By Rebecca Jennison

Suzuki Midori has been a tireless advocate of "media literacy" for more than two decades.  Through her work in Japan with the Forum for Citizen's Television and Media (FCT), which she helped found in 1977, Suzuki has facilitated numerous citizens' "media watch" projects.  These have led to an informed critique of commercial television programming for children, as well as of gender stereotypes and other misconceptions and biases found in the mainstream Japanese media.

     By translating and locally publishing Media Literacy: A Resource Guide, originally produced by the Education Ministry of Ontario, Canada, FCT has introduced Japanese to the notion of  "the critical analysis of the media from the standpoint of audiences, especially those socially and economically disadvantaged."
     Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, recognizing the increasing importance of critical media studies, recruited Suzuki in 1994 to develop a university-level course in the field .  While continuing to build a grass-roots citizen's movement for media literacy, Suzuki has developed educational materials which will enable the introduction of media literacy studies into classrooms at high schools, universities and lifelong-learning centers.
     Suzuki also now serves as Japan's first  NPO (non-profit organization) representative on a Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) commission which is discussing ways to implement "media literacy" in education and in all levels of local government.
     Though Suzuki Midori is clearly an innovator, she is not out of line with traditional Japanese wisdom.  As an old proverb here puts it, "If you believe everything you read, you had better not read."
 

REBECCA JENNISON: Let's begin with the definition of media literacy. You have said that while the term  is becoming more well known, there is still some confusion about its meaning, and perhaps even willful misinterpretation, especially in government circles. Could you explain?

SUZUKI MIDORI: Media literacy means the people's — the audiences' — ability to critically analyze and evaluate what they see, hear and read.  It also means having wider access to various media and to the production of social communications in a variety of contexts.  Since acquiring the ability to critically analyze the media requires learning, a range of educational activities are inseparable from my definition of the term.
    For the last several years, interest in what many call "media education" has been growing.  But there is still a tendency on the part of many academics, the Ministry of Education and others to confuse media literacy with a more conventional notion of teaching computer or audio-visual skills.  We encounter great resistance to the idea of helping students become "critical" analysts of media.

Could you give us an example of what you actually do in a ML workshop or classroom?

First of all, we usually take what would seem like a lot of time to analyze even a short commercial or TV segment.  In my seminar this year, we spent most of the semester working on a single 60-second Nescafe ad.  In a workshop last year, we spent a whole day looking at a 5-minute news segment on the opening of the Nagano Olympics.  I have students split up into groups and fill in worksheets.  What works best is to have one group working on each aspect: camera angles, gestures, sound track, script, etc.  I ask the students to write down in words everything they notice.  It's amazing how much you have to write to convey what happens in just a short segment.

Studies done in America have shown that media content, whether news or otherwise, which avoids stimulating critical thinking in readers or viewers tends to be more successful in delivering a buy-happy audience to advertisers.  The U.S. trend, with some exceptions, seems to be running toward dumber news and programming as a result.  Would you say that's happening here too?

Yes, it's like "infotainment." It's true. Compared with Japan, we used to think of America as the country of strong journalism, but now it's becoming more commercialized.  In that sense, what we're talking about is not just happening in Japan — it's a worldwide trend.  Media is a very profitable  business today.   Young people are eager to go into the field in this so-called "information age."  That's why "critical analysis," the key term in Media Literacy, is so important, and why the emphasis on democracy is so important.

You are now a member of the MPT's panel of experts working on media literacy.  Could you tell us about that?

For several years now, partly as a result of discussions here and abroad about the V-chip, the ministry has shown an increasing interest in media literacy.  Last November ('99), they asked me to join a "Panel of Experts on Media Literacy and Young People in the Field of Broadcasting." The Panel's first report was published in June, and I can say that we finally got them to include a really clear definition of the aims of media literacy in this report.

How did you manage to do that?

There is a very bright young woman working for the MPT now, and she worked hard to put this into place.  She sent me the drafts to check and spent hours going over them with me here in Kyoto.  She's picked up on the fact that a lot of departments, such as the Ministry of Education, are actually interested in this and have read all the literature.  She sees how important it is — not only to introduce a more radical working definition of media literacy,  but also to look at how it's being talked about in terms of policy and implementation by other policy makers.
     One example is in the guidelines on gender equality. This is still at the proposal stage, but it's being discussed at the level of national government.  As you may know, the Plan of Action put forth at the '95 Women's Conference in Beijing lays out clear guidelines concerning women's rights and the media. But the Ministry of Education has mis-interpreted or mistranslated these guidelines, emphasizing policing or surveillance from above.  This goes directly against the principles of participation and empowerment that are so important when we talk about media literacy.

You have often said that children's rights and women's rights — minorities' — rights, actually — are central to media literacy.

I think it's important to look at gender issues, and other minority issues, not as separate, "special" issues, but as an integral part of critical media studies.  If you look at the news, advertising and entertainment with this in mind, you can quickly see gender and other inequalities. It's all related.  In my Study Guide, I have tried to include gender and minority perspectives from the start.  In a very fundamental sense, discrimination is there.  We need to look more carefully at a deeper level, learn to recognize the discriminatory messages and practices in the mainstream media, and realize the extent to which the various media end up perpetuating the problem — how they reproduce and  support  what is beneficial to certain interests  and the extent to which they exclude and negate viewpoints that are not profitable or otherwise advantageous for them. We need to learn to see that  this is the very structure that needs changing.

Why is it so difficult to introduce the notion of a critical analysis? Do publishers and broadcasters see media literacy efforts as adversarial?

They are very resistant to this.  They are only interested in pleasing the Japanese government and don't really care about the viewing audiences.  They seem to think audiences should just follow along with what they say.  It's like they're telling us, "What's the problem?  Don't bother us with your complaints."

What efforts are underway to promote media literacy elsewhere in Asia?

I was at a symposium in Taipei earlier this year, and can say they are just at the stage of starting to define the issues and discuss approaches to implementing media literacy. Sophia Wu, a young scholar there, is taking the lead.  As a teacher she sees the importance of nurturing a critical awareness and she's making this the central focus of her work.  Oh has brought many of her students to the symposium.  Other scholars I met were also very enthusiastic about learning more.  One reason is that Taiwan now has a new, democratic government, so they feel it's a crucial, opportune moment to begin incorporating media literacy into their work.  More than reform of the media, they are interested right now in learning about media. and introducing such studies into the educational curriculum. They have already started holding workshops for teachers.
     Around Asia the trend is to look at democracy and a broader view of social issues.  In Canada they're certainly concerned with these questions, but since many teachers there are already teaching media literacy, specialists are focusing more on the specifics of how and what to teach.
      Interest in media literacy is definitely growing in Asia, and on the whole one finds a much higher level of concern about social issues in other Asian countries than we unfortunately find in Japan. In this country there's a lot of talk about a joho kakusa, or "information divide," with regard to the developing world, but it's really capitalism that's creating it.  And development agencies are only pushing the "hardware" in those countries and missing the real meaning of an information gap.  One can solve the hardware problem by just giving out money, but the really important question is about people's lives: how discrimination is being made worse, or people's values are being altered, due to this information age.  The extent to which cultures themselves are being influenced.

Could you tell us more about the Media Literacy Study Guide you have just published?*

It was written for high school students and their teachers to use together in the classroom, or for participants and facilitators in lifelong learning workshops and classrooms.  But it's not a manual just for the teacher: every participant has the same book, so all are on equal footing as they learn about media literacy.  It can also be used in universities.

At the unversity level it would be a matter of individual teachers adopting it as a text, but what about at high schools?

The same.  From 2002 there will be a new "sogo gakushu"  (a period for integrated study) in the Japanese high school curriculum.  The Education Ministry is introducing this free elective period, and teachers can choose whatever they want to do.  At the same time, the schools are suggesting that they choose from four areas, one of which is "information studies."   We will be doing workshops on how to use this new text in teaching media literacy.   More than anything, it's the method of teaching, which involves a lot of participation and workshops, that we expect will have an impact.

You're talking about something that could make a big change in teaching here.  If the classroom itself becomes more democratic could this spark broader changes in education here?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, the Education Ministry has misunderstood the aims of media literacy, and are promoting computer literacy and the teaching of computer skills.  It's because they're not thinking of it as a question of culture, or people's lives, but as a matter of "hard" technology.  Their view of this is all tied up with economic policies.  But an even bigger reason is that the level of awareness and understanding, of intelligence, in the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, where I now serve on that commission, is higher than that in the Education Ministry.

Finally, what is the most difficult challenge working in media literacy in Japan?

Well, Japan is a media okoku, or "media saturated" society — saturated to a degree seen nowhere else in the world.  So, trying to do this work in a country like this is very, very challenging.  It means changing each individual's perspective, changing the whole paradigm.  With young people, it comes close to being a revolution.
     Compared to America or England or Canada, societies that are more multi-cultural, where the reality is that there is greater ethnic diversity, it is more difficult.  In Japan, it's so hard to be different.  Now, in the midst of that — in a media literacy classroom — one has to become a "different self," and it is simply harder here for young people to place a positive value on that.  They're likely to say, or think, "Oh, I've lived like this up to now. I've just been getting a one-way flow of information, and that's been okay.   But that is the point of entry.  Waking them up to influences that they might not really approve of.  Once they cross that line, students really enjoy it.  If you start learning actively in that way, you can't go back.  Students are really sorry to see the class end, and we have to remind them that this was just the beginning of seeing things in a new light.

 *Media Literacy: A Study Guide (Liberta Shuppan)
 

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For more on the teaching of media literacy in Japan, see this recent Asahi article by Suzuki Kazue, on Sugaya Akiko, journalist and author of Media Literacy, recently published by Iwanami Shoten. Suzuki Midori's media literacy website is at http://www.mlpj.org/index-e.html
 

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Rebecca Jennison is professor of Women's Studies and Comparative Culture at Kyoto Seika University.

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