas; release compact discs; and endorse commodities in commercials. Producers fortify the transmedia employment of the tarento by commonly casting them in dialogue with their earlier performances. For instance, the television drama Keizoku (Beautiful Dreamer; TBS, 1999) features a detective sidekick whose hobby is ballroom dancing. This aspect does not add much to the drama's plot except the pleasure of recognizing that Tokui Yu, the actor playing this character, had previously been cast in the hit movie featuring ballroom dancing Shall We Dance? This cross-genre and transmedia employment of the tarento turns television watching into a process of moving between programs and leads to the production and reception of meaning in a network of texts, genres, and media forms. The game of encoding and decoding not only renders program production more enjoyable for the producers, but it also makes participation in domestic media culture more pleasurable for the audiences. Further, the cross-genre and transmedia circulation of the tarento creates a culture of intimate televisuality, participation in which generates a vital sense of membership in a nationally based televisual community.

As a new global division of labor was emerging in the media economy and media ownership was becoming more concentrated in the 1990s, nationally based television production and consumption declined worldwide. However, the Japanese television industry has not only managed to reinforce its self-sustaining business structure; it has also joined the ranks of global cultural exporters. (I analyze the latter phenomenon in chapter 6.) This chapter explores how Japanese commercial networks reinforced their self-sufficient system of production and centrality in the Japanese media economy in a business environment destabilized primarily by market fragmentation and secondarily by globalization. While Japanese viewers started demanding more custom-tailored entertainment, the domestic television industry could not easily adopt niche targeting, because it depended on large-scale consumer markets to finance its highly capital-intensive system of production. However, with conventional primetime formats such as family-oriented, historical, or mystery dramas, the local commercial networks were decreasingly able to unite the viewers in front of their television screens and thus to deliver the ratings their sponsors expected. By the mid-1980s, audience erosion and the concomitantly shrinking viewing rates had led to a structural crisis in the television industry.

The development of a new primetime genre, the trendy drama, played a key role in resolving this crisis. By placing the tarento system at the heart of program production, trendy dramas succeeded not only in reviving a general interest in domestic televisual culture, but also in keeping transnational media out of the domestic market. The tarento made domestic programming more appealing to Japanese viewers than international shows available on cable channels whose celebrities did not carry the same informational value to them. As the tarento gained primacy in television production, a new media economy emerged in which these celebrities became the links through which new tie-ins were established between media institutions. Thus, by accelerating the flow of media content and integrating formerly unrelated markets, the tarento system helped networks reinforce viewers' commitment to local television networks and other local media producers. The collaborative relationships between media institutions operated on the logic of cross-media branding in which endorsement by the tarento at once served the interests of client brands, host media, and the client tarento.

By exploring how and why the television industry adopted the tarento system as the new center of its economic activities, this chapter examines how the subsequently emerging media economy mediated social realities and relationships and forged new kinds of subjectivities in the process. As the tarento system gained primacy in television production, programs increasingly became vehicles for the transmission of information about the tarento. It is through such practices of accumulating knowledge about the local celebrities that a culture of intimate televisuality has evolved. I argue that in the wake of the prolonged economic recession, intimate televisuality has offered a sense of comfort and familiarity that effectively compensated for the erosion of older forms of solidarity and community. At the same time, I will suggest that as the tarento became more important to rendering everyday realities intelligible, the culture of intimate televisuality has simultaneously reified human relationships and social life.

Television Broadcasting in Japan

Japanese television networks became self-sufficient in the postwar period, and such independence was an important precondition for the development of the tarento system. Nippon Hoso Kyokai (Japanese Broadcasting System; NHK) and Nippon TV (NTV) began broadcasting in 1953. Black-and-white television sets were among the first three privileged items of mass consumption in the 1950s, yet in 1957 only 5.1 percent of the Japanese households owned television sets. As the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822348241
• ISBN 13: 9780822348245
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 278
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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