Multiculturalism or Cultural Nationalism? Representation of Ellie Kameyama as a Conduit and the Other in the NHK Morning Drama Massan

ABSTRACT

NHK’s decision to depict the story of Ellie and Masaharu Kameyama in the drama Massan seemed to suggest its desire to reflect Japan as a more multicultural society. Combined with positive representations of international couples, the drama seemed to embrace multiculturalism. More prominently, however, NHK promoted cultural nationalism. Although the drama praised Ellie as an ideal Japanese woman, it used her as a conduit through which Japanese traditional virtues were revisited. In addition, the drama marked her as the distinct Other. Ellie’s hair was blonde, which marked her as conspicuously non-Japanese. Her language use also painted her as the Other. She was assigned dialogue in Standard Japanese and used regional dialects only in marked utterances. She also spoke gender-neutral Japanese, rather than feminine Japanese. In addition, the drama creators assigned her simplified and disjointed grammar, utterances with ‘mistakes’ in the prescriptive sense, and occasional English phrases within her Japanese discourse. By manipulating her appearance to be distinctly non-Japanese and linguistically alienating her, the drama highlighted Ellie’s role as the outsider and underscored the idea that only ethnic Japanese know the Japanese language and culture. In this way, Massan provided an example of how diversity is contained and managed in Japan.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the contributors to this special issue for their support and stimulating conversations, and the area editor Nerida Jarkey for her encouragement and guidance. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions.

Notes

¹ The original Japanese 日本は多様化している appears on the screen towards the end of the film. The English translation appears on the screen as ‘Japan is changing’, but I translated it as above to be more faithful to the Japanese sentence. All translations in this article are by the author.

² Please see the introduction of this special issue for an explanation of the title of this drama.

³ Thelen (2019) offers a similar analysis about NHK’s depiction of Ellie Kameyama and multiculturalism, but he does not discuss Ellie’s language. I have developed the analysis in this article independently of his work.

⁴ Themes in multicultural ideologies include, for example, ‘the recognition of difference as a positive agent within society, rhetorical equality in justice, access, and human rights, a democratic political structure that proposes to ensure presentation of the diversity […], and the absence of explicitly privileging one culture’ (Lee, 2003: 105).

⁵ For example, Komori (1998: 17) calls the correlation between Japan, Japanese people, culture, and language, yonmi ittai ‘the holy quadrinity’ and observes that a mentality based on this equation promotes exclusionary discourses.

⁶ In this article, I will refer to two leading roles by given names (‘Ellie’ and ‘Masaharu’) to distinguish between the Kamayamas in the script.

⁷ A European white woman from the past and resident Koreans in current Japan might strike a reader as completely different, but they are connected to each other in the sense they represent the Other. Interestingly, one viewer of the drama’s first episode on YouTube left a comment disparaging NHK for ‘trying out with a white woman [as its morning drama heroine] to see how the public reacts so that they can one day use a resident Korean woman as its heroine’ (YouTube 2014). This apparently xenophobic remark reveals the (perceived) continuity between different demographic groups. With regard to the past versus present contrast, Harvey observes that NHK makes its morning dramas relevant to matters of current interest even when they depict a historical period (1998: 144–147).

⁸ Sakura is another NHK morning drama whose theme is relevant to the discussion in this article as its heroine was a foreigner (a Japanese American woman). NHK hired a Japanese (rather than Japanese American) actor to play the heroine. Yano (2010) reports critical reactions to this decision among some in Japanese American communities.

⁹ See Nozaki (2016) and Tachibanaki (2016) for recent discussions of Japan as a kakusa shakai (unequal society).

¹⁰ For example, Asahi Newspaper published a series of articles on children in poverty in Japan (Asahi Shinbun Digital, 2017).

¹¹ As Kelsky writes, ‘Whiteness functions in Japan as the transparent and free-floating signifier of upward mobility and assimilation in “world culture”; it is the primary sign of the modern, the universal subject, the “citizen of the world”’ (2001: 421)

¹² Sugimoto explains the phenomenon as follows: ‘Japan’s images around the world have been resurrected with the global spread of Japanese cultural goods, ranging from manga and anime through computer games to sushi and sashimi’ (2014: 22).

¹³ Some members said the blond hair ‘perpetuates the image that all foreigners from Western countries are light-haired’ (Kittaka, 2014).

¹⁴ See Muraoka (1981) and NHK Hiroshima Hosō-kyoku (1991) for descriptions of Hiroshima dialect.

¹⁵ My style of dialog presentation differs from the style used in other articles in this special issue because my analysis focuses on linguistic forms (as opposed to content). I provide the Romanized version of Japanese and grammatical gloss in addition to the original Japanese and English translation. The following symbols are used in the transcription and gloss:

. a pause preceded by falling intonation (。in Japanese)

, a pause preceded by sustained intonation (、in Japanese)

? a pause preceded by rising intonation

Abbreviations used in the transcription and gloss are CP copula, DO direct object marker, FP final particle, NM nominalizer, GN genitive marker, QT quotation marker, SB subject marker, TG ag expression, and TP topic marker.

¹⁶ It is interesting that the drama creators ‘allowed’ Ellie to speak in Osaka dialect, albeit to a limited degree, while her Hiroshima dialect was much more restricted. Shibamoto-Smith and Occhi’s work (2009) on asadora observes that asadora heroines may speak in Standard Japanese and regional dialects that are considered to be more urban and modern, while morning drama producers do not assign them regional dialects that are regarded as more rural and unsophisticated.

¹⁷ Kinsui (2003) and Okamoto (2016) also note that heroes and heroines of novels, manga, anime, and TV dramas in general tend to speak in Standard Japanese.

¹⁸ See Kumagai (2016) for a critique of the treatment of Tohoku dialect in NHK morning dramas including Amachan.

¹⁹ See Occhi (this issue) for a discussion of a character in Massan who speaks Aizu dialect.

²⁰ Doerr (2015) notes that proficiency in a regional dialect is equated with authentic Japaneseness.

²¹ See Okamoto and Sato (1992) and Okamoto and Shibamoto-Smith (2008) for summaries of stereotypically feminine expressions.

²² Yoda (2011) describes the type of katakoto nihongo used in manga and anime as having the following characteristics: (a) unconventional use of the utterance-final particle ne, (b) unconventional vowel length, (c) incorporation of native language, and (d) representation in katakana (when speech is written). (Yoda, 2011: 214-218).

²³ Kinsui (2014) describes aruyo kotoba as having the following characteristics: (a) presence of aru at the end of an utterance indicating assertion, (b) presence of yoroshi or yoroshī at the end of an utterance indicating request or command, (c) absence of postpositional particles such as ga and o, and (d) absence of connectives and connective particles between clauses (Kinsui, 2014: 3). See also Suzuki (2015) and Fukuda (2017) for further descriptions of media portrayals of non-Japanese individuals’ Japanese speech.

²⁴ They observe that speakers often combine clauses extensively in casual speech. In such speech clauses often have the gerund forms or are linked together with connective expressions such as kara ‘so’ and kedo ‘but’.

²⁵ While I found many instances of the non-use of postpositional particles in the representation of native speaker characters’ speech, I hardly saw any instances of the non-use of connective devices between clauses when native speaker characters use multiple clauses.

²⁶ As Ellie is a bilingual character, it would be interesting to explore issues of multilingualism, plurilingualism, and translingualism. However, they are out of scope of this paper.