neomarxisme

I just read the OECD Economic Survey on Japan from this year which highlights the "key economic challenges" facing the nation over the next decade. This sentence from the conclusion generally sums it up:

While the Japanese economy is in its best shape since the early 1990s, the basis for comparison - the weak economic performance of the last decade - does not set the bar very high.

This report estimates Japan's future growth rates at the meager 1.3% a year, and Japan will only keep up with the other countries' per capita income gains if it can maintain high working hours (already 8% above the OECD average), increase labor force participation rates (which the low birth rate is making difficult), and boost labor productivity to 2.5% (Japan's labor productivity is infamously poor).

Japan's per capita income has fallen to 75% of that the United States, even though the per capita incomes of other OECD countries have been relatively stable. Increases in private consumption will only follow gains in income, which means that consumerism isn't likely to return to early 90s levels anytime soon.

The report sharply criticizes the new Japanese employment practice of hiring temporary "non-regular" workers at much lower salaries and less job security. Apparently, there is little difference in productivity between the regular and non-regular workers, and non-regular workers have a difficult time moving to regular employment. In other words, the male elite students hired as permanent employees get 60% larger salaries for doing essentially the same amount of work as those with less prestigious backgrounds. This will obviously create a substantial income disparity in the future. On top of that, most skills come not from the education structure, but from firms' in-house training, which means that non-regular workers will seriously lack human capital.

Greater female participation in the workforce could be beneficial to the economy, but the fact that women make up 2/3 of the lower-paid, non-regular workforce is not providing economic encouragement for their mobilization.

Another interesting statistic: workers aged 15 to 24 show a 10.1% unemployment rate and more long-term unemployment than the other OECD countries.

Weekly Playboy - Japan's number one magazine for angry, breast-obsessed men - has a banner-article in the new issue advising their readers not to use "deai-kei" websites to meet women. In the enormous deai-kei industry, men pay exorbitant fees to send emails to various "girls," whom they hope to meet in person. Turns out: companies hire young women and men ("net-okama") to write emails as "sakura" set characters and find new and innovative ways to evade talk of actual meeting the clients. I have a half-dozen friends who've worked this job, and they all claim that these men are all frightfully sad and pathetic - especially since it's a huge open secret that the "girls" don't exist and the sites are a sham.

Weekly Playboy, in its infinite mission to get their readers laid (usually through glorifying the culture of paid transactions), suggests in its headline: "If you're gonna do it, definitely go with "non-Deai-kei" sites" (「ヤルなら、断然”非出会い系”サイト」). This particular magazine is always happy to fill the pockets of the underworld sex industry, so I would guess that they've gotten the OK to move readers away from these fake sites.

Earlier this year, there was news of police raiding a deai-kei office and busting up the yakuza-nerd network running it, after several of the highly frustrated patrons filed massive complaints. Japanese men, evidentally, do not like the fantasy of paying money to talk to women who do not really exist.

In order to find source material for a current research mission, I rescued a huge stack of women's fashion magazines awaiting trash pickup and gave them a new home (thus, the Can Cam post.) Minutes ago, I was making my way through the April issue of the triumphantly bland With when I spotted the odd yellow advert pictured at right. The red text warns, "The Northern Territories were decided as Japan's islands" (in smaller black text, "150 years earlier in the 1855 Japan-Russia Amity Treaty") [click on the picture to glance at the full-sized ad]. For those not up-to-date on Japan's desperate claims to various tiny islands in their environs, this ad refers to the Kuril(e) Islands above Hokkaido, seized by Stalin at the end of WWII.

Today, these islands have no Japanese residents and are mostly oversized volcanic rocks, but Japan wants these suckers back. And the government will take out ads in women's fashion monthlies until all the Japanese people understand that their government totally called those islands 150 years ago on the diplomatic playground! Japan didn't spend all that manpower eradicating the Ainu for nothing!

Now back to the latest installment of "How to Dedicate Your Room with Wicker Baskets"...

Do architecture-themed dancers like the Bauhaus Ballerinas get sick of having their work constantly compared to "writing about music?"

Freelance journalist Douglas McGray's 2002 article for Foreign Policy "Japan's Gross National Cool" (GNC) introduced an extremely intriguing idea to Japanese policy makers: can Japan revive its economic outlook by becoming a content-providing cultural superpower? McGray's point is certainly on-target: Japan's cultural exports increased from 500 billion yen in 1992 to 1.5 trillion in 2002, while the total amount of exports went up only 21% for the same period. In the past, I've claimed that cultural exports could never rival the steel industry or other heavy industries, but check this: the Japanese content industry is a 14 billion yen business, compared with the measly 5 billion yen of steel.

To quote Sly Stone, "There's only one way out of this mess/Knock the corners off the squares." Dig, man, Japanese cool is going to save us, say a whole legion of Japanese critics and scholars, and seeing that Puffy Amiyumi have their own TV show in the USA and kids are all reading their comics from right-to-left, there's certainly something to this idea.

The other day, out of nowhere, someone dropped the Japanese scholar Kawamata Keiko's new paper "The Current State of the Japanese Content Industries" on my desk, and to my surprise, Kawamata asks the exact question that has been plaguing me about GNC for the last three years: how can Japan's cultural industries be expected to save the economy when each of the industries have been declining since the late 90s? From music to comics to games, business has been steadily falling.

Each particular media has its own particular reasons for decline, but the low birth rate is responsible for vastly undermining the creation of new consumers. Traditionally, music, games, and comics have been youth-centered markets, so with less young people total, there are less possible consumers, and with high cellular phone charges and general economic sluggishness, the kids who have managed to be born have less pocket money for culture than those a decade ago. The music industry has responded by releasing cover versions of old songs in order to target consumers in their 40s and 50s - not exactly a new source of innovation.

The game industry has been in decline since 1997 (Kawamata 7), although the new consoles will no doubt provide a lift in the near future. Films are doing much better than before due to the convenience of new suburban cinemaplexes (11), but the business is still 1/7 of what it was in the 50s (12). Anime got a huge boost through DVD sales in 2002, but 2003 sales failed to break the 200 billion yen mark (13). Plus, television anime viewing rates are down, and an overproduction of titles has lead to a decline in quality (14). Magazine sales are way down (19), and seeing that magazines provide the blueprint and instructions for all consumer behavior, this cannot possibly help the consumer markets on the whole.

In her conclusion, Kawamata states that it is difficult to be optimistic about the content industries (23), and the reasons for this decline - less youth, bad economic conditions, and high phone prices - are not just temporary problems, but nearly permanent ones. The market needs to cultivate new producers, she warns, but desperate industries generally do not place their resources into long-run development.

Although I chide Puffy for getting to America eight years after their Japanese success, they were an authentically high-quality pop cultural product - due entirely from Sony giving producer Okuda Tamio the freedom to produce them in a new and innovative way. Today there are no innovative producers like Okuda who have the past-results to win freedom from profit-motivated corporate boardrooms. There's no money to take risks, and so now in 2005, there are few innovative artists attractive to foreigners in the Japanese music market with high-sales. Today's hit artists are usually tomorrow's producers, so nothing innovative now may mean no new producers being primed for interesting work in the future.

The content industry could be ripe for development into a even larger export industry, but the culture created in the industry's current decline is much less exportable than that made in its peak. Will the Japanese government respond with a long-term plan to boost exportable goods or just let the industry attempt to do it at their own increasingly-limping pace?

啓蟄　（けいちつ）　： "the day on which insects are said to come out of their holes in the earth (around March 6th)"

When Japan's economy is hot, Japan's social system clearly gets everything right. And when Japan's economy is ice cold, Japan's social system clearly gets everything wrong. No matter our post hoc logical fallacies, the pundits have agreed: Japan's economy is fundamentally different than Western models.

In his interpretative essay on Japanese economics - "Japanese Economics: An Interpretative Essay" - Prof. Keizo Nagatani paints a picture of the "Japanese economic perspective" in opposition to the free-market-obsessed Neoclassical orientation of the West. Nagatani spends a lot of time describing U.S. and Japan in the "Black dudes drive like this/White dudes drive like this" style of overreaching platitudes, but he offers a valid defense of Japanese economic practice:

1) The Japanese notion of equity is ex post (equality of final share/result), not ex ante like America (equality of opportunity) (37).

This is an excellent dichotomy that encapsulates many principles of Japanese social orientation. Japan's low income gap - compared to the awful income inequality in America - offers proof of this fundamental outlook. I wonder, however, why this vigilance against inequity would have let the income gap soar throughout the 80s and 90s. Seeing that the WWII leveling of accumulated wealth and high wage negotiations of labor unions in the 50s mostly explain how Japan started its economic growth in prime conditions for equality, the idea that the Japanese as a nation are "fundamentally against" wage inequality seems unrelated to the actual development of fair income distribution - especially as Nagatani admits, "Most of these equitable customs were never rules of law. (38)"

2) The Japanese are essentially anti-globalist because of its "potentially devastating effect on equity" (40).

This makes sense - globalization is just a drive for efficiency at the cost of domestic workers. American firms open factories at China, which lowers consumer prices in the States, but may further widen wage gaps. The problem is that globalization isn't something you pick - it's a enormous monster swallowing everything in its path. Nagatani explains, "For the Japanese, to follow this global trend is to risk destroying much of their economic culture." Yes, but can Japan slay this monster? Or does it just plan on building walls so large the monster cannot come ashore?

The new video for Japanese female R&B group Soulhead's song "Fiesta" is a deadly-serious imitation (pakuri) of the C & C Music Factory video for "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" complete with vague reproductions of early 90s Black Nationalist symbolism.

Most of you out there are thinking, the Goonies 'R' good enough for me.

But remove the wool from over your eyes and behold the nefarious octopus smear plot against people of East Asian descent!

As you may recall, the Goonies' head tech-guy/inventor-genius is a young Chinese kid named Data. He is so named because Asians are good at math and science, and also, without a tradition of Christianity, they could not possibly have real human feelings. Thus, his internal processings are just "data."

Towards the end of the film, the Goonie crew jump into some wicked water slide rock formations - like Panama City meets Yellowstone - and as they splash into the big wading pool at the bottom, the film cuts to them hugging each other in total relief. Something feels wrong. Of all the things they've endured in their fantastical journey - Italian mobsters, dynamite, falling rocks, booby traps, spiked floors, obnoxious rich kids, Mouth's overly dramatic "quarter speech" ("You see this one... this was mine! This was my wish! And it didn't come true. So I'm takin' it back. I'm takin' them all back...") - I find it hard to believe that the super fun water slides somehow seemed to be the scariest part.

But here's the trick: originally there was a scene after the water slides where the Goonies are almost drowned by an octopus. The science genius Data shoves his walkman into the sea beast, which then proceeds to "breakdance" away. Thus, having been saved from drowning, Mouth and Martha Plimpton hug in ecstatic relief.

The octopus scene, however, was cut from the film - mostly for being totally implausible and unnecessary to the plot.

Yet, as the movie closes and the ragtag Goonies defeat that rich kid Troy's dad ("Mr. Walsh"), a local film crew interviews the youngsters about their incredible-sounding, possibly-dubious story.

No doubt the viewer is thinking, "Octopus?! Little number-crunching Asian kid, what possibly are you talking about?! There was no octopus!"

The hot Anglo-saxon girl Andi pipes in: "The scariest thing was walking the plank." Thank you, decent white people, for telling the truth about what happened instead of inventing ridiculous stories about giant mollusks.

So, the director cut the scene with the octopus but left in a totally unnecessary line from Data explaining the octopus. This could only have one goal: to question the general motives of Asiatic peoples, to put that lingering doubt in all good Americans' minds, "What octopus?!"

This article claims that the Japanese fashion world is now targeting Japanese middle-aged corporate male workers. The writer starts his piece with the sexy "no-tie" look - failing to mention that the huge consumer story of the moment is the cool-biz (no tie, no jacket) movement trying to get employees to shun suits in the summer (to save on air conditioning expenses.) In the 80s, older men started to buy Armani suits to keep up with rising tastes, but from what I've heard, as consumer budgets went down and the moms tightened the family's pursestrings in the last five years, the first thing to go was men's fashion.

So this article is confused: are companies starting to target oyaji now or is it that oyaji are suddenly interested in fashion? There is weak evidence for the latter, but does the former really constitute news if it hasn't succeeded yet? The success and standarization of Uniqlo and the discount suit stores are the real story, but they're not sensational enough to write home about. So much Western journalism about Japan gets worked up about "social changes" that are mere blips when viewed with proper historical perspective.

The great variety of men's magazines in Japan bind together a post-modern, fragmented, multicultural society through one certain universal: the love of enormous breasts. From the elementary-school manga Shuukan Shonen Magajin to the rabid right-wing sex-and-violence of Weekly Playboy, editors lead all other stories and features with pictures of young, large-chested women. Headlines blare kanji neologisms like "kyonyuu" (巨乳, giant breasts), "deka-nyuu" (デカ乳,huge breasts), and even "bakunyuu" (爆乳、explosive breasts), and that's just the personal computing magazines.

Such breast-fetishization seems particularly odd for Japan - a country that has historically lacked both curvy female physiques and widespread use of enhancement surgery. There appears to be a lack of "talent" in Japan to fill the great demand, and magazines promising "G-cup" breasts usually deliver the goods at the expense of the models' other attributes. In other words, the American "girls of Playboy" are well-rounded fantasy women made of plastic, whereas the Japanese labor pool is filled with generally mediocre-looking plump women who happen to have that one special virtue.

The Japanese breast market, however, is relatively new - both for producers and consumers. According to Laura Miller's 2003 journal article "Mammary Mania in Japan" (positions 11:2), Japanese men were not sexually attracted to the chest area until after the Pacific War. Compared to 260 old Japanese slang terms for a women's nether region, there were only six for breasts. The kimono strictly suppresses a woman's curves, and this style of dress moved attention towards a woman's nape. But as Japan adopted the Western mode of modernization, public breast exposure became taboo and children started to be weaned earlier; these both made the once commonplace breasts into a new hidden sexual object. Globalization further spread the American big-boob gospel across the archipelago, and now, even Japanese women themselves believe that a busty bust is a must for a sexy physique. The Japanese demand for breast surgery is still meager compared to America's millions of silicon recipients, but breast enhancing chewing-gums and ring-tones are all the rage.

The latest chest to fall under the male gaze belongs to eleven year-old Irie Saaya. Her F-cup breasts are the talk-of-the-town and supposedly easing international tensions. Japan has a an enormous market for elementary school-girl "gravure" (photography of girls in bikinis) since it fills two contemporary trends: a greater need for more infantile, less threatening females and an obsession with top-heaviness. Whether Saaya's parents are negligent moral-vacuums or just awful human beings, they are no doubt moving into a bigger house as we speak.

The magazine cover above for this month's Super Jump perfectly illustrates the mismatch between traditional Japanese culture and its newly-acquired love of fantastical bosoms - the explosive chest does not fit into the kimono. This is an apt metaphor for Japan's current economic and social crises: the new globalized tastes and directions can no longer be forced to fit into the old "Japanese" structure. While there is something titillating and sexy about this specific moment captured by the artist, the scene cannot be maintained over the long run. There are only two equilibrium positions: either the breasts fall out or the kimono is closed back up to flatten out the chest. With 80 million Japanese consumers solidly obsessed with women's mammary organs, I very much doubt that the traditional order is coming back...

In the news: Japan's beloved Little Black Sambo has returned to bookshelves. American pressures led to the book's banning in 1988, but an online petition has brought the lovable racist stereotype back from the dead.

Some choices quotes from "expert" Mori Kazuo - a psychologist from Shinshu University:

Kazuo Mori...said most Japanese were surprised to learn that "Little Black Sambo" had racist overtones.

"It never occurred to us," he said. "It was just a story."

And...

"The Japanese people can be racist when it comes to Koreans living here," Mori said. "But racist against blacks?"

"We have no experience in dealing with black people. Where would we get it from?"

Two observations:

First of all, my friend Scott pointed out how nonchalantly Prof. Mori assumes that racism against Koreans is structurally ingrained in Japan. Of course, we don't like the Koreans, because we know the Koreans. But how can we learn to hate Africans if we don't get a chance to know them...?

Second, I think his quote "It never occurred to us" gets at the heart of racism towards Africans in Japan: there's no malicious attempts to put Black people "in their places" (like old-style American racism), but just a widespread ignorance towards sensitive issues. Okay, certainly many Japanese fear miscegenation's threat to the pure Yamato damashii, but for the most part, I would euphemistically describe Japanese attitudes towards Africans as deviating from what is considered "appropriate" in the West.

I am personally uncomfortable with the widely-used term "Black Music" - hip-hop, soul, R&B - because it assigns specific artistic styles to racial disposition, but moreover, there are tanning salons called "Blackie's" and hip-hop skin-darkening practices that border on black-face. Foreign talento Bobby is a whole 'nother bag. For those who have not seen him on television, he is an African immigrant with (possibly fake) poor Japanese who is thrown on shows to say inane things for everyone else's enjoyment. Perhaps there's an argument that he's "breaking barriers" with his stardom, but his popularity seems to be based on his lack of linguistic skills and understanding of Japanese manners, while the white foreign celebrities all speak Japanese fluently and crack "Japanese" jokes. If the allegations are true that Bobby is intentionally mangling his Japanese, this would have seriously damning implications for Japanese tastes.

As with Little Black Sambo, the line is: hey, we Japanese love Black people! But it's a pretty constricting love affair. Blacks must be entertainers, wild natives, sports stars, or naturally "cool." America is equally guilty of constructing these limiting media images, but we fortunately have the chance to know real-life African-Americans of diverse experiences and we have a history of heroic Black leaders whose accomplishments are worth more than what can fit on a 4800 yen t-shirt. The Japanese mainstream, in some ways, doesn't know any better, but I wonder how much longer that's possible in a progressively globalized world.

Japan is Louis Vuitton, and Louis Vuitton is Japan. While years of recession have seen domestic fashion brands crash and burn on the homefront, the French luxury brand just keeps on expanding its market share. Although LV is less dependent on Japanese customers now than it was in the 80s, Japan still accounts for more than half of Louis Vuitton's global sales. Those brown-and-gold trademark leather bags infest the farthest reaches of Tokyo - from the nouveau riche castle of Roppongi Hills to the chintzy supermarkets of train-station suburbia, from the rich princesses at elite universities to the lower class kogyaru lumpen eating hamburgers at Lotteria. Proportionally speaking, Japan is not Zen, Gothic Lolita, textbook revisionists, sneaker collectors, otaku, or sumo wrestlers: Japan is Louis Vuitton.

The Japanese have been fascinated with the brand for the last several decades, but its social penetration was much more subdued in the past. The super-snobby female-model protagonist from (Gov.) Tanaka Yasuo's 1981 work Nantonaku, Crystal refuses to get a Louis Vuitton bag on principle, because - as the comment-writer explains (in note #212), LV bags should only be carried by those who are rich enough to hire a bag-carrying servant (55). The brand has always symbolized aristocratic "high-society" (hai-so) for the Japanese, and this made the bags an easy target for those select narikin families who found unbelievable wealth in the Bubble period. At that point, however, the media still presumed all rising tastes to be "mass," widespread changes, and so the brand oddly became part of the "middle-class standard." As a fashion editor told me in 1998, "Where else do you see girls with Louis Vuitton riding the subways?"

In the mid-90s, high school girls became obsessed with owning the 100,000 yen purses, and as a result, shady, unorganized prostitution flourished among the lower-class kogyaru who couldn't just ask Mom and Dad for the funds. But such sordid stories could not tarnish the image of the brand, which grew bigger and bigger in the following years. Louis Vuitton somehow defies Simmel's traditional theory of fashion - Japan's upper classes are supposed to abandon these cultural objects once the dirty proles get their paws on them! But no, Louis Vuitton's Christ-like powers emanate from Old Europe and nothing that happens in Japan could dent that sacred halo.

In the past, Japanese fashion was about living up to a middle-class standard, but now that most have started to be cognizant of real class differences, everyone is scrambling to prove that they're on the right side of the fence. The message used to be - don't be left behind! - but now it's - are you in or are you out? And there's nothing more "in" than Louis Vuitton. There seems to be no coincidence that LV sales are rising in parallel to consciousness about class divisions.

There's a segment of Japanese middle-class women in their 20s who read JJ and ViVi. They dye their hair a rich brown and bronze their skin a shiny gold. I can't help but think, is owning the bag not enough? Do you really need to look like the Louis Vuitton logo?

Splendid weighs in on my album Kyoshu Nostalgia.

This week's Shuukan Bunshun has a story entitled "“中高生の歌姫”大塚愛の新曲にパクリ疑惑!?" (Suspicions of plagurizing for the "song queen of middle-schooler/high schoolers" Otsuka Ai's new song.) Is it just me or are there not a lot of sensational "pakuri" cases in the news all of a sudden? Between these stories and a new stricter sampling policy for major label releases, are Japan's attitudes towards intellectual property converging towards the Western model?

Update: I looked over the article last night. Otsuka apparently ripped-off the chorus melody from a song by minor visual-kei artist WYSE. (And Shukan Bunshun ripped off Cyzo by demonstrating the pakuri through comparing the melodies' musical notation side by side.)

BOB DYLAN: Roy, good to see you.
ROY ORBISON: Hi, Bob.
GEORGE HARRISON: Roy, you know Tom, right?
TOM PETTY: Hi, Roy. Nice to see you again.

(sound of rustling in the bushes.)

GEORGE HARRISON: Oh, no! Jeff Lynne is here.
BOB DYLAN: That guy who did Xanadu?
TOM PETTY: Christ.

JEFF LYNNE enters the room - in pop-operatic form.

JEFF LYNNE: Bob, Roy, George, Tom! Great to see you all.
BOB DYLAN: Hi, Jeff. I really liked that one album of yours...
JEFF LYNNE: Which one?
BOB DYLAN: The one with the gaudy spaceship on the cover.
JEFF LYNNE: All of my albums have gaudy spaceships on the cover.

TOM PETTY: (aside to George Harrison) I'm only working with this guy if you promise to never let him get his paws on Beatles material.
GEORGE HARRISON: Let's not worry about the impossible.

Working under an ingenious post-modern rhetoric, Japanese artist Murakami Takashi has found a way to sell his cartoons to the rough beast of corporate capitalism and have those financial transactions beheld as subversive, progressive endeavor. Greed is good, and just because your logos grace Louis Vuitton bags and the towering monument to capital accumulation Roppongi Hills doesn't mean it's not all about the art, man. (sound of cash register)

But if Murakami continues to dedicate his artistic career to helping the super rich get even richer, he should at least have the business sense to protect his brand cachet. LVMH and the Mori Family are the tops of their respective games: so why on earth, Mr. Murakami, are you illustrating record jackets for the lame acoustic band Yuzu?

Yuzu is one of those heart-warming, acoustic-guitar-plus-harmonica acts for music fans who lack the courage to like anything approaching youth subculture. They are the 90s coffee-house version of Boz Scaggs, doomed to future obscurity for being neither very good, nor sufficiently kitschy. Their mediocrity makes them difficult to hate and even harder to remember.

So, when Yuzu puts together a two-disc Greatest Hits collection (Going and Home), how can Murakami Takashi refuse to take the job? I mean, how totally lame would it be to make art without getting money from giant corporations? If you've amassed a huge pool of art-school slave labor, why not use it at every possible opportunity?

Since I'm not currently in the United States, it's hard for me to gauge whether the size of Gwen Stefani/Harajuku Girls's stardom warrants all this press attention, but here is a NY Times article on Stefani's limited-edition (oh, so 1998!) Harajuku Lovers Digital Camera.

Most journalists writing about the Harajuku Girls seem to be skimming the other articles on the Harajuku Girls for the "truth" on Harajuku, so again, this kind of statement shows up:

[T]he identically dressed Japanese girls who surround her like so many props in her videos hardly seem to represent the individuality that is perhaps the most praiseworthy aspect of what Stefani is singing about. (bolding mine)

Highly-detailed, extravagant colorful street fashion in the West is a very rare phenomemon, and without explicit instructions for constructing this look, must be a somewhat individualistic self-project. However, we should not project these assumptions onto the kids at Harajuku. A vast majority of the girls in that neighborhood achieve their appearance through perfectly following consumer style guides like Cutie and Zipper. While some subcultural spin-offs from consumer lifestyles have occurred (perhaps early Goth Lolita), the bulk of what Stefani loves could be easily replicated through picking up a couple of choice magazines.

Therefore, the Harajuku look is not a "subculture" as much as as media-guided "consumer lifestyle" (see this). So when the NY Times' Rob Walker writes, "It's about figuring how to remake a subcultural style into something salable on a mass scale," it makes absolutely no sense because the Harajuku look has always been something "salable on a mass scale."

We shouldn't necessarily respect the Harajuku girls less just because they wear a pre-determined uniform, but the assumption that they are creatively manufacturing their own style to separate themselves from the rest of society does not reflect reality.

Out near the suburbs of Mitaka-shi, between marine research institutions, vegetable fields, and highway sprawl, there is a complex of dorms for Tokyo University students. The buildings have that decaying Modernist concrete slab look, like if Japan's highest academic achievers found refuge from apocalyptic cataclysm in the set of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. The Komaba campus of "Todai" looks equally slummy, but there is something desolate and creepy about these free-standing futuristic dorms in the middle of the country. Ye intruders beware.

I just finished reading Brian McVeigh's subtly-titled Japanese Higher Education as Myth - a work that spends 250 pages discussing why and how Japanese universities do not particularly function as a higher education system. While Japan's secondary schooling has some obvious pluses compared to those of other post-industrial nations, I can't imagine anyone ever defending the Japanese tertiary level institutions - even Ezra Vogel quickly admitted to "mediocre universities" in his Japan as Number One.

Kirsten Refsing breaks down the education process into four goals:

1) education - the teaching of skills
2) socialization - training responsible citizens
3) selection - distributing talent to the labor market
4) depository - getting the youth off the streets (McVeigh 11)

The Japanese system is amazingly efficient at 2,3, and 4, but in order to mask schools' function as an agent of social control, we generally emphasize the first reason - teaching and learning - to justify the other three. A certain level of basic skills - literacy, math, science - is crucial for constructing the workforce's human capital, but there are real doubts whether the Japanese education system today provides students with any intellectual skills and knowledge above and beyond what is important for a smoothly-running, super-efficient society. Learning about history, critical theory, or social issues tends to pester the capitalist system, not contribute to its safety.

As someone currently enrolled in an "elite" Japanese university, I can vouch for the widely-stated comment that expectations on Japanese college students are very low. The facilities and faculty may be high-level, but there is pretty much a society-wide understanding that learning should not get in the way of shuushoku katsudou (finding a job, starting from the end of the 3rd year and ending in spring of the 4th) and bu-katsu (club activities). Things have supposedly gotten stricter with attendance lately, but I hear stories from hot-shot employees about showing up to campus "around 4 or 5" times throughout their student life. Employers never look at grades anyway, so graduating with the lowest possible GPA is not so different than graduating at the top.

Graduating at the top, however, does not take so much effort - mostly just perfect attendance and taking the final exams. There are very, very few papers or long writing assignments, and reading is kept to a minimum. Students enrolled in elite zemi (seminars) are expected to write a thesis and do other substantial research projects, but mostly they do work as part of the zemi group.

I've seen nothing compare to my own undergraduate Junior Tutorial in East Asian Studies where we read 200-300 pages on a given topic, discussed it with a professor one day, discussed it with a graduate student the next day, and wrote a seven-page paper each week. This particular class was my trial-by-fire that whipped me into much stronger academic shape with writing, reading, and general knowledge. Japanese universities - in their current institutional role as "fun time" before a life of dull employment - would be somewhat malicious to assign such a curriculum. The students may be able to do such a task, but this sort of demand breaks the trust between educator and educatee in what McVeigh calls "simulated education" - we all pretend like we're studying and you pretend to not notice we aren't.

Since there's no universal standard of what "education" should be, I decline an invitation to snipe and criticize just because Japaense universities are not imparting knowledge in the same ways as the Western model, but I do think there is a connection between the anti-intellectualism (well maybe, a-intellectualism) of Japanese universities and the a-intellectualism, apoliticism, and general social apathy of Japanese society. Most Western students may get a taste of social understanding in high school, but universities are where we get a chance to get a deeper knowledge and broader perspective on the world. Not everyone necessarily needs to go to college (so says the Animal Collective in four-part harmony), but it's certainly the easiest place to learn to be a critical, literate human being. There are some positive society-wide benefits to having a college-educated populace: higher understanding of social issues like racism, higher interest in artistic endeavor, a greater social discourse. Frankly, huge swatches of Western societies lack a certain amount of these "ideal" effects, but we do have institutions that are fueled by academic maturity. And we all prosper under inventions created within university research facilities.

The Japanese see intellectual maturity as a slow life-long process, and if you've ever talked to Japanese in their 30s, they are often as political and critical as anyone in the West. There are not, however, very many well-educated Japanese youths with broad social understanding, who can shoot the breeze in pseudo-intellectual discussions. I can't claim that societies absolutely need academically-trained 20-somethings, but surely their absence has had a profound impact on Japanese youth culture.

Gazing upon the shelves of Japanese video rental stores, there is apparently much consumer demand for early 1980s American TV. Although I've spent many afternoons watching Night Rider on Tokyo cable channels, I don't know if I could bring myself to actually rent the DVDs. For some reason, however, I decided that The Greatest American Hero was a different caliber of program - a thinking-man's Night Rider, if you will - and I rented it yesterday to give myself something to do while convalescing. (The series automatically wins serious bonus points for having the Greatest American Theme Song.)

For those unfamiliar with the story, here's a short recap: a Los Angeles high-school teacher - Ralph - teaches a class of delinquent students who oddly all sound like they've been taking speech classes from Danny Zucco at Coney Island. If this pedagogical challenge wasn't hard enough, he has been recently divorced and is dating uppity female lawyer Pam (a female lawyer - what hath mine eyes behold?!), played by ultra 80s powerhouse Connie Sellecca. One day, a U.F.O. brings Ralph a magical red suit, but get this: he loses the instructions. This does not stop him, however, from teaming up with the perfectly-named Bill Maxwell - a shoot-first-quip-later gumshoe F.B.I. agent. Hilarity ensues. (If you think the idea that a superhero can't fly is hilarious.)

The writers decide to frame every exciting episode within 1) his high-school class 2) his relationship with Pam and 3) his own coming-to-terms with his new-found powers. For forty minutes, all sorts of action gets in the way of a date with Pam, which of course, leads us back to teaching the Jersey kids something about their place in society.

Making fun of television conventions has become so ingrained within contemporary culture ("Just wait until the Sergeant sees what I put in his pants..." --> "McVetty!!!!"), that it's surprising and refreshing to see real programming completely unaware of its own ridiculous premises. GAH features a lot of small-scale international intrigue - like the kind of plots that an eight year-old imagines the F.B.I. and C.I.A. get themselves embroiled in. The bad guys are Hollywood drug dealers, astrology believers, vaguely Arab terrorists, and ultimately, Communists. The show is also obsessed with the main character wearing the suit in public and everyone thinking he is totally crazy. The kind of crazy where people move to the back of the bus when he gets aboard. Or conversely, when bad guys claim to see him flying, we later find out that those bad guys' statements have landed them "in the crazy bin."

This is all slightly amusing, but not quite terrible enough to be over-the-top kitsch. I know there are a lot of GAH fans out there, but ultimately this show reminds me of how much better television has gotten since the 80s.

(Why do I feel like VH-1 already has the corner on all 80s nostalgia?)

Location: Hollywood, California.
Setting: Network Television Boardroom

Network Executive: Okay, we need a really good background location for this new show. Think, people! Think!
Junior Executive 1: ...
Junior Executive 2: ...
Junior Executive 3: ...
Junior Executive 4: ...
Junior Executive 1: ...
Junior Executive 5: ...
Junior Executive 2: ...
Junior Executive 3: ...
Junior Executive 4: How about Southern California?
Network Executive: Brilliant.

For the next six months, I'll be dedicating myself to unlocking the mysteries of Japanese media collusion through enormous music market data sets. Early numbers show that there are indeed cabalistic relations between television shows and artist management companies: how else could Johnny's Jimusho get more than fifty appearances for their artists in 1991 on the weekly show Music Station without scoring a single Top 100 hit? As we've seen, Japanese magazines show little restraint in printing an entire book of unlabeled advertorial, and I, for one, automatically assume that this is all "bad" for consumers.

Japanese consumers, however, do not appear to mind, because for the most part, they don't want to know what's good or who's talented or who's next - they just want to know what's right.

Certainly, there is a minority of Japanese youth consumers who reject media guidance for their lifestyle, but we cannot deny that there is massive demand for "manual" style magazines that show exactly how to construct certain looks. Unbelievably popular Can Cam and J. J. run at 600 pages a month and outline detailed strategies for brand shopping and outfit coordination. Compared to Western fashion magazines that suggest a vague theme and then offer subtle hints towards subsequent action, these magazines are explicit and authoritative. And if you dress exactly according to the instructions, you can rest assured of being beyond peer criticism.

Magazines legitimize objects, and this influence is easily apparent. The Lower East Side is filled with Japanese clutching the store maps from Brutus and Relax, and brand directors often complain that if a magazine prints a picture of a shirt in black, the kids will only buy the black version, even if the same shirt is available in red. Apparently, no one can quite take the risk of interpolating or improvising.

In this particular atmosphere, a magazine based on subjective reviews has an uphill battle with consumers. Music Magazine was very popular in the 70s for its critical, thrashing music reviews (!), but had to soften its rhetoric in the 80s once music fans started to prefer the corporate info-sheets from Sony and Shinko Music. Recently, I asked an ex-editor at Rockin' On Japan why they had yet to put Yura Yura Teikoku on the cover, when the universally-despised Orange Range got the royal treatment. He said, "Only about 1/5 of our readers are hard-core music fans, and the other 4/5 just want to know more about music on the charts."

So, here's the catch: music that is popular is that on the charts, but the only way to get on the charts is to belong to the right corporation or artist management company, who are happy to pay magazines for the cover and main article. With magazines refusing to buck producer and consumer demands for unfiltered information from the most well-endowed companies, there is little room to promote innovation. Magazines and other media provide one of the few chances for rearranging product messages before they hit the consumer, and if magazines become unfiltered product information, then all information is just advertising.

This leads us back to why there are no subjective reviews in Japanese culture: they are not a trustworthy gauge of social correctness. If orthopraxy indeed moves social behavior towards the right "path" (道) and doing the "right" thing, then there is no possibility that was is "popular" could be "wrong" or "bad." Marketing thus becomes not a quest of offering the best product, but creating the highest level of legitimacy. In the past, magazines had more authority to curate their own lifestyles, but something has drastically changed in the past few years. As media sales decline, magazines are more desperate to please the manual-seeking consumer and the fund-providing advertiser. If no one wants innovation, why would there be innovation?

Nothing has eaten into the Japanese cultural industries more than the spread of cell-phones (keitai). Where kids from the 80s and early 90s had 10,000-20,000 yen a month to spend on records, clothing, and karaoke, kids today have to scrap together the same amount just to pay their monthly phone bills. Numerous studies on the decline of the music market blame keitai, and since the Japanese still primarily go "online" through their phones, using the Internet appears to have an inverse relationship with cultural participation.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the post-industrial world, the computer-based Net is relatively low priced, and for most kids under 22, provided for free by parents or universities. And what's more, all the illegal downloading and file trading has provided amazing access to music and movies at the rock bottom price of zero. The long-term effects on the cultural industry have yet to be seen, but at least the American markets have fought off constant decline like in Japan.

Of course, the Japanese record industry blames CDRs and file-trading on their yearly 10% descent, but file-trading culture here is still in its infant stages. For starts, there aren't massive networks of T3-connected college kids in dorms, and most Japanese Internet users are men in their 30s and 40s who don't have so much incentive for illegal downloads. There is not much to suggest that the number of music fans has remained constantly while fewer pay for real releases; simply, less Japanese people care about music than in the past.

With print media and fashion, there is no real threat of bootlegging, and yet there are similiar rates of market contraction. The phone bills and general economic malaise have redistributed funds out of the "leisure" business into the communications business, and I would not assume that kids are using phones to access more culture. They easily rack up 10,000-20,000 yen bills just talking and emailing friends.

For at least the last twenty-five years in Japan, all pop/youth culture has been consumer culture, and now that kids can't buy anything, "culture" has gone into a strange transitory period where the old "buy=participation" market structure remains, but the values and consumer abilities have changed. Meanwhile in the United States (and possibly, in Korea and elsewhere), youth Internet usage may not be increasing media sales, but it seems to be boosting overall participation and involvement in culture.

Bring It On Again
Cruel Intentions 2
Meatballs III
Meatballs 4
Rocky V
Police Academy 6: City Under Siege
Play It Again, Sam. Again!
License to Drive