Paper short abstract:

Japanese television dramas have historically portrayed patriarchal values towards women’s selfhood. However, during the Bubble Era, ‘trendy dramas’ envisioned novel ways of being a woman. This paper examines how normative ideals of femininity were forged into a new urban woman.

Paper long abstract:

Japanese television has historically produced well-established drama genres, some of which date back to the 1960s (Gotō et al., 1991). However, not until the Bubble Era (1986-1991) did Japanese dramas attain their golden age, brought about by the innovative narrative formula of ‘trendy dramas’, love stories that displayed a trend towards urban, consumer-oriented, glamorous lifestyles (Lukács, 2010).

Trendy dramas greatly contributed to the redefinition of the modern and urban woman: instead of reinforcing the dominant national values of marriage and motherhood, they featured young, single women that were succeeding professionally. Nevertheless, it has been suggested that although they challenged previous portrayals and normative conceptions of gender, they continued to propagate patriarchal views (Itō, 2004; Saeki, 2012; Freedman, 2018).

Drawing from media anthropology, cultural studies and gender studies, this paper explores in what ways trendy drama discourses redefined the politics of Japanese women’s identity and to what extent they reproduced patriarchal views towards women’s selfhood. Through an ethnographic study of the all-time popular Tokyo Love Story, 1991, and its 2020 version, qualitative questionnaires, newspaper articles and online forums analysis, this presentation explores the discourse entanglements between the normative ideals of femininity and the forging of a new woman in the drama. I will argue that the 1991 drama not only challenged patriarchal conceptions of femininity but developed novel ways of being a woman. As an informant stated, ’we envisioned a future where women could come into the open both in regards to their love affairs and their professional careers’. Trendy dramas set a primary stepping stone towards womanhood in Japan’s lost generation, characterised by low marriage and childbearing rates amidst the post-bubble uncertainty of a deregulated labour market, a never-ending stagnation, and a collapse of the institutions that allowed the once normative way of life (Allison, 2013). Diachronically, the once groundbreaking 1991 uninhibited, straightforward womanhood seems to have been somewhat normalized in 2020. While Japan still lingers for the glitzy bubble years, new ways of romancing and communicating may have sunk in.