ABSTRACT
This chapter constitutes the core of this book, examining the cultural elements of Japanese infotainment and suggesting broader perspectives that might clarify how infotainment works to engage viewers, how it is crafted and delivered, and why it is popular at both the local and the national level. The data presented here enable me to argue that the various televisual discourses (e.g. the discourse of intimacy, uchi/soto, furusato, and omoiyari) are deployed in conjunction to construct an intimate atmosphere that makes the audience feel “at home” (uchi). This intimate mode of communication, which is one of the most powerful features of commercial television, may exist in all contemporary societies. In Japanese TV, however, intimacy is a fundamental rhetorical strategy seen across genres; it is a ubiquitous televisual discourse, which is at once both culturally specific and carefully orchestrated through production strategies. Infotainment discourse and its indispensable mode of communication, “intimacy”, build a nexus of discourses in which geographic, linguistic, non-linguistic, visual, and emotional components are brought together. This discursive practice of infotainment, in turn, provides an imaginary, yet genuinely experienced, locus – televised uchi – within which the televisual family members come together to share televised intimacy.
