Ritsumeikan University

Faculty Member, International Relations Faculty

!!! starting April 2012 !!!

Thesis Title: Reading news images in Japan : visual semiosis in the context of television representation

About

My first degree was in Japanese at the University of London (SOAS), after graduating I was lucky enough to get a job, initially as a producer at TBS' London Bureau which had just moved offices and was expanding. Even more luckily, the bureau cameraman wanted to do more reporting work and so had me train as camera operator.

After a couple of years at TBS I moved to the GMTV Reuters news desk as a 'Duty News Organiser' assigning crews, dealing with  intake, satellite and landline bookings, finding and booking facilities etc. It was a high pressure job, very rewarding when things went well but often very stressful. After two years of DNOing I realised I was losing my Japanese and managed to get myself assigned, still as a Reuters employee, to NTV's London Bureau as camera-op and all-round technical producer.

In 1997 I decided to leave London and applied for a job at the expanding Reuters Financial TV operation in Tokyo. I started off as a producer, but my interest in JGBs and BoJ policy meetings is rather limited so after a year or so I was employed by the technical production side of the operation as a trainee director. I worked on the RFTV team until its closure in May 2002.

In September I moved to Granada in southern Spain to learn Spanish and improve my guitar playing. I also did a little freelance production and translating work. Unfortunately I couldn't find enough work to support an expanding family and we moved back to the UK in 2004 and I carried on working as a freelance co-ordinator/camera op. I was spending long periods of time away from home, and my lovely family, and in 2006 we decided that a change of direction was necessary. I completed an MA in Media Studies at Sheffield Hallam University and then moved on to do a PhD in the School of East Asian Studies and the University of Sheffield. This led to a JSPS Fellowship at Kyushu University which has allowed me to get a first hand acquaintance with production in regional television stations in Japan.

My interests are television images, image production and the people who make these images, camera operator and editor: Who are they? Why do they work the way they do? Does what/who they are affect the way they see the world and the images they produce? How can academics and students engage with and analyse televisual images in a consistent way? What can looking at images from a non-Western country (like Japan) tell us about the effectiveness of visual semiotic theory?

I also have a broader interest in the mythology of the mass media, especially the news industry, in Japan, its relationship with power and its uses as a vehicle for propaganda and self-promotion.

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