Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji

2. Radio Drama in the Age of Television

· 35 ·· CHAPTER 2 · Radio Drama in the Age of Television The transistor radio, the stereo phonograph, and the television were all introduced to the Japanese public at about the same time at the end of the 1950s. Tokyo Tsūshin Kōgyō (later Sony) would release their TR-55 pocket-sized transistor radio to the Japanese market in 1955.1 The first stereo records were released in 1958 and could be played first on the new Victor STL-1S “Stereophonic Sound System.”2 Television broadcasting, which had begun on a small scale in 1953, was popularized by the completion of Tokyo Tower in December 1958 and the scramble to buy sets to watch the imperial wedding in April 1959 between current emperor Akihito and the former commoner Michiko. Sound was suddenly on the move—down the street, back and forth across a room, and in danger of being chased out of the marketplace and culture itself by television’s new combination of sound and moving images delivered directly to living rooms. Established radio drama scenarists began moving from radio to television, throwing the new commercial radio networks (legalized in June 1950) into a minor crisis and marking for some the end of the “Golden Age of Radio Dramas.”3 Listener- and viewership numbers moved dramatically between 1959 and 1963, with television use overtaking use of radio midway through 1961 according to surveys done by the Cabinet Ministry (Figure 2.1). Radio stations, much like the film studios, addressed the threat of television by recruiting young writing talent to create fresh material—programs targeted at the demographic of the scenarists themselves. At the moment when assistant directors like Ōshima Nagisa, Shinoda Masahiro, and Yoshida Kijū were being invited to direct their own features to revitalize the film studios (and capture the leading edge of the baby-boomer market), Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) and various regional commercial radio broadcasters also began airing radio dramas written by young authors and poets. Abe Kōbō and Tanikawa Shuntarō wrote scripts, and Terayama began writing for radio in 1958 on Tanikawa’s recommendation. Writing for radio paid well, and as such 36 RADIO DRAMA IN THE AGE OF TELEVISION it helped this young poet (fresh out of a three-year stay in the hospital) launch a professional writing career that would have been impossible had he limited himself to publishing poetry. If photography can be credited not only with pushing painting away from portraiture toward abstraction but also with forcing a reconceptualization of painting as something intimately tied to the brush stroke, to the canvas, to color, and to the texture of paint—that is, if the foregrounded material properties of the medium shifted, or were even discovered, as a result of an interaction with the development and popularization of another visual medium—then we should expect that something similar probably happened to radio through its relationship to television. Did this retroactive production of “essence” effectively create features experienced as core to, or at least intimately related to, broadcast radio? Does radio’s “blindness” relative to the visual media (a problem we can trace back at least to Rudolph Arnheim’s mid-1930s “In Praise of Blindness” in his book on radio) shift in a significant way during the transition from film to television?4 Figure 2.1. Radio listenership versus television viewership rates according to surveys done by the cabinet ministry of around three thousand citizens. Data from Hōsō ni kan suru yoron chōsa (Tokyo: Naikaku Sōridaijin Kanbō Kōhōshitsu, 1962). 1959 1960 1961 1962 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Percentage of Respondents watch TV daily listen to radio daily RADIO DRAMA IN THE AGE OF TELEVISION 37 If we look toward television as one of the forces mediating and conditioning our reception of radio, and particularly as a force that would have been in a listener’s mind as television was rapidly spreading through consumer culture, an apt approach to the radio dramas of that era might parallel visual culture’s emphasis on the mediation and regulation of images—an “audio culture” methodology. Following Irit Rogoff’s suggestion that a critical theorization of visual culture would focus on images (and their contested histories), viewing apparatuses (and their cultural narratives and technologies), and subjectivities of identification (the positions from which and through which we view), we could then, in the case of...