What’s Up With Japanese TV?

Something quirky people often don’t know about me is the extent to which I watch Japanese TV. Ever since I started learning Japanese 6-7 years ago, I’ve snuck in some amount of watching Japanese shows into nearly every day of my life, including many very early mornings where I’d set my alarm for 5am here in the US to catch a live drama as it aired in Japan’s evening.

In the thousands upon thousands of hours I’ve watched over the years, it’s been super interesting picking up on the unique ways Japanese TV goes about drawing in viewers, as well as how it differs from American TV in certain culture and design elements – something that I think would be especially fun to learn about for those interested in localization. So, let’s dive in!

Introduction

All TV, regardless of country or genre, has one main goal:

Draw in viewers.

Sounds pretty basic, right? However, the ways in which this goal is accomplished are quite different around the world, and understanding the varied methods in which other regions consume media is something very important in many fields, such as marketing, user design, and localization. Let’s take a deeper look into Japanese TV and a few ways it goes about drawing in viewers.

Elaborate Subtitles

One of the first things that any foreigner in Japan is likely to comment on upon turning on a Japanese variety show is: Why is there always so much text popping out on the screen?

It can be a bit over the top if you’re not used to it. Every Japanese variety show has colorful subtitles with elaborate typesetting, and the text often jumps out at you with special effects.

There are a few different reasons that people have given for this. One is that, well, it’s a means of drawing in viewers. By making stuff pop out so much, the show is more visually appealing and likely to capture attention. Additionally, when someone on screen makes a joke, the added typesetting glamor (which is often accompanied by canned sound effects) enhances the entertainment value.

Another reason is that it helps with accessibility – by putting text on the screen emphasizing important aspects of the dialogue and narration, it makes it easier to follow along for someone who has trouble parsing spoken Japanese, especially given the large number of homophones in the language. There are also cases where the subtitles are creatively combined with other visuals, which can be thought to serve both an entertainment and accessibility purpose. In the picture above, the characters on screen are talking about certain people in vague terms like “the funny guy” and “the annoying girl”, and the added face icons in the subtitles are both clarifying for who they’re talking about and also amusing because it adds to the humor.

One other explanation comes from a design perspective: as pointed out by this btrax article, Japanese people tend to seek out information by reading text, and more emphasis is thus put on typography. The elaborate subtitle style in TV is one example of this, but it’s also present in ads, websites, and many other platforms.

Text on News Programs

Let’s step away from variety shows for a moment to focus on something completely different: news. I think this is especially interesting to look at, particularly when compared to American news programs.

For example, the average American news show begins by showing an overview of stories to be covered throughout the program, most of which look something like this:

The main focus is on the video footage giving a visual overview of each of the main stories, allowing viewers to gather information from quickly glancing at the screen for just a couple seconds.

So how does this compare to the way Japanese news programs do it?

Well, here’s a snapshot showing news shows from four of the biggest TV channels in Japan:

Many might think, “How could this possibly draw in viewers? It’s literally a wall of text!”

I’ve written about this before, but the “wall of text” can be explained by what was mentioned earlier: Japanese people generally tend to seek out information through reading text. Because there is lots of textual info, viewers are able to get a better holistic overview of all the news stories to be covered, and it makes it easy to decide whether to watch if they see that a story they’re interested in will be discussed.

Additionally, if you look closer, there are a couple formatting decisions that do make things easier to parse:

• Important words in each headline are put in a different color for emphasis.
• In the news programs in right half of the photo, the stories are color-coded for type of story: blue for sports, pink for showbiz, and yellow-orange for “normal” news.
• The bottom left news program has small visual photos to accompany the text. Still, this is much different than the American news example, where the visuals were the main focus.

All of these aid viewers in being able to pick out the information they need to understand exactly what will be covered on the show. Usually, there will be at least one story that catches their eye, so it can be a good technique to get viewers to watch.

Personally, I’ve actually come to like the Japanese format better myself over the years. While American news does sometimes have the news ticker at the bottom, you have to devote full attention to it to understand the tiny text going by (and the news ticker stories are usually not even touched upon in the actual news program), whereas for Japanese news shows it’s very easy to track everything through the headlines that are repeatedly shown on screen as each story is discussed.

Interactive Broadcasts

Have you ever owned a TV with a remote that has these colored buttons?

They’re fairly common, but in the West, these buttons rarely have any (non-trivial) use.

In Japan, however, TV programs often utilize the colored buttons as a way for viewers to participate in interactive activities. This could take the form of a quiz in which viewers guess the answers along with the show participants (left picture), or simply a minigame that viewers can pop out on the screen to play at any time during a show’s broadcast (right picture).

What’s especially appealing is that viewers can actually sometimes win prizes from the TV channels through these games! The “prizes” could be anything from little merchandise goods related to the show, to gift cards that can be used at different stores and restaurants. It’s a pretty genius way of attracting viewers in my opinion and makes you wonder why this doesn’t exist in other countries.

There’s Something for Everyone

Another trend I see is that shows tend to feature many different “segments” that increase the chance of reaching a wider audience. The majority of morning news programs will have fun segments interspersed between news blocks (perhaps comparable to The Today Show in the US, if you’re familiar with that). My favorite one, Nippon TV’s ZIP!, for example:

• Has a segment at around 6:55am every day where you can eat breakfast with one of the TV anchors (see picture), which pulls in the foodie viewers as well as encouraging a fun regular routine that viewers will watch the show to follow along with
• Features a celebrity or well-known figure on each day of the week to accompany the main TV anchors throughout the broadcast, which is likely to attract younger viewers who are fans
• Has a “what’s trending” segment so viewers can stay current with pop culture trends
• Always ends by showing off attractive tourist spots in different Japanese prefectures, creating connections with viewers who get to see their prefecture represented

This “variety in segments” aspect extends to other programming as well, such as game shows. Whereas many American game shows center around a single concept (e.g. Jeopardy is all about answering trivia questions, The Price is Right is all about guessing prices of merchandise), Japanese game shows will often have several completely unrelated games. The show in the picture below, for example, visually lists out the 6 (entirely different) game segments contestants are competing in:

By providing so much variety, at least one of these is going to be a game that a viewer enjoys, so a wider audience is reached. It’s also worth noting that the games themselves can even change from week to week, adding even more variety so that viewers can always look forward to something fresh each time.

Notice this particular example also bears some resemblance to how news programs list out the headlines of all the stories they’re going to cover – by giving viewers a holistic overview of what will be on the show and a way to track where they are, it provides more comprehensive info they can use to make a decision on whether to watch. Don’t like the current game segment? That’s fine, just wait until the next one in 15 minutes that you do like more.

In Conclusion

Japanese TV can be quite unique in its various traits, many of them traceable back to certain themes such as how visual design is so different between Japan and the US. An understanding of these underlying themes can help us understand how to best create content to resonate with a target audience, as the design of the content is often just as important as the content itself.

There is actually one major aspect of drawing in viewers I did not cover here, though: the heavy use of idols, celebrities, and comedians as a way of getting fans to watch shows these well-known figures appear on. However, this closely ties in with Japanese marketing which I felt deserved its own separate post – check it out if you want to see a comparison of American and Japanese commercials for companies like McDonald’s and Amazon!