Sesame Street's place in Japan: marketing multicultural New York in cosmopolitan Tokyo
2014; Routledge; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09555803.2014.902397
ISSN1469-932X
Autores Tópico(s)Japanese History and Culture
ResumoAbstractSesame Street, the longest running and most popular children's program in world television history, has failed to gain a large fan base in Japan because of notions of place. Since 1969, Sesame Street has taught socialization skills, pioneered programming formats, developed marketing strategies and spread American ideologies. Sesame Street has aired in English in 145 countries; over thirty countries have developed localized versions. Japan's NHK public television broadcast Sesame Street from 1971 to 2004 to teach English to secondary-school students. In 2004, Sesame Street was moved to the commercial TV Tokyo network and was localized. Muppets were added to appeal to younger children. Yet the program was cancelled in 2007. A key to Sesame Street's worldwide success has been teaching cognitive skills and promoting compassion for local cultural differences, while tapping consumer desires for idealized American childhood. When New York was erased and the English language removed, Sesame Street could not compete with Japan's already extensive children's television market. Sesame Street characters, however, became more successful when removed from their original context.I overview five aspects of Sesame Street in Japan and Japan in Sesame Street that best exemplify the program's cultural and consumerist politics, significance in television history and the image of urban society it represents. Namely, I analyze Sesame Street's place on children's television, the reasons for its importation and localization, depictions of Japan, broadcast history and legacy after cancellation. I argue that the kind of popularity Sesame Street has enjoyed in Japan is different than in other countries and provides insight into the Japanese television industry and marketing of American childhood. I explore a historical moment when television was particularly influential in international relations and in constructing notions of ‘home’.Keywords: televisioneducationchildrenglobalizationinternational relations AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Jonathan Abel, Jeffrey Angles and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and Vicky Young and Hugo Dobson for their encouragement and support.Notes1. Academic studies (Lesser Citation1974, Kojima Citation1994, Davis Citation2008), illustrated books for general readers (Gilkow Citation2009) and documentary films (The world according to Sesame Street 2006) have explained Sesame Street's history, especially its early years, and successful international ventures. The few sources that mention Japan focus on the NHK broadcast; none analyzes Sesame Street's influence on Japanese popular culture.2. NHK was founded in 1926 with a first television broadcast in 1940. One of the first programmes was Before dinner (Yūgemai), a family drama in twelve-minute episodes. Japan's four major commercial networks began airing programmes in the 1950s, starting with 1953 with NTV (Nihon Television), founded in 1951 as part of the Yomiuri newspaper company. In 1955, KTV, the predecessor of TBS, became the first network with commercial sponsors. Fuji Television and NET (Nihon Educational Television, later Asahi Television) started in 1955. NHK developed as a private company funded through the payment of licensing fees (jushinryō) by all families who owned televisions. Regular television began in the United States in 1948.3. Obake no Q-tarō was serialized in manga magazines for boys published by Shogakkan, including Weekly Shōnen Sunday, from 1964 to 1966.4. In 2008, Dorompa became the name of thee mascot of the J. League Japanese soccer F. C. Tokyo team. This Dorampa does not resemble the earlier pink ghost.5. The first songs in April 1961 were ‘Nobody knows’ (Daremo shiranai), sung by Kusunogi Toshie and animated by Wada Makoto, and ‘Ah, lovely meadows’ (Omakiba wa midori), a translation of the Czechoslovakian folksong ‘Hořela lipka, hořela’ by the Little Singers of Tokyo (Tokyo Shōnen Gasshōtai) and set to film footage of peacefully grazing cows.6. When the actor who played Mr Hooper (Will Lee) died of a heart attack on 7 December 1982, Sesame Street faced the problem of the disappearance of a main character. Their answer was the special Farewell Mr. Hooper, which aired on the commercial CBS network on 24 November 1983 (the Thanksgiving holiday that year). It was the first and perhaps only television programme to explain death to children.7. A video of 15 Japanese crests can be found at http://www.sesamestreet.org/play#media/video_2beed894-156b-11dd-bb51-597ab51d2e81.8. I have not been able to find Benny Yoshida in my research at NHK. Perhaps the name is short for Beniya Yoshikazu, who worked for TV Tokyo on the local Japanese Sesame Street.9. SSPJ included ASATSU-DK Inc., Kyodo Television, Ltd., Nikkeisha, Inc., Odyssey Communications, Inc., Sesame Street Partners Japan Television Tokyo Broadband Entertainment Inc. and We’ve, Inc. Commercial sponsorship of TV Tokyo's Sesame Street included Merrill Lynch, Tomy Direct (toy company) and Cosmo Oil Company.10. In rare cases, Sesame Workshop has withdrawn funding from international co-productions, the most recent being the cut of $20 million from Pakistan's Sim sim hamara (begun in 2011 and filmed in Urdu). The official reason was allegations of fraud by a partner organization (see Aslam Citation2012).11. Hello Kitty was made tourism ambassador to Asia by the Japanese government in May 2008 with the idea that she could help erase memories of wartime atrocities and other issues plaguing the relationship between Japan and other Asian nations.12. Character goods can be seen on Sanrio's press release at http://www.sanrio.co.jp/corporate/release/detail/363.13. The Japanese site is available at http://www.sesame-street.jp.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlisa FreedmanAlisa Freedman is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Oregon. Her major publications include Tokyo in transit: Japanese culture on the rails and road (Stanford University Press, 2010), an annotated translation of Kawabata Yasunari's The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (University of California Press, 2005) and a co-edited volume with Laura Miller and Christine Yano on Modern girls on the go: gender, mobility and labor in Japan (Stanford University Press, 2013), along with articles on Japanese modernism, youth culture, media discourses on new social groups, television images of working women and intersections of literature and digital media. She may be contacted at alisaf@uoregon.edu.
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