The Japanese mobile phone market has one of the highest diffusion rates of mobile phones in the world, and in an attempt to reactivate this seemingly saturated market, the mobile phone industry now...Show moreThe Japanese mobile phone market has one of the highest diffusion rates of mobile phones in the world, and in an attempt to reactivate this seemingly saturated market, the mobile phone industry now targets the silver market with products aimed towards the elderly consumer. This thesis will take a more in-depth look at Japanese elderly-orientated advertising for mobile phone services for insight into how advertisers represents the elderly and how this fits into wider social practices in Japan. After first sketching a wider context of the Japanese mobile phone market, and how old age fits in the discussion on representation within media-created texts, Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis is used to investigate two advertisements of NTT DoCoMo’s “Tsunagari-hotto-support” service. It is concluded that the examined ads use various multimodal resources to construct and maintain dominant ideologies of filial piety, which can have a negative effect on elderly and their caregivers in Japan.Show less
