The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [31]
But Japanese topography has traditionally created insurmountable challenges for anyone seeking entry into the broadcasting market, for the country is dispersed across four main islands, most of which are heavily forested and prone to storms and volcanic eruptions, conditions requiring investment in prohibitively expensive maintenance facilities – which helps to explain why, for most of the post-war period, Japanese television has remained unchallenged in the hands of the staid, cherry-blossom-loving, government-owned behemoth.
However, the pioneering executives imagined a way around the logistical hurdles. They discovered that if they fired a satellite into space and, in particular, induced it to settle into an orbit at 110 degrees east, thirty-six thousand kilometres above the ground, they would then be able to beam down a signal to anyone with a modestly priced dish anywhere across their archipelago. A show such as Sensei No Kaban, about the illicit love affair between a twenty-year-old woman and her seventy-five-year-old calligraphy teacher, could be transmitted into the upper atmosphere and bounced back to reach both the icy mountains of Hokkaido and the palm- and skyscraper-fringed coastline of Okinawa.
And so evolved the idea for Japan’s first satellite television station, a business whose very name was intended – as the channel’s mission statement put it – to inspire in its viewers ‘an expression of constant wonder and amazement’: WOWOW TV. But there would be a host of further tribulations in translating the business plan into a reality, including struggles with government officials and regulators, painful equity deals with the Nippon Corporation and Fuji Incorporated, and fraught negotiations to secure broadcast rights to the popular Korean TV drama My Name Is Kim Sam Soon. Finally, there was a protracted search for an actual satellite, which, after pitches from rival companies and a process not much more dignified than a haggle in a souk, led to the purchase, from the Lockheed Martin Corporation, of a $100 million A2100A model, a device now awaiting its first meeting with its new owners in a hangar in a jungle clearing a few kilometres away from the airport.
2.
The Japanese television executives filed off the plane, past a photograph of the French President and into a VIP zone where they were greeted, with all the respect and warmth due to anyone who has lately handed over a launch fee close to $75 million, by bowing senior members of the French commercial space agency Ariane Espace. After clearing customs and formerly entering French Guiana, the executives were each handed a large wooden box containing a silver replica of their satellite and led out to a minibus bound for their hotel.
It was evident that they had arrived in a peculiar corner of the world. The difficulties with French Guiana begin with trying to place it on a map. Seldom has a country been as easily and as regularly confused with somewhere else: Ghana on the western coast of Africa, Guyana east of Venezuela, Guinea next to Senegal, the former Portuguese colony of Guiné next to Guinea and now referred to as Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea below Cameroon or the island of New Guinea divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Even the pronunciation is prone to engender trouble, the English referring to the country as French Guiana (Guy-arna) while the French favour a more compacted Guyane (Gü-yann).
More significantly, the territory bears the surreal burden of being at once located on the malarial northern coast of South America, between Surinam to the west and Brazil to the south, whilst also belonging to the French state, having been absorbed into one of the country’s twenty-six départements by its former colonial master in 1946. As a result, it is now a member of the European Union, its highest legal authority is the Court of Justice in Strasbourg, its agricultural and fishery policies are defined in Brussels and its currency, valid even in the Indian settlement of Pilakoupoupiaina