1
The Comfort Zone
THE SELLING OF 9/11
How a National Tragedy Become a Commodity
Edited and with an Introduction by
DANA HELLER
Chapter 5
The comfort zone:
Japan’s Media Marketing of 9/11[1]
Yoneyuki Sugita
The 9/11 terrorist attacks were of course big news in Japan. And it was made bigger still by the Japanese people. However, reporting the 9/11 attacks and subsequent related events presented a problem for the Japanese media for two reasons. First, the media was at a loss to explain what had actually happened. Second, and more fundamentally troublesome, was how to understand the significance and meaning of the attacks through the lens of Japanese society. The value of 9/11 as a media commodity depended on the Japanese mass media’s abilities to locate the comfort zone, or to package these events and their meanings in a manner that the Japanese public would find compelling and comprehensible. In the process of tack-ling these problems, the media passed though a period of situating and resituating the shocking images of airline passenger planes smashing into the World Trade Center towers, building that were very familiar to the millions of Japanese tourists who had visited New York City or to the many Japanese moviegoers who knew the New York City skyline from watching Hollywood films.
“When confronted by a culturally exotic enemy, our first instinct is to understand such conduct in terms that are familiar to us—terms that make sense to us in light of our own fund of experience.” writes Lee Harris, as part of this attempt to chart the West’s course of action in response to 9/11.[2] When the term “enemy” id replaced with “event,” Harris’s comment becomes an accurate description of the situation that the Japanese mass media tends to confine major events, especially news about an overseas crisis (usually read as a crisis involving the United States), within certain categories of understanding that the Japanese public are long familiar with. The Japanese mass media long ago convinced itself that it had to set agenda for how major news items, especially items that suggest the need for response to foreign policy changes, would be presented to the Japanese public. For example, if North Korea were to test launch a ballistic missile, broadcast TV would immediately start showing new or stick video of the missile leaving the launch pad, complemented by an overlay of ominous-sounding background music to deepen the impression of danger and threat, with the rest of the media echoing this style of reporting. Above all, media outlets across the board could be relied on to follow the time-tested formula of analyzing the implication of the launch for Japan’s safety within the context of the U.S.-Japan bilateral security agreement. No major or popular mass media outlet would think of discussing the possibility that North Korea moth have legitimate state interests that its government decided to protect, as any country with a functioning central government would consider doing, and that ballistic missiles might represent a defensive counterthreat to any country contemplating military aggression against North Korea (usually read as the United States, but sometimes understood to include Japan).
In short, the Japanese mass media considers news items not as reportage of political, economic, social, or business events, but as reportage of political, economic, social, or business events, but asinformation products to be sold to the Japanese public. The best marketing strategy is to fit these news items into test-marketed categories, or "comfort zones," by which I mean the categories of collective understanding that Japan's mass media assumes the public is comfortable with. The media as an organ of propaganda serving government and/or corporate interests is not my concern here. While propaganda in support of state or corporate interests occurs to a significant degree on a daily basis, the Japanese media is less nervous about government ministerial or business agents looking over their shoulder and more concerned with how news items can be presented in ways that are appealing and familiar to the public andthat fit preexisting popular notions of Japan's place in the world.
As a story about a major overseas event, 9/11 was at first difficult for Japan's mass media to cover. While it was soon reported that theterrorists who hijacked and flew the airliners were apparently from Middle Eastern countries, the attacks themselves did not immediately fit into any category of understanding about the Middle East region, or any other global situation already familiar to the Japanese media. Consequently, the media found that it had to experiment for a period of time with different ways of marketing 9/11-related news. Generally speaking, the marketing of 9/11 proceeded initially through four coverage themes: (1) constant repetition of the spectacular images of the attacks (the airplane crashes into the World Trade Center) in a fairly decontextualized, apolitical, and dichotomous fashion (innocent New Yorkers victimized by crazed terrorists); (2) the positioning of the 9/11 terrorist attacks within the context of Islam and the Middle East, a religion and a region unfamiliar to most Japanese prior to 9/11; (3) expressions of sympathy for Americans and praise for America's greatness as represented by its ability to quickly get back on its own feet; and, (4) reports aboutwhat seemed to e a resurgence ofAmerican nationalism, which were coupled with reports of sudden and jarring American demonstrations of a consensual desire to rail against and kill all terrorists.
Finally, after the launch of the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, the Japanese mass media found a way to present 9/11 in a way that fit into the nation's comfort zones, or preexisting sense-making categories that both the media and the public are at ease with. These categories were based on:
(a) The Japanese public's understanding of the protection provided by the United States, in the form of the more than fifty-year-old U.S.-Japan bilateral security agreement, which operates not only to provide Japan with security but that has also provided, historically speaking, room for Japanese companies and government ministries to pursue enrichment and economic growth;
(b) Ambivalent pacifism, a belief structure in Japanese society that houses two opposing popular desires: (1) a strong emphasis on Japan's newfound postwar interest in pacifism and (2) the desire for Japan to play a more substantial role in international affairs.
This chapter demonstrates that in the case of 9/11 the Japanese mass media believe that success as agenda-setters for the public, along with commercial success (after all, with the exception of Japan’s public broadcasting station, the media consists of for-profit commercial entities), depends on keeping the news confined to these categories. When the Japanese mass media linked 9/11 to the U.S.-Japan alliance, it realized that it had finally found a groove that could supplant earlier nerve-wracking reporting attempts. When this happened, the mass media was able to prolong public interest in 9/11 beyond the temporarily arresting images of suicide airplane attacks. Once 9/11 linked by the media to the U.S.-Japan alliance, there was room for opinionated disagreement among, for example, those who support the alliance and those who do not; those in favor of dispatching Japan’s Self Defense Forces (SDF) to Afghanistan’s coastal waters in support of America’s military campaign, and those who support it. But unquestionable itself was the U.S.-Japan alliance, which Japan’s mass media used as the overriding lens for viewing 9/11 and explaining its ramifications for Japan to the Japanese people. Any other analytical option, even the obvious one of attempting to understand how the Arab world's growing hatred for the United States had contributed to 9/11, was scarcely considered.
As this discussion concerns the Japanese mass media and its role of translating the meaning of 9/11 to the Japanese public, the main focus will be on television news and news shows broadcast by commercial television stations (with the exception of NHK, Japan's public broadcast station), major nationwide newspapers, tabloid newspapers, popular magazines with large circulations, books published by mass-market publishers, and polls. The manner in which Japan's television stations and leading mass-media writers covered 9/11 will be surveyed in order to arrive at a general understanding of the prevalent mass-media strategies for marketing the 9/11 attacks.
Spectacular Images and Simplistic Viewpoints
In Japan, it was evening when the first aircraft crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Japan's mass-media coverage of the 9/11 attacks began with dramatic, Hollywood-style images on the TV screen. As in the West, commercial TV stations in Japan continuously replayed the spectacular images of the jet crashes to keep viewers riveted to the screen. The public was informed by these fast-paced, shocking images rather than by detailed and objective commentaries. While this approach was understandable given the absence of explanatory facts during the early days of 9/11 coverage, the news bureau director at Nippon Television (NTV), one of Japan's three major commercial broadcasters, readily admits that at the outset, commentary about 9/11 (explanation and analysis) was kept to a minimum and served mainly as an organizational device to help viewers process the far more important video images. As the NTV news director put it: "We all know that the public was interested in knowing the facts immediately after the incident took place. Broadcasting, however, needs a series of attractive flows: a live broadcast, a report, a summary, and a commentary. When we have the right rhythm of flow, our audience will not change the channels. Commentaries are necessary to keep the flow moving."[3] The emphasis was on big-picture drama and action. Echoing this preference for visual as opposed to analytical content, the chief news executive at another major commercial network, Fuji Television Network, said he wanted "images of the scene rather than people's faces." The NTV news director claimed that his station was giving the public what it wanted. "What matters most is what the viewers wish to see. Of course, that is footage of the scene," he said.[4]
Only one of Japan's three commercial networks, NTV, broadcast an extended special (lasting two hours) the night of 9/11. The NTV program, which was titled "Exclusive: Worldwide Simultaneous Exposition-09/11 Camera was Inside the Building," converted the attacks into aesthetic commodities, accompanied by such window-dressing features as exclusive video shots from all sorts of angles, constant replays of the most dramatic images, a succession of well-thought descriptions of visual elements, and other sophisticated visual presentation techniques. Absent, however, was analytical substance or any serious attempt to explain why the attacks had happened. Thus, it can be argued that NTV's news special was quite successful at dramatizing 9/11, especially as scary relatives of the victims and heroic activities by firefighters pulled at the heart-strings of Japanese audiences. Indeed, NTV registered a TV rating of 30.4 percent of all households for this program, an astonishing success given that in Japan even popular TV entertainment shows rarely command ratings of higher than 18 percent, and very few programs have reached 30 percent.[5] The shocking scenes presented in this program undoubtedly upset many viewers and produced anger at the still-unknown assailants, but viewers were presented with no objective analysis of who might have been responsible for the attacks, or why.[6]
During the two-hour news special, NTV paraded various "experts" across the screen, but the result was only speculation and superficial examination. The main job of these experts was to break the silence of watching the nonstop onscreen horrors with provocative remarks. In contrast, Japan's public broadcasting station, NHK, tried to fulfill its mission of presenting only the objective facts without any spectacular enhancement. As part of its coverage, NHK opted not to invite outside experts but to rely solely on its in-house staff. NHK's editor-in-chief later said, "In this kind of ongoing emergency, the mission of the public broadcasting station is to convey only the facts. Consequently, we focused on live footage from the scenes and reports from NHK's correspondents. At that particular time, we did not have much background information about the incident. We came to the conclusion that it was too early to invite external experts for commentary."[7]
In short, eye-popping scenes initially had a startling impact on Japanese television viewers, but otherwise the public did not know what to make of 9/11. The continuous broadcast of these scenes did not fall within a comfort zone. There was no immediately available category of understanding that could be referenced, and hence speculation about 9/11 was rife, not only on TV but also in the print media. The excitement generated by the initial coverage of 9/11 quickly began to die down as there was no central news focus and the public became inured to burning and collapsing buildings. To maintain interest in 9/11, the Japanese mass media began searching for sound bites. When President George Bush announced that the 9/11 attacks meant that the United States was at war, the Japanese media jumped immediately on his words. They quickly and uncritically accepted Bush's simplified explanation of what had happened and how America would respond: A terrorist group called "Al Qaeda" was responsible for the attacks. Osama bin Laden is their leader. Both fundamentalists and protectors of fundamentalists arc the bad guys while Americans are innocent victims. This would be a war on terrorism, and the fight against terrorism would be a righteous crusade.
War, especially a war declared by the world's only superpower, is guaranteed to arouse public interest and generate media coverage in any country. But Bush's sudden war rhetoric struck a chord that was more familiar in Japan than in most other countries, especially when one considers that Japan's memory of its wartime defeat is only a half-century old and that since that time there has been a steady drumbeat of war-related concerns in the context of the generally quite prominent coverage Japan's mass media gives to the implications of any change in Japan's security relationship with the United States. The war rhetoric helped transform 9/11 into an information product that the mass media felt it could market more easily, especially as it was becoming evident that the Japanese people were hungering for a more meaningful explanation of what happened and its ramifications. Not only did the Japanese mass media need to find the right explanatory format, it also needed to distill information into simple black-and-white terms, to make 9/11 consistent with the usual approach to reporting major foreign policy stories in Japan. The war rhetoric that started to flow from the Bush administration and its Manichean view of evildoers vs. innocent victims exactly suited the Japanese mass media's need to roll out a different category of understanding.[8]
Focus on the Middle East
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, mass media outlets such as newspaper tabloids, popular magazines, and publishers of general-interest books began marketing 9/11 from a different perspective. Because the terrorist attacks were executed by Islamic fundamentalists, there was a sudden surge of interest in the Middle East and Islam, made more intense by the fact that most Japanese barely had any knowledge of the region and its leading religion. A number of popular books on Islam and the Middle East, not to mention maps of Afghanistan, experienced a strong surge in sales.[9]
Keeping in step, Japan's commercial TV networks began to air programs that dealt primarily with Islam and the Middle East. Beyond this thirst for basic knowledge, the question underlying these TV programs, and the information in the press, was whether Japan, too, might become the victim of terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists. Whether it was ignorance or a preference for simple-minded explanations, the tabloids, popular magazines, and TV gossip programs chose to represent the Islamic world as monolithic and essentially different from the modern Western world (which for the purposes of this reporting included Japan), and therefore mysterious and dangerously "other." Osama bin Laden, whom the United States regarded as the terrorist mastermind behind 9/11, was described as the leader of a global Islamic terrorist network. In short, bin Laden and the Islamic world were paired and presented as treacherous and evil, dangers to those living in the West-and possibly in Japan.[10]
From the outset of the Japanese mass media's focus on Afghanistan, which the U.S. government had decided to confront militarily, the Taliban were essentially described as alien beings, liable, Japanese viewers were told, to behave immorally. Following up on Bush's declaration of a "war on terrorism," the Japanese media decided that it had to make clear to the public who the enemy was. Taking their cue from U.S. assertions of the nature of the terrorist threat, the Japanese mass media in short order went along with designating the Taliban as the primary enemy target, though there was no independent Japanese government official report or Japanese media investigation to confirm whether this determination was warranted, With this biased presumption now in hand, the Japanese mass media thought it would be much easier to find an audience-pleasing way to report on the next 9/11 event, which was the start of military operations in Afghanistan. From a business-marketing standpoint the sensible course of action was to report the attack on Afghanistan in uncomplicated, dichotomous "good vs. evil" terms."[11]