My Year Of Meats

"Meat is the message. Each weekly half-hour episode of My American Wife must culminate in the celebration of a featured meat, climaxing in its glorious consumption. It's the meat (not the Mrs.) who's the star of our show! Of course, the "Wife of the Week" is important too. She must be attractive, appetizing, and all-American. She is the Meat Made Manifest: ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest. Through her, Japanese housewives will feel the hearty sense of warmth of comfort, of hearth and home--- the traditional family values symbolized by the red meat in rural America" (Ozeki 8).


This passage appeared in the very beginning of the story and promoted the show's beginning message and the stereotypes it held towards Japanese women. In Japan, a women should be docile and pretty with attractive husbands. Then to top it all off, a happy home filled with happy children completed with the perfect life. This is what the Japanese producers are attempting to seek to present to the Japanese audience, but this is both a lie and a stereotype.Not all American families fit this standard and cookie-cutter mold.But this behavior can also be attributed to American producers as well and not simply Japanese producers.Many American producers of commercials use white families comprised of two children (one boy and one girl), a housewife, and a working husband to fit the image of America's idealized familial image.An example of this could be found in this waffle commercial: it shows how amazing the father could actually cook something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRho_5Is1sc

As the story progresses further, Jane attempts to break this stereotype by filming different families such as the lesbian couple and showing the darker aspects that all families can carry.Jane eventually believes that "deformities" such as race, poverty, and physical disability are precisely the magic ingredients that make some stories compelling and "authentic," while others seem, in the words of Joichi"s Japanese wife, "phony" (Ozeki 130).


In other words, in Jane's mindset, families such as Becky and Tom Thayer, an upper-middle-class couple with two kids is the most boring family one could possibly broadcast on reality television.Thus, both Akiko and Jane turn out to dislike the Thayers for their apparent "phoniness" for their conformity to society's perception of normal. This line of thinking led to Jane's long-running complaint to the producers of the show,"But at the same time, the Network is always complaining that the shows aren't 'authentic' enough" (Ozeki 57). Ultimately the reader discovers along with Jane, that the people want flaws, mistakes, imperfections, and not flawless perfection. Nowadays, the most popular TV shows are based on troubled adults and teens who f*cked their lives up or lead f*cked up lives. Best examples include The Beverly Housewives, Teem Mom, The Jersey Shore, and many other popular reality TV shows. People are watching them, because those reality TV stars' lives are more f*cked up than their own. 



According to Jane and Akiko, this is boring as hell. 




This is what the people want. 




Another type of stereotype that Jane faced that is also pushed forward by the media are racial identities within America. 


     "I wanted to make programs with documentary integrity, and at first I believed in a truth that existed--singular, empirical, absolute. But slowly, as my skills improved and I learned about editing and camera angles and the effect that music can have on meaning, I realized that truth was like race and could be measured only in ever-diminishing approximations" (Ozeki 176). 


Jane states that truth, similar to the perception of race, CANNOT be measured or calculated but can only be seen or recognized by a gut feeling. You're supposed to know it when you see it, but such opinions are easily manipulated by the media and can be transformed into something else entirely that eventually most of society will follow and pass on to later generations. 




Source:
Ozeki, Ruth L. My Year of Meats. New York: Viking, 1998. Print.