On Countryside Roads to National Identity: Japanese Morning Drama Series (Asadora) and Contents Tourism

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On countryside roads to national identity: Japanese morning drama series (asadora) and contents tourism

Elisabeth Scherer & Timo Thelen

To cite this article: Elisabeth Scherer & Timo Thelen (2020) On countryside roads to national identity: Japanese morning drama series (asadora) and contents tourism, Japan Forum, 32:1, 6-29, DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2017.1411378 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2017.1411378

Published online: 20 Dec 2017.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjfo20 On countryside roads to national identity: Japanese morning drama series (asadora) and contents tourism

ELISABETH SCHERER and TIMO THELEN

Abstract: Since the 1960s, NHK’s morning drama series (asadora) have become known as a popular and quasi-institutionalised serial format of Japanese TV broadcasting. They attract millions of viewers by telling stories of female protagonists struggling to achieve personal fulfilment. At the same time, they also function as tools to spread certain forms of national identity, which are often linked to conservative concepts of an ideal Japanese lifestyle and anchored in a nostalgic rural landscape. Using the example of 2015’s asadora Mare,we investigate how these two crucial aspects are implemented in the series’ narrative and production. Furthermore, we link our observations to the domain of ‘contents tourism’; this type of Japanese media-induced tourism recently gained significant attention from regional decision-makers working towards local revitalisation. By investigating contents tourism activities in Mare’s context, the rural city of Wajima in the Noto Peninsula, we aim to understand how the media-touristic negotiation between real and imaged landscapes works and how that process influences consumers as well as locals. Our study provides a previously missing link between the qualitative analysis of media content and the examination of contents tourism in order to achieve a broader sociocultural perspective on this phenomenon.

Keywords: Contents tourism, media, TV series, Japan, national identity, asadora, terebi dorama, furusato

Introduction The ﬁnest French confectionery, baked with regional ingredients and served in a wooden cottage on a remote Japanese peninsula by a young woman who has returned home for her family’s sake instead of pursuing an international career – this is what the formula for personal happiness can look like on Japanese television. The TV series Mare, which aired from 30 March to 26 September 2015 on NHK, follows the life story of the eponymous protagonist, played by Tsuchiya Tao, who

Japan Forum, 2020 Vol. 32, No. 1, 6–29, https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2017.1411378 Copyright © 2018 BAJS Elisabeth Scherer and Timo Thelen 7 has set herself the goal of becoming the world’s best pâtissiere. The series is mainly set in the port city of Wajima in the Noto Peninsula (Ishikawa Prefecture), where Mare and her family end up when she is ten years old, and Yokohama, where Mare later begins a traineeship. The 156 episodes of the series combine the subject of confectionery, which stands for personal fulfilment at work and creativity, with the ‘solidly grounded’ life of rural Japan, which finds its material expression in local specialties such as refined Wajima lacquerware (Wajima nuri). Mare belongs to the series format of renzoku terebi shosetsu (serial TV novel), or asadora for short, which has been broadcast on NHK every morning since 1961 to great success. The asadora have been an important morning institution for generations in Japan, a bastion of family life, and a mediator of traditional ‘Japanese’ values. They are both ritual everyday practice and part of the national culture of remembrance and thus consid- erably contribute to the construction of national identity. The critic Uno Tsunehiro considers Mare, with her always good humour, love of tradition, and sincerity, to be a typical example of asadora heroines since the 2000s (Uno 2015, p. 3). He argues that asadora since the Heisei period (1989–) have usually dealt with the role of women in society and their social ascent, but that this narrative pattern now has to be balanced with the (conservative) values of an ever-larger proportion of elderly viewers. This would lead to ‘redundant works, lacking in profile and resembling tourism videos’ – a category to which he also attributes Mare. This tendency of media such as TV series to focus on touristic imagery, however, is not only due to demographic change, but is also the result of deliberate production goals in Japan. Since the mid-2000s, the phenomenon of ‘media-induced tourism’ – or, to use the common Japanglish buzzword, ‘contents tourism’ (kontentsu tsurizumu) – has been discussed in research on Japan, with the focus lying mainly on Anime series and so-called Taiga dorama (historical series format) (e.g., Masabuchi 2014; Yamamura 2015, Seaton 2015). Japanese fans themselves prefer the expression ‘pilgrimage to sacred places’ (seichi junrei)(Okamoto2015,p.12),whichgovernmental institutions such as Japan National Tourist Organization recently usurped for international promotion (JNTO 2016). At the same time, local communities are getting more and more involved in the production process and the marketing of media content, and some media producers also choose certain regions as locations for development or charity reasons, as was the case with the asadora Amachan (2013). This series is set in Miyagi Prefecture, which suffered severe damage from the Tohoku Triple Disaster of 2011, and one of NHK’s expressed aims in choosing this location was to restore the region’s public image. The Taiga dorama of 2013, Yae no Sakura, was likewise set in Northern Japan (Seaton 2015, pp. 82–83). Despite some popular cases such as Amachan, the asadora series format has usually played a subordinate role in research on ‘contents tourism’ and is a subject that has scarcely been dealt with in general, especially in English 8 On countryside roads to national identity publications. Yet, the asadora deserve much more attention: in times of declining audience ratings, this genre is regarded as one of the last institutions which sup- posedly still reaches a ‘national audience’. Furthermore, since the early days of this genre, significant impacts on tourism have been observed, and the local communities, which are chosen as filming locations, generally expect positive effects on regional development and promote tourism on a large scale. In the case of Mare, the Development Bank of Japan estimated the economic value of the series for the filming location Ishikawa Prefecture as 6.6 billion yen (Travel Voice 2015), more than twice of the value of Amachan estimated by the same institution (Travel Voice 2013). Based on the example of Mare, we aim to identify how this type of series and its attendant structural-narrative characteristics construct national identity, most notably through the significant presence of regional identity. The way of life, ideals and values presented in the series stand, as we will show, in close connection with the rural landscape as a filming location. What this means for the location as a tourist destination is the second problem we will discuss in this article. Does the specific media format of asadora with its strong national anchorage induce a different form of ‘contents tourism’? What impact does the broadcast of asadora have on the filming locations – in our case, on Wajima in the Noto Peninsula?1

Ritual media consumption and national identity The asadora are a national institution in Japan. For generations, people have been tuning in to the state broadcaster NHK every morning to follow the plots, which extend over half a year. Hiyama (2015, p. 2) refers to the asadora, owing to their great social and economic importance, as the single kokumin-teki dorama (‘national drama’) on Japanese television. In their heyday, the asadora regularly reached audience ratings of over 40 per cent. As a result of digitalisation, online distributors, advanced recording technology, and a diversified range of programmes, it has become more difficult for stations to attract large audiences in recent years; the asadora, however, with ratings of over 20 per cent, are still considered a driving force of NHK and the most successful series format on Japanese television. Watching these series is thus more than just pure entertainment; it has become a ritual that contributes to structuring everyday life. As Larsen and Tufte (2003) explicate, it is just such everyday, seemingly ‘mundane’ acts as media consumption, which have the potential to ‘link the participants to a general social and cultural order’ (p. 90). Watching television as an everyday ritual thus can help to preserve the family as a social unit and to ‘position each participant within the social group’ (p. 104). The importance of television for family life is also stressed by Kobayashi (2003) for Japan. According to him, the concept of a ‘happy family get-together’ (danran) only emerged in the 1960s in Japan, along with the change Elisabeth Scherer and Timo Thelen 9 of the general housing situation and the introduction of television into house- holds. The ‘national’ television audience was conceptualised and naturalised in Japan, from the outset, as composed of standard families, i.e. nuclear families – which is still obvious today in the concept of the asadora as ‘family programmes’. Hansen (2016, p. 3) even designates the NHK morning programme, including the news and the weather forecast, as a ‘secular morning ritual’, ‘analogous to a religious morning prayer’. According to him, a group identity as ‘Japanese’ arises through the shared information about weather and news reports and through the experiences connected to this information. As far as the asadora are concerned, there exists no anthropological audience research to date to support this assump- tion, but studies in other countries have shown that media can actually influence how people think and speak about themselves as well as their relationship to the construct of the ‘nation’. Pertierra and Turner (2013), for example, point out for Mexico that even in the digital age, by watching television, people regard themselves as ‘participants in an imagined national community’ (p. 50), which for them, above all, has a ‘commercial appeal’ (p. 47). Madianou (2005) has learned through interviews in Greece that national discourses on television are viewed differently depending on the personal circumstances of the recipients; especially in times of external challenges, ‘people rely on a more emotional framework that essentialises themselves and their others’ (p. 5). In this paper, we do not focus on the reception of the asadora, but rather on internal structures and mechanisms of the series, which ‘invite certain meanings and block others’ (Morley 1992, p. 75). We deal with how the asadora address their audience, which ‘modes of address’ (Morley 1992, p. 84) the producers choose and how effects on tourism are a crucial part of the production agenda from the outset. While many other TV series in Japan approach the recipients as individuals, we argue that the asadora address their viewers as Japanese and as members of a (national) family. What Morley (1992) states in connection to the BBC’s programmes also applies in this context: ‘What is assumed to unite the audience, the “nation of families”, is its experience of domestic life’ (p. 256). The content of asadora is thus often characterised by traditional values, provides an ideal image of Japanese family life and creates normative concepts of femininity and masculinity. In ca. 150 episodes, aired from Monday to Saturday from 8 am to 8:15 a.m.,2 asadora tell the life and success story of a usually female protagonist working for her family’s well-being with all her strength. The most successful asadora so far, Oshin (1983–1984), traces the life of the heroine Oshin, who works her way up from a poverty-stricken peasant girl to the wealthy owner of a supermarket chain, experiencing the Kanto earthquake, the Second World War, and the harsh reality of the post-war period along the way. The series thus reflects the evolution of the Japanese nation: ‘Oshin […]symbol- ises Japan, and the drama is a synecdoche for modern Japanese history’ (Harvey 1995, p. 107). Harvey traces a ‘nostalgia for past core values’ in 10 On countryside roads to national identity

Oshin (Harvey 1995,p.87),suchasthecentralpositionofthefamilyor hard and devoted work for the improvement of one’s own situation. Oshin’s power as a national symbol was deliberately used in political contexts while the series was airing. On a visit to Japan in November 1983, US President Ronald Reagan, for instance, drew an analogy between the rise of Oshin and Japan’s economic success after the war (Haberman 1984,p.25).Somemem- bers of the House of Representatives also created a kind of fan club and oftenreferredtotheexemplaryperseveranceoftheheroine(Yomiuri Shinbun 1983, p. 2). And beginning in 1984, the Japan Foundation provided broadcasters worldwide with copies of Oshin as part of its cultural programme, which led to it being aired in 44 countries by 1995 (Takahashi 1998,p.144).AsIwabuchi(2015,p.421)states,Oshin was an important part of Japanese cultural policy, which aimed at building a new international image of Japan, detached from the negative connotations of Japanese imperi- alism. TV series are thus not only commercial products, but may also be charged with political signiﬁcance and become instruments of national identity construction. As Morley (1992) states, ‘there is, in television, no such thing as “an innocent text”’ (p. 82). In asadora, Japanese identity is often constructed by picking up on great national narratives such as the Second World War or the reconstruction after defeat. This view of national history from the perspective of women, as can cur- rently be seen in the series Toto Nechan (2016) and Beppin San (2016–2017), is an important part of the Japanese culture of remembrance. Equally important for identity construction in asadora, though, is the strong emphasis on the regional, which is used pars pro toto to negotiate national values. Already in early asadora, it was customary to choose different regions of Japan as settings for the plot. In the late 1970s, the newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun ﬁrst wrote of a ‘regionalisation’ (tochika)ofasadora (Yomiuri Shinbun 1977, p. 23), and with the great success of Oshin, rural Japan gained an even stronger presence in the series format. By 2009, all 47 prefectures had been present as a location at least once (Shibamoto Smith and Occhi 2009, p. 529).

Rural culture as source of national identity in asadora The construction of a Japanese identity through the ‘regional’ in asadora parallels the famous tourism campaign ‘Discover Japan’ (1970–1978), which the advertis- ing agency Dentsu created for Japan National Railways. This campaign enticed Japanese city dwellers to travel to the countryside by spreading images of idyllic nature and stereotypical pieces of traditional culture as well as by cultivating a ‘nostalgia for Shinto shrines, dirt roads, and the feeling of being simultaneously back home and far, far away’ (Middeleer 2016, pp. 97–98). As Sugawa-Shimada explains (2015, p. 41), single young women in particular were discovered as consumers by the tourism industry in the 1970s, and magazines such as An-an and Elisabeth Scherer and Timo Thelen 11

Non-no further aroused this group’s longing to travel to the countryside. The role of the young urban woman as ‘discoverer’ of a rural, rustic world which sym- bolises her own ‘native’ Japaneseness is similar to the basic storyline of recent asadora like Mare or Amachan. ‘Discover Japan’ constructed a clear dichotomy between the modern, urban Japan and the seemingly unspoiled countryside, while the Japanese were invited to explore what was considered ‘traditional’ and ‘original’ and thus to discover and consolidate their own identity as Japanese (Ivy 1995). In this logic, the rural stands for the ‘real Japan’ while life in the major cities is perceived as westernised. In Tobin’s words: ‘If Tokyo is Japan’s West, the countryside is Japan’s Japan’ (Tobin 1992, p. 16). The success of ‘Discover Japan’ and the rediscovery of the local in asadora are closely connected to the concept of furusato (literally ‘home village’) (Robertson 1988), in which the countryside becomes a projection space for an idealised Japanese lifestyle. Although Dusinberre (2008) argues that furusato hardly reflects the diversity and transnational aspects of rural Japanese municipalities, the term still gains large attention in national policies as a well as in local movements, supposing a homogeneity of Japaneseness and the countryside. Furusato stands for strong social bonds within the family and village community, for tradition and modesty, and thus functions as a counter-concept to urban life. This may also be considered one reason why in the last 50 years rural places have regularly been used as asadora locations: these places are thought best suited to representing ideal images of a Japanese family (Tako 2012, p. 227). In asadora, a convincing and attractive rural setting is constructed by incorporating regional peculiarities such as food, dialect, and customs in as much detail as possible. These details are very important for the persuasiveness of the story, because they create a sense of authenticity and credibility with the audience. Today, it has become more and more difficult for TV producers to get away with mistakes as a result of the ‘collective intelligence’ (Jenkins 2008) of social networks, which makes sure that even the smallest discrepancies are quickly identi- fied and disseminated. Viewers complained on Twitter, for instance, about the distances between the locations in Mare, which do not match the real situation in Wajima.3 Particularly close observers even noticed a microwave model that did not exist at the time in which the story is set.4 The quest for authenticity may not go so far, however, as to endanger the com- prehensibility of the series. One essential feature of regional identity which clearly demonstrates this difficulty is the local dialect. The ‘real’ regional dialect is usually too difficult for a national audience to understand. Moreover, according to Shibamoto Smith and Occhi (2009), a protagonist who speaks in a strong dialect will hardly be acknowledged by the audience as an attractive Japanese heroine, since in Japan femininity is linguistically transmitted by a highly feminised standard Japanese. For the script, therefore, a compromise must be found, and usually only certain features of a dialect are selected and combined with standard Japanese. Tanaka calls this ‘edited’ dialect ‘virtual hogen’; according to him, a 12 On countryside roads to national identity

‘fake dialect’ (nanchatte hogen) was common from the 1950s to the 1970s in Japanese drama series, until producers began to engage dialect consultants in the mid-1970s (Tanaka 2014, pp. 24–25). Since the mid-2000s, the producers’ claims of authenticity have continued to grow, and they make increasing effort to capture the nuances of a dialect (Tanaka 2014, p. 27). In recent years, dialect expressions that appear in asadora are also increasingly becoming fashionable and subsequently part of everyday language. The word jejeje from Amachan (2013), for example, became very popular with its audience and won the third place in the national buzzwords-of-the-year contest (shingo ryukogo taisho) (Jiyu kokuminsha 2013). In some cases, small changes or even inventions are made in the representation of local customs to create a more coherent overall image for addressing the national audience. One example is the yaki-saba (grilled mackerel) which appears in the asadora Chiritotechin (2007–2008) as a specialty of Obama City (Fukui Pre- fecture). In the series, some characters bite directly into the mackerel which is grilled on a skewer (see episodes 28, 29), whereas in the real Obama the ﬁsh are actually eaten on a plate. It became clear in statements from the production side that it was not NHK’s intention to represent the real place in the series, but to create a credible, authentic setting by incorporating and simulating local particu- larities (Tako 2012, p. 237). Following the representation, however, tourists began to eat the mackerel this way, which shows that the fantasy world of a series has the potential to spread to the real place whenever this fantasy world seems more plausible to the audience. This is an example of what Baudrillard (1988, p. 166) calls a ‘precession of simulacra’, i.e. when a simulacrum – in this case of a custom – eventually (re)creates the ‘real’ through its simulation. Simulated authenticity is clearly one key concept in the creation of the utopian rural world in Mare and, as we show later, several stakeholders are involved in making this utopia marketable in terms of tourism.

Asadora tourism as identity tourism In Japanese research, the beginnings of ‘contents tourism’ are usually associated with the so-called Taiga dorama, a historical series format that has been broadcast on NHK since 1963. However, the asadora have also had a remarkable impact on tourism in Japan throughout their history. Even the fifth asadora Tamayura (1965–1966), written by Kawabata Yasunari, had an impact on the local tourism industry: honeymoon trips to Nichinan in Miyazaki Prefecture became fashionable because of the series (Yomiuri Shinbun 1977, p. 23). The subsequent series Ohanahan (1966–1967) also induced fans to travel, this time to Ozu in Ehime prefecture, which was appreciated for its Meiji-era charms much to its inhabitants’ surprise.5 In 1977, when the series Ichiban hoshi aired, this effect was already widely known. At the filming location, Tendo City, the mayor and the local tourist office deliberately began using the asadora for tourism marketing Elisabeth Scherer and Timo Thelen 13

(Yomiuri Shinbun 1977, p. 23). Commercial fan tourism first reached a peak with the series Oshin: Yamagata prefecture, where the protagonist grows up, was marketed as a tourism destination on a large scale. Why do so many people feel attracted to the locations of TV series such as Oshin? Based on Baudrillard’s and Eco’s thoughts on postmodern hyper-reality, Urry and Larsen (2011) argue that the distinction between representations and reality vanishes as real landscapes become mediated as simulations in media. In consequence, the real rural landscapes appear here as representations charged with the viewers’ selective interpretations, such as concepts of nature or nostalgia. Urry and Larsen also use the term romantic gaze, which describes the tourist’s motivation to visit places away from mass tourism in order to have sup- posedly ‘real’ and individual experiences, e.g. in rather remote places such as rural villages (Urry and Larsen 2011, pp. 97–118). The romantic gaze is nurtured by an ‘imagined nostalgia’ or ‘ersatz nostalgia’ (Appadurai 2003 [1996], pp. 77–78), a nostalgia that is created by media, advertisements, and consumer- ism. In the case of Japan, the romantic gaze was mediated in campaigns such as ‘Discover Japan’ and also in media formats such as asadora, which projected the furusato ideal onto rural places and allowed urban dwellers to ‘rediscover’ their own Japaneseness. Pitchford (2008, p. 3), who ties in with theories of heritage and ethnic tourism, describes with the term ‘identity tourism’ a kind of tourism that helps to spread or reinforce the idea of a nation with ‘attractions in which collective identities are represented, interpreted, and potentially constructed through the use of history and culture’. As the asadora and their ideological impact show, media-induced tourism may also become identity tourism if media products play a part in consti- tuting national identity. When asadora viewers travel to filming locations, they not only seek a kind of para-social interaction with the series’ protagonists and their world, they also buy into the worldview or myths presented. One of the asadora’s myths is that rural communities in Japan, which in fact occupy a mar- ginal position in the dominant sociocultural discourse, stand pars pro toto for an essentialised native Japanese identity. In the mid 2000s the government of Japan discovered media tourism as an economic resource: governmental institutions such as the Ministry of Economy coined the neologism ‘contents tourism’. The term ‘contents’ refers here to the aim that a certain region not only uses its potential as the specific location known from media such as movies, anime, or even video games, but also generates a ‘narrative quality’ (monogatari-sei) connected to the media content (Yamamura 2015, p. 61). This ties in with Riley and Van Doren’s (1992, p. 269) argument that films create a ‘contextual package’ that links landscape and local attractions with certain ideas. In the case of asadora, this does not only concern the personal story of the protagonist; the ‘contextual package’ includes the Japanese nation as a grand narrative which is dressed in ever new (local) garments. In order to enhance the ‘narrative quality’ of their product and create a solid foundation for 14 On countryside roads to national identity media-induced identity tourism, asadora producers use their best endeavours to intensify the appearance of an ‘authentic’ depiction of a certain region. Such efforts are also obvious in Mare, as we show in the following section.

Placing Mare The series Mare tells the story of the protagonist Mare, who moves from Tokyo to the rural area of Noto with her family as a little girl and makes it her new home. After graduating, she starts working at the Wajima City Office but then decides to pursue her dream of a career as a pâtissiere. She eventually goes to Yokohama, where she works with the eccentric master confectioner Ikehata Daigo, becomes herself a master of her craft and is finally given the opportunity to further develop her skills in France. At the same time, however, Mare has married her childhood friend Kontani Keita, heir to a lacquerware workshop (nuriya) in Wajima, and she decides to support her husband back home instead of pursuing an international career. In the end, the couple gets twins, and Mare succeeds in opening her own small cafe. Even if eleven of twenty-six weeks of Mare take place in Yokohama, the Noto Peninsula has an overwhelming presence in the series. The opening credits show Mare dancing on the beach, picturesque aerial views of Noto, people working in agriculture, local festivals (matsuri), and lacquerware production. At the end of this sequence, people of different ages, some in traditional clothing, pile up local products on a large table, and Mare places a cake in the middle. With these opening credits as an important part of ritual TV consumption, the audience absorbs fragments of regional identity daily, which are associated with general values such as a sense of community, a lifestyle close to nature, and the continuity of tra- ditions. ‘Specialties’ of Noto are very present throughout the series, most notably lacquerware, matsuri, and a special kind of sea salt, which Mare’s ‘stand-in grandpa’ Okesaku Ganji still produces on a salt field through manual labour. The production team of Mare paid much attention to these local references – fragments of reality which are used to suggest authenticity. Five experts were engaged in order to supervise the correct representation of lacquerware handicraft, salt field cultivation (agehama-shiki enden), and the use of the local dialect by the actors (NHK Shuppan 2015, pp. 64–69). In the case of lacquerware handicraft, the original home and workshop of a craftsman were used as a location. For the portrayal of salt field cultivation, a still cultivated field in the neighbour- ing city of Suzu served as an outdoor location. In Mare’s narrative universe, the salt field is located in the fictitious village of Sotora, for which Osawa Town, about 15 km west of Wajima City’s centre, was used as a model. Thus, the mediated nostalgic ‘fantasyland’ of Mare is constructed out of fragments of real landscape, but rearranged to create a more convincing representation of romantic rural scenery. As a simulacrum conjured up in the editing room, however, this scenery is not one that can be visited by tourists – one of the main problems in Elisabeth Scherer and Timo Thelen 15 the promotion of ‘contents tourism’, which has been described by the term ‘displacement’ in tourism research (O’Connor and Kim 2016, pp. 18–19). When customs or specialties are shown for the first time in Mare, additional information is provided by the so-called ‘witch princess’, a voice-over that, as is common in asadora, functions as narrator and comments on the events of the narrative. This also contributes to capturing a panorama of the region’s tourist attractions: in episode 8, the ‘witch princess’ presents lantern festivals (kiriko matsuri), a particular type of shrine festival in Noto. A short video sequence shows the most impressive festivals in the region. This is no coincidence, as opu- lent Shinto festivals have become popular tourist attractions in Japan since the late 1970s (Robertson 1988, p. 509). Moreover, in some scenes, Mare, for example, learns about the lacquerware handicraft (‘Really? You coat it so many time- s?’, episode 8) and gives the viewers, who are usually unfamiliar with the craft’s secrets, an opportunity to join the heroine in admiring the precision of the crafts- manship. The message is always that these regional products are of excellent and unique quality. Such sequences project a nostalgic image of rural Japan and recall documentaries or even tourist commercials. Likewise, the members of Mare’s family have to acquaint themselves with the local dialect when they move from Tokyo to Noto: the audience picks up typical dialect words and sentence endings together with the family onscreen. A similar use of dialect can be observed in the series Amachan, where the protagonist from Tokyo adopts the Tohoku dialect, practices it like a foreign language and thus makes the region her new home. This ‘hogen cosplay’ (Tanaka 2014, p. 33) becomes a symbol for the process of taking on regional identity. However, local dialect in Mare is essentially a ‘virtual hogen’, i.e. it features only some recurring and rather famous expressions such as dara (idiot) or the local slogan ‘the kind- ness in Noto even reaches into the soil’ (episode 2). Although the drama portrays rural life as an ideal form of community, the countryside’s recent difficulties are also mentioned. For example, the main characters discuss the lack of a labour force for traditional and physically challenging professions such as salt field cultivation (episode 2) as well as the decline of the lacquerware industry since the bubble era (episode 15). Furthermore, historical events are remembered or even integrated into the story, such as the Noto tourism boom in the late 1960s (episode 5) or the municipal mergers of 2006 which led to the closing of town halls (episode 7). Thus, Mare repeatedly refers to local peculiarities and real events, which suggests authenticity and pays a tribute to the people of the region. In addition to the series itself, NHK and local stakeholders tried to increase media presence for the Noto region. Various measures were aimed at extending the ‘Mare experience’ and at promoting regional development through tourism. There were reports about Noto on breakfast TV, websites with information on the filming locations, and lots of related activities on social networks. The main actress Tsuchiya posted snapshots of the locations on her blog accompanied by 16 On countryside roads to national identity descriptions of the atmosphere and her experiences. Below, for example, she gives an account on her first acquaintance with Wajima lacquerware: This wonderful lacquerware feels strange to the touch, and it has its own tem- perature. It is very stable, so you expect it to be hard, but it is very light and soft and a little warm to the touch, so that it feels just like touching something that is alive. (Tsuchiya 2015) Here, Tsuchiya ‘lends’ her five senses to the viewers, so that they can immerse themselves more deeply into the world of Mare, and this intensifies the fans’ interest in Wajima lacquerware as many comments on this post show. This results not only in a kind of ‘ersatz nostalgia’, but also in an ‘ersatz experience’: similar to the protagonist Mare, Tsuchiya adopts the role of a pseudo-tourist who allegedly rediscovers ‘native’ culture and therefore her own Japanese self, in rural Japan. The patisserie as a central theme of the series contradicts this strong local root- edness. Confectionary has a ‘western’ or cosmopolitan connotation in Japan, and Mare specialises in French pastries. Following an international trend, elaborate homemade pastries were in vogue at the time in Japan and thus emerged as promising material for a series, especially since the audience could participate by baking the cakes featured in the story. The creators of the series had to offer a plausible link between the region and confectionary, which they achieved by referring to a local personality: the well-known pâtissier Tsujiguchi Hironobu, a native of Noto. After winning national contests, he continued his education in France and gained international acclaim. Upon returning to Japan, he opened some cafes and started appearing regularly on television. Although Tsujiguchi is not mentioned in the series, he acted as a consultant, and it has repeatedly been pointed out that the story has been inspired by his life. Another narrative manoeuvre was the ‘fusion’ of Mare’s pastries with local handicraft and local ingredients. This becomes especially evident at the end of the series when Mare participates in the national preliminary round for the World Pastry Cup and chooses the title yume (dream) for her creations. The four cakes stand for Wajima lacquerware, sea salt, matsuri, and family respectively (episode 150). For ingredients, Mare uses sea salt, which she associates with her life motto (jimichi ni kotsu kotsu, ‘hard-working and steady’), konbu seaweed (for a ‘nostalgic taste of family’, episode 153), and seeds of the lacquer tree. She also builds a piece montee in the shape of a kiriko lantern. Here, the pastries are ‘Japanised’ through their ingredients as well as through their connection to regional tradi- tions and conservative values, thereby also contributing to the construction of national identity. The elements, which are combined in this ‘domestication of the West’ (Tobin 1992), i.e. patisserie and lacquerware, are regarded as being of high quality and exclusive. The products resulting from this process therefore are not ‘Japanese’ in an everyday sense, but stand for a rurally rooted yet utterly refined Japaneseness. Elisabeth Scherer and Timo Thelen 17

Distancing herself from an international pastry scene and developing her own Noto variant is very important for Mare, because her way of life is negotiated through pastry. Her boss Ikehata and her grandmother Yukie, who is married to a Frenchman, both practice global lifestyles with a strong orientation towards France as the pâtisserie’s country of origin. Confectionery is a kind of gateway to the world for Mare, but one which she nonetheless resolves to leave unopened. She decides to prioritise classical Japanese family life and to only pursue her career within this framework. Furthermore – here the asadora makes a clear statement – an ideal life with her husband and children is only possible in the countryside, which is presented as the cradle of the Japanese family. That Mare’s decision in favour of Noto was the right choice is further emphasised by the character of Kuramoto Ichiko, one of Mare’s friends who acts as a kind of antagonist. Even as a young girl, she already dreamed of living in a big city. Upon realising this dream, however, she encounters many difficulties and becomes the ‘problem child’ of the series (among other things, she works as a hostess in a night club, episode 87). A rigid binary gender structure thus forms the ideological background of the series, with women caring for the children while men act as primary breadwin- ners and ‘protectors’ of the family. The stand-in grandpa Ganji is presented as a representative of hegemonic masculinity, providing for the family through his hard work on the salt field. When Mare’s brother Ittetsu learns that he is going to be a father (episode 114), he takes Ganji as a model and expresses his will to pro- tect (mamoru) his family. He takes over the salt field, and his wife Minori quits her job (episode 130). Such a distribution of responsibilities is presented as social normality in the series, i.e. as an ideal Mare has to deal with if she wants to pursue her dream of working as a pâtissiere. This is particularly evident when Mare gives birth to twins and plans to re-open her cafe soon afterwards. In episode 130, which takes place two months after birth, her husband, Keita, takes care of the children for the first time and is unable to cope with the preparation of bot- tles, changing of diapers, etc. When one of the twins gets a high fever during his care, her mother-in-law holds Mare alone responsible for this situation, and Mare blames herself for having ‘failed as a mother’ (hahaoya shikkaku). That she can finally re-open her shop (episode 132) is presented as a compromise, and her role as a mother is given priority.6 Reconciliation of work and family life is a purely ‘female topic’ in this series, and male figures are not confronted with theseproblems.IfwecompareMarewiththe‘real’Notopâtissier Tsujiguchi, their biographies emerge as clearly determined by their gender: while Tsujiguchi could pursue his career in France, Mare has to sacrifice some of her ambitions for the sake of her family. Through ritual consumption of asadora, viewers are confronted on a daily basis with such gender constructions and ideologically shaped family models embed- ded in a romanticised rural Japanese setting. As we have already pointed out, the audience’s voyage to Mare’s world might not only remain imaginative; the series 18 On countryside roads to national identity actively encourages viewers to travel to the filming locations in the periphery. Based on field research in Noto, our last section deals with Mare’s touristic impact on its filming location Wajima.

Visiting Mare’s furusato Back in the Edo period (1600–1868), Mare’s furusato Wajima (see Figure 1) was a prosperous harbour town famous for its lacquerware handicraft. Today, however, Wajima suffers from serious depopulation and an ageing population like many rural regions in Japan. The population of the recent city area decreased from about 43,000 inhabitants to 27,000 within the last 30 years, while over-ageing is also a serious problem, as 42 per cent of the inhabitants are over 65 years old (Ishikawa Prefecture 2016). The bubble era of the late 1980s led to a short- term revival of lacquerware; however, sales of lacquerware have decreased from 17 billion yen in 1990 to 5 billion yen in 2010, and the number of individuals engaged in the industry (craftsmen, sales staff, etc.) dropped from about 3000 to 1500 (Wajima City 2015, p. 15). Since the railway station closed in 2001, highway buses are the most important connection to the regional economic centre of

Figure 1 Map of Ishikawa Prefecture with marks for places related to Mare; own illustration. Elisabeth Scherer and Timo Thelen 19

Kanazawa (about 120 km in the South). The Prefectural Office of Ishikawa has launched many projects for the support of the Noto region, such as the designa- tion as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems site in 2011. Other recent local support projects have also considered the potential of contents tourism. The anime production company P.A. Works, in particular, which is based in Toyama Prefecture, often refers to local places as location models; Hanasaku Iroha (2011, 2013), for example, features Kanazawa and Noto as locations. This series received public attention for attracting more than 12,000 visitors to an annually held fan event (Masabuchi 2014, p. 10). The regional experience of contents tourism raised expectations for Mare as a tool for rural revitalisation of the Noto region and for transforming Wajima – at least for the six months of broadcasting – into the mediatised archetype of a ‘national hometown’. The new Shinkansen connection from Tokyo to Kanazawa had been finished only two weeks before the drama started at the end of March 2015; the strategic coincidence of both events is obvious. The journey from Kanazawa to Wajima by highway bus takes a bit more than two hours. Around 15 km before reaching Wajima, the melody of Mare’s opening song Marezora suddenly emerges while driving. In June 2015, a 1.2 km long section of the highway was transformed into a ‘melody road’ (oto no michi), which welcomes travellers to Mare’s furusato. When talking with inhabitants of Wajima about this project, many individuals expressed harsh critiques. The cost of the melody road’s construction was only published in combination with other highway improvement costs (Ishikawa Prefecture 2015, p. 18). Locals rumour the amount to be around 42 million yen – a rather expensive greeting to Mare’s hometown.7 Another way to reach Wajima is to fly from Tokyo Haneda to the Noto Airport, where life-size cardboard cut- outs of the Mare actors welcome travellers. These references to the series function as boundary markers and contribute to ‘framing’ the arrival at Noto/Wajima as a (ritual) passage into Mare’s world. At the former Wajima railway station, souvenir shops offer products related to the series, such as Mare chocolate, cheese cakes, and cookies with sea salt from Noto, the same that the heroine uses for her patisserie. The souvenir package (see Figure 2) shows a large licence sticker of NHK and the shadow profile of a woman who is apparently supposed to be Mare. According to a local tourism consultant, NHK’s copyright policy is rather strict. Not only the Mare logo, but also the actors and their photographs are protected by a complex copyright sys- tem. This is the reason why even the official NHK souvenirs do not feature a photo of Mare’s actress Tsuchiya but only a mysterious female shadow, which reduces the link to the narrative universe of Mare to a vague allusion. This example not only points to the legal difficulties that occur when media content is brought back to its rural origins, but also to the ‘spatial order’ (Couldry 2003,p. 80) that stands behind the production, i.e. to the unequal relationship between the media producers in the centres and the mediatised peripheries. In many cases, like for Mare, the media producers’ charity for the struggling peripheries 20 On countryside roads to national identity

Figure 2 Mare souvenir; own picture taken in July 2015. ends with providing them attention in the mass media; the rest is up to them. Local communities then have the difficult task of correlating their daily-life reali- ties with the mediatised images, which viewers know from their TV screens and expect to encounter in their tourist experience. Mare flags wave along Wajima’s main street to the morning market and harbour (see Figure 3); their logo looks slightly different. Again, the local tourism consultant offers an explanation: this is the logo of the Mare promotion group (Mare suishin kyogi kai), an initiative of the thirteen municipalities of Noto, the local trade and commerce chamber, and the local tourism union in collaboration with the Japanese Travel Bureau. Such local promotion groups are a common phenomenon; a similar group existed for Amachan (Tajima 2015), and there even exists a network of municipalities that functioned as asadora locations (http://asadora.jp/). For the fiscal year 2015, the Mare promotion group organised the contents tourism in Noto. Its logo has been accepted by NHK for non- commercial promotional usage. The activities of the Mare promotion group in 2015 included a homepage which places a larger focus on local information than the official NHK website, a stamp and a photo rally. From 25 April to 31 December 2015, Wajima’s tourism association also offered a guided tour in a minibus. For 1200 yen, fans were taken to Osawa Town, the model of Mare’s fic- tive village; the tour took about 90 minutes and was offered three times per day.8 The two rallies as well as the guided bus tour encourage the travelling fans to col- lect stamps, photographs, or other individual impressions of the rural landscapes, buildings, and specialties that NHK used to create Mare’s furusato. Eventually, the visitors rearrange these visual fragments to get a glimpse of the ‘simulated’ Elisabeth Scherer and Timo Thelen 21

Figure 3 Mare ﬂag in Wajima; own picture taken in July 2015.

Noto they know from the asadora; through the practice of re-mediatising their on-site experience, they are able to get closer to an ideal image of the Japanese countryside. As their ‘tourist gaze’ is nurtured by the real landscapes, the series’ imaginative world, and also tropes of national ideology that the series refers to, we suggest that their travel can function as an example of identity tourism. In September 2015, we interviewed a lacquerware craftsman who served as con- sulting expert during the drama’s production. He also proofread the drama’s script, for which he gave only minimal corrective advice. In his house, which is both his atelier and his living space, nothing indicated that it was used as a ﬁlming location. 22 On countryside roads to national identity

As an item linked to the series, he offers lacquerware chopsticks with a small Mare inscription on the upper side for 2000 to 3000 yen depending on the quality of the lacquer used. On our visit, his assistant was also producing these chopsticks, which, as he admitted, were selling well. However, the chopsticks are probably his shop’s cheapest products, and he still has thousands of lacquerware dishes in stock waiting for customers. The drama Mare did not lead to a lacquerware boom as it did with patisserie, which fans may try to do on their own. The lacquerware handicraft is a highly specialised profession, which produces expensive products less attractive to the mass of tourists and aimed more towards a wealthy elite.9 One might assume that for most of the viewers, mediatised images of traditional, locally produced handicraft goods sufﬁce to evoke a warm and nostalgic feeling of furusato – the product itself is no longer necessary. Nevertheless, Wajima City is generally very active in promoting lacquerware as a touristic resource. A Chinese native guide has recently joined the tourist information ofﬁce, as rich Chinese tourists are expected to become a potential new clientele for the precious lacquerware. The broadcast of Mare on TV channels in Taiwan and Hong Kong in late 2015 and early 2016 further raised hopes of foreign tourists coming. Wajima City prepared itself by producing 5000 Cantonese language maps leading to 22 Mare spots (Hokkoku Shinbun 2016). In fact, East Asian tourists are increasingly becoming an important clientele for keeping Japanese handicrafts alive on the countryside; for them, these products are branded not as local goods, but as ‘national’ artefacts of Japan.

Figure 4 Touristic data for Wajima City; own illustration. Elisabeth Scherer and Timo Thelen 23

Figure 5 Mare poster at Noto Airport; own picture taken in November 2016. 24 On countryside roads to national identity

During several short stays in Wajima in summer 2015, we were able talk to citi- zens about their opinions on the series and the producers’ attempt to show the region as authentically as possible. Most inhabitants asked were positively impressed by the portrayal of their home region, and they only mentioned some minor issues such as mistakes in the actors’ dialect usage. The locals’ positive evaluation is also based on their participation in the creation process, e.g. as background actors in outdoor sequences. The involvement of locals is a common practice in the production of asadora, as also seen, for example, in the case of Amachan (Tajima 2015) and – much less successfully – in Jun to Ai (Maruta et al. 2014). This not only creates a sense of authenticity but also guarantees local support and positive resonance for the series. The locals felt proud of the national attention the drama attracted. In a short speech at the abalone festival in July 2015, the governor of Ishikawa Prefecture referred to Mare as the prefecture’s greatest recent success alongside the new Shinkansen. At that commercial event organised by the local fishermen’s union, the asadora’s opening song Marezora was played as background music in an endless loop for hours. By consuming their ‘mediatised hometown’, people who inhabit the real place partly began to incor- porate the romanticised, positive gaze created by the asadora producers. Many scholars (e.g. Heitmann 2010, Seaton 2015) argue that in most cases the success of contents tourism is only temporary. Mare brought Wajima a short- term boom in tourism for the fiscal year 2015: the number of visitors and over- night stays in Wajima increased impressively in 2015 by about 30 per cent com- pared with the previous year (see Figure 4; Wajima City 2017), but it has also been slowing down since, reaching the lowest point in the last five years during summer 2016. This comes as no surprise since most local activities related to Mare ended shortly after the series’ final episode: NHK closed its Mare homepage in January 2016; Noto Airport removed its Mare promotion corner in March 2016, leaving only a rather hidden Mare poster (see Figure 5); and the Mare promotion group was dissolved as the fiscal year 2015 ended. Wajima City did, however, establish a ‘Wajima TV Drama Memorial Hall’ in June 2016, where visitors can enter free of charge, marvel at some relics from the shoot and buy a small stock of souvenirs. Even if this place probably does not attract new tourists by itself, it might become a kind of lieu de memoire (Nora, 1989) of the year 2015 for the locals, when Wajima became mediatised as the epitome of an idyllic Japanese furusato.

Conclusion Mare definitely did not become a new Oshin. The series’ audience ratings aver- aged at 19.4 per cent – less than the previous series – and as such Mare generally received less acclaim than expected (Nihei and Sekiguchi 2016, p. 41). Accord- ing to a survey conducted by NHK (with 1000 viewers), most viewers appreciated the series’ cast (48 per cent); the presentation of the Noto region with its Elisabeth Scherer and Timo Thelen 25 landscape, dialect, and handicraft (37 per cent); and the filming locations (36 per cent). Some aspects that were received rather negatively were the tempo of the narrative (26 per cent), the script (23 per cent), and the characters of Mare (16 per cent) and her father (19 per cent) (Nihei and Sekiguchi 2016, p. 34). Thus, on the one hand, the rural ‘fantasy land’ constructed out of fragments from the Noto region fulfils its purpose as an object of nostalgia, while on the other hand, viewers were not content with the story and the characters as agents of a conservative worldview. At the same time, NHK’s survey confirms the ritual character of asadora as a media format: 67 per cent of the participants answered that view- ing asadora had become a habit for them to a certain degree. One of the study’s conclusions therefore was that Mare demonstrated that asadora carry a ‘strange power that lets people go on watching’ (Nihei and Sekiguchi 2016, p. 41): even though parts of the audience did not enjoy the series, they kept on watching it. As the limited interest in contents tourism related to Mare has shown, the ‘narrative quality’ of the series obviously did not suffice to create a convincing simulacrum. The producers did not succeed in creating the utopia of Mare’s Noto in a way that made it possible to project it onto the real filming location Noto. Eventually, Mare’s mediatised version of Noto may not have appeared authentic and attractive enough to stir the audience’s desire to travel. Even though, as NHK’s survey has shown, the representation of the rural itself was appreciated by the viewers, the underlying ideals of life and social values as embodied by the characters were not. It is not sufficient to just assemble fragments of local identity – even when producers pay attention to the smallest details – if the ‘contextual package’ fails to convince the audience. Even rather conservative viewers may have been disappointed by the storyline and the values conveyed by Mare, since the series format of asadora is generally known for a more progressive depiction of its female heroines. Furthermore, the life course of the protagonist – marriage after high school, childbirth at the beginning of her twenties, living in a multigenerational household – offers little potential for iden- tification, since such a model is far from the reality of life for most Japanese people today. It becomes clear that the construct of the ‘national audience’ as well as the narrative of the Japanese ‘nation of families’ must be reconsidered to gain new significance for the asadora format. This might also be the reason why asadora such as Amachan, with its references to the recent triple disaster as well as to contemporary idol culture, or Massan, the first asadora with a foreign heroine, gained more attention and critical acclaim than Mare. In addition, the ‘tourist experience’ in Noto offered for Mare fans was, and still is, rather limited; even though there have been some contents tourism activities related to Mare in 2015, the trip to Wajima was still only a trip to Noto and not a journey into Mare’s world. One might add that, due to the structural problems it shares with many rural areas in Japan, the Noto region is also not predisposed to become a utopia of ‘true Japaneseness’. Even images of friendly locals and an iconic panorama cannot hide the visible symptoms, such as closed shops, of an 26 On countryside roads to national identity environment being transformed by over-ageing and depopulation. Although there has been limited success, it remains questionable if the legacy of the asadora will prove to be fruitful for the Noto region. Indeed, Mare seems to be ill-fated: in August 2016 a big scandal emerged, leaving even the locals in doubt. The actor Takahata Yuta, who played one of Mare’s close friends in the asadora, was accused of rape, and this incident became a huge story in the Japanese mass media. For NHK, this scandal severely damaged Mare’s economically crucial ‘secondary revenue’ (Nikkan Gendai 2016); Takahata’s character was too important to be eliminated from the series in TV reruns or Blu-Ray/DVD distribution, yet his appearance would probably remind most viewers of the aforementioned incident. This may have been the final blow for the idyllic and conservative world of this asadora.

Disclosure statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In addition to media analysis, our research is based on several short field trips to Wajima in summer 2015 and interviews with locals involved in the production process of Mare as well as with tourist advisors who organised the activities of contents tourism in Noto. 2. The asadora had been broadcast at 8:15 a.m. for decades. After audience ratings reached an all- time low with Uerukame (2009), NHK decided to shift the broadcast time, and in fact there has been an increase in the ratings. 3. https://twitter.com/koudenh/status/583254146989486080 (@koudenh, 01.04.2015, 06:06). 4. https://twitter.com/chablis777/status/590667580978950147 (@chablis777, 21.04.2015, 17:05). 5. See Tako 2012, p. 234, Yomiuri Shinbun 1977, p. 23; Yomiuri Shinbun 1966, p. 10; one street in Ozu is still officially named Ohanahan-dori (Ozu-shi Kanko Kyokai 2016). 6. Gossmann€ (2000, p. 215) identifies a similar narrative pattern in some Japanese TV series of the 1990s. 7. The fiscal report of Ishikawa Prefecture for 2015 suggests that, apart from the melody road, around 40 million yen were invested in projects linked to Mare, such as the stamp rally, local events, or production of souvenirs. 8. For the stamp rally, three stamps could be collected on a postcard, and in return the fans could receive a Mare present. The photo rally required fans to visit five Mare locations, where they could take pictures with an integrated Mare sticker and upload them on Twitter. According to a local newspaper, the guided bus attracted about 7000 visitors. 9. To give one example, a simple Wajima lacquerware rice bowl without special features may start at about 20,000 yen.

ORCID Elisabeth Scherer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5582-0351 Timo Thelen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5859-3094 Elisabeth Scherer and Timo Thelen 27

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Elisabeth Scherer is a lecturer and research associate at the Department of Modern Japanese Studies, Dusseldorf€ University, Germany. Scherer has studied Japanese Studies and Rhetoric at the University of Tubingen€ and Doshisha University (Kyoto). She obtained her PhD in Japanese Studies from the University of Tubingen€ in 2010 with a thesis on female ghosts in Japanese cinema. Scherer’s areas of research interest include Japanese popular culture, rituals and religion in contemporary Japan, Gender Studies, and the reception of Japanese art and popular culture in the West. She may be contacted at [email protected]

Timo Thelen is a research assistant and PhD candidate at the Department of Modern Japanese Studies, Dusseldorf€ University, Germany. Thelen has studied Japanese Studies at Dusseldorf€ University, Keio University (Tokyo), and Kanazawa University (Ishikawa). His PhD thesis focuses on rural revitalisation measures in the Noto Peninsula, Ishikawa Prefecture. Thelen’s areas of research interest include rural culture and society, Japanese popular culture, science studies, and mobility. He may be contacted at [email protected]