Black Ships? Locating Netflix in Taiwan and Japan

This article compares the discourses around Netflix's expansion in two East Asian markets, Japan and Taiwan. Specifically, it looks at how the term "black ship" (kurofune in Japanese)—a historical reference to the Perry expedition to Japan in the 1850s—is frequently used as rhetoric by both Japanese and Taiwanese media critics to discuss Netflix's possible impact on their respective domestic markets. It explains how and why, although media critics in both Japan and Taiwan used a common rubric (i.e., black ship) to discuss the introduction of Netflix, the ways Netflix is situated in each country are substantially different.

As a video-streaming platform operating simultaneously in more than 190 countries, Netflix persistently proclaims itself as a service capable of deterritorializing our television experience by offering content that comes from around the world to audiences across the globe.¹ The future of online television, in Netflix's vision, seems to be both borderless and postnational. In practice, however, Netflix continues to abide by national and regional regulations, as other transnational television systems do. Its role as a business and a cultural form varies significantly across the globe. Such variations, nevertheless, are often overlooked in journalistic and scholarly discussions of Netflix. This tendency limits scholars' account of Netflix and the ecology of internet-distributed television in diverse global contexts. It is imperative to examine Netflix's specific cultural role comparatively across different national contexts, in the understanding that Netflix, similar to television, is a set of cultural practices, technologies, and markets that "can only be studied as located."² By contextualizing the black-ship discourses in Japan and Taiwan, this article not only accounts for the introduction of Netflix in these two East Asian markets but also shows the importance of a comparative approach for studying internet-distributed television in increasingly transnational contexts.

Originally, kurofune referred to US Navy Commodore Matthew Perry's gunboat diplomacy and military expedition, which forced Japan to open its borders to foreign trade in the 1850s, after two centuries of isolation. In contemporary Japanese contexts, the term is often used by the public to describe the launch of a Western (usually American) product, service, or enterprise, as well as its impact on the domestic market. Depending on the intentions of the people employing the term, kurofune may imply a wary or defensive tone of uncertainty about the unpredictable impact, or it may be used in a descriptive sense.

To examine the kurofune discourses around Netflix, it is important to consider how the arrival of transnational satellite broadcasting was understood in Japan during the 1990s. Transnational satellite broadcasting was one of the first media phenomena analogized as kurofune by Japanese media. According to Koichi Iwabuchi, the kurofune discourse on Japanese media suggests that, with the rise of transnational satellite broadcasting, the Japanese industry "can no longer enjoy a self-contained domestic market, but rather is now under threat of being forced to open its doors to the world."³ However, different from the Perry Expedition, in which the foreign forces had profound influence on Japanese society, Iwabuchi points out that in practice, the presence of foreign television in Japan did not seem to pose a real threat to the domestic market, as audiences strongly preferred domestic content. By comparison, he argues that in Japan in the 1990s, there were doubts over the ability of the famously inward-looking Japanese producers to create content that would be appealing to international markets, where they faced considerable competition. For Iwabuchi, concerning the impact of transnational broadcasting on the domestic industry, "what is at stake this time is less a foreign invasion of Japan than a Japanese advance into global media markets."⁴

How, then, can we understand the resurgence of kurofune discourses when Netflix Japan launched in September 2015, the company's first venture into East Asia? While Japanese media critics tended to employ kurofune to describe, quite defensively, the arrival of transnational satellite television as a threat to the domestic industry in the 1990s, they have tended to use the term in a looser and more ambiguous manner when it is...