Land of the Rising Plug

One recent evening, Japanese at their 14-inch TV screens watched breathlessly as a topknotted samurai disarmed his opponent after some ferocious swordplay. The cowering loser awaited the death thrust; instead, the victor tossed him a bottle of tranquilizer pills, shouted the manufacturer's name and advised: "If you took these regularly, you wouldn't get into such a fix!"

This method of building the commercial into the drama is the most distinctive feature of television in Japan, a nation rapidly becoming as TV-obsessed as the U.S. In a soap opera, A Comic Housemaid, the heroine habitually complains of a racking headache in midscene, gulps down an Arakawa Drug Co. remedy and announces: "Now I'm ready for anything." One private eye uses a drugstore as rendezvous--a drugstore whose shelves are conspicuously filled with the sponsor's patent medicines. In another samurai episode, the hero vanquished a batch of evildoers, then warily approached a wayside shrine whence came a mysterious breeze; he jerked the shrine door open to discover an air-conditioning unit and a pretty girl, who intoned: "It's Nippon Electric's latest model."

After five years of operation, Japan now has 1,400,000 sets in operation. No bar, restaurant or coffeehouse can afford to be without one. There are quiz programs, broadcasts of baseball games and many imported U.S. film series (Emperor Hirohito's favorite program is Superman). Viewers who want no part of commercials can tune in on the 19 government-run stations, which operate on the lines of Britain's BBC. But the seven commercial stations have more business than they can handle and their number is increasing by the month; by year's end commercial stations will outnumber the government's, will reach a total of 39 in 1959.

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