Now that Tokyo has been given the honor of hosting the 2020 Olympic Games, the city, as well as all of Japan, will spend the next seven years "internationalizing" (kokusai-ka), a term that becomes fashionable again every few years when something like this happens. Theoretically a circumscribed society can internationalize only once, and the consensus is that it happened to Japan in the 1980s after the economy had become strong enough to compel companies and individuals to go overseas. In media terms it was the era that generated TV travel shows such as TV Asahi's now-defunct "Naruhodo the World" and TBS's still-running "Sekai Fushigi Hakken," which introduced viewers to exotic locales. These programs were sometimes derided for presenting other cultures in overly simplistic terms through a narrow set of values.
Some programs are still derided in accordance with the idea that Japanese people believe themselves to be unique members of the human race: Japan isn't so much a part of the world as it is standing slightly outside of it, and while it is perfectly happy to interact it can't do so without feeling self-conscious. In a recent post on his blog JAPANsociology, Ritsumeikan University associate professor Robert Moorehead discusses a Japanese symposium on internationalization where young people from other countries were asked their opinions on "the most impressive feature" of Japanese corporations. "In other words," Moorehead writes, "they were asked to tell their hosts how great (the Japanese) are."
This perception is still the basis for many TV travel programs, but the angle of contact has been altered. The traditional methodology is to send a TV personality to a foreign land and have them directly sample the culture and its trappings in a way that makes sense to Japanese viewers. There are also shows, such as Nippon TV's "Woman on the Planet" and TBS's "Dare ka Jiman Shitaku Naru Nihonjin" ("Japanese We Want to Brag About"), that cover Japanese people who specifically take the "challenge" of living and working abroad.