<p>The purpose of this paper is to explore how Melanesia, which consists of Fiji, Irian Jaya, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, and people living in these countries and regions are represented in contemporary Japanese television programs. There are quite a few studies on representations of Melanesia and its people in Japanese mass media. Hisafumi Saito, for instance examined several newspaper articles and books, issued between the late 1980s and early 1990s, which focused on the people of Papua New Guinea, and reported that most of the articles described the people by using the terms genshi-jidai (primitive age), sekki-jidai (stone age) and razoku (naked tribe). Lindsey Powell, on the other hand, discussed a television program entitled Hikyo'o To Nippon Kokan Seikatsu (Exchange Program between a Secluded Place and Japan which aired in September 1999, and pointed out that he program presented the Alamblak of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea as if they ere totally isolated from the "modern world" and were still living very primitive lives. Following these pioneering works, this paper takes forty-four television programs, including the one that Powell discussed, as its resource material. These programs were aired on NHK General, NHK Satellite Two, Fuji TV, TBS and TV Asahi between January 1998 and November 2002. Most of them, including Hikyo'o To Nippon Kokan Seikatsu, can be classified as "entertainment" or "variety shows", - "documentaries" are few. These programs tended to focus on rural areas of Irian Jaya, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, and people who wore "traditional clothes" such as grass skirts and penis case. And similar to the cases reported by Saito and Powell, they depicted the areas as isolated from the modern world and the people as still living pre-modern lives by using the terms hikyo'o (secluded place), mikai (uncivilized), buzoku (tribe), razoku and so on which are frequently used with negative connotations. On the other hand, things and effects from the modern world were carefully obscured from the scenes. It should also be noted that a number of the programs had scenes in which local people wearing traditional clothes were threatening or attacking Japanese visitors with bows and arrows, clubs and spears. Concerning these programs, local people were presented not only as those who were isolated from the modern world but also as "wild savages". By contrast, the programs that focused on people living in urban areas, for instance, were rare, though cities and towns do exist in every country and region in Melanesia and the urban population is no longer a negligible percentage of the total population. As Edward W. Said has already shown in his works such as Orientalism and Covering Islam, every representation is constructed under the influence of preceding ones. This is also obvious in the case of the television programs examined here. For instance, four different programs that took up the Kolowai of Irian Jaya were aired one after another between May 1998 and May 1999. They focused particularly on those people who wore grass skirts and penis wrappers, and described them with the terms genshi (primitive), hikyo'o, okuchi (back-wood), and sekki-jidai. One of the programs was referring to an article that appeared in National Geographic Magazine Japanese Version which had been published in February 1996. The article also took up the Kolowai wearing grass skirts and penis wrappers by using the terms and the expressions such as "primitive people", "the forest people refusing the outside world", etc. Thus, it is obvious that the representations of the Kolowai appearing in the television programs were constructed under the influence of the preceding descriptions presented in the article. Incidentally, the article's author was not an</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>