a post-blog
On to the next quarter-century! (Hi-yah!)
In 2000, I asked a senior employee at the publishing giant Kodansha whether he had ever tried the $200-a-bottle, top-of-the-line Johnny Walker Blue Label scotch. He laughed and said, "During the Bubble, that's all we drank."
During Japan's high-growth period, the middle-class standard for whiskey consumption rose directly with the rising income level. In the early 60s, Suntory created "Suntory Old" as its expensive upper-end model, but in no short time, everyone was so wealthy that Suntory Old became the standard for the middle-class salaryman's palate. So Suntory had to put out "Suntory Reserve" as its newest upper-end whiskey, and soon, even that became the standard.
The most interesting aspect of Japan's consumer culture was that products considered to be "upper-class" or "high-end" in the West became standard items for the average citizen. And as Japan's incomes rose across the board up until the Bubble burst in the early 90s, middle-class tastes rose as well. In America, very wealthy artists and those with overflowing pocketbooks were the bulk of Comme des Garcons' patrons, but in early 90s Japan, the shoppers were all middle-class kids who had taken the subway to the store. During the Bubble, things got so out-of-hand that Blue Label scotch was the nonchalant standard for nightly imbibing.
Knowing this, I have been extremely worried about the rise of happoushu in the last couple of years. Happoushu is essentially near-beer - a "malt liquor" resembling beer that is half the price due to a weird hops-related tax loophole. It's possibly the worst-tasting beverage ever. I hate American mass-marketed beer, but I have to say that even a bland Miller Light would defeat the best of the happoushu. I'd rather drink swamp water.
Regardless, happoushu has almost become the standard for beer-type beverages. If a friend shows up to your house, he's going to be holding a six-pack of this near-beer. If you go to a convenience store, there's so much of it in the beverage area that it's hard to find the real beer.
I asked my professor what he thought of all of this, to which he replied, "I don't really think happoushu is a good thing, because everyone should always be working to make things better. And clearly, happoushu is a step backwards."
I tend to get a lot of slack for believing in a "Decline of Japan," but the new lowering of cultural standards seems to be a market correction in middle-class tastes. In the 90s, everyone went on shopping as if the Bubble never burst, but finally after a long recession and the current short-term growth with no consequences for consumers, everyone's tastes are following their skinny pocketbooks. Given a choice, no one would choose happoushu over beer - it's an "inferior good" in economics lingo. But more and more, the Japanese are choosing these inferior goods - happoushu, Uniqlo, etc - over their more-expensive counterparts.
The new "happoushu culture" is certainly a more realistic set of tastes for this current economic environment, but what we all liked about 90s Japan was its choice of high-taste goods over economic rationalist concerns - ie, quality over price. Are these currently popular subcutlures with inexpensive fashion codes - punk and hip hop - more examples of this embrace of inferior goods? Will we still be drinking happoushu five years from now?
Today I went out to the outskirts of Tokyo to hike and enjoy the autumn color around the mountain Takao-san.
On the way to climb the nearby mountain Kusato-san, we passed through the weird, super-wealthy graveyard pictured above. At the entrance, they had a whole host of stone grave markers for sale, including these two:
Do people really want to bury their loved ones under Mickey and Minnie or is this just the stonecutter showing off?
I am currently reading the book J-POP Shinkaron (The Evolution of Jpop), which chronicles the melodic changes in Jpop songs from the 50s to today. I'm still stuck in a chapter about the differences between the traditional Japanese pentatonic scale, the Western octave, and the bluenotes of "Black" music, but I'll let you know if discover something interesting. When talking about music, most Japanese tend to use the "do re mi" nomenclature for notes, which has been disorienting, but now when the bass player yells, "Play me a Fa," I'll know what he's asking for (Also, for those at home taking notes, there is no "ti" sound in the old Japanese soundbank, so it's "shi".)
I was just eating my Friday night luxury Yoshinoya dinner and listening to the 90s Jpop selection on the restaurant speakers. Some people use the word "Jpop" as a way to say "the Japanese mainstream music market," but Jpop is certainly its own genre and has its own body of rules and conventions. Once you know the Jpop melodic range, rhythmic timing, and word choice, it's easy to make up heartful Jpop ballads on the spot, just like you can "do" hip hop or punk. I would be tempted to call the bands who break through with their own nontraditional and rule-breaking works - Puffy, Halcali, and the Shibuya-kei gang etc. - something other than "Jpop". This is like calling the Beatles a "skiffle band."
We'll see what this books argues, but it seems to me that the collusion between artist management companies, record labels, and the television music programs keeps diversity in the industry very low. And subsquently, the closed-off production environment creates a musical form with very strict adherence to conventions.
A quote from Steve Albini in the Sept/Oct 2004 issue of Tokion:
| "Well, I think the '90s created an artificial inflation of attention on music...I think that was a really bad cultural influence. Because it raised the possibility that bands could do that sort of music as a career, and I think that was a very destructive influence. Music is good when there are no consquences for failure, when people are doing it for its own sake. If someone is counting on it as a paycheck, then all of the reasons for doing it, and every single decision after that, becomes a questionable one." |
The same thing can be said about Shibuya-kei and Japan: the neo-Shibuya-kei crew are all convinced that they can make a living as musicians doing a genre originally created as anti-Jpop. At this point in time, the Japanese music business barely provides for anyone outside of the top mainstream level of success, and this in turn is just making the younger bands act more explicitly commercial, instead of the more reasonable alternative: giving up on the financial side of things. I've been to way too many gigs in this city where the ticket prices are very high for unknown acts and the focus is selling CDs and other goods in the stalls at the entrance. I'm not as dogmatically "anti-sellout" as Mr. Albini, but I do think that commercialism and self-marketing should at least be as hidden as much as possible to not interfere with the music. If you're going to pander for money, at least do it with a quiet dignity.
I wrote this essay on this problem last June if anyone is interested.
This is a new ad for cigarettes using an image of the late 70s/early 80s Yoyogi-koen rock'n'roll dancers - the so-called Takenoko-zoku. In its prime, this weekend subcultural activity was considered to be the height of youth immorality and rebellion. These Harajuku 50s dancers were no media-created market segment - they were real high-school dropouts who fought the system by doing crazy things like... smoking cigarettes. Parents and the local law enforcement community held many a meeting to find solutions to this weekend "hankou" (rebellion, insubordination) - dear God, they are smoking... and dancing in funny ways to the Oldies!
If you don't believe me, there's a great NHK documentary about the Takenokozoku that was made in 1980 called Wakai Hiroba 'Harajuku 24jikan'. In one scene, a young greaser lights a firecracker, and the police immediately take it upon themselves to beat the living shit out of the young lad and haul him off in a police cruiser. The other interesting thing is that Tokyo used to fully shut down around 7 pm, so all these rebellious kids would just go home at around 6 in the evening.
Now in 2004, the Takenokozoku sells you the product that society desperately tried to stop them from using.
Neo-Shibuya-kei
In the last two years, there has been a small-scale, nostalgic revival of early Shibuya-kei - two Flipper's Guitar tribute albums in four months, the model Meg scoring a minor hit with a cover of "Groove Tube," and magazines/stores anointing a new generation of bands "neo-Shibuya-kei." At this point in time, the groovy Continental sound itself is so ingrained within Japanese culture that it is hard to understand why anything would be a "new" version, but the "Neo" label makes more sense when we look at the three distinct groups carrying the Shibuya-kei torch into the 21st century.
The first group should be called "post-Shibuya-kei" because they were influenced as contemporaries (being only a few years younger than the original artists), but were outsiders to the central Shibuya-kei clique. This group includes Spank Happy, Akakage, Qypthone, Cymbals, Paris Match, and Stoned Soul Picnic. There is also a stream of artists who have been handpicked by the original crew to be a part of the direct lineage - for example, Halfby (Readymade), Nomoto Karia (Readymade), and Harvard (Escalator).
The third group - Neo-Shibuya-kei - describes the younger acts who listened to Shibuya-kei as middle-school kids and are now creating new music based on the aesthetic principles of the original recordings. The P5-clones Capsule are the de facto leaders of this movement (although producer/songwriter wunderkind Nakata Yasutaka claims he's never heard much of Konishi's work). Other acts include Hazel Nuts Chocolate, Aprils, Dahlia, Petset, Spaghetti Vabune!, Pictogram Color, Kofta, Orangenoise Shortcut, and Tetrapletrap. There are many neo-Shibuya-kei indie pop labels active in Japan at the moment - like abcdefg-record, Sucre, and Softly! - which do a very light, innocent cute pop thing. Marquee is the media guide to the movement, which editor-in-chief MMM calls "Future Pop" to include the parallel cohort of electronic-tinged artists like the avant garde-meets-Disney sample-pop maniacs Plus-Tech Squeeze Box and the electropop acts of the label Usagi-Chang Records (MacDonald Duck Eclair, Micro Mach Machine, YMCK, Sonic Coaster Pop, and Pine*AM.) While they are all students of the Shibuya-kei movement, these young musicians' level of actual influence ranges from just sharing the "spirit" (Plus-Tech or MDDE) to certain melodic qualities (Aprils) to full out imitation (Tetrapletrap, who are virtually a Flipper's Guitar pakuri act.)
The interesting part of the story is that the original Shibuya-kei musicians generally have zero interest in this younger group and have tried to distance themselves accordingly. Comoestas and Mike Alway like Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, and that's about the strongest link I can find between the two generations. There is particular internal tension within Marquee itself, since the magazine features the old timers and the upcoming young 'ens. (There was an issue a couple of months ago where Naka Masashi from Escalator Records was clearly very upset by having his Yukari Rotten release be compared to Capsule.) The reason for the hostility seems to stem from the fact that the elders created this sound from scratch - they personally dug up the references and set the sound's boundaries and rules. Konishi loved 60s AM softpop before that was an acceptable thing to like. The new kids are just working within this old paradigm, which they inherited wholesale and updated only with greater technical skills and electronic gimmicks. The core of the new work, however, is essentially the same plastic aesthetic message.
I would also suspect that in a very Japanese way, there is something hostile about unknown major label-sponsored outsiders doing the same sound as you without being invited to the party. The neo-Shibuya-kei kids are part of the first generation of Japanese musicians who had mainstream access to hipster sounds without needing to gain admission to the hipster world. And these kids are clogging up the record bins with their bossa nova or 60s-revival, twee pop at the same time when Konishi is trying to launch his own young bossa nova dancepop producers and 60s pop idols.
This is also the first generation in a long time to grow up with a radio full of decent Japanese music. Who needs to protest against the mainstream Japanese industry and search for obscure European indie music when Cornelius is the mainstream Japanese music industry? The Shibuya-kei oeuvre was interesting enough to tie up the young listeners' ears and wallets for a decade - a long span of time in which they could have been out crate-digging themselves. Those Japanese artists now provide the template for new music creation, and the Neo imitation of the highly imitative Shibuya-kei is creating a "copy of a copy" clarity problem. Moreover, the whole "anti-major label" attitude that was at the heart of Flipper's Guitar is gone. Many of the Neo kids have explained to me that the big difference between them and the indie spirit ten years ago was that they no longer have any animosity against the mainstream. In fact, their goal is to be accepted by the mainstream. They've got just as much Ozawa Kenji in them as Oyamada Keigo.
When all is said and done, these factors explain why the older generation isn't lending a helping hand, but should not lead us to dismiss them on such broad charges. Admittedly, some of the neo-Shibuya-kei artists are complete knock-offs of their big brothers, but many of the young acts in the same peer group are highly original and listenable. Petset's Sound Sphere does something emotional for me that no other Japanese indie record ever has. Plus-Tech Squeeze Box's Hayashibe Tomonari is of genius caliber and has created a fiercely original and difficult version of pop music. Everything on Usagi-Chang is top notch. I like that Aprils sound like an amalgam of Flipper's Guitar without directly imitating any of their songs. If you like guitar pop, Spaghetti Vabune! are your guys.
I am sure that most of these artists in particular would not liked to be called neo-Shibuya-kei, which was a title attached by Tower Records and Marquee as a way to sell this new peer group of bands as the "next big thing." The title is convienent, however, as "indies" no longer connotes bands that sound like Western indie artists, but just all the bands who are not on major labels. "Indies" are selling great these days in Japan, but the Shibuya-kei thread is not - even the original artists are seeing their sales at 1/10th of the 90s level. Five years ago, someone like Neil and Iraiza could easily break the 10K mark, but now the indie market is overwhelmingly pre-major label training league punk, ska, and urban sounds. After a huge financial push from Yamaha, Capsule have begun to sell reasonably well (in the x000 range, I would guess), but no one from the neo-Shibuya-kei group has done what made the Shibuya-kei group shine in the first place: score a substantial hit with their unique sound in the mainstream market.
The shadow of Shibuya-kei is long, and anyone engaging in creative pursuits here in Japan is either working under it or against it. The music revolutionized both Japan's domestic consumer market and the nation's international reputation. As the Japanese music charts return to being manufactured Jpop idols, stale Jrock, and imitative punk/hip hop, the memory of Shibuya-kei burns even brigher. I find it hard to imagine now, but indeed there was a time when you could turn on the radio and find something that you liked.
From the posts on my blog and views elsewhere, I've created my own Right-to-Left continuum for views on Japan:
Far Right - The Colonialists - "Japan is dumb. The West is better. J-birds are easy. The Japanese are bad at English. Nova, where's my paycheck?" (Note: This view doesn't show up much on my site, but is probably the dominant mode of thought among the US/UK foreigners living in Japan.)
Moderate Right - The Collaborationists - "Japan's shining moment was the Dainippon Teikoku. Japan should stand up to North Korea more. Don't criticize Japanese culture when its Asian market success proves it to be right. Ishihara is correct to try to keep all the riff-raff out."
Neutral - The Casual Fans - "I like Japanese things."
Moderate Left - The Sociologists - "Japan is a modern society, and thus, should be judged on the same standards as other post-Industrial nations. Somethings work, but others could be improved. The remaining illiberal political culture should be eradicated for democracy's sake."
Hard Left - The Anthropologists - "Japan is a unique nation and cannot be judged by Western ethnocentric criteria. Let Japan be Japan. Stop trying to interfere."
最近、英語で「渋谷系」に関していっぱい書いているが、「パクり問題」というところで、「パクりには想像力があるのか、クリエーティヴィティーがあるのか」という物議を醸した。渋谷系のアーティストは昔の文化のキュレーターとしては上手で、お洒落な音楽を作ったと思うが、６０年代のアーティストが作曲した歌のメロディーを少しだけ変更し、新曲として出すことが倫理的なことであろうか。小山田圭吾氏は最近大変独特の、オリジナルなサウンドを作り出しているが、フリッパーズの時代には、恥ずかしいぐらいメロディーなどに盗んだ曲を多用しているようである。
このパクりの議論では、日本の方のご意見も聞いてみたいと思っています。日本語でコメントを是非どうぞ。（偽名でも良いよ。）
I am a big fan of Saizou (or Cyzo), which is an intelligent magazine that works to break down some of the information barriers in the Japanese media (and lately, show girls in various states of undress). They do a lot of stories on "ura" Japan and say a lot of things publicly that you're not supposed to. Back in July of 2001, they did a piece mocking A Bathing Ape's Nigo as a specimen of social disease. They had used an unauthorized picture of Nigo from Takarajima magazine and were sued by Nigo and someone at Takarajima for illegal use of the image. Saizou was forced to recall every single copy of that issue. (No problem: I have copies!)
What did Shibuya-kei mean?
Like the Alternative revolution in America, Shibuya-kei brought more sophisticated musical tastes up from subcultural groups into the mainstream Japanese popular music market. Obscure music that was once only available to a specific underground clique was now available to everyone. Furthermore, Flipper's Guitar, Pizzicato Five, and Kahimi Karie all sold so well that the entire industry had to take notice and start gearing their own mainstream acts - like Puffy and My Little Lover - to be as o-share as the those on the fringe. The Bubble Economy produced great wealth for Japan, but Shibuya-kei was the nation's initiative for good taste. America could be the leader for economic growth, but Shibuya-kei showed that Europe was the better model for style and aesthetic sense. This may be slight hyperbole, but I think that we can thank Shibuya-kei for the overwhelming scope of well-designed products that litter Japan. Certainly, Japan looks more Shibuya-kei now than it did in the early 90s - the products and stores based on the style appeared en masse after the music enjoyed commercial success. Even if these bands are not fully responsible for the changes to the consumer market, they surely acted as a visible and audible representation of the movement for a more cultured approach to culture.
The Shibuya-kei bands also created a product that was mukokuseki - nationality-less - and palatable to an international audience. Shibuya-kei does not sound particularly Oriental; it's an amalgam of various regional music - French pop, UK indies and psych, Brazilian jazz, American dance music, German Krautrock, and Japanese synthpop - all thrown together under a rubric of 60s retro-future Internationalism. If De Stijl was Internationalism through channeling the universal, Shibuya-kei was Internationalism through all-inclusive bricolage.
Even though this sound became known as distinctly "Japanese," the accessibility and quality of the music itself helped the bands break into the American and European market like no other Japanese acts had done before. Pizzicato Five and Cornelius each sold more than 100,000 records on Matador and opened the floodgate of Japanese acts into America after a long dry spell. (Can you imagine a "Japan Night" at SXSW without Shibuya-kei?) Combined with the rise in Japanese street fashion and animation, Shibuya-kei changed the worldwide image of Japan from being a nation of imitative consumers with delayed tastes to a high-tech, cutting-edge wonderland.
There is no doubt that Shibuya-kei was a style of music destined to be born in Japan, not the West. By the mid 90s, Japan had the most diverse and active consumer market ever assembled, and the music itself was a logical aural extension of this consumer culture. Shibuya-kei did not just glorify shopping and products in the lyrics - the entire base of the music itself relied on sampling or pastiche of pre-existing media. Konishi Yasuharu was a record collector first, and a musician second. Like the DJ Shadow school of hip hop, Shibuya-kei was about finding and buying the most obscure (and therefore, best) records and reintroducing them to the world. Beikoku Ongaku's editor-in-chief Kawasaki Daisuke sees Shibuya-kei as just the 90s progression of rich, urban youth consumer culture, and indeed all our innovators of the scene fit the Hosono Haruomi upper middle class model. Oyamada and Ozawa (who is part of the Ozawas) went to a top-tier private high school. Supposedly, Konishi was supported by his parents until he turned 30 and spent all of their hard earned money on records.
Accordingly, Shibuya-kei has no explicit political message other than delineating the creator and listener from mainstream culture through product choices and taste. I do not think that this should be held against the artists, but it explains why the movement was so easily subsumed into the mainstream. Shibuya-kei exclaimed, you are all consuming the wrong goods! And their fans, who were also upper middle class educated kids agreed. The market responded by providing those more sophisticated goods and incorporating them into the mainstream "middle class" lifestyle. In this way, Shibuya-kei was just fashion - but it was interesting fashion, and Japan was better off for it.
By 1991, Oyamada Keigo's fame had made him a full out fashion and cultural authority, and he alone deserves credit for introducing the nation's youth to a slew of interesting and challenging acts. (We are all indebted to him, just for his patronage of Citrus). He did not use his new position of power to promote himself like the Last Orgy 3 crew in Ura-Harajuku, but worked to spread the Gospel about overlooked music and culture. Japan's magazine system needs personalities to legitimize products for insecure reader/consumers, and lately the country has suffered with no one as daring as Cornelius at the helm.
The Pakuri Problem
While I think that Shibuya-kei was overall a great influence on Japanese culture, I do have to point out what I think is its fatal creative flaw: the systematic embrace of pakuri as art. Pakuri comes from the Japanese verb "pakuru" - to rip off or steal. Shibuya-kei artists like Pizzicato Five and Cornelius often walked the thin line between "influence" and outright thievery. Some people find this charming, but the question must be asked: is essentially rewriting someone else's music count as creative endeavour?
Pastiche - the act of creating a new work using someone else's idiosyncratic conventions - is a well-accepted art form, and certainly parody has been an effective creative tool throughout the years. However, I would gamble that few people find these kinds of artistic works as original as creating a new work out of whole cloth. If there was an axis of originality, pakuri seems to be one step below "tribute band" and "Weird" Al but nowhere near the other side.
There is plenty of pastiche in the Beatles' work, but the Shibuya-kei folk took it one step further by stealing the melodies as well as the production techniques. "The Quizmaster" does not just have the same instrumentation and tempo as Primal Scream's "Loaded" - it has the same melody. For an example of Shibuya-kei pakuri, listen to Gary Lewis & the Playboys's "Green Grass "" and Pizzicato Five's "Baby Portable Rock" back to back. Both are good songs, no doubt, but one is highly indebted to the other.
Hip hop's use of sampling gets the same flack for being "unoriginal," and I do not want to write off the entire Shibuya-kei oeuvre as hack rewriting. Works should be judged by the cleverness and quality of the material's reuse. Sometimes the new work is better than the original: I find Cornelius' "The Microdisneycal World Tour" superior to actual songs by the High Llamas.
But lately there have been difficult ethical questions arising out of this semi-legal borrowing of styles and melodies. A recent Nissan commercial used Flipper's Guitar's "Young, Alive, in Love" as background music, but only the intro segment that Oyamada and Ozawa stole directly from an Italian film soundtrack. The Double Knockout Corporation owns the copyright to the song, even though they did not come up with that particular melody. George Harrison was sued for unintentionally ripping off the melody to "He's So Fine." Is it worse to steal intentionally or just more of a tribute?
(For more information on the amount of theft in Shibuya-kei works, check out one of the many Shibuya-kei reference guides on the market.)
(Also, stayed tuned for Part Six: Neo-Shibuya-kei! No, I'm not kidding)
If you are interested in the usual lack of investigative reporting in Japan, this article by a foreign reporter in Japan talks about how the media has evidence of links between a Koizumi staff member and the Inagawa-kai crime family, but won't do anything about it.
The End of Shibuya-kei
Identifying the exact moment when Shibuya-kei "ended" is a difficult task, but I tend to see the 2001 release of Cornelius's Point as the beginning of a new era. If Fantasma was the Shibuya hipster-pastiche sound taken to its logical extreme, Point was that sound's reduction into its most universal parts; there are faint traces of the Beach Boys and bossa nova and dance music, but the pure joy of reference has been eschewed for electro-acoustic audiophile bliss. Oyamada Keigo quit being a historian and started being a scientist. Kahimi Karie's Trapeziste and Montage took her in a similar experimental direction. If this sound was "Nakame-kei" (from the hipster relocation to Nakameguro in the early Aughts), then the most influential work was 3-D studio's house producer Tomoki Kanda's Landscape of Smaller's Music.
Escalator Records meanwhile has gone all NYC-Berlin Electropunk in recent years. Konishi and co. at Readymade are doing the same thing they did five years ago, just in a more "adult" way. Fantastic Plastic Machine dropped the lounge schtick and became a full-out house DJ. Ozawa Kenji is secretly located somewhere in New York.
And sometime in the last two years, the Japanese public stopped wearing border shirts.
We Are Not Shibuya-Kei
Why the race to get away from the title "Shibuya-kei"? (Shhhhh!) Lately, all of these musicians have hit their mid-30s and most likely want a change in direction, but there is a distinct distancing of the cultural elite away from the particular wording of that now unspeakable epithet. The ultra-hipster Bonjour Records in Daikanyama curates their selection with a S******-kei-esque discerning eye to international cool but specifically avoids all references to anything seeming too S******-kei (like they will not carry Beikoku Ongaku, even though the good people at B.O. are also trying to get away from being too S******-kei!)
The problem stems from the fact that the Shibuya-kei sound has been completely codified and categorized, and many an entrepreneur have sold manual-type reference guides and specialty books to help younger fans uncode all the influences, inside jokes, and connections. In other words, the whole game of "I have this sample/reference and you will only know where it came from if you're in-the-know" is over: all the crates have been dug into and the instructions for this brand of hipsterism are spelled out in a large font. Magazines like Relax sold this elite cultural mix of Shibuya-kei and Ura-Harajuku to a mainstream audience, and chain stores like Village Vanguard have become like a Shibuya-kei-curated junk shop. The cafe boom of the last five years took its template less from Europe itself and more from the Shibuya-kei fantasy of Europe - bossa nova, Jane Birkin, and cafe au lait. Places like Cafe Apres Midi release their own cd collections of obscure bossa nova jazz, and even chain coffee stores like Excelsior Coffee use an all-Astrid Gilberto soundtrack. The culture that Konishi and Oyamada etc worked so hard to discover and present to the world has now become a standard set of accepted cool items. No one has to actually search for anything themselves anymore; they can just get all the info from books and mainstream publications. Free information has been the death knell of rarity-based consumer subcultures around the world, and Shibuya-kei is no exception.
Some of the original Shibuya-kei folk are breaking new ground, some are cashing in on past success, some are finding safer niches to conquer, and some have completely given up making music. But it is safe to say that Shibuya-kei is over, and we can now start to think about what it meant in the next installment.
The First Wave Consolidates
Although a strict interpretation of the Shibuya-kei scene would start and end with Flipper's Guitar, the words "shibuya-kei" came to connote the stream of Japanese indiepop following in the original bands' footsteps. The First Wave had been pioneers in introducing a whole panopoly of new sounds to Japanese popular music: UK indie/alternative scenes like anorak pop, neo-acoustic, and Madchester (Flipper's Guitar), hip hop (Scha Dara Parr [SDP]), and 60s softpop and club jazz (Pizzicato Five).
From 89-91, these bands had minimal interaction, but once FG was officially over, they began a long history of crossover appearances. Oyamada produced Pizzicato Five's 1993 album Bossa Nova 2001, which would codify the "Shibuya style" for the next decade as nostalgic borrowing from past sounds mixed with au currant dance beats. Meanwhile, Ozawa collaborated with SDP to create the 1994 megahit "konya ha bugii bakku".
The Second Wave
After the breakup, Ozawa and Oyamada took two completely different routes with their own solo careers.
Oyamada renamed himself Cornelius and in 1993 put out his debut The First Question Award. The album recalled a friendly, mid-period FG, but took its greatest influence (and hooks) from the hipster rediscovery of Roger Nichols and the Small Circle of Friends. More importantly, he started the sub-label Trattoria on Polystar to release unavailable Western titles in Japan (like Apples in Stereo and Free Design) and kickstart the careers of young Japanese indie stars: Bridge (Kaji Hidek's original band), Citrus, Seagull Screaming, Kiss Her, Kiss Her, and many others. Oyamada also produced some of his then girlfriend Kahimi Karie's first work and repaid his debt to Salon Music by adding them to the Trattoria roster. Regardless of his plunge underground, Oyamada was still a bonefide rockstar. In 1993, he did ads for a brand of hair mousse.
In stark contrast, Ozawa went straight-up Jpop, scoring a string of big hits and even appearing on the ultra-conservative NHK New Years' tradition, Kouhaku Uta Gassen. Original Flipper's fans followed Ozawa's work devotionally, but he essentially left the indie world and no longer influenced the Japanese underground music scene. If FG was the Beatles, Ozawa was Wings.
A host of new bands also joined the mix in the mid-early 90s: Venus Peter (discovered by Oyamada and produced by Salon Music's Yoshida), Love Tambourines (on Takemi Kenji's influential Cru-el label) , the rap-pop act Tokyo No. 1 Soulset (discovered by Oyamada), and Original Love (ex-Pizzicato Five vocalist Tajima Takao). Dee-lite's Towa Tei came back to Japan from New York in the mid-90s, and although he was regarded as a pioneer and antecedent to Shibuya-kei, the sound of his solo releases resembled the movement's signature style enough to imply a loose membership. Denki Groove were more of a dance-humor-pop act, but there was great crossover between fans of Shibuya-kei and their work.
Cornelius' second album - the heavy metal/hip hop-influenced 69/96 - was released in 1995 and is still his best selling record to date. Kahimi Karie scored some big hits with the Scottish producer/songwriter Momus on board.
Shibuya-kei fashion had been strictly Continental dandy, but starting around 1995, Oyamada's close relation to Nigo and his brand A Bathing Ape brought the indie-fashion world of Ura-Harajuku into the indie music world. Both men had supposedly stumbled upon an obsession with Planet of the Apes at the same exact moment in 1993 and collaboration was inevitable. Soon after meeting, Bape was making tour t-shirts for Cornelius, and Oyamada dressed head-to-toe in the brand for official appearances.
The Third Wave
By the late 90s, the Shibuya-kei bands had become so ubiquitous that the term no longer implied any sort of rebellious alternative to the mainstream. Their influence had permeated society, and massive big budget projects like the Puffy were obviously taking notes from the indiepop playbook.
However, the term "Shibuya-kei" still served as a convienent way to describe the new acts working in a similar style. The German label Bungalow Records' massively well-received Japanese "clubpop" compilation Sushi 4004 directly codified the featured bands as "Shibuya-kei."
New additions to the scene were the Naka Masashi's Escalator Records group: Yukari Fresh, Cubismo Grafico, Neil and Iraiza, and later, Losfeld. Also, Oh! Penelope - the reincarnation of ex-JRockers Shijin no Chi - put out one album of dead-on Shibuya-sound 60s tributes and earned a tenuous place on the stage. Ex-Fancy Face Groovy Name and Ozawa girlfriend Minekawa Takako came aboard with her bedroom analog synth concoctions. Krautrockers Buffalo Daugher also were lumped in. Ex-Denki Groove's Sunahara Yoshinori (aka Marin)'s amazing concept album Take Off and Landing was an electronic tribute to Pan Am jetset culture.
Pizzicato Five's Konishi Yasuharu meanwhile started his own label Readymade and released works by the lounge/dance DJs Tanaka Tomoyuki (Fantastic Plastic Machine) and Ikeda Masanori (Mansfield) and latin beat fanatic Comoestas Yaegashi. The label even tried to construct a revisionist "Shibuya-kei" past through their Goodnight Tokyo and Midnight Tokyo collections of groovy tracks from the 60s.
Cornelius's masterpiece Fantasma came out in 1997 and was the culmination of the scene's sound. The album is a seamless trip through a well-curated collection of hipster influences - hip hop, turntabling, High Llamas, My Bloody Valentine, 70s punk, cartoon rock, drum'n'bass, Primal Scream, the Beach Boys, sampling, Apples in Stereo, retro-futurism, Bach, Disneyland, the Jesus and Mary Chain, drugs, theremin, and Cornelius self-references.
By the end of the decade, the term "Shibuya-kei" had snowballed and snowballed to a point where it almost included any and all anti-mainstream sounds. It was no longer a certain musical style, but a devotion to sophistication, a penchant for reference and pastiche, an anti-Jpop attitude, and an unwavering attention to design and detail. However, as we'll see in the next and chapter, the rest of Japan also scooped up these trends, and the mainstream use of the Shibuya-kei ingredients softened the impact and meaning of the indie rebellion.
 | According to this article, Apple has sold 500,000 iPods in Japan, out of a total 60 million worldwide. Does it not strike anyone as odd that the Japanese consumer is making up less than 1% of the world market? And Apple has 50% of the mp3 player market, so it's not like some other company is selling more. Didn't the Japanese used to be all high-tech and interested in consumer electronics? |
Supposedly, there is a professor at Rikkyo Daigaku teaching a class called "Shiina Ringo vs. Jpop."
I was listening to her last album Karuki Zaamen Kuri no Hana yesterday for the first time in ages and remembered how great it is. There has never been a more well-produced and challenging album created in the world of Jpop. (She has zero indie-cred, so the album cannot be classified as a product made outside of the mainstream industry). I highly recommend it to anyone who has not heard it. The lyrics are particularly interesting, with veiled criticism towards the Japanese music industry in "宗教" and meta-discussion about the process of creation itself in the stunning final track "葬列". The album literally destroys itself at the end.
Which is why Tokyo Jihen kind of disappoints me. I've come around to liking that first single, but if someone stumbled upon her new work, they certainly would not go and make an entire class framing her against the Jpop system. No matter what, however, she still wins my adulation.
For the first time just now, I got stopped by the police while walking down the street. They were on some kind of scout mission, and I haven't shaved in a while, so they asked to see my Foreign Registration Card. Here's the dialogue translated into English:
"Excuse me. Can I see your foreigner registration card?"
"(On phone with girlfriend, who ironically, just had her house broken into) Uh, can I call you back? There a policeman here... (click). [pull out card]"
"Have you been in Japan long? Your Japanese is very good."
"Tonde mo nai desu.No, just a year and a half. I am studying on a government grant!" (I throw this in to make myself look aligned with authority.)
"Oh, you're American?"
"Yes."
"Okay. [hands back card and says in English] Sankyuu Berii Maachu."
"[in Japanese] Doumo arigatou gozaimashita."
Very odd interaction. I was not the droid they were looking for.
Graham suggested the new magazine Tokyo Graffiti - NewGeneration Magazine as a democratic antidote to the standard Japanese authoritarian fashion catalog. The magazine is essentially a collection of photos of people on the street, sometimes holding white boards on which they've written their hope for the next year, etc. I took a look at it today and found it to be a different methodology for the same gambit of creating an alternate reality.
For example, they have a "local style" section with photos taken on the streets of different neighborhoods. Every single photo from Shibuya was a young man in full hip hop gear. Every photo from Shimokitazawa was a young man in full punk-rock gear. The Harajuku section contained only pictures of ten Lolita-Goth girls (of probably the twelve that reside in front of the Meiji-Jingu shrine.)
These are indeed "photos from the street," but they've been curated and edited to such an extreme degree that they no longer resemble anything approaching real life. Shibuya is hip hoppy, but it's no more than 10% of the population. Shimokitazawa has a reputation of being a "rock" hangout, but maybe only 5% of the people around are actually wearing head-to-toe Neo-punk chic. I know Harajuku isn't the hot spot it was five years ago, but is it only that baker's dozen of little drama queens who are a relatively recent addition to the neighborhood? Is Akihabara all anime geeks? There is still a substantial amount of obsessive dress coding about, but if anything, the distinct youth neighborhoods are becoming more and more mixed up. Shibuya alone probably holds every specimen of fashion subculture. Like bad media everywhere, the magazine creates a separate reality through selective focusing of chaotic objective evidence into a neat order for public consumption.
The other part that bugged me was a page of resident Tokyo foreigners who wrote their thoughts on white boards in English. Was there not one foreigner who chose to write in Japanese? Are all the gaijin in the city such hopeless colonialists that they can't write in the local language? Is it that or more selective editing of reality?
Last time, we left our protagonists Oyamada Keigo and Ozawa Kenji on the verge of their first record release.
The Primordial Flipper
On August 25, 1989, the five-piece Flipper's Guitar released their first album Three Cheers for Our Side 海へ行くつもりじゃなかった on Polystar (named for an Orange Juice song). Ozawa - a student at top-ranking Tokyo University - wrote the band's English lyrics. The sound was straight-up Neo-Acoustic with nods to Anorak Pop and UK schoolboy culture. While the subject matter generally ranged from adolescent concerns like red shoes and cafe au lait, "The Chime Will Ring" was a grown-up realization that they were approaching the "end of youth." The lyrics to the similarly-themed "Goodbye, our Pastels Badges" contain a laundry-list of references to influential bands: the Boy Hairdressers, Aztec Camera, Haircut 100, the Monochrome Set, etc, etc.
The album was a commercial flop.
And then Flipper's Guitar went from five to two.
The story goes that Flipper's manager at Polystar realized that the two charming boys fronting the band were a marketable power team and the other three were deadweight. (The alternate theory is that Ozawa was so difficult to work with, the other three quit.) Now a duo, Flipper's became a vehicle for the Double Knockout Corporation songwriting team (a reference to the KO initials of the two lead members). They got a big break when their English-language single "Friends Again" was used as part of the Shibuya chiimaa-idolizing film Octopus Army ~ Shibuya de aitai! in early 1990.
Polystar repackaged the boys as pop idols, and suddenly they began to sing all their songs in Japanese. In May 1990, Flipper's mania reached fevered pace when their new Italian film soundtrack-flavored single "Young Alive in Love (恋とマシンガン)" became the main themesong to the popular drama "Youbikou Bugi" (Cram-school Boogie).
Ozawa and Oyamada released album number two, Camera Talk, in June 1990. All the lyrics were now in Japanese, and even though they had a new pop direction, their sound broadened out to include more obscure and sophisticated sounds: bossa nova/latin ("Summer Beauty 1990"), vocal jazz ("Southbound Excursion"), house music ("Big Bad Bingo"), and spy thriller instrumentals ("Cool Spy on a Hot Car"). References to British bands still made the cut (songs called "Colour Field" and "Haircut 100"). Flipper's also won the award for the most clumsy sampling ever for the intro to "Wild Wild Summer."
Defined
Sometime before or after this period, the media discovered that Flipper's Guitar, the rap group Scha Dara Parr, older lounge-rockers Pizzicato Five, and a couple of other bands were making it up the charts just by selling well at the recently opened HMV Shibuya. All of these acts had a similar interest in a slightly-more elitist European mode of music, and the media christened the group of performers "Shibuya-kei." The musicians themselves never formally associated themselves as a movement, but the label stuck. Their more dainty sound, however, was a big departure from the super-masculine Band Boom that had been entrancing Japan since the late 80s.
Contrary to myth, the term "Shibuya-kei" never had anything to do with Shibuya being a particularly stylish part of town. If anything, the rich Setagaya kids running around and reeking havoc on the neighborhood in their chiimaa turf wars had abandoned Harajuku designer fashion for a sloppy, casual "shibu-kaji" look. If "shibuya-kei" had a defining style, it was French coastal - Saint James border shirts and berets. Hardcore "Shibuya-kei" fans were essentially upper middle-class high-school kids who were "anchi-meijaa" - anti-major label - and embraced Flipper's sophisticated tastes.
Flipper's kept busy with a string of big singles, a widely-heard radio show called Martians Go Home, and a monthly column in the hipster mag Takarajima. Their mainstream popularity introduced the average Japanese person to a highly-obscure, well-curated world of hipster bands, movies, and brands.
A year after their hit Camera Talk, Flipper's changed directions again and put out the sample-crazy, psychedelic/Madchester-influenced Doctor Head's World Tower. The title is a reference to the Monkees 1968 film Head and samples from the movie's dialogue are sprinkled throughout. The film's theme - studio-created pop stars busting out of their shells into more "groovy" territory - obviously resonated with the two young stars. "Dolphin Song" is a reference to Head's "Porpoise Song" and a pastiche of the Beach Boys' "Heroes and Villains"-type pop symphonies. "Aquamarine" is a knock-off of My Bloody Valentine's "Lose My Breath." Primal Scream's Screamadelica was the other blueprint: "The Quizmaster" is just "Loaded" with Japanese lyrics and "Groove Tube" takes its verse melody from "Come Together."
Goodbye, our Flipper's Badges
Three months later, on October 29th, the media announced that Flipper's Guitar had unexpectedly broken up. Tickets for the album tour had gone on sale, but the shows had to be cancelled. Apparently, Ozawa and Oyamada were no longer talking during their publicity appearances. The "rumor" to emerge was that the two were fighting over the same girl - ex-Onyanko Club member Watanabe Marina. (Her love of the band had introduced the young hipsters to the Jpop idol world of Myojo). Imai Kentaro from the Aprils told me that this rumor was just a cover story for the real reason: playing the new sample-based material live was not sounding good at the rehearsals and these problems snowballed into ill-will between Ozawa and Oyamada.
By late 1991, Flipper's Guitar was over, but the Shibuya-kei sound explosion had hardly begun. While not as big as Nirvana was in the US, Flipper's were certainly the cultural equivalent: they opened the floodgates and indie culture poured into the mainstream.
ザビ・トルズというバンド名にしょうと思った。英語で書き直すと、「Zabi Toruz」になるから、誰も本当の意味を気が付かないだろう。それで、アルバム名は「連音真赤常時林檎」にする。
やめたほうがいいかもね。ヨーコ・オノに訴えられる。
On February 20th of this year, I found myself at a Flipper's Guitar Night at Kichijoji's Bar Drop celebrating the release of the second FG tribute album in four months. The first tribute had been a B-list major label effort, and my indie-kid friends were so incensed by this hack revisionism that they went out and made their own two-disc collection of covers. Until recently, questions about the legacy of Flipper's Guitar were overshadowed by the post-breakup solo careers of Oyamada Keigo and Ozawa Kenji. But once Ozawa disappeared to New York and Oyamada went into leftfield acousto-electronics, the indie world became like the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin - a political battle between the disciples for securing the crown of legitimacy in a time with no designated successor. A myriad of parties appeared on the scene, ready to steal away the banner of "shibuya-kei" for their side. (Hey boys, fly the tricot!)
Shibuya-kei was not just a term invented by the media for certain set of bands or a particular obsession with European style; the appearance of Flipper's Guitar was the pivotal event in the surfacing of underground culture in Japan. To establish oneself in the shibuya-kei lineage would be to be descedent from the throne.
Japan, before Shibuya-kei
The Japanese embrace of the Western countercultural rock music started in the late 60s, after the Beatles had come to play at the Budokan. They had essentially missed the mods and teddy boys, but caught up by the beginnings of psychedelia. At the time, however, there was a lack of drugs in Japan to accompany the incoming psych sound, and the background music to the Leftist student rebellion was folk-based. Most of the bands in the Group Sounds (GS) boom were essentially Monkees-type creations who didn't write their own music , and those with a tinge of authenticity, like the Dynamites or the Mops scored nary a huge hit. But even the most tame GS bands like the Tigers were too much for the Japanese authorities, who promptly enforced a nationwide crackdown on the the entire movement. In the early 70s, however, music became less tense, and Happy End were able to sell to mainstream fans while still preserving a certain air of credibility, and from there on out, Happy End's leader Hosono Haruomi became the patron saint of underground music with one foot stationed firmly in the overground.
In the 80s, the underground music scene was a small clique centered around the long-running London Night party. This was the New Wave underground network that spawned the the Plastics, Ookawa Hitomi of Milk, and much later Fujiwara Hiroshi. People in Hokkaido would fly down to Tokyo just to attend. YMO were stars around the world and royalty of the scene, and their patronage launched the careers of many younger artists waiting in the wings: Pizzicato Five debuted on Hosono's Nonstandard label, and Takahashi Yukihiro produced the second Salon Music album. The London Night scene was a cool kid clique, and if you weren't part of it, you had no access to the underground currents of culture.
Salon Music are considered to be proto-Shibuya-kei. Their excellent debut single "Hunting on Paris" came out in 1982 on a British label and were one of the first bands in Japan to do a stylish "o-share" sound looking more towards the UK and the European Continent than America. The major label Pony Canyon put out their first album My Girl Friday, but Salon Music never peaked above cult status.
They made history, however, by discovering a young Japanese neo-acoustic band called Lollipop Sonic. Salon Music's Yoshida Zin helped Lollipop get a record deal, with one condition: they had to change their name. The five-piece were thus rechristened as Flipper's Guitar.
ずっと英語で日本に関して書いていた僕のブログは、どうして日本語で書かないの、みたいにいっぱい批判されたから、日本語で書けるように設定を変更した。英語の刑務所から解放された！
僕のよく間違っている日本語とくだらないコメント、よろしくね。読まないほうがいいかも。もしこのサイトで書いたことはご意見と不一致したら、僕に直接に攻撃しないで下さい。思想で闘おう！
My site has gotten horribly academic and polemical. (Momus wrote me, "I opened up child sex as an alternative topic the other day because it's a LESS controversial issue than Japan!).
I am planning some more pop related essays. Stay tuned.
I was flipping channels today and happened onto some variety show where the short week in review segements had been placed into a chart according to rank. This is a common trope, but I was reminded how much the Japanese media is always ranking everything. Vertical hierarchy bleeds into every part of life. Top Ten Street Brands according to Readers in Osaka! Tower Records' Top Five Dance Singles - Sendai Branch! Everything needs to be ranked and placed into a nice visual order.
Here is where things start getting weird: you never see rankings like Best Albums of the Year or Best Albums of the 70s or What's Hot/What's Not. Once the judgment criteria become subjective, all ranking stops. Oricon is ranking heaven, but the magazine's weekly hierachies are based on album sales - a cold quantitative guide. A readers poll is also fine, because the magazine is only tabulating votes, not picking favorites.
Subjective criticism is verboten in the mainstream Japanese media, and this leaves editors and writers no choice but to fill the beloved ranking charts in relatively objective ways. However, there is something deeper going on. Read how Nakane Chie explains the criteria related to education used for hiring systems in her classic work Japanese Society:
| Educational qualifications are obvious and perceivable, and can be used as a clear measurement and open indication, while it is difficult for everyone to agree on generally accepted and acknowledged standards to judge individual experience and achievements outside of school. As has been indicated already, Japanese methods of measurement are directed towards neat institutionalization; clearly perceptible criteria are given more weight than individual merit. (116). |
Taking this into account, the Japanese would believe there is something fuzzy and chaotic about subjective review systems. I tend to believe that writers fear to engage in subjectivity because they may offend a company that advertises, but Nakane's example seems to suggest that the review system itself has become victim to the mechanization of Japan's strive towards modernity. Mechanization requires rational order, and order requires breaking down all unquantifiable parts of culture and recontextualizing them in a way they can be measured scientifically.
This mathematical approach to industry, and ultimately culture, is why I refer to Japan as a "content-less" society. Starting in the 50s, the Japanese imported popular music directly from America, and since they had no pre-existing examples of these new melodic forms and rhythms, they had to copy songs as best as they could to recreate their own versions. Imitation is a dirty word in English, but if anybody anywhere were handed some new weird form of art and told to make something in that style with no indications of context, they too would most likely be forced to imitate the originals until getting comfortable with the conventions. In this process of mechanical imitation, the song must be dismantled into smaller, quantifiable chunks: chord progression, tempo, instrumentation, rhythm, and melodic form.
Content is the fuzzy, subjective part of art work. What is a song about? This is different for each person. What does the song feel like? Same answer. What kind of melodic range does the song have? This can be mapped out and directly imitated. Thus, the melodic and lyrical content - which in the West are considered a song's soul - can be mechanically analyzed and recreated once fully understood in quantitative terms. Content must be changed into form in order to make content. The question is, can you go from analog waves to digital coding to back again? No, the original information approximated in the encoding process is gone forever.
Subjectivity, for a number of reasons, is avoided, and therefore, the process of cultural endeavors often falls into content-erasing objective analysis. Imitation certainly has less stigma here in Japan, but I find it unfair to expect one nation to completely understand the intentions and cultural contexts of the music/art of another. Why would a sixteen year-old kid born and raised in rich Setagaya-ku understand the social conditions and cultural codes that direct and shape hip hop? The Japanese kids interested in hip hop had no choice but to take it all apart and rebuilt it from a cold, mechanical analysis of its workings.
The Beatles loved American rock'n'roll, but they didn't really get it and were bad at imitating it and out popped Merseybeat. A culture with so much anxiety about subjectivity like Japan knows how to break things down perfectly and rebuild them perfectly - almost to the extent that no new forms are born. Rhymester sounds and looks like an American hip hop group, but is it as good as one? Aren't Halcali better because they don't sound like hip hop?
Of course, not everyone has to go through this mechanical imitation process when creating music, especially with forms like rock or pop, which are now deeply rooted in the culture. Happy End surely "got it" and were not stealing melodies. Shugo Tokumaru doesn't have a single imitating bone in his body, and if Kiiiiiii are imitating something, it's not from this planet. So what happens to all the talented Japanese artists who create real content for their works? They are subjected to the same cold aversion to subjectivity that started this mess. No one can say Shugo is better than anyone else until Shugo sells more than someone. Content cannot be recognized as content, so critical parties pass judgment by quantifiable criteria: sound quality and level of technical ability. Originality and overall quality are too fuzzy too deal with.
Without passing judgment on this system, I would suggest that a media and culture avoiding subjectivity create a rather different set of priorities and ways of rewarding excellence in culture. Does this explain why B'z are national heroes?
I need to get my MT 2.x running in Japanese and English. Can someone email me to help me set this up? I tried to install the font images and that didn't seem to do everything necessary.
James made a good point that I can't hide behind my English if I want to say controversial things about Japan. Agreed.
Well, I am starting to hear from the people who think my views on Japan are completely and utterly ignorant, chauvinistic, and downright false. I am also being accussed of making up facts about my time in Japan (thanks for the tip, James), which I did not intend to do. For the record, I first came to Japan in '96, then came back twice for three-month internships/research in '98 and '00 and then moved here in April '03. In light of this, there are probably a lot of better people to turn to if you want to read a long-term resident's opinions.
I also want to restate that I like Japan and things Japanese in spite of the fact that I have, gasp, some politically charged feelings towards the current societal structures. And I want to add that a lot of the foreigners' antagonism towards Japan stems from some personal rejection, which is not something that I have experienced nor guides my writing. I am happy living here and have long gotten over the fact that I am treated differently by a certain portion of the population. Little kids laugh at me about tall I am, but hey, I am tall.
My challenge/welcome mat to all those who believe that I am wrong about Japan is to provide me with some evidence or examples. I am open to the idea that Japan is going to get even better than it is now! That would, honestly, make my life a whole lot easier. If somehow Petset had a number one on the Oricon, I would throw a party.
But it doesn't help much to just tell me, "By the way, you are totally wrong."
After spending too many hours debating the grand philosophical swoops of "What is Japan?" I would now like to go back to tackling the smaller issues that usually take up my time - Japanese youth consumer culture, the current changes in popular music, the education system, and the impact of media/information structures on all of the above. Now that you know the overarching principles that guide my observations, I am returning to the small scale problems, which become inductive evidence for the larger scale narratives. (Also, I have an album coming out in less than two months, and I'm sure this academic jib-jabbery is ruining my rebellious rock'n'roll image.)
I've been under attack for my views on Japan - either I "hate" Japan or I'm "ethnocentric" in my comparisons. (Oddly, all the loudest yells are from Japan fans who don't live in Japan and all the votes of support come from residents of this fair island nation.) I appreciate such criticism, however, because my essays are not intended to be dogma, but a dialogue, and these broadsides help me redefine my positions and improve them.
Thus, to clarify my position on Japan, let me list my fundamental beliefs:
1) A large majority of what is considered "Japanese culture" was created after the influx of Western ideas in the 19th century. This includes lifetime employment, the State Shinto cult, Hello Kitty infantile culture, the daily consumption of rice, and a lot of the byzantine laws that over-regulate the socioeconomic system. I went to an aikido match between Keio and Waseda, which is an extremely stoic and "traditional" event. Japanese men wearing 19th century Prussian uniforms led the cheerleading effort and the singing of the school songs - which are all 19th century Germanic church anthems. If we think of all culture everywhere as a product of artificially-created structures, there is no ethnocentrism in attacking the structures that reinforce and shape the culture and behavior.
2) Japan is in economic decline. As far as I have read, no one seems to believe that the recent growth here is a good omen of future recovery - only a temporary bump from China's overheated economy. This is not good for kids' pocket money, which could explain some of the reason that the Japanese record market has been shrinking at a rate of 10% each year. The entire socioeconomic system in Japan is built upon the idea that the nation will always be at high-growth, which means that it is ill-suited to healing the current conditions. This system can be criticized just as any economist or scholar would suggest a better set of social policy. And in that vein, I frequently question a system that seems to be erasing some of the best parts about Japan - the social equality of wages and a well-adapted set of human capital.
3) Japanese culture has been invented by an authoritarian elite to keep itself in power. Some may reject this as a bit Marxist, but lest we forget that Japan officially had an authoritarian government until fifty years ago and had very little domestic philosophical groundwork for democracy. Most of the institutions that guide education, public policy, government accountability, and commerce remain the same with minor corrections that erased obvious Imperialist content. The Japanese "don't criticize," because it's not Japanese, say the Japanese. But who is benefitting from this lack of expressed criticism? For starters, the government bureaucracy doesn't have to answer to anyone. Companies also reap rewards. The amount of consumer claims (for defective products etc.) in Japan is embarrassingly low compared with the rest of the world. The whole culture of collectivism is nice, if it weren't for the fact that the government and the mass media exploit this trust for profit and gain. In the room of well-behaved children, the bullies set the agenda.
4) Like Karl Marx, my pessimistic glee for decline is an optimism for the future. The 1955-system no longer works for Japan, and I believe it must be dismantled. Bureaucrats are clinging to power and dependent upon the corruption in the system; they will never change of their own volition. However, the decline could possibly hit a point where the Japanese people could demand a change in the elected government, and the new blood could work to reconstruct a system better suited for the 21st century. Tanaka Yasuo is doing revolutionary things in Nagano-ken (like dissolving the press clubs, for start) and has wide public support. Inertia is strong in this country, but the worse it gets, the greater the chances for mobilizing the populace.
I am running out of bear puns and bear references, but the Tokyo Metropolitan Subway is hardly running out of bear-related etiquette posters. Here we see our first female of the species - indicated by the flower on her head and lighter color. I didn't particularly think the earlier bears had any gender distinction, but now thinking about it, how obtuse of me! - male bears read books and newspapers, female bears put on makeup.
Correction: Halcali will not be playing at Tokyo University's festival on November 21th, which makes Kiiiiiii the winner by default. Congratulations, Utako and Reiko.
Come see Kiiiiiii if you can.
 | Straight from the middle middle-class ghettos of Gotanda, hard hittin' MCettes Haruca (age 16) and Yucari (age 16) are back with their bling-bling, bang-bang, and boom-boom second album Ongaku no Susume. The material is Olympic material, but Silver Medal range - losing the Gold of Adolescent Japanese Girl Rap to their first effort, Bacon. I like the opening a capella/beatbox track, I like the the full-out 80s electrofunk of "Fuwafuwa Brand New," I have been won over by the 2/4 rock anthem "Marching March." I may not understand the relation between "Strawberry Chips" and Christmas, but my heart is warm like roasted chestnuts. The straight-up techno of "Oboroge Copy View" does not fit with the flow, but I am not annoyed. Okay, "Shibafu" is bad. Wait, was "Wakakusa Dance" made for Zetima? Why are they going "whoo-a whoo-a whooooo"? And stop that Japanese male from rapping! You are ruining my fantasy world where Japanese hiphop is a subculture made up of young Japanese girls who have no desire to inauthentically adopt African-American mannerisms and customs! I am won over by "Baby Blue" although I don't get the reference of sampling Boowy, but neither will you if you are reading this in English. Let's also not kid ourselves, "Densetsu no Futari" is Puffy. It's not Halcali. It's Puffy. I don't know if this is a uncredited guest spot, but it is absolutely Puffy. The last track is classic Oshare Track Factory (the boys at Rip Slyme) - fun, short, sample-based, synthy. (And they reference a Del tha Funky Homosapien lyric from Handsome Boys Modeling School.) If anything, this album proves that Rip Slyme are really good at producing Halcali and they should fire everyone else. Overall, I declare this album for the People's Republic of Good Jpop. Only the most heartless critic can fully slam this collection. The songs are way too long - do I really need six minutes of a Halcali track? - but I'll manage. Paraphrasing someone dead and British and foppish, if there wasn't Halcali, we'd have to invent them. |
Extra Credit - Write an essay comparing Japan and America on the basis of differences between Halcali and FannyPack.
 | YMCK's debut album Family Music came out last Wednesday. This album is a technical marvel and atavistic masterpiece: complicated bossanova jazz done with only 8-bit Nintendo sounds. Not easy to listen to in one sitting, but maybe qualifies as the best game soundtrack ever. Hats off, imaginary controller in hands! |
I tend to make the "no criticism in Japan" a moral issue. Deep down I do believe that the lack of public criticism and accountability hinders democracy and free discourse, but on a more practical level, there is more and more stuff in the world and I need someone to sift through it for me.
Turn to the back pages of any Japanese music magazine and you'll find 50 reviews of new music. Look at the label names and you'll realize that there are something like 50 different labels featured this month - 45 of which you've never heard of. There is way too much cultural output for anyone to keep up with it all. Barry Schwartz's monumental book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less presents a clear argument that the overabundance of product choice leads to dissatisfaction and depression. Not only can we not keep up with the output, it's killing our souls.
The wicked tongue of Pitchfork Media may irk the casual music fan, but a short glance at the site or any other trustworthy source as a daily routine will introduce you to myriad works of solid quality and great importance. And if they're wrong on the value judgment, so be it. Maybe the review sounds interesting, and so I'll check it out regardless of their slander.
In Japan, I am drowning in a sea of mediocrity.
When you are 14 and live in a shitty little town with no music scene, the guys "at the top" are the lame musicians with the best licks and most expensive gear. There is something beautiful in the fact that they never go anywhere - sloppy, off-kilt bands like Pavement and the Pixies win the critical glow and slay the dragons of heartless virtuosity.
Meanwhile in Japan, the Japanese music business is Salieri Inc. Pick yourself up a copy of Sound and Recording magazine and peer into the five million yen studios of completely unknown hacks. The message is clear: if you don't have a Urei 1176 compressor and a pair of Neve preamps and a Neumann U87, don't even think about recording anything! If you can't play perfectly, don't play at all! In this environment, that guy who works at the guitar shop in your small town is the King of the World.
With these legions of mediocrity pumping out unprecedented amounts of their bland gruel, I need a magazine to say: ignore these lifeless imitators and guitar wanking sessionmen! Listen to Plus-tech Squeeze Box, Shugo Tokumaru, Macdonald Duck Eclair, and Citrus. And if you haven't checked out the Salon Music back catalog, do so now! the Cymbals are boring and Capsule should reduce their rate of record releases. (I like my Japanese to have alliteration when translated.) Instead I get a full-color magazine of "editorial" articles made possible by direct contributions from the record companies. And two pages full of compressed press releases about 50 bands I've never heard of. The only way to preserve my psyche is to assume they all suck and move on.
In this environment that fears the bad sportsmanship of ratings systems, I rely on the mythical "word of mouth" to spread its Gospel of new music on to my doorstep. The Agricultural Revolution proceeded only when the combination harvester and thresher hit the scene, and I dream of the day when Japanese critics can come in my life and begin to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I just got up and found my last post on Alex Kerr completely disparaged by members of the pro-Japan community. Here are some clarifications so that my writing no longer gets compared to a "fascist dictator."
1) Some kind of Absolutism is necessary to talk about culture in Japan. Besides some brief periods of innovation, Japanese popular music is terrible and getting worse. The American music scene is also getting a lot worse, but I would argue that innovative songs like "Hey Ya" or interesting producers like the Neptunes do get airplay. This is no longer true in Japan. Do Japanese people know that anything on Zetima is complete and utter garbage? Yes, but the whole media system is structured so that no one can say this outloud.
Daft Punk is enormous, and Air is a lot bigger than any Japanese act operating worldwide. Are all European artists really selling worse in the West than all Japanese artists in Asia? Interesting idea. Let's get some figures.
2) The Japanese media industry has worse collusion and corruption than any other post-Industrial state. There is no debating this. I don't understand how you can apologize for it either.
3) Japanese cellphones are the great red herring, because their spread has singlehandedly killed off music and fashion consumption, plus blocked the rise of the computer-based Internet. In the mid-90s, all the elites in Japan panicked: the Internet is free to use and has no restrictions on content! So they moved the entire operation over to the phones, where all content is corporately-mediated. No computers means no mp3s, no iPods, no blogs, and, thank Christ, no independent media sources. Japan is finally starting to get into the worldwide web, but its arrival is extremely slow for a country famous for its fascination with electronic gadgets.
4) Marketing is both a business tool and way to view culture, and I am only interested in the latter. By targeting consumers more efficiently, culture-producing and mediating companies become way more profitable. However, this semi-control of the volatile culture markets is bad for culture in general, because organizations are now a lot more hesitant to put out television shows and music on the cutting edge. No one in 2004 is going to let David Lynch have a TV show.
5) The overground power lines are a terrible eyesore. Accidental mistakes and imperfections are fun. Poorly planned aesthetic disasters are not.
6) Of the Japanese cultural products that sell overseas, how much is not regarded as kitsch or marketed towards children? That show on Spike TV is not a sign of interest in Japan. Is it just a language barrier that keeps Japanese culture from US shores? Is that why Utada didn't sell?
7) There is a five-year lag between the creation of Japanese cultural products and when they hit the states. The current Japan Boom in the US is mostly related to Japan's cultural apex of the late 90s. My message is always that if people saw what was going on in music and street fashion at the moment, they would see how everything is going to come crashing down.
8) Momus mentions the "fantastic availability of records, best-stocked record shops in the world". That is why I moved here, but I find that Amazon.com is totally erasing the need for physical spaces with great selection. And the closing of shops like Maximum Joy etc seem to suggest that the Japanese feel the same way.
9) I am not the only one who feels the cultural crash here. I would not be that confident talking about it, were it not for the Japanese themselves telling me the same thing. I'm just the harbinger.
I finished reading Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons last night, and I found it a well-written laundry list of grievances against Japan. Kerr sometimes jumps to conclusions and puts words into the Japanese populace's mouth. And he's got some kind of weird antagonism towards manga - I think analyzing Americans on Hollywood movies would be equally damning - but I recommend the book as a primer on Japan's well-hidden blemishes to anyone who wants to demolish their own naivete in one fell swoop.
One of my pro-Japan friends yelled at me this morning for incessantly criticizing Japan when "every other country in the world has its own flaws and problems." There is something to this argument of cultural relativism: is Japan really worse off than the nations of Old Europe?
I sincerely believe that globalization is creating a "world standard" on which we judge the level of quality for products and culture being sold on the International Market. A new Absolutism. When thinking about Japan in terms of my personal pet topics (information barriers and the relation of economic success to culture), Japan is hopelessly behind. Why does the number two economy in the world have a totally archaic, mercantilist information flow? Why are the Japanese not allowed to publicly judge artistic content? If the Japanese themselves have no idea that it's not supposed to be like this, isn't there a value to criticizing the system?
I don't really believe that "culture" is something that exists outside of its supporting structures - just an arbitrary set of rules. The Japanese hide behind "cultural differences" unlike any other civilized country in the world and would benefit greatly from suddenly doing away with the parts of their culture that no longer match reality.
From here on out, I will try to take a more balanced take towards Japan, but I think it's a great embarrassment that foreigners are the only ones brave enough to wage any kind of complaint against a system that clearly no longer works like it had in the past. Do the Japanese really prefer having power lines unburied? If so, I guess my aversion to looking up and seeing messy black squiggles everywhere is just some kind of dogmatic orientation towards Western values.
I had planned out a quiet evening of work and just wasted two hours watching the New American Classic, 10 Things I Hate About You. But what can you do? It's Shakespeare.
When Letters to Cleo and Save Ferris reach canonical status in the year 2025, this will be a cult hit.
Yesterday I attended Tokion Magazine's Creativity Now Tokyo conference at the La For�t Museum in Harajuku. I did not get a chance to see all the panels, but I was very impressed with what I did see.
First of all, I want to say that the moderator Ukawa Naohiro is a total rockstar in his own right. He's one of Japan's greatest living artists, but did a great job moving the dialogue along for all the panels. At the very end, a shaggy-haired, toe-headed white kid with native fluency in Japanese gave him some grief about just sucking up to all the guests, which was true, but I don't think moderators are necessarily there to criticize the guests' opinions.
The first panel on Japanese fashion quickly devolved into a DC brand vs. streetwear debate with streetwear God Fujiwara Hiroshi challenging the hyperactive Hirakawa Takeji for comparing the consumption of the Harajuku street wear brands to o-miyage (souvenir) culture.
I tend to demonize Fujiwara in my head, because he represents the worst of the Japanese fashion world's follow-the-leader karisuma (charisma) system, but I have to admit that I was won over by his charm. To say the least, the man is a puzzle wrapped in an engima. What does he actually do? (His profile just said simply: "Music producer.") How did he get the power to make or break products? How is he Shibuya-ku's largest taxpayer year after year when you never actually see Goodenough on the backs of anyone? Does he directly make money from Head Porter? What is Nike flying him around in their private plane for? He is usually silent about the entire ballgame, but he talked yesterday about "using the media and being used by it," which at least starts a dialogue about who exactly he is. By his own words, he has now "dropped-out" of the fashion world, but wasn't exactly forthtelling about what he is actually up to. Nigo is getting a lot of worldwide attention these days, but Fujiwara Hiroshi is the Number One, the whole shebang, the Godfather of all street fashion culture in Japan. Avant moi, le deluge. If there wasn't such a prejudice against "teen culture" in Japan, there would be hundreds of books written about this guy.
I missed the "Commodification of Art" panel, but got a chance to see Shing02, Uchida Yuya, and the cane-brandishing Haino Keiji have a highly unproductive talk about music. Someone told me that this was the most interesting panel, but I was held back by the embarassing fact that I don't know who any of these guys are. Uchida told a good story about yelling at Yoko Ono, but the three didn't have a lot in common - except the two old guys found common ground to unfairly treat the honest hip-hopper Shing02 like a little kid.
I also missed the "Asian Films Explosion" panel, but Kurosawa Kiyoshi is a handsome man.
The "Japanese Art Today" panel was extremely laid back and convinced me further that art is the new rock'n'roll. Bathing Ape and Undercover graphic designer Skatething was the full-fledged, drunken rockstar. His new long hair makes him look like Axl Rose (if Axl Rose wore KMFDM shirts), and throughout the whole discussion, he just muttered things with perfect comic timing. Aida Makoto wore a white t-shirt that said "Shippai Joutou" (Mistakes are great!) in red spray-paint. Ukawa Naohiro and Endo Kiki gabbed througout, getting drunker and drunker on happoshu.
I am always looking at Japanese culture through music and fashion, and the evidence for my theories of decline comes primarily through the stagnation of those two fields. However, art in Japan is really really interesting, and I am open to the idea that Japan is just as creative as ever, just in new categories. I am not necessarily going to stop everything to follow the art scene now, but I am impressed these artists' vibrancy and lack of ego (for the moment). I also like that this art is a culture not based on using magazines to sell trinkets to kids (except maybe Murakami Takashi).
The last panel on "Media Philosophy in Japan" was bit of a snooze, because the guests were from the very straight mainstream world of Japanese television. As soon as ex-pornstar tarento Iijima Ai and producer/comedian Terry Itou took up their mics, the level of professionalism skyrocketed: these guys know how to sit on a couch and talk about nothing! It's their job! They were, however, stuck in the position of being celebrities who will not and cannot criticize the system that employs them. When somebody from the audience asked if there are things they can't say on TV, Terry was smart enough to say, no, there is no censorship. (The less conniving Iijima Ai admitted that there was a whole slew of things not allowed on the airwaves, but would not elaborate.)
I have never liked Iijima Ai, because I felt that the movie adaptation of her book "Platonic Sex" was an attempt to santize and excuse her lurid lifestory. I still don't think she's a terribly interesting person, although listening to her speak yesterday gave me a window into the tarento world. She hinted to having relinquished all control over her own daily activities to her jimusho. I also felt a bit sorry for her when the others suggested she make a television commercial warning consumers against going into debt - her financial problems are supposedly what dragged her into the world of adult video.
All in all, the conference allowed the artists to talk about the creative systems themselves, which for some reason has been a taboo topic in Japan. Magazines never allow even the slightest discussion that someone is in the background pulling strings. No one divulged any shocking info, but I thought it was interesting to a least hear them breach the topic. Ukawa always complained at the end of each panel that the time was too short and they hadn't reached any conclusions, but that's fine: the Japanese creative community has started a public dialogue about their work and their world and hopefully everyone leaving La For�t will continue that dialogue until they meet up again next year.
I finally got copies of my debut album Kyoshu Nostalgia yesterday. (Japan Post had searched the package and then retaped it with super cute cartoon-character tape). Two more months until the release...
Bilingual Space Shower TV host, trance DJ, and sometime lyricist for Sunahara Yoshinori, Cornelius, and Denki Groove, Brian Burton-Lewis has completely disappeared. In mid-September, his television show and radio spot were suddenly cancelled with no explanation, and the rumor mills on 2-ch seem to point a drug-related arrest. Unless I've missed his some new info, he still remains missing.
The minute you do something wrong in this country, you descend into the shadows, never be seen again.
The New York Times Magazine did a story on Tom Wolfe a couple of weeks ago. Hats off to the author for the dead-on Wolfe pastiche towards the beginning.
I've never read Tom Wolfe's fiction, but I'm a huge fan of his New Journalism from the 1960s.
Stolen from digiki's site:
An article from the poorly-named magazine Wired about the decline of brands.
The basic idea is that consumer loyalty is down and that no one will pay a premium for brand goods anymore. Prices are down and quality is up, but satisfaction is low. According to Barry Schwartz, the decline in satisfaction is directly linked to the staggering number of products on the market (Read his groundbreaking "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.")
Alas, a company can no longer hide behind the brand name/image, but has to make good products. The Triumph of Content over Form!
I just spent the last twenty minutes deleting SPAM comments that had accrued on my blog. I never imagined that having a blog would be require so much touch-up work. It's like having to mow the lawn every two weeks.
Spammers, you are wasting your time trying to blast ads onto my blog! I doubt anyone will suddenly get an urge to play Texas Holdem Poxer while reading comments about obscure Japanese indie bands.
Momus has a new essay up on his LiveJournal blog that codifies and groups the current Western views on Japan. I get my own section for the "Spenglerian" outlook that the Japanese cultural empire is in decline.
I also get called "shibuya-kei," which reminds me that I need to finally write an essay on my reappraisal of 90s indie music in Japan. I've come to believe that Flipper's Guitar and Pizzicato Five were more about taste than talent.
Honestly, losing this election feels like getting dumped by a girl. This is, of course, the most navel-gazing approach to political involvement ever, but I found much comfort today in my iPod's collection of heartbreak songs. Just replace "you" with the concept of "America" or "democracy," and all the love songs instantly create direct dialogue about Nov. 2, 2004.
Songs that can ease Post-Political Heartbreak:
Anything by Nirvana
"Bulls on Parade" - Rage Against the Machine
"Souretsu (Funeral Procession)" - Shiina Ringo
"Oh Darling" - The Beatles
"Canary" - Liz Phair
Anything by the Get Up Kids or the Promise Ring pre 2000 (if Emo is not good for times like this, when is it ever good?)
Songs that are no good for Post-Political Heartbreak:
Anything Japanese
Anything that could be called "Loungecore"
Anything Jazzy
Anything by the Archies
They Might Be Giants B-sides
"My Own Worst Enemy" - Lit
I am currently reading Alex Kerr's critical reappraisal of Japan, Dogs and Demons. Interesting bits on the lack of free information in Japan:
| While experts on Japan know all about the commonly encountered difference between tatemae (an official stated position) and honne (real intent), they tend to view the discrepancy as a negotiating ploy. It hasn't occurred to them that the fundamental Japanese attitude towards information might differ from what they take for granted in the West. But it does differ, and radically so. (104) |
Amen.
While most of the books on the Japanese information barrier - Ivan Hall's Cartels of the Mind and Laurie Anne Freeman's Closing the Shop, for example - deal with the political implications for a democratic society, I think that these information structures fundamentally alter something as trivial as the way that popular culture is constructed and consumed.
These barriers are operating behind even the most unpolitical Jpop fan magazine and street-wear shopping guides. The lack of free information is a critical component for steadying the markets to provide funding for the cultural industries.
My question is: how will the Internet change this? If you look at 2-ch, there is a lot of dissemination of taboo news items, but there is so much flaming and nonsense and ASCII art that you have to spend hours searching to find anything good. There is access to freer information, but it's marginalized. What worries me is not the technology, but the fact that those in position to receive privileged information feel no responsibility to spread it outside of their circles. No one feels any urge to "spread the truth." Talk to any magazine editor for thirty minutes and you'll be shocked to find out how much they know and aren't telling their readers.
And people in the bottom don't really mind if the information they get turns out to be made-up. I used to love the school-themed "reality show" Gakkou e ikou!, but I got really angry when I saw one part of an episode that was obviously scripted. Outraged, I complained to a Japanese friend who said tersely, "yume ga nai" -- "Jeez, you have no imagination."
I feel like I got dumped last night, and I'm waking up today to a sunny day, trying to start over. Music sounds better when you're depressed, but when the Zombies' "This Will Be Our Year" popped up on my iTunes party shuffle, I couldn't really find an ironic way to appreciate the song. Apple needs to make a "Solitude Shuffle" for times like these. Ah, "The Freed Pig" by Sebadoh just came on, good enough. Now, "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone" by the Monkees. There's enough vitriol in that one for the moment.
I will get back to analyzing Japanese culture and making music soon. I need a couple days to get over it though. I talked to my roomate from college a bit ago, and we all need to remember that there are 50 million other people who woke up with the same awful feeling. We're still pissed and reforming into a Unified Cultural Front. I finished reading Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone last night, and I feel like there must be some Progressive solution to all this subcultural alienation.
Allright, E.L.O.'s "Mr. Blue Sky" just came on the stereo. Things are looking up.
My friend Lanha on the lack of young voters:
"P-Diddy now has to kill them all, because it was vote or die."
Remember that dickhead George W. Bush? Turns out, he's our president for another four years.
What's that feeling.... oh, yeah - despair.
It's early here, but I'm up to watch results. The internets are bring wall-to-wall excitement to this election. I say we keep them around for 2008.
No real news or results yet, so I was flipping channels: man, Japanese videos are so bad! What happened!
Anyway, this democracy thing is awesome.
Americans: Go vote!
I voted through an absentee ballot. In Florida, no less!
I will be up tomorrow morning to watch the results, Pastis bottle in hand waiting to drink for either victory or defeat.
I believe that one of the main keys to understanding the difference between Japanese and American cultural consumption is a comparison of published reviews. Almost all Japanese magazines do not use critical reviews or numbered rating systems to evaluate new CDs, films, and books. The review usually describes the sound of the music itself and gives a little biographical information about the artist, but never directly judges the quality of the work. There is no Japanese equivalent to the hyper-critical Pitchfork Media - who rate music releases down to one-decimal place.
I realized yesterday that Japanese reviews also do not extract certain lyrics from the CD to explain the artistic intent - something that is standard operating procedure in America. Some of this is probably related to the fact that Jpop lyrics have little diversity (dakishimetai!), but overall, none of these write-ups give the impression that the "reviewer" is really thinking about the content of the work. I cannot claim to know whether or not the listener is thinking about the lyrics or judging the work's quality or creating an emotional bond to the music, but clearly, any content-analysis of music in Japan is not happening in the public sphere.
My gut feeling, however, is that media's avoidance of critical inquiry bleeds down to the consumer.
Let's say that you were an anthropologist and discovered an unknown tribe of people. To get a sense of their culture, you ask them to describe lots of different objects, and it ends up that they never once talk about color in their descriptions. There are two obvious conclusions: they have no concept of color or there is something that prevents them publicly from talking about color.
Applying this to the Japanese refusal to openly judge culture, there are thus two conclusions: they have no concept of content analysis or the structure does not allow a free discussion of content quality. I feel that it's a bit of both, but certainly, the lack of public discussion is pointing to a radically different approach to culture.
Meta-style jokes - where art admits to the audience that it is art or otherwise breaks the fourth wall to talk about its own construction - were a staple in the 90s and soon became used to make an excuse for bad content - � la the teen comedy trope: "Hey, we know this is just a dumb horror movie, so it's okay if we follow its conventions." Meta had been around in literature for a long, long time (see Candide etc), but suddenly admitting failure in an ironic way began to absolve all wrongdoing.
This has apparently filtered down to pop music. If you are D-12 and everyone in the world criticizes you for just being big because of Eminem, what do you do? Of course, you create a hit single "My Band" starring Enimem about how everyone in the world criticizes you for just being big because of Eminem!
So, what do we do about Ashlee Simpson - whom everyone attacks for riding the coattails of her sister? Ah, we give her a pop song about how she is always in the "Shadow" of her sister!
I am waiting for R Kelly's next single "I Do Nasty Things to My Underage Cousins."
Momus wrote me an eloquent response to my response to his essay on Postmodernism:
Sometimes I'm amazed by your anti-Japanese tone, Marxy. You sound like Japan's jilted lover! I mean, I know I probably err too much on the other side and you're just trying to correct the balance. But I think all too often you suggest that Japan just copies the west, or is some tangle of empty signifiers.
I like Japan. I like living in Tokyo, and I do not have any plans to move back to America in the near future. I like the relative cleanliness, politeness, and attention to detail, but also the chaos and unpredictability. There is a freedom to do what I want and buy what I want. I've never once regretted spending the last eight years actively studying Japan and Japanese.
When I first came to Japan in 1996, I was blown away by the creativity and the wholesale integration of good design into everyday life. I liked how the popular culture was unique and did not seem to specifically parrot American examples. My initial response was then: why did this happen?
Lately, many astute individuals have begun to introduce Japanese culture to the world, but still no one attempts to dig deeper and explain what is going on behind the scenes or provide an explanation of why this specifically happened in Japan.
Now after consuming and processing countless Western scholarly books on Japan, boxes upon boxes of Japanese magazines, various self-critical Japanese works, hours of long-winded conversations with thoughtful Japanese pundits, and eight years of first-hand experience with Japanese institutions (although not all in Japan), I am coming to conclusions about the Japanese cultural system and it's not pretty.
In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu argued that good taste and an appreciation for culture do not just naturally spring up in the individual, but are inextricably linked to education and social capital. To really get what is going on in Japan, you have to look at the sociological, economic, and psychological structures guiding the culture, not just the end product. Everything in Japan on a superficial level is A-OK, but there is not much evidence that the ura (back) has changed much since WWII.
If you pass one girl in a crazy Fruits-type, lysergic outfit, this appears to be spontaneous creativity. But when you start passing girl two, three, and four in the exact same outfit, there are questions to be asked. And when you finally find the magazine that spells out exactly how to dress in this way, certainly the system no longer appears to be one of free-thinking democracy.
Personally I don't think The Simsons is a 'better' postmodernism than 'Super Milk Chan' or 'Oh! Mikey'. And, being of a rather anti-metaphysical mindset myself, I completely welcome what Takashi Murakami said in BT magazine:
| 'I think we won't need art and artists some day. That's why Japan is the future, don't you think so? We don't have any religion, we just need the big power of entertainment.' |
My ongoing argument can be boiled down to: is it okay to like art but not understand art? Should we no longer expect people to get it, just buy it?
Do Japanese kids financially support a lot of revered, talented artists? Yes. Is there much evidence that they really understand what they are consuming? No.
That suggests to me that Japan regards postmodernism as a kind of anti-metaphysical utopia. We in the west are just too steeped in Plato, Christianity and the political consequences of the Reformation to ever throw off metaphysics so freely.
Sure, there are demographic issues in Japan's future and there's fascist imperialism in Japan's past. But the Japan I know is the Japan of now, and it's one of the most creative, interesting and intelligent cultures on earth.
Yes, but only by some weird historical anomaly. I often foolishly try to predict the future of Japan, but my worry is that Japan's creativity is not an integral part of the culture, but a byproduct of its structural alignment. And when external pressures change that structure, the culture will suffer. I think you are already seeing this. Who is the new Cornelius? The new Nigo? Even the Japanese themselves are worried about this younger generation. The word used to describe them is nurui - lukewarm. No passion, no interests. Even if the current Japan is great, this is worthless if the system cannot replicate itself, even for one generation.
For all its problems, America has been able to consistently churn out interesting culture, innovative business models, and
