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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
174114
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| Summary/Abstract |
The NHK morning drama Massan features a male protagonist who unrelentingly pursues his dream of making Scotch whisky with Japanese-grown ingredients. After spending two years studying whisky-making in Scotland, he returns to Japan in 1921 with his Scottish wife, Ellie. Over the course of the drama, we follow Masaharu Kameyama as he develops as a craftsman, a husband, and a father. Drawing on explicit statements made by the characters about husbands and fathers, this paper focuses on the conduct and culture of fatherhood as represented in Massan. Focused attention is given to three central male characters in the drama: merchant Kinjirō Kamoi, aspiring artisan Ei’ichirō Kamoi, and Masaharu Kameyama himself. Specific attention is given to dialog that focuses on work, work–life balance, and stereotypical roles of husbands and wives. We find that due to the presence of a foreign wife, overt communications regarding husband–wife roles and fathers’ responsibilities take place. Moreover, we discover that the story of one Japanese man and his foreign bride offer a bridge from the 1920s to present-day issues surrounding men’s non-performance in the domestic sphere.
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| 2 |
ID:
174109
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| 3 |
ID:
174113
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article analyzes courtship between secondary characters Toshio and Hana in the televised NHK drama Massan. When viewed through the lens of sociolinguistics, their romance is fraught with linguistic and pragmatic problems. Toshio and Hana speak different non-prestigious dialects, and also spend much of their interaction arguing. However, they eventually marry. Their path to marriage and the contents of their speech are also interesting from the perspective of cultural linguistics because they reflect competing cultural models for successful (happī endo) romances derived from the analysis of romance fiction. One type of romance reflects Japanese ideals of social contextualization, while the other is based on translations from English, reflecting cultural importation.
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| 4 |
ID:
174110
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| Summary/Abstract |
NHK’s decision to depict the story of Ellie and Masaharu Kameyama in the drama Massan seemed to suggest its desire to reflect Japan as a more multicultural society. Combined with positive representations of international couples, the drama seemed to embrace multiculturalism. More prominently, however, NHK promoted cultural nationalism. Although the drama praised Ellie as an ideal Japanese woman, it used her as a conduit through which Japanese traditional virtues were revisited. In addition, the drama marked her as the distinct Other. Ellie’s hair was blonde, which marked her as conspicuously non-Japanese. Her language use also painted her as the Other. She was assigned dialogue in Standard Japanese and used regional dialects only in marked utterances. She also spoke gender-neutral Japanese, rather than feminine Japanese. In addition, the drama creators assigned her simplified and disjointed grammar, utterances with ‘mistakes’ in the prescriptive sense, and occasional English phrases within her Japanese discourse. By manipulating her appearance to be distinctly non-Japanese and linguistically alienating her, the drama highlighted Ellie’s role as the outsider and underscored the idea that only ethnic Japanese know the Japanese language and culture. In this way, Massan provided an example of how diversity is contained and managed in Japan.
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| 5 |
ID:
174111
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines how ideologies of English are constructed and reproduced through the use of English by various television characters. It analyzes the form, content, and context in an NHK morning drama Massan, focusing on the construction of incompetence. Similar to previous studies, the contrast between characters based on their English skills are represented through various semiotic processes. However, unlike other studies where the individuals lacking English competence are represented as stupid and objects of ridicule, one of the main supporting characters of Massan uses ‘bad English’ but has a strong, positive role in the drama. The mismatch between the character’s speech and her character in the drama seems to blur the negative aspect of incompetence in English, and possibly mollifies the viewers’ own English inferiority complex. The juxtaposition of a strong supporting character with a lack of English creates a space for this alternative positive interpretation. However, such positive representation does not negate the power of English itself; rather, it appears to heighten the division among Japanese people based on their English skills.
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| 6 |
ID:
174112
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article analyzes portrayals of English in Japan during World War II in Massan, a Japanese television show that features the life of a mixed-race bilingual couple, Masaharu (the Japanese husband) and Ellie (the Scottish wife), and their adopted Japanese daughter (Ema) living in Japan. I argue that the show constructs a hierarchy of languages where English is valorized as a sign of an anti-war position, speaking one’s mind and material wealth, all framed as progressive, in contrast to Japanese language. As the use of language is connected to race relations in the drama, this hierarchisation of English and Japanese languages is consistent with the historical and current valorization of English and whiteness in Japan. However, this hierarchy contradicts the show’s explicit message of inclusiveness of all races. This article analyses a set of performative messages conveyed by this highly popular drama in the current Japanese political and racial context to show the ways uses of language convey unarticulated and sometimes contradictory messages.
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