Japanese trendy dramas: new imaginaries of Japanese women in Tokyo Love Story

ABSTRACT

During the bubble era (1986–1991) Japanese television dramas attained their golden age, brought about by the innovative narrative formula of ‘trendy dramas’ – love stories that displayed a trend towards urban, consumer-oriented, glamorous lifestyles [Lukács, Gabriella. 2010. Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan. Durham: Duke University Press]. Drawing from media anthropology, cultural studies, and gender studies, this paper explores the ways in which trendy drama discourses redefined the politics of Japanese women’s identity and to what extent they reproduced patriarchal views towards women’s selfhood. Through an ethnographic study of one of the most popular trendy dramas, Tokyo Love Story (TLS) [1991. Produced by Ōta Tōru, featuring Suzuki Honami, Oda Yūji, Arimori Narimi, and Eguchi Yōsuke, aired January 7, 1991, on Fuji TV], involving qualitative questionnaires, and analysis of newspaper articles, I will argue that TLS not only contributed to the redefinition of the modern and urban woman, but was also a pioneer in reinventing Japanese womanhood for the future generations.

KEYWORDS:

• Trendy dramas
• Japanese television
• social imaginary
• Tokyo Love Story
• gender discourses
• bubble era

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Katakana jobs, katakana shokugyō, refer to job titles that are written in katakana or in pseudo-English Japanese words (wasei eigo) as their translation into Japanese is unclear. A common reason for writing job titles such as ‘designer’ or ‘planner’ in katakana, however, responds to the strong association of katakana with Westernization, creativity and modernity.

2 The concept of idol and tarento intersect, both of them being celebrities that engage in multiple media genres and become omnipresent not only on TV but in numerous platforms on and off screen. However, while tarento are celebrities who exercise famousness, it is around idols that fan communities, marketing, and advertising are organized; they occupy the centre-stage position of the viewing experience (Galbraith and Karlin 2012, 2–7). Kirsch (2014) adds that idols ‘are usually actors and singers in their late teens and early 20s’ (75), whereas tarento can be actors and singers, but also academics and former politicians or even first ladies’ (75).

3 The word getsuku, occasionally shortened to gekku, is the abbreviation of getsuyō kuji, Monday nine o’clock, and refers to the most popular prime time slot of Japanese TV dramas.

4 The first karaoke bokes had started to proliferate in 1989 and there was a great karaoke boom in the 1990s (Yano 1996, 7).

5 The fictional characters are faithfully named in accordance to the series. Consequently, Rika is referred by her first name, Sekiguchi and Mikami by their last name and Kanchi by his nickname.

6 This is the only instance of Rika failing to appropriate her own agency and expecting Kanchi to affect her life choices. As Saeki points out, this reaction would be incompatible with the original manga character. She argues that by adding this conversation to the drama, the male scriptwriter imposed a male-biased view of women (2012, 205).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the R+D research project ‘New socio-cultural, political and economic developments in East Asia in the global context’ (PID2019-107861GB-I00) granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades) to InterAsia Research Group at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Notes on contributors

Minerva Terrades

Minerva Terrades is a PhD candidate in Translation and Intercultural Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. After conducting research on mobile phone communication in Tokyo under the MEXT scholarship, she is currently analyzing gendered media culture in 1990s Japan, particularly in television dramas.