Being a part of the family? Genre, gender and production in a Japanese TV drama

In this article I use the concept of genre as a notion to look into the relationship between the production and the audience, especially on the production side. The empirical material of the study is a Japanese television family drama called Wataru seken wa oni bakari or Wataoni. Recently the concept of genre - traditionally known from literary theory and cinema studies - has been found useful especially in studies on (news) journalism. In these studies genre is usually defined as a cultural and social contract between the production and the audience, the rhetorical mode of address inherent in genre being a central notion. The mode of address is seen to recommend audience members certain meanings and viewing patterns. Although the idea of `communicative contract' also includes the production side, empirical studies of the rhetorical force of genre in both production and reception are rare. I propose that it can be useful in an empirical study to look into the ways in which genre addresses both the viewers and the makers. The way the generic mode of address works for each direction may differ, but nevertheless genre also persuades the makers to adopt a certain subject position and meaningful relationship with the programme in question.