Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this research is to show how Japanese television dramas represent "August 15th" and how it is related to the memory of war among Japanese people, by analyzing and comparing the scenes of "August 15th" in war memorial dramas and NHK's morning drama series.

Paper long abstract:

Japan has a genre of journalism called "August journalism" in which mass media such as newspapers and television write about war and peace annually in August. In previous research, Takumi Sato (2005) has revealed how "August 15th" was memorized as "the unofficial war memorial day" and became mythicized among Japanese people after the war, by examining past newspapers, photographs, radio programming etc.. As Japanese TV dramas have not been studied from this perspective yet, I will focus on them to show how they represent "August 15th" and how it is related to the memory of war (here refers to the Asia-Pacific War) among Japanese people.

In the history of Japanese television broadcasting, the dramas that have dealt with war frequently are war memorial dramas (mainly two hour special drama) and NHK's morning drama series (so-called asadora). These few years I have been studying how the dramas of both types deal with the aspects of war along with the times, I found out that there are subtle differences in the representation of "August 15th" between 1965 and 2015．

In this presentation, I focus on how the dramas depict "August 15th" which is regarded as "the unofficial war memorial day" in Japan. As a procedure of analysis, I first outline war memorial dramas and NHK's morning drama series along with the flow of 70 years after the war and briefly introduce their features and differences. Next I extract the scenes of "August 15th" represented in both dramas, compare and examine them from the aspect of audiovisual references to the Emperor's announcement of Japan's surrender (Gyokuon-hōsō) and Japanese people's reaction to defeat etc.. If time permits, I will also focus on 5 years afer the Great East Japan Earthquake (2011.3.11), which is said to have drastically changed the existence of the mass media in Japan, by drawing attention to similarities and differences between depiction of "war" and "earthquake disaster" .