Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (40 page)

Workplace Dramas: Love Fatigue and Social Realism

The workplace itself is not an entirely new setting in Japanese television dramas. In detective serials (
keiji dorama
), the police department was a typical workplace setting that provided a rich ground for developing new story lines and articulating values vital to the reproduction of the dominant socioeconomic order (for example,
Taiyō ni Hoero!
[Howl at the Sun!], NTV, 1975–1982). The school drama (
gakuen dorama
)—preoccupied with the perennial conflict between individual and society—was another type of workplace drama (such as
Sannen B Gumi Kimpachi Sensei
[Third Year B Group Head Teacher Kimpachi], TBS, 1979–1980, 1982–1990, 1995, 1998–1999, 2001). The popularity of these dramas, however, declined in the 1990s when commercial television networks responded to market fragmentation by reuniting viewers into affective communities through offering them lifestyle-oriented trendy dramas (Lukacs 2010). Although commercial television had always served marketers by providing a programming environment amenable to advertising their products, the launching of trendy dramas in the late 1980s marked a new phase in the commercialization of the medium as it effectively destabilized the boundary between entertainment and advertising. In the second half of the 1990s, television professionals profusely commented on this trend with bitterness, pointing out that primetime drama serials had lost touch with reality and hence had lost their capacity to engage issues of social relevance.

In this section, I examine how producers talked about the need for reintroducing social awareness into drama production and what strategies they
employed
to achieve this goal. It was a particular type of realism television producers referenced in their criticism of love dramas. We might call this realism social realism. In relation to British soap operas, Ruth Mandel defines social realism as a strong assumption that television can raise consciousness and shape the beliefs of the viewers through didactic means. A long-running social-realist soap opera on BBC Radio 4 in the United Kingdom has been
The Archers
(1951–present), which was launched with the goal of teaching modern techniques of agriculture and animal husbandry to the audiences. Other British social-realist programs have raised such important issues as domestic violence; these aimed not only to educate the audiences but also to help victims by providing numbers of hotlines in the end of the programs (Mandel 2002). Similar to their British colleagues, many Japanese television professionals in the late 1990s increasingly resented that television had lost its role of serving the public sphere as a forum for the discussion of socially relevant issues. They reasoned that making programs of social importance would reverse the process of steady degradation in the quality of television entertainment and restore its role in reinforcing the social order by reproducing the socioeconomic structures and dominant subjectivities that underwrote it.

The social-realist mode of representation insists on the natural and the realistic; in other words, on creating believable characters and showing their everyday activities and surroundings. In love dramas, the heroines are dressed and coifed far beyond the means of the particular characters they play; however, this is not characteristic of workplace dramas. Their characters commonly don office attire, police uniforms, or scrubs. Yamaguchi Masatoshi, the producer of
Kirakira Hikaru
(Shining Brightly, Fuji 1998, 1999 Special, and 2000 Special) commented:

Fuji TV is strong in the trendy drama genre. Trendy dramas portray characters as if they spent ten hours out of a day’s twenty-four hours thinking about love. Apparently, these dramas are very popular, and I admit that it is difficult to make high-quality love dramas. It’s just that in my environment there is no one who would spend that much time on managing his or her love life. Isn’t it rather the case that most of us don’t spend more than daily fifteen minutes on our love-related problems and personal conflicts? Grownups spend most of their time making money and worrying about their work. (cited in Komatsu 2000: 111)
7

In
opposition to love dramas, Yamaguchi emphasizes the importance of dramas that address socially relevant issues. Given the fact that prime-time dramas are the television programs most people watch, producers like Yamaguchi highlighted that these programs offer a great opportunity for commercial television networks to tackle problems that threaten the integrity and vitality of society. In most cases this effort has remained an unrealized ideal; nonetheless, the discourse on social responsibility has been efficient in serving other interests and producing other effects. I argue that television producers have come to use the notion of social responsibility as a discursive trope to negotiate their agency as their artistic aspirations have become constrained by the increasing commodification of the medium. At the same time, the strategy of making prime-time serials that impart a sense of realism also serves to draw, package, and deliver new audience segments (most notably, young men) to advertisers.

This is, however, not to say that these workplace dramas failed completely to realize the objectives of social realism. Scriptwriter Nakazono Miho’s
Dear Woman
(TBS, 1996), for example, pioneered the trend of educating female employees about gender-based discrimination in the workplace. The serial followed the story of a young woman, Tsuno Reiko, who was trying unsuccessfully to find employment in Tokyo as a single mother. Finally she decided not to tell her employer that she had a child, earning her a non–career-track job as an office lady. In her new workplace, she was assigned to a project that aimed to monitor gender-based abuses within the company and to address complaints. In the mid-1990s, although sexual harassment was pervasive in Japanese companies, there was no public discourse to address the issue. The serial thus filled a crucial gap by discussing issues such as recruiters hiring female employees solely for their looks, male employees bullying their “aging” female colleagues (women in their late twenties!) so that they would quit and be replaced with younger employees, and bosses forcing female employees to participate in a swimsuit contest on the mandatory company trip. Scriptwriter Nakazono Miho recounted to me in an interview that many of the letters she and the network received claimed that viewers used
Dear Woman
as a reference point to fight sexism in the workplace.
8

Dear Woman
, however, was an exception. An early forerunner of workplace dramas, it targeted primarily female viewers by blending a love story with plotlines revolving around the vicissitudes of office ladies in the masculinist corporate world. However, in most workplace dramas, social realism was
not
so much a means of raising social awareness as a “promotional marquee” to draw new audience segments to television by making these serials clearly distinguishable from love dramas. A brief description of the strategies producers employed to reintroduce a concern with socially relevant issues into their dramas supports this claim. Commonly, producers mention three strategies. They claim that (1) these dramas do not capitalize on the
tarento
(celebrity) system, (2) their selling point is the well-crafted stories, and (3) they discuss character development not in a social vacuum but in the context of work. Note that these are precisely the features used to distinguish workplace dramas from love dramas.

First, producers of workplace dramas believed that, by not capitalizing on the
tarento
system, their dramas could relax the link between television and consumerism. The
tarento
system is specific to the Japanese media industries. The word
tarento
derives from the English word
talent
, but this is exactly what distinguishes the
tarento
from American celebrities: The
tarento
are often not talented. Rather, their popularity is a result of their extensive cross-genre and transmedia exposure to the viewers as Japanese celebrities simultaneously pursue careers in the television, music, and advertising industries. By capitalizing on the
tarento
, love dramas were embracing more and more the self-referential world of the
tarento
-system, and in parallel they were increasingly estranged from external social realities. Yamaguchi Masatoshi, producer of
Kirakira Hikaru
, lamented that the
tarento
and their capacity to mobilize references to consumer culture posed difficulties in making dramas of social relevance.

Second, Yamaguchi has noted that, unlike love dramas that exploit celebrity power, the strength of workplace dramas lies in the carefully crafted stories. In the production of workplace dramas, tremendous research is invested in the scripts to ensure the accuracy of details and the integrity of the narrative because the success of these shows depends on how compelling and convincing the stories are (Komatsu 2000). A focus on the story in serial drama production tends to correspond to a narrative style that considers the individual episodes both as independent units and as parts of a serialized program. This means that the episodes are enjoyable as discrete units, without requiring the viewers to commit themselves to watching the entire series. The producers of love dramas had counted on a continuing commitment to the series on the viewers’ part. To keep viewers hooked, producers relied on cliff-hangers and what Modleski (1982) calls the “ever-expanding
middle,”
a narrative strategy that postpones conclusions until the very end of the season finale. However, this deterred casual viewers who were not interested in making the commitment to watch serialized dramas that ran for twelve weeks. These viewers appreciated work dramas, as they could enjoy single episodes independently without having to watch the entire series.

Lastly, love dramas discuss the question of happiness for individuals in a social vacuum. Their characters are not members of particular social communities; we do not know what family background they come from and do not always get a clear sense of what they do for living. In contrast, workplace dramas contextualize characters as social beings who spend the majority of their time in their places of employment.
9
In late 1990s dramas, the workplace is not simply a background to the unfolding story line but the primary site for character development. The work environment is described in detail, and the characters’ attitude toward work is scrutinized. Moreover, workplace dramas were in dialogue with media and government discourses on the need for institutional restructuring in the wake of the recession (
Shiroi Kyotō
, Fuji 2003, 2004), their primary target of criticism being the rigidly hierarchical corporate structure (for example, the seniority system), which they identified as a major source of inefficiency. Accordingly, one of the main conflicts of workplace dramas was the clash between junior and senior employees because it was in the course of struggles with their superiors that characters matured.

Work and Subjectivity in Trendy Dramas and in Recessionary Japan

Workplace dramas were particularly popular among young male viewers, who claimed that they enjoyed the refreshing portrayal of the characters and their relationship to work.
10
To understand why young male viewers found these aspects appealing requires an elaboration of the differences between love dramas and workplace dramas in representations of the drama protagonists (most of whom were women) and their relationship to work. Work was not a privileged theme in trendy dramas, mainly because producers believed that office ladies—the target demographic of the genre—were not interested in watching stories about work after a hard day of unrewarding labor. In love dramas, women’s relationship to work was represented in two ways. First were those office ladies, who considered their employment as an interim
period between school and marriage and quit their job after having a child. This is the typical heroine of love dramas. The second type of working women, which in reality is far less common, is the die-hard thirty- to forty-something career woman who is single and devotes herself to her work at the price of having a family (Suzuki 1999). The series
Single Lives
(TBS 1999) and
Brand
(Fuji 2000) were examples for this type of female protagonist.

Producers of workplace dramas have commented that this binarism in the representations of women in trendy dramas less and less reflected the realities of working women’s lives toward the end of the 1990s. The scriptwriter Inoue Yumiko has observed that both portrayals were exaggerations:

Kirakira Hikaru
[Shining Brightly]
11
was made before
Shomuni
, and there were not many dramas in which women were doing something together in a team. I personally badly wanted to see a drama in which four individualistic women (
koseitekina kyarakutā
) vigorously work, eat, and drink together. . . . When watching dramas I often had the feeling that they were made from a male perspective. Basically, you could see two types of women: the non–career-track office lady, who mostly wanted to get married (
kekkon ganbō no tsuyoi koshikake OL
) and the career woman type, who spent most of her time fighting her male colleagues. Real working women don’t conform to these stereotypes. Career women have more pride than to fight men all the time; likewise, it’s false to assume that noncareer office ladies spend most of their time thinking about love. My impression is that it is flawed to make that hard divide and put out a message that women do either work or love. Instead I wanted to show that women indeed work just as hard and responsibly as men do. I wanted to portray women who took pride in their professional identities. (quoted in Satake 2000: 41)

Similarly, the scriptwriter of
Shomuni
, Takahashi Rumi, has commented on the unrealistic portrayal of women in television dramas:

The office lady of television dramas, who has a lot of money and a rich lover and spends most of her life having fun (
asobimakutteiru
), originates in women’s magazines like
SPA!
The everyday lives of ordinary office ladies are far less joyful. They work hard for the 3 to 4 million yen [US$35,000–47,000] they make a year, and when they get home from work late in the night, often their only pleasure is to watch television in their tiny studios while eating some instant food that they picked up on the way home. (quoted in Satake 2000: 141–142)

Other books

Wheel of Stars by Andre Norton
Star of Gypsies by Robert Silverberg
Reckoning by Lili St Crow
A Piece of Me by Yvette Hines
The Colorado Kid by by Stephen King
Nine Minutes by Beth Flynn


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024