3
other countries. Unfortunately, Japanese investment in the cultural industries, however,
decreased with its worst economic recession since the early 1990s.
Literature Review
The changing role of the Japanese cultural industries in the last two decades was
usually examined by Japanese media scholars who studied some exceptionally
successful television program export phenomena. Among these, Sumiko Iwao and
Ithiel de Sola Pool (1984) studied Japanese television program flows with the case of
“Shogun” in the early 1980s. Hamid Mowlana and Mehdi Mohsenian Rad (1992) also
examined the growth of Japanese television programming to other countries with
special attention to the Japanese television programs of “Oshin” on Iranian television.
They argued that this effort has mirrored a desire on the part of a number of countries in
Asia and Middle East to consider Japan as a possible source of such programs. Kenichi
Ishii, Herng Su, and Satoshi Watanabe (1999) also addressed Japanese television
program penetration in Taiwan in the 1990s. They examined how historical and cultural
backgrounds affected Japanese television program trade in Taiwan.
Meanwhile, Dan Schiller (et al., 1994) reviewed U.S.-Japanese relations across
several sub-sectors of the communication industry in order to find communication
instrumentalities become less central to the larger process of political-economic
dominion in Japan. They argued an historical reason for the weakness of Japanese
cultural products by explaining the colonialism issue.
However, media scholars usually did not give much attention to Japan’s cultural
products. As Roya Akhavan-Majid (1990) addressed, despite the growing importance of
Japan on the international scene, the last five decades until the late 1980s, had seen few
analytical investigations of postwar mass media in Japan. In light with this argument,
Convention