Does American television drama Americanize
Japanese college women? : gender roles and
expections in Beverly Hills 90210 and Asunaro
Hakusho
journal or
publication title
椙山女学園大学研究論集 社会科学篇
number
28
page range
129-149
year
1997
URL
http://id.nii.ac.jp/1454/00001446/
Does American Television Drama Americanize
Japanese College Women?:
Gender Roles and Expections in Beverly Hills 90210 and Asunaro Hakusho
Eriko YAMAMOTO
lntroduction
In Japan today, American popular culture is seen everywhere and consumed in various forms. The younger generation enjoy hamburgers at McDonalds, visiting the
Tokyo Disneyland, smoking American tobacco like Virginia Slims and Marlboro,
listening to American music on CD's and radio. The latest Hollywood movies
(although with a few months lag) are shown in theaters and many of the older ones are easily available on videos at any rental store. Television stations and cable chan-nels broadcast American movies and television shows, including Star-Trek, X-files
and Sesame Street.
In particular, television programs expose us to American popular culture right in our living room almost every day. American mass media entertainment is now part of Japanese day-to-day life. According to one source, almost 80％ of foreign TV shows imported to Japan in 1980-81 were from the United States, of which 90％ were dramas.1) With the expansion of direct broadcast through satellite in recent years, the ratio of American-made programs is clearly on the rise.
American television programs are exported widely throughout the world. Holly-wood is the largest supplier of TV programs.2) Europeans, however, express reserva-tions toward the influx of American popular culture and its influence on teir own culture, while the younger generations are attracted to it.3) Authorities and educators fear Americanization influence especially through such transnational media as film and television programs. According to Kim Christian Schroder and Michael Skov-mand, "it is still widely believed that if the European countries do not react forceful-ly and mobilize their rich and diverse cultural potential, we shall be committing spir-itual suicide in a flood of Donald Duck Americanization."4)
In Japan, such fear toward transnational media cultures is rarely observed. Anti-American activism is confined to political sphere, as seen in the student move-ment against the U. S.-Japan Security Treaty and the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s and in the recent controversy over the U. S. military bases in Okinawa. Once I
was amused to witness right-wing nationalist activists eating at McDonald's during their break from a weekend protest campaign. They might be watching American TV shows and videos at home. What Europeans fear as a spiritual suicide seems to re-ceive little public attention in Japan.
Unlike films, television series can attract fan audience for a long period of time and probably have bigger influence. One of the current programs that are popular among young Japanese women is Beverly Hills 90210, which has been broadcast since June 1992. The weekly 1-hour TV show portrays a group of close friends in West Beverly Hills High School and later in college, with a plot centering around their love relations and friendship but also involving some social issues. Although the sample is not large, the result of a questionnaire administered in my classes in 1996 reflects the show's popularity. Among 43 senior and jonior female students surveyed, 28 had watched the show. Twenty of them were continuous viewers, of whom 8 watched it every week. Among the continuous viewers, more than 80% found the program en-joyable. Acｃording to the fans who are "hooked," it is such a great show that they have been recommending it to their friends.
Is this because there are no equivalent Japanese programs? Actually, there are all kinds of domestic television dramas, although they usually conclude in three to six months. One of the past programs, Asunaro Hakusho, was a weekly late night show that portrayed a group of close college friends, with some similarity to Beverly Hills, and also attracted many young women as audience. The result of the above-mentioned questionnaire shows that more than 90% of the students watched Asunaro at least partially, of which two thirds said they had watched it every week.
However, among those who watched both shows, only one said Asunaro was bet-ter. An overwhelming majority said that Beverly Hills was better, with a few excep-tions who said that each show had its own charm. Why is it? The audience tends to generalize the Beverly Hills traits as American, and the Asunaro traits as Japanese or their own. The main differences they saw between the two youth-targeted soap operas were in values and human relations, especially those that female characters showed. In other words, they saw differences in gender roles and expectations in the two shows and preferred the American drama. Can it be that Japanese college women identify better with American female characters?
This paper attempts to understand Japanese college women's perceptions of gen-der roles and expectations and of American culture, by analyzing the two television programs and the students' reactions.5) It becomes clear that students expect differ-ent things, but because the main characters are very similar to themselves in age, concerns and interests, they could be relating themselves to the characters.6) By iden-tifying themselves with the American female characters, could the students become Americanized?
Japanese College Women as Viewers
Living in a society which gives women a sense of freedom while still defining them mainly as housewives and mothers and continues employment discrimination, young Japanese women today show complex and sometimes contradictory behaviors. Many are now getting higher education like men and yet they still seem to maintain the traditional sex roles and accept an inferior status. There seems little correlation between women's higher level of education and their feminist awareness these days.7)
Indeed, Japanese women have come a long way in obtaining education. Four-year college education was generally considered inappropriate or unnecessary for women until the 1970s, but it gradually became common. The ratio of women going into
4-year college increased from 2.5% in 1960 to 6.5% in 1970, and to 16.1% in 1991,
although it has not caught up with that of men (14.9% in 1960 and 36.3% in
1991).8) Women's interest in higher education is growing. .
This trend reflects a gradual change in sex discrimination in Japan, and is hoped to raise women's social awareness and increase their professional potential. However, there are mixed results. More women are working, but many of them are in low-paying, part-time positions. In 1985, the government passed the Equal Employment Law, encouraging employers to "make efforts" to hire and treat women on an equal basis to men, but the law is not legally binding.
However, college women show surprisingly little dissatisfaction. The majority of the students do not expect to pursue a professional career. Although they do want to get a job after graduation, their plan is to resign after childbirth and stay home, with a possibility of getting a part-time job when their children are old enough. It is true that the system is set up to encourage "tradional" families with the father as a bread-winner and the mother as a homemaker. Women do complain about companies' unfair employment practices, but they often take it for granted.
Statistics show that Japanese women with a college degree hold stronger opin-ions in favor of gender equality, but that their actual life course, involving employ-ment and marriage, is far from being equal. As a group, they show a remarkably high employment rate upon graduation, but many leave their jobs by 30, and the em-ployment rate among the middle-aged is even lower than those of their peers without any college education.9) College education certainly has not led to women's economic independence from men.
Some feminists say that role models in the mass media are important in helping women get a better opinion of themselves and aim at a higher goal in life. Television programs can have a big influence on the young women, because they do watch tele-vision a lot. According to one source, among Japanese women age between 16 and 24, more than 90% watch television for more than an hour every day.
heroines becoming more independent and aggressive.11) If Japanese college women watch an American television show and like it much better than its Japanese counter-part, could not there be some Americanizing effect on them? Focusing on Beverly Hills 90210 and Asunaro Hakusho, an analysis of the characters and plots and the stu-dents' reactions, based on personal interviews and questionnaires, follows.
Profile of Beverly Hills 90210
Beverly Hills 90210 is a popular show in the United States and in other coun-tries like Hong Kong and Australia.12) In its home country, it has been broadcast on FOX network every Wednesday since 1990 to the present.13) There is an internet Home Page devoted to this show, where fans exchange opinions and information.14) It shows exciting and fashionable lifestyles of rich Bevery Hills youths――mainly their love life, schooling, careers, aspirations, and family relations.
In Japan, the national public broadcast corporation, NHK or Nihon Hoso Kyokai, which has four television channels (NHK General, NHK Educational, and Satellite Broadcast 1 and 2), and a few radio stations, has been broadcasting this Hollywood hit program since June 1992. Beverly Hills was first available on Satellite Station only to the limited audience who had the appropriate receiving equipment. When the story moved on to the college part, the reruns of the high school part became avail-able to general audiences on the Educational Station. Currently the rerun of the high school part is broadcast from 12:10 a.m. Saturday morning (or virtually late Friday night) on the NHK General Station.15) Despite its inconvenient show time, young peo-ple either stay up late to watch it or record it on video.
According to NHK, this program is popular among college and high school stu-dents in high teens, particularly women, and also among their mothers. The official rating of the rerun on the Educational Station averaged around only 3% because of its show time, but NHK assumes its popularity is far stronger than it appears in the rating.16)
The main characters in the high school part are a twin brother and sister, Bran-don and Brenda Walsh (Jason Priestley and Shannen Doherty), and their friends, Kel-ly Taylor (Jennie Garth), Donna Martin (Tori Spelling), Andrea Zackerman (Gabrielle Carteris), Dylan McKay (Luke Perry), Steve Sanders (Ian Jiering) and David Silver (Brian Austin Green), plus their parents and Mr. Nat, the owner of Peach Pit diner
where the students hang around.
The story is broadly continuous, but each week there is a theme or two and a few focal characters (either regular or special on the show) and the story line con-cludes. This format is not common in Japan. Themes include personal issues like ro-mance, dating, friendship, pregnancy, marriage, ambition, parent-child relationship, and growing up, as well as social issues such as substance abuse, gun control and
sex education. Overall, the freindship and romantic relationships of the main student characters are the basic issue, with an additional social or personal topic overlap-ping. Generally Japanese college audience like this format, because the story moves on quickly and keeps them interested.
In the upper middle class, California setting, attractive youths (all white) who are basically good human beings with some weaknesses, try to solve various prob-lems that come up. To most Americans, and even to Californians, this program por-traying fashionable Beverly Hills youths must look "fictional," and many like it be-cause of the different kind of lifestyle. In contrast, young Japanese audience like the show because it looks so "American." It is perceived as a depiction of characteristi-cally "American" lifestyle, although the characters are fictional. Young women view-ers in Japan see "America," with the flavor of Southern California. They like the show because of its interesting plots and likeable characters. They are impressed that American high school students are independent, assertive, and expressive of their opinions and feelings, and mature in terms of their looks, thinking and be-haviors.
Beverly Hills Characters
Brandon, Brenda and their parents are a Minnesota family who moved to Cali-fornia, They look like a "perfect" American family to Japanese audience: an affection-ate and humorous, and yet sometimes stern father with a good job, a young-looking, witty, full-time mother, and two wonderful, well-bred children. This happy, loving family living in a beautiful Spanish mission-style house in Beverly Hills is almost ideal.
On the other hand, some other characters have different forms of family――with single, divorced, remarried or adoptive parents. Some have trouble with family rela-tions. But most parents are generally well-to-do and have a successful career, and student characters are shown living in a luxurious home. The Japanese viewers would not assume that all Americans live in such a luxurious house, but many feel that the show is realistic in portraying different forms of families with divorced, single or adoptive parents.
The qualities that Japanese college women fans find characteristically American are described as "openness," "assertiveness," "freedom" (for students), "verbal ex-pressiveness" and "independence." As to female characters, they described them as "independent," "strong," "confident," "assertive," "equal to men," "expressive of emo-tions and opinions," "positive," "mature," "active," "lively," and "fashionable." Gener-ally they have a very positive image, although some say it is overwhelming that high school student characters are more mature and sexually active than Japanese college students.
Brenda and Kelly are well-liked female characters. Brenda is attractive, bright, positive and caring, although she is sometimes a little immature. Raised by her loving parents, she has been a "good" girl. She maintains a monogamous value and attitude, while dating with Dylan, her first serious boy friend. Because of Dylan's problematic and different upbringings, she runs into troubles trying to keep their relationship lifelong. Gradually she becomes a more confident and assertive young woman.
Her close friend, Kelly, is also a beautiful, charming woman, but she has been cooler about love relationships than Brenda. She has had more boyfriends and some unpleasant experiences, although she still gets interested in new men. Raised by a single mother who once had a chemical abuse problem, Kelly herself went through a rough period. Some Japanese fans characterize her as assertive, because she decides to break up with Steve and starts other relationships.
Other main female characters are Donna and Andrea. Donna is beautiful and good-natured, but a little simple-minded. Surprisingly she shows some independent qualities. Because she is from a well-to-do physician's family, she sometimes gets tired of her parents' protective and conservative attitude. Over some sex education matter, she challenges her parents publicly. Her boy friend, David, is a year junior, so she sometimes has to take the lead.
Andrea is a little different from the other three women. She is the brainy one, with Jewish faith, lives with her grandmother, and is more devoted to her work as the student paper chief editor than to romantic interests. She is interested in Bran-don but gets turned down. Unlike the other three women, she is not overtly sexy, but is a charming, lively person. Despite Brandon's rejection, they can still work together and she turns her energy to her own work. Later she gets married to Jessy while still in college and has a baby. Japanese women audience who have seen that far say Andrea is admirable for being so strong and brave.
According to some Japanese college women fans, these female characters are very attractive and objects of envy and admiration. The way these characters of similar age express themselves to men and adults makes them feel good and re-freshed. Besides these characters, the show features many good-looking men. Among the male characters, their favorites are Brandon and Dylan, whom they think are handsome, caring and dependable. One of their charms is that they express their feel-ings to and communicate well with women.
Brandon, especially, is a "good guy": he is a good student, a good son, a good friend, and a good brother. He is smart and athletic, but he is not macho. He is con-scientious, caring and sensitive. He dates several women in the story, but is usually very nice to them. Although he does not date Andrea, he still remains a good friend and colleague to her.
Dylan is a surfer with the cool atmosphere of James Dean. With his parents separated and his father in jail, he has had difficulty with his family. His personality
is not as perfect as Brandon's, but his dark, lonesome aspect is an attraction to some fans. Despite his tough family situation, Dylan still shows a loving and sensitive atti-tude toward his father and others. This makes him looks mature and dependable. He seems to communicate with Brenda openly and talk things over even when they have a quarrel.
In the relations between male and female student characters, the Japanese audi-ence sees an unfamiliar and yet fascinating quality――willingness and efforts to communicate with each other. It is a two-way process. Female characters do express themselves and assert their opinions, to which male characters respond with a simi-lar expressiveness, and vice versa. This gives women audience a sense of equality in relationships.
They see similar qualities in adult female characters. Mrs. Walsh, or Brenda and Brandon's mother (Carol Potter), for example, is a traditional homemaker and mother, and yet she expresses her opinions assertively to her husband, children and others. Other characters with less traditional roles, for example, are Kelly's mother, or Jacky Taylor, and Steve's mother, Samantha Sanders. They both have a successful career and have raised their children by themselves. Jacky overcame substance abuse and reckless relationships with men, and in her middle age, falls in love with David's father, Mel Silver, and eventually gets remarried. Samantha is a pretty successful
actress. Divorced, she raises her adopted son by herself, while fighting for her
career. These two are portrayed as loving mothers and wonderful women with some weaknesses. The career-oriented, independent mothers are unusual figures to most Japanese women viewers. They find Jacky and Samantha exemplify the changing pat-terns of American families, which they do not associate with Japanese families. In general, they have less interest in adult characters, but gets the impression that women are strong and independent, dealing with their children, men and the society.
The American audience apparently like the program because such attractive stars as Jennie Garth and Jason Priestley play roles as sexy Beverly Hills teenagers. They do not look to it for unusually assertive women characters. Some of the Amer-ican audience may even find the program male chauvinistic――with men always trying to seduce women and women always looking seductive and interested.
The Japanese audience do not see the program that way. It is seen as a portrait of American youth and society. Female characters are admired for their independent, assertive and yet charming personalities and good looks. Some students said they wished they could be like those characters. Others said they liked this program be-cause characters were different from themselves or unlike Japanese. Overall, the au-dience gets pleasure from the show by overlapping the Beverly Hills female charac-ters with their image of independent American women.
Beverly Hills Plot Analysis
Let us look at a few scenes to give concrete examples of students' reactions to the plot. The first example shows how college women audience admire sweet, inno-cent Brenda for expressing her feelings to Dylan bravely. Her relationship with Dylan faces a minor crisis, when both become attracted to somebody else and also become suspicious of each other's faithfulness. Dylan helps out a young woman in his alcoholism rehabilitation association, Sara, who has difficulty staying off alcohol. Dylan, as a former addict, sympathizes with her, but gradually Sara gets too attached to him. Brenda, on the other hand, meets a UCLA medical student, Tim, in a fitness club. Flattered by his aggressive and yet charming pursuit, Brenda almost falls into him, while feeling jealous of Dylan and Sara. The women in the audience worry that Sara might take advantage of Dylan's kindness and wonder how Brenda will bring him back in the end.
At the beginning, Brenda tries to be understanding of Sara's need for Dylan's help and support. Even when she gets disturbed to hear Sara's pleading message on Dylan's telephone answering machine, she tries to stay calm and be understanding:
Dylan:
[The message was from] Someone from the program. Brenda: I figured.Dylan: It's supposed to be confidential. I'm sorry.
Brenda: Why don't you drive me home? That way you can call her and do what you have to do.
Dylan: Are you sure? Brenda: Yes, it's okay.
Even on another occasion where Dylan has to leave her to help Sara, Brenda says, "Just do what you have to do," and "Dylan, just go. I understand."
However, when she finally decides she wants Dylan only, she walks up to Tim and tells him her decision face to face, although very amiably. Then she faces Dylan and straightens out their situation.
Dylan: That girl, Sara――she needed me.
Brenda: Dylan, I know who she is. Brandon told me. Dylan: So you understand?
Brenda: Kind of――although I am not quite sure why you didn't tell me who she was, and why did I have to hear it from Brandon?
Dylan:
I don't know.Dylan:
What about you and that cardio-funk guy [Tim]? Brenda:Dylan!
Dylan: No, maybe you should think about that, Bren. I was just trying to help someone.
Dylan: Listen, I'm sorry I disappeared on you last night. Brenda: [I] Kind of did a little drifting myself.
Dylan:
Do I need to worry about that guy?Brenda: No, not any more. ――Dylan, I kissed him. I'm sor-ry. I felt terrible. May be I'm telling you just so I'll feel better. I don't know.
Dylan:
It happens.Brenda: Did it happen to you? Dylan: Yah.
Brenda: What's happening to us?
Dylan:
I don't know. You know what it's like being
mar-ried for 20 years, and someone catches your eye? Brenda: I guess if you are in love, you are flattered, and you
look the other way.
Dylan:
I don't want something like this to break us up,
Bren.
Brenda: Neither do I Dylan: We're gonna be OK. Brenda: Yes, we are.
She opened up her feelings, and so did Dylan. Thus they solved misunderstandings and reconciled. This type of plot, for example, impresses Japanese female students in a positive way in that Brenda speaks out her feelings and wins the person she wants, instead of repressing her feelings for Sara's sake or keeping her doubts about Dylan. Later, this will make a clear contrast to the Japanese heroin, Narumi, and her boy-friends in Asunaro Hakusho.
In a sense, the basic issue in this episode is rather conventional. Dylan goes out of his way to help another woman. Brenda becomes jealous but gets flattered when another man pursues her. At the end Dylan and Brenda make up. However, the Japanese audience can see maturity and assertiveness in Brenda even during her time in high school. They see this quality grow as Brenda gets older in this long-running drama, turning from a cute, innocent girl into a confident, ambitious young woman. Eventually she breaks up with Dylan and Dylan turns to Kelly. In the college part, Brenda eventually pursues an acting career.
independent and yet feminine qualities, highlighted by a male character's respect for them. Brandon falls in love with a career-oriented, independent woman in one epi-sode. Brandon, who realizes that he is not good enough to be a professional athlete, meets a figure-skating queen, Tricia. She has sacrificed most of her private life in
order to be a champion and to pursue a professional career, Brandon tries to
accommodate her career needs, but she leaves him for a prestigious competition. On her way, she stops by at the Peach Pit to see Brandon:
Tricia:
Mr. Kay [coach] is in the car on the way to the air-port. But I didn't want to leave without saying good-bye.Brandon: Good-bye.
Tricia:
Brandon, I'm sorry I closed the practice today. Brandon: There's no need to explain.Tricia:
Yes, there is. It's not Coach or my parents or any-one else that drives me to do this. It's me. It's what I want――to be the best skater in the world, to go to the Olympics, to turn pro, and to be a star. Brandon: Oh, was I, too, a distraction?Tricia: You don't believe that, do you?
Brandon: You know what hurts me the most? That it was OK
with me. I was willing to show up at 5:30 every
morning and take what I could get.
Tricia: But how fair would that have been to either of us?
You know, I'll always remember you as the guy
who gave me my first barrito.
Brandon: I'll always remember you as the girl who got me to dance.
After this, they part, and Tricia wins a championship title. This ending leaves a sad and yet warm feeling to the audience. It shows Brandon's love and understanding for the ambitious, driven woman athlete who actually loves him too.
A carrer-oriented woman who is willing to sacrifice her personal life is not com-mon even acom-mong liberated women in the United States. Tricia would be an unordin-ary character in real life. However, the image that Japanese women see in this epi-sode is that American women tend to be independent and profession-oriented, and that men tend to be understanding.
In these plots, students find "un-Japanese" qualities. They find the stories por-traying career-oriented, independent women satisfying and enjoyable, but they look like a "dream world." In other words, they are too unrealistic and therefore enjoyable.
The lifestyles and ambitions of these women are fascinating, which they think must be the reflections of actual American society but could not happen in Japan.
Asunaro Hakusho Profile
The Japanese counterpart of Beverly Hills 90210 is a drama series broadcast on a commercial Fuji Television station, in 1994. Asunaro Hakusho consisted of 11 weekly shows, each ran for an hour including commercials. The story was about a group of college freshmen――two girls and three boys――who just entered a pri-vate 4-year college in Tokyo, with a focus on one couple who werre attracted to each other but clumsy in expressing themselves. The story was continuous, starting from the time of entrance examination till a few years after graduation, when the couple finally got engaged. Besides their relationship, there were soap opera-type complica-tions including love triangles, friendships, pregnancies, and family problems. The plot was based on a long-running comic series by Fumi Saimon under the same title, which was very popular among young women. The television drama, with several big stars in the cast who became even more popular for their roles, turned out to be a big success.
The story moves along slowly because of the main characters' clumsy, mislead-ing communication skills accompanied by their indecisive relationships with others. The five friends hurt each other and grow up. However, the story ends by por-traying them after graduation as adults who are adjusting to the real world and yet still retaining some genuine, passionate feelings that they had in their college days. In that tone, the main couple get engaged, a supporting female character becomes a single mother, and a supporting male character desires to work in a developing coun-try. Unlike Beverly Hills, this drama has no social issue but revolves entirely around characters' human relations and personal growth.
The title implies "a story about youths growing up": asunaro refers to a kind of semi-cypress tree that people think is trying to become a real big cypress. Hakusho literally means a white paper, but it is often used to imply a young people's story, a usage which may have derived from The Strawberry Statement '70 (Stewart Haggman, dir.). The movie and the book, distributed under the Japanese title, "Ichigo Hakusho" or strawberry white paper, was widely known in Japan as a symbol of youth culture. The title is probably appropriate for a television show that young Japanese college students find indetifiable.
Asunaro Hakusho Characters
The five main characters are two women, Narumi Sonoda (Hikari Ishida) and Seika Higashiyama (Anju Suzuki), and three men, Tamotsu Kakei (Michitaka Tsutsui),
Osamu Toride (Takuya Kimura), and Jun-ichiro Matsuoka (Hidetoshi Nishijima), who form an informal friendship group named "Asunarokai" at the beginning of their freshman year. They are basically good people and try to help each other. However, they have different backgrounds which cause conflicts. While the drama is trying to portray the average college students like Narumi, Seika and Osamu, it also has un-likely characters like Jun-ichiro, who is gay and extremely wealthy, and Tamotsu, an illegitimate son of an alcholic bar hostess. Three supporting female characters, Tamotsu's mother and two girl friends, are also extraordinary.
The two main female characters and the setting are expected to attract young women's empathy. The well-bred middle-class women go into a competitive co-educa-tional university, study and play with male students on a rather equal basis, and have relationships. They are active and yet reserved; they are sexually inhibited but they do have physical relationships. Narumi and Seika reflect "modern" educated women by the Japanese standard in an urban setting, and have much in common with the growing segment of young female population. Many college women watched the show, identifying themselves with these characters.
The heroine Narumi, in particular, is considered a typical female college student today. The 19-year-old daughter from a suburban Tokyo middle-class family just started to live away from her parents. She is somewhat immature but sincere; cute but not particularly beautiful; academically fairly smart but not outstanding. She maintains good middle-class values emphasizing family, trust, love, and goodness to other people. She believes in a traditional monogamous value that happiness means falling in love with someone, marrying him for life and having a family. She thinks that someday she will meet that "right" person. Japanese college students view this kind of character as very realistic and acceptable, because her gender roles and ex-pectations comfortably overlap theirs.
Narumi's life becomes complicated and painful, as she falls in love with a man of a very different background and values. Tamotsu is blunt, insensitive, and closed. Being fatherless and poor and raised by his alcoholic, uneducated mother, he has had tough life. In order to support and educate himself, he even worked in a shady bar. Despite all these difficulties and lowly background, he is trying to move above his environment. Narumi, to him, seems like a symbol of respectable, well-bred middle-class femininity. While strongly attracted to her for her personality and values, he gets involved with women who are similar to himself or his mother. In other words, he falls for "unrespectable" women out of sympathy. He ends up often denying or suppressing his feelings for Narumi for fear of the gap. No matter how badly she is treated, Narumi keeps loving Tamotsu deep in her heart.
Narumi's better match is Osamu, a sincere, easy-going guy with similar middle-class values and family background. He tries to talk Narumi out of hurting herself by pursuing Tamotsu, and she gives in to him. However, noticing that she cannot forget
her brief relationship with Tamotsu, Osamu finally decides to break up with her. Narumi's suffering doubles from losing Osamu. No matter how hard or long she tries, she cannot stop loving Tamotsu, knowing that he is a kind of dark sheep with a low upbringing and anti-social, selfish values. She keeps hoping that he must care for her. The pains of relationships change Narumi into a cooler, more complex woman.
Most viewers who identified themselves with Narumi felt that she was maturing but were irritated by her weakness and indecisiveness over the two men. That was one of the main issues in the plot, but it showed a rather negative aspect of a sup-posedly modern woman, who says "I decided to do this," and yet cannot control her-self or others to carry out her decision.
The other female character, Seika, is portrayed as a more mature, liberated woman than Narumi. She is a beautiful, intelligent woman from a well-to-do family in Kobe and with a clear career goal to become a diplomat. She is sincere and caring to everyone, and yet never becomes emotional. It is implied that she has boy friends but she is in cotrol of herself. This initial image of Seika is very positive, but to the average audience, too perfect to be indentifiable. Her character is too modern, cool and perfect.
And yet it turns out that she cares for Tamotsu but painfully suppresses her feelings, for the sake of Narumi. In the latter part of the story, she turns to Jun-ichiro for love, and gets pregnant. The career-oriented, cool image of Seika crumbles down quickly, and she turns into a "courageous" woman who decides to become a single mother after Jun-ichiro dies in a tragic car accident. She quits school, gives up her carrer goal, and becomes a struggling single mother dependent on Narumi for housing and support. It is suspected that the producer intended to attract female au-dience's sympathy with Seika for this change.
As seen here, the two main female characters look modern initially but they are actually inhibited and passive when it comes to relationships. It is bewildering, irri-tating or disappointing to some young female audience to see modern women being indecisive and at the mercy of their love life――creating a sense of fear, "What would I do if I got into a situation like Narumi?" All the more, they feel irritated but stay tuned.
On the other hand, three supporting female characters are different. They are aggressive, mean and often direct. Almost stereotypically, they are uneducated and from a lower class. Tamotsu's mother is a loud-mouthed, vulgar, lustful woman con-stantly depending on younger lovers and her son for money. She even steals her son's college tuition and causes him to drop out. Yet she does not show any regret, because she has no respect for education.
Tamotsu's first girl friend, Tokie, is also a typically low-class, unrespectable woman. She is a bar hostess with a drug problem and was once very promiscuous. She is assertive and tough about her needs, and yet psychologically she is dependent
on Tamotsu. She calls him her "savior," saying that she would commit suicide if he left her. She feels that Tamotsu will leave her when he gets too educated and finds a woman with better education and upbringing. This fear drives her to threaten Naru-mi and to put a show in order to keep Tamotsu. He stays with her for quite some time, until he finally decides to switch to Narumi.
The second girl friend, Kyoko, is another stereotypically unrespectable woman. She has a mean, anti-social personality because she was born out of wedlock and has suffered from discrimination since childhood. She seduces Tamotsu out of des-peration when her fiance dumped her because of her fatherlessness. Kyoko falls in love with Tamotsu and thinks they are a good match in terms of their low social sta-tus. She asserts Tamotsu to be hers, and tries various mean, aggressive strategies against Narumi.
These three characters are portrayed as unrespectable, bad women. The female audience, with middle class background, think these characters are too extreme and unrealistic. The contrast between college-educated middle-class women and unedu-cated lower-class women is clear and gives a stereotypical message: respectable women are restrained, perseverent, and inhibit their feelings, whereas undesirable, selfish, lower-class women are assertive, expressive, and sexually uninhibited.
However, the qualities that both types of women have in common are dependen-cy on men and a good, altruistic tendendependen-cy at heart. Both Tokie and Kyoko eventually give up Tamotsu, after finding out that he really loves Narumi. The plot of Asunaro is unrealistic, but it shows that femininity in both respectable and unrespectable women is dependence on men and altruistic devotion to the man they love, and im-plies that "respectable" women should control their feelings.
Comparison
The plot of Asunaro Hakusho is basically a love story between Narumi and
Tamotsu. For almost three months, college women patiently followed the dramatic weekly series, hoping Narumi would eventually win Tamotsu's love after all her mis-erable sufferings and anguishes. Students say that the plot focused on Narumi's inde-cisiveness so much that the conclusion did not leave a strong impression. In reality, the conflict with Kyoko went on a long time, and the last scene where Tamotsu final-ly proposed Narumi took less than 5 minutes.
The overall show, however, attracted young women. College women particularly empathized with Narumi, because they thought they understood how she felt――being unable to say what she thought and suffering from unreciprocated love for years. Narumi is an irritating and yet familiar, identifiable character, because she reflects the Japanese gender expectation of restraining feelings, especially toward men.
both portrayed as "well-bred" daughters from respectable families, who have good values, strongly believe in monogamous relationship, and are sometimes immature. They both love one man and want to be committed to him, and yet their feelings waiver as other men earnestly seek them and as their boy friend looks close to other women. When Narumi is in a situation similar to Brenda's mentioned earlier, how
does she react?
In the second week, Narumi believes that her feelings for Tamotsu are mutual, without verbally asking him. Feeling very happy, she decides to show her affection in the most feminie way: preparing food for him. Learning that he works till late washing buses, she makes an elaborate box dinner and delivers it to him. As she waits for him with the box dinner, Tokie comes by and ruins Narumi's romantic plan. She is especially shocked to see Tokie kiss him. However, she still waits and tries to give him the dinner as if she had not seen anything. Noticing this, Tokie runs into Narumi and knocks down the dinner. In a great shock and sadness, Narumi
kneels down and picks up food, without saying anything. When Tamotsu scolds
Tokie and starts to pick up the food, Narumi says with a smile, "It's okey. Don't mind. I was just on my way to my grandmother's place." She blurts out a lie and waves them a friendly good-bye. Tokie triumphantly smiles and sees her off. Naru-mi's reticence and reservedness do not change even after she become intimate with Tamotsu. Unlike Brenda, who decides to talk out the misunderstandings and express her devotion to Dylan, Narumi repressed her frusturation as well as her love for Tamotsu. A series of this type of frustrations leads her to a relationship with Osamu. Once in a while, she becomes emotional, but she expresses her emotions without showing them to Tamotsu. When Tamotsu leaves for Kyoko, she yells "I love you" af-ter his bus has taken off. Only at the very beginning of the drama, when Narumi just started college, she expresses her feelings openly, which Tamotsu admired. But from that time on, as she learns the pain of loving someone, she becomes less and less ex-pressive. A few years after graduation, Narumi visits Tamotsu, hoping for a possi-ble chance to revive their relationship, but she leaves without saying much, as she sensed he was living with Kyoko.
Thus Narumi's growing process is to become more and more reserved and rep-ressive of her feelings, whereas Brenda becomes more assertive and independent. At the same time, Narumi's reservedness is probably perceived as a sign of getting stronger and more mature, and as a respectable quality of "femininity" for a woman
like her.
Basically most surveyed viewers of both dramas say they preferred Beverly
Hills, with a very positive opinion of its female characters and an upbeat plot. I
asked some students who like both dramas: "If Asunaro's plot is so irritable and frus-trating, why do you still enjoy watching it?" Their answer was: "Because I can empathize with Narumi. She suffers from loving him so much and yet being unable to
assert herself. I can feel and understand why she cannot be mean and aggressive to Tamotsu's other girl friends, or why she cannot tell him what she thinks directly. If I were in her shoe, I would probably suffer in the same way, which I hope will not happen."
In other words, Narumi is the student viewers themselves. She represents femi-ninity that they are familiar with. Although Narumi is a "modern" Japanese woman in today's urban setting, just like them, she is still a good old Japanese girl personality-wise: she is marriage-oriented, altruistic and passive. Her education and career are secondary to love life, although they do play some role. She looks more active and assertive than the traditional Japanese woman, but she cannot liberate herself from men or from traditional values. Although Narumi's traits and problems are exagger-ated, college women find her realistic in the settings they are familiar with, and therefore empathizable.
A comparison between Andrea and Seika shows that although neither is a type that students can really indentify with, the ways they handle pregnancy and mother-hood show a contrast. Andrea keeps her career goal and is in control of her own life, whereas Seika takes up her unexpected motherhood as if hit by a lightning. Seika is strong not so much as a liberated woman but as a devoted mother who regards motherhood as a mission and her son as the most important thing in life. Her altered life course, humbly dependent on others for help, renders the cool, career-oriented woman into a tragic heroine of love and devotion. Independence, after all, becomes something that women cannot attain in a Japanese drama, and even if there is a char-acter that seems independent, it becomes converted into strength as a mother or perseverance as a devoted lover.
All the more, they long for Beverly Hills' female characters who express them-selves more straightforwardly and lead a more positive, independent life. To the Japanese college women who feel that gender equality exists and is important, these characters allow them to feel the fantasy of becoming liberated, expressive and unin-hibited, and yet still attracting handsome, loving men.
Analysis
Despite the attraction, the female college student audience perceive the Beverly Hills world as "fantasy" that they cannot bring into their real life, and the Asunaro world as their pseudo-reality that they think might happen to them. They do not accept the femininity or gender roles that they admire in Brenda or Kelly, for exam-ple, as their own, even though they admire the characters. Despite their education and exposure to the ideas of gender equality, why would college women not emulate what they consider wonderful traits of American women?
The current generation of young people have been exposed to television shows, videos and movies as part of their everyday life. This situation probably resulted in their resistance to media influence, thus making them acquire a skill to separate fan-tasies in their entertainment experience from their real life. When they turn off the television, or when a show is over, the audience go back to their eveyday life.
This trend relates to the characteristic of the young generation coined the "flip-per" generation in Japan, because they flip television channels at will with the remote control. The remote control, which first came in Japan in 1977, caused the current college-age generation to be quite selective about television programs. They are con-sidered capable of sorting out television information in patterns and discerning the information that they want to retain. Flippers, according to one source, may look whimsical, and yet they are actually independent viewers who have control over mass media information flow.17) This seems to explain college students' detachedness from their television experience. This kind of automaticity as viewers is a remark-able quality, because television viewing has been generally associated with passivity.18)
Secondly, if college-age viewers have such "automaticity," they must be pro-cessing information based on their real life experiences, previous information, and arrive at the conclusion that their current lifestyle is all right. Indeed, they are the generation that have been blessed with economic prosperity and material abundance. Born in the 1970s and growing up during the "bubble economy," they have enjoyed a good standard of living and take it for granted that life in Japan is not bad. Young women are generally satisfied with Japan's status quo, despite the recent recession and existent gender discrimination. Their life style is partially Westernized but not completely――which means, some good old Japanese values may not have to dis-appear. Their college life is a bit boring but pleasant and comfortable. After gradu-ation, employment opportunities are limited and they can never expect job equality. However, they can still expect to have a happy life by having enough money to travel and buy various goods, by getting married and having a loving family. Material wealth, as well as secure and comfortable status as wife and mother, is quite possible and realistic. In some ways, the independent, assertive, hardworking women in Bever-ly Hills look wonderful but are too much to them. Some fear that women's independ-ence may lead to more divorce, single parenthood, and less commitment from men.
This relates to the third point, namely that the college women today lack serious interest in feminism, especially as a political movement because they are complacent with the existing gender roles and expectations in Japan. So when they watch the "liberated" or "independent" women characters, they probably do not associate their image with the feminist process of changing society and changing themselves. They are watching the American television drama not as a political document but as an en-tertainment with reference to some social issues.
Educated women should be more interested in feminism than average women, but this cannot simply be presumed. Like some American women in the 1950s, who went to college and even graduate school in order to find a better husband, most Japanese women today have a marriage-oriented objective in their higher education. In this sense, Asunaro accurately reflected its targeted audience's expectations. Although there may be much in common between college women in today's Japan and the 50s U. S., the Japanese audience would not have any historical perspective.
Lastly, their interest in American culture and society has the "flipper" charac-teristic. Younger generations of Japanese like American popular culture, have a fair amount of information about the United States based on the massive amount of news and other mass media information, and considers it a familiar country. To them, the United States is a country of an almost equal rank to Japan, but not as a model or ideal. When they get information on American society or women, it seems to become compartmentalized, instead of getting integrated into students' life perspectives or opinions. Their admiration for Beverly Hills is like looking into a neighbor's lifestyle with envy but keeping their own lifestyle.
The important question is whether the Japanese college women viewers' tempor-ary escape into American society in fantasy is based on stress in real life because of their gender. As Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi write, "People feel more passive and relatively less relaxed and satisfied afterward because television view-ing is only a marginally effective solution; it distracts and removes us from stress and the demands of reality only temporarily."19) Japanese college women viewers should realize that feeling upbeat while watching Brenda, Andrea or Tricia comes from their gender frustration with Japan's status quo, and feeling empathetic but frustrated with Narumi indicates the need for them to reconsider the society they live in, beyond the personal adaptive regression. The freedom as a channel flipper is far from the freedom as a self-determining, thinking individual.
Conclusion
The fact that Beverly Hills 90210 is so popular among Japanese college women, sitting up till late night to watch it, can mean that there are some "melodramatic identifications." Ien Ang writes as follows:
All too often women．．．have to negotiate in all sorts of situa-tions in their lives――at home, at work, in relasitua-tionships, in larger social settings. In this women are constantly confronted with the cultural task of finding out what it means to be a woman, of marking out the boundaries between the feminine and the unfeminine. This task is not a simple one, especially
in the case of modern societies where cultural rules and roles are no longer imposed authoritatively, but allow individualistic notions such as autonomy, personal choice, will, responsibil-ity, and rationality. In this context, a framework of living has been created in which every individual woman is faced with the task of actively reinventing and redefining her femininity as required.20)
Ang goes on to say how the modern feminist has contributed to raising women's con-sciousness. That part may not apply to Japan, but it is true that the task of defining the feminine and the unfeminine is more complex than ever before for Japanese women, with exposure to foreign cultures. They seems to like the feeling of being in-dependent and liberated, even if they are afraid of some potential negative
consequ-ences.
The difficulty is that the femininity in Japan, as we saw in Asunaro, means rep-ressing one's wants and needs, denying one's true feelings, not to mention exprep-ressing one's opinions to men. As an educator and researcher in American Studies, I find it important that the Japanese female students perceive themselves objectively by ex-amining themselves from a cross-cultural perspective as the first step and thus ac-quiring a gender perspective. Instead of distancing American women as "different" from themselves, they can learn what is in common among women, as the "feminine" experience, and what is not. They should also learn that certain things that Amer-ican women now have may not have existed before the feminist movement or have not taken place overnight.
This does not mean that educated young Japanese women should blindly follow the Western-style feminist movement, but first they should become introspective of themselves, their status and experience objectively, and examine what choices they have. And if the choices they want are not available, they should go after them, in-stead of confining their frustrations internally, or of pretending they are happy or satisfied. As modern women, in a modern, information society, they can become a new generation of aware and perceptive women,
The potential changes in Japanese young women, on a personal level, can happen quickly when some of these women actually experience American life. They probably will not live in Beverly Hills, but the experience of living in an average American city will give substantive meaning to their media images of liberated, assertive Amer-ican women that they have seen on television. In that sense, Beverly Hills 90210 is a good drama, showing the sufferings or other negative implications of women's inde-pendence as well as the joys. When the mass media image of independent women becomes empirical, the melodramatic identification with liberated women may become
awareness. Someday, when "aware" Japanese women will perceive Narumi-type characters as "fictional" and "unrealistic," and a TV drama like Asunaro as too stifl-ing and unempathizable, even male television producers will probably repond. Female viewers can then claim that they are not passive but active with
self-autono-my.
Notes
The author gratefully acknowledges the contributions of Yoko Mizuno, Fumie Shimono, Maki
Yoshida and Mayumi Kaneko, who helped conceive this paper and provided insightful information. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1996 annual meeting of the California
Amer-ican Studies Association at Occidental College, Los Angeles, on April 27, 1996. The author's
appreciation goes to Drs. Carmen Ramos and Arth〓 Anthony of Occidental College for their com-ments and support,
1) Kazuo Kawatake, Terebi no naka no gaikoku bunka (Foreign cultures on TV) (Tokyo: Nihon hoso
shuppan kyokai, 1983), pp. 254-255. According to NHK, 80-90% of their foreign
entertain-ment programs are American ones. NHK jigyokyoku, letter to the author, March 22, 1996. 2) Kawatake, pp. 232-4. In his book, Part 4, "Amerika terebi bangumi no sekai seiha"(American TV
programs conquer the world), describes this in detail.
3) European resistance, to American popular culture is studied by various scholars in Michael
Skovmand and Kim Christian Schroder, eds., Media Cultures: Reappraising Transnational Med-dia. The case of Denmark, for examPle, is described by Soren Schou, "Postwar Americanization
and the Revitalisation of European Culture," in which the author points out that American
popular culture was considered a threat by Danish authorities and schools. 4) Schroder and Skovmand, "Introduction," Media Cultures, pp. 5-6.
5) Reiko Morikawa analyzes gender in the popular Japanese television drama, Wataru seken wa oni bakari (The world is filled with mean people), targeted at a more general audience, and
con-cludes that its popularity shows the unchanging gender expectations while admitting some
feminist consciousness. See Junko Ueda, Yumiko Ogawa, and Reiko Morikawa, Onna to hou to jendaa (Women, law and gender) (Tokyo: Seibundo, 1996), pp. 145-160.
6) In fact, the main reason for choosing these two is that this study originally started as one of the junior seminar projects in my 1994-95 American Studies course. After spending the first term
on American dual career families with some feminist flavor, students were assigned to do
group projects in the second term on American culture and society, preferably dealing with women's issues. One group compared Beverly Hills and Asunaro Hakusho, analyzing the Amer-ican and Japanese portrayals of college students through their characters and stories. Based on their interpretations of value differences seen in the two dramas, this paper was developed into an analysis of current college women's perception of gender roles in Beverly Hills and Asu-naro Hakusho. Although the original student project dealt with the college part, this paper will deal with the earlier high school part because of its wider circulation on NHK General broad-cast.
7) In the United States, the relation between education and feminism has been strong. The situation
in the 1970s is described in Winifred D. Wandersee, On the Move: American Women in the
1970s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988), pp. 102-126.
8) Teruko Inoue and Yumiko Ehara, eds., Josei no deta bukku (Women's data book) (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1991; 5th pr. 1993), pp. 116-117.
9) Inoue and Ehara, eds., Josei no deta bukku, pp. 130-131.
10) "Masu media bunka to josei ni kansuru chosa kenkyuu (A study on mass media culture and
women)," Tokyo Metropolitan Life Culture Bureau (1986), cited in Inoue and Ehara, Josei no
deta bukku, pp. 186-189.
11) According to Makita and Muramatsu, television heroines' characters have become more
aggres-sive (53% in 1974 to 83% in 1984) and more self-centered (16% to 31%), although the ratio
of independent heroines remained almost the same (66% to 64%) and that of dependent ones increasing from 3% to 21%. Tetsuo Makita and Yasuko Muramatsu, "Ima terebi dorama wa nani wo egaite iruka (1) (What television dramas' are portraying today)," Hoso kenkyu to chosa (Sept. 1985), p. 10, quoted in Inoue and Ehara, eds., Josei no deta bokku, pp. 200-201.
12) To explain the program's popularity, NHK cites an articles in New York Newsday (September 19,
1991) that says Luke Perry, who plays Dylan, attracted 100,000 young women in a Florida
shopping center, of which 21 got injured.
13) NHK jigyobu, letter.
14) Jennifer's Beverly Hills, 90210 Homepage offers weekly summaries, opinion polls, comments, and other information (http://home.earthling.net/-eddie3/90210. htm).
15) NHK has broadcast Beverly Hills 90210 as follows: Beverly Hills koko hakusho (high school part)
on Satellite 2 from June 1992 to March 1994, its reruns on the Educational Station from
April 1995 to March 1996 and on the General Station from April 1996 to the present; Beverly Hills seishun hakusho (college part) on Satellite 2 from April to December 1994, April to De-cember 1995, and from April 1996 to the present.
16) NHK jigyobu, letter, March 22, 1996.
17) Asahi Gendai Yogo: Chiezo 1994 (The Asahi Encyclopedia of Current Terms) (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun, 1994), p. 437.
18) Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Television and the Quality of Life: How Viewing
Shapes Everyday Experience (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1990), p. 37. They use the phrase, "automaticity of viewing," to explain viewers' moods and behaviors. 19) Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, Television, p. 146.
20) Ien Ang, "Melodramatic Identiffications: Television Fiction and Women's Fantasy," in Television and Women's Culture: The Politics of the Popular, Ed. Mary Ellen Brown (London: Sage
