Japan Forum ISSN: 0955-5803 (Print) 1469-932X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjfo20 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. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 462 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 2 View citing articles 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 p^atissiere. 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 spe- cialties 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 asa- dora 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 dor- ama (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 mar- keting 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 sub- ject 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 com- munities, 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 institu- tion (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 connec- tion with the rural landscape as a filming location. What this means for the loca- tion 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 pro- grammes, 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 con- sidered 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 consump- tion, which have the potential to ‘link the participants to a general social and cul- tural 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.