March 05, 2020
dLibrary Japan (background)
Long after politicians stopped worrying about Japan as an economic threat (and started worrying about China instead), Japanese popular culture is gaining an increasing mind share around the world, including in China. And yet getting access to Japanese live-action entertainment remains an uphill climb in North America.Unlike anime, its own genre category on streaming sites such as Hulu, Tubi, and Netflix, Jdrama hasn't found a significant audience outside of Asia. Netflix has ten times as many Korean live-action dramas as Japanese live-actions dramas. DirecTV offers just three Japanese channels and over a dozen Korean channels.
Demographics has a lot to do with this. Korean-Americans (1.8 million) outnumber Japanese-Americans (1.4 million). Korean immigration peaked in the 1980s while Japanese immigration peaked at the end of the 19th century. The large home market for Japanese studios also lessens the need to compete abroad with Hollywood.
Japanese dramas and "unscripted" content (news, talk, and reality shows) are more popular across Asia, where Fuji TV distributes through Alibaba. Hulu/Japan is wholly owned by Nippon TV (the highest-rated network in Japan) and reaches 19 Asian markets.
The Big Three (Crunchyroll, Funimation, HIDIVE) keep their anime offerings up-to-date, and simulcast new series every season. But when it comes to live-action titles, "new" means released in the last decade. Over the past year, Crunchyroll has aggressively pruned its live-action catalog (once the largest) to two dozen titles.
Netflix is the only streaming service actively increasing the number of localized non-anime listings. Alas, little of the content on its Japanese service (like all of the Tora-san movies) is available in North America, where most of the live-action series are "Netflix Originals" rather than content from the domestic networks.
As a result, the only legal way to stay up-to-date with Jdrama has been TV Japan (via Comcast and DirecTV) and Nippon TV (via DirecTV). TV Japan carries a curated selection of shows from NHK and the commercial networks, scheduling episodes soon after being broadcast and some within a few hours. News is carried live.
It can do this because, aside from Cool Japan, sumo, and one nightly news program, TV Japan (and Nippon TV) localize almost none of the content. In language acquisition terms, TV Japan and Nippon TV are "immersive." You experience the content the same way you would in Japan (unfortunately sans most of the domestic commercials).
dLibrary Japan now offers that experience as a streaming option. (And now Rakuten Viki is is competing at the same price point with an emphasis on Jdrama based on manga and anime.)
If you are serious about learning Japanese, a necessary step is immersing yourself in a wide variety of Japanese programming (including Radio Japan). If culture is your primary interest, NHK World is an accessible guide (and includes news and sumo). It's free, mostly in English, and along with streaming, broadcasts OTA in many markets.
NHK World even carries the occasional scripted show, like Home Sweet Tokyo, an amusing educational sitcom about an Englishman who moves to Tokyo with his family to live with his widowed father-in-law.
You can (and should) watch a lot of subtitled anime. But for a true immersion experience and access to a largest catalog of live-action Japanese television available to audiences in North America, the only legal streaming solution is dLibrary Japan from NHK Cosmomedia (which also distributes TV Japan and NHK World).
When it first debuted, dLibrary Japan was full of promise but little substance. Its catalog was threadbare and it had none of the major apps. But at the end of September 2019, dLibrary Japan gave its home page a much needed makeover and announced that "New programs will be available every week from October!"
It has followed through with that promise. Along with the Google Play and Apple TV apps, dLibrary Japan added Roku support at the end of January 2020. Now they're getting serious.
At $9.99/month, dLibrary Japan is a dollar more than Netflix's lowest cost tier and two dollars more than Crunchyroll, both of which have bigger catalogs (by orders of magnitude), so I count it as a "premium" provider.
But let's compare and contrast the streaming services. I paid $42.00 (total) a month for TV Japan from Dish. When TV Japan left Dish for Comcast and DirecTV, the cost for the most basic international package including TV Japan almost doubled. That's when I cut the cord. Here's what I'm paying now.
| Netflix | $6.99/month | $83.88/year |
| Crunchyroll | $7.99/month | $79.99/year |
| HIDIVE | $4.99/month | $47.99/year |
| dLibrary Japan | $9.99/month | $119.88/year |
| NHK World | free | |
The yearly total comes to $34.64/month ($37.95 month-to-month). A ginormous amount of content for six bucks less than what I paid for TV Japan on Dish, and a third the price of the full Japanese package (TV Japan, Nippon TV, NECO movie channel) from DirecTV. That's the big difference that streaming can make.
Related links
dLibrary Japan (user experience)
dLibrary Japan (content)
dLibrary Japan
dLibrary Japan Roku app
NHK World Roku app
Nippon TV and NECO
Labels: crunchyroll, demographics, directv, dlibjapan, funimation, hidive, japanese tv, jdrama, k-drama, netflix, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, nippon tv, streaming, tv japan, viki
November 24, 2016
"Ghost in the Shell" trailer
Yes, another movie I won't be seeing for a while.
Okay, I'll get to the trailer. But first this silly whining about Scarlett Johansson not being "Japanese." Silly because she's playing an android whose only "human" component is her brain, and has swapped "shells" more than once. Besides, phenotypic racial characteristics in manga and anime are highly malleable, to say the least.
It's true that casting Japanese as Japanese in Hollywood is a perennial problem. But in Hollywood, everything's ultimately about the box office, which also points to a perennial supply and demand problem.
As an Asian-American ethnic group, Japanese (1.3 million) lag behind Korean (1.7 million), Vietnamese (1.73 million), Indian (3.18 million), Filipino (3.41 million), and Chinese (3.79 million).
Except for the cream of the crop (Ken Watanabe), a Japanese actor with any kind of talent can get more and better work in Japan (and won't have to speak English). The reverse is true too, which is why (with rare exceptions) "Americans" in Japanese productions are so often played by Europeans who "look" the part.
So while Star Trek creates roles for Japanese actors, aside from George Takei, it has a hard time finding Japanese actors to play them. Thus we have Rosalind Chao in Next Generation (who doesn't look Japanese) and Linda Park in Enterprise (who more or less does) and John Cho in Star Trek (close enough).
I always wondered why they just didn't make Linda Park's character Korean. It's not like there was any continuity to preserve.
In any case, the setting of Ghost in the Shell is postmodern and post-mini-apocalyptic, taking place in a Japan that, like Los Angeles in Blade Runner, has become a polyglot tossed-salad of Asian cultures. So it's hard to hung up about the specifics of national identity.
Anyway, who's to say Johansson isn't Japanese? How many people know that Dean Cain (Lois & Clark) is a quarter-Japanese? (I didn't until I looked it up.) Risa Stegmayer (American father, Japanese mother), co-host of NHK's Cool Japan, doesn't look especially Japanese, especially seated next to the very Japanese Shoji Kokami.
Meanwhile, the very Japanese Hiroshi Abe plays a Roman architect in the Thermae Romae movies.
This anecdote by Peter Payne (who lives in Japan, where he runs an online store for otaku) is a good antidote to this plague of third-party offense-taking:
It's always a good idea to make sure that those on whose behalf you are getting offended would actually get offended by what you think would offend them. Because they might not have the slightest idea what you are talking about. (See also here.)
As far as that goes, the great Takeshi Kitano plays Aramaki in the movie, which I do consider inspired casting.
But enough with that, back to the trailer.
Based on this small sample, it looks like the movie is using material from Masamune Shirow's manga (the girl-on-girl stuff), Mamoru Oshii's animated film (the opening sequences are an exact match), and the second season of Stand Alone Complex (directed by Kenji Kamiyama), in which the Major gets some hefty "shell" repair.
The live-action version also draws its existential moodiness from Oshii. Like Blade Runner, Oshii's versions are more psychological thrillers, far "heavier" than the manga. The same shift in tone can be seen comparing the Patlabor anime series to Oshii's Patlabor feature films.
Stand Alone Complex is a straightforward cybernetic police procedural.
Like Sherlock Holmes, Major Kusanagi has adapted to the needs of the director, the story, and the medium. Shirow's Kusanagi is a futuristic take on a Connery-era "Jane Bond." Oshii's is closer to Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty from Blade Runner, while Kamiyama's approximates Mark Harmon's Gibbs in NCIS.
Explaining why he broke with Oshii's interpretation, Stand Alone Complex director Kenji Kamiyama quipped, "The first episode would be the final one!" People would get bored of watching a character search for her identity for half a year."
So far, I rank Stand Alone Complex and Solid State Society as the best of the bunch (the Tachikoma robots being no small reason why). Like The X-Files, the Stand Alone Complex seasons are tied together by season-long arcs, interspersed with science fiction stories that work well on their own.
But we'll have to wait a while to see where Hollywood's live-action version ranks in the franchise.
Okay, I'll get to the trailer. But first this silly whining about Scarlett Johansson not being "Japanese." Silly because she's playing an android whose only "human" component is her brain, and has swapped "shells" more than once. Besides, phenotypic racial characteristics in manga and anime are highly malleable, to say the least.
It's true that casting Japanese as Japanese in Hollywood is a perennial problem. But in Hollywood, everything's ultimately about the box office, which also points to a perennial supply and demand problem.
As an Asian-American ethnic group, Japanese (1.3 million) lag behind Korean (1.7 million), Vietnamese (1.73 million), Indian (3.18 million), Filipino (3.41 million), and Chinese (3.79 million).
Except for the cream of the crop (Ken Watanabe), a Japanese actor with any kind of talent can get more and better work in Japan (and won't have to speak English). The reverse is true too, which is why (with rare exceptions) "Americans" in Japanese productions are so often played by Europeans who "look" the part.
So while Star Trek creates roles for Japanese actors, aside from George Takei, it has a hard time finding Japanese actors to play them. Thus we have Rosalind Chao in Next Generation (who doesn't look Japanese) and Linda Park in Enterprise (who more or less does) and John Cho in Star Trek (close enough).
I always wondered why they just didn't make Linda Park's character Korean. It's not like there was any continuity to preserve.
In any case, the setting of Ghost in the Shell is postmodern and post-mini-apocalyptic, taking place in a Japan that, like Los Angeles in Blade Runner, has become a polyglot tossed-salad of Asian cultures. So it's hard to hung up about the specifics of national identity.
Anyway, who's to say Johansson isn't Japanese? How many people know that Dean Cain (Lois & Clark) is a quarter-Japanese? (I didn't until I looked it up.) Risa Stegmayer (American father, Japanese mother), co-host of NHK's Cool Japan, doesn't look especially Japanese, especially seated next to the very Japanese Shoji Kokami.
Meanwhile, the very Japanese Hiroshi Abe plays a Roman architect in the Thermae Romae movies.
This anecdote by Peter Payne (who lives in Japan, where he runs an online store for otaku) is a good antidote to this plague of third-party offense-taking:
Once I was watching an episode of Alias with my [Japanese] wife, and there was a horrid scene in which some female spy went to "Japan" (which appeared to be shot in a sushi restaurant about ten minutes from West Hollywood), painted her face white like a "geisha" and proceeded to extract information from her target despite not knowing his language. I was livid that in the 21st century TV producers couldn't even come close to getting basic imagery right, but my wife was enthralled with it, laughing at each new hilarious plot twist.
It's always a good idea to make sure that those on whose behalf you are getting offended would actually get offended by what you think would offend them. Because they might not have the slightest idea what you are talking about. (See also here.)
As far as that goes, the great Takeshi Kitano plays Aramaki in the movie, which I do consider inspired casting.
But enough with that, back to the trailer.
Based on this small sample, it looks like the movie is using material from Masamune Shirow's manga (the girl-on-girl stuff), Mamoru Oshii's animated film (the opening sequences are an exact match), and the second season of Stand Alone Complex (directed by Kenji Kamiyama), in which the Major gets some hefty "shell" repair.
The live-action version also draws its existential moodiness from Oshii. Like Blade Runner, Oshii's versions are more psychological thrillers, far "heavier" than the manga. The same shift in tone can be seen comparing the Patlabor anime series to Oshii's Patlabor feature films.
Stand Alone Complex is a straightforward cybernetic police procedural.
Like Sherlock Holmes, Major Kusanagi has adapted to the needs of the director, the story, and the medium. Shirow's Kusanagi is a futuristic take on a Connery-era "Jane Bond." Oshii's is closer to Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty from Blade Runner, while Kamiyama's approximates Mark Harmon's Gibbs in NCIS.
Explaining why he broke with Oshii's interpretation, Stand Alone Complex director Kenji Kamiyama quipped, "The first episode would be the final one!" People would get bored of watching a character search for her identity for half a year."
So far, I rank Stand Alone Complex and Solid State Society as the best of the bunch (the Tachikoma robots being no small reason why). Like The X-Files, the Stand Alone Complex seasons are tied together by season-long arcs, interspersed with science fiction stories that work well on their own.
But we'll have to wait a while to see where Hollywood's live-action version ranks in the franchise.
• Ghost in the Shell (manga) 1989–1990
• Ghost in the Shell (theatrical release) 1995
• Innocence (theatrical release) 2004
• Stand Alone Complex (TV anime series) 2002–2006
• Solid State Society (movie in the SAC arc) 2006
• Arise (OVA series) 2013
• New Movie (movie in the Arise arc) 2013
• Ghost in the Shell (theatrical release) 2017
Related posts
The Shirow franchises (1)
The Shirow franchises (2)
Back to the social welfare future
Haafu and half
Labels: anime, demographics, ghost in the shell, japan, japanese culture, k-drama, manga, movies, nhk, personal favs, pop culture, social studies, technology
May 21, 2015
No pilot on board
Scripted Japanese television series (as opposed to "reality," news, and infotainment shows) don't follow the "pilot" approach.
In Hollywood, that means "auditioning" a series by filming a "first episode" (which may not be the first or even shown). If the pilot is picked up, more episodes will be ordered. If those episodes get good ratings, the series will be picked up for a year (20-24 episodes, half that for cable).
The broadcast and cable networks juggle upwards of 300 pilots every year (see a list here), and pick up less than a quarter. At two to three million dollars an episode, it is egregiously expensive. But this is a billion-dollar business and Hollywood is the dominant player in a worldwide market.
Japan isn't. And shows no signs of wanting to be.
Oh, it pats itself on the back when happy accidents happen (Akira Kurosawa, Studio Ghibli, anime). But outside a handful of its (friendlier) Asian neighbors, Japan's industry leaders haven't traditionally treated media like cars and electronics. Pirates created the overseas markets for anime and manga in the first place.
As a result, sites like Hulu list many more live-action Korean dramas than Japanese. The streaming model is changing that, along with SoftBank's purchase of DramaFever and Rakuten's purchase of Viki, both distributors of Asian television programming (still mostly Korean but expanding their catalogs).
Not to mention that Amazon-Japan is already a major retailer and Netflix is launching its service in Japan this fall.
Japan's terrestrial broadcasters and satellite channels and theaters already carry every Hollywood production worth seeing. Having ceded that ground, Japanese television studios instead choose to compete in those niches that Hollywood can't or won't bother to enter.
Speaking specifically of the gaming market, Nippon Ichi CEO Sohei Niikawa adheres to a similar strategy:
Sure, there's plenty of the same only different on Japanese TV: police procedurals and medical dramas but with Japanese actors, Japanese culture and Japanese sensibilities. Add to that samurai dramas. Slice-of-life melodramas. The whole swath of (badly stereotyped) reality television. And lots of anime.
The big bonus is that declining to compete head-to-head with Hollywood productions means not having to run up the budget.
When Samuel L. Jackson signed on to produce and star in Afro Samurai (bringing to the table first-run U.S. distribution rights), he secured a budget of $1 million per episode, a truly head-spinning amount of money in Japan, but par for the course in Hollywood.
An average anime episode costs between $100,000 and $300,000. Star Trek had a budget of $250,000/episode in 1967! (Adjusted for inflation, that comes to around $1.5 to $2 million, so television production costs in Hollywood haven't changed very much in the past half century.)
As a rough estimate, Japanese live-action dramas are made for a half to a third of the base production costs of their Hollywood counterparts. Start by paying everybody "above the line" the equivalent of "scale." This does mean that the best television actors in Japan are constantly working.
And they don't do pilots. Well, a lot of anime series are based on manga and live-action series are based on anime, manga, and "light novels." So producers have a good idea going in of how popular a series should be.
Once a series gets greenlit, the full slate of 11 to 13 episodes (sometimes half-slates of 5 or 6) goes into production and will be aired in full. This constitutes a "series" or cour (クール), a backformation from the French cours. With a handful of exceptions, this is consistent across the industry.
(Exceptions include NHK's year-long Taiga historical drama, the 15-minute Asadora dramas that run six days a week for six months, and popular anime like One Piece and Sazae-san that have run weekly for decades. The police procedural Aibo is produced in 19-episode seasons.)
More often than not, a single "series" (cour) comprises the entire run of the show. However, popular shows (especially with low marginal costs) can go into "auto-renew" mode. The samurai actioner Mito Komon ran 1227 episodes, cycling five actors through the lead role.
One odd effect is that because of the short runs, popular performers like Masaharu Fukuyama will have already booked their schedules around the shooting. As a result, the two Galileo series were made several years apart. Ditto Takuya Kimura and the two Hero series.
In the meantime, Fukuyama made two Galileo theatrical movies and appeared briefly in a third spinoff.
At the opposite extreme, very popular shows such as I'm Mita, Your Housekeeper and Madoka Magica each ran a single series (so far). The producer of the former flatly stated there would be no more series. It's hard to imagine that in Hollywood.
Japanese television can be compared to the U.S. cable networks, producing episodic shows in half-seasons, with a wide mix of first and second-tier writers and actors, and third-tier budgets. It makes me wonder if there might be something to buying whole "mini-seasons" of shows.
Netflix has previously acquired the balance of shows from network series that were canceled mid-season, or produced an abbreviated season of a canceled show, as with Arrested Development. Yahoo is taking over Community from NBC for a 13-episode run.
In the case of Tina Fey's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Netflix bought the entire 13-episode run when NBC didn't pick it up. I expect to see these arrangements get more formalized, with streaming services competing for second refusal rights or becoming a "farm team" system.
Under such a system, any television program that reaches the pilot stage would be considered good enough to be guaranteed an audience somewhere.
In Hollywood, that means "auditioning" a series by filming a "first episode" (which may not be the first or even shown). If the pilot is picked up, more episodes will be ordered. If those episodes get good ratings, the series will be picked up for a year (20-24 episodes, half that for cable).
The broadcast and cable networks juggle upwards of 300 pilots every year (see a list here), and pick up less than a quarter. At two to three million dollars an episode, it is egregiously expensive. But this is a billion-dollar business and Hollywood is the dominant player in a worldwide market.
Japan isn't. And shows no signs of wanting to be.
Oh, it pats itself on the back when happy accidents happen (Akira Kurosawa, Studio Ghibli, anime). But outside a handful of its (friendlier) Asian neighbors, Japan's industry leaders haven't traditionally treated media like cars and electronics. Pirates created the overseas markets for anime and manga in the first place.
As a result, sites like Hulu list many more live-action Korean dramas than Japanese. The streaming model is changing that, along with SoftBank's purchase of DramaFever and Rakuten's purchase of Viki, both distributors of Asian television programming (still mostly Korean but expanding their catalogs).
Not to mention that Amazon-Japan is already a major retailer and Netflix is launching its service in Japan this fall.
Japan's terrestrial broadcasters and satellite channels and theaters already carry every Hollywood production worth seeing. Having ceded that ground, Japanese television studios instead choose to compete in those niches that Hollywood can't or won't bother to enter.
Speaking specifically of the gaming market, Nippon Ichi CEO Sohei Niikawa adheres to a similar strategy:
The overseas market is key. It's not something we can turn our backs to. However, I think it's a bad idea to create products targeted for the West. Even if Japanese people try their best to make a game that feels Western, there's no way they'd outclass actual Westerners doing that. I could probably count on one hand the number of Japanese people who'd even have a chance. I know we can't, so our only choice is to make titles that hardcore Japanese fans go for, then bring them out overseas as a purely made-in-Japan product.
Sure, there's plenty of the same only different on Japanese TV: police procedurals and medical dramas but with Japanese actors, Japanese culture and Japanese sensibilities. Add to that samurai dramas. Slice-of-life melodramas. The whole swath of (badly stereotyped) reality television. And lots of anime.
The big bonus is that declining to compete head-to-head with Hollywood productions means not having to run up the budget.
When Samuel L. Jackson signed on to produce and star in Afro Samurai (bringing to the table first-run U.S. distribution rights), he secured a budget of $1 million per episode, a truly head-spinning amount of money in Japan, but par for the course in Hollywood.
An average anime episode costs between $100,000 and $300,000. Star Trek had a budget of $250,000/episode in 1967! (Adjusted for inflation, that comes to around $1.5 to $2 million, so television production costs in Hollywood haven't changed very much in the past half century.)
As a rough estimate, Japanese live-action dramas are made for a half to a third of the base production costs of their Hollywood counterparts. Start by paying everybody "above the line" the equivalent of "scale." This does mean that the best television actors in Japan are constantly working.
And they don't do pilots. Well, a lot of anime series are based on manga and live-action series are based on anime, manga, and "light novels." So producers have a good idea going in of how popular a series should be.
Once a series gets greenlit, the full slate of 11 to 13 episodes (sometimes half-slates of 5 or 6) goes into production and will be aired in full. This constitutes a "series" or cour (クール), a backformation from the French cours. With a handful of exceptions, this is consistent across the industry.
(Exceptions include NHK's year-long Taiga historical drama, the 15-minute Asadora dramas that run six days a week for six months, and popular anime like One Piece and Sazae-san that have run weekly for decades. The police procedural Aibo is produced in 19-episode seasons.)
 |
| On the air since 1969. |
One odd effect is that because of the short runs, popular performers like Masaharu Fukuyama will have already booked their schedules around the shooting. As a result, the two Galileo series were made several years apart. Ditto Takuya Kimura and the two Hero series.
In the meantime, Fukuyama made two Galileo theatrical movies and appeared briefly in a third spinoff.
At the opposite extreme, very popular shows such as I'm Mita, Your Housekeeper and Madoka Magica each ran a single series (so far). The producer of the former flatly stated there would be no more series. It's hard to imagine that in Hollywood.
Japanese television can be compared to the U.S. cable networks, producing episodic shows in half-seasons, with a wide mix of first and second-tier writers and actors, and third-tier budgets. It makes me wonder if there might be something to buying whole "mini-seasons" of shows.
Netflix has previously acquired the balance of shows from network series that were canceled mid-season, or produced an abbreviated season of a canceled show, as with Arrested Development. Yahoo is taking over Community from NBC for a 13-episode run.
In the case of Tina Fey's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Netflix bought the entire 13-episode run when NBC didn't pick it up. I expect to see these arrangements get more formalized, with streaming services competing for second refusal rights or becoming a "farm team" system.
Under such a system, any television program that reaches the pilot stage would be considered good enough to be guaranteed an audience somewhere.
Labels: anime, crunchyroll, economics, hulu, japanese tv, k-drama, nhk, streaming, technology, television, viki
March 31, 2014
Full stream ahead
Manga and anime in the U.S. had a thriving fan base long before they were commercially viable. With an already established market, and since their IP was getting pirated anyway, Japanese publishers made the rational decision to license it.
The market for physical media—manga and DVDs—maxed out about ten years ago. Then the bubble burst, driving several established importers/distributors out of business. And yet the demand for content was still there and the licensors were still licensing.
So the sensible solution was streaming, with a side business in printed books and discs. Crunchyroll delivers many anime episodes a week after they air in Japan, beating the pirates to the punch. (Unsurprisingly, Crunchyroll was a pirate site before it went legit.)
Mid-list genre novels and live-action television dramas from Japan have never made that break. With no existing market to feed, Japanese media companies couldn't be bothered to try and create one. (Or they tried once and now are twice shy.)
NHK's year-long Taiga dramas and morning serials are often licensed throughout Asia. But to this date, never in the U.S., even though recent series like Ryomaden, Go, and Atsuhime have accessible storylines and attractive lead characters.
Korean television dramas, by contrast, can be found in abundance. The Japanese section of Netflix has a boatload of anime and only a handful of television series. The Korean section has over 100 live-action television series.
Despite the fact that South Korea has half the population of Japan and a third its GDP. This isn't a supply problem. But how can there be a demand when hardly anybody knows the supply exists, or thinks it consists primarily of gonzo game shows?
As an ethnic group, Korean-Americans (1,822,000) outnumber Japanese-Americans (1,411,000). I suspect the bigger reason is that Korean broadcasters (and the South Korean government) have more realistic expectations about the size of the market.
At Anime News Network, Justin Sevakis explains that anime continues to thrive because
Given its microscopic fan base, the cost of simply subtitling a Japanese live-action dramas would wipe out the profit margin for a series.
Korean television content is also more likely to be distributed with a second-generation demographic in mind, while TV Japan is directed primarily at an expatriate audience. This makes it hard to create a home-grown audience
There are plans in the works to create more export-friendly Japan channels. And NHK is slowly building a fledgling distribution network based on its news and infotainment programs.
Drama-wise, NHK has to put something good out there to start the word-of-mouth going. Such an effort would dovetail with the government's "Cool Japan" initiative, launched in 2010 with the goal of creating a profitable overseas market for Japanese culture.
The market for physical media—manga and DVDs—maxed out about ten years ago. Then the bubble burst, driving several established importers/distributors out of business. And yet the demand for content was still there and the licensors were still licensing.
So the sensible solution was streaming, with a side business in printed books and discs. Crunchyroll delivers many anime episodes a week after they air in Japan, beating the pirates to the punch. (Unsurprisingly, Crunchyroll was a pirate site before it went legit.)
Mid-list genre novels and live-action television dramas from Japan have never made that break. With no existing market to feed, Japanese media companies couldn't be bothered to try and create one. (Or they tried once and now are twice shy.)
NHK's year-long Taiga dramas and morning serials are often licensed throughout Asia. But to this date, never in the U.S., even though recent series like Ryomaden, Go, and Atsuhime have accessible storylines and attractive lead characters.
Korean television dramas, by contrast, can be found in abundance. The Japanese section of Netflix has a boatload of anime and only a handful of television series. The Korean section has over 100 live-action television series.
Despite the fact that South Korea has half the population of Japan and a third its GDP. This isn't a supply problem. But how can there be a demand when hardly anybody knows the supply exists, or thinks it consists primarily of gonzo game shows?
As an ethnic group, Korean-Americans (1,822,000) outnumber Japanese-Americans (1,411,000). I suspect the bigger reason is that Korean broadcasters (and the South Korean government) have more realistic expectations about the size of the market.
At Anime News Network, Justin Sevakis explains that anime continues to thrive because
License fees have fallen to a point where they are relatively reasonably priced, and an American publisher can reasonably be expected to buy the rights to a show, produce subtitles (or occasionally a dub), put it on sale, and make a decent profit.
Given its microscopic fan base, the cost of simply subtitling a Japanese live-action dramas would wipe out the profit margin for a series.
Korean television content is also more likely to be distributed with a second-generation demographic in mind, while TV Japan is directed primarily at an expatriate audience. This makes it hard to create a home-grown audience
There are plans in the works to create more export-friendly Japan channels. And NHK is slowly building a fledgling distribution network based on its news and infotainment programs.
Drama-wise, NHK has to put something good out there to start the word-of-mouth going. Such an effort would dovetail with the government's "Cool Japan" initiative, launched in 2010 with the goal of creating a profitable overseas market for Japanese culture.
Labels: asadora, crunchyroll, hulu, japanese tv, k-drama, netflix, nhk, streaming, taiga drama, technology, tv japan
July 11, 2007
Chunhyang
The Korean folk tale that the screenplay is based upon begins as a Cinderella-type love story about young love conquering class, in this case between Chunhyang, daughter of a courtesan, and the son of a local governor, Master Lee Mongryong. When Mongyong's father is promoted to a position in Seoul, he orders his son to accompany him in order to prepare for his civil service exams.And so the lovers must part, though not after consummating a common-law marriage. At this point the story grows more serious. In theme it resembles Fidelio, Beethoven's paean to marital devotion, though is closer in tone to Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (Mongyong's servant Pangja providing the comic relief), including the sharp turn from light to dark melodrama. Though where Shakespeare focuses on the balance between justice and mercy, the Korean version makes central the conflict between competing Confucian loyalties to state and spouse.
A new governor has been installed in the province. Hearing of Chunhyang's famed beauty, he orders her to appear before him. She rebuffs him, telling him that she is already pledged to another. But he ranks the privileges of class over the promises of the heart. Confucian order demands her obedience to his office. She again refuses. The governor jails and beats her, but she does not relent. Could a man serve two kings? the faithful Chunhyang asks. Better that you kill me instead.
The governor is unmoved, but the commoners, who had initially expressed some glee at her plight (she was disdained for thinking herself above her station) are deeply moved. When at last Mongyong returns (incognito, another parallel with Measure for Measure), having graduated with honors and now carrying a royal inspector's mandate in his back pocket, they are ready to rally to his side. Not to spoil the suspense, but things do end very much happily ever after.
Apparently, Korean audiences have reacted to the film as would we to yet another retelling of Cinderella. It is a simple story simply told (the governor has only a vaudevillian depth as a villain). The rest of us unfamiliar with the story, though, should be entranced by its operatic excesses, director Im Kwon-Taek's vivid use of vibrant color and sound, and the breathtaking scenery. Chunhyang breaths new life to the period costume drama.
What uniquely sets it apart, though, is the film's narrator, Cho SangHyun. Chunhyang is one of the five extant Pansori operas, an school of traditional storytelling in which the balladeer (or soriggun) is accompanied by a single drummer. Watching his energetic live performance—often stirring the audience to call and response outbursts—convinced me that this is how the Homeric bards must have sounded to their ancient listeners.
The movie begins with Cho SangHyun alone on the stage, and his narrative is threaded into and through the film's narrative, even echoing, overlapping, or answering the dialogue on screen. The scene of Chunhyang being beaten by the governor's guards, for example, is depicted stylistically, almost as a dance. Even so, the camera cuts away to show the soriggun reciting the story to the audience. This third-person description is no less intense, and perhaps truer to its emotional depth.
Of course, keep in mind that this is a fairy tale and not so much concerned with historical "realities" (the downtrodden peasantry manage to not be unaesthetically downtrodden). This treatment of violence contrasts interestingly with an earlier series of love scenes between Mongyong and Chunhyang, which are sufficiently explicit as to leave little to the imagination. (The soriggun's verse at this point is filled with delicious double entendres about honey, watermelons, cucumbers . . . . )
It's sweet and clever and hardly gratuitous in its context. After all, the whole movie is gorgeous to look at, and Hyo-jeong Lee ( Chunhyang) and Seung-woo Cho (Mongyong) are plenty beautiful without their clothes on, too, and photographed so magnificently. Okay, it would be shocking to many good folk if Disney came out with an R-rated version of Cinderella, but I have the sinking feeling that it would end up being rated R for language and violence instead.
Movies like Chunhyang or Tampopo that are rated R solely because an attractive actress (true, usually an actress) spends a few minutes of screen time undressed are inexplicably rare. Part of this trend I blame on movies like Saving Private Ryan for again conning the viewing public into believing that graphic violence is not only "realistic" (a laughable assertion, if it weren't taken so seriously), but somehow "bold" and "artistic."
Though I suppose you could trace it back to Sam Peckinpah, or when the Hollywood horror community discovered latex, as in Cat People (the objectionable thing about Cat People is Ed Begley getting his arm ripped off—and various other people eaten by Malcolm McDowell—in living color, not Nastassja Kinski naked). But that's not it, alone.
Consider what meets the current standards for broadcast television in the United States.
First of all, you can intimate anything about sex on broadcast TV, and come close to showing it, as long as everybody stays dressed. And most such intimations about "normal" couples with "normal" sex lives are found in sit-coms about mostly normal people (The Simpsons, for example). Otherwise, sex is the province or the juvenile, or the perverse, or the insipid (Sex and the City qualifies as all three). There is an entire series, Law & Order: SVU, that is only about sex crimes. Why anybody watches it is beyond me.
In other words, showing horrible and ugly things about sex is acceptable. Showing naked bodies on CSI is okay as long as they are disemboweled on an operating table (and mostly not even then). I blame it on our Victorian forebears. This is a rhetorical stretch, I know, but the kind of society that produced Jack the Ripper is also the kind of society that sits down to watch Law & Order: SVU every week. Yet would be shocked! shocked! if Jolene Blalock took her top off on Enterprise.
[Sorry for the dated pop-culture reference, but it makes the point. And besides, I consider Enterprise the best of the Treks.]
I'm referring to a giggle-inducing scene in which T'Pol and Trip are supposed to be decontaminating their skin of nasty alien pathogens. Of course, they've still got their underwear on, thus leaving swaths of themselves un-decontaminated. The nitpicker in me says: do it right or don't do it at all. Though I suppose there's a certain logic to the argument that a fine-looking Vulcan woman shouldn't mind spending more time than the rest of the cast in her skivvies. Not that I'm complaining.
But my original point—and I'm finally getting back to it—is that, watching Chunhyang, it was very nice to see, for once, the metaphor—the aesthetic distance—being used to depict the violence, and not (the euphemism is appropriate here) the love scenes.
Labels: k-drama, korea, movie reviews, personal favs, sex