Japanese Celebrity Media Intimacy. With their cross-platform media ubiquity, an idol group like AKB48 or Arashi is integrated into everyday life in Japan today.
On a morning "wide show,"15 a news report discusses Arashi's recent concert. Billboards in train stations feature the members of AKB48 in advertisements for everything from computers to coffee.
The magazine racks of convenience store and kiosks are crowded with magazines featuring members of these groups on their covers.
On the subway, a hanging advertisement for a tabloid magazine features gossip about the groups' members. On television, they star in dramas, host variety shows, and appear in commercials.
Altogether, with no effort or intention, one might easily encounter countless images of AKB48 or Arashi in the course of a day.
The frequency with which they and other idols and celebrities present themselves within Japan's media-saturated culture makes them not only identifiable but familiar.
In the daily routine of life in contemporary Japan, one might have more contact with a particular idol or celebrity than with one's own family. This is the basis for feelings of intimacy.
The intimacy with idols in Japan derives largely from the central importance of television as a medium in postwar Japan.
During the 1950s, due to the high price of television sets, there were few private owners, and audiences assembled in public spaces to watch television in the streets (gaito terebi).
16 By 1960, more than half of all households owned a television (Yoshimi 2003, 37). As television moved from the public sphere to the private sphere of the home, it had an immense impact on the experience of celebrity.
Once television was anchored in nearly every home by the 1970s, it became part of everyday life and a medium of greater intimacy.
The experience of celebrity was no longer liminal and collective, but routine and personal. Television celebrities, mediated through their interjection into the cycles of everyday life, became part of the structure of the new television family in postwar Japan.
The medium of television is a technology of intimacy. T.J.M. Holden and Hakan Ergill (2006, 106) refer to the production strategy of Japanese television as a form of "intentionally engineered intimacy," and attribute its success to the form and content of its programming.
Similarly, Andrew A. Painter (1996, 198) observes that intimacy is a result of Japanese television's construction of an "electronically created uchi" (in-group). He argues that Japanese producers and directors work to create intimacy by emphasizing themes related to unity and unanimity.
The intimacy that is created through television is not unique to Japan—it is a function of the medium's capacity to form an emotional relationship between the viewer and the television performer—but it is arguably more pronounced in Japan due to the performance of idols and celebrities across media genres and platforms.
While recent scholarship has affirmed that intimacy is central to the structure of Japanese television, the agency of its audience in its affective relationship to celebrity is also important for understanding media intimacy.
Though intimacy is structured in terms of rhetorical forms and patterns, the importance of affective intimacy in Japanese media culture demands greater attention to the forms of identification in star-audience relations (Stacey 1991).
Intimacy revolves around the audience's establishment of affective emotional ties to particular celebrity performers. Lukacs (2010, 29-31) argues that the "culture of intimate televisuality" in Japan is derived from its "tarento system."
Celebrity performers in Japan make the programming more appealing to Japanese viewers, who take pleasure in accumulating knowledge about the tarento. Owing to the ubiquity of celebrity images across the Japanese media, even non-fans are familiar with most popular tarento.
However, rather than focusing on the tarento system and its intertextuality, Lukacs examines the genre of dramas as "vehicles for the transmission of information about the tarento" (Ibid., 31).
Drama is but one node in the complex network of information about celebrities in Japan that includes wide shows, tabloid newspapers, weekly magazines, variety programs, social media, and so on.
The intimacy of celebrity is not reducible to any particular genre or platform, but is rather a function of the complex intertextuality of the larger Japanese media system.
