SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The Asia boom in Japanese cinema that has been observed by scholars of Japanese cinema was not without re-percussion on the genre of Japanese television drama. Although throughout most of its history, Japanese TV drama has focused on ‘Japanese’ topics set in Japan – thus underpinning the myth of Japanese homogeneity – in the late 1990s, the genre began to slowly internationalise. In the wake of that ‘internationalisation’, more Asian characters were also brought to the small screens and the genre ‘discovered’ interculturality. Centring on the content analysis of two TV dramas of the years 2001 and 2002 respectively, this paper aims to work out how the encounter of female characters with another culture took place. The first drama to be analysed, features a young woman of Japanese-Taiwanese parentage coming to Japan whereas the second drama focuses on the encounter of three Japanese women with Hong Kong. In contrasting the encounter of the women with the respective ‘Other’, it shall be elucidated how ‘identities’ are constructed in these two dramas and what kind of gender concepts are portrayed therein.