Author: -

Abstract: »My thesis explores how Japanese television documentaries frame the Asia-Pacific War in the 1990s by looking at the documentary-making process. In Japan, the ‘perpetrator’ narrative, exploring Japan’s wartime atrocities has been rare, while the ‘victim’ narrative has been dominant since postwar (Hashimoto 2015). Yet, the ‘perpetrator’ narrative increased in the 1990s and had largely disappeared by 1999. How did the narrative change? This paper looks at these shifts from the perspective of television documentary makers, particularly Japanese public broadcaster NHK. It is worth digging into how war documentaries have been made and have portrayed the Asia-Pacific War because the role of documentaries is not only to inform people like news but also to educate and cultivate them, giving the interpretation of the present and the past. Also, television programming is a site where various political and social forces struggle, reflecting a dynamic process in which memories of the past are selected and discarded (Yonekura 2021).
There is a considerable amount of academic research on media portrayals of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan. However, all of this work analyze media representations. There has been little attempt to explore the actual production process of how the past has been memorized. Television producers are important because they act as a bridge between opinion leaders and the public, and their role in setting agendas and shaping popular memory is relatively underexplored. Therefore, I’m trying to explore the television production process through the prism of journalism studies, especially gatekeeping theory. I cite NHK documentaries and the interviews of NHK program makers on the Asia-Pacific War.
This paper argues the role of NHK in both legitimizing and challenging conservative views of Japan’s transgressions during the war. While the gatekeeping process is highly contested and more complex than is often acknowledged, NHK’s ultimate role during the period studied was to buttress the hegemonic view of Japan’s wartime history.
In the early 1990s, amid growing globalization, attention moved from the Japanese victims to the Asian victims. NHK documentaries were a deeper questioning of Japan’s wartime responsibility by NHK producers who saw the Asia-Pacific War more critically because of their generation. As a consequence, NHK addressed several controversial topics. By the late 1990s, program makers found it more difficult to make critical documentaries on controversial wartime episodes. Arguably, this tension peaked with the ETV2001 affair, the controversy over this program finally led to NHK shying away from addressing the judgment of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal, including the responsibility of Emperor Hirohito and testimonies of perpetrators and some victims. After that, the documentary makers who had focused on Japan as a wartime perpetrator came gradually to feel marginalized within NHK: they were moved to sections other than war documentary-making.« (Source: Thesis)

Contents:

	Abstract (p. 126)
	1. Introduction (p. 128)
		1-1. Literature Review (p. 129)
		1-2. Framework (p. 130)
		1-3. Research objects and methodology (p. 131)
	2. Gatekeeping and NHK (p. 131)
		2-1. The social system level: globalization (p. 132)
		2-2. The social institutional level: Japan looks abroad (p. 133)
		2-3. The organizational level: NHK (p. 135)
		2-4. The communication routine level: shaping professionalism in NHK (p. 136)
		2-5. The individual level: influence of individuals (p. 137)
	3. Gatekeeping in the 1990s (p. 139)
		3-1. NHK Specials (p. 139)
		3-2. Non-NHK Special documentaries (p. 141)
	4. Closing the gate: the late 1990s (p. 142)
		4-1. NHK Specials (p. 143)
		4-2. Non-NHK Special documentaries (p. 144)
	Conclusion (p. 148)
	Note (p. 150)
	References (p. 152)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of Japan / Shōwa era | Television: Television in Japan / NHK | Prostitution: Forced prostitution / Comfort women | Sex and the law: Wartime sexual violence / Sexual violence in World War II | War: Pacific War / Japanese war crimes