Tag - media-mix

 
 

MEDIA MIX

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Mar 10, 2002
Can common sense penetrate the food market?
You don't have to be paranoid to conclude that the recent series of food-labeling scandals represents the tip of the iceberg. With the Japanese market continually opening itself wider to food imports, and the government still unable or unwilling to untangle the tight, complicated interrelationships that...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Mar 3, 2002
Who's killing the great athletes of Japan?
Japanese television coverage of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics amounted to 820 hours of total airtime on all the various terrestrial and satellite stations. This compares to about 500 hours for the Nagano Games. The main reason for the sizable increase is the growth of digital satellite channels...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Feb 24, 2002
Dubya's campaign to bring tourists to America
During this past Christmas season, it became something of a joke in the United States when Americans were asked by their government to go shopping as a means of pursuing the War on Terrorism at home. The idea was that the Forces of Evil wanted nothing less than the destruction of Our Way of Life, so...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Feb 17, 2002
Was she used -- or were Makiko's tears deemed too dangerous?
The sixth Press and Human Rights Committee Conference, held at the end of January by the Asahi Shimbun, focused on the problem of gender discrimination in the media. In a full-page feature promoting the event in the Feb. 10 issue of the newspaper, three participants started out by blasting Prime Minister...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Feb 10, 2002
Better living through cosmetic enhancement
Several months ago, this column discussed how plastic surgery had transcended its basic meaning as a technique of improving on nature to become a means toward self-actualization. People who once tried to hide their face-lifts and nose jobs now trumpet them proudly, because they believe that feeling better...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Feb 3, 2002
A little bit of Martha in every rabbit hutch
Considering the state of the Japanese economy, the current popularity of penny-pinching advice in the media is hardly surprising. There seems to be a fundamental paradox at work here, in that advertisers prefer programs and articles which encourage the spending of money, while the advice given out these...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jan 27, 2002
Hi-Vision advocates display a lack of foresight
Being someone who isn't intimidated by purchases of electronics, I recently entered the digital age with an alarming lack of serious forethought. I bought a digital BS tuner. At less than 50,000 yen, it's hardly a huge investment by itself, but since being hooked up to my TV, it's caused me to reflect...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jan 20, 2002
Discussing the humane execution of the law
As far as I know, no one has tried to figure out why two of the most popular theatrical releases of 2000 in Japan were "The Green Mile" and "Dancer in the Dark," movies whose dramatic core involved capital punishment and whose moral compass pointed toward the opinion that noncombat state-sanctioned killing...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jan 13, 2002
Skeptics searching for super powers
The laziest attributes of Japanese TV come to the fore during the New Year break, namely, the over-reliance on repetitive talk-show formats, the use of quizzes to liven things up, and lots of amateur videos and old news footage.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jan 6, 2002
Faces of 2001: who's hot and who's not
Media Personality of the Year: Ichiro Suzuki or Junichiro Koizumi
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Dec 23, 2001
Robbing the little guy of life's pleasures
Following the government's eleventh-hour decision to forgo a planned increase in the tax on happoshu foamy liquor the Asahi Shimbun ran an editorial cartoon showing a happy man sitting at the kotatsu and hoisting a can of the beerlike stuff in tribute to his TV, which showed Koizumi father and son toasting...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Dec 16, 2001
The final downfall of a hard-boiled harridan
Just audible under the cheers that greeted the birth of the new princess was the tip-tapping of bored fingers coming from the direction of the "wide shows," where smiling faces and mandatory keigo barely masked acute impatience. Nine months of being forced to keep quiet about the crown princess's pregnancy...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Dec 9, 2001
Drivers wary of the troll who collects the toll
With new highway construction suspended and the prime minister pledging to abolish public corporations, the business of the Japan Highway Public Corp. at the moment is anything but business-as-usual. As both the overlord of the nation's vehicle-choked intercity expressways and the troll who collects...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Dec 2, 2001
Mad cows reveal meaty contradictions
Two weeks ago, the Asahi Shimbun ran opposing editorials by an assistant professor at Kanazawa University and the president of a municipal board of education in Akita Prefecture. The two educators faced off over a program that had been proposed by an idealistic elementary school teacher.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Nov 25, 2001
Failed chemistry experiments in the media lab
Two weeks ago, a friend faxed me an article from the weekly news magazine Aera about a new advertising trend called "collaboration CF," which is the selling of two different companies' products in one TV commercial. I had already read about collaborations two days earlier in advertising critic Yukichi...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Nov 18, 2001
Judgment day falls on celebrity panelists
On Nov. 9, one of the long-discussed judicial reform laws was finally enacted. Next month a committee task force will be set up under the Cabinet to discuss its implementation. How should committee members start such a huge, long overdue task?
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Nov 11, 2001
Trying to sell the news to kids who don't care
We've heard a lot lately about the decline of literacy in the developed world, as more people turn to new technology as their principal source of information. Commentators often illustrate this claim with figures demonstrating how no one reads novels anymore or by citing the decline in advertising revenue....
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Nov 4, 2001
Shaking preconceptions in the land of tourists
A few weeks ago, a friend visited from Europe. It was her first time in Japan and she wanted to see as much of the country as she could. She had purchased the discount JR rail pass that only foreigners can buy in their home countries, but besides that, all she came with was the Lonely Planet guide to...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Oct 28, 2001
Politics in entertaining TV shocker
Though the Koizumi revolution has yet to yield anything substantial in terms of fiscal policy, the prime minister's enormous popularity has certainly brought politics closer to the average person, which, considering how apathetic most Japanese were about government a year ago, is a notable achievement....
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Oct 21, 2001
Meeting baseball's Dr. Ichiro and Mr. Suzuki
Last Sunday, Nihon TV did something interesting. At the last minute, they pulled the scheduled installment of their biography series "Shitteru Tsumori" and replaced it with a hastily produced documentary about "Mr. Baseball," Shigeo Nagashima, who a few weeks ago announced that he was stepping down as...

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