Television, Japan, and Globalization makes a monumental contribution to the literature of television studies, which has increasingly recognized its problematic focus on US and Western European media, and a compelling intervention in discussions of globalization, through its careful attention to contradictory and complex phenomena on Japanese TV. Case studies include talent and stars, romance, anime, telops, game and talk shows, and live-action nostalgia shows. The book also looks at Japanese television from a political and economic perspective, with attention to Sky TV, production trends, and Fuji TV as an architectural presence in Tokyo.

The combination of textual analysis, clear argument, and historical and economic context makes this book ideal for media studies audiences. Its most important contribution may be moving the study of Japanese popular culture beyond the tired truisms about postmodernism and opening up new lines of thinking about television and popular culture within and between nations.

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto is Associate Professor in Department of East Asian Studies at New York University. He is the author of Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (2000) and Empire of Images and the End of Cinema (2007).

"An excellent resource for those interested in media programming and in Japanese culture and economic variables."

—M. A. Williams-Hawkins, Choice

“This book opens a new field of inquiry with untold riches. Long the competitor of cinema—although now a major investor—Japanese television has historically been the bane of Japanese film scholars. No more. Television, Japan, and Globalization collects a powerful set of essays on identity politics, industrial transformations, stardom, media convergence, and diaspora. We have been waiting for a book like this. Now that it is here, the future of Japanese moving image studies has clearly come into view.”

—Abé Mark Nornes, The University of Michigan

"A major contribution to the understanding of contemporary or recent Japanese popular culture. . . . A set of very accomplished and well-researched essays on contemporary Japanese televisual culture and its industry."

—John Clammer, Journal of Japanese Studies