ABSTRACT
When it comes to making events intelligible, national cultures exhibit radically different communities of sense. A critical perspective on those differences emerges when the author explores different media genres. For purposes of illustration, the author invokes two of his media experiences decades ago: it is August 1966 and he was exposed to two media events at roughly the same time. First, several of us, leaving a dinner party shortly after midnight, decided to take in "the late show" at the Nippon, a Honolulu theatre showing Japanese films: a sentimental genre in the early evening and a soft pornography genre around midnight. The second media event had a different kind of ending. It was a showing of military potency, a simulated bombing run staged on the 6 August anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and shown during a newscast on a local Hawaiian television station.
