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Although Japanese soft power is commonly associated with anime and manga - media products that have achieved great success around the world - we realize that this soft power is proving to be more plural. The appearance of streaming platforms is an interesting fact to this process, since it facilitates access to other Japanese media productions, such as reality shows, which are not usually broadcast internationally in an official manner. With that in mind, we aim to investigate the potential of this "alternative" soft power, through the interpretation of the speeches present in the reality shows Terrace House and Ainori, co-produced by Netflix. We start from the assumption that Japan is experiencing an effervescent moment of expansion of its soft power through dialogue with these platforms, which help to convey other images and speeches about the nation. We conclude that although these programs lack incentives from the government, they may also be able to co-opt soft power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article seeks to understand how media imagery uses the association between body care and accountability of individuals to produce an idea of health tied to appearance, called here "imaginary health." We use the concept of biopolitics and theories of the imaginary to study the empirical material: the reality shows Medida Certa and Além do Peso, broadcast by TV Globo and TV Record, respectively. We propose an analysis model focused on three categories: (i) body without shapes, based on the social imaginary about the risks of fat/inactivity to health; (ii) media modeling of bodies, emphasizing the efforts in search of the weight and measures of imaginary health; and (iii) prêt-à-porter body, for the presentation of a body-image ready for exhibition/consumption [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how the reality show Lar, doce lar (Home, sweet home) from the program Caldeirão do Huck, broadcasted by Rede Globo de Televisão (Globo TV) promotes the "aesthetics process" of the private space. We aim to highlight the biased way of showing households portrayed in this program, based on the concepts of public and private space drawn by Habermas (2003), as categories of social life. In criticizing the illusion of fame for everyone propagated by realities shows, the study also makes use of the concepts of reality show and television entertainment from Andrejevic (2003) and Lacalle (2001), who blames attractions about reality of blurring the border demarcations between public and private. The research methodology adopted consists of analyzing the image as a narrative (Coutinho, 2006), which proposes a reflection of non-verbal records; even if they are submitted to the logic of the commodity and to an emptying of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]