May 29, 2024
Live-action Japanese TV
In many cases, push the price point low enough and you can stop thinking about the sunk costs. Kocowa, for example, South Korea's equivalent of TV Japan, offers its basic plan for $7/month. But the Jme TV website and app are so poorly designed that I'd be unlikely to stick around at any price greater than zero.
Speaking of which, NHK really ought to host a version of the Jme Select channel on NHK World Japan, along with the Asadora. If nothing else, it'd be a great publicity move. TV Japan used to be the only game in town for live-action Japanese content. Used to be. That built-in audience is long gone by now.
NHK World Japan, TV Japan's public service sibling, has something worthwhile to offer most days (especially during the sumo tournaments). NHK posts its flagship domestic newscasts online. Japan's commercial news networks stream their television feeds on YouTube. NHK's hourly radio broadcasts are also online.
And it's all free.
Back in February (the offer has since expired), I couldn't resist Rakuten Viki's 30 percent off sale and got the annual basic plan for $3.50/month. Even with its emphasis on romance and Kdrama, Viki has a decent enough collection of contemporary Jdrama that there simply isn't a downside.
Though given the glacial pace at which Viki acquires new Japanese content, I'll probably subscribe every other year. That's one reason why I think Viki should do a deal with NHK to license more of their material. (It is very telling that Rakuten Viki, a Japanese company, is dominated by Korean and Chinese content.)
Tubi is probably the best FAST (free advertising supported streaming television) streaming service currently available.
As Jordan Minor puts it, "Tubi fearlessly gets down and dirty by adding whatever cheap, old, and just plain weird stuff it can find to make sure you can always look forward to a novel viewing experience." In other words, Tubi's Japanese content consists of everything from art house to grindhouse to anime, along with quirky travelogues and documentaries.
My only big gripe with Tubi is the absence of language and country filters that would make it easier to find live-action Japanese content. Tubi has three anime channels and two Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama.
Many of the Japanese historical dramas on Tubi are distributed by Samurai vs Ninja, which has an impressive collection of action-oriented television movies and series from the 1970s up to the present. Content can be viewed online and there are apps for Android and Apple (but not Roku). The cost of a streaming subscription is $7.99/month.
With its worldwide reach, Netflix is emerging as one of the best sources of modern Japanese movies and television outside Japan. Netflix also provides subtitles in English and Japanese for many of its Japanese and non-Japanese titles.
The focus here is on live-action television, but you could spend a good portion of your life working through the free anime catalogs at Tubi and Retrocrush alone. Then for under $20/month total, you could add to that Crunchyroll, HIDIVE, and Netflix, and you'd need another lifetime.
Related posts
Jme TV (NHK World Premium)
Jme TV (grumpy old man edition)
Tubi in Japanese
News from Japan (in Japanese)
Japanese language links
Labels: anime, hidive, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, jme, netflix, nhk, samurai vs ninja, streaming, tubi, viki
May 11, 2024
Japanese language links
My main online dictionary is Weblio. I also reference Eijirou and Word Bank.
NHK World Japan is NHK's English language service. The live feed can be viewed online, along with an extensive VOD library and OTA in some areas (9.4 in Northern Utah). There are apps for most streaming platforms.
The previous 24 hours of NHK Radio newscasts can be streamed online.
For now, my primary sources for anime and Jdrama are Crunchyroll, Netflix, and Tubi. Many of the Japanese historical dramas on Tubi are distributed by Samurai vs Ninja. I purchase emanga at BookWalker.
A Japanese tutoring YouTube channel I watch on a regular basis is Kaname Naito.
Related links
Weblio
Eijirou
Word Bank
Word Hippo
NHK World (Japanese)
NHK World (English)
News from Japan
NHK Radio News
Crunchyroll
Tubi
Netflix
Samurai vs Ninja
BookWalker (Japanese)
BookWalker (English)
Kindle Store
Yes Asia
Labels: anime, bookwalker, crunchyroll, ebooks, hidive, japanese, japanese tv, jdrama, jme, kindle, language, netflix, nhk, nhk world, samurai vs ninja
May 04, 2024
Jme TV (a few suggestions)
Dish briefly picked up Family Gekijyo after getting dumped by TV Japan. DirecTV offers Nippon TV as a replacement for TV Japan. NHK World Japan aside, there's no Japanese programming left on Xfinity or Dish. By contrast, Korean live-action content is available everywhere and on all platforms. Even Tubi has two dedicated Kdrama channels.
Live-action television comprises a paltry 5.5 percent of Japan's media exports. Fuyuhiko Takahori points to the cour system, with small budgets and short run-times holding down audience size, which limits budgets and run-times. But as anime has proven, I don't think the cour system is the impediment Takahori makes it out to be.
The cour-length season became standard practice in North America back during the premium cable days, long before streaming took off.
There's nothing wrong with the episode counts of the typical Jdrama series. The push, rather, should be to increase audience size. NHK Cosmomedia's overpriced and poorly designed streaming service is the wrong approach. If NHK cannot reduce costs to the consumer, it should let somebody else handle the business.
Another part of the problem may be a sibling rivalry. NHK World Japan is a worldwide service with an international audience, available for free online and streaming, on cable and satellite, and OTA in nineteen North American markets.
NHK World Japan is on YouTube and even shows up in screensaver ads on my Roku. Compared to NHK World Japan, NHK World Premium (née TV Japan) has taken over a vanishing niche. Jme TV is not a long-term solution. Granted, if you're looking for a one-stop shop, now you don't have a choice, unless one of the choices is "None of the above."
Here are a few possible solutions. I was also going to suggest creating a VOD sumo channel but Jme has already done that. So kudos for that. However, I would mirror the sumo channel on NHK World Japan as well.
- Move Jme Select to the free NHK World Japan website and use the same templates for the program guide. Jme Select has the same format as NHK World Japan, meaning a six-hour block of programs repeated four times a day. NHK World Japan should also add the Asadora with subtitles. It'd be a great PR move.
Like NHK World Japan, the Select programming would be primarily news and infotainment. The premium drama and variety content would remain behind the paywall. Even NHK World Japan content could be reused by removing the dubbing and ADR. - Do a deal with Rakuten Viki similar to the deal Viki has with Kocowa. Kocowa is South Korea's far more affordable equivalent of NHK World Premium. The $10/month Viki Pass Plus plan gives subscribers access to Kocowa and the entire Viki catalog, that includes VOD content from across Asia, including Japan.
A hypothetical Viki Pass Japan Plus plan would provide subscribers with access to Viki's VOD catalog and all of the non-localized material that previously ended up on TV Japan. One big advantage here is that Rakuten Viki is a well-designed and well-known (in its niche) website with all of the streaming apps in place. - Okay, instead of doing a deal with Rakuten Viki, at least copy their website and app designs. Viki really does have one of the best streaming UIs in the business. And then only stream the newscasts live (simply copy the news section from NHK World Premium). Make the rest of the programming available as VOD.
- If nothing else, the core VOD streaming service should cost considerably less. HIDIVE and Viki charge $6/month. Kocowa and Netflix start at $7/month. You can bundle Viki and Kocowa for $10/month. Crunchyroll's basic tier is $8/month. HIDIVE, Viki, and Crunchyroll offer discounted annual subscriptions.
And for a non-hypothetical option, simply go elsewhere. If you're willing to forgo the latest and greatest from prime time Japanese TV and do a bit of spelunking through sites like Viki, Tubi, and Netflix, there is plenty of (legal) live-action content available at far more affordable prices and even for free.
Related posts
Jme TV
NHK World Japan
Live-action Japanese TV
Jme TV (grumpy old man edition)
Labels: business, japanese tv, jme, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, streaming, technology, television
March 27, 2024
That's Edutainment!
"Is Japanese Television a Tool for Establishing Social Order?" asks Erik Luebs. Yes, but he mostly avoids the sort of academic navel-gazing you'd expect from a thesis question like that (until the last paragraph), and instead wonders aloud what can be read into the television habits of the average Japanese.
Japanese and Americans watch about the same amount of television. Except the slow penetration of cable in Japan means that for half of the population, their viewing choices are confined to a handful of networks. Japan's "Golden Age" of television hasn't ended, which makes those habit easier to generalize.
Luebs compares at the top-rated television shows in the United States and Japan for the week of May 4, 2015 (the article was published on June 11, 2015).
Despite the data being almost a decade old, NCIS is still on the air, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, as of December 2023, "only 44 percent of households in Japan have at least one subscription video service," compared to 86 percent in the United States. So I think the comparison is still relevant.
To clarify: Shoten resembles a haiku version of the original Whose Line Is It Anyway? The host sets up a scenario and feeds lines to the (seated) panelists, who improvise responses with an emphasis on verbal wordplay. It's a clever and entertaining show, and has been on the air since 1966.
Neither is the variety/talk show strictly analogous to its American counterpart. There are celebrity-of-the-day chat shows (NHK's Studio Park, for example), but these are not that. They are "talk" shows in that people talk, and "variety" shows in that a variety of topics are discussed. But the topics take precedence.
Despite the reputation Japanese reality shows have earned overseas for being weird, wacky, and dumb, these programs can get pretty brainy on the edutainment scale. I think Luebs is onto something when he observes that the reality television format popular in North America is far more fictional.
The Hollywood version of reality television has been increasingly infiltrating the airwaves in Japan (thanks in no small part to Netflix), but the well-nigh ubiquitous home grown version still follows the formula described above, with experts educating the tarento, who function as stand-ins for the viewer.
A tarento ("talent") is a professional TV personality. To be sure, a tarento may be an actor or singer or Nobel laureate but is a tarento when acting as such. His job is to always have something witty or insightful to say, regardless of the subject. For the viewer, explains Luebs, they become real-life Walter Mittys:
My only caveat here is that I read "social order" in the most benign sense: lessons on how to play the game of life (specifically ordinary Japanese life).
Still, Luebs can't help slewing back to the comfortable confines of scholarly cant. No, he concludes, it's not "indoctrination," but "without the cultural synergy created by diversity, homogeneous cultural ideas are refined and concentrated, and the TV is the medium that projects these values onto the individual."
As if these cultural ideas didn't exist before television, and only sprang into being around 1950 in the smoke-filled room of a producer's office.
I think it more likely that this hallowed "diversity" in mass media instead reinforces our individual silos: with cable and streaming, we only have to watch what we want to see. But old-school Japanese broadcasters must attract the largest audience possible. They do that by giving the audience what it wants.
Or at least by not broadcasting what the audience doesn't want to see.
If anything is being projected onto the individual, well, the individual is holding up a mirror reflecting it right back at the set. This is readily apparent to somebody who prefers the Japanese approach to "reality" to the American brand.
An awful lot of travel shows on Japanese television focus on traveling in Japan. And then there are the travel shows about going to foreign countries in order to find a Japanese person living there, an ongoing attempt to address the mystery of why any Japanese would choose to live anywhere but in Japan.
But note that the host and audience are always impressed, even awed, by these daring explorers of the World Outside Japan. They serve as proxies for the audience, not cautionary tales. It's not that complicated. All you have to do is stipulate a more introverted and nerdier population and it all makes sense.
They're doing it so we don't have to. For that, I thank them very much.
Japanese and Americans watch about the same amount of television. Except the slow penetration of cable in Japan means that for half of the population, their viewing choices are confined to a handful of networks. Japan's "Golden Age" of television hasn't ended, which makes those habit easier to generalize.
Luebs compares at the top-rated television shows in the United States and Japan for the week of May 4, 2015 (the article was published on June 11, 2015).
Despite the data being almost a decade old, NCIS is still on the air, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, as of December 2023, "only 44 percent of households in Japan have at least one subscription video service," compared to 86 percent in the United States. So I think the comparison is still relevant.
• NCIS (crime drama)
• The Big Bang Theory (sitcom)
• NCIS: New Orleans (crime drama)
• Dancing with the Stars (contest/dancing)
• The Voice (contest/singing)
• Mare (family drama about cooking),
• Shoten (sketch comedy)
• Pittan Kokan (variety/talk show)
• Jinsei ga Kawaru (variety/talk show)
• Himitsu no Kenmin (variety/talk show)
To clarify: Shoten resembles a haiku version of the original Whose Line Is It Anyway? The host sets up a scenario and feeds lines to the (seated) panelists, who improvise responses with an emphasis on verbal wordplay. It's a clever and entertaining show, and has been on the air since 1966.
Neither is the variety/talk show strictly analogous to its American counterpart. There are celebrity-of-the-day chat shows (NHK's Studio Park, for example), but these are not that. They are "talk" shows in that people talk, and "variety" shows in that a variety of topics are discussed. But the topics take precedence.
These celebrity panels chat and share anecdotes about various topics—tear-jerking stories about family reconciliation, first loves, travel, and maybe the most popular topic: food. Their chats are interspersed with short documentaries and dramatizations, in which the viewer can watch each celebrity's emotional reaction to the content through a "picture in picture" embedded at the side of the screen.
Despite the reputation Japanese reality shows have earned overseas for being weird, wacky, and dumb, these programs can get pretty brainy on the edutainment scale. I think Luebs is onto something when he observes that the reality television format popular in North America is far more fictional.
These [Hollywood productions] are not concerned with attempting to directly address the identities and concerns of the viewer. Rather, they are a playful engagement of thoughts and ideas in which we, the viewer, interact within a fictional world. They are a form of escapism.
The Hollywood version of reality television has been increasingly infiltrating the airwaves in Japan (thanks in no small part to Netflix), but the well-nigh ubiquitous home grown version still follows the formula described above, with experts educating the tarento, who function as stand-ins for the viewer.
A tarento ("talent") is a professional TV personality. To be sure, a tarento may be an actor or singer or Nobel laureate but is a tarento when acting as such. His job is to always have something witty or insightful to say, regardless of the subject. For the viewer, explains Luebs, they become real-life Walter Mittys:
Popular Japanese television looks inwards, into its own society. The variety TV show concept is based on the viewer personally relating to specific individuals who represent various tropes of Japanese-ness. Whether intentional or not, watching these celebrities chat with one another serves as an instructional guide for what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior in society. They give the viewer a clue into how to participate in any number of conversations, and how to react in any number of situations. These programs are just as much a form of entertainment as they are a framework for establishing social order.
My only caveat here is that I read "social order" in the most benign sense: lessons on how to play the game of life (specifically ordinary Japanese life).
Still, Luebs can't help slewing back to the comfortable confines of scholarly cant. No, he concludes, it's not "indoctrination," but "without the cultural synergy created by diversity, homogeneous cultural ideas are refined and concentrated, and the TV is the medium that projects these values onto the individual."
As if these cultural ideas didn't exist before television, and only sprang into being around 1950 in the smoke-filled room of a producer's office.
I think it more likely that this hallowed "diversity" in mass media instead reinforces our individual silos: with cable and streaming, we only have to watch what we want to see. But old-school Japanese broadcasters must attract the largest audience possible. They do that by giving the audience what it wants.
Or at least by not broadcasting what the audience doesn't want to see.
If anything is being projected onto the individual, well, the individual is holding up a mirror reflecting it right back at the set. This is readily apparent to somebody who prefers the Japanese approach to "reality" to the American brand.
An awful lot of travel shows on Japanese television focus on traveling in Japan. And then there are the travel shows about going to foreign countries in order to find a Japanese person living there, an ongoing attempt to address the mystery of why any Japanese would choose to live anywhere but in Japan.
But note that the host and audience are always impressed, even awed, by these daring explorers of the World Outside Japan. They serve as proxies for the audience, not cautionary tales. It's not that complicated. All you have to do is stipulate a more introverted and nerdier population and it all makes sense.
They're doing it so we don't have to. For that, I thank them very much.
Labels: cooking shows, education, food, japanese culture, japanese tv, nhk, pop culture, social studies, television
February 17, 2024
The end of TV Japan
Based on pretty good evidence, namely that TV Japan had disappeared from the international lineups of every single cable and satellite service in North America, I concluded that NHK Cosmomedia had pulled the plug on its TV Japan contracts. It also followed that the reason the TV Japan website hadn't been updated was because it was going away by April 2024.
Well, now it is official. TV Japan will expire in six weeks.
And what will replace it? Jme TV, of course.
I also speculated that the current Jme TV website may be a placeholder. After all, the TV Japan URL is going to be available pretty soon. A simple redirect would take care of that. But we'll find out in April. Morbid curiosity remains my main motivation now. If NHK Cosmomedia persists with the TV Japan pricing model, that's when my subscription ends as well.
Well, now it is official. TV Japan will expire in six weeks.
After more than three decades of broadcasting Japanese television programming to audiences across North America, we regret to inform you that TV JAPAN will cease its broadcast on March 31 [and] will no longer be accessible [as a cable or satellite service] as of April 1, 2024.
And what will replace it? Jme TV, of course.
With Jme, you'll have access to live NHK news, the latest dramas, popular movies, and much more—all conveniently accessible on internet-connected devices. With Jme, you’ll have the flexibility to enjoy your favorite Japanese programs from the comfort of your home or on the go.
I also speculated that the current Jme TV website may be a placeholder. After all, the TV Japan URL is going to be available pretty soon. A simple redirect would take care of that. But we'll find out in April. Morbid curiosity remains my main motivation now. If NHK Cosmomedia persists with the TV Japan pricing model, that's when my subscription ends as well.
Related posts
Jme TV
Whither TV Japan
Jme TV (grumpy old man edition)
Labels: business, jme, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, streaming, television, tv japan
February 14, 2024
Jme TV (grumpy old man edition)
To give credit where it is due, you can now bookmark shows in your browser and you don't get logged out every time you close the browser tab.
Still, it wouldn't hurt to fix the UI problems, such as a useless banner that takes up half of the home page. The oversized genre icons that belong in a menu. Get rid of horizontal scrolling. NHK World Japan has a list-based program guide. Viki has a grid-based program guide. Both are so much better. Pick one.
I really cannot overemphasize how badly designed the Jme TV website is and how difficult it would be to scale in its current configuration. Again, I have to hope it is only a placeholder and something better will emerge in April.
In Japan, everything starts in April, from the school year to the corporate fiscal year. Except for the NHK Taiga drama. It starts in January. Speaking of which, new episodes of the Taiga drama are being added every week. Along with other recent TV Japan content, the catalog no longer feels so threadbare.
Although it's akin to filling a swimming pool with a squirt gun.
My theory for the premature rollout is that NHK Cosmomedia went ahead and pulled the plug on its TV Japan cable contracts and has to fill that hole by April 2024 with something. They should have followed the herd and called the new site TV Japan Plus or NHK World Plus and reused what they had on hand.
As a previous dLibrary Japan subscriber, I signed up for $9.99/month. That $9.99/month price lasts three months and then skyrockets to $25/month, which makes this a three-month experiment. Nothing NHK Cosmomedia has put on the table so far is worth $9.99/month, let alone 2.5 times that.
Once upon a time, TV Japan had a monopoly on live-action Japanese content and could charge whatever the market could bear. That didn't mean we liked it. As one Reddit commenter puts it, "$25/month for mostly NHK through an already overpriced cable package was one of the larger ripoffs in my life."
Taken together, there is plenty of Japanese content on Viki ($5.99/month), Netflix ($6.99/month), and Crunchyroll ($7.99/month) I could be watching instead. All three don't add up to $25/month and I don't subscribe to all three at the same time. And that's not counting NHK World Japan (free) and Tubi (free).
The only criteria Tubi appears to follow when licensing Japanese content is that it's cheap and available. It's an approach that delivers a lot of dreck, but at the same time, often yields pleasant surprises, like the Edo period Detective Dobu television series from 1991. I just wish Tubi would make it easier to find.
If NHK Cosmomedia had any sense, it'd make the site free until it becomes fully functional and then copy Rakuten Viki's pricing plan, starting at $5.99/month.
It could offer a premium tier to those who want to watch live broadcasts and real-time news (though NHK's domestic news programs are free on the NHK World Premium website).
Anyway, we'll find out in April if there is any there there. I have to admit, morbid curiosity is my main motivation now. Like, you can't sign up for TV Japan using the information on the TV Japan website. It points you to providers who have removed TV Japan from their lineups. But that page hasn't been taken down.
This is the same page that states, "The price of TV Japan is about $15/month." That has never been true and yet it's been posted there for a year. One cynical explanation is that it doesn't matter because it's all going away in April. Another is that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
Oh, and to answer a previous question, the name "is derived from the hope that Jme can help bridge Japan (J) and (me)." At least the URL is easier to remember.
Related posts
Whither TV Japan
dLibrary Japan (big upgrade in the works)
Labels: business, dlibjapan, japanese tv, jme, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, streaming, television, tv japan
December 09, 2023
What's in a name
Were I the marketing consultant for NHK Cosmomedia, I'd go with TV Japan as the brand for all linear TV programming. NHK World Japan would continue as the free service and the subscription streaming services would inherit the NHK World Premium brand.
Or it could follow the herd and call it Plus. And, in fact, NHK's domestic streaming service (geoblocked outside of Japan) is called NHKプラス (NHK+).
Along with the recent removal of geo-blocking from NHK's flagship news programs (branded as NHK World Premium content), the noticeably improved video quality also hints at a possible integration between NHK World Japan and NHK World Premium.
NHK World Japan had always compressed the heck out of its video feeds. So while relatively still images delivered the full HD quality, any motion (such as during a sumo tournament) resulted in on-screen pixelation and artifacting.
But watching the November 2023 sumo tournament, I couldn't help noticing how much the video quality had improved. We're talking leaps and bounds. Almost no image distortion at all. Crystal clear HD even with full motion.
Raising the bar like this may be a first step to a tiered unification of NHK's online services. Another clue is that two of NHK's domestic satellite channels, BS1 and BS Premium, merged into NHK BS on December 1, 2023.
Going forward, content consolidation will become the name of the game as NHK faces an aging and literally shrinking audience, with the population of Japan predicted to drop another 10 million by the end of the decade.
Once upon a time, I subscribed to TV Japan. Were money no object, I still would, but it is only available on cable and DirecTV and is insanely expensive to boot.The actual TV Japan subscription by itself still costs the same $25/month it has for decades. That price is dear enough, and doesn't include the ever growing mountain of taxes and fees Xfinity piles on top of even its "Limited Basic" tier.
South Korea's closest counterpart to TV Japan is the streaming service Kocowa, a joint venture between the top three Korean broadcast networks. A basic (ad-free) subscription to Kocowa runs $70/year.
That's about how much TV Japan costs a month on Xfinity. Cost alone is a big reason why live Japanese content has little chance of achieving the same market success outside Japan as anime or Kdrama.
Labels: dish, dlibjapan, japanese tv, jdrama, kdrama, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, streaming, tv japan
November 18, 2023
Japanese streaming update
With dLibrary Japan offline until April 2024 (at the latest), it's once again time to reshuffle my Japanese language streaming choices. Tubi and NHK World Japan are free, so no decisions to make there.
Viki goes into watch and drop rotation. No complaints about the service itself. To start with, it's eminently affordable. It's a content mismatch. The Japanese content focuses on BL and romance. Frankly, when it comes to romance, Jdrama simply doesn't measure up to manga and anime.
I prefer police procedurals, low-stakes slice of life dramas, and documentaries, which Japanese television writers are much better at pulling off.
Viki has a few in that category, just not that many. But speaking of which, I see that Viki has licensed 99.9 Criminal Lawyer. It's a well done execution of the reliable formula that pits an eccentric defense lawyer against his uptight boss (a corporate lawyer because it pays much better).
And while I'm at it, I'll again point out that Viki has Sleeper Hit, a fun, insightful, and even philosophical examination of the manga publishing world and the hard-nosed business of selling art.
In any case, as with pretty much every streaming service that doesn't focus specifically on Japan, Viki's Jdrama offerings take a back seat to its Kdrama series (true of Tubi and Netflix too). But if that is what you're looking for, Viki is one of the better overall sources for Asian content.
Unfortunately, take away dLibrary Japan and Viki and there aren't that many viable Jdrama alternatives left. When TV Japan was alive on traditional cable, it added up to eighty (!) bucks a month for a single channel on Xfinity. Not an option when I cap my monthly streaming budget at twenty dollars.
Tubi has a few Jdrama series and (subbed) Japanese movies worth watching. It sure doesn't make them easy to find. But a little effort will occasionally turn up genuine classics, campy tokusatsu series (featuring primitive CG effects and guys in rubber suits), and recent releases like Blue Thermal.
At least for now, that leaves Netflix as far and away the best of the remaining Hobson's choices.
Anime, by comparison, offers an embarrassment of riches. Thanks to Sony's acquisition of Funimation and Crunchyroll, Crunchyroll rules the anime streaming world. You could watch Crunchyroll all day long and not make a dent in the huge backlist before getting swamped by dozens of new titles.
The annual subscription option makes Crunchyroll an even better deal. On price alone, HIDIVE is the most affordable anime streaming service but is so much smaller that it's hard to justify an annual subscription anymore.
I've been following Princess Principal and Girls und Panzer on HIDIVE. Both franchises have moved to the theatrical model. This wouldn't be a problem if they were releasing standalone movies but they're actually serials. What we end up with are regular series produced at a glacial pace.
I'll wait until a season is over before watching it. I'm very much on board with the old Netflix approach of releasing a whole series at once. Even on Crunchyroll, I watch a season behind the current schedule. The added benefit is that makes it easier to figure out which series are worth the time.
While waiting for titles to accumulate, HIDIVE joins Viki in the watch and drop category. Once I run out of live-action content on Tubi, I'll shift to Viki and then to Netflix. Netflix uniquely provides Japanese subtitles for much of its Japanese content, a very valuable language learning resource.
I prefer police procedurals, low-stakes slice of life dramas, and documentaries, which Japanese television writers are much better at pulling off.
Viki has a few in that category, just not that many. But speaking of which, I see that Viki has licensed 99.9 Criminal Lawyer. It's a well done execution of the reliable formula that pits an eccentric defense lawyer against his uptight boss (a corporate lawyer because it pays much better).
And while I'm at it, I'll again point out that Viki has Sleeper Hit, a fun, insightful, and even philosophical examination of the manga publishing world and the hard-nosed business of selling art.
In any case, as with pretty much every streaming service that doesn't focus specifically on Japan, Viki's Jdrama offerings take a back seat to its Kdrama series (true of Tubi and Netflix too). But if that is what you're looking for, Viki is one of the better overall sources for Asian content.
Unfortunately, take away dLibrary Japan and Viki and there aren't that many viable Jdrama alternatives left. When TV Japan was alive on traditional cable, it added up to eighty (!) bucks a month for a single channel on Xfinity. Not an option when I cap my monthly streaming budget at twenty dollars.
Tubi has a few Jdrama series and (subbed) Japanese movies worth watching. It sure doesn't make them easy to find. But a little effort will occasionally turn up genuine classics, campy tokusatsu series (featuring primitive CG effects and guys in rubber suits), and recent releases like Blue Thermal.
At least for now, that leaves Netflix as far and away the best of the remaining Hobson's choices.
Anime, by comparison, offers an embarrassment of riches. Thanks to Sony's acquisition of Funimation and Crunchyroll, Crunchyroll rules the anime streaming world. You could watch Crunchyroll all day long and not make a dent in the huge backlist before getting swamped by dozens of new titles.
The annual subscription option makes Crunchyroll an even better deal. On price alone, HIDIVE is the most affordable anime streaming service but is so much smaller that it's hard to justify an annual subscription anymore.
I've been following Princess Principal and Girls und Panzer on HIDIVE. Both franchises have moved to the theatrical model. This wouldn't be a problem if they were releasing standalone movies but they're actually serials. What we end up with are regular series produced at a glacial pace.
I'll wait until a season is over before watching it. I'm very much on board with the old Netflix approach of releasing a whole series at once. Even on Crunchyroll, I watch a season behind the current schedule. The added benefit is that makes it easier to figure out which series are worth the time.
While waiting for titles to accumulate, HIDIVE joins Viki in the watch and drop category. Once I run out of live-action content on Tubi, I'll shift to Viki and then to Netflix. Netflix uniquely provides Japanese subtitles for much of its Japanese content, a very valuable language learning resource.
Related links
NHK World (Japanese)
NHK World (English)
Crunchyroll
HIDIVE
Netflix
Rakuten Viki
Tubi
Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, dlibjapan, hidive, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, kdrama, manga, netflix, nhk, nhk world, sony, streaming, technology, tubi, tv japan
November 11, 2023
Good Morning Japan
That is no longer the case. You can watch Good Morning Japan, News at Noon, and News 7 on the NHK World Premium website. Also available are Today's Close-Up and A Small Journey.
dLibrary Japan has announced plans to include NHK news when it relaunches its subscription streaming service. Removing the geo-blocking may be a first step to including these programs in the new lineup.
Along with the commercial news network feeds on YouTube, you can listen to NHK Radio News online.
Related links
NHK World (Japanese)
NHK World (English)
News from Japan
Weather News
Labels: dlibjapan, good morning japan, japanese, japanese tv, nhk, nhk world, streaming, tv japan
November 04, 2023
Kiyo in Kyoto
The manga won "Best Shounen Manga" at the Shogakukan Manga Awards in 2020 (curiously enough, the boy's category). The studio is anime heavyweight J.C. Staff, which does a fine job within the given constraints.
Watching the anime, you will see from the (lack of) inbetweening and the use of rotoscoped backgrounds that this isn't a high-budget production.
Rather like The Way of the Househusband, it uses what I'd call the PowerPoint approach to animation, more a moving manga.
To be sure, The Way of the Househusband was purposely directed as "an animation that looks like a manga." With Kiyo in Kyoto, my guess is that NHK chose to divert their available resources into the adorable character designs and top-notch voice talent.
They certainly are adorable and top-notch (veteran voice actors Kana Hanazawa as Kiyo and M.A.O as Sumire).
The setting is Kyoto, so we're also treated to a delightful sampling of the Kyoto and Aomori dialects (coaches for both are listed in the credits). The genre is one of the most reliable in popular Japanese narrative fiction.
Food. With a fascinating setting, Kyoto's Kagai, or geisha district. In other words, cute girls doing interesting things. Don't expect deep drama or complex story arcs. That's not the point. It's slice-of-life comfort food that succeeds surprisingly well at being both entertaining and educational.
Kiyo is the live-in cook at the Maiko House and her childhood friend Sumire is an aspiring maiko, an apprentice geiko (more commonly known in Tokyo as geisha). The reason sixteen-year-old Kiyo isn't in school is because secondary education in Japan is only compulsory through junior high.
Each thirty-minute episode is split into three segments that follow a similar format, a day-in-the-life about Kiyo and Sumire followed by a discussion of the featured recipe (with Sumire doing the research and Kiyo doing the cooking).
Kore'eda made his mark directing slow burn but beautiful art house movies. So no surprise that The Makanai is a slow burn but beautiful live-action series.
While the anime starts in medias res and focuses on the food that Kiyo prepares, basically one recipe per eight minute vignette, The Makanai is story and character driven, beginning at the beginning and taking a full two episodes (ninety minutes) to get to the premise.
Nevertheless, Kore'eda sticks to the spirit of the slice-of-life genre with a light touch and lots of ambience, in the process painting a living portrait of this little corner of Kyoto.
Kore'eda brings Sumire's father and Mother Azusa's daughter into the narrative to create a pair of family dramas. But again, he maintains a low-key approach that results in a sweet story seasoned with occasional touches of melancholy that never turn sad or saccharine.
Another addition to the live-action version is Mayu Matsuoka as Yoshino, the prodigal maiko who returns with loudly proclaimed plans to replace the current Mother of the Maiko House when she retires. As the designated court jester, she makes for a delicious dessert.
All around, two very good (and quite unique) entertainment meals.
Related links
The Makanai
Kiyo in Kyoto
The Way of the Househusband
Cute girls doing interesting things
Labels: anime, anime reviews, japanese culture, nhk, streaming
October 14, 2023
The Showa drama
The Showa drama is a staple of narrative fiction in Japan, especially movies and television. According to the still active practice of giving the era of each emperor a unique name (or nengou), the Showa period is named for the reign of Emperor Hirohito (1926–1989).
The era name of his son Akihito is Heisei, so Showa 64 and Heisei 1 both refer to 1989. Confusing? You bet! Historical references prior to the Meiji period often include the Gregorian year in parentheses because it's confusing to Japanese too.
A Showa drama can begin in the late Meiji (ending in 1912) or Taisho (ending in 1926), as long as it continues into the Showa. The story typically gets rolling during or immediately after the Occupation (1945–1952).
Political events such as the February 26 Incident are noted in passing (if at all) and the war is depicted from the point of view of a middle-class housewife—coping with draconian rationing while watching the young conscripts go off to war and come home in boxes.
And in series like Hanako and Anne and Massan (the former because Hanako was an English translator, the latter because Ellie was a British national), fending off the loathed Kenpeitai, the Gestapo-like police force.
The Great Tokyo Earthquake in 1923, the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 and the broadcast of Hirohito's Surrender Rescript a few months later, the Tokyo Olympics and debut of the Shinkansen in 1964, all frame the Showa drama as metaphorical turning points.
The genre has eclipsed even the popularity of Edo period (1603–1868) samurai dramas. With every milestone (almost eight decades have passed since the war's end), it is increasingly steeped in nostalgia. Of the ten Asadora serials broadcast on NHK between 2010 and 2015, seven were Showa dramas.
Including Hanako and Anne and Massan. Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises is in many respects a very conventional Showa drama.
The more upbeat Happy Days version of the Showa drama is prefaced by the Occupation and ends in 1964 with the Shinkansen and the Tokyo Olympics. Ume-chan Sensei belong in this latter category, as does Goro Miyazaki's From up on Poppy Hill.
There probably isn't a more sepia-steeped example of the latter than Always: Sunset on Third Street. Literally, in this case, as you can tell from the title.
Always tells the story of a working-class neighborhood in Tokyo, focusing on Ryunosuke Chagawa, a struggling novelist, and Norifumi Suzuki, an auto mechanic who can't resist buying the latest gadget—a refrigerator and B&W television in the first film, a color TV by the third.
The trilogy ends in 1964 with the Tokyo Olympics and a pair of newlyweds leaving for their honeymoon on the brand-new Shinkansen.
Yasujiro Ozu's slice-of-life family dramas from the 1950s and early 1960s make for an interesting comparison. The only nostalgia on display in Ozu's postwar films is for those few remaining remnants of a world destroyed by the war and now fading away.
Ozu spends little time looking backwards and instead focuses his attention on the world around him. Not knowing what was going to happen hence, Japan in the 1950s was a less than reassuring time. For all anybody knew, it was going to be the Taisho period all over again.
In 1953, Donald Keene visited Kyoto as a graduate student, at one point attending an economics conference sponsored by the Institute for Pacific Affairs. He observed that the Japanese attendees were uniformly "convinced that Japan's future was dismal."
None of them could imagine that the three decades of double-digit economic growth right around the corner would turn Japan into an industrial powerhouse.
This evolving realization can be read into Yasujiro Ozu's films. The sober realism of Tokyo Story (1953), Early Spring, (1956) and Tokyo Twilight (1957) brightens markedly with Good Morning (1959), The End of Summer (1961), and then Late Autumn (1963).
His later films are suffused with a bemused wonder at the new world blossoming around him. Ozu delights in framing old, worn, wooden architecture in facades of glistening glass and steel; characters leave one scene in traditional kimono and enter the next in suits and skirts.
People move from old businesses to modern office buildings, from old houses to concrete apartment blocks. The glowing technicolor turns them into photo spreads out of National Geographic, preserving a point in time as it really was rather than how it is now remembered.
Still, Showa nostalgia is more than a trick of memory. Japan went on a thirty year winning streak, temporarily tripped up only by the oil shocks of the early 1970s. It became the second largest economy in the world and not a few "big thinkers" predicted it would soon pass the U.S.
Little wonder that Japan's most popular anime series today remains the long-running Sazae-san, a family-friendly Showa dramedy that take place roughly between the late 1960s and the early 1980s.
Come the 1990s and the bubble burst. For the next two decades, everything that could go wrong did: a stock market crash, two devastating earthquakes, a nuclear meltdown, birth rates below replacement and a declining population that shows no sign of leveling out anytime soon.
Except when that declining workforce is factored into the equation (GDP-per-worker), the Japanese economy is doing rather well. Now it's only the third biggest in the world. Per-capita GDP in 2014 is over three times that in 1964. Japan leads the world in life expectancy.
A few years ago at TEDx Kyoto, Jesper Koll enthusiastically made the forward-looking argument.
Which isn't to say that the good old days weren't, just that they weren't quite as good as we like to remember, and the present day isn't quite as bad as we like to pretend. This too shall pass and Japan will still be here, doing better than most.
The era name of his son Akihito is Heisei, so Showa 64 and Heisei 1 both refer to 1989. Confusing? You bet! Historical references prior to the Meiji period often include the Gregorian year in parentheses because it's confusing to Japanese too.
 |
| In Carnation, Itoko has to work hard to save her precious sewing machine from getting recycled. |
Political events such as the February 26 Incident are noted in passing (if at all) and the war is depicted from the point of view of a middle-class housewife—coping with draconian rationing while watching the young conscripts go off to war and come home in boxes.
And in series like Hanako and Anne and Massan (the former because Hanako was an English translator, the latter because Ellie was a British national), fending off the loathed Kenpeitai, the Gestapo-like police force.
The Great Tokyo Earthquake in 1923, the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 and the broadcast of Hirohito's Surrender Rescript a few months later, the Tokyo Olympics and debut of the Shinkansen in 1964, all frame the Showa drama as metaphorical turning points.
The genre has eclipsed even the popularity of Edo period (1603–1868) samurai dramas. With every milestone (almost eight decades have passed since the war's end), it is increasingly steeped in nostalgia. Of the ten Asadora serials broadcast on NHK between 2010 and 2015, seven were Showa dramas.
Including Hanako and Anne and Massan. Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises is in many respects a very conventional Showa drama.The more upbeat Happy Days version of the Showa drama is prefaced by the Occupation and ends in 1964 with the Shinkansen and the Tokyo Olympics. Ume-chan Sensei belong in this latter category, as does Goro Miyazaki's From up on Poppy Hill.
There probably isn't a more sepia-steeped example of the latter than Always: Sunset on Third Street. Literally, in this case, as you can tell from the title.
Always tells the story of a working-class neighborhood in Tokyo, focusing on Ryunosuke Chagawa, a struggling novelist, and Norifumi Suzuki, an auto mechanic who can't resist buying the latest gadget—a refrigerator and B&W television in the first film, a color TV by the third.
Yasujiro Ozu's slice-of-life family dramas from the 1950s and early 1960s make for an interesting comparison. The only nostalgia on display in Ozu's postwar films is for those few remaining remnants of a world destroyed by the war and now fading away.
Ozu spends little time looking backwards and instead focuses his attention on the world around him. Not knowing what was going to happen hence, Japan in the 1950s was a less than reassuring time. For all anybody knew, it was going to be the Taisho period all over again.
In 1953, Donald Keene visited Kyoto as a graduate student, at one point attending an economics conference sponsored by the Institute for Pacific Affairs. He observed that the Japanese attendees were uniformly "convinced that Japan's future was dismal."
The general impressions of the conference, at least to an outsider like myself, were of resignation on the part of the Japanese and friendly but unhelpful attempts by non-Japanese to cheer them. I could not detect anything positive arising from the discussions.
None of them could imagine that the three decades of double-digit economic growth right around the corner would turn Japan into an industrial powerhouse.
His later films are suffused with a bemused wonder at the new world blossoming around him. Ozu delights in framing old, worn, wooden architecture in facades of glistening glass and steel; characters leave one scene in traditional kimono and enter the next in suits and skirts.
People move from old businesses to modern office buildings, from old houses to concrete apartment blocks. The glowing technicolor turns them into photo spreads out of National Geographic, preserving a point in time as it really was rather than how it is now remembered.
Still, Showa nostalgia is more than a trick of memory. Japan went on a thirty year winning streak, temporarily tripped up only by the oil shocks of the early 1970s. It became the second largest economy in the world and not a few "big thinkers" predicted it would soon pass the U.S.
Little wonder that Japan's most popular anime series today remains the long-running Sazae-san, a family-friendly Showa dramedy that take place roughly between the late 1960s and the early 1980s.
Come the 1990s and the bubble burst. For the next two decades, everything that could go wrong did: a stock market crash, two devastating earthquakes, a nuclear meltdown, birth rates below replacement and a declining population that shows no sign of leveling out anytime soon.
Except when that declining workforce is factored into the equation (GDP-per-worker), the Japanese economy is doing rather well. Now it's only the third biggest in the world. Per-capita GDP in 2014 is over three times that in 1964. Japan leads the world in life expectancy.
A few years ago at TEDx Kyoto, Jesper Koll enthusiastically made the forward-looking argument.
Which isn't to say that the good old days weren't, just that they weren't quite as good as we like to remember, and the present day isn't quite as bad as we like to pretend. This too shall pass and Japan will still be here, doing better than most.
Related posts
Massan
Hanako and Anne
The Wind Rises
Ume-chan Sensei
From up on Poppy Hill
Showa nostalgia
Labels: akihito, history, japanese culture, japanese tv, movies, nengou, nhk, showa period, television, ww2
October 07, 2023
News from Japan (in Japanese)
Japan's commercial news networks and a number of regional television stations stream their news feeds on YouTube. These news networks are akin to the old school news agencies like Reuters. Stations often subscribe to more than one, including their competitors.
Because the primary purpose of these news networks is to provide their affiliates with broadcast content, the same blocks of material are reused and repeated throughout the day and week. But a broad slate of channels makes it easy to sample a fresh set of stories.
For a couple of fun peeks behind the scenes, Stay Tuned! (Netflix) is a slice-of-life comedy about a television station in Hokkaido. Wave, Listen to Me! (Crunchyroll) is an even wackier comedy about a late-night talk show host at a small radio station in Sapporo.
This is not a definitive list. Watch one channel and the YouTube bots will suggest a bunch more. The World Clock is a good resource for keeping track of the time.
News Networks
• All Nippon News Network (ANN) has 26 affiliates and originates from TV Asahi in Tokyo.
• Fuji News Network (FNN) has 28 affiliates and originates from Fuji Television in Tokyo. FNN has a live cam of the famous Shibuya Crossing.
• Nippon News Network (NNN) has 30 affiliates and originates from Nippon Television (NTV) in Tokyo.
• TBS News Dig is part of the Japan News Network (JNN) with 28 affiliates and originates from TBS Television in Tokyo.
Regional Stations
• HTB Hokkaido News originates from Hokkaido Television Broadcasting in Sapporo. HTB produced Stay Tuned! as part of its fiftieth anniversary.
• STV News originates from Sapporo Television Broadcasting in Sapporo. STV has been the highest rated television station in Hokkaido for over a decade.
• Nagoya TV News originates from the Nagoya Broadcasting Network in Nagoya and focuses on news from Aichi, Gifu and Mie prefectures.
• MBS News originates from the Mainichi Broadcasting System (MBS) in Osaka.
• Kansai News 24 is an ANN affiliate that focuses on news from Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, Wakayama, Nara, Shiga, and Tokushima prefectures, known in Japan as the Kansai region.
• Sun TV News originates from Sun Television in Hyogo prefecture.
• Home Hiroshima News originates from Hiroshima Home Television in Hiroshima prefecture.
• Kagoshima News KTS originates from Kagoshima Television Broadcasting Corporation in Kagoshima prefecture, located in the southern part of Kyushu.
Of course, no news can be considered complete without the Weather News.
Because the primary purpose of these news networks is to provide their affiliates with broadcast content, the same blocks of material are reused and repeated throughout the day and week. But a broad slate of channels makes it easy to sample a fresh set of stories.
For a couple of fun peeks behind the scenes, Stay Tuned! (Netflix) is a slice-of-life comedy about a television station in Hokkaido. Wave, Listen to Me! (Crunchyroll) is an even wackier comedy about a late-night talk show host at a small radio station in Sapporo.
This is not a definitive list. Watch one channel and the YouTube bots will suggest a bunch more. The World Clock is a good resource for keeping track of the time.
• All Nippon News Network (ANN) has 26 affiliates and originates from TV Asahi in Tokyo.
• Fuji News Network (FNN) has 28 affiliates and originates from Fuji Television in Tokyo. FNN has a live cam of the famous Shibuya Crossing.
• Nippon News Network (NNN) has 30 affiliates and originates from Nippon Television (NTV) in Tokyo.
• TBS News Dig is part of the Japan News Network (JNN) with 28 affiliates and originates from TBS Television in Tokyo.
• HTB Hokkaido News originates from Hokkaido Television Broadcasting in Sapporo. HTB produced Stay Tuned! as part of its fiftieth anniversary.
• STV News originates from Sapporo Television Broadcasting in Sapporo. STV has been the highest rated television station in Hokkaido for over a decade.
• Nagoya TV News originates from the Nagoya Broadcasting Network in Nagoya and focuses on news from Aichi, Gifu and Mie prefectures.
• MBS News originates from the Mainichi Broadcasting System (MBS) in Osaka.
• Kansai News 24 is an ANN affiliate that focuses on news from Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, Wakayama, Nara, Shiga, and Tokushima prefectures, known in Japan as the Kansai region.
• Sun TV News originates from Sun Television in Hyogo prefecture.
• Home Hiroshima News originates from Hiroshima Home Television in Hiroshima prefecture.
• Kagoshima News KTS originates from Kagoshima Television Broadcasting Corporation in Kagoshima prefecture, located in the southern part of Kyushu.
Labels: business, dlibjapan, geography, japanese culture, japanese tv, nhk, streaming, television, weather
September 02, 2023
dLibrary Japan (big upgrade in the works)
By next April, we should find out the results from that survey.
Changes are afoot at NHK Cosmomedia, which owns and operates (along with Japan International Broadcasting) dLibrary Japan, NHK World, and TV Japan (also known as NHK World Premium).
I've speculated about the possibilities before. Cable cutting is surely eating into TV Japan's subscriber base. The (free) NHK World streaming service already carries a considerable amount of localized NHK edutainment material, including the all-important sumo tournaments.
dLibrary Japan recently started streaming series after their first run on TV Japan and shows after they debuted in Japan. With sumo bouts covered by NHK World, the only programming on TV Japan I really miss are the Taiga and Asadora dramas, and live news from Japan (in Japanese).
NHK World streams news on the hour from its own bureaus, half of the day from New York, and all in English. But, frankly, a lot of the time, I get the feeling that the NHK World anchors think they're on CNN. News from North America often gets more airtime than anything to do with Japan.
dLibrary Japan could become the VOD library for TV Japan, including real-time news and commentary.
It's never had a backlist and only held onto content for a year or two. While services like Retrocrush specialize in classic anime, long-running series like Abarenbo Shogun remain unknown outside Japan. (You can watch Shadow Warriors and a couple of tokusatsu series on Tubi.)
NHK World is available via streaming, OTA, and VOD, so NHK Cosmomedia doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. Ideally, they'd integrate the services in a single app with paid and unpaid tiers. But easier said than done, which is why dLibrary Japan is going on hiatus for several months.
In any case, for now, dLibrary Japan stopped enrolling new customers on 9/1/2023 and won't post new content after 9/30/2023. The service will go offline on 10/31/2023.
Don't panic! The official press release (which has been updated several times since the original announcement) promises they will be back!
We are thrilled to announce the upcoming introduction of an upgraded streaming distribution service. This renewed service will bring you an even richer selection of Japanese content and improved performance, including the addition of NHK news viewing. To make way for these enhancements, the current dLibrary Japan service will be suspended.
Well, I do like that bit about the news. All we know at this juncture is that the new service will launch "within fiscal year 2023." In Japan, that means before the end of March 2024. They won't need five months to update the apps and servers, so other stuff must be going on behind the scenes too.
I am very curious find out what sort of "upgraded streaming distribution service" NHK Cosmomedia has in store.
Labels: business, dlibjapan, japan, japanese tv, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, streaming, technology, television, tv japan
July 22, 2023
"Shogun" revisited (1/4)
Two months later Ronald Reagan would be elected in a landslide. A year later, IBM launched the IBM PC. Japan had the second largest economy on the planet. Japanese automakers were leaving Detroit in the dust and Sony was the Apple of its day. Serious people were seriously predicting "Japan as #1."
(And I was studying Japanese at BYU.)
By the end of the decade, Sony Corporation owned Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center. Only seven years after that, Mitsubishi lost a billion dollars on the deal and sold off its controlling interest. The real estate bubble burst and Japanese fell into a decade-long recession.
(And I was teaching English in Japan.)
But at the time, Japan was the China of today, with a critical difference being that Japan was and remains a stalwart ally of the United States.
So credit NBC with great timing. But also credit the network for broadcasting a pretty good product. Based on the 1975 novel by James Clavell and starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune, Shogun gave its American audiences a westernized version of a classic NHK Taiga historical drama.
Meaning "big river," the Taiga is a big-budget (by Japanese standards) hour-long drama that runs from January to December. Each year it tackles the life of a notable historical figure. This year, the 16th century female clan leader Ii Naotora; next year, the 19th century general Saigo Takamori.
Unlike Shogun, the Taiga drama strives for sufficient accuracy to use everybody's real names, and does its best to faithfully recreate well-documented events. Though with forty or so hours to fill, a healthy amount of fiction will inevitably backfill the scarcer stuff that historians are confident happened.
Taking place after the death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1598 and before the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Shogun is mostly fictional filler. But the miniseries does nail down the time frame and the principal characters, and does a reasonable amount of justice to the historical context.
Richard Chamberlain's John Blackthorne is based on a real person. Will Adams was the English captain of the Dutch-flagged expedition. Confined to a single year, at the end of which Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated Ishida Mitsunari at Sekigahara, Shogun can't help but downplay what a fascinating figure he was.
It also downplays the cruelly ironic turn of history that would take place in his lifetime. Every indignity suffered by the Protestant sailors at the beginning of Shogun would be visited upon the Jesuits a hundred fold. One explanation for this reversal of fortunes is made clear in Shogun, and another is alluded to.
Made clear is the geopolitical insult of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which "divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between the Portuguese Empire and the Crown of Castile." The reason alluded to was Portuguese involvement in the mid-16th century trade of Chinese and Japanese slaves.
Martin Scorsese's Silence (based on the novel by Shusaku Endo) explores this at length (if you can stomach two hours of man's inhumanity to man vividly illustrated).
Along with the suppression of Christianity, the Edo period of Tokugawa rule was characterized by a strictly-enforced sakoku (isolationist) policy. But Ieyasu did employ Adams to negotiate limited trading rights with the East India Company and the Dutch, though they were confined to a small port off the coast of Nagasaki.
Until the mid-19th century, information about the outside world trickling in from Europe became known in Japan as rangaku (蘭学) or "Dutch learning." Though it was an Englishman that made it happen.
Shogun is not without its anachronisms, stereotypes, and soapy subplots. But as a Hollywood version of Japanese history, it does an all-around better job than The Last Samurai or 47 Ronin. Not merely a noted moment in television time, some forty years later, Shogun stands up well to a second viewing.
Related posts
Shogun revisited (2)
Techno-orientalism
Dances with Samurai
Japan made in Hollywood
Labels: japanese culture, japanese tv, movies about japan, nhk, pop culture, shogun, social studies, sony, television, television reviews
December 01, 2021
Radio Garden
Radio Garden was created by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the design firms Studio Puckey and Moniker. It hosts over eight thousand stations from around the world and can easily navigate to anyplace on the planet.
You can save favorites and bookmark links. There are apps for iPhones and Android devices too.
Also online are the NHK Radio News archives (in Japanese) and J1 Radio. The three main channels on J1 Radio are J1 Hits (pop/rock), J1 XTRA (Heisei era hits), and J1 GOLD (Showa era hits).
Now that we're on the subject, Wave, Listen to Me! is sort of WKRP in Hokkaido. The anime can be streamed on Funimation. Amazon has the English translation of the manga published by Kodansha.
On that nostalgic note, let's conclude with "My Broken Radio" by Hideaki Tokunaga (lyrics here).
You can save favorites and bookmark links. There are apps for iPhones and Android devices too.
Also online are the NHK Radio News archives (in Japanese) and J1 Radio. The three main channels on J1 Radio are J1 Hits (pop/rock), J1 XTRA (Heisei era hits), and J1 GOLD (Showa era hits).
Now that we're on the subject, Wave, Listen to Me! is sort of WKRP in Hokkaido. The anime can be streamed on Funimation. Amazon has the English translation of the manga published by Kodansha.
On that nostalgic note, let's conclude with "My Broken Radio" by Hideaki Tokunaga (lyrics here).
Labels: anime, funimation, japanese, manga, nhk, radio, streaming, technology
April 04, 2020
Last name first
On March 30, NHK World's foreign-language services and websites reverted to the traditional format for Japanese names. This follows a policy adopted six months ago by the Japanese government to prefer the surname-first style in Latin script documents.The surname-last name order for Japanese names in Latin script came into fashion during the Meiji era, when Japan aligned itself with the West. After 150 years, the Japanese government decided it wasn't its job to do the orthographic flip-flopping anymore.
Japan is actually catching up to the rest of Asia in this regard, as surname-first in Latin script publications has long been standard practice for Chinese and Korean names. Chinese President Xi Jinping, for example. And South Korean President Moon Jae-in. But not Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Prime Minister Abe Shinzo would like that to change. This update to the NHK World style guide is one small step.
Incidentally, when names originally written in Latin script are transliterated into katakana, the surname order is preserved. So "Brad Pitt" is still "Buraddo Pitto" (ブラッド・ピット). Following the cultural conventions of the source material is a good rule. Though this rule can cause confusion.
Hosts and anchors with Japanese names who were not born in Japan or are not Japanese citizens may stick with the surname-last format. On domestic NHK broadcasts, such names would be written in katakana, not kanji, making the distinction clear. But that clue gets lost on NHK World.
So some Japanese names on NHK World are surname-first while others are surname-last, leaving it up to the viewer to guess why.
In my own writing, I'm all over the map. Accustomed to rendering historical names surname-first, that's what I did in Serpent of Time. In the contemporary Fox & Wolf, I reverted to surname-last, as I do in the Boy Detectives Club novels.
It comes down to trying to anticipate what the reader expects, and western readers generally expect surname-last. Then again, it might not be a bad idea to start changing those expectations.
A related style conundrum are long and double vowels. In Serpent of Time and Fox & Wolf, I used Hepburn romanization. In the Boy Detectives Club novels, I don't bother. In the Twelve Kingdoms, I transliterate the vowels as they would be written in hiragana, which is my linguistic preference.
Labels: history, japanese, japanese culture, japanese tv, language, nhk, nhk world, politics, streaming
March 27, 2020
The rising ebook in Japan
For a country with such a post-modern reputation, Japan loves paper, especially paper books and paper money. The ￥10,000 note, the equivalent of a $100 bill, is used and accepted everywhere.Cash in circulation in Japan amounts to over 20 percent of GDP, significantly higher than the United States (8.3 percent), China (9.5 percent), or the Eurozone (10.7 percent).
Recent trends suggest that Japanese may be embracing electronic publishing faster than they are embracing electronic money. The ebook in Japan gained significant momentum in 2019.
According to the All Japan Magazine and Book Publisher's and Editor's Association, while print sales fell for the fifteenth straight year, sales of digital manga shot up 29.5 percent. Digital book publishing rose 8.7 percent. The entire digital market was up 23.9 percent. The overall publishing market even saw a small increase.
Physical video media also took a hit, with the Japan Video Software Association reporting that the market for physical media declined almost 11 percent from 2019 to 2019. Blu-Ray sales fell one percent while DVD sales were down 20 percent.
Like the ebook, Japan is also embracing the convenience and lower costs of streaming. Netflix, Hulu (wholly owned in Japan by Nippon TV), and Amazon Prime are making their presence known in a big way. Even NHK is jumping on the bandwagon, and will launch a domestic live streaming service in April.
Labels: business, ebooks, economics, hulu, japan, japanese culture, netflix, nhk, publishing, streaming, television
March 19, 2020
dLibrary Japan (content)
Two big reasons to sign up for dLibrary Japan are NHK's two flagship series, the weekly Taiga historical drama and the daily Asadora serial. It'd be nice if they showed up on a predictably timetable after their domestic runs, but the licensing windows are all over the map. Check the "End Date" before getting too invested.
dLibrary Japan has a good selection of six recent Taiga series, including three of the most interesting woman-centered stories you'll find anywhere. And they are subtitled!
Go follows the three nieces of the warlord Oda Nobunaga as they play a major role in shaping the end of the Warring States period, two of them marrying into clans on opposite sides of the conflict.Atsuhime examines the life of Tenshoin, the adopted daughter of the province lord of Satsuma. Hoping to become the power behind the throne, he arranged a marriage between her and Tokugawa Iesada, the third-to-last shogun.
Yae's Sakura is about a markswoman who fought on the side of the shogunate during the Boshin War that launched the Meiji Restoration. Her firearm of choice was a Spencer repeating rifle.
And then for a view of the events depicted in Atsuhime and Yae's Sakura from the perspective of Japan's Alexander Hamilton, Ryomaden follows the life of Sakamoto Ryoma, who, like Hamilton, tragically died a violent death before his time.
Asadora serials include Ume-chan Sensei, about a girl who attends medical school and becomes a doctor during the Occupation. Toto Nee-chan is a biopic about Shizuko Ohashi (1920–2013), who in 1948 co-founded Notebook for Living, a home improvement magazine still in print.Though Oshin was the most-watched television program in Japanese history, its Gothic Perils of Pauline plot leaves me disinclined to slog through it. During the 1980s (it debuted in 1983), Oshin became a synonym for perseverance in the face of neverending hostility and opposition.
The cheerfully upbeat Toto Nee-chan is more my speed, and it's been nice to revive my old TV Japan habit of watching a fifteen-minute Asadora episode every night.
Along with the Taiga and Asadora dramas, the scripted content includes family and food dramas, and an eclectic collection of police procedurals and medical dramas, such as the preternaturally cute Aoi Miyazaki playing a teenage super-sleuth in Mobile Detective and Ryoko Yonekura channeling Gregory House in Doctor X.Mobile Detective is worth watching simply as a reminder of what "cutting edge" smart phone technology was like a mere fifteen years ago.
dLibrary Japan has the first three seasons of Midnight Diner, an ensemble series that takes place at an all-night hole-in-the wall restaurant (Netflix has seasons 4 and 5). And speaking of food dramas, dLibrary Japan has six seasons of Solitary Gourmet, pretty much the salaryman version of Wakakozake.
For whatever reason it was shot in a 21:9 aspect ratio. I really don't see the point of that (I don't see the point of shooting anything in 21:9 except as a special effect).
There are a handful of documentaries and talk shows, such as Matsuko no Shiranai Sekai ("The World Unknown To Matsuko"), and the Wildlife and Great Nature documentary series from NHK. Plus a cute travel show in which Tetsuro Degawa rides a electric scooter until the battery is dead and then bums a charge from the locals.
The handful of anime titles on dLibrary Japan are aimed at kids, such as Anpanman, a long-running kid's franchise (1500 episodes and counting) hugely popular in Japan and practically nowhere else. (Tim Lyu explains why.)
So far, there's more than enough to keep me interested. If dLibrary Japan keeps adding new programming at the current rate, it will become the unquestioned home of live-action Japanese television in North America. Though I'm afraid it won't be able to significantly expand beyond the TV Japan and Nippon TV audiences without more localization.
Related links
dLibrary Japan (background)
dLibrary Japan (user experience)
dLibrary Japan
dLibrary Japan Roku app
NHK World
TV Japan
Labels: asadora, dlibjapan, history, japanese tv, nhk, nhk world, streaming, taiga drama, tv japan