Watching TV during Fieldwork

When I was in Ann Arbor, I didn’t watch TV at all. Since I came here two months ago, however, I have been watching TV for a couple of hours every day. At first, I started watching evening news with my father. Then, I added to my routine a few TV programs on Sunday. One of them is a live-broadcasting of debates among politicians on various political issues. It’s interesting (and, more often than not, frustrating) to watch Japanese politicians engaging in heated discussion on North Korea, China, the UN, and so on.

Another is NHK’s “Junior Special,” a social-studies kind of educational program for elementary school students. Actually, this program is not very good. I can see that the program aims to help kids develop a set of cognitive skills to answer why certain social phenomena are happening (or happened) by critically examining multiple variables and mechanisms, which the Japanese are said to be lacking due to the educational system that pushes students to memorization of facts. Nonetheless, in-program activities are not well organized to help the child actors investigate problems through logical and hypothetical reasoning. I often fail to see clear and cogent connections between problems, hints that the kids receive from adults, and answers that the adults tell them at the end. That is, they tend to stop at providing the kids with pieces of information and are not very successful in facilitating cognitive processes required to solve problems through coherent reasoning based on those facts that they could easily look up in the internet or encyclopedia. I don’t think NHK’s programs for learning English are very good, either, but it will take another blog entry to do justice to this topic.

Anyway, I think TV programs and ads can be useful data in understanding Japanese society and culture.