ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the various ways in which Japanese audiences engage with the media and ICT. It makes use of previously identifi ed dimensions of audience activity from several traditions of audience research and adds to these some new dimensions revealed from my fi eldwork. As steps towards the internationalising of media studies generally, I, fi rstly, recontextualise Japanese emic concepts such as uchi and soto, amae and the ‘contextual’ in contemporary Japanese society. Secondly, I investigate relevant etic audience activity concepts developed in Western literature, such as selectivity, parasocial interaction, personal/social use, the encoding/decoding model and participation (focusing on the notion of the public sphere) as they apply in the Japanese case. In the course of introducing new dimensions of audience engagement which emerged out of my ethnography in the Japanese fi eld, I examine both Japanese emic and Western etic concepts within contemporary Japanese society and draw out some similarities and differences between the West and Japan. I will pay particular attention to the role the Japanese emic social concept sunao plays in encoding and decoding for Japanese audiences as this brings to light fascinating and important social and political differences between those audiences and Western ones. Further exploring these differences, I also take a close look at the Habermasian notion of the ‘public sphere’, exploring the again surprising Japanese conception of a ‘public’ and discussing its negotiated and distinct nature in the Japanese audience. My considerations of the ‘public sphere’ lead us to some interesting questions regarding the installation of democracy into non-Western nations, on the part of Western ones, and I use an interesting example of mediated interaction to look at the possibility of connection with ‘distant others’, in the context of these questions about democracy, regarding some current issues around the Iraq war. Importantly, this chapter also serves to introduce my informants.
