You arrive home after a long, hard day, fall into your favorite chair and switch on the TV. The screen flickers to life and you see . . .
. . . Two dozen men and women wearing enormous inflated rubber suits resembling various garden vegetables. They are playing American football in a stadium. But because the costumes are so unwieldy, giant carrots and tomatoes stumble out of control and crash into mammoth cabbages and turnips and roll awkwardly on the ground until, like defenseless turtles, they come to rest on their backs with their tiny legs and arms flailing helplessly.
Suddenly a man wearing a black and white referee`s shirt rushes up with a huge sponge mallet and smacks the horizontal veggies on their heads. What the . . . ?
Click. Next channel.
A hidden camera focuses on the front of a restaurant at a ski resort, then tightens onto a board near the door that spans a shallow trench filled with mud. Several unsuspecting customers step onto the board and immediately slip and fall, causing the studio audience to roar with laughter. The board is obviously coated with some slippery substance. Great fun . . . .
Click. Next channel.
A man is sneaking around placing firecrackers under or near unsuspecting people in restaurants, offices and other public places. Why? The show is called ”Tobacco Bashers,” and the victims are smokers who the firecracker vigilante concludes are displaying bad smoking manners. The audience guffaws as the tobacco fiends leap in terror from their chairs with each exploding firecracker. Uh huh . . . .
Click, click, click.
This looks better. A teenage girl wearing a Victorian-era dress with large, puffy sleeves and a prudishly high neckline stands on a stage clutching a microphone in her white-gloved hands. Behind her, a huge orchestra cranks up and multicolored lights dance across the set. Impressive. But then the young woman opens her mouth and begins to sing. The old ”Gong Show” gang would love it. What emerges is a microscopic voice with all the pitch and dimension of a distant noon whistle. Quick, the remote control . . . .
No, you have not died and gone to amateur night in Television Hell. This is prime-time television in Japan, where tackiness, banality and mediocrity are the reigning deities of the tube.
But why? Isn`t this the nation that gave the world the serenity of the precisely manicured Japanese garden, the grace of the tea ceremony, the beauty of the silk kimono, the soothing music of the koto?
Yes, it`s the same Japan all right. But at least when it comes to television programming on Japan`s five commercial networks, fabled Japanese decorum and tradition last about as long as a 98-pound weakling who kicks sand in the face of a Sumo wrestler.
”Childishness is conspicuous in Japanese television programming,” says Yukio Akatsuka, a media critic and sociology professor at Chubu University in Nagoya. ”You don`t see any really outstanding programs. Instead you see a bunch of amateurs or semiprofessionals doing something stupid. There is no attempt at quality.”
It seems incongruous that in a nation where quality is emphasized in almost every industry-automobile, consumer electronics, machinery, computer chips-that television programming has been allowed to blunder on.
But there is a reason for that paradox, says American television producer Dave Spector, a Chicagoan who came to Japan six years ago as a producer for ABC`s ”Ripley`s Believe It or Not” and who has since evolved into one of Japan`s top gaijin TV tarentos (foreign TV talents), paid to look, well, foreign.
”In the United States, television is seen as an industry and as an art form,” says Spector, a graduate of Lane Tech High School who is fluent in Japanese. ”But in Japan, television is neither an industry nor an art form. There is no one in Japan looking at television critically like in the United States.”
Actually, there are a few people in Japan who do look at Japanese television critically, but most are foreigners writing for English-language publications, such as Jean Wilson, an Englishwoman who has lived in Japan for 10 years.
”Japanese television is the ultimate form of mind pollution,” says Wilson, who writes a television column for the Mainichi Daily News. Such frank opinions are seldom reflected in Japanese language newspapers and magazines, mainly because Japan continues to be a society where it is considered impolite to publicly criticize other people or their work.
That is one reason that, unlike the United States or Britain, the Japanese very rarely produce dramatic shows that actually have the power to move people, Spector says. Critically acclaimed shows such as the United States` ”Life Goes On,” which examines the problems encountered by a teenager with Down`s syndrome, would be ”very difficult” to produce in Japan because the Japanese do not see television as a place to achieve ”cerebral satisfaction.”
In addition to the five networks, there is a sixth that shouldn`t be lumped in with the commercial operations. The government-operated Nihon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) is known the world over for quality programming, particularly its documentaries and dramas. And certain news shows-even those produced by commercial networks-do a reasonably good job of reporting the news.
However, in this overcrowded, California-sized nation of 123 million, where people`s lives are still rigidly controlled by tradition and convention, commercial television is one segment of the Japan experience that knows no bounds. It allows 40-year-olds to suspend age and engage in the kind of behavior they might have enjoyed when they were 12-had they had the opportunity.
That may explain not only why slapstick is such a significant part of Japanese television, but also why there is such an obsession with the no-talent teenage ”singing” idols who parade chronically across the nation`s TV screens.
”Talent is not a requirement for success as a television singer,”
Wilson says. ”There is definitely a national `Lolita` complex here among middle-aged Japanese men. They like looking at these young, giggly girls. What men admire about women in the West-beauty, intelligence, charm-are not important to Japanese men.
”Here, cuteness is the number one requirement. If a singer is sultry and self-confident, she is considered threatening.”
Dating game for dogs
Naoyuki Arai, a professor of mass communications at Tokyo`s Soka University, chides Japanese television producers for feeding the nation a diet of junk food programming.
”Broadcasting has a responsibility to respond to the needs of viewers and not just pander to their desires,” he says. ”It is very difficult to think of anything good to say about Japanese television.”
Take the recent prime-time show that ran a segment that was a dating game for dogs. If two dogs sniffed each other, then it was considered a match. Sometimes the dating dogs decided to get intimate right on the set-a situation that allowed the Japanese host to ”critique” the mechanics of the merger.
Another prime-time show called ”Gimme a Break” featured an adult cartoon called the ”Warau Salesman (The Laughing Salesman)” in which a 50-ish Japanese ”salaryman” spends 15 minutes lusting after and chasing 12-and 13-year-old schoolgirls.
Then there was the show called ”Endurance Test” in which college students allowed themselves to be placed in sometimes dangerous situations to generate laughs. ”I call it the sadomasochistic approach to humor,” Spector says.
Indeed, in one show a student was lowered in his underwear into a pit filled with bananas. He was instructed to lie perfectly still. Then the show`s producers dropped several hungry orangutans into the pit.
The animals romped through the pit snatching up the bananas while the terrified student jumped around in an attempt to stay away from them. The segment got huge laughs from the audience. When the student was finally removed from the pit, a close-up revealed dozens of scratches on his body.
Scant fear of lawsuits
That Japan is one of the least litigious societies in the world enables television producers to get away with such programming. Putting people in pits filled with orangutans, or stuffing them into tiger cages without food or water (another ”Endurance” segment), would seldom result in a lawsuit-not even in the case of death.
”In the United States if you caused people to fall down as part of a television gag, the personal injury lawsuits would never stop,” says lawyer James Uchida, a specialist in Japanese law from Hawaii. ”In Japan if someone gets hurt, the show simply pays off the family with an apology and some cash.”
A year ago, for example, a Japanese actor was decapitated during a sword-fighting sequence in a popular series about a blind samurai swordsman. Somebody replaced one of the special ”safe” swords with a real sword. Not only was there no lawsuit, but the segment containing the actor`s death was actually used.
Japanese television gives the masses a lot of gratuitous sex as well.
In a scene from one recent crime drama, a man is pummeled by another until his face is darkened with fake blood. He rolls over, groans and spits out pieces of his teeth. The assailant proceeds to the victim`s house, where he strips his wife down to her panties and ”rapes” her on the floor while fondling her bare breasts-all in full view of the camera. The show, which you might expect to air at least late at night, was shown between 7:30 and 9 p.m. on a weeknight.
Japanese sociologists say such shows provide a critical vicarious release-especially for men who find themselves frustrated at work or angry with co-workers or superiors and who are unable to express their feelings honestly in a society that discourages individual expression.
One of the most popular series in the history of Japanese television dealt with a minor civil servant named Mondo Nakamura who is henpecked at home, abused by his boss and smothered by the rules of Japanese society. Nakamura`s release from his confining lifestyle is to join a team of secret assassins-for-hire who avenge the wrongs done to ordinary people by those in power.
”The only thing that is still mostly taboo on Japanese television is kissing,” Wilson says. ”You won`t find men and women doing that.” In Japan, kissing-especially in public-is still considered aberrant behavior.
Other taboos are shows that deal with Japan`s imperial family and which depict torrid romances between Japanese and foreigners-still a sensitive topic in a society that still regards itself as homogeneous and wants to stay that way.
Japan as victim
What apparently is acceptable in Japan is an increasing number of subliminal and sometimes overt messages about foreigners and foreign countries that are emerging in weekly dramas and other shows.
”There is a much greater tendency these days to portray foreigners in a bad light and Japan as the victim,” Wilson says. ”Because of Japan`s economic power, there is a redefining of who the Japanese are in television programming.
”For a long time, the Japanese saw themselves as inferior to foreigners- especially white European or American foreigners. Now they see themselves as superior.”
Foreigners more and more often are playing subservient parts that they never before played: as waiters, secretaries, lackies and buffoons to suave, sophisticated and wealthy Japanese who move about the world as though it is their playground.
Other foreigners portray generally unsavory, slavering types who lust after Japanese women or who are out to inflict some evil on Japan. In one recent episode of a series that is set in a Tokyo hotel, an overbearing American guest berates a bellboy for refusing (as is the custom in Japan) to take a tip for carrying his suitcases.
”That`s why you Japanese have problems in the world,” the American shouts. ”You want to do everything your own way. Now take this money and get out.”
No explanation is given for such rude behavior, so the viewer is left with the impression that once again, Japan is under attack for no good reason by the foreign devils.
At the other extreme is a seemingly insatiable yearning among Japanese producers to project themselves and their audiences into every corner of the world. Last year, more than 10 million cash-ladened Japanese traveled abroad and the figure is expected to top 11 million in 1990, so there is an unprecedented fascination with foreign countries in Japan.
Shows with such titles as ”How Much the World,” ”Dreamy Trip” and
”Japanese People in Foreign Countries” take Japanese audiences to foreign countries. The host is usually a giggly young woman who spends her time squealing and blurting the Japanese equivalent of ”gee whiz” and ”ohmygod” at bewildered ”natives” as she bounds pigeon-toed through alien places such as Bolivia and Baltimore.
”In the minds of the producers of these shows, other countries and cultures are toys, and the people who live in them are dolls,” Wilson says.
”There is no attempt to show any respect for them, to understand them, to appreciate them, to communicate with them.” The foreigners shown on these shows could just as well be cardboard cutouts or statues, as far as the Japanese are concerned.
”What the Japanese are unaware of is how stupid they look on these shows,” Wilson adds.
Mistakes are affordable
Chicagoan Dave Spector, who once hosted a tour of Chicago for a Japanese travel show, says most Japanese television programs are only marginally planned.
”There is no pilot process in Japan,” he says. ”Here each network is producing 22 or 23 new shows each season. They put them together very quickly and say, `Okay, let`s go with it.` If the show is no good, they just throw it out and start on another one. Nobody gets axed.”
Why? For one thing, there are no unions in Japan and wages paid to writers, performers and technicians are about one-tenth the bloated fees received by their American counterparts, Spector says. So mistakes are much more affordable.
”About 70 percent of all prime-time shows are done live,” Spector says. ”The Japanese love spontaneity. They like to see people make mistakes and fumble. Nobody expects perfection here.”
”Japanese television producers are taking the approach Detroit automakers used to take: If you have an audience that will buy anything, why change the product?”
