ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two films aired for the Japanese TV viewing public for the first time in the same season in 1985. One of these was the American-made film 'Kramer vs. Kramer' which had actually been made and released in North America a few years previously, in 1979. The other was a Japanese made-for-TV movie in the 'Suspense Theatre' series. When the two films were aired in 1985, Japan was actively involved in debates about the actual, possible, desired, or undesired contemporary shifts in gender roles, and in women's place in society. In the re-interpretation of Kramer vs. Kramer for the Japanese audience, autonomy, independence and careers for women are first co-opted, then re-defined negatively, thus again reaffirming more conventional Japanese gender roles. The chapter presents the highly contrastive, made for Japanese television, movie of the same period that also deals with family values.
