ABSTRACT

In 1992 I conducted a seed grant research project 1 which aligned Japanese and Australian discourses on television and nation in crosscultural juxtaposition. The aims of the research included exploring the potential of cross-cultural juxtaposition (Marcus and Fischer 1986:157) as a method for audience research, and identifying distinguishing genres, discourses and styles in television production between the two cultures. The research design pushed the participants to essentialise the differences between television in Japan and in Australia and encouraged their reading of national differences. The juxtaposition itself, however, worked against this push by matching full with empty categories. For example, a lot was said about the CMs (commercial messages) on Japanese television, but almost nothing was said about CMs on Australian television. In another example, the Australians could think of no Australian programs they watched as children unless prompted, whereas the Japanese remembered Japanese programs and had to be prompted to think of foreign ones. Using cross-cultural juxtaposition forces the researcher to accept what is presented and to interpret its significance in terms both of what is present and absent in the ‘empty category’ culture. In other words, cross-cultural juxtaposition can show how cultures don't match. This is one of the ways the method works as a defamiliarisation process. Own cultures become suddenly strange when their apparent seamlessness is shown to be full of holes.