The term “media history” itself was coined in the 1970s, but the field of media studies was established in the 1990’s in Japan. The studies of media history have encompassed individual studies of different media, with the historical study of newspapers and television at its core. Much media history research has emerged in last 30 years most of which concentrating on the war and occupation periods between 1931 and 1951. Particularly remarkable was the development of research on Taiwan and Korea, under the Japanese Empire, as well as on Japanese occupied territories and China.

In the study of newspaper history, the social transition of journalists as a group was discussed anew. The historical studies of magazines and publishing has seen the development in the area of readership and magazine genres. Research on news agencies has been carried out over a long period from 19th to the 21st century. As for radio broadcasting, research newly developed the histories of broadcasting in Asia and in the Arab world. In the study of the history of television, a study has appeared on the issue of war and memory in television. In the field of photography and film, a wide variety of research results have been achieved, including the international history of film exchange, research on cinemas and the film industry, and the archiving of documentary films. In the history of advertising, progress was made in the collection of oral histories and in the archiving of advertising material. Media studies of Japanese immigrants have developed mainly on North American newspapers. The historical study of public relations diplomacy and propaganda also took a new turn with studies of the US, China, Japan and Germany.

Cross-media studies include those on media reception in local communities and those on narratives of war. Last but not least important is a meta-study that re-examines the history of media history research itself.

This paper investigates the history of broadcasting studies in Japan and suggests possibilities for future research. Nearly 100 years have passed since the commencement of broadcasting in Japan. A wide variety of studies about Japanese broadcasting have been conducted. In the 1920s through the 1930s, early radio studies focused on analyzing the characteristics of radio as new medium. However, in the late 1930s through the 1940s, radio studies in Japan changed the opinions that radio was the weapon of state control during the war. After the Second World War, academic institutions were established in Japan, such as the Institute of Journalism and Communication Studies at The University of Tokyo （1949-1992） and the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute （1946 onward）. These academic institutions created demonstrative research of television and present a new scheme for critical research called “Broadcast Studies”. However, in the 1970s through the 1980s, Japanese broadcasting studies were gradually stagnant because of the bloated broadcasting industries. After the 1990s, Japanese television studies tries to build a new scheme, depending on the theory from overseas such as Cultural Studies and Semiotics. “Archive research” that gain momentum in the 2000s through the 2010s has become the darling of Japanese research on television broadcasts. In other words, an “age of verification” where a number of researchers use radio and television programs as materials for argumentation has started. Nowadays the television viewing is decreasing among young people, on the other hand the viewing images on the Internet such as YouTube and Netflix is more and more increasing. Future broadcasting studies in Japan have to focus on changing a concept of “broadcasting” on the internet age.

NHK Chugakusei Nikki was a weekly educational TV program produced by NHK Nagoya Broadcasting Station. It aired nationally from 1972 to 2012. This show was significant because it focused persistently on “the daily lives of ordinary” junior high school students and attracted a larger audience than other educational TV series. Interestingly, amateur teenage actors played themselves in the program. This study analyses how the program was viewed and produced. It also takes the media studies perspective to discuss why viewers considered the images of junior high school students disseminated by the program to be attractive and realistic. In doing so, it specifically references Dean MacCannell’s concept of staged authenticity. The present study is original because it presents the viewpoint that the producers, viewers, and performers of the TV program were all spectators observing the “back region” of other groups, while simultaneously being performers who showed other groups their own back region. The study finds that the television program was underpinned by the desire of viewers and producers to understand junior high school students, scrutinize their human aspects, and function as appropriate adult for students. The program also represented an attempt to preserve the boundaries between adults and junior high school students, and between being in school and out of school. The study could yield a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of real and everyday life depicted on television and other media.