Abstract
This paper offers a method of studying TV documentaries: by regarding a documentary as a result of producers’ giving meaning to the reality of what they aimed to report, examining how much the text of a TV documentary is “reality-driven” or “producer-driven,” converting each area of text into data, and finally apprehend the text by interpreting the data. To be more precise, the author shows how images and audio composing the text were converted into the data based on “scene/non-scene” and “language/non-language” indices and how the data was analyzed to apprehend the text content multimodally. Along with this, using the above method, the paper examines why Nihon no sugao: Nihon-jin to Jirocho (Japan Unmasked: the Japanese and Jirocho) (1958)—the very first hit program in Japanese TV documentary history—became such a big hit.
