Keywords

1 Introduction

TV program greatly affects Japanese daily life. People can communicate each other by talking about contents of TV program and often guide people to one direction of political movement. In this paper we examine Japanese people hospitality so called OMOTENASHI in famous TV program; “Asa-Dora”. In OMOTENASHI bowing is very important, so that bowing style and scene were investigated. Through bowing style Japanese people attitude was discussed. First the meaning of “Asa-Dora” was explained and high viewer rating dram “Asa ga kita” was presented. In this drama all of bowing seens scene were picked up and the style was divided into 6 type and relation between the style and scene was discussed.

2 The Meaning of “Asa-Dora”

<“Dora” is short for “Drama”> It is the drama broadcast in the morning slot every day. Especially, it refers to “Television novel” it had been broadcasted from 1961 by NIPPON HOSO KYOKAI (NHK). It is general term the drama broadcast by NHK. Broadcasting form is changing gradually, but the basic form is one story is 15 min are broadcasted 6 days a week for a half year (26 weeks, about 156 times). It is picked up on media as Japanese representative drama with “epic drama”. This is only the drama program audience rating of every time and every week is released. Most of the stories are home drama based on the heroine’s life and their family, and the main character is basically woman.

3 The Story of “Asa ga kita”

In end of Edo period, she was born as the second daughter into wealthy merchant family in Kyoto. Her name is Asa (Haru) who is the tomboy likes Sumo very much. She has a sister Hatsu (Miyazaki Aoi) who is eager to lessons of Koto and sewing. They married into their fiancés in Osaka, and they lived through a turbulent Era in Osaka.

Asa got married to Shinjiro (Tamaki Hiroshi) who is the second son at a famous exchange company Kanoya in Osaka, but after began Meiji Era, their business had been critical because it couldn’t meet the new era. Shinjiro said “Making money isn’t my nature.” and he began amusing with shamisen. When Kanoya will go bankrupt, Shinjiro took the new job to Asa “the management of a coal mine”. He said “It is the age of coal now.” His words made Asa became absorbed in “business” she has be interested from she was a child.

Asa went to Kyushu there are a lot of coal by oneself, and she met coal miners who didn’t work while drinking. On the one hand, Hatsu married into the oldest exchange company Sannojiya, but it went bankrupt due to the Meiji Restoration. After that Hatsu disappeared like skipped town at night. Asa could find her at last, and she offered supporting money to Hatsu. However, she and her husband Soube (Tsukamoto Yu) declined it, and they went to Wakayama to restart their lives.

The time has passed, Asa was working as businesswoman, but there were a lot of trouble in male-oriented society. One day, she met Godai Tomoatsu (Dean Fujioka) who makes an effort for development of Osaka. He said “Support people who are going to start new business!” Asa accepted the bank business, and supported a lot of people. Then, she also trained the first women bank clerk.

Kanoya begin life insurance business, and their business expansion was progressive. Asa accepted the final job was founding the first girls’ school. She could collect donation by her vitality and virtue. The day of foundation, Asa talked to students about her thought of education for girls.

After that, she back out of all business, and decided to live the rest of her life with Shinjiro. At last, she talked to students about her thought from her experience.

4 Audience Rating and Reputation of “Asa ga kita”

4.1 “Asa ga kita” Average Audience Rating is the Highest in the World 23.5

“Asa” of the title means morning in English. This title has a meaning “This drama will make the world brightly such as the morning coming lead opening the new world.”

It is the effective to make the highest rating that an era setting is the period of great change from end of Edo to Meiji. Today this society was enveloped in sense of hopelessness, and we can’t see the future well. We can be absorbed in this drama because there is how the woman lived through this turbulent era with great paradigm shift.

In addition, this is important Kansai was the theater of this drama because if it was in same era, we can see it from different viewpoint depend on each position. It makes new discovery. Almost Bakumatsu restoration drama was mainly samurai story when Edo was the theater of drama. In this case, it wasn’t interesting because there was a custom in samurai family. However, on “Asa ga kita”, there are a lot of Osaka merchant with vitality.

Haru who performed Asa went well with the character. Her fresh performance as amateur actress matched the young hostess in exchange company and person in charge of coal mine. She could become the heroine who we want to cheer her.

Older sister Hatsu also worked actively in the first half of this drama. She gave large depth because of her life and character different from Asa. This is one of “double heroine” structure, amateur actress Haru and versatile actress Miyazaki Aoi, so viewer saw this drama while comparing the two lives.

“Asa ga kita” has three factors of Asa-Dora’s royal road “woman’s biography”, “working drama”, and “grown up story”.

5 Observation

“Asa ga kita” was watched carefully and bowing scene was picked up. The bowing style was classified into 6 kinds; sitting bowing and standing bowing, and inclination angle was 15°, 30° and 45°. Examples are shown in Fig. 1. Scene was categorized into 5 kinds: Greeting, Apologizing, Acknowledgment, Requesting and Thanks. Total observation time was 360 min 24 times broadcasting.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Various bowing style

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6 Results

Total 70 scene was observed. These data was summarized in Table 1. The type of bowing, scene, person name who did bowing, person name whom was received bowing were appeared in this table.

Table 1. Bowing scenes
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7 Discussion and Conclusion

Table 2 shows statistic of bowing style. The sitting 45° bowing is almost a half of total number. And then the order is sitting 30°, standing 15° and standing 30°. The standing 45° is very rare case.

Table 2. Classification of bowing style and scene
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Japanese people life style is Tatami culture, so that sitting bow is majority. The meaning of 45° is, that is deep bowing, apologize. It can be said that bowing style contains the expression of person’s feeling. Apologize feeling brings deep bowing, so that from bowing style we can estimate person’s feeling.