neomarxisme

Speaking of the cinema, one of the things that's almost impossible to do in Japan is talk to Japanese friends about foreign films. Not that they haven't seen the film in question or that they won't have an insightful opinion - it's that it takes forever to figure out what the hell it's called in Japanese. With both song and film titles, Japanese distributors are wont to give the work a "houdai" 「邦題」 - Japanese title - that will be attractive to domestic consumers. Creating an accurate translation of the original does not, apparently, fall into their game plan. They simply assign more "palatable" titles that will appeal to the broadest possible audience.

Now, American firms are quite guilty of equal crimes; for example, how did C'est arrivé près de chez vous become Man Bites Dog? But in Japan, the blatant rewriting of film titles for marketing purposes is a widespread, ingrained practice. Distributors must first take out all words used metaphorically or abstractly and replace them with specific, direct meanings. Then, if love enters into the plot at any level, they must insert the words 恋, 愛、心、or ハート.

Some choice cuts:

Chariots of Fire --> 「炎のランナー」 (The Runners of Flames)
Dead Poet's Society --> 「いまをいきる」 (Live the Today)
Dazed and Confused --> 「バッド・チューニング」 (Bad Tuning)
Before Sunrise --> 「恋人たちのディスタンス」 (The Lovers' Distance)
重慶森林 (Chungking Express/Jungle) --> 「恋する惑星」 (Love Planet)

There are a million more like it - some sensible, some egregious. (The new War of the Worlds' houdai is 「宇宙戦争」, which pretty much means "Star Wars.") These title changes, however, make sense: why would anyone want to see a movie starring dead poets? Or how could you go on a date to a movie with the word "Chungking" in the title? Can you imagine a Japanese fan really getting into the Partridge Family song "I Think I Love You" if it was not re-named 「悲しき初恋」("sad first love")?

Maybe Wes Anderson likes the fact that his film Rushmore is called「天才マックスの世界」(The World of Genius Max), but these title changes seem to reflect another theme quite apparent within Japanese society: companies think very little of their consumers. In this extremely low-risk culture, distributors fear that filmgoers will choose films based solely on the title. "Rushmore?!" exclaimed Yoshi, "I'm not seeing a movie about that monument in South Dakota!"

To us children of the early 1980s, one only thing was clear: we were all going to die in a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Looking back on our history, we see a straight line of Cold War paranoia from the 50s to the 80s, but we soon forget that the bad guys in mid-1970s American films about spies and international intrigue were Americans. The Russians didn't kill Robert Redford's colleagues in Three Days of the Condor - we did. But after Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and Reagan took the presidency in 1981, Cold War culture was back and hotter than ever.

A couple of films really encapsulate this era. The most obvious example is Rocky IV, where an old, tiny, ethnic American boxer goes head-to-head with a soulless, blond supermachine from the Soviet Union. (There's no way that Rocky can win, or can he?).

Decent white people will save the world.

The other movie is Top Gun, where Tom Cruise plays a short F-14 fighter pilot with the good Christian name of Pete Mitchell. His call name is "Maverick" because this bad boy doesn't play by the rules. And no one can seem to discipline him too strictly, because he's such a goddamn great pilot. (Just like his "old man.") This guy is all results and no process.

Eastern Europeans cannot win the war for America.

The Russians are the film's ultimate villains, but they only bookend the story, so the ersatz enemy is Val Kilmer's character Iceman. From the start, we hate this guy because he is tall, blond, and has a Polish last name. The name "Iceman"? This cat flies "ice cold" - no mistakes - and there is nothing more un-American than Perfectionism. Okay, he's kind of a dickhead and is a bit cocky, but Iceman is not so much a "bad guy" as extremely skeptical about Maverick's unreliable and risky piloting.

At the end of the film, textbook-flier Iceman wins the "Top Gun" trophy, but the tide turns when an international incident inconveniently erupts minutes into their graduation party. Mr. Perfect Iceman finds himself in a lot of trouble with five MIG fighters, and he is only saved by Maverick's maverick flying. The moral of the story goes back to that Protestant belief that following rules is ultimately unimportant compared to "faith" and "talent." Maverick may not do "what's right" (orthopraxy) but he and God know that he's a goddamn good pilot at the end of the day (orthodoxy). The East - whether that be the Russians or the Japanese - may have scientific precision on their sides, but God's U.S. of A. has got the heart. And who wins the Cold War sports match of Top Gun? Goddamn Maverick.

A side note:

1) Is Kelly McGillis really that hot? My nine year-old friends were convinced as such, but I never saw it. Does it only take blond hair to be "hot"? Do we already understand that at age nine?

A couple of additional points from watching Top Gun on Japanese T.V.:

1) Lyric Translation - Most Japanese films will translate the lyrics to background music in scenes without proper dialogue. So when Maverick and Kelly McGillis are finally having "carnal knowledge," the bottom of the screen is filled with the italicized translation of the lyrics to "Take My Breath Away." I find this quite interesting in that we native viewers tend to unconsciously take in the words of background music, and I've never considered whether they are actually crucial for understanding the plot. So, seeing them explicitly printed on the screen struck me as odd at first, but I can understand why they may be necessary, or at least, why viewers may want to see what is being sung.

(By the way, the gated-reverb snare drum of "Take My Breath Away" essentially sums up the entire 1980s.)

2) Immediate Credits - When new characters pop on the screen, the Japanese subtitlers take it upon themselves to label them. For example, when "Iceman" shows up for the first time, the screen says 「アイスマン」, and then get this: under it, they write the actor's name (ヴァル・キルマー）. This goes back to the idea of commerce taking great precedence over art in Japan; how could one enjoy a foreign film without knowing immediately who the actors are? Personally, I can't imagine finding Goose funny without knowing he is portrayed by Anthony Edwards. I feel sorry for the Americans who had to sit through the entire film wondering whether that was indeed Tom Skeritt playing Viper.

If you believe the common arguments offered on this blog, the magazine Cyzo should not exist. I'm always barking about "no criticism" in the Japanese press, and team Momus claims that this is because the Japanese are extremely satisfied with their society and culture. Well, Cyzo is a very popular monthly magazine that casually scatters, smothers, covers, chunks, tops, and dices the Japanese culture industries without drifting into the heavy conspiracy angle of underground publications like Uwasa no Shinsou. Cyzo is satire and dissent at its slickest and most pleasant.

For all of their brave bashing of the entertainment/media cabal, the magazine still navigates very narrow waters. They've been sued by new religions and Nigo for saying mean things. And the huge talent agencies have pretty much blocked them from getting top-tier bikini models for their covers. (After several articles trashing Orange Range's melodic thievery, they are no longer welcome friends to Stardust Production.) No matter, they get all the best talent from the outsider networks and great access to anonymous insiders. If Cyzo were published in English, my blog would most likely become obsolete, seeing that my most "controversial" positions are just lifted and recycled from this alternative media world.

Some articles from this month's issue:

• Article on how the music business has tried to destroy the upstart chaku-uta (downloadable ringtones) industry.

• A conversation with three major stylists to the stars. A telling quote about A Bathing Ape: "Now, the only people who buy [Bape] are young students coming to Tokyo on field trips, but it's really big right now in New York as a hip-hop brand."

• Small article bemoaning the possibility of having to deal with an endless lifetime of Tsuji Nozomi and Kago Ai (Morning Musume/W members) on TV.

• Article on Matsuda Seiko and her daughter's fall-out that highlights a lot of music industry politics. For example, the daughter Sayaka has run to industry "don" Suhou Ikuo (Burning Pro) to protect her, and the magazine speculates that the recent press on the incident was pay-back for Matsuda's disrespect of Suhou's friend in the past.

• Small article on people who record the backstage chatter of idol concerts.

• Komuro Family: where are they now?

• Large article on how Japan's top subtitler Toda Natsuko keeps messing up the translation for big American movies, with exposition on how the subtitling industry works.

• Story on how Nara-ken has started a "Deai-kei" mail magazine to help counter the fall in childbirths.

Any interesting side note: Talking to a freelance reporter, he told me that the debates on 2-ch give magazines most of their ideas for stories. So when they write about pakuri or translation mistakes, etc., they generally report "Everyone on 2-ch is up in arms about..." as a way to not get themselves in trouble for opening up the issue themselves. This is a very intriguing role for the Japanese internet.

I was biking home from the OK Fred office when I spotted an abandoned Roland Juno 106 polyphonic analog 80s synth out in the street. It was moments from raining, so I decided to save the thing from most definite water-based ruin. Plugged it in - it works! A little wonky - an octave of keys doesn't function and the sound is scratchy - but it's certainly not bad for free. I'll add it to my other half-working 1980s Japanese analog synths. Anyone know somewhere to get this repaired? Five-g won't repair synths it didn't originally sell to you.

I already have a Juno-6, which essentially does the same thing as the 106 (but better). Trying to figure out what to do with this beast in the long term...

In my post from April 30th, I asked whether anyone really cares that art director Noda Nagi habitually steals ideas from other sources? Apparently, people do care.

According to some insider sources, Japanese fine artist Aida Makoto's managing gallery - the Mizuma Art Gallery - has sued Noda over her illicit copying of Aida's work "Azemichi" for the record cover of Halcali's second album Ongaku no Susume. Noda's management was apparently livid over the action and claimed that Noda had never even heard of Aida until they both appeared at the same art conference last November. Aida supposedly thinks this whole episode is hilarious, and his manager sees the aggressive lawsuit as a provocative piece of "contemporary art." Nice idea: if the system keeps stealing your idea, make the legal-economic system into performance art.

In totally unrelated news, Halcali have discontinued the original Ongaku no Susume cover and have a new pakuri-free one to celebrate their breaking of the 100,000 sales mark! God bless the omote/ura distinction. No one loses face - unless those idiot bloggers start wanting the truth or something lame like that.

I'm not sure where the ad on the left comes from, but it shares some striking similiarities to the video Noda directed for Yuki's song "Sentimental Journey." The cd jacket on the right is not as telling as the actual video or the long promotional poster for the Yuki single "Commune." Maybe the art director of the ad ripped off Noda's work. Whatever the case, everyone is now extra-sensitive about Noda stealing things - eyes keen like those of security guards when Winona Ryder enters a department store.

Speaking of Halcali and pakuri (a word I have defined as "an artistic use of creative elements from other works used within a similar context without acknowledgement of the original"), enter The Do-Nuts - a new two-girl hip-hop-pop group from Okinawa. Their debut single "Nagisa no Go-Go Girl" not only manages to lift rhythmic and thematic elements from Halcali's "Giri Giri Surf Rider" but in the video, they full out copy parts of Halcali videos (like hitting each other with food à la "Strawberry Chips.")

Where in the world did these two girls with the hardest hitting MC names ever - MC Eriko and MC Akino - come from? Well, of course, Orange Range's label Spice Records. Ripping off other artists is their whole raison d'être. I see the thought process: the Do-nuts are from Okinawa, which means that are racially inclined to be better performers than Halcali, so why not give the public a better version of the original?

For the last six months or so, the Japanese media has been massively obsessed with Densha Otoko ("Train Man") - the "true" story of a nerdy commuter who meets a fancy girl on a train and solicits romantic advice on the online BBS 2-ch, which he successfully uses to win over said girl. (Full plot description here.) First, there was the infamous 2-ch thread itself, then that was condensed into a book. Now, there's a feature film and a television serial on Fuji TV (with different actors portraying the characters.) There are also manga and adult video adaptions in the works.

How did a small Internet phenomena blow up into the mainstream? Well, behind the scenes, the ultra-powerful Dentsu advertising corporation and the Fuji entertainment group are doing their damnest to make this modern tale of romance into a mass cultural boom, cashing in on every possible media format.

The tag line of the television show is "A True Love Story," and clearly, the novel/film/program is being sold on its incredible veracity - to make all the socially-awkward Japanese otaku feel that they do indeed have a chance with Can-Cam girls if they all band together and dispense appropriate advice in online chat forums. The question has to be asked, however: is any of this story actually real? The writer is anonymous, the story arc is way too perfect, and the backers are all extremely cunning and powerful. And within the context of a Japanese media constantly creating fictional "reality" entertainment for the public, the burden of proof rests squarely on the marketing juggernaut selling this ridiculous story.

Does it matter if it's real or not? I certainly understand the quiet dismissal - it's only a story - but if they sold this work as a fictional tale, would anyone care? "Based on a true story" is the artistic equivalent of platform shoes - providing a big boost to an otherwise weak narrative. And while an invented "true" story abuses that new false height to play with the big boys, we don't draft artifically tall people for the basketball team.

With all this media attention, I find it odd that no one is asking to interview the real Train Man and find out the current status of his love life. Perhaps, they don't bother to ask because they fully know that there is no "real" Train Man, and they'd rather not have the Dentsu brigades stop supplying ads because of a couple of ill-advised questions.

Perhaps there is a Train Man, and he's just happy to have met the girl of his dreams. But I think the precident certainly suggests the opposite, and while the seeds of doubt were apparently planted long ago, very few people in the mainstream media seem to be asking the right questions.

Anybody who has ever listened to early Pizzicato Five records will know that sampling law was essentially non-existent in Japan for a good part of the 1990s. Now, however, things are getting much stricter. For example, I just got the new Oricon numbers for 2005, and the songwriting credits for Orange Range's lackluster hit "Locolotion" are attributed to Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Yes, the song does rip off sections of the 60s classic "Locomotion," but I would hardly call it a "cover."

I gather that the Japanese recording/publishing industry is now forcing songs with obvious samples to be handled as cover versions as a way to appease the "samplee." Supposedly, the same thing happened with the last m-flo single, and I assume that this will now be standard industry practice. I've always hated Orange Range, but knowing that a portion of their earnings is going to Goffin/King - writers of the Monkees' "As We Go Along" and other amazing songs - I may just become a fan.

In related news, I just got the new Go! Team CD single "Bottle Rocket" from Vroom Records, and they have apparently had to clean up their sample usage for a U.S. release. (Although using "Soul Time" by Shirley Ellis seems to be strangely decriminalized.) The new versions still retain the same flavor, but a lot of the old incidental samples are gone and were not replaced with soundalikes.

I asked a Japanese acquaintance who works for the shukanshi (weekly tabloid magazines) about Densha Otoko, and he said that there's a common view that:

Someone at 2-ch (specifically, Nishimura Hiroyuki) and a commercial writer planned out the project, aiming at publication, and intentionally manipulated the 2-ch thread. Nishimura has made anywhere from X,000,000 to x00,000,000 yen in royalties from the publication and the film/television adaptations. As a manager of 2-ch, Nishimura continues to lose libel/defamation suits for things written on 2-ch and has had to pay several million yen in indemnities, which he is unable to pay. So the idea is that he planned the publication of Densha Otoko as a way to be able to pay off the libel fines.

The reason that debunking the story hasn't taken off in the shukanshi world is that Shinchosha is the publisher of the Densha Otoko book, and they happen to own the most vicious weekly magazine, Shuukan Shincho.

This is infinitely more interesting than my original conclusion: the runners of 2-ch had to create a media hoax in order to pay off the libel suits born from the anti-establishment rhetoric on their site. And the reason no one is barking about it is because both mainstream and outsider media companies have vested interests in the project's success.

I recently saw a Japanese kid walking down the street wearing a shirt that said "Fuck to the Future" - written in the same font, of course, as the Back to the Future logo. Oh, how I miss the carefree days of logo parody masquerading as fashion! Had that said "Aperican Express" instead of "American Express" and it had been 1998, that shirt would have been worth several gilder in the resale markets of Harajuku. Something's amiss in Tokyo at the moment: that whole generation of thirty year-old cultural intermediaries working at magazines, defining cool, getting paid by denim companies to represent "creativity" - nobody cares a lick what they have to say about anything anymore. A total cultural rift between the new freshmen and the cool seniors.

The whole economy used to be based on the idea that the young generation - needing a shepherd to guide them through the crazy, mixed-up world of overabundant culture - would hang on to every syllable uttered by these older charismatic opinion leaders, but the times have changed: kids of today don't care about limited-edition or obscure knowledge, crate-diggin' - that's all rich kid, nerd stuff. The new buzzwords for Generation Y are "nurui" (luke-warm) and "iyashi" (relax) - let's all chill out together and not expend too much energy trying to outdo each other.

Well, the big kids who grew up in the Cultural Bubble of the 1990s have now found themselves at peak earning age, and they're feeling nostalgic for the past when people automatically bought all the things they made. And Casio looks back fondly upon the decade in which they sold thousands upon thousands of G-Shock watches. Business idea: A Back to the 90s campaign!

I picked up the corresponding "Back to the 90s" free-paper with semi-Shibuya-kei rapper/Organ Bar homeboy You the Rock on the cover, and there are interviews inside with two captains of the sinking 90s Cultural Steamboat: Tanaka from FPM and Sunaga Tatsuo. But nevermind the marketing of this matter, I totally understand what they're trying to say: everybody agrees that the 90s was Japan's pop cultural peak - even the Japanese! We all understand that Japan has been cool in the abstract for a very long time - the way that Mario and Luigi are "cool" but not exactly fashion leaders. (I doubt that there are many foreign websites exclaimng how awesome the Alfee, Kome Kome Club, and the Checkers were.) The 90s is when it all came together, when each and every Japanese person - from Hokkaido down to Kyushu - was cooler than every other single person on earth. Name another country where mainstream bands were gleefully referencing Haircut 100 and the Pastels and making albums based on the Monkees' Head, etc, etc, etc.

But let's hear what the promotional pamphlet has to say about things (my translation since the English provided was unintelligible):

At the beginning of the 90s, there was a large-scale economic retreat - a turn from the Bubble economy to the heavy fall of stock and land prices - and for the next ten years, Japan's economy was called "the Lost Decade." Under these circumstances, society became chaotic, but within the cultural scene, these conditions constructed the "the Perfect Decade" in seemingly inverse-proportion to the economy. Talented young people with firm identities started their own independent fashion labels and permeated into the the street scene. It was a fashion scene where kids went to the shops of the so-called "Charisma Brands" totally obsessed. R&B, Techno, House, and Hip Hop culture each beamed out from the clubs, and higher sales weren't just for major label artists - the number of well-earning self-produced musicians also increased. As a result, the diversity of music increased, and the music scene gave birth to high-quality genreless music. And from the middle of the 90s, design for commercials, CD package, and editorial surfaced on the top stage while maintaining a certain lightness.

Thus, as the movement of each cultural scene's became lively, genre divisions gradually became meaningless, and "crossover" became the keyword. As a result, we achieved the change to an era that demanded creativity and added-value formed from compound-objects made of different genres in fashion, music, and art. As the 90s came to a close, there was a deeper diffusion of the Internet into the general public, and Japan's culture scene propelled the commercialization of network computing as a media, which made all types of information available.

This is very early nostalgia for a freshly buried era, mind you, but you can't imagine the frustration of this 90s generation: their brands are failing, their fans are bailing, their records don't chart. There's still logo parody and pakuri and consumer culture, but kids just don't have the heart, the skills, and the knowledge to make it interesting. Orange Range rips off old songs just like Flipper's Guitar, but they do it with the lamest possible execution. Sure, there are still fascinating underground artists and unknown talents, but the whole nostalgia comes from idealizing a time when they were the gods of the commercial overworld; that shining, sparkling moment that comes once in a lifetime when the businessmen turn over the keys to the freaks, to do whatever they want! An era when a major label lets Oyamada Keigo - age 25 - do a record label that releases ridiculously uncommercial Bill Wyman albums and all sorts of dangerous sounds from Citrus, Salon Music, and Violent Onsen Geisha.

It's sad to say, but true: everything cool about Japan at the moment is residual from the 90s. Great cafes, the remaining good record stores, the complete works of Godard at Tsutaya - these never existed in the 80s, and they now stand like classical Roman ruins in the coming Dark Ages.

I get it now: "Fuck to the Future" - if the future means all this hollow punk and hip-hop and declining taste. But sadly, the creative minds of the 90s are an isolated, floating island with no roots in today's young generation. It's not that we need a band that sounds like Flipper's Guitar or godforbid, Pizzicato Five but we sure as hell need one that thinks like them.

Ignore the delinquent kitten for a moment: on Monday, I'm watching Star Wars - Episode III, and the earth-shaking THX spot comes on - preparing us all for finally seeing the movie we only dreamed about as children - when some awful, awful advert pops up featuring a bland-looking Japanese girl mysteriously crying a black tear, which falls on a reel of film and makes out a Jolly Roger skull- SAY NO TO PIRATED MOVIES! - in a tone of voice implying that every time you buy a bootleg DVD, you destroy the magic of film-making for hungry children in Africa. I get so annoyed with this industry self-pity that I almost put down my camcorder.

Now yesterday in Shibuya station, I pass a poster featuring the famous Namennayo Neko - cats dressed up in semi-Nationalist, yankii teenage-motorcycle-gang style. They were icons of the early 80s, but now they've oddly become spokespersons against making/selling/buying counterfeit goods. I ignore the poster's message, but I do write down the name of the cats' webpage and cram the paper into my fake Gucci wallet.

Their site - nameneko.com - is highly informational, with a wealth of English exposition.

What does namennayo mean?

Children who turned their anxieties and frustrations toward the school and society found a way to release such tensions through "Namennayo" Cats' slogan "Namennayo", which roughly translates to "Don't monkey around with me".

Okay, but what's the big deal about dressing up pets in costumes?

No other real cat characters around the world have ever enjoyed the same success as the "Namennayo" Cats. It is also said that the "Namen nayo" Cats brought on the idea of costumes for pets, a common idea today.

I see. But, I mean, these cats were "just a consumer boom," right?

Even the government PR department used "Namennayo" Cats as their campaign mascot for the National Sound Upbringing of Youth Month, which received much press attention.

Oh, but who's the kitten who was always meowing?

The kitten always meowing was named Nyanta.

What happened to the main cat, Matakichi?

This was covered in detail on the television show 20th Century Expedition (Nijuu Seiki Tankentai).

Okay, I'll check that out.

As much as I'd love this Yamanote Line "let's speak English" segment to be a subtle criticism on the state of Japanese punk rock (パンク）, panku is indeed how you say "flat tire" in Japanese. I learned this after watching Trevor from Music Related machine-translate some emails from Micro Mach Machine with every other sentence saying something like "electro flat tire pop."

The National Science Museum is having an exhibition this summer entitled "Jomon vs. Yayoi", comparing the first two cultures found on the Japanese archipelago. The Jomon (10,000 BC to 300 BC) are named after their distinctive "cord-mark" pottery. Yayoi culture (300 BC to 250 AD) followed the Jomon period and abruptly introduced organized rice cultivation to Japan. What I find interesting about the ad for the exhibition is that they use two young fashionable female models with looks approximating the dominant theories about the two cultural periods. (click on picture for close-up)

Archeologists and historians are still unsure whether the Jomon and Yayoi were the same people or entirely different ethnic groups, but the most common theories make out the Jomon to be either related to the Ainu peoples, or perhaps, Austronesians. Several parts of the Japanese language resemble South Pacific languages - especially reduplication like giri giri, butsu butsu, kira kira etc. - and having the Jomon not be from mainland Asia but from southern islands instead would give credence to the idea that Japanese has an Austronesian superstratum (to go along with its Altaic/Northeast Asian base).

The Yayoi, on the other hand, are believed to have come from the proto-Korean states of Koguryo and Paekche, and immigrants from these regions introduced many aspects of Japanese civilization to Japan - for example, wet-rice farming and Shinto. Most agree that there was an immigration from Korea around 400-300 BC, but there is much debate on the size of this influx and its impact. For a while, the dominant idea was that four million people filtered into Japan through Kyushu, but now this is seen to be impossible in the recognized timespan. The jury is still out: did the Yayoi join the Jomon to form a new period of Japanese civilization or replace the Jomon culture completely? Regardless of the various theories, the model on the right representing the Yayoi looks stereotypically Northeast Asian with slender eyes and lighter skin.

I'm not sure which theory this exhibition is supporting, but the picture seems to indicate a belief in two distinct racial/language groups meeting in Japan.

A couple of months ago, I biked down to Den-en Chofu - Tokyo's wealthiest neighborhood - to see what constitutes "super-rich" in Japan, and while the large houses and ginkgo-lined streets are certainly nicer than the ugly apartment buildings littering the bulk of the city, I could not help but think that these houses were tiny compared even to the moderately rich people who live in my middle-sized suburban hometown in the Florida Panhandle. This is hardly Japan's fault; I've realized lately that the automatic-luxury of the American lifestyle makes an awful standard for global comparisons. No matter how hard the Japanese work, nothing will come as easy as it does for Americans.

Unless you've driven around the American South, you could not imagine how much unused land remains in the United States. All the big cars, boats, enormous houses, cheap food, etc. are more a product of geographical determinism than virtuous hard-work or widespread ingenuity. In the early 20th century, owning all this stuff was the American dream - my great-Grandfather escaping Russian pogroms had a much lower standard and supposedly quipped, "All you have to do is pay 20% of your income and no one comes in and burns your house and rapes your wife? Great!" - but now, this luxury is an international symbol of tacky American excess and environmental destruction. Maybe rightly so.

But as I bear the burden of unbelievable summer heat, I want nothing more than a quick dip in a backyard swimming pool. I can't imagine anything crazier about America than the fact that owning one of these tubs of water - designed to perfectly refract an icy blue - is totally commonplace in the suburbs and countryside. Land is cheap, and the local bank will happily finance the construction of a pool with a "home improvement" loan. $15,000-$30,000 doesn't sound so bad when paid in installments, and while the pool still retains an image of wealth, they are generally available to most members of the American middle class.

I had a pool when I lived in Mississippi (but oddly, not in Florida), and it looked eerily similar to the picture above. Many summers were spent playing Marco Polo, pool hopping across the neighborhood, eating Doritos with soggy fingers. Every school year ended with the mandatory pool party at a schoolmate's house. Of course, we still fawned over the indoor pools of big hotels and the tall diving platforms of anachronistic Southern country clubs, but swimming in the summers was just a natural, everyday part of eight year-old life.

There are some local athletic pools in my Tokyo neighborhood, but only an insane billionaire would build a backyard oasis in urban Japan. But why would he think to build a large, impractical concrete cool-water bath in the first place? How did such a devilish dream become a reality in America?

I picked up a copy of the new Cyzo today, and there's a fascinating article about how the Japanese promoters/distributors of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith systematically censored magazine critics' reviews of the film. The whole story broke as film critic Machiyama Tomohiro wrote on his blog that the promoters heavily corrected several parts of his review.

In Japan, all writers must submit their final texts about a certain person/cultural item to the corresponding management company for what is called the "genkou check." At least in America, writers just write about their topic and give a subtle cold-shoulder or extended middle-finger to later interference, but most magazines in Japan are dependent upon the producers for access to information, so in this imbalance of power, texts get checked. Mostly, management companies just change straight-up mistakes or incorrect facts or try to stop magazines from running "spoilers," but Machiyama was upset that the film promoters had edited his critical content.

The edited text in question.

They specifically told him to "take out" sentences, "change this expression," and "cut the political content." He was asked to remove references to "greek myths." Failing to adhere to these edits would mean losing the right to print promotional photographs from the film, and the promoters rejected another magazine's attempt to run photo-less critical reviews, threatening to stop sending press screening passes for future movies. Comparing the films to other sci-fi works was also verboten. In other words, write a positive review or we will add you to our little blacklist.

Machiyama was particularly puzzled that the Star Wars promotion team was so keen to jettison any discussion of the film's political message, seeing that George Lucas himself had discussed these themes in official interviews. A film critic and shukanshi writer interviewed for the article explained this action (translated quote): "Japanese distributors think that if you don't appeal to people with 'love' or 'you'll cry' or a famous actor's name, OL (office ladies) and young kids won't get into it. There's a feeling that films that include a political message are absolutely hopeless."

The author also notes that German film critics threatened a boycott against War of the Worlds after the distributors there attempted to ban all pre-release reviews. Japanese critics, on the other hand, did nothing and fully complied with the guidelines. Except for Machiyama, of course, who whined about it on his blog and then had the second-tier tabloid media pick up the story.

So what have we confirmed here about the Japanese media world:

I like this magazine Cyzo, but I admit that it's clearly cocooning - i.e., only reading media sources that echo your own opinions. My nay-sayers, however, seem to suggest that I'm the only one worrying about whether Densha Otoko is real while the Japanese masses are pleasantly enjoying their post-modern futuristic ambiguous views on truth and silently laughing at arcane Western ideas of "false advertising" and "hoaxes." In this ideological battle, I start to think I'm the crazy one, so it's at least nice to read a Japanese writer essentially have the same doubts about something.

In the intro to an article on the adult video version of Densha Otoko - which, by the way, apparently has a lot more story than normal Japanese porn and rips off chunks of dialogue from the original 2-ch threads - the writer muses:

先日も、本物の電車男とエルメスが２人仲良くそろって映画鑑賞に訪れたことが報じられたが、そのうさん臭さは相変わらず。関係者一同、ネタ疑惑の否定には余念がない一歩で、いまだに、本人たちがマスコミの前に現れて白黒をハッキリつけようとういう気配がないのがじれったい。

Even yesterday, it was reported that the real Train Man and Ms. Hermes are getting along well and made a visit to see the film, but the whole thing's as fishy as ever. While all of the related parties are busy repudiating doubts about the original story (neta), it's irritating that there's no indication that the actual couple is going to appear in front of the media to set the record straight.

Lately, I've been bemoaning the soft, feel-good rhymes of a two-man reggae/hip-pop unit called Def Tech - featuring a real foreigner! - but I'm a hardened music snob and tend to automatically hate everything in this new youth culture of Japanese punk/hip-hop/reggae/dancemusic. Despite what I think, the Def Tech bros - Micro and Shen - are currently breaking into the big time, and the industry rumor mill thinks it knows why they are suddenly selling a billion records from an indie label called "Tensai Baka Records": they're a Soka Gakkai conspiracy!

The evidence for the SG plot seems to be that both young men are members of the Soka Gakkai organization, their original logo used the red, yellow, and blue SG flag colors, and the lyrics seem to drop mad-philosophical bombs coming straight out of SG promotional pamphlets. (Nothing gets the party pumping like the word "価値創造" [value creation].)

My friend at a major label suggested the following: the bar for record sales is so low now that if SG members were to sponsor the band through some aggressive group buying, the Def Tech messengers would certainly make it into the top rankings. This certainly worked for Scientologists and all those bad L. Ron Hubbard books that always seemed to be in full-stock at Waldenbooks in my local shopping mall.

I'm not particularly interested in getting bogged down in Ikeda Daisaku-bashing myself, but I now like Def Tech even less for essentially being Japan's answer to Jars of Clay. So goes the Christian Rock Paradox: it's cool when non-Christian Rock bands discuss God and Jesus and the Bible in their songs, but it's totally creepy when Christian Rock bands sing about non-religious themes. Same goes for any religion.

In the course of this blog, I tend to make the assumption that there is essentially no cultural criticism in Japan - i.e., no rated reviews or subjective rankings, just pure information on films, records, television shows, and other products - based on the fact that almost all of the major Japanese music magazines tend to avoid negative comments. After looking through an issue of Shunkan Bunshun today, I realized that there is a pretty standard film criticism culture in Japan, including the rating of new releases with stars. This information is a much better backdrop to the Star Wars review controversy; reviewers were upset that the film's distributor was crossing the line of normally-allowed press freedom and directly editing the articles' content.

Critical culture is certainly less prevalent in Japan than other places, and I've always seen two opposing explanations: a cultural one (Japanese people "don't like to criticize") or a market-based one (the dependency of magazines on advertisers and information-suppliers makes criticism impossible). The lack of criticism in the music market and presence of it in the film market seems to support the latter explanation, because these two markets have totally different organizations.

Most music in Japan is created by artists, who work on contract for artist management companies (jimusho), which then license the masters to record labels. The management companies have greater sway with the media (especially television) than the record companies, and media conglomerates are dependent upon these jimusho to provide talent for content. From the beginnings of the music industry, the management companies have made it clear that there is a zero-tolerance policy about scandals, gossip, and bad reviews related to their artists appearing in the publications/productions of media partners, and in this environment, independent criticism of domestic music has been next to impossible, especially when the music magazine market was taken over by large media conglomerates in the 80s.

The market for foreign films, on the other hand, is much simpler - involving mostly distribution and promotion companies. While there are some distribution companies with great market power, critical discussion of foreign films is much less political than music criticism in that (1) the films are foreign, and therefore, attacking the film is not an attack on Japanese production companies (2) panning one film does not necessarily mean panning all the distributor's films and future efforts. In the case of Star Wars Episode III, the distributor did have enough market power to enforce a policy of only positive reviews and decided to break its traditional pact with the media to perfectly create a well-managed flow of product information to the consumers. Whether there will be more pressure in the future on film reviewers remains to be seen, but I do think it's ultimately a question of who holds the greatest market power - the media or the distributors?

Although I am not an expert on the field, Japanese car magazines supposedly hold great sway over consumer tastes and are highly critical of domestic cars. In these market conditions, the automobile industry does not have the ability to pressure the magazines into solely positive reviews.

From these three examples, I find it hard to believe that an aversion to media criticism is a strictly cultural issue. If there was a natural inclination against negativity, why would music, movie, and car magazines all have different levels of critical reviews? Or do music magazine writers just have no interest in describing a record beyond its press release while their brethren in the film world speak their minds?

News broke yesterday that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's 11-month investigation into radio payola has resulted in a $10 million dollar settlement from Sony, with similar arrangements with the other labels to follow.

Everyone is "outraged" of course, but fighting payola is like crushing spiders - they lift up some rocks once in a while, valiantly stomp the offenders, and then go back to pretending like it's not a naturally occurring state of affairs. The practice became a federal crime in the 1950s after the major labels complained to the government about independent labels bribing their way onto the scene - paying the DJs was the big boys' game plan, and they didn't like these new kids using the same tactics. So, the direct payment of a third-party gatekeeper for playing a song became illegal, which let the major labels invent a much more capital-intensive, complicated payola system involving "independent consultants" that continued the same game while keeping out smaller labels lacking the necessary "promotion" budget.

The music industry is extremely unstable: what will "hit" is almost completely unpredictable and the companies involved must scurry around trying to figure out how to match consumers' wildly fickle and protean tastes. The easiest way to stabilize the market is to secure exposure. Consumers don't usually buy songs they've never heard, and with lots of plays on the radio or on MTV (which for you youngsters out there, used to play music videos), simple musicians become "stars" overnight to even the most passive, casual listeners/viewers.

So, payola is a natural thing for companies to pursue, but in the other corner, there's the odd American liberal idea that the airwaves should be for the people, whether owned by a private or public company. Federal prosecutors do not normally pursue payola cases, but there is an ethical and legal precedent that bribing DJs and cultural intermediaries is a bad thing, and I would assume that most Americans agree with this principle. This current case proves again that the United States government takes pop culture seriously, and they should: movies, magazines, songs, and images are not only big business, but define our identities, shape social discourse, and end up becoming explanatory agents for the world around us.

Meanwhile in Japan, there is no concept of "payola" or widespread consciousness of the practice, seeing that direct payment for the exposure of songs is a standard, semi-legal part of industry. The Japanese government has never shown much antipathy towards cartels - the dust is so thick on the Anti-Monopoly Law of 1947 that you can hardly read the text - and no one particularly thinks that media outlets should be under different guidance than supermarkets. If Coca-Cola can pay for an end-aisle display at a grocery, why can't Sony buy time for Puffy on J-Wave?

But this attitude of Japanese policy-makers resembles another theme of Japanese society: pop culture is rarely taken seriously. And that's crazy, seeing how vibrant popular culture is in Japan. Some of this is that Japan's pop culture market is relatively new, and I assume that the old men who run the country couldn't possibly see the importance of a bunch of silly, frilly things primarily consumed by women and children (especially since you're supposed to give up all interests in these frivolous matters after becoming a shakaijin). Now that the Japanese "contents" industry is a 20 trillion-yen market, JETRO and the think tanks are starting to look at pop-cult with a more serious eye, but if the bureaucrats and politicians continue to support oligopolistic industries and suppress competition as part of a national economic strategy, I doubt there would be any precedent on which to go after payola.

While the American government is hardly a noble knight for killing the occasional exhibition beast, as a liberal American distrustful of big business and collusion, I do agree with the anti-payola law. Payola ultimately benefits the firms with the most capital and acts as an entry barrier to smaller companies with innovative ideas. Creating a record costs almost nothing, but getting it played evidently costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, plasma televisions, drugs, prostitutes, and exotic vacations. But that's all over now, right?

Update: Here is an interesting pro-payola article from Slate.com that brings up a lot of similar points. I am hesistant to agree with his overall idea that consumers can perfectly counterbalance industry collusion through their purchase power. Even if we all hate Celine Dion and don't buy her records, she's still a "star" if played on the radio a million times in the major markets, and a lot of other companies will use that artificially frequent radio play as a guide for their own organizational decision making. If successful, payola creates fake stars, who eventually create a distortion in the cultural code.

Automatic
Old Ironsides
Rusty
Parachute
Penguin
Pontius Pilot
The Navi-Gator
The "Gee" Force
Ashkenazi
Hard On
Mellow Yellow
Sunshine Superman
Barabajagal
Riki Tiki Tavi
Dred-Scott
Maverick II
To-Be-Looked-At-Ness
"I Fought the Yaw and the Yaw Won"
"Slap My Pitch Up"
"It's Only Rock and Roll (But I like it)"
"Rudder, Can you Spare a Dime?"
Peter Torque
J Mascis
Murph
Bar Low

I was biking near the Tamagawa River yesterday, and we went inside a park complex that includes Neko Tama and Inu Tama, which are like poor man's zoos with only domestic cats and dogs. Towards the back, there are two giant European-style houses made from stone, completely abandoned. There were no signs, but from what I could deduce, they were built in the 19th century for British occupants. Very interesting thing to see in the middle of surburban Tokyo, but I guess they can't demolish stone buildings as easy as they can wood-construction. The one pictured above seems to have been used as an office building until quite recently.

How many years will it take until I can walk around Tokyo without seeing Japanese punk teenagers in t-shirts with the big red-framed Nazi swastika? I mean, Sid Vicious was pretty pathetic and worthless even before considering his fashion habits, and if you're going to believe the punk line that the Nazi shirt was meant to be ironic and shocking, what a nasty twist of fate that this use of the symbol landed in a culture of little historical understanding and zero irony. Thank god Kurt Cobain always wore that Daniel Johnston alien t-shirt and not one with the slogan "The Turkish Massacre of Armenians Never Happened."