The University of Chicago Laughing
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAUGHING UNTIL IT HURTS: CHILDREN, MOTHERS AND CONCERNS ABOUT COMEDIC TELEVISION IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY BY WILLIAM JOHN FEENEY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii Introduction: Laughing Until it Hurts: Children, Mothers and Concerns about Comedic Television in Contemporary Japan 1 Chapter 1: Smiles, Scars and Suicide: Forensic Anxieties and the Limited Interactional Agency of Children 20 Chapter 2: Institutional Complainers: The Emblematization of the Japanese PTA National Congress 63 Chapter 3: Boon and Bane: The Intimate Pleasures and Public Hazards of Childish Vulgarity 107 Chapter 4: Managing Monstrousness 137 Bibliography 169 ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my co-chairs, Professor Michael Silverstein and Professor Susan Gal for the profound inspiration and sustained support they provided throughout my graduate career. Their mentorship has left a deep and lasting imprint on my intellectual development and this project would not have been possible without them. I am deeply grateful for their guidance, support and patience. I would also like to thank Professor Michael Bourdaghs whose insightful feedback and direction has been a true boon. His consistent encouragement has also helped me stay in motion in the face of what often felt like an impossible task. I also wish to express gratitude to Professor David Slater who served as my advisor during my fieldwork in Japan. His advice and support proved invaluable as I found my way as a fieldworker. I am grateful for his continued support. It must also be recognized that this research would not have been possible without the kindness and generosity of my fieldwork interlocutors. I am deeply indebted to those that I met in Yokohama and Tokyo for their willingness to allow me to become a feature in their busy lives. I would also like to thank my friends and peers for their consistent input, support and forbearance. Their generosity with their time, feedback and companionship have been an essential aspect of my development at Chicago. This said, the list of those who given generously of their time and energy to help me grind my analytic lenses and sharpen my scholarship is much too long to enumerate here. To name but one, I would be remiss not to single out Shunsuke Nozawa as a pivotal contributor to my scholarly development and steadfast interlocutor. Finally, I would sincerely like to thank my family for their patient and positive support during this long and challenging process. iii This research was made possible through a generous dissertation research fellowship from the Japan Foundation. iv Introduction: Laughing Until It Hurts: Children, Mothers and Concerns about Comedic Television in Contemporary Japan “Then [the expanse of high heaven] shook as the eight-hundred myriad deities laughed at once.” - Kojiki (The Record of Ancient Matters) This dissertation considers the social entanglements of critical (mediatized) discourses concerning comedic television in contemporary Japan. Comedy (owarai) and comedic variety (baraeti) television programming have become a mainstay format on Japanese television since the 1980s. Compressed production schedules and low costs have helped sustain the appeal of comedic formats for broadcasters in an era of diminishing advertising revenue and tightening budgets. However, popular commentators have noted that these constraints, coupled with ceaseless demands to fill air-time, have led to a profusion of low-brow (teizoku) programs that increasingly compete to corner the market on cheap laughs. Such programs are both popular— according to industry ratings research—and subject to frequent criticism within public discussions mediated by newspapers, magazines, talk television and, more recently, social media. These ‘problematic’ programs regularly feature coarse speech and crude behavior which become salient foci within mediatized expressions of concern that find such rough (ranbō) interactional displays unsavory, meaningless, and potentially harmful. As one might expect, children overwhelming figure as the explicit locus of concern. Rigorously institutionalized ideologies of childhood dependence invest children with potentials 1 to be developed and cast them as unequipped to operate as fully responsible social actors. These convictions normatively defer responsibility for the problematic behavior, speech, or study habits, of children onto other, more legitimately responsible, agents. The public discussions considered here entangle three principle agents as suspect figures that can fail to live up to their mature responsibility to appropriately care for, or at least consider, children. They are comedic producers—as creators of a problematic communicative contagion, schools and educational institutions—as ratified custodians of the social and academic development of children, and parents—as personally responsible for their own child’s personal growth and development. Elementary school and junior high school children figure most prominently in these critical discussions, however high-school students and pre-schoolers (yōchien, hōikuen) also occasionally feature as vulnerable and in need of protection from comic television’s presumed viral vulgarity. While each of these figurated agents become targets of criticism at times, parents regularly appear as most often subject to criticism and blame. Mothers in particular serve as regular targets of criticism in sensational mediatized cases involving deviant acts by children. The stark division of labor associated with postwar Japan’s ‘maternal society’ (bosei shakai) lays the responsibilities of childcare (as well as other forms of domestic labor) on mothers, thus freeing up fathers to engross themselves in economic labor to sustain the household as well as serve corporate and national interests (Yoda 2000b). Maternal ideologies materialize institutionally in workplaces in the form of recruitment and promotion practices that channel women towards positions with limited avenues for advancement (Ueno 1989; Brinton 1994; Edwards 1992). The implicit logic being that female employees will eventually leave their jobs to focus on the important work of childcare. This gendered formation hangs in large part on the 2 ideological linchpin of maternal love (bosei ai), which casts mothers as naturally inclined, and instinctually equipped, for child rearing (Akkiko and Yoda 1993; Bardsley 1999). In this light, the explicit focus on the potential dangers and distractions to children presented by comic television within these mundane public discussions obscures a profusion of more situated stakes for those tasked with caring for children. This dissertation approaches these mundane public discussions concerning the social entailments television comedy as generative communicative (interdiscursive) process. The analysis builds on relatively recent approaches to circulation (Silverstein 2011, 2013; Gal 2018), as a form of interdiscursive process (See Silverstein 2005), and ‘mediatization’ (Agha 2011, Nakassis 2016) as a specific mode of semiotic mediation that selectively obscures and erases (Gal & Irvine 2000) social processes that participate in ‘mass media’(ted) communication. Individual chapters emphasize the ways that critical accounts, and their rebuttals, unfold in regular (mediatized) ways as they traverse an institutional landscape composed of diverse constraints and interests. In working to advance arguments and mobilize support, such public discussions regularly conjure ideological formulations of Japanese society and index consequential figures of maternal personhood that become salient within the manifold social encounters that compose everyday experience. The Ambivalent Social Power of Laughter There is a longstanding appreciation for the power of laughter in Japan. For example, laughter holds a storied place in the oldest extent Japanese text, the Record of Ancient Matters (Kojiki). The key episode begins with a visit by the storm-god Susano to his sister, the Sun- Goddess Amaterasu. Susano had a great proclivity for mischief which regularly tested 3 Amaterasu’s patience. On this visit, Susano’s antics became more than his sister could bear and drove the exhausted Sun-Goddess to hide herself in a rocky cave and pulled a great boulder to seal the entrance. His sister gone, Susano departed, leaving Amaterasu to the solitude of the cave. With the heavens in darkness, the deities of the heavenly plane assembled with great concern and set about finding some way to coax the Sun-Goddess out of hiding. Only the sound of raucous laughter, wrung from the assembled deities by a bawdy dance, had the power to draw Amaterasu from her self-imposed solitude. Her curiosity piqued by the laughter, Amaterasu shifted the boulder from the entrance of the cave, eager to see what she was missing, and light was restored to the world (Phillipe 1987). Of course, the social power of laughter has holds more than mythological significance. In stark contrast to American depictions of the fanatical humorlessness of the Japanese (Kushner 2004: 300-301), the continued prevalence and social power of laughter was not lost on the administrators of the wartime Japanese state. Keenly aware of the double-edged potentials of laughter to both boost and undercut the ideological foundations of the imperial project, Japanese authorities