HOW TO WIN THE MODERN TOTALITARISM
- WHAT LAUGHTER MEANS IN JAPANESE MEDIA
Keiko Sei
When the communism collapsed in Eastern Europe in 1989. the majority of voices were that the capitalism won against the communism proving it to be a bad mechanism people also talked substantially about the role of media in helping the change, that the modern technology such as satellite TV, a video and computer didn't let the communist keep their totalitarian control of information.
Reserving this consensus, there is however another important factor in the so-colled capitalists' victory to be considered. That is what won the cold war regarding media in not the freedom and democracy against the totalitarian technic against the primitive technic of the conventional and rural totalitarism.
The rural group includes the old regime of the former USSR, DDR, Chechoslovakia, Romania and some other Eastern European countries and current China and North Korea which were naive enough to believe that the banning and the censorship solve the problem of their people being influenced by the Western "ideology" (or non-ideology), and the democratically elected Hungarian and Slovakian government after 1989, both of which have no linger power any more, that amateury tried to dominate the media by eliminating the oppositions from the state controlled TV and radio as well as the publications. The group also contains the current media of the former Yugoslavian republics.
At the urban group is formed mainly by America and Japan, the two capitalist giants where people are pickled in a excessive amount of information and entertainment.
The Japanese media is even far more science-fiction like than the American, which intentionally sends the merely happy entertainment in order to make their people believe that they live in happiest nation on the whole earth with the least problem. In its media a serious political event such as the fall of the Berlin wall is turned into a soapopera, and their gruesome war time past which should be discussed in replaced by a ultra-hip ethno-pop program with pretty Asian musicians.
The LPD government, which enjoyed the overwhelming stability in power for nearly 40 years until its and because of the recent corruption-scandals, in fact developed the highly sophisticated technic to capitalise laughter in media in order to maintain the power. To study the Japanese case therefore will open the alternative but significant view of the future watching when Asia is rapidly becoming to be dominant in the world's economy and the population, as well as of the historical study of the communists' blunder.
The paper, which is a series of my studies on media as political strategy, will examine the idea manipulation by laughter of Japan looking at the traditional role of laughter creators (and co-ordinators) and their new mission in the modern society.