ABSTRACT
More than a genre, Japanese infotainment works as a televisual discourse, transgressing traditional genre boundaries to create an intimate, familial communication with television consumers. Functioning through cultural norms and values, infotainment engenders a "nexus of discourses" around which a number of cultural, professional, and highly commercialized nodal discourses cluster, thereby constructing an atmosphere, an inner space, to enable the audience to feel "at home". There are, indeed, widely used (pre-/post-)production techniques behind the creation of the on-screen homey space. It is this very nature of Japanese infotainment and its post-produced discourse of intimacy that plays an operational role in first constructing an uchi (or emotional-physical interior space) before managing relationships and communication within that space. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
