Ch. 5: August commemorations

Synopsis

Early August is the key period of war commemoration in Japan. The anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks and the war end anniversary (6, 9 and 15 August respectively) generate much media attention. The way in which Japanese television covers war issues in August is analyzed for the period 1991-2005.

General Sources

Details of what Japanese people watch can be found at Video Research Ltd, an online viewing figures service. Online TV listings and guides can be found at Za Terebijon and Internet TV Guide (which has listings the same as the daily newspapers). Despite the importance of television, it has been largely overlooked in studies of Japanese war memory. Television studies pose numerous technical and methodological problems, not least the inability to access to all past programmes.

Japan does have two excellent public-access television archives, The Broadcast Library in Yokohama and NHK Archives in Saitama. However, these are mainly for documentaries and drama/entertainment specials and are nowhere near comprehensive. Japan has a highly respected public broadcaster, NHK (often called "the Japanese BBC"). The current system of NHK plus five commercial networks, each one affiliated to one of the national quality newspapers (see chapter 4), had stabilized by 1969. The commercial networks broadcast via local affiliate stations across the country, and the local stations in the Hokkaido area (where the 2005 commemorative programmes survey was carried out) are included in the table below. In recent years, there has also been an explosion in the number of satellite and digital channels, although terrestrial TV remains the most important place to view war-related Japanese television. The pace of change on television is very fast and many of the presenters or programmes mentioned in the book have changed since publication in 2007.